Thousands of residential school survivors, who spent years sharing their experiences as a way to find healing, closure, and accountability, are facing the prospect of losing the largest archive of their testimonies, which is set to be destroyed next year.
However, the Survivors Secretariat, a research group from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), is working to ensure their accounts are preserved.
Darlene LaForme and Tony Bomberry attended Mohawk Institute, the first residential school to open in Canada and its longest running. It operated for over 140 years in Brantford.
“They called it the mush hole because historically the kids only got mush all the time,” shared LaForme.
LaForme and Bomberry’s experiences, along with those of thousands of others, have helped shed light on what Indigenous children suffered through for decades at residential schools across the country.
“I don’t care if mine is saved, but I think there should be some that are saved because that history will be erased. They will say, ‘Yeah, we paid them, and we give them money for whatever they went through,’ and now it’s all washed away, and you have no proof that anything happened anymore,” said LaForme.
Testimonies of survivors were gathered over the course of six years as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. It was implemented in 2007 as a way to bring resolution and closure to the legacy of the government-sponsored religious school system that target Indigenous peoples.
Survivors were able to submit their experiences of abuse and receive financial compensation after an independent review.
“The process is that it would be in camera and the survivor could bring in health or moral or emotional support that they wished and an adjudicator with the survivor would discuss their experiences and a decision would be made on the resulting compensation or torte,” explained Raymond Frogner, the Head of Archives at National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
In 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that once claims were complete, all testimony should be destroyed by September 2027, citing promises of privacy and confidentiality made to survivors.
Survivors can stop that process and request their testimony be preserved, but advocates say many survivors are not aware they have to do this.
“The responsibility has been put on survivors to seek out those records. What many people don’t think about is that many of the survivors that are involved in this are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s,” said Laura Arndt with the Survivors Secretariat.
Arndt tells CityNews the testimonies could be useful for organizations that work to locate and identify Indigenous children who never returned home.
Investigative journalist and TMU professor Connie Walker launched the research project in hopes of helping preserve more testimonies and raise awareness about the looming deadline to save these claims.
“I absolutely think this is crucial information for all Canadians to know and understand. This is Canadian history,” Walker said.
The initiative will include law and journalism working in collaboration with First Nation, Inuit and Metis communities to build a new archive that will preserve survivor accounts and court filings. Its first pages will investigate five residential schools across Ontario.
“[We are] going to courthouses, compiling those documents, creating this archive, and then working with survivors from that institution from that school to determine how they want that information to be used,” said Walker.
“Going through trauma is a normal process, we’re never going to heal from it totally. It’s going to be there with us for the rest of our life, but like my sister said, how do we learn something from it?” said Bomberry.
Survivors can contact organizations like the Survivors Secretariat for help preserving their records or visit the Centre for Truth and Reconciliation website for more information.
