School survivors can’t get papers

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This article was published 23/09/2011 (5215 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

REGINA — The head of the residential schools commission says some survivors are frustrated because they can’t get papers needed to back up their claims.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is trying to collect documents from the government and churches. But Justice Murray Sinclair told a meeting of the Canadian Association of Provincial Court Judges many documents have been destroyed.

“There’s a lot of documents, let me tell you,” Sinclair told about 200 judges Thursday.

“The one thing about churches… is they keep lots of records. The government does, too, but we found that interestingly many have been destroyed. We can’t comment about whether or not they were deliberately destroyed or accidentally destroyed.

“But we do know that many claims… by students who say they went to a residential school are denied — not because they don’t present a credible case that they went to the school — but because the government says, ‘We look at our records and we can’t find any record that you were there.’ “

There were more than 130 residential schools across Canada dating back to the 1870s. The last closed outside Regina in 1996.

About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were forced to attend the schools. Many were taken against the wishes of their parents.

The $60-million commission has a mandate to learn the truth about what happened at the schools and to share that information with Canadians. It was established as part of a landmark deal called the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which was reached with survivors who had filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government and the churches.

Survivors have told of physical and sexual abuse, of losing their language and culture and of turning to drugs and alcohol as a way to forget.

Sinclair later told reporters documentation has been a challenge for the commission and survivors.

“I would probably say the biggest frustration we’ve heard from survivors has been that they don’t have access to the documents that the government says they need to see in order to verify their claim, and that all of those documents are in the hands of government, and it’s the government themselves who have failed to protect all of the documents, preserve them,” he said.

— The Canadian Press