The Blue Quills Boneyard Might Host MY Relatives
By Michelle Stirling ©2024
When people are laid to rest in Western society, even though they are dead, there are many laws that criminalize the disturbance of graves and human remains. This stems from the notion that a dead person cannot defend themselves from desecration and for Christians, the belief is that the body must be buried in as whole a condition as possible for the day of Resurrection.
Whether or not you ascribe to that belief, you can surely understand that a society which treats the dead with dignity, will also treat the living with dignity.
It is sad that the unproven, ghoulish reports of mass graves in the orchard at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School have led to copycat claims across Canada from many Indigenous groups and First Nations Bands.
Invariably, the parties claiming residential school genocide point to old community graveyards where wooden crosses or headboards have disintegrated over time; thus no one knows who is buried where, or who is buried at all.
Virtually every community has claimed that there are hundreds of unmarked graves, sometimes finding them inadvertently like Blue Quills First Nation did in 2004, when gravediggers trying to create a grave shaft for a newly deceased tribe member dug up and broke the remains of someone. There are conflicting reports that the remains were reburied; where or how?
What is concerning is that at least two gravediggers have stated at press conferences that this happened many times; one instance was as recent as Dec. of 2021.
The Blue Quills Acimowin Opaspiw Society (AOS) now claims there are two mass graves at the former Blue Quills Indian Residential School, even though this was obviously the Catholic mission’s community graveyard. Blue Quills AOS believe the bones to be those of people who attended the Indian Residential School from 1898–1931 when it was on site (It has since moved).
These graveyards are community graveyards. Anyone could be buried there, including my relatives.
The Oblate records* show that in 1919 there was a typhoid epidemic that killed two nuns, five children and an unknown number of people on the Saddle Lake reserve. This is noted in the University of Alberta 1980 thesis of Diane Iona Persson. If a relative had been born in that year, they would be 105 today; the chance of finding surviving relatives or those who might remember being told anything about them is extremely low. *Alberta Provincial Archives. Oblate Accession 71.220, fol.57, B-VIII-340, 26 October 1900.
Plus, the unwarranted presumption by the Blue Quills AOS is that the folks in their boneyard are all Indigenous and most likely school students. This is not borne out by historical evidence.
In Canada’s history, the short form description of how the newcomers arrived is “First the mission; then the Mountie outpost.” (As opposed to the US which is “First the saloon; then boot hill.”)
Thus, we find records for several members of a Polish family from Galicia who are buried in the same Sacred Heart Catholic Church graveyard where the Blue Quills gravediggers have been making their gruesome discoveries. The Podloski family might be the bones that Blue Quills has been digging up.
Podloski family, Adam (d.1933), Anna (d.1925) and Anton (d.1939):
It will be difficult to know because it seems that the lead investigator hired by the Blue Quills AOS is one of the gravediggers who made some of these discoveries. That appears to create a serious Conflict of Interest. Can this individual fairly investigate himself?
Now funded for several million dollars by the federal government, the Blue Quills AOS is planning to do a ‘humanitarian recovery’ — hoping to gather DNA from Indigenous people across Alberta who might have had relatives attend the Blue Quills Indian Residential School in that time period of more than 100 years ago.
Will they also want DNA from people named Podloski?
How much will all that cost? And for what? Many of the people in those graves have no living relatives. Witness poor little Eliza Oseemeemas. She was an orphan. There is no one left to pray for her or rebury her bones if they are some of those unearthed. It was she who willed her treaty money to Father Balter to say Masses for the salvation of her soul according to a letter from Sister Leveille. It seems she was a devout Catholic child who died believing in the Resurrection.
Is she nothing more, now, than cranial and sub-cranial fragments like those that Dr. Soren Blau of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) reviewed in photographs?
Does Blue Quills AOS realize that some children who died at the Blue Quills Indian Residential School were laid to rest elsewhere? Oh dear. More bones to disturb.
This is a wild goose chase of the highest order and yet the International Commission on Missing Persons seems to be willing to go along with it, with one of their experts participating in a conference and another in a recent press conference. The most recent comment encourages further investigation — of course. It’s at least a $2 million contract for ICMP.
Most offensive, for Christians and Catholics everywhere, is that rather than doing archival research to ascertain the known facts, prior to ‘digging in,’ the ICMP is now involved with people who have been digging up children who were never at the Indian Residential School at Blue Quills.
How do we know this?
Dr. Soren Blau claimed that, based on photographic evidence, the skull fragments were those of a child of less than 5 years old.
Independent researcher Nina Green has done that work, without millions of dollars from Canadian taxpayers. She writes:
We now know from the 1921 and 1931 census that the school’s quota (from the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA)) was about 60 students, and that there were about 60 students there in 1921, and 60 students there in 1931. And every child living at the school would have been accounted for because it was a census, so even if the school had taken in an orphan, and the DIA wasn’t giving the school a federal per capita grant for that child, the child would still have been recorded in the census.
There is no child under 5 years of age in either census, and very few who were 6 or 7. So the skull Dr Blau evaluated via photographs was almost certainly not that of a child who had been at the Blue Quills Indian Residential School.
It seems clear the Band has been accidentally digging up non-residential-school graves in the Sacred Heart Parish cemetery since the Band took over management of it.
Incidentally, the census calls it Blue Quills Boarding School, not Sacred Heart, as AOS claimed in their press conference.
The graves of Christians and Catholics lying in abandoned, unmarked mission cemeteries are being disturbed by Indigenous groups in a frantic effort to find the claimed residential school ‘missing children’ who were never missing the first place. Lots of money and access to mineral/resource rights and Natural Climate Solutions carbon credits are riding on this lie. The Indigenous community, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and the Canadian Human Rights Museum have gone way out on a limb, in promoting such claims of “children who did not come home;” now various forces want to prove a genocide happened, must prove it, to keep the millions of tax dollars flowing. So far, the phantom genocide reported by the unquestioning, compliant domestic and international press, has gripped people’s minds and caused gut-wrenching sorrow to millions of people around the world. Facts are supposed to matter to journos. But they are all just repeaters, and not reporters of facts.
And no journalists had any questions about this screenshot from the Global News report of Jan. 24, 2024, which marks a spot of “3 children” and “2 exhumed Nuns.”
Exhumed nuns? It is a criminal offence to tamper with human remains.
Who authorized that? How were the sacred remains of the nuns treated, post exhumation?
In the Global News story, a second video opens with the voice of Leah Redcrow of Blue Quills AOS stating “We’re here today to talk about genocide.”
But mass graves due to epidemics are not evidence of genocide; they are evidence of a public health emergency.
Not one of the journos thought to look for census records, as Nina Green did. Would it not have been odd for the federal government to conduct consecutive census and not one family mention that a child has gone missing?
The mass graves mass formation psychosis is destroying Canada, frightening children, inducing an unfounded sense of guilt and despair in Christians, enraging some people who then burn down churches as vengeance for crimes not committed.
Mischaracterizing mass graves that exist due to epidemics of 100 years ago as genocide is an example of shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre. Under Section 319 (1) it is a criminal offense to incite hatred against an identifiable group — in this case Catholics blamed for genocide, when the historical evidence shows these were deaths from epidemics. It is a criminal offense to commit mischief against religious property as a result of that incitement, Section 430 (4.1). It is a criminal offense under Section 372 (1) to publicly convey information that one knows is false, to injure or alarm someone. Under Section 298 (1) it is a criminal offence to publish defamatory statements — such as claiming Indian Residential Schools run by Christians/Catholics committed genocide — when there is no such evidence.
So, while the AOS speaker publicly claimed “this is about genocide” while on site at the graveyard, in the related press conference at River Cree Resort and Casino, the speaker asked people to not burn down churches, perhaps recognizing the incendiary nature of such claims (no pun intended).
Thanks to such claims by diverse parties in Canada, over 90 churches have been vandalized or burnt to the ground.
The historical record shows there was no genocide of any kind.
The Oblate fathers travelled and lived with the various Indigenous people they met. They knew each other well and the Oblates spoke the native languages. Indeed, many of these oral languages would have vanished if not for the Oblate fathers who conscientiously documented them and created syllabic ‘alphabets’ — a written language that had never existed before.
Meantime, in the boneyard of Blue Quills, many who died in contemplation of Christ and the Resurrection lie broken, scattered, and likely all mixed up together.
These people had traditional Catholic burial rites. It is unclear to me that any of the deceased would want someone to dig them up and rebury them with the bones of others to drumming and sweetgrass rituals. And it seems there are more important priority places to spend millions of dollars on — like the living children who matter most of all, the living children who are traumatized by Canada’s Indian Residential School mass graves mass formation psychosis.
Who or what will break the mesmerizing multi-million-dollar mass graves spell that has been cast over Canada since that fateful day on May 27, 2021?
Maybe this article and Nina’s research. Please share it.
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Michelle Stirling is a former member of the Canadian Association of Journalists. She researched, wrote, and co-produced historical shows about Southern Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Dempsey.
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