Residential Schools

Missing (and Buried) Children

Information on Missing Children from Indian Residential Schools

Caution:

Information presented here can be triggering to trauma survivors.   The Indian Residential School Survivors Society operate a 24-hour crisis line for Indian School Survivors and Families:

1-866-925-4419

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) in 2007 started a project to identify and register missing children and unmarked burials.  Due to limited funding, they could only begin this project as it was not part of their original mandate.   They were able to identify 3,200 deaths of children who attended Indian Residential Schools but obtained verbal accounts from survivors of many more children that were missing or dead that were not recorded.  Since the completion of the Commission’s work the official death toll is now 4,100 before the recent discoveries.  There is still much more work that needs to completed.

“Missing children and Unmarked Burials Project”

from the

Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015:

http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Volume_4_Missing_Children_English_Web.pdf

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” is a systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate. The project’s research supports the following conclusions:

•The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students and the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students.

•For just under one-third of these deaths (32%), the government and the schools did not record the name of the student who died.

•For just under one-quarter of these deaths (23%), the government and the schools did not record the gender of the student who died.

•For just under one-half of these deaths (49%), the government and the schools did not record the cause of death.

•Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population.

•For most of the history of the schools, the practice was not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities.

•For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance.

•The federal government never established an adequate set of standards and regulations to guarantee the health and safety of residential school students.

•The federal government never adequately enforced the minimal standards and regulations that it did establish.

•The failure to establish and enforce adequate regulations was largely a function of the government’s determination to keep residential school costs to a minimum.

•The failure to establish and enforce adequate standards, coupled with the failure to adequately fund the schools, resulted in unnecessarily high death rates at residential schools.”

TRC Calls to Action 71 -76:

http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Future_July_23_2015.pdf

“Missing Children and Burial Information

71) We call upon all chief coroners and provincial vital statistics agencies that have not provided to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada their records on the deaths of Aboriginal children in the care of residential school authorities to make these documents available to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

72) We call upon the federal government to allocate sufficient resources to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to allow it to develop and maintain the National Residential School Student Death Register established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

73) We call upon the federal government to work with churches, Aboriginal communities, and former residential school students to establish and maintain an online registry of residential school cemeteries, including, where possible, plot maps showing the location of deceased residential school children.

74) We call upon the federal government to work with the churches and Aboriginal community leaders to inform the families of children who died at residential schools of the child’s burial location, and to respond to families’ wishes for appropriate commemoration ceremonies and markers, and reburial in home communities where requested.

75) We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residential school students, and current landowners to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried. This is to include the provision of appropriate memorial ceremonies and commemorative markers to honour the deceased children.

76) We call upon the parties engaged in the work of documenting, maintaining, commemorating, and protecting residential school cemeteries to adopt strategies in accordance with the following principles:

i. The Aboriginal community most affected shall lead the development of such strategies.

ii. Information shall be sought from residential school Survivors and other Knowledge Keepers in the development of such strategies.

iii. Aboriginal protocols shall be respected before any potentially invasive technical inspection and investigation of a cemetery site.”

Actions that anyone can take:

  1. Contact your local Federal, Provincial and Municipal elected officials to immediately put in to place the TRC’s relevant Calls to Action and the MMIWG Inquiry’s Calls for Justice and to urge the Federal government to move quickly to change Canada’s laws to align with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
  2. Donate money to a reputable organization that is searching for unmarked grave sites on former residential school property.
  3. Petition the Catholic church to release documents and for the Pope to issue an apology https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/un-calls-canada-prompt-exhaustive-investigations-1.6049912