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A Quebec court will hear a motion filed by a group of Indigenous women to stop the work on the former hospital site.
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Quebec’s Superior Court has agreed to hear an emergency motion filed by a group of Indigenous women to stop drilling and excavation work on the former Royal Victoria Hospital site.
The Mohawk Mothers (kanien’kehá:ka kahnistensera) said Tuesday they have “significant concerns” over the way that McGill University and the Société québécoise des infrastructures are handling an archeological investigation to search for unmarked graves of victims of medical experiments. The motion will be heard Thursday in Montreal, the Mohawk Mothers and McGill said Tuesday.
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Redevelopment work on the Royal Victoria site resumed Monday, part of a long-term effort by McGill to expand its campus following the 2015 closure of the hospital. While McGill wants to turn a portion of the site into a research, teaching, and learning hub focused on sustainability systems and public policy, the Mohawk Mothers have argued they have reason to believe that Indigenous children might have been buried there.
“We just want the truth,” Kwetiio, a Mohawk Mothers spokesperson, told reporters Tuesday on Docteur Penfield Ave. as construction crews and heavy machinery went about their business nearby. “We’re not asking for money. We are asking just to have some peace and to not dig into what could possibly be unmarked graves. That’s what we ask.”
McGill, the SQI, the city of Montreal and the Mohawk Mothers are among the parties that signed a deal in April allowing for searches to be conducted for possible unmarked graves. The deal, which led to the creation of a three-person panel of experts, aims to ensure that the “appropriate archeological techniques” are used to detect whether there are graves on the site. All parties will be bound by any recommendations that the panel makes.
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In a recent court filing, the Mohawk Mothers say they have faced “many unforeseen challenges and hurdles” in implementing the agreement. Those include the lack of “consistent and transparent communication” from McGill and the SQI, as well as deficient security on the Royal Victoria site. In essence, McGill is “disregarding” the spirit of the agreement, Kwetiio said Tuesday.
“This is supposed to be an Indigenous-led investigation and that’s not what’s happening,” she said. “We were not given any kind of archives from McGill. We’re being given a roadblock everywhere we go.”
McGill offers a far different take the situation.
“Our view is that we’ve been firmly and diligently complying with the terms of the agreement,” associate provost Angela Campbell said late Tuesday afternoon in an interview. “We have been doing as much as we can to ensure that not only the terms of the agreement are respected, and where there have been requests to go beyond that or do things that are not necessarily spelled out in the agreement, we’ve also been doing our best to accommodate those things as well.”
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“There’s one really important interest that all the parties share, and that’s to find the truth of whether or not the site of the former Royal Vic is the site of unmarked burials,” she added.
Although three teams of detection dogs reported one alert in the same location in June, which possibly indicates that they picked up the smell of human remains, no such remains have been discovered to date, McGill says. If human remains were ever detected on the site, work on the site would stop immediately, the university says.
“False positives are possible,” Campbell said. “That area was dug and there was nothing found pursuing to the dig.”
“We are taking the allegations extremely seriously.”
ftomesco@postmedia.com
Mohawk Mothers hopeful after deal to search for unmarked graves at Royal Victoria
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