The Marieval Indian Residential School opened on December 19, 1898, on the Cowessess First Nation reserve. For nearly a century, it operated as part of Canada's systematic effort to assimilate Indigenous children by severing them from their families, languages, and cultures. Four sisters from the Congregation of Our Lady of the Missions ran the school initially, followed by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Saint-Hyacinthe from 1901 to 1979. The Cowessess First Nation eventually took control in 1987, running it until its closure in 1997. The cemetery beside the school predated the institution itself, first used in 1885. By 2021, only a third of the graves remained marked.

The announcement came on June 23, 2021. Ground-penetrating radar had detected 751 recorded hits beneath the cemetery grounds, each potentially indicating one or more burials. The technology carried an error rate of 10 to 15 percent, suggesting at least 600 actual graves. This was not a mass grave - the bodies had been buried individually, their headstones deliberately removed by Catholic Church representatives in the 1960s. The discovery at Marieval represented more than three times the 215 unmarked anomalies found at Kamloops Indian Residential School just weeks earlier. Perry Bellegarde, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, called it 'absolutely tragic, but not surprising.'

The revelations sent ripples across Canada. Communities in British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nunavut cancelled their Canada Day celebrations, opting for reflection instead of fireworks. The CN Tower in Toronto glowed orange in solidarity with Indigenous communities. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the findings 'Canada's responsibility to bear,' though critics demanded action over sympathy. In Saskatoon, St. Paul's Co-Cathedral was covered in graffiti reading 'we were children,' surrounded by red handprints. Four Catholic churches on First Nations land in western Canada burned in suspicious fires within a week of the announcement.

By October 2021, the Cowessess First Nation had identified 300 of the 751 likely gravesites, piecing together records from the RCMP, the Catholic Church, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, and the oral histories preserved by community members. The Archdiocese of Regina had provided $70,000 in 2019 to help identify the unmarked graves and restore the cemetery. The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, responsible for operating Marieval and 48 other residential schools, announced they would release all historical documents in their possession. In 2019, the federal government had allocated $33.8 million over three years to develop the National Residential School Student Death Register, which opened in September 2020 with an initial list of 2,800 names.

Today, the site in the Qu'Appelle Valley stands as a testament to both tragedy and resilience. The rolling Saskatchewan prairie stretches to the horizon, east of Crooked Lake and north of Broadview. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued 94 recommendations for healing and justice; their implementation remains an ongoing struggle. For the Cowessess First Nation and Indigenous peoples across Canada, these 751 markers - visible now through technology if not through stone - represent children who were taken from their families and never returned. The land remembers what others tried to forget.