Dr. Kona Williams on Investigating Residential School Gravesites: It's Complicated.

Residential schools in Canada were set up in the 19th century, funded by the government and often run by the Church. Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to over 130 schools with the, “primary aim of assimilating Indigenous children” 

Stories of abuse at these schools have been told for decades. After another 751 unmarked graves were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School site in Saskatchewan, Canada, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) demanded that charges be laid over the deaths of Indigenous children at residential schools. 

The NWAC asked that, “sites of former Indian residential schools be declared crime scenes and that an investigation into how each child buried there died — as well as into who is responsible for their deaths — be conducted…In Canada, we live under the rule of law. The law does not allow those who are responsible for the deaths of children to walk free with impunity.” This principle of investigating these deaths and charging anyone responsible has been widely discussed among  Canadians.

To address this issue, I had the honour of speaking with Dr. Kona Williams, the only Indigenous Forensic Pathologist in Canada. 

Forensic pathologists are medical doctors who are trained to autopsy bodies and come as close to the truth about the cause of death as is possible.

I asked, naively, why aren’t we investigating to charge people for the murder of these children? 

Dr. Williams explained that she has had many talks with the Indigenous leadership and her colleagues in the forensic world about how to proceed as more gravesites are found. While acknowledging the anger and grief these gravesites are engendering, she explained that it is very complicated. 

“We know that there are stories of children being injured and who died from these injuries, as well as children who died from malnutrition or not receiving medical care.”

“We know that some of these graves may be older than 50 years so we don’t have the legislation for those over 50 years on how to deal with these deaths.” 

Deaths over 50 years ago are considered not ‘forensically relevant’ in Ontario because prosecuting deaths over 50 years ago is - in most circumstances - unlikely to yield convictions. 

Dr. Williams then went on further explain how complicated the process of any investigation would be. “It’s going to be hard for families and communities to decide what to do. Some will want to let them rest, some will want it investigated… It’s up to the families and communities.

“These are difficult discussions. This can’t be forced. it has to be driven by what the communities want. 

“We might not be able to find all the children, or identify all of them or even maybe not even find the cause of death. What do you want us to do then? 

“The investigation is more complicated if we only have bones. If they died of pneumonia - bones aren’t a lot to go on. If it’s malnutrition or blunt trauma, that’s easier. 

“It’s going to be hard for families and communities to decide what to do. Some will want to let them rest, some will want it investigated.

“Also, with my work, generally we have records that we compare to the body, for example, dental records. Here we only have bones so we could get DNA but we would have to go to the community and ask if they would provide DNA samples to compare…the ethics around this are huge. How do we ensure that the information is kept securely and not used for anything else?” 

When I asked how would they even know which body to exhume if some families and communities don’t want an investigation and some do? 


“We need to ask the communities about how to proceed. I’m happy to provide the expertise, but I’m not going to do it without the permission of the people involved” 




When I asked if there were about 150,000 children in these schools, Dr. Williams said, “That’s an estimation, because we really don’t know. The records kept by the government and church aren’t always clear. The Catholic church has never provided the records that they have…do we have the authority by law to get these records? I asked [someone recently] do we have the authority to subpoena the Catholic church?”



Then Dr. Williams added, “There is something I’ve been chewing on. There is a ‘death in custody’ if the person is being held against their will, they may be some responsibility on the part of the people whose care they’re in…legally this is an interesting question. The custodians and institutions can be held responsible…Can this be put under “death in custody”? 

Would this allow these people to be charged past the 50 years?

Dr. Williams replied, “Potentially. The legislation doesn’t exist - it might still be limited by ‘forensically relevant’.

“My colleagues and I have been discussing how to investigate these sites. People will get traumatized and re-traumatized, digging up bones is traumatic, and the proper ceremony, protocol must be followed. 



“Some people have been asking about the cost - how can we put a price on this? We don’t know how many children there are, and we don’t know the cost. When people ask how much is this going to cost to dig up these kids, I say - I don’t know, how much would it cost to dig up yours if they were your kids? Would you not want everything done? Would you not want to know what happened and would you not want someone to pay for this? The last school closed in 1996 - it’s not ancient history.” 

How to proceed, whether to proceed in some cases, in investigating the gravesites at residential schools is indeed complicated. I thank Dr. Williams for giving us a glimpse into the difficulties and how to proceed respecting the Indigenous community because surely, the utmost respect must be given to these children, their families and communities. 




Resurrection Men

by David Edgerley Gates

Ian Rankin published his thirteenth Inspector John Rebus novel, RESURRECTION MEN, in 2002. The story is about a group of cops in a rehab facility - sent down in disgrace because of alcohol or domestic violence issues, or they've fallen afoul of Internal Affairs - but being Rankin, the book is of course about a lot more than that. The title is double-edged, a turn of phrase with a dark history.


In the early 19th century, medical schools relied on the dead bodies of executed criminals for anatomy studies. It was illegal, in that day and age, to leave your body to science. but the supply began to dry up, and it gave rise to a trade in fresh cadavers, and the graves of the newly buried were dug up by body-snatchers, who sold the dead for necropsies. They were known as Resurrection Men. 

Two of these entrepreneurs, Burke and Hare, resident in Edinburgh in late 1827, improved their market share by skipping exhumation and turning to murder. Their victims were the derelict, the sickly, women of the street - people who wouldn't be missed. Over the course of the next year, they killed at least sixteen people, and shopped their corpses to a surgeon named Knox, to use in his anatomical lectures. How much Knox knew, or suspected, is an open question, but certainly he turned a blind eye. After they were caught, Hare turned King's Evidence, in return for immunity, and Burke was hanged. His body, as it happens, was then publicly dissected at the University of Edinburgh. Knox, the doctor, was never prosecuted.

"A wretch who isn't worth a farthing while alive," Sir Walter Scott remarked, "becomes a valuable article when knocked on the head and carried to an anatomist." Scott was being ironic about economies of scale, but as far as I know, he never used this incident as material. Dickens wasn't so shy. One of

his characters in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Jerry Cruncher, is explicitly a grave-robber. And in 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story called "The Body-Snatcher," which stops just short of naming Knox as a knowing accomplice. Stevenson's DR.

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is a reimagining of the Whitechapel murders, and there's been some conflation, in books and movies, of Burke and Hare's crimes with Jack the Ripper. The serial killer, as a figure of fear, is a mid-Victorian invention, I believe. Not that somebody might not claim many victims, but that he does it for the sick thrill.

Psychopathology wasn't well-understood, in the 1800's - the term didn't even come into general use until the early 20th century. One of the narrative engines of David Morrell's gripping recent novel, MURDER AS A FINE ART, which takes place in 1854 London, is the lack of any practical forensic approach, and the inability to process, let alone inhabit, the mindset of a serial murderer. It's not simply an unknown, but unimaginable, like an empty space on an old map, which simply states: Here Be Monsters. Burke and Hare took up their trade for the easy money, but the seeming

effortlessness of the murders gives you pause. They displayed no remorse. Burke, in fact, before he went to the scaffold, asked whether Dr. Knox would give him the five pounds he was owed for his last victim, so Burke could buy a new suit of clothes to be hanged in. 

"To know my deed, 'twere best not to know myself," Macbeth says. Burke and Hare apparently avoided any kind of self-knowledge. They denied the humanity of the men and women, and at least one child, that they murdered, but did they deny their own? Neither one of them were crazy, so far as we know, although they were probably a few cards short of a full deck. They were paid five to ten pounds for each dead body they delivered. In today's numbers, between six and twelve hundred bucks. Not too shabby, if you're desecrating a grave in the wee hours, but for a capital crime? The odd thing about these guys is that they were very far from the pathology of the Ripper. There was actually nothing out of the ordinary about them. They were simply dumb enough to get caught.

Maybe that's the thing. It isn't that Burke and Hare live on in our imagination because they were criminal deviants who've evaded detection for 125 years - is the Ripper case solved? More, perhaps,

that Burke and Hare touched a popular nerve at the time, and that a writer like Dickens or Stevenson gives them shelf life. (Burke's skeleton is still on display at the Edinburgh Medical School.) No, the dread lies in the open grave. 

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