Bodies to be Exhumed: Court Order

A Quebec Superior Court judge has ordered the bodies of two Innu children exhumed to shed light on their deaths over 50 years ago. The exhumations are the first to be authorized under a 2021 Quebec law intended to help Indigenous families learn more about the deaths and disappearances of their children in Quebec healthcare institutions. The children in question, aged four months and one month, died in May, 1970 at a hospital in Baie-Comeau (around 413 kilometers northeast of Quebec City), after they were admitted for whooping cough.

In a first in Quebec, the families’ requests have been granted under the recent law, allows Indigenous families to access information about children who went missing or died while hospitalized away from their communities. Once exhumed, the bodies will be transported from a cemetery in Quebec’s Côte-Nord region to a morgue in Montreal, where DNA tests will be conducted to confirm the children’s identities.