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She Died in a Residential School and Was Buried in Secret

It took eighty-three years to bring Denise Boucher home

She Died in a Residential School and Was Buried in Secret

It took eighty-three years to bring Denise Boucher home

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY PAT KANE

Published 6:30, SEPTEMBER 30, 2026

This story contains details about residential schools that some readers may find disturbing.

A simple hand-crafted wooden box with a painted pink fireweed and wild rose lays beneath the ground at a cemetery near the bank of the Snowdrift River in the Northwest Territories. The small casket holds the remains of Denise Boucher, a little girl who died at a residential school more than eight decades ago. She rests next to family members who have long passed, just outside the remote but picturesque Dene community of Łutsel K’e. Not much is known about Denise—what she looked like, what her laugh sounded like, or what clothes she liked to wear—because her living family members have never met her, and her living friends have forgotten. The loss of these details makes her story all the more tragic, but, to her family, keeping her memory alive—the recognition that she lived and is still grieved—is all that matters.

Roughly 200 kilometres southwest of Łutsel K’e is Fort Resolution, or Deninu Kųę́ in Dëne Sųłıné. The hamlet is tucked along the southeastern shore of Great Slave Lake next to the Slave River delta and, for centuries, has been a destination for fur traders. Today, many families in the area can trace their ancestry back to François Beaulieu II, or “Old Man Beaulieu” as he’s called, a Métis trapper with several wives who helped Alexander Mackenzie and John Franklin in their expeditions in the Northwest Territories.

A North West Company trading post was established nearby in 1791. In 1819, the post built by the Hudson’s Bay Company was named Fort Resolution, and the area turned into a hub of activity. Trappers, traders, and their families moved closer to the burgeoning community, and with them came the Oblate priests and nuns to spread Catholicism. By 1903, St. Joseph’s residential school was founded on the shores of Great Slave Lake—a place where children from places including Łutsel K’e were scooped up from their teepees and parents to spend their childhoods.

Denise Boucher was one of the many children in Canada’s residential school system who did not live to see adulthood.

Lizzie Beaulieu slept in a bed........

© The Walrus