Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

104 • Truth & Reconciliation CommissionResidential school students at the Roman Catholic cemetery in Fort George, Québec. Deschâtelets Archives.name and date of birth and death. The burial spots of students were identified only byplain white crosses. 391The general Indian Affairs policy was to hold the schools responsible for burialexpenses when a student died at school. The school generally determined the locationand nature of that burial. 392 Parental requests to have children’s bodies returnedhome for burial were generally refused as being too costly. 393 In her memoirs, EleanorBrass recalled how the body of one boy, who hung himself at the File Hills school inthe early twentieth century, was buried on the Peepeekisis Reserve, even though hisparents lived on the Carlyle Reserve. 394 As late as 1958, Indian Affairs refused to returnthe body of a boy who had died at a hospital in Edmonton to his northern home communityin the Yukon. 395The reluctance to pay the cost of sending the bodies of children from residentialschools home for burial ceremonies continued into the 1960s. Initially, for example,Indian Affairs was initially unwilling to pay to send the body of twelve-year-oldCharlie Wenjack back to his parents’ home community in Ogoki, Ontario, in 1966. 396When Charles Hunter drowned in 1974 while attending the Fort Albany school, it wasdecided, without consultation with his parents, to bury him in Moosonee rather thansend him home to Peawanuck near Hudson Bay. It was not until 2011, after significantpublic efforts made on his behalf by his sister Joyce, who had never got to meet herolder brother, that Charles Hunter’s body was exhumed and returned to Peawanuckfor a community burial. The costs were covered by funds that the Toronto Star raisedfrom its readership. 397