Alumni association seeks to identify long-dead children from Shingwauk Residential School

The Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association is striving to find the names of two boys who drowned near the former Shingwauk Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie over a century ago. 

Members of the association want to see a plaque in memory of the two boys erected at the Sault’s Snowdon Park, near the modern-day Algoma University, the site of the former Shingwauk Residential School. 

The association represents those who attended the Shingwauk and Wawanosh residential schools.

At this time, all that is known is that the boys drowned between 1914 and 1915, with no records surviving which would help identify them.

Shingwauk Residential School officials made note of the deaths, however, there are no details regarding their identities or the communities from which they came, says an article by the CBC.

The association says the school’s principal at the time made no effort to retrieve their bodies and give them a proper burial and members want to remedy that with a plaque on the site, memorializing the boys who drowned there.

Research from fragmentary evidence shows the boys could have hailed from any one of the following communities, from which Shingwauk Residential School survivors came:

• Kahnawake
• Chapleau Agency
• Chippewas of Georgina and Snake Island
• Chippewas of Walpole Island
• Chippewas of Saugeen and Saugeen Agency
• Fort William Band
• Garden River Band
• Gore Bay Agency
• Manitou Rapids Band
• Manitowaning Agency
• Oka Band (now known as Kanesatake) 
• Oneidas of the Thames
• Akwesasne
• Six Nations of the Grand River
• Sturgeon Falls Agency

Research based on the recollections of a Shingwauk staff member’s relative and another individual who attended the school shows Shingwauk staff attempted to retrieve the bodies of the boys from a marsh area around the pond where they drowned by using a long pole but were unsuccessful.

The pond was filled in by the City of Sault Ste. Marie in the early 1960s after the drowning of a local boy.

At that time, a group of girls attending Shingwauk Residential School, walking near the pond, saw two boys in the pond in distress.

They alerted area neighbours to the emergency and one of the two boys was saved, but Police and Fire Services, despite their efforts, were unable to save the other boy, identified as Gerald Crossman.

Divers retrieved Gerald’s body from the pond.

The Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association wants to include Gerald Crossman’s name along with those of the two boys from the Shingwauk Residential School who drowned at the pond on the plaque it wishes to erect.