Indian Residential School Records

A New Online Research Tool for Indian Residential Schools

By James Pew

Independent researcher Nina Green has created an invaluable online archive for Indian Residential School research. The website, Indian Residential School Records, launched yesterday.

On a related note, Nina, myself, and Brian Giesbrecht collaborated on an essay titled The Unmarked Graves Boondoggle, which was also published yesterday, in the Dorchester Review. I have cited Nina’s research in many of the indigenous pieces I’ve written, but until now, information from Nina came randomly in dozens of emails. With this new research tool, Nina has created a place where her prolific research into the IRS system now lives in an orderly fashion, freely available for public consumption. This is a major development for researchers seeking information about the IRS system. It is also a generous gift and exquisite resource. Thank you Nina!

From the Indian Residential School Records website:

“Have you ever wondered why the story of residential schools has been told only by those who attended during the system’s final years? Do no documents survive from the more than a century of the residential school system’s existence to add to that limited perspective?

Yes, thousands of documents do survive. They tell a fascinating story.” - Nina Green

The site hosts a number of different pages, some dedicated to administrative records - Applications, Attendance, and Quarterly Returns, others to Medical and Death records. There is a page dedicated to Student Reunions and another to Student Activities. The page on Kamloops is richly detailed and comprehensive.

I began at the Staff Chronicles page. I randomly selected, from a list containing over a dozen options, the chronicles of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Evron Mission St-Raphael - La Goff, Alberta. Here is a sample from the first booklet (1916-1919): 

“June 4, 1916 - page 4 The next day, Sunday, June 4, all the Indians came to attend High Mass; the church was full. All sang at the services; they pronounced Latin quite well, recited the Rosary in Montagnais; the hymns were also mostly in that language.”

Montagnais was the Indigenous language spoken by the majority of the residential students in La Goff, Alberta. This is just one of many instances that demonstrate that a blanket prohibition on indigenous languages across the IRS system is simply not true. In an essay written for Woke Watch Canada, former IRS student Mark Dewolf tells about his experience not being able to understand his classmates who spoke Black foot during recess.

“July 30, 1916 - pages 13-14 On July 30, the school was closed; typhoid fever had already claimed 10 victims among the children. The Sisters, during the whole time that the epidemic lasted, made numerous visits to the sick scattered on the reserve. Their rounds were sometimes quite long. It was during these excursions that they got to know the faith, the good spirit, the confidence in the priest or the Sisters of their dear Montagnais, their sensitivity to signs of affection and devotion. But also, they were more than once able to observe the uncleanliness, the disorder of their grown-up children of the woods, their carelessness and little care for their sick. The little authority that the parents exercise over their children in general.”

And later,

“Mid-November 1916 - page 30 Towards the middle of the month, the schoolchildren became less assiduous; supervision during recess was made easy by the appearance of the sleighs. The girls began to work on small works intended to make the surprises for the projected Christmas Tree. The beads especially had the gift of delighting them; each one put all her ardor in it. Many of them asked to wash their hands before working on them; this was something new.”

You can spend days on this website pouring over many fascinating historical accounts of those who ran the residential schools. Another I took a look at was produced a few decades later. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate - Piegan Reserve, Brocket School of the Sacred Heart and Mission of the Conversion of St. Paul. Codex (Volume I), 1943 to 1945. Below is two entries that appear beside each other, one on Christmas day, December 25th, and the other the next day, December 26th:

“December 25, 1944 Christmas! Christmas! The celebration was religious and everything went well. A hundred communions at the midnight mass, with the Sisters and the children. High mass with "Merry Christmas" and a sermon, then low mass with Christmas carols. At 11 o'clock, another low mass followed by the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Then we served dinner to the Indians present. All declared themselves satisfied. Then the Christmas tree was stripped - a song - and Fr. Crépeau spoke of his reasons for being as generous as possible with the gifts. Bob Crow Eagle speaks for the Indians first in Blackfoot and then in English. He thanks the staff and then says that every Christmas he is glad to see that there is a good God who helps the Indians year after year. No one notices much about the absence of "Santa Claus" and that is a good sign. We can't send the children home because of the so recent quarantine; they will go on New Year's Day. Besides, the weather is not very nice: cold and big wind from the West.” 

“December 26, 1944 This evening, we were told by the hospital in Cardston that Gloria White Cow had just died of tuberculosis. She was a student at the Protestant school and was converted and baptized by Fr. Levern.”

The two entries above say a lot about what life was like at an Indian residential school during World War II, when deadly diseases were rampant. Moments of joy and celebration, immediately followed by the cruel reality of disease and death at a time when antibiotics and vaccines were not yet available to prevent such tragic outcomes.

On the student activities page we are confronted again with historical information that doesn’t just slightly disagree with the IRS genocide narrative, it fully contradicts it. We learn of many field trips of former IRS students, like those in a dance troupe that traveled to Mexico City to compete in 1964. And a few years later groups of IRS students attended  Expo 67 :

“Students from several schools, including Kuper Island and Marieval, travelled to Expo ’67.

Many schools had bands and choirs, and some offered individual music lessons. A number of radio programs were recorded featuring the children singing in both English and Cree.

In the early years, schools bought radios and phonographs for the students’ entertainment during the long winter evenings. In later years there were games, movie nights, dances and parties.”

Over and over again, you will come across evidence of IRS students permitted (even encouraged) to speak their native language. This fact, and many others (like the use of radios and phonographs for entertainment), paint a picture so entirely at odds with the one created by the indigenous grievance industry. Disingenuous neotribal elites and their non-indigenous co-conspirators and useful activist idiots, have infused into the modern Canadian consciousness, the belief that the IRS system was something many times worse than it actually was, that its negative effects on the children who attended were overwhelming, that many of those children went missing, or died from lack of care, and to this day remain unaccounted for. 

This false IRS narrative, which many modern Canadians accept, not only lacks evidence of any missing or murdered children, it also has no explanation as to why a system should be (in modern times only) considered genocidal when it had offered field trips, phonographs, dance troupes, sports clubs, native languages and customs, ice rinks, swimming pools, all for students. But yet, the historical truth regarding the IRS system does indeed include these perks, programs and opportunities (not unlike what one would expect non-indigenous students to have had access to).

I’ll leave it at that for today. In the coming days I will be spending a lot of time on the new Indian Residential School Records website, and I’ll share my discoveries here!

My writing on indigenous issues is bound to improve due to this new research tool created by Nina Green. Expect to see far richer historical accounts and details. And, since the organized nature of the website makes writing on Indigenous issues much easier and more streamlined, expect to see a higher volume of indigenous writing from me!

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Thanks for reading. For more on Nina Green’s work read The Unknown Truth Of Canada's Residential School System  — Please consider supporting Woke Watch Canada by becoming a paid subscriber.