Sioux Valley Dakota Nation seeks residential school research funding

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This article was published 26/01/2022 (1374 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sioux Valley Dakota Nation is seeking federal funding to support its ongoing research into the former Brandon Indian Residential School site. 

The funding application from Sioux Valley comes after an agreement was signed between the federal government and Dakota Tipi First Nation to guide potential unmarked gravesite investigations into five former residential school sites, including Sandy Bay, Portage la Prairie, Assiniboia, Brandon, and Fort Alexander (Sagkeeng). 

The agreement will create a survivor-led steering committee to search each of the sites, but also to research various places, including church and Hudson Bay Co. records, St. Boniface Archives and the Winnipeg-based National Centre of Truth and Reconciliation, to determine how many students attended the schools. 

The partnership between the federal government and Dakota Tipi First Nation will not directly impact Sioux Valley Dakota Nation research into the former Brandon residential school site that has been taking place since 2012, according to Sioux Valley Chief Jennifer Bone. 

“Moving forward, we will just need to communicate with each other between Dakota Tipi and Sioux Valley Dakota Nation and any other stakeholders to ensure we all have the same vision for our projects and not to duplicate each other’s efforts,” Bone said. 

Sioux Valley is in the process of completing a funding application and is working with the federal government to clarify the logistics of the application, she added. The deadline for the application is Feb. 15. The current funding for the Sioux Valley project is provided by the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant allocated through post-secondary institutions. 

Sioux Valley’s research into the former Brandon residential school has been ongoing since 2012 and to date has never received federal or provincial funding specific to the project. 

“I’m glad that we have this opportunity to actually receive funding to do the work and we’ll be working alongside to ensure that all the work that has to be done around this sensitive issue is being completed.” 

The current available federal funding also has the potential to encourage collaboration between other nations and Indigenous organizations to help them move forward with residential school research, she said. 

The federal funding would aid in the search for unmarked graves. Since its inception, the priority of the project has been identifying the remains of the 104 potential graves at the site. Bone said about 78 are only known based on the current historical record. 

A challenging and key part of work is researching archives and records to learn the identities of the buried children — a task that is not always easy as records can be sparse or missing, Bone said. 

“There are families and the people out there that don’t know where their loved ones are buried, or the location. 

“It’s about education and awareness and the general public knowing about the residential schools and what took place.” 

The ongoing investigation at the former Brandon residential school not only affects Sioux Valley, she noted, but several First Nations, because Indigenous children were sent to the site “from all directions.” 

When it comes to residential school research and funding communication, Bone said, it will be critical to ensure everyone is on the same page and shares a vision for each site. This communication needs to include survivors because they have living memories of the institutions and can provide insights into the experience. 

“Some of the stories that the elders share — they may not be in the archives, they may not be documented,” Bone said. “I think that it’s important that that plays an important part of any project moving forward.” 

This scope of the project has remained constant, Bone said, although it has been amplified, and awareness has grown since the acknowledgment of unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C., in May 2021. 

Simon Fraser University PhD candidate Katherine Nichols has been working with Sioux Valley to uncover information on the former Brandon residential school for nearly 10 years. The nation recently had a chapter published in the book “Royally Wronged” by The Royal Society of Canada and Indigenous Peoples, providing an overview of the history of residential schools and explaining why investigations into the facilities’ traumatic legacy are needed. 

Survivors, community and family members have always known about the damaging and traumatic impact of residential schools in Canada, Nichols said, but it was not until the archeology uncovered unmarked graves that Western perspectives started taking the impact of the schools seriously. 

“The conversation has really changed. Indian residential schools and unmarked graves … are just on the public radar in a way that they weren’t before,” Nichols said. “Even though we’ve been asking for support for multiple years to address some of these serious gaps and gaps in legislation and policy that have allowed these residential school cemeteries to go unprotected, that’s left the potential unmarked graves in limbo, and it’s just also really permitted the missing Indigenous children to remain anonymous. Those are still things that we need to actively work towards.” 

A key part of addressing these challenges is supporting Indigenous communities in building the capacity to conduct and lead investigations, like the project being undertaken by Sioux Valley. 

Sioux Valley has developed a positive working relationship with the United Church of Canada archives, specifically the Conference of Manitoba Northwest Ontario and All Natives Circles in Winnipeg in the last decade, Nichols said. They also recently began developing a working relationship with the Hudson Bay Company Archives at the Archives of Manitoba. 

However, some archives are difficult to come by. 

“It’s hard to access these historical documents even for legitimate reasons, so members of Sioux Valley Dakota Nation and I have been trying for years to find and access these records,” Nichols said. “They really are difficult to locate; they are incomplete and they are still really highly restricted.” 

Doors are slowly opening, but some challenges remain in place.

“Talking through the challenges and also designing a plan that is culturally appropriate [is important]. These investigations, there is flexibility in them, but there needs to be a lot of support for that initial planning stage,” Nichols said. “There is progress being made.”

— with files from the Winnipeg Free press

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