Calgarians brought 215 pairs of children's shoes to the steps of Calgary's municipal building after First Nation Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc announced, in May 2021, ground-penetrating radar had detected 215 graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, BC.
The radar survey was conducted by anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu, who said at the time ground penetrating radar detects soil disturbances, not bodies.
Regardless, the First Nation announcement opened the door to mainstream media to blast out headlines reading, “215 children found buried at residential school”, “Mass grave of 215 children discovered” and others.
Memorials popped up across the country as the news spread, including in Calgary where the shoes collected were meant to be in memory of the children the media and First Nation said were buried at the school.
Now, five years later, despite ongoing investigations, no bodies have been found and the claims of buried children on the site have been challenged.
The Kamloops band itself has quietly backed off the graves language, calling them vague "signatures resembling burials" with no full consensus ever likely. The band will not allow the land to be disturbed to look for bodies because, it says, it is sacred land.
Maybe it has backed off because they know the claims are false, and digging will prove it?
In 2022, Jyoti Gondek’s Calgary city council approved $1 million in capital funding to pay for the memorial and three years later it upped the ante by $6.5 million for a total of $7.5 million of taxpayers’ money.
The money was set aside to build a permanent home for the shoes in a memorial to be built at what is now called the Confluence, but is still better known as Fort Calgary, and should still be called Fort Calgary.
On Friday morning at 10:30, there is a ceremonial walk from city hall to where the memorial at Confluence will be built in about two years.
The city commissioned a memorial naming contest in 2022, with four shortlisted concepts making it to the finals. The suggested names were The Wandering Spirit; My Special Child; Footsteps in the Firelight, and; Our Way of Life.
According to the city, an independent jury composed largely of indigenous elders and experts selected The Wandering Spirit, “which acknowledges those ‘wandering’ between memory, grief, and healing, aiming to provide a place to steward the memory of children who never returned home.”
That’s all fine and good, but it appears those indigenous elders and experts on the jury may have pulled a fast one on the white folks, because it’s hard to believe they didn’t know a Plains Cree war chief from many years ago was known as The Wandering Spirit.
He was not a pleasant man, apparently.
The Wandering Spirit was involved in the Frog Lake Massacre, where he led other Cree fighters to kill nine settlers, priests, and officials. He also fought during the 1885 rebellion, including the Battle of Frenchman's Butte.
Eventually he, and seven other Plains Cree men were tried and executed by hanging on Nov. 27 1885 at Battleford, the largest mass execution in Canadian history.
By contrast, the North West Mounted Police, who arrived in the pre-Calgary era in the 1870’s came here to help the plains Indians by chasing away whiskey traders who came up from the United States to trade their whiskey for the Indians’ furs.
The Indians were not familiar with whiskey, and it did them great harm, so the NWMP set up permanent camp on the banks of the Bow and Elbow Rivers and called it Fort Calgary.
The name will forever have great importance to thousands of people, regardless of race or colour and the name should be returned to honour those who found it.
Honouring a man who killed settlers, priests and others with a memorial at Fort Calgary is wrong.
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