(The fifth in a series of excerpts from the Truth and Reconciliation Final Report Summary, prompted by Senator Lynn Beyak's opinions about residential schools. This is another from the Report's "History" chapter, an impressive history with global context and local details throughout).
The number of students who died at Canada's residential schools is not likely ever to be known in full. The most serious gap in information arises from the incompleteness of the documentary record. Many records have simply been destroyed....
It was not uncommon for principals, in their annual report, to state that a specific number of students had died in the previous year, but not to name them....
There can be no certainty that all deaths were, in fact, reported to Indian Affairs....
A January 2015 statistical analysis of the Named Register for the period from 1867 to 2000 indentified 2040 deaths. The same analysis of the Named and Unnamed registers identified 3,201 reported deaths..
Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population....
For Aboriginal children, the relocation to residential schools was generally no healthier than their homes had been on the reserves. In 1897, Indian Affairs official Martin Benson reported that the industrial schools in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories had been "hurriedly constructed of poor materials, badly laid out, without due provision for lighting, heating, or ventilation." In addition, drainage was poor and water and fuel supplies were inadequate....
Lack of access to safe fire escapes led to high death tolls in fires at the Beauval and Cross Lake schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commisson of Canada has determined that at least fifty-three schools were destroyed by fire....
The schools were not only fire traps.They were also incubators of disease.... [Dr Peter Boyle] found school staff and even physicians "inclined to question or minimize the dangers of infection..."
In 1897, Kah-pah-pah-mah-am-wa-ko-we-ko-chin (also known as Tom) was deposed from his position as a headman of the White Bear reserve in what is now Saskatchewan for his vocal opposition to residential schools."Many of them are sick most of the time, many of the children sent from this Reserve to the Schools have died."
