Current Problems

Missing Children and Burial Information (71-76)

Kamloops Indian Residential School

May 28, 2021

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Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation

Toronto Star – The bodies of 215 Indigenous children were discovered in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Residential School located in the territory of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation. The Truth and Reconciliation records the death of 51 children dying at the Kamloops Residential School between 1914 and 1963. The commission noted in its 2015 report that officials in 1918 believed children at the school were not being adequately fed, leading to malnutrition. Ry Moran, founding director of the Nations Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba …said as many as 400 unmarked burial locations are believed to exist across the country, but only about 100 have been identified.

Indigenous Watchdog Background: Three of the Six Calls to Action of “Missing Children and Burial Information” Calls to Action have not even started – six years after the Summary Report of the TRC was first released on June 2, 2015. All three are specifically directed at what the discovery at the former Kamloops Residential School address:

  • Identify child’s burial location and notify families for reburial ceremonies
  • identify, document, maintain, commemorate and protect residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried
  • All Policies and protocols relating to residential school cemeteries are Indigenous led

In Budget 2019, the federal government allocated $33.8M specifically for Calls to Action # 72 “to develop and maintain the National Residential School Student Death Register” and Call to Action # 73 to “establish and maintain an online registry of residential school cemeteries, including where possible, plot maps showing the location of deceased residential school children”.

Of that amount $6.8M was for the Student Death registry and the online registry of residential school cemeteries. (CTV News)The balance was left unallocated until June 2, 2021 when $27M was suddenly made available to “assist Indigenous communities in locating and memorializing children who died at residential schools”.

Six years to the day that those Calls to Action were first issued.