Regina Indian Industrial School grave site gains heritage status
- Nikita Longman | October 26, 2016
The Regina Indian Industrial School Commemorative Association was recently granted approval for heritage recognition of a gravesite that is home to nearly 40 children who died at the Industrial School.
On September 7th, 2016, the City of Regina Planning Commission passed the recommendation to designate the cemetery, located on Pinkie Road, heritage status. It was a unanimous vote.
Days leading up to the city council meeting to approve
the status were stressful for Janine Windolph, the President of the RIIS
Commemorative Association. “I had mixed emotions, tensions and an anxiety,”
said Windolf. “There’s always that doubt
because when you’ve been doing this for so long, you never just want to assume
things are going to go well.”
Reconciliation between Regina citizens and Indigenous people has been the
backdrop for the cemetery’s heritage status. After an earlier unanimous vote of
March 2016, the City of Regina agreed to adopt and implement the TRC’s Calls to
Action. “All of city council and the delegates were aware that this is just the
beginning of the journey,” Windolph said.
The work of the association is inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Call to Action #75, which calls for…..ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried. This is to include the provision of appropriate memorial ceremonies and commemorative markers to honour the deceased children.
“The biggest challenge we faced in this process was building trust from the community,” explains Windolph. The association spent countless hours raising awareness through film screenings of the documentary RIIS from Amnesia and a memorial walk that was held on July 27th. Other projects, like the prayer performance piece by the late Lacy Morin-Desjarlais and Michele Sereda, Dancing with Space Inbetween were also created as the first project and set the tone for future awareness. The piece was recently screened at an Indigenous film festival in Venezuela.
RIIS Board member Trudy Stewart recalls welcomed support from city council during the walk. “As we built more trust, that gave us the confidence in the work that we do, and kept us going.” The cultural support of elder Noel Starblanket was also invaluable during the process.
Windolph describes the process for a heritage site as a means of reconciliation. “A lot of healing came out of the process within our group,” she recalls. “The methodology became the healing process. It really brought us together. We were no longer these fragmented voices speaking alone. We really had to come together.”
Stewart added that the awareness became a realization for a lot of people. “We’ve been hearing about these stories for a long time as Indigenous people. But there were a lot of people who were hearing about these things for the first time,” she explained. “There was a viewer who came to realize that his great aunt may be one of the children who were buried at this site. The Indian Agent at the time of her death simply told the family ‘she died’, without ever telling them any of the details.”
Heritage status and commemoration feels a lot like protection. According to Windolph, “It’s the beginning of a larger conversation.”
Stewart describes the recognition as “peace of mind.” The association agrees that knowing nothing will be developed on the site is a relief in itself. “There was a group of citizens that put in a lot of work in before us,” Stewart added. “To get where we are today is a pretty commendable.”
“RIIS’ next steps are for provincial status, followed by federal status,” Windolph says. “The RIIS narrative is not limited to a municipal story.”