ABSTRACT
In 2005, a chilling story from New Westminster, British Columbia, made headlines across Canada. The British Columbia Association for Community Living, a group advocating on behalf of children and adults with intellectual disabilities, stumbled upon a large unmarked grave next to a former long-stay mental retardation facility, the Woodlands Institute.1 After a forensic investigation, they concluded that the grounds had been the site of an institutional cemetery which had been stripped of its gravestones in order not to dismay the senior residents who had moved into one of the renovated buildings once the provincial policy of deinstitutionalisation had taken hold in the 1990s. After weeks of spadework, the volunteers began to uncover the missing gravestones. As one volunteer recalls, ‘Some . . . were found in a retaining wall in a nearby ravine, some were found in walkways, and in a bizarre twist that seems to embody the indignity of the event, some were found in a barbecue pit that had been built for Woodlands staff.’2 The experience was, for many of those involved in the restoration events, quite spiritual and symbolic: ‘We weren’t just touching stones, we were touching people. By recovering these headstones we’re saying, “They will no longer be forgotten.”’3
