Our missing children’: Indigenous survivors gather in Vancouver, seek info on unmarked graves – Vancouver Sun

Charlene Belleau wept as she said a prayer before a tiny rocking chair placed at the front of a Vancouver conference room, where Indigenous leaders gathered to push for answers about unmarked graves at former residential schools.

The chair, covered in a colourful blanket beside a pair of small moccasins, was reserved for former students who never returned home from those schools.

Belleau’s prayer was for an elder in her family — she respectfully refers to him as Grandfather — who attended St. Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake and while there killed himself by eating poisonous hemlock as a young teenager in 1920.

“What is so disturbing about all of it is that they never let my family know. They just buried him there,” said Belleau, a longtime justice advocate who vows to find her Grandfather.

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