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

As noted above, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has created a Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students (the “Named Register”) and a Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Students (the “Unnamed Register”). The first register contains reports on the deaths of students whose names the Commission has been able to identify. The second contains reports on the deaths of students whose names the Commission has not been able to identify. As recommended by the Working Group on Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, the TRC carried out a statistical analysis of the information in both these registers.¹ The analysis is based on information entered into the registers as of November 18, 2014. As previously indicated, it is probable that not all residential school deaths have been recorded in either register.

Student deaths must be placed in the context of student enrolment. Graph 1 shows total enrolment figures for Canada’s residential schools and residences from the school year 1869–70 through to the school year 1965–66. It is based on information in the annual reports of the Indian Affairs and Northern Affairs departments and branches. After 1966, Indian Affairs stopped providing annual reports on the number of students living in residence. As can be seen from this graph, enrolment rose steadily from the mid-1880s, peaking in 1956–57.

Graph 1

Annual residential school enrolment: 1869–70 to 1965–66

Source: Indian Affairs and Northern Affairs annual reports. After the 1965–66 school year, Indian Affairs stopped reporting on annual residential school enrolment.

As of November 2014, the Commission had identified 2,040 students in its Named Register for the period from 1867 to 2000. When combined with the figures in the Unnamed Register, the total is 3,201 deaths. The majority of deaths took place prior to 1940. In the pre-1940 era, there were 1,150 deaths for which no name was provided. In the post-1940 period, there are forty-four death reports that do not provide the student’s name.

Table 1. Total deaths identified in TRC Named and Unnamed registers.

Period	Named	Named and Unnamed Combined
1867–1939	1,328	2,434
1940–2000	647	691
1867–2000	1,975	3,125
Year of death unknown	65	76
Total	2,040	3,201

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths,” 3.

In many cases, neither the gender nor the name of a deceased student was recorded. There were 747 deaths for which gender was not reported. Table 2 presents information on the death reports for which the gender of the student was reported. As shown, female students represented a slightly larger percentage of student deaths in both the Named and Combined categories.

Table 2. Residential school deaths by gender, 1867–2000.

Period	Female		Male
	Named	Named and Unnamed Combined	Named	Named and Unnamed Combined
1867–1939	731	872	595	728
1940–2000	330	331	316	321
1867–2000	1,061	1,203	911	1,049
Year of death unknown	25	26	40	41
Total	1,086	1,229	951	1090

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths,” 3.

The number of student deaths per year (Named and Unnamed combined) rose during the early years of the residential system’s operation. It declined in the second decade of the twentieth century, only to rise again. The number of deaths per year remained high until 1948. Graph 2 illustrates this pattern.

Graph 2

Annual residential school deaths (Named and Unnamed registers combined), 1867–2000

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

The death rate over the years per 1,000 students, shown in Graph 3, follows a similar pattern to the number of deaths. Because enrolment was increasing in the early twentieth century, the increase in the death rate in the 1920s was not as steep as the increase in the total number of deaths for the same period. There were more students; there were more deaths; but there were not as many deaths per student population. Because Indian Affairs ceased reporting annual residential school enrolment in 1965, it has not been possible to calculate death rates beyond that date.

Graph 3

Residential school death rates (Named and Unnamed registers combined) per 1,000 students, 1869–1965

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

Graph 4 presents both the number of reported deaths per year and the death rate per 1,000 students per year.

Graph 4

Residential school annual deaths and death rates (Named and Unnamed registers combined) per 1,000 students, 1869–1965

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

There are relatively little comparative data on death rates for school-aged Canadian children. From 1921 onwards, Statistics Canada does, however, provide an average five-year death rate for members of the general population, aged five to fourteen. Graph 5 compares the five-year average death rates per 1,000 for Canadian, school-aged, public school children with the deaths of residential school children (Named, and Named and Unnamed combined). As can be seen, until the 1950s, Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population. It is only in the 1950s that the residential school death rates decline to a level comparable with that of the general school-aged population. As late as the period from 1941 to 1945, the Named and Unnamed combined death rate for children at residential schools is 4.90 times higher than the general death rate for Canadian schoolchildren. In the 1960s, even though the residential school death rates were much lower than their historic highs, they were still double those of the general school-aged population.

Graph 5

General population death rates per 1,000 population, aged five to fourteen, and residential school death rates per 1,000 students (Named and Unnamed registers combined), five-year averages, 1921 to 1965

Source: Fraser, “Vital Statistics and Health, Table B23-34,” Average age-specific death rates, both sexes, Canada, for five-year periods, 1921 to 1974; Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

There are no reliable, annual, province-by-province or territory-by-territory enrolment figures. As a result, it is not possible to determine or compare overall provincial death rates. Table 3 presents the total number of deaths, using contemporary political boundaries for both the Named Register and the combined registers.

Table 3. Residential school deaths per province and territory, 1867–2000.

Province	Named Register	Named and Unnamed Registers Combined
Alberta	557	821
British Columbia	352	580
Manitoba	164	338
Northwest Territories	190	252
Nova Scotia	15	15
Nunavut	12	15
Ontario	264	426
Québec	17	38
Saskatchewan	375	566
Yukon	29	74
Total	1975	3125

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths,” 14.

Due to changes in Indian Affairs’ reporting practices, it was not possible to calculate annual provincial enrolments.

For 1,391 of the 3,201 deaths (43.5%) on the Named and Unnamed registers combined for the period from 1867 to 2000, there is no known location of death. Table 4 reports on the location of the 1,810 deaths for which there is a known location of death.

Table 4. Location of residential school deaths, 1867–2000.

Location	Named Register	Named and Unnamed Registers Combined
School	423	832
Hospital	400	427
Sanatorium	43	43
Home	300	418
Other Non-School	75	90
Total	1241	1,810

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

In 32 of the 832 Named cases reported in the Named and Unnamed Registers Combined column in Table 4, the location of a death at school was identified as occurring in the school infirmary. Depending on the period in which the student death occurred, a “hospital” death could refer to a death in a church-run mission hospital, an Indian Affairs hospital, or a hospital operated for the general public. In the same fashion, depending on the period and the geographic location of the schools, students might have been sent to either Indian Affairs-operated sanatoria or sanatoria operated for the general public.

For approximately half the deaths that the trc has identified, there is no known cause of death. In the case of the Named Register, the cause of death is unknown for 1,040 deaths (51% of the deaths). For the combined Named and Unnamed registers, the cause of death is unknown for 1,364 deaths (42.6% of the deaths). Graph 6 reports on the main causes of death due to illness.

Graph 6

Causes of residential school deaths by illness (contributing and sole causes combined; Named and Unnamed registers combined), 1867–2000

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

Many diagnoses of the cause of death may not have been accurate. The determination of cause of death would often have been made by individuals without medical training. Many of the illnesses that were reported were not well understood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which would further contribute to the possibility of misdiagnosis. Inaccuracy in the reporting of the cause of death remains a problem in the medical system to this day.² It is possible, for example, possible that some of the cases of tuberculosis were misdiagnosed as being lung disease. It may also be the case that the meningitis diagnoses were tubercular in origin. Hemorrhage is not an illness but the result of an illness or injury. Severe hemorrhaging was not uncommon in cases of tuberculosis.³ These illnesses are also linked in other ways: tuberculosis, for example, can lead to pneumonia.

Tuberculosis was the dominant reported cause of death. It was identified as a contributing cause of death in 896 instances. In 737 of those instances, it was the sole cause of death. It was the reported cause of death in 48.7% of the cases for which there is a reported cause of death. As Graph 7 demonstrates, the tuberculosis death rate remained significant until the late 1940s. Its final decline coincides with the availability of effective drug treatment for tuberculosis.

Graph 7

Residential school tuberculosis death rate per 1,000 students (Named and Unnamed registers combined), 1869–1965

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

The other two major causes of death were influenza and pneumonia. As Graph 8 demonstrates, the influenza pandemic of 1918 caused a spike in the residential school influenza death rate.

Graph 8

Residential school influenza death rate per 1,000 students (Named and Unnamed registers combined), 1869–1965

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

The pneumonia death rate, as illustrated in Graph 9, appears to have had a number of spikes before undergoing a significant decline in the 1940s.

Graph 9

Residential school pneumonia death rate per 1,000 students (Named and Unnamed registers combined), 1869–1965

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

Graph 10 presents the tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonia death rates (Named and Unnamed registers combined). It shows that the tuberculosis death rate was dramatically higher than the influenza and pneumonia death rates until the second decade of the twentieth century. It also shows that the influenza death rate surpassed the tuberculosis and pneumonia rates in 1918. In the years that followed, tuberculosis remained the main cause of death, but in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the pneumonia rates were also high. All death rates appear to have dropped dramatically at the end of the 1940s.

Graph 10

Residential school tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonia death rates per 1,000 students (Named and Unnamed registers combined), 1869–1965

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

Students also died as the result of suicide and accidents. The statistical analysis identified six suicides (all from the Named Register). It also identified fifty-seven drownings (fifty-one from the Named Register), forty deaths in school fires (all on the Named Register), and twenty deaths due to exposure (nineteen of them on the Named Register). Thirty-eight students (thirty-five of them on the Named Register) died in a variety of other accidents, including vehicle accidents and falls. At least thirty-three students died while running away: they would have died from a variety of causes, the most common being exposure and drowning.⁴ Graph 11 reports on the numbers of suicides and deaths due to accidents.

Graph 11

Causes of residential school deaths by suicide and accidental deaths (Named and Unnamed registers combined), 1867–2000

Source: Rosenthal, “Statistical Analysis of Deaths.”

Despite the partial nature of the data, a number of significant facts emerge from the statistical analysis of the Named and Unnamed registers combined.

•The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Named and Unnamed registers of confirmed deaths of 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.

There is a need for information sharing with the families of those who died at the schools. As the historical record indicates, families were not adequately informed of the health condition of their children. There is a need for the federal government to ensure that appropriate measures are undertaken to inform families of the fate of their children and to ensure that the children are commemorated in a way that is acceptable to their families. (The numbers for the Calls to Action are the ones used in Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.)

71) We call upon all chief coroners and provincial vital statistics agencies that have not provided to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada their records on the deaths of Aboriginal children in the care of residential school authorities to make these documents available to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

Throughout the history of Canada’s residential school system, there was no organized effort to record the number of students who died in residence each year across the entire system. 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. The register is far from complete: there are many relevant documents that have yet to be reviewed. The completion and maintenance of this register will require ongoing financial support.

72) We call upon the federal government to allocate sufficient resources to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to allow it to develop and maintain the National Residential School Student Death Register established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

The five highest annual national residential school death rates that the trc statistical analysis identified were 28 per 1,000 in 1885, 27.4 per 1,000 in 1902, 26.2 per 1,000 in 1892, 25.8 per 1,000 in 1903, and 24.9 per 1,000 in 1907. If these rates were expressed as percentages, they would be 2.80%, 2.74%, 2.62%, 2.58%, and 2.49%, respectively. These, the Commission recognizes, are considerably lower than have been reported elsewhere.⁵ This is due to a number of factors, the most significant being the overall limitations in the data, which lead to undercounting. As more documents are reviewed, it is likely that the death rates based on the data in the National Residential School Student Death Register will increase. They are not, however, likely to increase to the point where they match the death rates of between 42% and 47% that are reported in some publications.⁶

Before making comment on this issue, it is important to note that the numbers and percentages of students and former residential school students reported to have died in the schools were scandalously high. None of this discussion is intended to minimize that fact that a health crisis existed in the general Aboriginal population and in residential schools, and that the federal government and the schools failed to adequately address the crisis. This discussion is intended to clarify the statistical record.

A significant portion of the disparity arises from the ways in which the term death rate has been used in some sources. A “death rate” (often called a “mortality rate”) deals with a defined population over a defined period of time. There can be annual death rates, monthly death rates, and so forth. Rates are usually reported as so many deaths per 1,000 for a specific period.⁷ Unfortunately, the term death rate has also been applied to reports of the percentage of students who had died since a school (or group of schools) had opened. The matter is further confused by the fact that these reports do not always distinguish between the deaths of students and the deaths of former students.

For example, in 1891, the Qu’Appelle school reported that since opening in 1884, it had discharged 174 students, 71 of whom had died (40.8%).⁸ A 1901 study of the industrial schools concluded that of the 2,752 students who had been enrolled since 1883 (a period of eighteen years), 506 (18.4%) had died, while another 139 were reported to be in poor health.⁹ The percentages that emerge from these reports are evidence of the existence of high death rates, but they are not, in themselves, death rates. They record information on different populations (in one case, discharged students; in the other, both current and discharged students) and different periods of time (in one case, seven years; in the other, eighteen years). For these reasons, these percentages cannot be directly compared with other death rates—particularly those that arise in other contexts such as the Nazi work camps of the 1930s and 1940s.

Dr. Peter Bryce’s 1907 report on boarding schools in western Canada is an often-cited document in any discussion of residential school death rates. Bryce reported that “of 1,537 pupils returned from 15 schools which have been in operation on an average of fourteen years, 7 per cent are sick or in poor health, and 24 per cent are reported dead.”¹⁰ Here again, the 24% figure is not a death rate but a proportion of the total enrolment who had died over an eighteen-year period. The annual average death rates for these schools for this period can be calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the sum of the enrolments for each year. According to the Indian Affairs annual reports, the total of each year’s enrolment for all these schools was 7,245. Bryce never gave a precise figure for the number of deaths. However, 24% of 1,537 is 368.9. Based on these figures, the annual average death rate for the schools was 50.9 per 1,000 (or 5.1%.)¹¹ This figure, like most calculations based on the school data, should be treated cautiously. The enrolment figures, for example, may not be accurate. Nor can one have certainty that all relevant deaths were reported to Bryce. Finally, it is not clear from Bryce’s report if the 24% figure included only those who died while students or if it included those who died after leaving the school.

Other than the passage quoted above, Bryce made only one other statement in his report in relation to the 24%, writing that “of a total 1,537 pupils reported on nearly 25 per cent are dead.” Bryce returned to the topic in his 1922 booklet The Story of a National Crime, in which he wrote that, according to his 1907 report, “24 per cent. of all the pupils, which had been in the schools were known to be dead, while of one school on the File Hill reserve, which gave a complete return to date, 75 per cent. were dead at the end of the 16 years since the school opened.”¹² In all three instances, he simply states that the students were dead and does not state whether they died in school or after discharge.

In a table titled “Present Condition of All Pupils,” Bryce reported that 1,132 students were alive (950 in good health and 182 sick.) One possible interpretation of this table is that although 24% of the students who had been enrolled in all the schools over the eighteen-year period being reported on were dead, 76% were alive.¹³ (The “Present Condition of All Pupils” table could not be reporting solely on the number of students enrolled in the school in 1907, since total enrolment in those schools, according to the Indian Affairs annual report for 1907, was only 536.)¹⁴ It might well be the case that the entirety of the 24% of the enrolment who died did so while they were students. That, however, would mean that none of the students died after they were discharged, since 75.8% of the 1,494 individuals reported on under the heading “Present Condition of All Pupils” were alive in 1907.

The soundest interpretation of the 24% is that it represents what Bryce, on three separate occasions, stated it represents: the percentage of the total enrolment of students who had died between the opening of the schools and spring 1907. That they all died in school is unlikely, but the number of those who died in the school and the number after discharge cannot be determined from Bryce’s report. Bryce’s report is evidence of a high death rate, but it is not an annual death rate (or any other sort of death rate). Neither does the report provide sufficient information to determine annual death rates in the schools or to make predictions as to how many of the students then enrolled would die in the coming years.

Table 5. Deceased pupils and former pupils, Old Sun’s and Peigan Anglican schools, from opening of school to 1909.

School	Total number of students enrolled in schools from opening to 1909	Number of deaths (both while enrolled and after discharge)	% of total enrolment dead by 1909
Old Sun’s	135	64	47.4
Peigan Reserve	134	66	49.2

Source: LAC, RG10, volume 3966, file 150,000-14, Status of Pupils Present and Discharged – Old Sun’s Boarding School, 13 May 1909; Status of Pupils Present and Discharged – Church of England Boarding School, Peigan Reserve, 31 March 1909; Indian Affairs annual reports, School report tables, 1891–1909.

Indian Affairs Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott’s often-cited statement —“It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein”—has sometimes been used as evidence of a 50% death rate. The full quote, from an article that Scott wrote on the history of Indian Affairs, reads as follows.

It cannot be gainsaid that in the early days of school administration in the territories, while the problem was still a new one, the system was open to criticism. Insufficient care was exercised in the admission of children to the schools. The well-known predisposition of Indians to tuberculosis resulted in a very large percentage of deaths among the pupils. They were housed in buildings not carefully designed for school purposes, and these buildings became infected and dangerous to the inmates. It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein.¹⁵

While Scott’s statement is open to interpretation, it is consistent with reports of very high percentages of students and former students dying either in school or after graduating.

Number of individuals who died while in school	% of total enrolment who died while in school	Sum of annual enrolment from opening to 1909	Annual average death rate per 1,000 students
27	20.0	580	46.6
23	17.16	554	41.5

Principals’ reports from two Anglican schools in southern Alberta are worth examining in detail for the light they shed on the issue of death rates. The Old Sun’s school was founded in 1890 and the Anglican Peigan Reserve boarding school was founded in 1892. These schools have been reported as having death rates of 47% from their founding in the early 1890s to 1909.¹⁶ As Table 5 shows, after nineteen years of operation, 47.4% of the students who had enrolled in Old Sun’s were dead, and 49.2% of those enrolled in the Anglican school on the Peigan Reserve were dead. The percentage of those who died while in school, however, was 20.00% at Old Sun’s and at least 17.16% at the Peigan school. (The category of “Died while in school” also includes those who were sent home and died prior to the end of August of the school year of their final enrolment.) The average annual death rate for the Old’s Sun’s school during this period, was 46.6 per 1,000 students (or 4.66%), while average annual death rate for the Anglican school on the Peigan Reserve was 41.5 per 1,000 students (or 4.15%).

The principal’s report from the Old Sun’s school is sufficiently detailed to allow for the calculation of annual death rates using the annual enrolment reported in the Indian Affairs annual report. Those rates are reported (both as deaths per 1,000 students and as percentages) in Table 6.¹⁷

Table 6. Annual death rates at the Old Sun’s school, 1891–1909.

Year	Deaths	Enrolment	Annual death rate per 1,000 students	Annual death rate as a percentage
1891		33	0	0
1892	0	21	0	0
1893	1	28	35.7	3.6
1894	1	33	30.3	3.0
1895	4	43	93	9.3
1896	3	40	75	7.5
1897	1	31	32.26	3.2
1898	0	11	0	0
1899	1	12	83.3	8.3
1900	3	12	250	25
1901	1	16	62.5	6.2
1902	4	44	90.9	9.1
1903	1	42	23.84	2.4
1904	3	43	69.8	7
1905	0	39	0	0
1906	1	37	27	2.7
1907	0	32	0	0
1908	2	33	60.6	6.1
1909	1	30	33.3	3.3

Source: LAC, RG10, volume 3966, file 150,000-14, Status of Pupils Present and Discharged – Old Sun’s Boarding School, 13 May 1909; Indian Affairs annual reports, 1891 to 1910; Indian Affairs annual reports, School school report tables, 1891–1909.

An annual death rate of 4.66 or 4.25% may sound low when compared with the rates of 42% or 47% that have been reported elsewhere. The reality is that these rates were extraordinarily high: in 1901, the death rate for all Canadians between five and fourteen years of age was 4.3 per 1,000, or .43%.¹⁸ In other words, the Old Sun’s average annual death rate of 4.66% was 10.8 times higher than the national death rate for school-aged children. Over a nineteen-year period, an annual average death rate of 4.66% resulted in deaths while in school of 20% of the total enrolment.

The work of identifying the number of students who died in residential schools has only commenced. It has already demonstrated that annual school death rates were significantly higher than those for the general Canadian school-aged population. That these rates may not be as high as has been reported elsewhere should not detract from the fact that the federal government failed to take appropriate action to address a national health-care crisis in the residential schools and in the Aboriginal community in general. That failure is the topic of the next section of this report.