Four years ago, a ground-penetrating radar study commissioned by the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation identified evidence of about 200 child-size graves on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
After the discovery, I received a phone call. It was from a friend and former colleague, Emily Kassie, asking if I’d be open to co-directing a documentary about the legacy of the 139 government-funded and church-run boarding schools that operated across Canada and forcibly separated six generations of Indigenous children from their families.
The idea behind the schools, in the words of one of their administrators, was to “get rid of the Indian problem.” In 2008, the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document their destructive legacy, and the commission concluded that these institutions committed a “cultural genocide” against the country’s First Peoples.
The news of the grim discovery in Kamloops hit close to home for me. All my adult life, I’d heard rumors that my father was born at or near one of those residential schools and that he’d been found, just minutes after his birth, abandoned in a dumpster. Those few details were all he or I knew. The silence, shame and guilt that hid this history from broader society rippled across generations of Indigenous families like my own. Our communities continue to suffer from cycles of suicide, addiction and violence, instigated by the experience at these schools.
When Emily, a filmmaker and tenacious investigative journalist who’s covered human rights abuses from Afghanistan to Niger, asked me about joining her in documenting the legacy of these schools — a system that most likely nearly took my father’s life and remained an unspoken horror for my family — I agonized over the decision.
While I stewed, Emily forged ahead. She’d found an article in The Williams Lake Tribune about Chief Willie Sellars and the Williams Lake First Nation, whose community was about to embark on its own inquiry into a former school down the road from the Sugarcane Indian reserve. Emily wrote the chief an email and the next day he called her back. “The creator has always had great timing,” Chief Sellars said. “Just yesterday our council said we needed to document our search.”