Nine years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, families and survivors seeking information from various churches and government bodies are hitting roadblocks.
Toronto Star: Laura Arndt has cried at the table with residential school survivors while they received documents that some have been awaiting for 70 years.
For some survivors, it’s a promise they wished to see fulfilled before they died. For others, it’s being believed for the first time. For still others, it’s confirmation for the world that what happened to them was genocide.
“I’ve sat and listened to survivors say, ‘I knew. I knew something happened,’ and then I’ve sat with survivors who said, ‘My heart is breaking but I know now I can have peace because I’m not worrying anymore, because I didn’t want her to think I forgot her,’” said Arndt, the secretariat lead for the Survivors Secretariat.
Regardless of who is searching for records or why, Arndt always says one thing when she gets a call: “Welcome home.”
“We start your healing journey of remembering your family member to you. That’s what it’s supposed to be about,” Arndt said.
“This is a memory project.”
After the discovery of 215 potential unmarked graves of children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021, the Survivors Secretariat was established to search for unmarked graves in the 600 acres of land encompassing the Church of England-run Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ont., one of the longest-running residential schools in Canada.
“Whether it’s church documents or Canada’s numbers, we need to bring the memories of all those children home,” Arndt said. “We need to be able to grieve them, do ceremony for them, but the only way we’re going to do it is the research work.”
The discovery at Kamloops was a catalyst for many communities’ search for missing children from Indian residential schools. That year, the federal government established the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to be held annually on Sept. 30, a day previously recognized by many as Orange Shirt Day in honour of residential school children and survivors since 2013. The discovery also reinvigorated public pressure on churches to release their residential school records to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).
But nearly a decade since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, survivors and their families are still fighting for access to these records. Not knowing where to find records and months-long backlogs within the churches and NCTR are preventing survivors and their communities from accessing the records they say hold the answers to what happened to children who never came home.
The memories of all the children
There has always been a desire by survivors and their families to access their own records, said Tricia Logan, academic director of the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. While some communities have worked to find missing children for some time, hiring researchers and archivists to help, for others it’s relatively new.
“It’s the big job — this huge, formidable task to investigate missing children and unmarked burials at each of the former residential school sites,” said Logan.
“That search for records — for information of what happened — is going to take a long time. It’s a lot of different pieces and it’s a lot of records that haven’t been able to be accessed.”
Since the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples report in 1996, there have been calls for governments and the operating churches — primarily the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United — to give over all of their residential school records.
Residential schools by denomination
The listing of schools is based on the Indian Residential Schools Settlement and further research by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Some discrepancies exist because of schools that changed denominations and other anomalies. Star Graphic.
Some records were collected during the class-action suit by survivors against the churches and federal government, but it was the resulting Indian Residential Schools Settlement in 2007 that mandated all records be handed over to the forthcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission and eventually kept within the NCTR.
However, the TRC’s final report in 2015 revealed that not all records were acquired, and its Calls to Action urged government institutions and the churches to make all records available to the NCTR.
Although the NCTR is meant to be a central place to hold all residential school records, locating them is complicated by the fact that records are all across Canada, including provincial archives, museums and universities.
And because much financial responsibility over residential schools was absorbed by the government through the Indian Residential Schools Settlement, Logan said churches are often missing from the narrative.
Having access to the churches’ residential school records is crucial to understanding the churches’ larger relationship with Indigenous Peoples and how Canada took shape.
“I think there’s a much bigger picture where it connects residential schools to a lot of all of those structures of settler colonialism,” Logan said.
For the Survivors Secretariat, documents and records have been a pillar of their work. Church records show their foundational role in the early running of the school. But Arndt said there are significant gaps between government and church records.
The Secretariat estimates over 5,900 children were taken from 60 communities across the country and forced to attend the Mohawk Institute, run by the Anglican Church and the Canadian government between 1828 and 1970.
Before the Secretariat’s work, the NCTR had listed 47 children who died while at the school, but over the past two years the Secretariat have found records from 50 archival bodies that estimate over 100 children died — and they’re still searching.
This research included a visit to England last October to The Royal Archives, which holds many records for the New England Co. — which directly ran the Mohawk Institute until the 1920s.
Arndt said church records are essential to identifying children whose graves could be found using ground-penetrating radar.
“You need the records and documents to get a master student list so you can then begin to figure out who went home,” she said.
“We’re beginning to be able to narrow down that they could be one of the children in an unmarked burial, because we can’t find a discharge record or them ever re-entering their band records.”
Kimberly Murray, the federally appointed Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves, said residential school records are evidence of genocide and mass atrocities, and help support survivor testimonies.
“We have survivors’ truths that have been shared with the country for decades,” she said, “and some Canadians want to see it with their own eyes.”
Beyond the Catholic Church
Logan said after the Kamloops discovery and papal apology in 2022, more people began searching for records.
Various church entities made statements to “indicate that they’re going to try to help all of those searches to try to help connect family members with information about their ancestors,” Logan said.
But in recent years, it has become clear the Catholic Church’s archives at several dioceses and in the Vatican did not give all records to the NCTR or make them available to survivors.
The Catholic Church ran as many as 60 per cent of the 139 federally funded residential schools identified in the residential schools settlement, according to a report by the Special Interlocutor.
A set of new guidelines published in June 2023 by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops stated that as of August 2022, only 18 dioceses have handed over their residential school records to the NCTR. In a statement, Bishop McGrattan, president of the conference, said only 16 of the 73 Roman Catholic dioceses in Canada were involved in managing residential schools, and “it is our understanding that all 16 have submitted records to the NCTR.”
But experts have flagged problems within these guidelines.
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s head of archives, Raymond Frogner, said in a statement that the guidelines fail to mention victims dealing with trauma and don’t address female clergy who have abused children at the schools.
“There should always be room to address the trauma of Survivors,” Frogner wrote.
In response to these kinds of concerns, McGrattan said the bishops conference is “always available to listen to feedback, in particular from victims and survivors, about issues they have identified in accessing records that help them find truth and healing.”
“We encourage continued collaboration between dioceses and the NCTR, which develops expertise in this area, including specific processes for survivors or intergenerational survivors.”
Frogner said it’s also important to remember it’s not just a Catholic Church issue.
Since the residential schools settlement, the other governing churches have worked to different degrees with the TRC and NCTR on delivering records.
The Anglican Church ran the second highest number of residential schools. According to a church press release in 2015, 30 dioceses plus the General Synod Archives delivered about 300,000 digital copies of their records to the TRC.
The Anglican General Synod Archives, which have most administrative records for the schools, handed over 140,000 files, including 6,000 photographs, and the archives were part of the TRC’s archival pilot project.
It’s very difficult work of trying to piece a story together, no matter how good a record it is.
Laurel Parson, the archivist for the General Synod Archives, said the individual dioceses were responsible for submitting records to the TRC.
Kamloops had been Roman Catholic-run, but Parson said with the widespread fallout, the Anglican archive has done a project on its residential school cemeteries, hiring someone to look at what records they have related to students that went missing or were sick and died while at Anglican-run schools.
“We’ve compiled all of that, and we do make those records available to communities or individuals as requested,” she said.
The Presbyterian Church of Canada handed the TRC all documents related to the two residential schools they directly ran, according to their archivist Kim Arnold. They also have their own “Guide to Residential Schools Records” for Indigenous researchers looking to access records within their archives.
The United Church of Canada, which absorbed the Methodist Church and two-thirds of the Presbyterian churches in 1925, controlled about a tenth of the schools. The General Council Archives and regional council archives handed over their material to the TRC.
Following the TRC, the United Church brought in a researcher to digitize all the records related to Indian Day School institutions for the NCTR. But after hearing from the Special Interlocutor, the archives reprioritized to digitizing all records related to the roughly 40 Indian Hospitals and 90 United Church missions across the country to help in the search for missing children.
General archives manager Laura Hallman, who facilitated scanning records over to the TRC, is working alongside Reconciliation and Indigenous Justice Animator Sara Stratton. So far, they’ve reviewed about 100,000 pages.
“There’s just so much hidden in the archives that we don’t even know we have,” Hallman said, “and we’re finding a lot more communities.”
Together, Hallman and Stratton’s work has also involved creating new policies and procedures to guide Indigenous researchers and survivors seeking records. These include policies for handing full copies of documents over to communities, and trauma-informed practices for those coming to view documents.
But Stratton warns that the work involving records will also be difficult because residential school records are incomplete.
“It’s very difficult work of trying to piece a story together, no matter how good a record it is. It’s still a fragmentary record,” she said.
“No matter how good a record it is, it’s still a fragmentary record.”
“I mean, these children weren’t respected so the institution didn’t respect the records either.”
Backlogs and privacy concerns
But transferring church records to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is only half the problem, as experts say privacy laws that apply to the NCTR as a university-run institution have created difficulties for survivors and communities.
“The churches are trying to hide behind the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, because many of them will say, when you go to the entity and say let me access the records, they’ll say, ‘We gave our records to the TRC. Go get them at the NCTR,” Murray said.
“So documents are restricted at the archive that’s supposed to be the Indigenous archive, but not restricted at the archives where they’re originally from. And so communities have been saying it’s easier to get the records directly from Library and Archives Canada or directly from the church entities” than the NCTR.
McGrattan said having a single repository for residential school records, like the NCTR, is important because otherwise “records pertaining to a single school, or even student, may be held in several locations, which creates additional barriers.”
He also said working with the NCTR does not “preclude dioceses or other Catholic entities from providing direct access to the original records they hold.”
A professor of history and religion studies at the University of Ottawa, Emma Anderson has 20 years’ experience in accessing and researching church archives, including residential school archives, in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
Yet she said, based on the bishops’ conference’s new guidelines, it would be harder to walk into a diocese and ask to access their archives than 20 years ago.
One reason is an attempt to balance a right to information with the privacy of those in the church clergy, which Anderson said could be interpreted as concerns about protecting the church against liability.
“The more aware they are of what they have, the more difficult it may be for researchers, whether Indigenous or academic or both, to get access to the very information which might be the most pertinent.”
Hallman said the United Church has been trying to balance privacy and full access for communities. It’s often case by case.
“We’re actually trying to transfer the onus of the privacy responsibility to those Indigenous communities, allowing them to decide who gets access to these records,” she said.
“We’re trying not to see ourselves as the owners of the records and more the caretakers and that’s quite difficult. The archives are quite colonial.”
Murray said she has been cautioning survivors and families who contact the NCTR to request their records because of backlogs and long wait times.
“If it’s your own records, it might be a little quicker and you might get more information,” she said. “But if you’re a descendant of a survivor that wants records, you might wait six months and then get one page and it’s redacted.”
In response to questions about the NCTR’s severe backlog, Frogner said in a statement that demand for records has “skyrocketed in recent years, rising from 75 received requests in 2018 to a staggering 513 in 2023, and this number continues to grow.” These requests also come from researchers, educational institutions and the media.
“While limited resources can sometimes delay the process, we prioritize meeting the needs of Survivors and their families as they seek records of their truths,” he said.
Angela White, executive director of the Indian Residential School Survivors’ Society, leads one organization that has partnered with the UBC Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre to help survivors gain more access to records.
The society represents and advocates on behalf of survivors and their families. It has always maintained survivors should have access “no matter what, and there should be no barriers in place for them to get a copy of things.”
Who do the records belong to?
Finding the residential school records, White said, is about validation.
“A lot of survivors are told no one will ever believe you because you are ‘a dirty, no-good Indian,’ and they believe that,” she said. “I know my grandmother believed that.”
But now, White said survivors feel safer and want to find their records and even have their stories documented as part of their healing journey.
And since Kamloops and the increase of available documentation, White said more non-Indigenous people have contacted the Indian Residential School Survivors’ Society to learn more about residential schools.
Who the records belong to, and who should care for them, has long been clear to survivors.
They have gotten “louder and louder about the fact that they believe strongly that those records are theirs … about their lives and about their childhood,” Logan said.
Arndt of the Survivors’ Secretariat also said the records belong with communities, who can protect them from exploitation.
“Records and documents belong in the hands of the nations and the families for who those children were part of, so that they can be remembered as ancestors,” she said.
The Survivors Secretariat is starting to create its own database for the records it collected on the Mohawk Institute through an agreement with the NCTR.
The database will be stewarded by Six Nations and have Indigenous data sovereignty and governance frameworks to protect the rights of the survivors and the children who never came home, with communities and families being pivotal in deciding how data is used and shared.
“These children were taken, exploited and potentially died. They were abused, and nobody was there to protect them,” Arndt said.
“Now, as we’re getting access to the records as communities, we have an obligation to protect their memories so they don’t get exploited again, and that they aren’t somebody’s commodity.”
Request for family records goes into a long queue
I attempted to search for some of my own family’s residential school records for this story, both within the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and the Catholic Church’s local diocese.
My grandmother attended an Anglican-run residential school in southern Alberta during the 1930s. The NCTR’s form to request residential school records asked for information including my grandmother’s biographical information and the school she attended as well as any known nicknames; her parents’ names; their dates of birth and death; her siblings’ names; and proof of death in the form of an obituary, required as a third-party request.
I submitted the form on Aug. 15 and received a response the same day.
The email confirmed my request has been placed “in queue for research,” but the NCTR is currently researching requests submitted from August 2023 and it’s expected “it will be several months before research for your inquiry is complete.”
If records for my grandmother are found “it will be another wait” while their Access and Privacy Office — which is responsible for any privacy redactions — goes through the records, and this office has “a significant backlog.”
The NCTR’s head of archives, Raymond Frogner, said in response to the Star’s questions that a records request can take anywhere from three days to three weeks to complete. With only two full-time employees and “a shifting number of archivists on contract,” they currently have a rate of about 36 requests a month.
I also attempted to locate my aunt and uncle’s records from a Roman Catholic-run residential school from the 1940s and 1950s.
I contacted the local diocese and while I received a quick response from the chancellor in charge of the archives, they were only able to find my aunt and uncle’s sacramental registers and said “neither of the names appeared” in their residential school record search.
The chancellor referred me to the provincial archives or the NCTR, where the “significant majority of relevant records concerning the residential schools in Alberta are,” or to Library and Archives Canada.
By Joy Spear Chief-Morris Ottawa Bureau
Joy Spear Chief-Morris is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics and Indigenous issues for the Star. Reach her via email: jspearchiefmorris@thestar.ca