Family visits long-lost, unmarked gravesite of grandmother on Mother's Day

Mother's Day was bittersweetfor one Manitoba family as they visited the long-lost unmarked grave of their grandmother for the first time, decades after she died.

"We never had a granny, granny was gone," saidAnn Marry Ross, 57.

She and her cousin Sheila North Wilson, grand chief ofManitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, an organization representing northern First Nations, wereamong a small group of cousins who visited a cemetery in Brandon on Sunday to see the grave of their grandmother, Madeleine North.

North was a 33-year-old single mother of fourwhen she was taken from her home and children in Cross Lake, Man., to be treated for tuberculosis in the late-1950s. She died in 1959and for decadesher family didn't know where she'd been buried or the details surrounding her death. Until recently, thefamily believed she'd been buried in a mass grave.

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Ross said the loss left a hole in her life growing up.

"I wanted to meet her, I wanted to know her because we never experienced a real granny," she said.

North Wilson recalls her father telling her about the day Madeleine died. He was out on the trapline when someone came by and told him to get to his grandparents' home quickly.

"He said that he didn'tknow what it was, but he said that he knew it was something to do with his mom. So he raced back on his dog team and went to where his grandmother lived, and he said that there was a whole bunch of people there and they told him that his mom had passed away."

'It looks empty'

For years, that was all her family knew about North's death. Growing up, North Wilson said she didn't hear much about her grandmother or the mystery surrounding the end of her life.

"My dad was very, very hurt. He said that he had to process it for a long time, and over these years as he was growing up as a teenager and then raising us as his family, he never talked about it," she said.

"He had lots of emotions around it. Lots of anger, lots of sadness, and just not knowing what happened to her."

But her late aunt, her dad's sister, wanted to know what happened to her mother, North Wilson said. She started doing her own research, and one of North Wilson's cousins continued searching after her aunt died.

'A simple misspelling'

Her cousin posted information about North and the family's search on Facebook.

AlanaLangevin, a volunteer firefighter inElie, Man., saw the post on Jan 21, 2015, and was intrigued enough to do a little investigating.

She did an initial online search of the name "MadelineNorth" the way the name appeared in that original Facebook postbut came up short.She then remembered what worked months earlier when she was searching for her husband's ancestors online.

"It was a simple misspelling in the name," Langevin said. "Instead of spelling it with the ending of L-I-N-E, I spelled it L-E-I-N-E and then it popped up."

Langevinread through government documents she found online and located North,one of six patients from Cross Lake mentioned therein, andhelped the family track the grave to the Brandon cemetery.

"I'm just happy to be able to give them the closure of knowing she is somewhere,"Langevinsaid.

The gravesitewas beside a small row of other unmarked plots that North Wilson said mightbelong to otherpatients.

"The grave, her plot, is just grass. It looks empty," North Wilson said. "It looks like there's nothing there."

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The family learned North had died in Ninette, Man., about 50 kilometres away from Brandon, and that she'd given birth to a daughter before she died. North Wilson and Ross saidthefamily would like to get in touch with the daughter if they can.

It's still unclear why North's body wasn't returned to Cross Lake.

"We don't really know why. We'd like to know why she was taken there and not taken home," North Wilson said."It could have had something to do with the fact that she had TB, or you know, they just simply didn't care enough to repatriate her home. We don't know. There's a lot of unanswered questions."

Disregard for Indigenous people

North Wilson said she'sheard stories about what happened to patients in tuberculosis sanatoriumssick people being left out in the cold as a treatment, or experimented on to test out different potential cures.

"My familyand even my dad worries about what might have happened to her while she was in that asylum," she said."It's almost too heart-wrenching to find out exactly what happened, but I think we're going to keep looking and seeing what else we can find."

North Wilson said resolving one part of her grandmother's story was bittersweet.

"It's sad, but at the same time, I'm glad that this piece of the mystery is a little bit clearer now, because nobody ever really knew where she was," she said.

Rossadded that she is glad the family persevered in honour of her mother's wishes to find North.

"She told us to carry on with the torch and that's what we did," Rosssaid.

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For all of the personal grief the family says they've endured, the way North was buried alsodemonstrates the disregard for Indigenous people duringthat chapter of Canada's history, North Wilson said.

"We hear about what happened to residential schools, students and survivors, but we don't hear much about what happened to people that had TB and were sent away to asylums, and I think that we have to find out what happened," she said.