The Marieval Indian Residential School was part of the Canadian Indian residential school system. Located on the Cowessess 73 reserve in Marieval, Saskatchewan, it operated from 1898 to 1997. It was located in Qu'Appelle Valley, east of Crooked Lake and north of Broadview.
In June 2021, 751 unmarked graves were found on the school grounds by the Cowessess First Nation, the most found in Canada to date according to the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN), which represents Saskatchewan's First Nations. This marks the third discovery of unmarked graves in Canada in 2021, following the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School the previous month.
History
The school opened on December 19, 1898. The school was first run by four sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady of the Missions and subsequently by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Saint-Hyacinthe from 1901 to 1979. In its first year of operation, the school had an enrollment of 14 students, with the capacity to accommodate 45 students. The government of Canada took over running the school in 1969, having funded it since 1901. The Cowessess First Nation ran the school starting in 1987. The school was closed on June 30, 1997, and subsequently demolished in 1999 and replaced with a day school.
Enrollment at the school peaked during the 1962–1963 academic year, with 148 residents and 89 day students. At the school, students were only allowed to visit their parents on Sundays—a practice that ended with a new principal in 1933. Since then, children were permitted to visit their parents only under special circumstances. Students had their hair cut when they arrived at the school, and each student was assigned a number, which was used when staff members became upset. There was an expectation of staff to "physically dominate their students".
Discovery of unmarked graves
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada had reported in 2015: "Throughout the history of Canada’s residential school system, there was no effort to record across the entire system the number of students who died while attending the schools each year. The National Residential School Student Death Register, established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, represents the first national effort to record the names of the students who died at school. The register is far from complete . . . " The federal budget assigned in 2019 $33.8 million over 3 years to develop and maintain the National Residential School Student Death Register, formally opened in September 2020 with an initial list of 2,800 names.
The community cemetery predates the school, having been first used in 1885, though the school was built adjacent to the cemetery. It contains the remains of both children and adult Catholic parishioners. However by 2021, only an estimated third of the graves had remained marked. The archbishop of Regina Don Bolen said that the loss of headstones occurred at least partly in the 1960s when an Oblate priest and a local First Nations chief "entered into a conflict" and the priest then used a bulldozer to knock over "huge numbers of tombstones." One person claiming relatives in the cemetery said he knew the workers who picked up the headstones. In 2019, the Archdiocese of Regina provided the Cowessess First Nation $70,000 to identify the unmarked graves and restore the cemetery.