More residential school records needed to answer ‘hard questions’: special interlocutor

The call for records comes amid a wave of searches at numerous former residential schools across the Canada following the discovery of 200 unmark graves in Kamloops, B.C..

The fight is not over to find records that could answer “hard questions” about unmarked graves at Canada’s residential schools, including who the missing children were and how they died, said the woman appointed to work with Indigenous communities in searches underway across the country.

The Canadian government and the religious groups that signed the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement following a landmark class-action lawsuit were required to provide their records to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but many are still missing, special interlocutor Kimberly Murray said.

While most of those documents are held by Catholic entities, Murray said she has personal experience finding additional records that hadn’t been shared after Anglican officials in Canada indicated everything had been turned over.

She said she travelled with survivors of the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ont., to an Anglican diocese, where they found several boxes of files.

“That’s just one diocese, and there are others across the country,” Murray said in an interview on Tuesday.

“So, when the head of the church says, ‘We gave everything,’ and then we find out, well, that’s not actually true over here, so how can we know it’s true over there?”

The records are important because they represent “a path to the truth,” said Murray, who is a member of Kanesatake Mohawk Nation.

Meanwhile, many other record-holding bodies, such as provincial archives, museums, universities and police departments, had no legal responsibility under the settlement agreement to share their files with the commission, she said.