Finding and Honouring the Missing Children of Residential Schools

Content warning: The content on this page deals with residential and boarding schools, the death and disappearance of children, child abuse, genocide, and intergenerational trauma. The National Residential School Crisis Line is available at all times, free of charge: 1-866-925-4419. Free support is also available through the Hope for Wellness chatline at 1-800-721-0066 or using the chat box at https://www.hopeforwellness.ca/.

September 17, 2024

UNDER THE HEADING “MISSING CHILDREN AND BURIAL INFORMATION”, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada issued these Calls to Action in 2015:

1. 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.
   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.
   73. We call upon the federal government to work with churches, Aboriginal communities, and former residential school students to establish and maintain an online registry of residential school cemeteries, including, where possible, plot maps showing the location of deceased residential school children.
   74. We call upon the federal government to work with the churches and Aboriginal community leaders to inform the families of children who died at residential schools of the child’s burial location, and to respond to families’ wishes for appropriate commemoration ceremonies and markers, and reburial in home communities where requested.
   75. We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residential school students, and current landowners to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried. This is to include the provision of appropriate memorial ceremonies and commemorative markers to honour the deceased children.
   76. We call upon the parties engaged in the work of documenting, maintaining, commemorating, and protecting residential school cemeteries to adopt strategies in accordance with the following principles:

i. The Aboriginal community most affected shall lead the development of such strategies.
ii. Information shall be sought from residential school Survivors and other Knowledge Keepers in the development of such strategies.
iii. Aboriginal protocols shall be respected before any potentially invasive technical inspection and investigation of a cemetery site.

The Commission’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” reported in 2015 that its research to date supported 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.

(from the Executive Summary of Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 4))

Indigenous communities and families can download a six-page introduction to “the challenges involved in finding and honouring the missing children of residential schools” from the website of the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials.

The National Advisory Committee has been gathering other, more in-depth resources and tools on all aspects of this process. You can find links on our website at NAC-CNN.ca. Over time, we will be adding more resources, including new factsheets and briefing papers to fill the gaps in available information, as well as profiles of how different communities have addressed these issues. This overview document will also be updated and expanded based on the feedback we receive.

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We acknowledge that the land on which we work is the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.