Ronalda Audley lives in the Robinson Superior Treaty area in Ontario and is a trainee in Journalists for Human Rights’ Indigenous Reporters Program.
The paper in my hand feels old and cold. That only makes sense, since the brittle page has been sitting here, in this secret air-controlled space, for 100 years. Here, time is frozen in history – from a time when children were taken from the only home they ever knew. When children were taken from their families, their parents, their sense of security, their whole world.
I found myself in this strange chamber after I was hired and then fast-tracked into a six-month contract as a team representative with the Ontario government, in the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services (MGCS), in December, 2016. I was so excited! I got a government job! Yah! But I didn’t really know what I was in for.
On our first day, we arrived at our workplace, which looked like a normal place of business with office desks, but beyond a set of double doors, there was a breathtakingly huge library where you could feel the sense of history, amid the rows and rows of thick, centuries-old books lined on shelves two storeys high.
We were told by our manager at the time that we were not allowed to be alone in the air-controlled space; that we always had to go in with a partner; that no cellphones, cameras or any technology were allowed. Then he told us why we were hired and what we were to do: we were going to be front line workers, effectively, for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)’s Recommendation 71.
In its final report five years ago, the TRC found that at least 6,000 residential school students died while in their school’s care. But because not all chief coroners and provincial vital statistics agencies had released all death records, the expectation was that there were more. Recommendation 71 called for these death records to be released to the National Centre for the Truth and Reconciliation.
So our task was to scour the death records to locate the Indigenous children who had gone missing.
My other coworkers set to work as if it was a race – getting it done as quickly as possible. But I was wowed by the task – it felt like an honour. I knew I was going to be part of history in the making.
As I flipped carefully through the pages of a book of death certificates, I felt the cool, crisp and delicate paper. Touching the pages helped me try to connect with how people died, when they were born and how long they lived. At times, it was gruesome and disturbing: in the early 1900s, for instance, I read about the death of an entire family, except the parents, whom all burned in a fire. It seemed so cruel.
Then I came upon a death record that made my eyes tear up. I saw a name that was all too familiar to me: A boy named Preston Christopher Vacca. I knew him by his nickname, Boss; he was my cousin, my dad’s sister’s son, who I knew and played with when I was young.
He died, I read, in Raith, Ont., on Jun. 18, 1974; at the age of 5, Boss and his cousin died in a sudden fiery explosion while trying to light a cigarette in a shed full of gasoline. On that day, for reasons unknown, I was not playing with them. As the story goes, according to my mother, my aunt went into a deep depression after Boss died. Life was never the same for her again.
Boss was never in the residential school system. But it hammered home the heart that lay in these cold and old papers. Each one of them had tragic stories of their own to tell.
I realized all that’s left of the missing Indigenous children are old and cold papers, begging to be found; that’s what they’ve become. These children sit in this secret location, never seeing the light of day. They are forgotten. They are still missing. They are frozen in time.
When I was in that cold room, I felt like the children were calling out to me to be heard and rescued, like they wanted to go home, like they wanted to play and feel the warmth of the sun again.
I felt the pages telling me life stories, and I felt the pain and the emotion of each one.
It was hard to think about how the only world that they have known, that had loved them, that cared for them, that provided for them – it’s all gone. A mother’s touch, being tucked into bed, the lessons of a father, the good-night kisses – these things so many of us take for granted, all lost.
I sensed that their worlds were dark at their residential schools, and that they were still scared, frightened and lonely. From the old and cold papers, I hear them asking, “Where is my mom, where is my dad?” They’re crying but no one cuddles them; they’re hurt but no one is there to help them.
I feel my passion for this project even now, four years later. I feel the tears falling down my face again as I write this. I wish I could have helped them more. We should have done something! Anything!
By the end of my six-month contract, we had gone through and identified more than 30,000 death records in the age range we were looking for. This doesn’t mean they were all Indigenous children, but they were children. Some of those children didn’t even have names. And in particular, the Indigenous children that could be among them – whose voices were ripped from them – deserve to be remembered in all their essence. They deserve to be celebrated. They deserve to be acknowledged. They’ve had enough darkness.
I left that job knowing that it was an experience I would never forget and always carry with me.
The other night I had a dream that felt real. In the dream, I saw a huge, long memorial wall shining in the sun. When I got close to it, I saw that it was engraved with the names of the forgotten, the missing Indigenous children.
I became filled by a feeling that the children were once again happy – that they were free, that they could feel the wind and the warmth of the sun again. I felt them smiling at me. And I was comforted.
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