Indigenous

An excerpt from the piece to give context to the title:

In 2021, the Williams Lake First Nation opened an investigation into missing students at St. Joseph’s Mission. The First Nation’s investigators found that under Father O’Connor, a member of the clergy who rose to the rank of bishop, as well as other principals at St. Joseph’s, babies conceived by students and nuns—including some fathered by priests—were aborted or adopted out. Witnesses as well as records in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police archives attested to something even darker: newborn babies cast into the incinerator to be burned with the garbage.

Sometimes, I wonder what Tony knew about men like O’Connor and what happened at his school after dark. It’s hard to imagine he spent all those years walking the mission grounds at night without hearing or seeing some of the things that students, prosecutors, juries, and even abusers themselves later acknowledged. But he did tell this story to the Williams Lake Tribune, where, seven decades later, investigators found the article and shared it with me.

Because that night, the night of August 16, 1959, Tony followed that wail, flashlight in hand. Sound and light led him inside the service wing to a garbage burner about the size of an office desk, where trash from the mission was turned to ash. He opened it, casting rays of light onto rubbish and soot. Somewhere near the top of the pile was an ice cream carton, repurposed as a makeshift wastebasket and discarded no more than twenty minutes before. Within was a newborn. The authorities called him “Baby X.” And he was my father.