What happened at the Kamloops residential school was an offence against humanity

National Post, 01 June 2021

The anonymity of the undocumented grave itself is an offence, a final indignity.

The discovery of undocumented graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children, adds another tear-soaked and blood-stained page to that history.

Behind each grave is the death of a child, each death a story of illness and suffering, separated from family and often alone. Some of those stories are of attempts to flee, only to succumb to the elements.

Yet the anonymity of the undocumented grave itself is an offence, a final indignity.

News of the discovery of the graves brought to mind a work by Hans Jonas, the Jewish philosopher who explored the human spirit in the aftermath of the Shoah.

Jonas noted that human beings make three things that set them apart from all other animals: the tool, the image and the grave. The grave is a uniquely human construction.

“Life, in other words, carries death within itself,” Jonas writes in Mortality and Morality: A Search for Good After Auschwitz. “Being has become a task rather than a given state, a possibility ever to be realized anew in opposition to its ever-present contrary, not-being, which inevitably will engulf it in the end.”

The death of children grieves us more intensely precisely because the possibilities of being are cut short; “not-being” has arrived too soon.

Yet the human spirit rebels against “not-being.” Death may be inevitable, but “not-being” will not engulf life itself, obliterating it entirely. Hence the grave.

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