Letter to NCTR Executive Director
Release the Report on Alleged Missing Indigenous Children!
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By Nina Green
The letter below to Stephanie Scott, Executive Director of the University of Manitoba's National Centre For Truth And Reconciliation (NCTR), requests the disclosure of a document of great importance to all Canadians which the University of Manitoba has up to this time kept secret — the report on alleged missing children and unmarked burials produced for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by Alex Maass in 2013.
At the time, Alex Maass was employed as a lead researcher by the TRC. She subsequently spent many years as an employee of Crown Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC), latterly as Manager of CIRNAC's Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Branch (see attachment).
In 2018 Maass obtained her PhD on the basis of her work for the TRC and CIRNAC in which she emphasized the importance of the report she had submitted to the TRC in 2013, stating that it was the basis for the TRC's 2015 recommendations:
I was responsible for overseeing the production of a project report in support of the Commission’s final report on the Missing Children with recommendations to the Government of Canada in 2015.
The disclosure of Alex Maass' report to the TRC on alleged missing children and unmarked burials is thus of the utmost importance to all Canadians as her report will assuredly contain the evidence — if any such evidence actually exists — of missing Indian residential school children.
So far, there is no evidence of missing Indian residential school children. To date, a decade after the TRC finished its work and ceased to exist, Canadians have not been provided with the name of any child who ever went missing from an Indian residential school and whose parents didn't know what had happened to their child. Not a single one. Yet despite the total lack of evidence that there are any missing children, Canadians have been relentlessly bombarded by the TRC, the University of Manitoba's NCTR, the media, and even the Canadian Senate with the claim that thousands of children are missing.
The release of Alex Maass' 2013 report will clear the air, and allow Canadians to know the truth. The University of Manitoba should release it immediately.
Dear Stephanie Scott,
I'm writing to request a copy of Alex Maass' report to the TRC mentioned in the attached copy of historian JR Miller's review of the TRC report in BC Studies in 2016 (copy of Miller review attached for ease of reference):
The result of orphaned research, however, is that some aspects of the TRC’s work ended up falling short of what was hoped for or needed. Two such topics were missing children and the staff experience. Investigation of the heart-wrenching story of thousands of residential school students who disappeared, their fates often unknown to their families, was agreed to very early in the TRC’s work. In fact, it was during the summer and autumn of 2008, when the first trio of commissioners was falling apart, that the decision was made to pursue such an investigation. As the research evolved, the lead was an archaeologist who focused mainly on identifying cemeteries that likely would have held the remains of students who died at the schools. The provenance of a study of staff experience was somewhat different. In large part the Commission found it necessary to put special effort into locating and interviewing former residential school workers because relatively few such staff came forward to testify at National Events or be interviewed by the TRC’s statement-gathering team. Eventually, one of the most experienced of the Commission’s staff was assigned the task of working up a report on the staff experience. Serious difficulties arose, however, in the spring of 2012, when the Commissioners found it necessary, presumably for financial reasons, to give notice of termination to the two women who were the leads on missing children and staff experience. Under the public service commission regulations that governed the TRC, terminated staff had to be given a year’s notice, time that they could work out on the job if they wished. One of the two research leads in question chose to do so and filed a report, but the other departed before the year was out, leaving her work incomplete.
The two leads mentioned were Helen Harrison (staff experience) and Alex Maass (missing children). Miller states that Helen Harrison did not file a report, but Alex Maass did.
Although all the TRC documents are at the University of Manitoba's NCTR pursuant to the trust deed the University of Manitoba signed with the TRC in 2013, and Alex Maass' name must appear in a great many of them, including the afore-mentioned report, a search of the NCTR Archives website for Alex Maass yields zero results.
Similarly, searches of the NCTR Archives for other persons known to have been involved in the TRC's Missing Children Project - TRC Interim Executive Director Robert Watts, TRC Executive Director Kimberly Murray, historian Dr John Milloy, Dr Scott Hamilton, Dr Eldon Yellowhorn, Dr Greg Young Ing - also yield zero results.
The Missing Children Project was carried on by the TRC in secrecy, and it appears that secrecy is being preserved by the University of Manitoba's NCTR staff, contrary to the University of Manitoba's obligation to make the TRC documents available to the general public in accordance with the 2013 trust deed (copy of trust deed attached for ease of reference).
I'm therefore requesting that you send me a copy of Alex Maass' report to the TRC mentioned in JR Miller's review, and that the NCTR staff make all the TRC documents related to the TRC's secret Missing Children Project available to the general public on the NCTR Archives website immediately. It seems clear almost all the documents would be available in digital form already, so there would appear to be no reason for any delay in doing so, particularly since the University of Manitoba has had the TRC's Missing Children Project documents since the termination of the TRC in 2015.
I've copied University of Manitoba President Dr Michael Benarroch, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, and CIRNAC Minister Gary Anandasangaree on this email as the matter is of some importance considering the University of Manitoba has failed for the past decade to make these documents available to the general public under the trust deed it signed with the TRC in 2013.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Nina Green
Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, CBC needs to issue a full correction of Rosemary Barton's statement, and explain whether it had advance notice of the Kamloops Band's false claim
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This should be reported everywhere in the land: “So far, there is no evidence of missing Indian residential school children. To date, a decade after the TRC finished its work and ceased to exist, Canadians have not been provided with the name of any child who ever went missing from an Indian residential school and whose parents didn't know what had happened to their child. Not a single one.”
The trope of missing children is part of the smoke and mirrors surrounding indigenous issues.
Excellent work.