Judy Sackaney and her grandson Creedence, 10, stand at a memorial on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in 2021, honouring children who died at residential schools.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
It was a move that sounded like it came from the Dark Ages. In 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that around 38,000 Indian Residential School survivors’ records have to be destroyed next September, unless survivors proactively request that they not be.
These records include details about sexual and physical abuse and other forms of violence that no child should ever encounter, and about who is alleged to have done them. Those testimonies were made as part of the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) for former students to seek redress as part of the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA). That agreement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history, was only possible because so many survivors across the country were filing lawsuits against the federal government that funded the schools and the Christian Churches that ran them.
The creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was part of what was agreed upon in the settlement, and it produced 94 Calls To Action that this country is still struggling to fulfill.
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The Supreme Court cited protecting survivors’ confidentiality in its ruling. But these IAP testimonies are invaluable. Even the government of Canada agreed, arguing that they shouldn’t be destroyed but preserved permanently at Library and Archives Canada. Instead, survivors have to contact the third party managing the records through the court-approved My Records, My Choice program. They can request copies of them, and/or donate them to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).
A new initiative is under way to notify survivors of their rights to save their records, if they choose to. The Indian Residential Schools Records Project (IRSRP) stems from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Toronto Metropolitan University professor Connie Walker’s research into the abusive treatment of her own father by a priest at St. Michael’s Indian Residential School. For her Peabody award-winning podcast “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s,” she filed access-to-information requests for lawsuits filed before the IAP, and discovered more than 400 statements of claim and 200 allegations of abuse relating to that residential school. Now, she’s seeking to similarly document truths around the abuse, deaths and disappearance of children at other schools by teaming up with the Yellowhead Institute and with Kimberly Murray, a National Scholar in Indigenous Legal Studies at Queen’s University and the former special interlocutor for unmarked graves at former residential schools.
The IRSRP will work to raise awareness among survivors about their options around the IAP records. Only around 100 files have been transferred to the NCTR thus far, and while many might want their testimonies destroyed, a more robust notice clearly needs to go out to every community to inform survivors about their choices.
It will also deploy law and journalism students to build a new archive of the lawsuits and related documents filed by survivors before the IRSSA class action and the IAP – an effort that Ms. Walker, a member of Okanese First Nation, is documenting for another podcast. Already, the IRSRP team has been to courts across Ontario, hunting for statements of claim and defence, transcripts of testimonies in civil and criminal trials, and other pieces of potential evidence that are also at risk of eventual disposal. “Each province and territory has their own retention policy around court records,” said Ms. Murray, a member of Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk Nation. “Working with survivors, their families and communities, we are trying to get as many court files that led to the IRSSA that we could.”
Ultimately, it’s up to Indigenous people themselves to decide how or whether their information will be preserved, used and shared. In that way, this project serves as a model for Indigenous-led data sovereignty.
What is at stake is priceless. Five times the number of survivors applied to the IAP than were able to testify at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the TRC did not have access to the testimonies unless survivors handed the documents over to them. Those IAPs also documented something else about the survivors: how brave they were as kids, and as adults telling their stories. That doesn’t get mentioned enough.
Placing the onus on them to stop the destruction of their testimonies is a potential act of erasure. Survivors who have already died don’t have a say; their IAP testimonies will be expunged. Many are older and have to rely on others to advocate for them.
In this age of denialism, it is imperative that as many records as possible are saved. Denialism thrives in the absence of facts, and in that vacuum, false narratives are formed and perpetuated. The Supreme Court has effectively allowed this to happen in its wrongheaded decision.
Now it’s up to two Indigenous women, both hardworking superstars in their own rights, to step in where others have failed.