Bishop Grandin High School to receive new name

CALGARY -

Trustees with the Calgary Catholic School District have unanimously decided to rename Bishop Grandin High School that had been named after a key architect of Canada's residential school system.

The school will be known as Haysboro Catholic High School until a new moniker is selected.

School trustee Pamela Rath said the decision was one of the hardest she’s ever had to make in her entire career.

“I do not doubt that Bishop Grandin as an early missionary had good intentions in his work with the Indigenous people, but I also do not doubt that the residential schools he had a hand in have considerably caused great damage to our Indigenous brothers and sisters,” she said.

“As a Catholic and as a human being, I believe in forgiving and forgiveness and I believe in being responsible and taking responsibility.”

The CCSD has been under pressure to remove the name after recent discoveries of unmarked graves of hundreds of children found near residential school sites in B.C. and Saskatchewan.

The remains of 215 children were found buried at a former residential school near Kamloops, B.C. in May.

Last week, 751 unmarked graves were found using radar scanning of the ground near the Marieval residential school on the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan.

The discoveries have started conversations about renaming institutions to address racism in Canada's history. Advocates like Krista White, who works as an Indigenous community support worker in Calgary, hope to raise awareness.

“Our side of our stories we’re never shared and today we need to turn that new chapter,” she said. “It’s got to be shared and it’s got to be told for the rest of Canada and for the world.”

Other advocates like Heather Lucier with the Reconciliation Action Group say education is the only way to move forward.

“This is really news to a lot of people and it’s not to us,” she said.

“We’re not calling them discoveries anymore; we’re referring to them as recoveries.”

The school in the southwest Calgary neighbourhood of Haysboro had been named after Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin, who played a significant role in the creation of the residential school system in the 19th century.

The Calgary Board of Education recently reverted the name of a school in northeast Calgary from Langevin School back to Riverside School.

Hector Louis Langevin was both a founding father of confederation and the residential school system.

Alberta has a troubling history with the residential school system, with the highest number of residential schools amongst Canada's provinces and territories.

The boarding schools began operating in the late 1890s with the last closing in the in late 1990s. They were designed to assimilate Canada's Indigenous children by separating them from their families, making them Catholic and stopping them from speaking their first languages.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission study completed in 2015 estimates at least 3,200 children died amid abuse and neglect, but some Indigenous leaders say the numbers are likely much higher.

Last week, Premier Jason Kenney announced an $8 million fund to search for unmarked residential school graves and undocumented deaths.  Indigenous groups and communities can apply online now to access the grants.    

A recent board-commissioned survey of stakeholders found 79 per cent supported a name change.