Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

318 • Truth & Reconciliation Commissionis complex and sensitive. Although former schools might be associated with specificAboriginal communities, the cemeteries may contain the bodies of children frommany communities. They may also contain the bodies of teachers (or their children)who died while working at the institutions. No one set of recommendations will serveall circumstances.Call to Action75) We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, andmunicipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residentialschool students, and current landowners to develop and implement strategiesand procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance,commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sitesat which residential school children were buried. This is to include the provisionof appropriate memorial ceremonies and commemorative markers to honour thedeceased children.As infrastructure and resource development accelerates throughout Canada, therisk of damage to undocumented residential school cemeteries increases. Dependingon the jurisdiction, environmental impact assessments, which include the assessmentof heritage sites, are usually required prior to development. This generally involves areview of existing documentation, evaluation of the potential for heritage sites withinthe development zone, and also often a physical search. Such work is often done inphases, with preliminary review of centralized archives and databases to inform subsequentinvestigation. Local knowledge about residential cemeteries might not bereadily accessible to non-local planners, resource managers, and impact assessors.Therefore, it is important that locally collected information is shared with agenciesresponsible for land-use planning, environmental impact assessment, and protectionand regulation of cemeteries.Such information sharing is hindered by limited documentation, unclear jurisdictionalresponsibility, and uncoordinated consolidation of information. These problemscould be addressed through the establishment of a registry of residential schoolcemeteries that could be available online. At a minimum, such a registry shouldinclude the identification, duration, and affiliation of each cemetery; its legal description;current land ownership and condition; and its location coordinates.The complex and sensitive work of documenting, maintaining, commemorating,and protecting residential school cemeteries must be undertaken according to a set ofguiding principles that are based on community priorities and knowledge. Any physicalinvestigation of the cemeteries must involve close consultation with interestedcommunities, with identification of community-driven objectives, suitable methodologies,and attention to spiritual and emotional sensitivities.