The Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera’s search for unmarked burials
The Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) reveal crucial evidence in their search of unmarked graves at the New Vic site (May 2025)
photo by Kai
by Okwaraken
Since 2022, the Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers), have been fighting to investigate unmarked burials at the former Royal Victoria Hospital at the foot of Mount Royal targeted by a requalification project led by the Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) and McGill University. Without a lawyer, and relying solely on their own ancestral laws – the Kaianere’kó:wa (“Great Law of Peace”), which entrusts women, the “progenitors of the soil”, with the task of preserving their ancestral territory for future generations – they succeeded in obtaining an injunction from the Superior Court in October 2022 to suspend the work and implement an archaeological investigation. The testimony of Lana Ponting, a survivor of the CIA-sponsored MK-Ultra brainwashing experiments at the Allan Memorial hospital in the 1950s, confirmed that Indigenous children were used as test subjects in these psychiatric experiments on behavioural modification. To date, more than 200 Indigenous children were reported missing after attending health care institutions in Quebec.
Following the injunction, an agreement was signed in April 2023 to entrust a panel of three archaeologists with the task of directing the research using non-invasive technologies such as Ground Penetrating Radar, Historic Human Remains Detection Dogs and the S4 Subterra Grey Probe. However, after the dogs detected the scent of human remains in the footprint of the development project (the first of four targets identified so far), McGill and the SQI refused to use forensic precautions to handle the many artifacts excavated in this area, including the fragments of a pair of a pair of shoes for either a small woman or a child from the first half of the 20th century. They also rejected the panel’s recommendation to sift the excavated soils immediately and manually, instead leaving them to accumulate under the weather for months, before placing them in a large mechanical screener used in mining rather than archaeology. After passing through this machine, one hundred bone fragments were deemed too small to identify.
The Kahnistensera notified these breaches to the agreement to the court and won another injunction – although it was overturned on appeal a few months later. Now that more evidence was found, including in an area where three different technologies support the presence of human remains, the Kahnistensera count on the help of the public to help them protect the site from further destruction, especially since a report confirmed that three different remote-sensing methods support the presence of human remains.
For donations: https://fnd.us/e23JRc?ref=sh_4eN28ZRUyh64eN28ZRUyh6