The fight is not over to find records that answer “tough questions” about unmarked graves in Canada Residential schoolincluding who the missing children were and how they died, said the woman assigned to the task My country A search of communities is underway across the country.
Special negotiator Kimberly Murray said the Canadian government and religious groups, which signed the 2006 Indian residential school settlement agreement following a landmark class action lawsuit, were required to provide their records to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but many are yet to do so. are also missing.
While most of those documents are held by Catholic institutions, Murray said he has personal experience finding additional records that were not shared after Anglican officials in Canada pointed out that everything had been changed.
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She said she traveled with survivors of the Mohawk Institute to an Anglican diocese in Brantford, Ontario, where they found several boxes of files.
“This is just one diocese, and there are others across the country,” Murray said in an interview Tuesday.
“So, when the head of the church says, ‘We gave everything,’ and then we find out, well, that’s not really true over here, how do we know it’s true over there?”
The records are important because they represent “the path to truth,” said Murray, who is a member of the Kanesatake Mohawk Nation.
Meanwhile, many other record-holding bodies, such as provincial archives, museums, universities and police departments, had no legal obligation under the settlement agreement to share their files with the commission, she said.
Communities are going directly to those sources, trying to negotiate access to files that remain restricted, police records to investigate abuse or call information to locate children who have run away from institutions, Murray said. may be included.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said his government is committed to sharing all information it can possibly find about institutions in federal records.
Without a record of the genocide of Indigenous peoples, Murray said, “the denial will continue” and future generations may be driven to forget.
Murray told a national gathering on unmarked burials in Vancouver that survivors of residential institutions have a “right to know”.
Murray said that this right is not only individual, but collective, so the country “can draw on the past to prevent future violations”.
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That said, finding missing records “is not an academic exercise”.
Murray said the records affect real people who are searching for information about their grandparents, their parents and their children.
“These records could no longer be kept in safes, with colonial institutions controlling who viewed them.”
The renewed demand for the records comes amid a wave of searches at the sites of several former residential institutions across the country following Tk’emlups te Secwepemc’s announcement in May 2021 that more than 200 suspected unmarked graves were found on the grounds of the former school was identified. in Kamloops, BC
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A month later, the Cowes First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that 751 unmarked graves had been found near the former Maryvale Indian Residential School, followed by similar findings at former institutions in several provinces.
On Tuesday, the Wojciech Onigum Nation in northern Ontario said it had uncovered 171 “plausible burials” in a study of cemetery grounds at a former residential school site.
Tk’emlups Te Secwepemc chief Rosen Casimir said the announcement was like “healing an old wound” in his community.
“So many people have been triggered, re-traumatized,” said Casimir, who attended the national gathering on Tuesday.
She said she understands that many records related to the organization in Kamloops have been turned over to the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, yet challenges remain with how that information is shared with community members.
“What is missing today is the survivors and their truth, their history that really happened,” she said.
Casimir said this is why indigenous sovereignty or control over how residential school records are accessed and used is so important.
He said his community is working with a researcher and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to compile the information needed for their investigation.
Murray also told the crowd that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has said that the most serious gap in knowledge stems from the incompleteness of the records.
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He said many documents from past decades no longer exist, including “200,000 Indian case files” that were destroyed between 1936 and 1994.
Federal policy in 1935 allowed school returns to be destroyed after five years, while reports of accidents could be destroyed after a decade, she said.
Murray said it also became clear that “many, many, many deaths were not reported” to the Department of East Indian Affairs.
While records are important, Murray said that “nothing is more powerful than the direct accounts of survivors of residential institutions”.
“They themselves are witnesses.”
A 4,000-page report released in 2015 by the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission details the emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children in schools and harsh abuse in schools, including at least 4,100 deaths in institutions.
Murray said the full number of children who died will never be known.