History repeats itself as funds to search for missing children cut

Opinion

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This article was published 14/08/2024 (421 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The announcement on July 18 of an 85 per cent cut in funding commitments made in 2021 for searches of missing children and unmarked burials related to residential schools is devastating, disrespectful and reflects a troubling denialism regarding the true scale and significance of this issue.

According to the Survivors’ Secretariat, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Chief David Monias, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and others, news of the slash to the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund came in a 15-minute monologue without even a warning, let alone consultation.

With their microphones muted, researchers learned of imposed caps of $200,000 for burials research and $300,000 for field work for community-led investigation and received no clarity on funding for repatriation or commemoration.

I’m a descendant of students of two residential schools and a member of a community whose plans for a monument are now uncertain as there are no funds beyond what can cover an office rental and a full-time staff member.

The cut, and the way it was announced, violate United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples principles and the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The unilateral decision not just to cut back, but what and how to cut, belies the ongoing and overtly racist and paternalist approach of the federal government to Indigenous nations and people and is antithetical to respectful relationships and reconciliation.

Funding is now strictly limited to schools named in the agreements arising from class-action lawsuits, even though, as the Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Burials related to Indian Residential Schools Kim Murray explains, there are many other Indian Residential Schools where students died and were buried and there were many students who fell ill at Indian Residential Schools and were forcibly transferred to hospitals and sanatoriums where they later died.

I know a little about the difficulties of undertaking searches of missing children because I have led a research project on Indigenous histories of tuberculosis in Manitoba for many years, part of which has involved assisting families search for loved ones who went away for hospital treatment but did not return.

These searches are complicated and involve a network of church and state archival repositories, because children were often transferred to other schools and to other federal institutions like Indian hospitals and sanatoria.

Some of the records were kept, some destroyed, and some are open to researchers, while others fall under privacy restrictions and so accessing them requires long and complicated application processes and delays.

Finding a child who has been buried can be even more complicated. Officials often did not communicate the deaths to the families and the Indian Affairs’ practice was to bury people who had died “away from the reserve” at the place of death, at the local rate of the burial of an indigent person, unless costs were low enough to make transportation financially advantageous.

But even if a person’s family could afford to have their remains returned, they had to learn about the death first and many never heard about it. It is these families who are now left with the impossible task of shaking a dehumanizing history and trail of anti-Indigenous records to locate loved ones.

In its report Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience, the Office of the Special Interlocutor has argued that the apathy of the church, health-care workers, federal bureaucrats and employees towards Indigenous children’s lives in federal institutions followed through their deaths and burials.

The present cut to the Residential Schools Missing Children Search Fund echoes this approach by now shutting down structures, labour and commitment of Indigenous people to research and learn a deliberately hidden history and to commemorate the lives of those who died because of this approach.

This is history repeating itself right in front of itself, which suggests a far deeper and consistently racist approach to Indigenous nations and people.

The federal government has a serious and ongoing problem of racism that it has failed to identify and address time and time again.

Part of the problem is that the federal government centres Indigenous suffering and need to heal, rather than its own atrocities and the steps it needs to need to stop committing them.

In an anti-racist approach, the goal is to identify and then oppose racism by changing policies, actions, behaviours and cultures that uphold racist thinking and governance.

What might an anti-racist approach to missing children associated with Indian Residential Schools look like?

The Office of the Special Interlocutor shows that federal policy and practices led to deaths of Indigenous children and neglect, abandonment and desecration of their remains.

It recommends change in the form of “finding truth, restoring human dignity and commemorating burial sites.”

This means restoring the funding. Also, importantly, it means changing laws related to access to archives in ways that address delays, barriers and access to vitally important records for family searches including Vital Statistics and public health records at the provincial and federal levels.

An anti-racist approach would change the approach of the federal government and all archives in general from adversary to advocate — and in the process improve the accuracy and reliability of our knowledge of our history itself.

Mary Jane Logan McCallum is a professor of history at the University of Winnipeg.