The Unknown Truth Of Canada's Residential School System
The Unknown Truth Of Canada's Residential School System
Canada's National Center For Truth And Reconciliation Is Full Of It!
By Nina Green
Justice Murray Sinclair has claimed that there could be 15-25,000 residential school deaths:
The TRC documented the deaths of more than 6,000 students as a result of residential schools, but the true figure "could be in the 15-25,000 range, and maybe even more," Sinclair said.
Department of Indian Affairs documents in the federal government’s possession, as well as provincial death records, demonstrate that this wildly-exaggerated claim cannot be supported.
A. Why has the federal government not been able to prove that there are no ‘missing children’ and that only a few hundred deaths actually occurred at residential schools?
Pursuant to a Treasury Board directive dated 2 February 1933 (T.147760 B.) and a Treasury Board minute dated 2 June 1936 (RG55, Vol. 20032, TB Minute 160481)- See pdf below “Catherine Butler LAC” - thousands of documents in every federal department were destroyed, partly to save space and partly as a process for determining which documents were of historical importance and deserved to be preserved by Library and Archives Canada.
The destruction of thousands of DIA records has left an opening for baseless claims that there are thousands of ‘missing children’ and 15-25,000 residential school deaths. Those making the claims are undoubtedly aware that the federal government cannot refute these baseless claims by producing the DIA records which have been destroyed.
B. What would the destroyed records have proved?
1. Firstly, the destroyed records would have proved that it was impossible for any student to have gone ‘missing’ since every student in every residential school was rigorously tracked from the time he/she entered the school until the time he/she left.
On entering a residential school, each student was given an individual register number. At the end of March, June, September and December every year, every residential school sent a quarterly return to the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) listing all students by register number for the purpose of obtaining the federal government grant for the school. Although most were eventually destroyed pursuant to the Treasury Board Minute mentioned above, some quarterly returns fortuitously escaped destruction, were microfilmed by Library and Archives Canada, and are available online in the Library and Archives Canada School Files Series.
To access quarterly returns for the years 1943-1952 for the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS), go to this link for LAC c-8770, and insert page number 829.
An example of a quarterly return is attached (below). It has the name and register number (#935) of the Honourable Len Marchand, Canada’s first indigenous Member of Parliament, who attended KIRS in 1949/50 by his own choice, and had positive things to say about the school in his autobiography, Breaking Trail. See pp. 11-16.
In addition, on the submission of each quarterly return, the school was required to attach another form listing, by register number, each student admitted to the school during that quarter and each student discharged from the school during that quarter, including any child who had died. Fortunately, copies of admission and discharge forms for Lejac Indian Residential School in northern BC escaped destruction, were microfilmed by Library and Archives Canada, and are available online. To access the admission and discharge forms for Lejac, go to this link for LAC c-8769, and insert page number 1673.
2. Secondly, the destroyed records would have proved that the Department of Indian Affairs mandated that the local Indian Agent conduct a formal inquiry into every student death at a residential school, with the relevant documents forwarded to the DIA in Ottawa. Fortunately these formal inquiries survived destruction in the case of some residential schools, including inquiries into deaths which occurred at KIRS within the period 1935-1945, and were microfilmed by Library and Archives Canada. To access the inquiries into these KIRS deaths, go to this link for LAC c-8773, and insert the page number 1323.
C. Despite the destruction of thousands of DIA documents, are there extant provincial government death records which can fill the gap, and prove that children whose names are on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s lists and whose names are on the blood-red banner unveiled in 2019 are not ‘missing’ and that their deaths cannot be attributed to residential schools and that in fact they did not even die on residential school premises?
Fortunately, there are. Here are the NCTR lists for each residential school.
Here is the blood-red banner containing the names of 2800 allegedly ‘missing children.’
Some provinces turned their death certificates, as well as other records, over to the NCTR seven years ago. An article by Jorge Barerra on APTN dated 29 March 2014 states that the BC and Alberta governments had in that month transferred thousands of death records to the NCTR’s predecessor, the TRC:
. . . . the 4,900 death records the British Columbia government transferred to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Friday. The records include all deaths of First Nations children and youth aged four to 19 between 1870 and 1984.
On Monday, the Alberta government quietly turned over 41 DVDs containing about 10,000 death records of First Nations people who died between 1923 and 1945. TRC researchers will now sift through the records to determine which ones died in one of the province’s 25 residential schools.
The NCTR has denied everyone access to those records. See the NCTR website:
Following the direction provided by Survivors during the community engagements held in 2018 and at the National Gathering of Elders, only the names and dates of death will be public.
The NCTR’s denial of access to these government records means that wildly exaggerated claims concerning ‘missing children’ and 15-25,000 residential school deaths can be made by indigenous leaders without any Member of Parliament, Member of a Provincial Legislature, historian or other academic, journalist or member of the general public being able to check on their accuracy since only the NCTR has access to the provincial government records from which the lists of alleged residential school deaths have been compiled. This is particularly egregious when it is considered that these death records are provincial government records created and maintained at Canadian taxpayer expense.
Provincial government death records can be individually searched on provincial government websites by MPs, MLAs, academics, the media and the general public, but the process is labour-intensive and prohibitively expensive when access to large numbers of death records is required (BC death certificates, for example, cost $50 apiece). Moreover only BC has a user-friendly search site on which, in some cases, after 20 years a full death certificate specifying cause of death and place of burial can be viewed online. Other provinces only make death records available to the public after a much longer period, in some cases 70 years.
Here is the BC search site.
To date, I’ve personally searched for BC death records for all 18 former residential schools in BC, that is, all 416 students listed for BC on the NCTR lists.
There are BC death records viewable online for 225 of the 416 students. They show that only 12% of the students died at BC residential schools. The rest died in BC hospitals, on their home reserves, or elsewhere. The results for Kamloops, which show that only 2 students actually died at the school while the rest died at hospitals or on their home reserves, and that the students were buried on their home reserves, can be viewed here.
The results for the other 17 BC residential schools are similar. The children on the NCTR lists are therefore not ‘missing’. Not only did almost all of them die somewhere other than on the premises of a residential school, but they are buried on their home reserves (in some cases, as stated in the death certificates, by members of the Indian Bands themselves) so obviously their families were well aware that nothing nefarious had happened to them. I’ve attached spreadsheets with the results for 10 BC schools (spreadsheets have not been compiled for the 8 schools which had 0-5 student deaths).
D. Can claims that there were 15-25,000 residential school deaths be supported?
They cannot. Far from it. I’ve counted all the names on the NCTR lists on its website, province by province. There are only 2847 names for all residential schools in Canada. See the attached spreadsheet. Moreover the spreadsheet shows that of those 2847 names, 551 of them — almost 20% — are just a name — no date of death is given. How can the NCTR know whether a student died at a residential school when the NCTR does not even know the student’s date of death?
Moreover 202 of the 2847 names (7%) are not attached to any specific province or residential school. In other words, the NCTR has no idea whether these individuals even attended a residential school anywhere in Canada.
Thus, Justice Murray Sinclair’s wildly exaggerated claim of 15-25,000 residential school deaths has been reduced to the 2847 names on the NCTR’s lists, and of those, 20% lack even a date of death. If we eliminate the latter as being questionable, to say the least, there remain only 2296 names which have at least some claim to be on the NCTR lists of residential school deaths.
But as shown in the results for the 18 BC schools mentioned above, most of those 2296 children didn’t die on the premises of a residential school, which would surely be the only legitimate basis for the NCTR to term them ‘residential school deaths’. They died away from the residential schools — either in hospitals, or on their home reserves.
If the names of those who died away from the premises of a residential school were eliminated from the NCTR lists, how many names, that is, how many actual residential school deaths, would remain? It seems clear that the NCTR lists would then contain at most a few hundred deaths that actually occurred on the premises of a residential school over the more than a century that the residential schools were in operation.
E. Were more than 1100 unmarked graves ‘discovered’ at residential schools using GPR in 2021?
They were not. All experts agree that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) cannot locate human remains or burials per se. It can only locate soil disturbances which must be excavated to determine what has caused them.
Despite the acknowledged limitations of GPR, alleged ‘discoveries’ of the ‘remains of 215 children’ and of almost a thousand unmarked graves were announced in rapid succession last spring and summer at Kamloops (215), Marieval on the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan (751), and St Eugene’s in Cranbrook (182), sparking a media frenzy and worldwide shock and outrage.
In fact, no remains whatsoever, and no previously unknown unmarked graves connected to residential schools were ‘discovered’ in Canada in 2021. Let’s take them one by one:
Kamloops
The Kamloops ‘discovery’ is belied on many counts, the most significant being that Dr Sarah Beaulieu, who did the GPR work, made it clear on July 15th that her work was only a preliminary survey, that only soil disturbances had actually been located, and that excavation was necessary to determine the nature of those soil disturbances.
From the outset, since her first press release claiming that ‘the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old’ were found, Chief Rosanne Casimir has adamantly refused to release Dr Beaulieu’s detailed written report, presumably because it would contradict her claim that the remains of children had been found.
Moreover the Kamloops Band has permanently foreclosed the possibility of excavation by designating the apple orchard in its Heritage Park where it claims the remains were found as a ‘sacred burial site’.
Photos of the apple orchard in the Heritage Park here.
Marieval
Bryan Eneas of CBC News announced the Marieval ‘discovery’ on 24 June 2021. See his news story, and the 8-minute video within it.
However there was no ‘discovery’ at Marieval in the summer of 2021. The truth behind the alleged ‘discovery’ of 751 unmarked graves of residential school students at Marieval was revealed in an interview published by the CBC on 20 July 2021. 72-year-old Lloyd Lerat, a former student at Marieval who graduated from St Joseph’s College, Yorkton, Saskatchewan, in 1965, returned to work at the school in the 1970s, and became administrator of the residence in the 1980s, said it was always known that it was a community cemetery, and that the story of a ‘discovery’ of unmarked graves of residential school children was created by the media:
"We've always known these were there," said Lerat of the unmarked graves.
He said the idea that the graves were primarily of children who attended the school took on a life of its own.
"It's just the fact that the media picked up on unmarked graves, and the story actually created itself from there because that's how it happens," Lerat said.
See also an undated video made ‘six months ago’ by Jorge Barrera of CBC News.
Jorge Barrera’s video reveals that the unmarked graves at Cowessess had actually been known about for several years prior to the announcement of their ‘discovery’ on 24 June 2021, and that there are four volumes of a parish register which list the burials in the cemetery.
How long had the Cowessess Band known of the unmarked graves? According to this CTV News story dated 3 June 2019, the unmarked graves at Cowessess had been known about for more than two years before the summer of 2021. On 3 June 2019, CTV published a story stating that the Catholic Church had given the Cowessess Band $70,000 ‘to help identify unmarked graves, and add fences and trees in the Cowessess Cemetery’:
Donald Bolen, the Archbishop of Regina, hopes the funding can help meet some of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action.
“Calls to action 73 to 75 specifically call for churches that were involved in residential schools to become engaged in precisely that kind of work,” said Bolen.
A further element in the backstory to the alleged ‘discovery’ at Marieval was revealed by Chief Cadmus Delorme: on 2 June 2021, less than a week after Chief Casimir’s May 27th press release, the Cowessess Band and Saskatchewan Polytechnic began using GPR in the known community cemetery at Cowessess:
See also the Saskatchewan Polytechnic website:
This project is funded by the NSERC’s College and Community Innovation Program, through the College and Community Social Innovation Fund. The work being undertaken started in June 2021.
On 8 October 2021 it was announced that 300 persons buried in the cemetery have now been identified, although their names have not been released:
Cowesses First Nation has put names to about 300 of the 751 unmarked graves it discovered last summer.
Chief Cadmus Delorme said it used historical records from the RCMP, Roman Catholic Church, and Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.
It also relied on band members’ oral stories to identify some of the unknown remains. . . .
While Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc believes its graves belong to children, Cowessess said its was a community cemetery where Catholic Church parishioners were also buried.
But Cowessess didn’t release anything further about the identities.
In October 2021 Anderson Cooper was filming at Cowessess for a ‘60 Minutes’ program, apparently unaware that the unmarked graves at Cowessess had been known about since 2019 or earlier, and that they were located in a community cemetery, not a ‘residential school cemetery.’
On 11 December 11 2021 it was announced that the Cowessess Ban was accessing Marieval school records at St Boniface, Manitoba:
In partnership with the Roman Catholic Church, a Cowessess research team is currently in Saint Boniface, Man. where most of the Marieval school records are being kept, attempting to piece together a timeline of students and staff who entered the institution and when they left.
On 17 December the federal government stated that it would provide more than $700,000 in funding to the Cowessess Band to continue researching the unmarked graves:
Officials with the government and Cowessess say the funding will go toward the efforts to research, mark and commemorate the 751 unmarked graves at the nearby site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School.
In short, after taking $70,000 from the Catholic Church in 2019 to identify the persons buried in the unmarked graves it already knew about at that time, the Cowessess Band went to the media two years later on 24 June 2021 with a sensational story claiming the ‘discovery’ of 751 unmarked graves, a story which has been repeatedly reiterated ever since as part of a claim that thousands of unmarked graves were ‘discovered’ in Canada in the spring and summer of 2021. This claim has resulted in the Cowessess Band receiving $700,000 of federal government money in addition to the $70,000 it received in 2019 from the Catholic Church.
St Eugene’s
Like Marieval, the cemetery at St Eugene’s was a well known community cemetery where former Chief Sophie Pierre of the St Mary’s Band says her own grandparents are buried:
“There’s no discovery, we knew it was there, it’s a graveyard,” Pierre said. “The fact there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.”
Moreover the unmarked graves were accidentally discovered, not in 2021, but a year earlier:
The remains were found when remedial work was being performed in the area to replace the fence at the cemetery last year.
For reasons best known to the Lower Kootenay Band, it leaked the ’discovery’ to the media:
The unmarked graves were first reported by the Lower Kootenay Band, a sister band, which said some of the remains were buried in shallow graves only three and four feet deep.
Other recent GPR searches have found nothing, including searches at the site of the former Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova Scotia, the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, and Kuper Island in BC.
In short, despite the media uproar, the calls for an apology from the Pope and reparations from the Catholic Church, and a complaint to the International Criminal Court alleging genocide, not a single unmarked grave of a residential school child was ‘discovered’ in the spring and summer of 2021 using GPR.
Nina Green
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Thanks for reading. For more on the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, checkout Re-Evaluating Canada’s (Un)Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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The reputed murders at KIRS is a hoax. The blood libel against the Sisters of St. Ann and the Catholic Oblates is appalling. The government has an agenda, and it revises the past in Orwellian fashion to serve itself. I am out of a teaching job for simply suggesting the children who died at the schools did so mostly from disease. This is an important article for me. Can anyone tell me (jimmcmurtry01@gmail.com) how to contact the author, Nina Green?
The public was duped by mass hysteria. The "apology" should stem from the government for being "complicit" in making false statements about "genocide" without evidential basis. What are Canadians to think when our flag is lowered to half-mast from May to Nov 2021. The longest period in our shared history and for what? 'Guilt before innocence.' --
In a country that is said to be governed by the "rule of law". Where is the leadership in Canada? Shame, indeed.
"The Canadian flag has been half-mast since May 30 to honour the discovery of unmarked graves of Indigenous children at a former Kamloops residential school and has remained as other gravesites have since been discovered at residential school sites across the country. Nov 5, 2021" "The Canadian flag will return to full mast after Remembrance Day on Nov. 11, marking the end of the longest period in Canadian history that the flag has been at half-mast." - Global News
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Open Letter by Historical Scholars on the Canada Day statement of the CHA. https://www.christopherdummitt.com/blank-page