Markers will be something to remember them by

For children who died at residential schools, commemorative markers will serve as memorials.

“This is a very important project,” said Kathy Kettler, policy analyst with the Assembly of First Nations (AFN). “These monuments will be memorials for people who died in these schools. Not everybody who went to residential school came home.”

The AFN and Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) have received $1.6 million through the commemoration project fund, which was established by the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. Funding will be used for the National Commemorative Marker Project, which has as its goal to physically mark the 139 residential schools included in the IRSSA and host community ceremonies.

As the AFN and AHF launched the project, Kettler said she was surprised to learn that although the agreement names the schools, it does not include legal locations.

“There’s no one list of geographical information on the schools,” she said.

In order for negotiations to occur for the placement of commemorative markers, property owners need to be identified. Kettler and her counterpart in the AHF, Trina Cooper-Bolam, director of Legacy Projects, is working with communities that the residential schools served to do just that.

“We’re asking volunteers who live or work close to the sites, (if) they can go to the site, get the GPS readings, take the photos and be part of this mapping project,” said Cooper-Bolam, adding that no one is expected to go on private property without permission or disobey no-trespassing signs. Getting a reading as close to the site as possible will suffice.

The pair is pushing to get as many of the sites marked by global positioning systems on Nov. 20, which is National Geographic Information Systems Day.

Also helping out in the project are students from geography departments in nearby universities, as well as the Canadian Association of Geographers.

Those doing the site marking will be asked to upload the GPS coordinates along with photos to a Facebook page established for the project.

Cooper-Bolam expects uploads will come for schools not included in the IRSSA. The IRSSA does not compensate survivors of day schools, Metis residential schools, provincially-run schools, religiously-run schools or schools not operated in part by the federal government.

“We knew this was an issue,” said Cooper-Bolam, “and we’re not going to remove (those schools) from the Facebook site at all. They’ll stay up there. What we’re trying to do is use Facebook as a way to capture information.”

It will be Stephanie Pyne’s job to mark the residential schools on an interactive virtual map. Pyne, a graduate student at the Geomatics and Cartographer Research Centre at Carleton University, already has experience with a virtual map. Her thesis, which is on the Lake Huron Treaty Atlas, includes a virtual map, which is the initiative of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre.

Pyne is the lead student researcher with Dr. Fraser Taylor as principal investigator for the Lake Huron Treaty Atlas project.

“In order to understand something like the Lake Huron Treaty story, you need to understand a lot of context in the past and the present,” said Pyne. “An atlas allows you to map those different dimensions. Residential schools is not a direct story link but it is a link to the treaty story because it has to do with how the treaty relationships played out over time and also there’s a need for reconciliation in treaty-based relationships.”

Cooper-Bolam is hoping to get about one-third of the recognized schools marked on Nov. 20. Coordinates will be accepted on an ongoing basis after that.

It will be difficult to obtain GPS for some of the schools, admits Kettler. In the Arctic, hostels were temporary tent-like structures and in other places the buildings have been dismantled or burned down. Other properties have been subdivided and now have multiple owners, including private land owners. Others have been repurposed and now serve as provincial buildings, post-secondary schools or commercial operations.

Kettler knows of one former residential school where the private landowner would not allow a commemoration marker to be placed on site. In cases like that, markers will either be put on nearby public property or in the neighbouring community.

That lack of legal locations has set the National Commemorative Marker Project back. Funding needs to be committed by March 2014, but frozen ground will make it difficult to install markers. Kettler is seeking direction from Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada to determine how the project’s needs may be accommodated.

The steering committee that drove the commemorative markers project includes representatives from Canada Heritage and Parks Canada. Cooper-Bolam is hopeful that these federal departments will be able to identify additional funding that will allow the project to move beyond the IRSSA-recognized schools. As well, additional funding will be required to include schools that win court cases that put them on the IRSSA list of approved-schools, to maintain commemorative markers on-site, and to update the virtual map.

Cooper-Bolam anticipates the virtual map will be layered, starting with the 139 residential schools. Additional layers would include schools that applied, schools that were excluded, and other pertinent information.

“We’re laying the foundation for something much, much larger,” she said. “We want it to grow and we’re laying the ground work for that to happen.”

The virtual map, which could become the property of the National Research Centre, will be accessible to survivors and other Canadians.