OTTAWA (CP) The federal government has named an independent special interlocutor to connect Indigenous communities dealing with the discovery of unmarked graves with the federal government.
Kimberly Murray, a former executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, will work with Indigenous Peoples to recommend ways to strengthen federal laws and practices to protect and preserve burial sites found at former residential school sites.
The government promised to create the position last year after ground-penetrating radar detected what are believed to me hundreds of unmarked graves on the sites of former residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
More burial sites have been found and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller says they are expected to be just the “tip of the iceberg.”
Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc, who attended the announcement in Ottawa alongside Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation, says the mandate of the interlocutor confirms respect between Indigenous communities and the government.
Murray says she is ready to hear about challenges communities have faced in their tireless efforts to recover, protect and commemorate those buried at former schools, including how to dismantle colonial laws that are obstructing them.
Last year, Murray was named executive lead of the Survivors’ Secretariat on Six Nations of the Grand River, which is overseeing the search effort for unmarked graves on the site of the former Mohawk Institute residential school in Brantford.