‘Bring my brother home’

Just a little over 36 years ago my second oldest brother Charles “Charlie” Hunter died at residential school.
He was 13 years old on the day of his death. Had he lived, he would have celebrated his 14th birthday 12 days later on November 4. But it wasn’t to be.
Instead, our family later learned that he snuck off the grounds at St. Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany with two other boys to go ice-skating on a nearby lake.
While we do have copies of the investigating officer’s notes, the police report and coroner’s report detailing my brother’s death, those documents don’t reveal more than the bare facts:
where he died, that he had snuck off with the two boys, who turned his body over to the investigating authorities and the cause of death.
The police notes we have don’t show who was his assigned supervisor and there are no notes that explain why he wasn’t being properly supervised in the moments leading up to and during his death.
No charges were ever laid for criminal negligence causing death against his caregivers. As well, the coroner who autopsied my brother’s remains did not see a need to call for an inquest to determine what the contributing factors were to my brother’s sudden, violent death so that recommendations could be made to ensure no deaths would happen in the future under similar circumstances.
My parents were in the bush on the trap line when they got the news days later that my brother had died.
The helicopter which carried the person bringing them this tragic news was good enough to fly them to Winisk as soon as they were told. From Winisk my parents flew to Moosonee via a flight my dad had to charter to meet my brother’s body as it was being sent for internment after being autopsied in Timmins.
My father later told me that he and my mother, who was eight months pregnant at the time, were consumed and numb with grief. During their ordeal, no one came to hug them, offer them support, kind words, encouragement or even an apology. They were in a strange community hundreds of miles away from their families and traditional homelands, so they couldn’t even turn to family for those things.
No mental health supports existed yet in those days. My father said they struggled just to get through the funeral, that they didn’t know how to deal with their loss. He once said “no parent ever expects to have to bury their child.
It’s not something you ever think about as being a future possibility when you watch your child being born and there are no words to describe how painful it is to actually have to do it.”
Mechanically, as if in a nightmare that they could not wake up from, they went to the church and watched the service and internment proceedings unfold, never once having been approached for consultations about where they wanted their beloved son laid to rest.
I’ve watched my parents suffer in their later years.
They have so many burning unanswered questions for his caregivers, for the investigating officers, for the coroner as well as the government who legislated the residential schools into existence about their son.
They want to know why my brother’s life mattered so little to them that they did not afford him proper care, or a proper and thorough investigation, or an inquest to protect other children who may end up in his position, and most of all, why they, the government responsible for his death, won’t return their child’s body to them.
They have approached the different bodies responsible with these questions and they have been stonewalled at each attempt.
My parents are now in the winter of their lives and want to pass into the next world knowing he’s home among family instead of buried in some strange community hundreds of miles away from his home and family. They want to be able to walk over to his grave and talk with him, lay wreaths at his plot or simply to be able to cry.
I’ve gone in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, written to Indian Affairs and met with many others to express, as best I can, my parents and my family’s wishes, and I don’t understand why no one, especially the ones who are legally responsible for this, will correct this gross injustice.
It hurts.
And I do cry over how coldly and callously my parents have been and are still being treated.
How? How could they do this?