My Father Was Found in a Residential School Incinerator When He Was an Infant | The Walrus

"In my mind's eye, his carburetor is coughing, the crickets are singing, and there's that tiny, eerie cry. When he killed the engine and stepped out from behind his insect-speckled windshield, the night watchman could hear it too. It was coming from the service wing, a single-storey brick annex at the back of the mission. The baby's scream climbed the lone smokestack looming out of that annex and crawled across the school grounds. It was primal. The sound of birth meeting death."

"Antonius Cornelius Stoop went by Tony. He wore his brown hair in one of those short-cropped everyman cuts. And he was an everyman. A Dutchman who spoke broken English, Tony immigrated to Canada from the old country. At night, he walked the grounds of St. Joseph's, a ring of keys jingling on his hip and a flashlight in his hand."

Late one night a night watchman at St. Joseph's Mission residential school heard a tiny, eerie baby cry coming from the service wing. The four-storey white building had a large cross and blue-green trim, while the annex's lone smokestack carried the primal scream across the grounds. The night watchman, Antonius Cornelius Stoop, was a Dutch immigrant who patrolled with a flashlight and jingling keys, guarding children and the school's Hereford herd. He worked there for over thirty years until the school's closure in 1981. In 2021 the Williams Lake First Nation opened an investigation into missing students from the mission.

Read at The Walrus