The Province’s Indigenous Relations Minister says the Alberta Residential Schools Community Research Grant provides different options for communities to research undocumented deaths and burials in residential schools.
Rick Wilson was on the Trending 55 Hot Seat and says that some communities may have different methods on how they want to move forward on this issue.
“In talking with different community members and elders, everybody’s got different feelings with how they want to move forward. Some might want to do the ground penetrating radar, some might want to do round-tables and talk to elders and find out which kids didn’t come home. So we thought the best thing to do was just to make the money available and then leave it up to the communities to best decide how they want to move forward.”
The province has $8 million in funding available through the grant program.
Wilson says with discoveries of unmarked graves in residential school sites across the country, the provincial government felt it was important get the funding available for groups to go through the sites in this province.
“They can start going on our website and making applications and we’ll be contacting First Nations directly too to let them know how to get involved in that. It will be running out over the next year. We want to get the money out as quickly as they can so they can do their research and basically start the healing process.”
The grant application on the province’s website can be found by clicking here.
We had the minister on the Trending 55 Hot Seat, you can hear the full interview below.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
