Two Innu families from the community of Pessamit, on the North Shore, will finally be able to find out in the coming days if the coffins they buried in 1970 do indeed contain the remains of their babies.
The steps leading to the opening of two graves began in the middle of last week in this Innu community, where two exhumations were authorized by the court.
On Tuesday, the Minister responsible for Relations with First Nations and Inuit, Ian Lafrenière, went to Pessamit to meet the two families at the heart of this delicate process.
The two exhumations are the first to take place since the adoption, in 2021, of a law aimed at facilitating the search for missing indigenous children. “And these are not the last, there are other files that we are currently dealing with which risk leading us to exhumations”, declared the minister to Le Devoir.
In Pessamit, the two families that Mr. Lafrenière met on Tuesday are trying to find out if it is indeed their infants that they buried, in May 1970, in the cemetery of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in Betsiamites.
The two babies – one four months old and the other less than a month old – were returned to their respective families in closed coffins, after being hospitalized with whooping cough. Under instructions from doctors and funeral home owners, their relatives were unable to open the coffins to confirm the identity of their little ones.
156 “missing” children
In Quebec, 96 Aboriginal families are now looking for 156 children, mostly Innu and Attikamek. These little ones were evacuated from their respective environments to health facilities between 1940 and 1980. In some cases, their families then learned that they had died, sometimes without seeing any remains. Other families have never been informed of the fate of their children.
In June 2021, the adoption of a law on missing children simplified the search for families of missing children, in particular by promoting the transmission of documents from health establishments or religious congregations. The law, which bears the mark of Minister Lafrenière, also provided for a support process for families demanding the exhumation of the remains of their loved ones.
The two exhumations that will take place in Pessamit were authorized on June 7 by Superior Court judge Nancy Bonsaint. Exhumations are coordinated by the Coroner’s Office and the Forensic Science and Forensic Medicine Laboratory.
A confidential process
So far, the identities of the families involved in this process, as well as details about the exhumations, have been protected. By speaking to the media on Tuesday, Minister Lafrenière therefore lifted part of the confidentiality surrounding this process.
It is that with the arrival of teams in Pessamit – to carry out technical verifications on the site of the cemetery in particular – the elected official felt the need to address the media. “I wanted to do them myself, the interviews, so that it would be the least invasive possible for the families, to channel it so that the families would not be in this whirlwind [médiatique]there,” he explained.
The families involved in the search for missing children are going through “extremely hard” times, like other members of their community affected by the ongoing process, observed Mr. Lafrenière.
“It’s a torn between: “finally we know it” and “my God, we have just learned that we have lost our child”. Even if we suspected it for years, now we know it, ”he illustrated. “It’s the hope of finally knowing what happened and on the other side, the fear of saying: the truth, we’re going to have it in the face and have confirmation of a death. »
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2023-08-29 23:53:34
#Exhumations #Innu #babies #North #Shore
