Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials: Volume 4

Executive summary

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” is a systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate. The project’s research supports the following conclusions:

•The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students and the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students.

•For just under one-third of these deaths (32%), the government and the schools did not record the name of the student who died.

•For just under one-quarter of these deaths (23%), the government and the schools did not record the gender of the student who died.

•For just under one-half of these deaths (49%), the government and the schools did not record the cause of death.

•Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population.

•For most of the history of the schools, the practice was not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities.

•For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance.

•The federal government never established an adequate set of standards and regulations to guarantee the health and safety of residential school students.

•The federal government never adequately enforced the minimal standards and regulations that it did establish.

•The failure to establish and enforce adequate regulations was largely a function of the government’s determination to keep residential school costs to a minimum.

•The failure to establish and enforce adequate standards, coupled with the failure to adequately fund the schools, resulted in unnecessarily high death rates at residential schools.

These findings are in keeping with statements that former students and the parents of former students gave to the Commission. They spoke of children who went to school and never returned. The tragedy of the loss of children was compounded by the fact that burial places were distant or even unknown. Many Aboriginal people have unanswered questions about what happened to their children or relatives while they were attending residential school. The work that the Commission has begun in identifying and commemorating those students who died at school and their gravesites needs to be finished.

The work that the Commission has commenced is far from complete. The National Residential School Student Death Register established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada represents the first national effort to record the names of the students who died at school. There is a need for continued work on the register: there are many relevant documents that have yet to be reviewed. There is a need for the development and implementation of a national strategy for the documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries. Such a program, carried out in close consultation with the concerned Aboriginal communities, is necessary to properly honour the memory of the children who died in Canada’s residential schools.

Introduction

Death cast a long shadow over Canada’s residential schools. In her memoir of her years as a student at the Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, school in the early twentieth century, Louise Moine wrote of one year when tuberculosis was rampaging through the school.

There was a death every month on the girls’ side and some of the boys went also. We were always taken to see the girls who had died. The Sisters invariably had them dressed in light blue and they always looked so peaceful and angelic. We were led to believe that their souls had gone to heaven, and this would somehow lessen the grief and sadness we felt in the loss of one of our little schoolmates.¹

Enos Montour had similar memories of his time at the Mount Elgin school in Muncey, Ontario. On occasion,

the silent killer tb showed up amongst the enrolment. Some quiet, inoffensive lad would grow unusually quiet and listless.… As his creeping, insidious disease came over him, he began to lose interest in all boyish activity. He coughed frequently and his energy was sapped away. His chums tried to interest him in their games and outings, but he only smiled wanly and told them to leave him out. He didn’t feel like it.

Eventually, the boy was taken from the school. “An emptiness remained where the gentle boy had lived with his pals.”²

In his memoir, James Gladstone was critical of the medical care available to the students at the Anglican boarding school on the Blood Reserve in Alberta. In the spring of 1900, a fellow student, Joe Glasgow, became ill after stepping on a nail. “Rev. Owen had made arrangements for a doctor from Fort Macleod, but he was a useless drunk who didn’t come until it was too late. I looked after Joe for two days until he died. I was the only one he would listen to during his delirium.”³

Distressed, neglected, and abused, some students killed themselves. In her memoirs, Eleanor Brass spoke of a boy who had hung himself for fear of discipline at the File Hills school in Saskatchewan. “The poor youth was in some kind of trouble which was not so terrible but apparently it seemed that way to him.”⁴

Accidental death was also a risk for residential school students. A Methodist missionary and six students were travelling to the Brandon, Manitoba, school in 1903 when the boat carrying them sank. All seven drowned.⁵ Christina Jacob, a student at the Kamloops, British Columbia, school, died in 1962, when an airplane being piloted by a school employee crashed near the school.⁶

Poorly built and maintained buildings were fire traps. Nineteen boys died in the fire that destroyed the Beauval, Saskatchewan, school in 1927.⁷ Twelve children died when the Cross Lake, Manitoba, school burned down in 1930. The high death toll was partially attributable to inadequate fire escapes.⁸

Some students disappeared while running away from school. Four boys who ran away from the Fort Albany, Ontario, school in the spring of 1941 were presumed to have drowned. Their bodies were never recovered.⁹ Another two boys had run away from the Sioux Lookout, Ontario, school in 1956. The principal waited a month before reporting that they were missing.¹⁰ They were never found.¹¹

Many of the cemeteries in which students were buried have long since been abandoned. When the Battleford school in Saskatchewan closed in 1914, Principal E. Matheson reminded Indian Affairs that there was a school cemetery that contained the bodies of seventy to eighty individuals, most of whom were former students. He worried that unless the government took steps to care for the cemetery, it would be overrun by stray cattle.¹² Such advice, when ignored, led to instances of neglect, with very distressing results. In 2001, water erosion of the banks of the Bow Highwood River exposed the remains of former students of the High River, Alberta, school, which had closed in 1922. Thirty-four bodies were exhumed and reburied, with both Aboriginal and Christian ceremonies, at the St. Joseph’s Industrial School Provincial Historical Site.¹³

These examples point to a larger picture: many students who went to residential school never returned. They were lost to their families. They died at rates that were far higher than those experienced by the general school-aged population. Their parents were often uninformed of their sickness and death. They were buried away from their families in long-neglected graves. No one took care to count how many died or to record where they were buried.

The most basic of questions about missing children—Who died? Why did they die? Where are they buried?—have never been addressed or comprehensively documented by the Canadian government. This document reports on the first systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate.

The Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Mandate

The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), which was signed in 2006 and approved by the courts in early 2007, mandated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc) to:

Identify sources and create as complete an historical record as possible of the irs [Indian Residential Schools] system and legacy. The record shall be preserved and made accessible to the public for future study and use

and to

Produce and submit to the Parties of the Agreement a report including recommendations to the Government of Canada concerning the irs system and experience including: the history, purpose, operation and supervision of the irs system, the effect and consequences of irs (including systemic harms, inter-generational consequences and the impact on human dignity) and the ongoing legacy of the residential schools.

The establishment of a specific “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials” mandate did not come until after the Settlement Agreement had been approved by the courts. On April 24, 2007, Liberal Member of Parliament Gary Merasty (Desnethé/Missinippi/Churchill River) raised the issue of residential school death rates in the House of Commons. He stated that the schools were places of disease, hunger, over-crowding, and despair.

Many children died. In 1914 a departmental official said “fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein”. Yet, nothing was done…. Mr. Speaker, above all else, I stand for these children, many of whom buried their friends, families and siblings at these schools…. Will the Prime Minister commit to the repatriation of the bodies and an apology to the residential school survivors?¹⁴

James Prentice, who was both the minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development as well as the minister responsible for the Office of Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada, responded, “We will get to the bottom of the disappeared children. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission will hear much about that. I have instructed our officials to look into that and to work with Oblate records of the churches to get to the bottom of this issue, and this sad chapter in our history.”¹⁵

Prentice asked the Commission to form a working group to make recommendations for further research into the issue. The Working Group on Missing Children and Unmarked Burials was established in the spring of 2007.¹⁶ The working group included representatives from national Aboriginal organizations, former students, archivists, and the federal government.

The working group concluded that the following questions should be addressed:

1) Who and how many residential school students died?

2) What did residential school students die from?

3) Where are the residential school students buried?

4) Who were the residential school students who went missing?

The first three questions address the issues specific to students who died at the schools. The fourth refers to those students who may not have died at the schools, but who never returned home from residential school.

The term missing children in this context includes both those who died at school and those whose fate after enrolment was unknown, at least to their parents. This could include, for example, students who might have run away to urban centres and never contacted their home community again, students who never returned to their home communities after leaving school, students who became ill at school and were transferred to a hospital or sanatorium and died there (possibly several years later) without parents being informed, or students who were transferred to other institutions such as reformatories or foster homes and never returned home.

To address its four key questions, the working group proposed the following four research projects.

1) Statistical Survey: A statistical survey intended to achieve a precise estimate of student enrolment, including rates of death and disease.

2) Operational Policies and Custodial Care: A study intended to review administrative policies pertaining to death, illness, and disappearances of students.

3) Unmarked Burials and Commemoration: A study intended to identify the location of cemeteries and gravesites in which students are believed to be buried. The project was to collaborate with communities to identify options for commemoration, ceremony, and further community-based research.

4) Specific Case Research: A project in which the Commission, in collaboration with its partner organizations, was to help individual requesters to locate information regarding former students who may have died or gone missing while in the care of an irs. Where possible, this would include locating burial sites.¹⁷

These four recommendations formed the basis for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s work on the Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project, which was an expectation of significant additional work, beyond the Commission’s original mandate. Early projections indicated that the budget for this additional work and implementing the working group’s recommendations would be in excess of $1.5 million. Because research of the scope proposed by the working group was not anticipated in the original trc budget, in 2009 the Commission requested that Indian Affairs cover the cost of this further work.¹⁸ The request was denied in December 2009. The federal government’s denial of this request has placed significant limits on the Commission’s ability to fully implement the working group’s proposals, despite our sincere belief in their importance.¹⁹

Document review and statistical analysis

As a first step in the review and analysis of deaths, the Commission established a National Residential School Student Death Register. The register is made of up three sub-registers:

1) the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students (“Named Register”)

2) the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students (“Unnamed Register”)

3) the Register of Deaths that Require Further Investigation

The Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named
Residential School Students

Student deaths have been recorded in this register on the basis of the following criteria.

•The student was

- a registered residential school student,

- a student who was registered at a day school but was living in a student residence, or

- an orphaned or destitute child living in a residential school.

•The student either

- died during the school term, or

- died within one year of discharge from school. (This would include students who died in a hospital or sanatorium within a year of being transferred from a residential school to the hospital or sanatorium.)

•For the purposes of this study, a residential school was defined as an institution recognized in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, plus any residential school for Aboriginal students that was not included in the Settlement Agreement for the apparent reason that the school had ceased operation either in the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

The decision to include those students who died within a year of discharge rests on a common residential school practice of discharging students who were suffering from terminal illness to their homes or to institutions such as hospitals and sanatoria.

The Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed
Residential School Students

•The student was

- a registered residential school student,

- a student who was registered at a day school but was living in a student residence, or

- an orphaned or destitute child living in a residential school.

•The student either

- died during the school term, or

One of the common sources for the information about deaths included in this category is the reports made by principals who noted the number of students who had died in the previous year but who did not identify them by name.²⁰ It is recognized that the possibility exists that some of the deaths recorded in the Named Register might also be included in the Unnamed Register. The Commission has been cross-referencing entries in both registers to identify and eliminate such duplications wherever possible, and to identify the names of students who had originally been placed in the Unnamed Register.

The Register of Deaths that Require Further Investigation

Reports of deaths that the Commission has determined require further investigation to determine if they meet the criteria for inclusion in either of the other two sub-registers.

In creating the National Residential School Student Death Register, the Commission:

•conducted a review of documents held by the government and church signatories to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement that were provided to the trc;

•included questions in the statement-gathering process that sought information from former students about deaths, including causes, runaways, and burials;

•worked with provincial agencies, such as the offices of chief coroners and medical examiners, offices of the registrars general of vital statistics, and provincial archives across the country, to identify records that may relate to deaths at residential schools; and

•conducted a review of provincial archaeological site inventories. (These are databases of reported archaeological sites. They included maps and aerial photos of the vicinity of the former schools.)

As one measure of true commitment to reconciliation, and out of respect for the thousands of children who died and their families, the Commission believes that work on this historic National Residential School Student Death Register must continue after the transfer of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission records to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

Limitations to the register

There are significant limitations in both the quality and quantity of the data the Commission has been able to compile on residential school deaths. There are problems with the level of detail in the data. As noted above, in many cases, school principals simply reported on the number of children who had died in a school, with few or no supporting details. There are also some reports that give a total of the number of students who had died since a specific school opened, but with no indication of the year in which each student died.²¹ Such reports usually did not give detailed information on the cause of death.

Changes over the years in the way the government reported the information it received from the schools have also placed limits on data collection. Prior to 1915, Indian Affairs’ annual reports reproduced a detailed report from each principal that often contained information on the health conditions and the number of students who had died in the previous year. But, after 1915, Indian Affairs stopped publishing principals’ reports. Subsequent reports did not provide information on student deaths in any regularized format.

It was not until 1935 that Indian Affairs adopted a formal policy on how deaths at the schools were to be reported and investigated.²² Under this policy, the principal was to inform the Indian agent of the death of a student. The agent was to then convene and chair a three-person board of inquiry. The two other members of the board were to be the principal and the physician who attended the student. The board was to complete a form provided by Indian Affairs that requested information on the cause of death and the treatment provided to the child. Parents were to be notified of the inquiry and given the right to attend or have a representative attend the inquiry to make a statement. However, an inquiry was not to be delayed for more than seventy-two hours to accommodate parents, an extreme limitation, considering the relative isolation of many of the residential schools and the limited communications of the day.²³ The department was not prepared to pay parents’ transportation costs to attend the inquiry.²⁴ The policy was not always adhered to, and, in some cases, the Indian agent simply filled out the form, based on information provided to him by the principal.²⁵

It is also doubtful that schools reported on the deaths of seriously ill children who had been sent home. This was a common practice for at least the first several decades that the schools were in operation. For example, in 1907, Dr. Peter Bryce, the chief medical officer for Indian Affairs, proposed that tubercular students be treated in small tent hospitals rather than “being sent home to die.”²⁶

Due to the limitations in the records, it is probable that there are many student deaths that have not been recorded in the register because the record of the death has not yet been located. There are a number of instances where the only mention of a specific student death is in a church document, but there is no recorded indication of it in any Indian Affairs document that the Commission could locate.²⁷ There also exists the possibility that the death may not have been reported at all. As late as 1942, the principal of a residential school in Saskatchewan was unaware of any responsibility to report a death to provincial vital statistics officials.²⁸ Many residential schools housed significant numbers of Métis students during their history. In some cases, the federal government provided funding for these students; in other cases, it did not.²⁹ It is not clear if the schools reported on the deaths of unfunded Métis students at the schools.

As well, many records have simply been destroyed. According to a 1933 federal government policy, school returns could be destroyed after five years and reports of accidents could be destroyed after ten years. This led to the destruction of fifteen tons of paper. Between 1936 and 1944, 200,000 Indian Affairs files were destroyed.³⁰

Health records were also regularly destroyed. For example, in 1957, Indian and Northern Health Services was instructed to destroy, after a period of two years, “correspondence re routine arrangements re medical and dental treatments of Indians and Eskimos, such as transportation, escort services, admission to hospital, advice on treatment, requests for treatment, etc.” Reports of doctors, dentists, and nurses were similarly assigned a two-year limited retention period.³¹

The Commission’s work has also been hampered by limited and late access to relevant documents from the government and churches, due to problems with document production. The federal government first provided access to substantial numbers of documents in the fall of 2011. These came to the Commission through an Aboriginal Affairs departmental online database that contained documents that had been compiled from Library and Archives Canada and collected from the churches. The database was originally established by Canada in the preparation of the government’s position in response to civil lawsuits launched by former residential school students. It was also used for settling alternate dispute-resolution claims brought by former school students. Although it contained many relevant documents, this database had not been designed to collect documents related to deaths in the schools. The digitization of these documents was often of poor quality: in some cases, documents were illegible. Additions were made to this database throughout 2012 until it contained almost one million documents. Additional documents were sent directly to the Commission as other departments began to search their records. However, relevant documents held by Library and Archives Canada were still withheld. In January 2013, the Ontario Superior Court determined that the federal government, although not obliged to turn over its originals, was required to compile all relevant documents in an organized manner for review by the Commission rather than simply providing access to Library and Archives Canada for Commission researchers.³² Since that date, there has been considerable improvement in the production of documents to the Commission. Nonetheless, the delay in clarifying Canada’s obligation means that the production of documents to the trc is still continuing. It has not been possible to review all recently produced documents and to make the required adjustments to the National Residential School Student Death Register by the time of this report.

Operational policies and custodial care

As part of the Commission’s work, it reviewed operational and custodial care policies and practices at Canada’s residential schools. It is clear that the government and the churches failed to establish the necessary regulations to ensure that an acceptable level of care, based on the standards of the day, was provided to students. This failure occurred in the areas of health, nutrition, building conditions (including sanitation), discipline, truancy, student labour, abuse, and child welfare. Those regulations that were introduced were often poorly communicated and poorly enforced. Such failures contributed to unnecessarily high death rates among the students, and to poor nutrition that would have contributed to poor physical and mental health conditions that affected many students for the rest of their lives.

Cemeteries and unmarked burials

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada undertook ongoing work to locate and identify cemeteries and gravesites in which residential school students might be buried. Archival documents and oral testimony were used to identify potential locations of gravesites. In consultation with Aboriginal communities, the Commission visited some of these sites to ascertain current condition and location, and to record any disturbance or neglect. Visits were made to cemeteries and twenty unmarked gravesites in the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Ontario. In addition, the Commission documented the location and condition of school sites and cemeteries on maps, using satellite imagery. The area surrounding a visited school was systematically examined, using the available maps and satellite imagery. For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance. Although there have been creative and heartening community commemoration measures undertaken in some locations, there is an overall need for a national strategy for the documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries. On the basis of the work undertaken to date, it is apparent that there are likely to be other unidentified residential gravesites across the country. A national program, carried out in close consultation with the concerned Aboriginal communities, is required to complete the task of identifying the many unmarked residential school cemeteries and gravesites across Canada.

Specific case inquiries

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada received inquiries from individuals seeking information about what had happened to family members who had been sent to residential school. To the degree that it was able, the Commission responded to a number of these requests.

At a 2012 intergovernmental conference, the Chief Coroners and Medical Examiners of Canada adopted a unanimous resolution to support the Missing Children Project, and agreed to assist the Commission where possible in identifying deaths at residential schools in their provincial records. To date, Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island have responded. This process has provided both information about previously unknown deaths and more details about known deaths.