Mohawk Mothers want to stop hospital sale
The Mohawk Mothers want to intercede to stop the sale of the hôpital de la Miséricorde building on René‑Lévesque. As with the old Royal Vic, they want excavations made to confirm or disprove the theory that there were covert burials on the grounds.
JaneyB 10:00 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
Understandably. There’s probably lots of covert burials there, both Indigenous and also white. Homes for unwed mothers were notorious for illegal adoptions and other crimes eg: Duplessis orphans here in Mtl, Butterbox Babies in Nova Scotia, etc. At that time, the federal funding was more generous for hospitals than for orphanages (I have just learned). Likely some similar admin manoeuvres were used for Indigenous women and children. Such awfulness.
Ephraim 10:07 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
The problem is that our justice system assumes innocent before guilty. So, you need more than a theory to get a judge to give you an order
Kate 11:10 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
I’m not sure what I think, although only some investigative digging is going to put people’s minds to rest either way, so they should get on with it.
I tend to wonder whether anyone expected to get away with covert burials right in the middle of the city. I had the impression that sites of discovered burials in other provinces were more rural, more out of the public eye, although I could be mistaken about that. Also, neither the Miséricorde nor the old Vic were residential schools, so the situations are different.
The Miséricorde, which was where single mothers used to go to give birth, would certainly have had legitimate reasons to bury some people – mothers and babies who didn’t survive – from time to time. They kept records of births and baptisms, but the only people recorded as buried on site were apparently nuns who had lived and worked there (I just had a look in Drouin for that info). But they must have had a burial ground somewhere else, and somebody must still know where it is, and where the records are kept.
Taylor 14:54 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
@Kate – I’m not sur if the Misericorde would have had legitimate reasons to bury people on site, though I suppose the hospital’s social function predates investigations into why people died, be it by hospital authorities or the police. And I suppose people back in the day really wouldn’t have cared about orphans or single mothers.
That said, there seems to be at least a suggestion from evidence collected by the Mohawk Mothers that the same generalized anti-Indigenous racism extended beyond residential schools to hospitals and other institutions. I don’t find it too hard to believe.
There was a Duplessis Orphans advocate from many years ago who swore there were bodies buried all over the East End St Jean de Dieu (I think that’s what it was called) hospital complex, the one that had the subterranean tunnel network and was for some strange reason its own municipality, complete with its own police force. Nothing to see here eh?
Given all the likely remains that have already been found at residential schools across Canada, the widespread stories of abuse – both to Indigenous people as much as poor whites – here in Quebec, the numerous cases of gov’t sanctioned abuse (Duplessis Orphans, MK-Ultra), not to mention the number of locations in which pre-Contact Indigenous remains have been found all over the island, I think it makes sense for the city to buy ground penetrating radar and hire a team of archeologists and simply dig everywhere until at least every public and institutional space has been investigated.
Even if no remains of illicit Indigenous burials are found, I’m sure such an operation would likely find a bunch of legitimate Indigneous burials, a lot of various artifacts from the colonial and pre-Contact era, and maybe solve a few murders too.
Kate 19:22 on 2023-05-31 Permalink
Comes a point where I wonder what use it is to disturb the dead, but death is not the end, sometimes it’s a lingering mystery.