Truth and Reconciliation 

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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” is a systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate. The project’s research supports 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.
  

These findings are in keeping with statements that former students and the parents of former students gave to the Commission. They spoke of children who went to school and never returned. e tragedy of the loss of children was compounded by the fact that burial places were distant or even unknown. Many Aboriginal people have unanswered questions about what happened to their children or relatives while they were attending residential school. e work that the Commission has begun in identifying and commemorating those students who died at school and their gravesites needs to be finished. e work that the Commission has commenced is far from complete. The National Residential School Student Death Register established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada represents the first national effort to record the names of the students who died at school. There is a need for continued work on the register: there are many relevant documents that have yet to be reviewed. There is a need for the development and implementation of a national strategy for the documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries. Such a program, carried out in close consultation with the concerned Aboriginal communities, is necessary to properly honour the memory of the children who died in Canada’s residential schools.