Jay Jones remembers the day he was asked by survivors to lead the search for unmarked burials on the former site of Shingwauk Residential School.
It was just days after news broke that 215 potential unmarked burials were identified at a former residential school site in Kamloops, B.C. and came following a virtual meeting where Jones was serving as president of the Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association, a group made up of Shingwauk survivors and their family members.
“Each single survivor ended their sharing portion with, ‘We need to do a search at Shingwauk,’ and then I was the last to share, and I agreed with what everybody said,” Jones recalled. “With my mom and my dad both gone now, I felt it was necessary to continue their efforts that they had done for so long."
Little did Jones know that he would eventually end up relocating to Sault Ste. Marie to do just that — taking an extended leave from his job as a designer for General Motors in Michigan for a period of six months in order to live on the grounds of the former residential school, now the grounds of Algoma University.
His parents, the late Vernon and Susie Jones of Walpole Island First Nation, an Anishinaabe community situated on the Ontario side of the Canada-U.S. border and south of Sarnia, were survivors of the Shingwauk Residential School, which was operated by the Anglican Church from 1875 until its closure in 1970.
His mother attended the school from the age of four until she was 16 years old.
His father, meanwhile, attended Shingwauk with his brother for two-and-a-half years before successfully fleeing the school. Jones says the pair hid in the bushes for weeks in Walpole Island so the Indian agent couldn't bring them back to Sault Ste. Marie.
“They didn’t ask me right then [at the survivors meeting], but a few days after that meeting they must have talked amongst themselves and they asked me if I would lead the search. Right away I said yes,” he continued. “I didn’t know they were going to ask me, but I just said yes without even thinking. I said yes without knowing the enormous size of the task. I said yes. I felt instantly honoured because it’s such an important role to take on.”
After attempting to juggle his job as a designer for General Motors and his role as site search coordinator for the residential school survivors group throughout the summer of 2021, Jones would take a six-month leave from the Detroit automaker to fully commit to the search for unmarked burials in Sault Ste. Marie, some 500 kilometres away from his home in Waterford, Mich.
Jones says the decision stemmed from an offer by Algoma University President Asima Vezina to temporarily reside on the grounds of the university — the same grounds where his parents attended Shingwauk Residential School after being taken from their home.
“I asked GM, and they were gracious enough to allow that to happen,” said Jones. “I ended up moving up there, and then I had this epiphany about a month into the process, because I realized: 'Well, I just left my family, I just left my friends, I left a job that I love. I left my church that I really enjoy. I left my home. I left everything that I know to move to essentially a foreign country during the pandemic.'”
The search for unmarked residential school burials began on the former grounds of Shingwauk Residential School in late September 2021, with Jones leading the way on behalf of the Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association and in collaboration with Algoma University and a number of partners.
A ceremony was held the day before a local company began the search with ground-penetrating radar around the front parking lot of the university.
“It got to the point where it was kind of challenging,” Jones said of the search, which is being conducted in a number of phases. “It wasn’t bad, but it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s just like, wow, I don’t have any support system, so to speak.”
But Jones would view his role as a calling.
“I think you’re given gifts throughout your life, and to me this was a gift from the Creator that allowed me to go up there and kick off this site search in a good way,” he said.
Irene Barbeau, the current Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association president, says the group is still awaiting the results of the ground-penetrating radar search, which wrapped up in December 2021. Sarah Blackwell, a member of Aundeck Omni Kaning First Nation on Manitoulin Island, was named site search manager in a social media post by Children of Shingwauk July 12.
It's unclear when the next phase of the site search will begin.
Later this month, Jones will travel back to Sault Ste. Marie in order to carry out emcee duties at the survivors gathering and conference, slated to take place at Algoma U. at the end of the month. The annual gathering has been postponed for the past couple of years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jones has been attending the survivors gathering since 1996. He recalled being “put to work” that first year, checking people in at the registration table before being called upon by his mother to shuttle survivors between the gathering and their hotels. It took about two days of shuttling survivors around before he began to gain their trust.
“I’d hear their stories, they would be talking amongst themselves. You’re making an impact and learning at the same time, and it’s a really cool dynamic to be a part of,” said Jones. “Those types of things, working the gatherings instead of participating, was really beneficial.”
Jones says many survivors of Shingwauk Residential School are now in their 70s and 80s, and they’ve been telling their stories for decades with no one believing them, no one hearing them.
But following discoveries of potential unmarked graves of residential school children in Canada, he says, now all of a sudden survivors are finally being heard.
“With the gathering coming up and everyone’s excited it’s almost like a new era with the unmarked burials, and some of the real truth of the residential story — the real truth coming to light — and it’s almost like a stepping stone for that,” he said. “I remember the little sharing circle we had right after Kamloops. One of the elders, the first thing she said was, ‘Now, maybe they’ll believe us.’”
Jones says that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the public are welcome to attend this year’s gathering.
“If they attend one day or half a day, whatever it is, that they just come out and get more truth to the story and help them understand the story and the lives of these survivors a little bit better,” he said. “It really opens their mind and it’s a good learning experience for Indigenous and non-Indigenous.”