Ottawa inks deal to share more residential school records with reconciliation centre

Emotional support or assistance for those who are affected by the residential school system can be found at Indian Residential School Survivors Society toll-free 1 (800) 721-0066 or 24-hr Crisis Line 1 (866) 925-4419.

Canada’s Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller says Ottawa has reached an agreement with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to hand over thousands more records on residential schools that the federal government has been holding back.

“This is a process that has been deployed in relatively short order, obviously with an election in between but, eager to get funds into the hands of communities that are going through the very very difficult process of searching for remains or bodies,” explained Miller.

The government says the agreement outlines how and when it will send the historical documents to the Winnipeg-based centre, which will, in turn, make them available to residential-school survivors and work to preserve them.

“This is a historic time for the Dakota people. The time has now come for our history to be properly told,” said Cheif Eric Pashe, Dakota Tipi First Nation in a statement.

Pashe added, Dakota Tipi First Nation is establishing a Survivor-led steering committee to initiate protocol development to help guide the investigations into five former residential schools in Manitoba. The schools, located in Portage la Prairie, Sandy Bay, Assiniboia, Brandon and Fort Alexander, which Pashe says, all had children from Dakota Tipi First Nation.

WATCH: Federal government updates residential school document transfer

The agreement comes after Miller announced last month the government was reviewing the records in its possession to see what more it could release to help survivors.

He said at the time that it would begin by sending what is known as previously undisclosed “school narratives,” which are reports written by the government outlining key events at individual institutions.

Stephanie Scott, the centre’s executive director, said Ottawa’s transfer of these records will help piece together a more comprehensive picture of how the residential-school system operated.

Survivors and Indigenous leaders have long called on the federal government to release remaining records that it had refused to fully disclose, citing legal obligations it had to third parties, including Catholic entities that operated the federally funded institutions. Some of those entities are now defunct.

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In May of last year, hundreds of Indigenous children were discovered in unmarked graves at a former residential school site in Kamloops, B.C.

In August, 2021 the Government of Canada announced more than $300 Million dollars to support Indigenous-led, Survivor-centric and culturally informed initiatives to help Indigenous communities respond to and heal from the ongoing impacts of residential schools.

To date, $116.8 million has been committed to First Nations, Inuit, and Metis survivors to assist families and communities in locating missing children who attended residential schools.

At Thursday’s news conference, Scott said she hoped the federal government’s spring budget would include funding for the centre to get a new building and more resources to properly archive and share documents.

-With files from Mark Neufeld, CityNews