My Father Was Found in a Residential School Incinerator When He Was an Infant

My Father Was Found in a Residential School Incinerator When He Was an Infant

The noise came from behind the mission. It sounded like a cat. I’ve imagined it countless times. At about half past eleven, the night watchman pulled his car around the back of St. Joseph’s Mission, one of the Indian residential schools in British Columbia where my family was sent to unlearn our Indian ways. The four-storey building was all white and right angles. Unadorned, save for a big cross looming over the entrance and blue-green trim that…

Julian Brave NoiseCat's New Book Explores Indigenous Life, Death, and Survival

In May 2021, ground-penetrating radar detected more than 200 unmarked graves of Indian children near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. The discovery prompted US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to announce the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, an investigative review of the legacy of Indian boarding schools in the United States.  While both countries attempted to grapple with this era in the…

Whose stories make up the American story?

At a little after 11 p.m. on August 16, 1959, a night watchman named Tony Stoop was patrolling the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia. He pulled around back and turned off his car’s engine to inspect the grounds on foot. Stoop heard a “tiny, eerie cry” that at first sounded like a cat. Stoop’s job was to make sure all was quiet at the residential school, that “the Indian kids weren’t up to any Indian mischief, like stealing food…