Residential school survivors urge Ottawa to increase funding for searches – National

Survivors of residential schools say the federal government is keeping the truth about these institutions in the dark by cutting funding for casework and ground investigations into unmarked graves of children killed at the schools.

More than 150,000 children were forced into residential schools, and many survivors described the horrific abuse they suffered to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. An estimated 6,000 children died while attending schools, although experts say the actual number could be much higher.

In 2021, after numerous First Nations reported locating apparent human remains on the grounds of former residential schools, Ottawa stepped in with more than $116 million to search for unmarked graves and commemorate the children who died.

As of March 2024, the government had actually provided $216 million through 146 different financing agreements.

That amounted to an average of about $71 million per year.

In the most recent budget, the government allocated $91 million over the next two years to continue searching for graves, or $45.5 million a year.

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Laura Arndt, the leader of the Survivors’ Secretariat, a survivor-led organization that seeks to document and uncover the truth of what happened at the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, criticized what she says can only be characterized as a cuts in funding.

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Communities and organizations have been researching residential schools for decades, including through documents. The more recent ground searches, using ground penetrating radar, are being conducted in the hope of finding the deceased and bringing them home.

“We are trying to uncover a history that is 150 years old, and the limited funding we have received in three years is not feasible,” Arndt said.

The Survivors Secretariat has indicated that the change will have a dramatic impact on communities that have begun their search and those hoping to secure funding on their own. Communities and organizations were informed via conference call with federal government officials, and they say their microphones were muted and they had fewer options to reverse the cuts.

“They’re waiting for us poor old school kids to die,” said Roberta Hill, a survivor at the Mohawk Institute at Six Nations of the Grand River near Hamilton, Ont.

“Well, we’re not going anywhere – not yet, as far as I know. I said I will live as long as I can because I want answers and I want the truth. There is no reconciliation – absolutely none – if you lie to us and do this to us.”

Over the summer, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree reversed a decision to limit each individual community to $500,000 for a search. Previously, individual allocations were limited to $3 million, and Anandasangaree said the original limit would be reinstated.

Speaking on Parliament Hill during the Truth and Reconciliation Day ceremony on Monday, Anandasangaree declined to discuss the funding issue.

“I’ll be happy to talk about this later in a healthier way, about what we did,” he said in an interview. “And I’ve heard from survivors and I think we did the right thing by lifting the limit and we will continue to work with all those who have been affected. And I look forward to having this conversation at a later date.”

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Scott Hamilton, a professor of anthropology at Lakehead University who has been involved in residential school studies, said the federal government has an obligation to provide communities with the support needed to complete the work they do.

“If we choose to cover up, if we choose to ignore, if we continue to live in la-la land that these terrible things didn’t happen, or that maybe they weren’t as bad as what was said, then we are a kind of choice to close our eyes and hum a song so that we don’t have to witness what happened – to face the fact that terrible things were done in the name of our nation,” said Hamilton.

“An important part of Canada’s legacy is grappling with those dark, painful facts and trying to heal from them (and) seek reconciliation. But you cannot achieve reconciliation without acknowledging those painful truths.”

The Survivors Secretariat released a report on Monday calling for the release of 23 million documents to the National Center for

Truth and Reconciliation, along with RCMP data regarding missing children and unmarked burials.

It also says Canada must provide stable, long-term funding for these studies, and enable communities to determine what support they need to carry out their work.

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