The community members of Delmas were invited, but none of them came. Untouched food, meant for dozens more than the guests from nearby First Nations, sat cooling in Tupperware and wrapped in tinfoil at Delmas’ community hall. The searches for unmarked graves at the nearby residential school site had begun weeks earlier.
Everybody had already left that evening except some of the volunteers when McBain was outside late cleaning up. As she did, she saw a young man carrying a machete. , a 22-year-old from Red Pheasant First Nation who was shot and killed by Gerald Stanley on his farm near Biggar in 2016. They lived in a trailer — an old welding shop office on a vacant lot that they remodelled — for a decade, before they bought the property they live on now.
Delmas residential school, also known as Thunderchild or St. Henri, was run by Roman Catholic Church Oblate missionaries. That’s why McBain said their first conversation on the phone with Whitecalf earlier was “terse,” but they agreed to welcome Whitecalf to the couple’s home that afternoon. Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations and BATC Senator Jenny Spyglass, who is a member of Mosquito Grizzly Bear’s Head Lean Man First Nation, was there.Her brother died there when he was about four years old.
Potential search sites are held by private landowners, BATC CEO Neil Saskamoose said in a February news conference.He described Delmas as welcoming, but added that some residents in the region who were less so.Article content“That’s the No. 1 logistical issue.” “I would think that these land titleholders would want to know if there was crimes being hidden in their backyards,” she said.
“I think making it easier to label someone a trespasser is dangerous from the perspective of the people who are targeted in this way,” she said. “In rural Saskatchewan, I think it’s going to disproportionately affect Indigenous people.”