Site stewards of former residential schools across Canada met last week to start the process of proposing residential schools for UNESCO World Heritage Site designation.
The gathering was held at the Woodland Cultural Centre, the former Mohawk Institute residential school in Brantford, Ont.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) lists cultural and natural heritage sites of outstanding universal value.
“The international significance isn’t just the dark histories associated with this site, which we do need to tell and we do need to share, but how every single residential school represented at this gathering has reclaimed … those sites,” said Cody Groat, who is the project lead.
“They’re engaging in cultural revitalization, language revitalization, the restoration of our ceremony and practices in these spaces.”
Groat, who is Kanien’kehaka and a member of Six Nations of the Grand River, said his grandfather attended the Mohawk Institute.
Groat said it is a slow but collaborative process with UNESCO World Heritage Convention guiding the work along with site stewards.
UNESCO World Heritage Sites include the Rocky Mountains, Auschwitz Birkenau and the Great Barrier Reef.
Canada joined the World Heritage Convention in 1976 and has 22 sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, including Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Wood Buffalo National Park and Old Quebec City.
A UNESCO designation applies “international peer pressure to assure that these sites are preserved in a culturally meaningful way,” Groat said.
Sites with dark histories such as Robben Island in South Africa where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, are internationally significant because they represent how Black South Africans fought against apartheid and asserted their political rights, Groat said.
He said if residential schools are put on the list, it will preserve the rights of survivors and nations to advance culture and “contrast the legacies of what formerly occurred.”
Shared histories
Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kúkpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir said conversations about the shared histories of residential schools throughout the two-day gathering were meaningful.
The First Nation is the site steward for the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, B.C.
“There has been pain in the past, but moving forward there’s also an opportunity to commemorate and really take pride in who we are as First Nations,” she said.
Casimir said this legacy is important to share internationally. The recent trend in residential school denialism, she said, is “stemming from people not knowing what is happening, what is going on, and wanting more information,” something she said a UNESCO designation could help with.
The site of the former school is still under active investigation, Casimir said.
She said the process of collecting records held by the Catholic church, hospitals, provincial and federal archives and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is a complex one and findings will be shared with members before they are made public.
‘We were there’
Cynthia Desjarlais, chief of Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan, supports proposing residential schools for World Heritage Site designation and said it would impress upon the world what survivors endured.
The former Muscowequan Indian Residential School is the last standing residential school building in Saskatchewan.
Desjarlais is a also survivor of Lebret Residential School, and her parents both attended residential school but she said they were affected differently based on the length of time they spent there.
“It happened in our country and we have people that say that residential schools did not happen,” she said.
“It’s proof that we were there. We sat in those classrooms. We’re not 100 years old, we’re in our 50s and we went to those schools and we’re still here today.”
The National Bank has committed up to $2 million, with $500,000 to start the process.
“I will let the people that need to be involved decide if this continues to move forward,” said Sean St. John, executive vice president and managing director at National Bank.
“We’re just here to say we have the financial backing.”
He said what occurred at residential schools is “easier to deny than it is to accept” for some Canadians but “hopefully we become part of the healing process that people deserve.”
Every country has a World Heritage tentative list. Canada updates its list every 10 years; the last time was 2017, Groat said. Groat is anticipating that Canada will update its list again in 2027, which is why they’re starting the conversation now.
If residential schools are added to the tentative list, it will take seven or eight years for that nomination to be drafted, he said.
