Who is misinforming Canadian politicians about the number of Indian residential school deaths?
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By Nina Green
On 24 February 2025, BC Conservative Party leader John Rustad told Global News that:
the reality when it comes to the residential schools is in Canada more than 4000 children did not return home. They went to school. They were taken from their families and more than four thousand children did not return home. Those children died in residential schools.
According to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released in 2015, Rustad's statement is completely false.
The table below from the TRC final report shows that for 1391 of the 3201 deaths (43.5%) 'there is no known location of death', that for 569 deaths for which the location of death is known, the TRC did not even have the child's name, and that only 423 named children actually died on the premises of an Indian residential school between 1867-2000, an average of only 3 deaths a year in the entire residential school system. In retrospect, it is shocking that the TRC released this table when in so many cases the TRC did not know the child's name, the location of death, or both.
It will be noted from the table that the TRC found that only 423 deaths actually occurred on the premises of an Indian residential school.
That being the case, where does the 'more than 4000' figure repeated by Rustad and other Canadian politicians come from? Who is misinforming Canadian politicians about the number of children who actually died on the premises of an Indian residential school?
The source of Rustad's false statement that 'more than 4000 children . . . . died in residential schools' is the University of Manitoba - more specifically, the University of Manitoba's employees at its National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).
The University's NCTR employees have put up a Memorial Register which claims that 4140 children died at residential schools - ten times the number the TRC report said actually died on the premises of a residential school.
How did the University of Manitoba's NCTR employees arrive at this vastly inflated number?
The University of Manitoba's NCTR employees arrived at the figure of 4140 by sleight of hand, and as a result of the University's continued failure for more than a decade to release TRC records which it had pledged to make available to the general public in a trust deed it signed with the TRC in 2013.
Sleight of hand
As for sleight of hand, the University of Manitoba's Memorial Register misleadingly includes the names of thousands of children who did not die on the premises of an Indian residential school.
It includes the names of children who died up to a year after having been discharged from a residential school, as well as children who died in public hospitals, and children who died from illness and accidental deaths on their home reserves and elsewhere. Many children named in the Memorial Register as 'residential school deaths' were not at a residential school at the time. They were shot, drowned, hit by falling trees, run over by trains, and burned to death in house fires on their home reserves, or died far from a residential school on fishing boats and in highway accidents. One person named on the Memorial Register - Helen Betty Osborne - had been discharged from residential school several months before being murdered at The Pas, a case widely reported in the news media. Another died at the age of 85, many decades after having been discharged from residential school. None of these deaths had anything to do with Indian residential schools.
Thus, by sleight of hand, the University of Manitoba's Memorial Register has led Canadian politicians to believe that several thousand children should be misleadingly counted as though they had died on the premises of a residential school. These include children who were enrolled in Indian residential schools at the time of their deaths but did not die at residential schools, as well as children who were not even enrolled at an Indian residential school at the time of their deaths, and in fact died up to a year or more after they had been discharged from a residential school.
To add to the confusion, during the past few years the University of Manitoba's NCTR employees have departed even further from the table published in the TRC's final report, and have added names to the Memorial Register submitted by 'family members' who simply want to memorialize a child who attended a residential school, but did not die there.
Clearly, the University of Manitoba's Memorial Register is an egregious manipulation of the facts concerning Indian residential school deaths.
Failure to release records
The University's failure to release the TRC records has also resulted in confusion about Indian residential school deaths.
Under a trust deed it signed with the TRC in 2013 (see below), the University of Manitoba is legally obliged to make all records generated by the TRC in the course of its work freely available to the general public in compliance with the TRC's Schedule N mandate (see below) - including the records from which the TRC compiled its table of residential school deaths (see above).
However since signing the 2013 trust deed, rather than making the TRC records available to the general public, the University of Manitoba has hidden almost all important TRC records from public view.
Almost no significant TRC records are available to researchers and the general public on the University's NCTR Archives website, a clear contravention of the University's legal obligation under the 2013 trust deed.
In particular, the University's NCTR staff have not allowed the general public and non-Indigenous researchers to access the TRC records which reveal the sources for the purported 4140 deaths on the University of Manitoba's Memorial Register.
It should be emphasized that the TRC's sources for its table of Indian residential deaths (see above) were already public documents. The table was compiled by TRC researchers John Milloy and Alex Maass from Department of Indian Affairs documents held by Library and Archives Canada, including:
- Department of Indian Affairs Annual Reports, including reports on student health from Indian residential school principals
- quarterly returns sent to the Department by principals of Indian residential schools recording the names and daily attendance data for each student enrolled during that quarter
- admission and discharge records sent to the Department recording the names of students admitted to or discharged from residential schools each quarter
- reports sent by Indian Agents to the Department after inquiries into student deaths
- correspondence between the Department and Indian residential schools mentioning student health and student deaths.
Since the TRC's sources were already public documents, there can be no conceivable justification for the University of Manitoba to hide the TRC's sources from politicians, the general public and non-Indigenous researchers.
It took the TRC seven years, a very large staff, and $60 million Canadian taxpayer dollars to search the millions of pages of Department of Indian Affairs records for the names of children who died at Indian residential schools.
That work should not now have to be redone - on their own time, through their own efforts, and at their own expense - by every politician, member of the general public, and non-Indigenous researcher who wants to know the sources of the TRC's table of residential school deaths (see above).
Yet that is exactly the situation the University of Manitoba has put politicians, the general public, and independent researchers in. The University of Manitoba has hidden the specific public records by which the TRC compiled its table of student deaths, and refuses to allow access to them. Thus, the University of Manitoba is forcing politicians, the general public, and non-Indigenous researchers to do the TRC's work all over again - minus the TRC's large staff and $60 million dollar budget.
What can be done to remedy this untenable situation in which Canadian politicians are being misinformed about Indian residential school deaths?
The fact that the University of Manitoba has hidden these TRC records and has published its misleading Memorial Register which purports to rely on the TRC records, but which in fact inflates by ten times the number of deaths on the premises of an Indian residential school the TRC actually found, has led to confusion on the part of Canadian politicians.
In particular, it led to John Rustad's misinformed and inaccurate statement on 24 February 2025 that 'more than 4000' children died at Indian residential schools.
The confusion sown by the University of Manitoba's misleading Memorial Register must end, so that Canadian politicians and the general public can be properly informed about Indian residential school deaths.
The University of Manitoba must immediately make all the TRC's sources for its table of residential school deaths (see above) freely available to politicians, the general public, and non-Indigenous researchers on the University's NCTR Archives website in accordance with the University's obligation under the 2013 trust deed and in compliance with the TRC's original Schedule N mandate.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Why was a century-old septic field installed to dispose of the Kamloops Indian Residential School's sewage mistaken for 'the remains of 215 children'?
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What the University of Manitoba is doing is unprecedented and it is shocking. It is using millions of dollars of taxpayer and donor funds to deliberately misinform Canadians about residential school deaths, while preventing them from accessing the actual records. The result is shown in the comment below - uninformed Canadians who believe conspiracy theories about thousands of horrific deaths. The University of Manitoba is no longer the honourable institution I knew
The first comment above is false, the second hateful. Nina Green is a brilliant researcher, her point being that “only 423 named children actually died on the premises of an Indian residential school between 1867-2000, an average of only 3 deaths a year in the entire residential school system.” John Rustad said “more than 4000 died in a residential school.”