For years, Terri Cardinal has been working as MacEwan’s director of Indigenous initiatives and building up kihêw waciston, the university’s Indigenous centre. But for the next year, she is taking on a different role, one with great personal meaning and purpose.

And she candidly admits, she wasn’t sure about taking on the job of helping to search for unmarked graves at the former residential school in her community.

“I didn’t know if I could do it. Emotionally or even spiritually, I didn’t know if I was capable because it’s so close to home for me.”

Close to home is an understatement. Cardinal is a graduate of University nuhelot’ine thaiyots’I nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills (UnBQ) near St. Paul, as are a number of her family members including her mother who brought Cardinal to her classes as a newborn before putting her in the school’s daycare.

University nuhelot’ine thaiyots’I nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills (UnBQ). Image Courtesty of Blue Quills.

But perhaps the deepest connection to Blue Quills is the fact that from the time he was five years old, her father, Joseph, was a student. Back then it was still an Indian Residential School.   

“He was told he was a savage, that he was nothing. They weren’t spoken to as people by name, they were given numbers. My dad was 47.”

Her father’s experience weighs heavily on everything she does at Blue Quills, but she also has been encouraged by his participation in ceremony at the site.

In August, Cardinal’s team conducted a five-day search using ground-penetrating radar on an area directly in front of the building. At first, her father was reluctant to be part of the healing ceremony taking place at the same time. But that changed.

“He had never thought that he would be holding a pipe ceremony in front of Blue Quills. Here we were in a tipi right in front of a school that had once harmed him and he was praying for all of us.”

The results of the search in August won’t be known until the new year. Right now, Cardinal is involved with interviewing survivors and setting up community meetings to help with their research. They want to know where specifically they should look next, trying to narrow the search area within the 240 acres upon which Blue Quills sits.

“We know that there are graves. How many we will find is going to be the question.”

In addition to Cardinal’s contributions to this project, she is working towards her PhD with a focus on healing through ceremony. This, too, is top of mind for her.

“How do we bring about healing from this process? It is going to be painful for many people, so how can we create this space where we sit with them in their pain but we create an opportunity for healing? This has been a long time coming and there is a way that we can collectively come together and move through this.”

This project is going to involve many searches and will likely take years to complete. Officials at MacEwan University consider this work significant and necessary. Since 2019, the university has had a memorandum of understanding with Blue Quills that expresses the universities’ shared commitment to promoting good relations; preserving Indigenous knowledge, cultures and languages; and collaborating on educational initiatives in the spirit of reconciliation.

“We are very supportive of Terri's involvement in this important work and see it as part of strengthening our relationship with a key partner institution in pursuit of truth and reconciliation,” says Dr. Annette Trimbee, president and vice-chancellor. “This work is not only beneficial and important to Terri and to Blue Quills, but it's also important to MacEwan in terms of our collective role in honouring the memories and experiences of survivors, intergenerational survivors, and families as we learn about the findings and discoveries from the project at Blue Quills.”