Last April 14, we were among nearly one hundred people who gathered outside Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver to remember the more than 50,000 children who died in church-run “residential schools” across Canada. At that rally, it was decided to launch a cross-country Caravan that would have three objectives:

1.     Call on the Catholic, Anglican and United Churches to fully disclose the fate and buried location of the children who died in these schools, and to have their remains returned home for a proper burial;

2.     Undertake a forensic analysis of these remains to determine their cause of death, and

3.     Bring the murderers of these children to justice.

And thus the Spirit Keepers Caravan was born. It was decided right away that the Caravan would travel to as many residential school sites as possible and hold gatherings where the burial sites of the children could be identified and their remains exhumed according to proper protocol. It was also decided that our Caravan’s ultimate destination would be New York, where we would bring the accumulated evidence of these mass murders to the attention of the United Nations and the world.

Until early June of this year, the Spirit Keepers Caravan was proceeding according to these aims. And then, as has happened so often before whenever murdered Indian children are the issue, the whole project began to be subverted.

Initially, three aboriginal elders had given their blessing to the Caravan: Whispers Wind of the Anishinabe nation in Winnipeg, who had originally proposed the Caravan; Martha Joseph of the Gitksan nation in Terrace, BC, who was the first female residential school survivor ever to sue the United Church; and Dolly Pratt of the Cree nation from Saskatchewan, who presently lives in Victoria, BC. But in the months following the April gathering, Dolly Pratt assumed the role as the sole elder and spokesperson for the Caravan, despite the fact that she was not delegated to do so and is not indigenous to the west coast.

By June, all Caravan meetings were being held in her home, she assumed control over all finances and fund-raising for the Caravan, and she acted in a regularly non-consultative and disrespectful manner towards other members of the Caravan.

Unfortunately, since Dolly was the only “elder” present at these meetings, most of the Caravan members tended to go along with her, and enable her behaviour. For example, when it was being decided where to have an account for donations, all but Dolly strongly agreed that a credit union was preferable to a bank, with at least six members articulating very strong reasons for this preference – yet Dolly adamantly insisted that a bank be used, which it was.  Also, sometime during this period and on her own initiative, Dolly contacted government-funded native groups like the United Native Nations and the Assembly of First Nations and asked them for their support.

By the end of June, 2006, in our absence and without our input, it had been unilaterally decided that the entire purpose of the Caravan and its original aims be fundamentally undone.

At a meeting to which we were not invited, Dolly Pratt and other unknown parties determined that the Caravan would no longer seek to uncover or return the remains of the missing residential school children, or inquire how they died, but instead would simply “offer prayers” at the sites. Also, the Caravan would no longer be traveling to the United Nations, but rather would end up in Ottawa, at the Parliament buildings.

This decision was completely against the consensus of the original Caravan organizers, who were united in a wish to avoid allowing the Caravan to become yet another “photo op” for federal politicians (whether “white” or native) in Ottawa. Even more serious, our fear had always been that, by publicly identifying the location of the burial sites without also retrieving the children’s remains, we might inadvertently allow the government, RCMP and churches to disinter and destroy those remains, as they have allegedly done in the past. It was therefore agreed that simply “saying prayers” at these sites was dangerous, and could not happen without a simultaneous exhumation of the remains.

Suddenly, Dolly Pratt disregarded all of these concerns and redirected the Caravan along the path that all of us wished to avoid, and which was playing into the hands of those very institutions that had killed the children in the first place.

Those of us who resisted this new direction were immediately forced out of the Caravan planning sessions. We were never informed of any meetings after that. Elder Martha Joseph was also marginalized by Dolly, who insulted her over the phone and goaded her into dropping out of the Caravan. It was also announced that only Dolly and one other person would now constitute the Caravan. The “Spirit Keepers Caravan” had now become a one-woman show: The Dolly Pratt Caravan.

Sure enough, our worst fears came true. On August 7, 2006, Dolly attended a gathering on Kuper Island, the first site that the Caravan had originally intended to visit, where a notorious Catholic residential school had operated. According to a participant, even though a Penelakut band member had described carrying out “babies’ bodies, some of them still alive” for burial near to the school and had pointed out the site, Dolly made no effort to address the fact that children had died and been buried at Kuper Island when she presented herself as speaker for the Spirit Keepers Caravan. Not even a single prayer was offered.

The now-misnamed “Spirit Keepers’ Caravan” is proceeding in this farcical manner, under the sole control of Dolly Pratt and her anonymous backers. Its apparent purpose is simply to identify to the government where residential school victims are buried, so that once more the evidence can remain hidden, and the murderers can remain in power.

It is vital that no-one endanger the effort to bring home the disappeared children of the residential schools, by giving support to this pseudo-Caravan. Instead, all those who genuinely support the three original aims of the Caravan need to take action in their own communities to recover the remains of the residential school victims, and bring their murderers to justice.

We are now attempting to re-establish the Caravan on its original foundation, and bring the evidence of mass murder to the United Nations and the world. This will take a few months, and we need your help to achieve this goal.

To assist the real Caravan, please contact us at the original email site of the Caravan:

With our thanks and respect, and in the spirit of the Disappeared Children of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada,

Eagle Strong Voice, Lori O’Rorke, and Elder Whispers Wind, Anishinabe Nation