Still trying to grasp the facts here, and the statistics, from that era, and relate to them.
What are the known mortality rates from the 1890s on thru the 40s, in towns and on the land or smaller native communities for kids 5 to 14? Is 215 deaths average, below, or high?
Unmarked graves from 100 years ago is common. Here, in Yellowknife, we're trying to identify many local and their locations from 1940 on as the wooden markers rotted away.
A few years I ago I visited some old family cemeteries and was amazed not to find some graves I knew to be there. Talking to a couple elder locals, they explained that there were more graves than are visible, but the marble headstones had aged and fallen down, and were pushed away. Many of the marble gravestones still remaining had deteriorated to the point that writing was not sufficiently visible to the eye. So today one could say they were unmarked but that is not the truth as they were originally well marked. But time marches on.
I have found more than one grave, including one from Sir John Franklin's expedition. Thru research I have identified a couple, but that is it, and time marches on.
It's known that the Indian agents were usually notified, but how many knew how to contact the family at the time, or who they were, and their location somewhere in the "wilds", away from any settlement? And how could the families possibly collect the remains if notified when they were a great distance away? It was a different time then.
When the Iroquois came north and decimated the Huron. were any graves marked? I have a couple of ancestors from the war of 1812 and earlier that I can find no mention of where their graves are, ..... who do I blame?
Now, before someone calls me a racist, I've spent most of my life in the North and am proud to be friends of both Dene and Inuuit and at times, feel more Native than white southerner!
'nuff said!
Last edited by Barryt; 06/02/21.
