Thousands of Indigenous children died in Canadian residential schools. Now we know some of their names

EDMONTON—Christine Fortin died on June 9, 1901. Brian Dillon died on Oct. 9, 1984. Abel Half died somewhere between Aug. 1 and Aug. 31, 1894. Arnot Robinson’s date of death isn’t known. Neither is that of Sarah Gastz, William Sauteau, or Francis Black Forehead.

Their names joined those of around 2,800 other Indigenous children known to have died in Canada’s residential school system on a 50-foot cloth unravelled on Monday during an emotional ceremony in Gatineau, Que. A corresponding website set up by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation lists every single one, as well as the horrific conditions these students endured at their respective schools.

Two former staff members and a former principal at Cariboo Residential School in Williams Lake, B.C., were found to have sexually abused students. In 1921, a nurse reported finding four boys chained to benches at Crowfoot (St. Joseph’s) school in Cluny, Alta. The local Indian Superintendent for St. Paul’s residential School in Cardston, Alta., said in 1948 that he couldn’t take runaways back to the school — they were better off at home.

Marlene Poitras, the Assembly of First Nations’ regional chief for Alberta, said in a statement that the release of the names highlights what many have known for decades: that the loss of life as a result of the residential school system was “massive and widespread.”

“It breaks my heart knowing that so many families in Alberta had to go through the pain of never knowing why their children didn’t come home,” Poitras said. “While there are still so many who remain to be named, I hope today’s findings help support the ongoing healing of our communities.”

A total of 150,000 Indigenous children are thought to have spent time in residential schools that were operated by governments and churches. Poitras said these institutions should take responsibility and help find all the names of children who died in residential schools. At least 1,600 other children who died remain unnamed, while hundreds of others simply vanished, according to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

Alberta, the province with the most residential schools — at least 26 of roughly 130 that existed across the country from the 1870s until the mid-1990s — accounted for more than 680 of the dead.

Dozens of children died at some of these schools. Horrific conditions and diseases like tuberculosis and Spanish flu at the Red Deer Industrial School in central Alberta killed 69 children in total — one out of every five Indigenous children sent there over a period of 26 years.

“It was one of the earliest — and it was one of the worst,” said Lyle Keewatin Richards, a retired artist and Indigenous advocate based in Red Deer, Alta.

Eighty-nine students died while attending Holy Angels Catholic residential school in Fort Chipewyan between 1880 and 1953. St. Paul’s Anglican residential school near Cardston, where a 1930 report said the boys were worked like “slaves,” oversaw the deaths of 76 children between 1896 and 1949.

Some schools have extensive lists of students who died, while some have no lists at all. Cecile Fausak, secretary of Remembering The Children Society — an initiative started in 2011 to preserve the Red Deer Industrial School’s cemetery — said they got their hands on the school’s registry thanks to research by Don Hepburn, a former school superintendent who worked at residential schools in the Northwest Territories.

However, the registry didn’t offer a lot of clarity on where particular students were buried. While Red Deer Industrial School had its own cemetery, four students who died of Spanish flu were interred in the city cemetery.

“It hardly ever (said) if the student was buried at the school or not, or whether they were sent home,” Fausak said.

Miranda Jimmy, co-founder of Reconciliation in Solidarity Edmonton (RISE), said it’s important to note that it was in each school’s best interest to not document deaths, or to destroy records that were kept.

“All of the payments from the federal government to the churches that ran the schools was based on quarterly reports, which was the list of residents, and you got a per-capita grant. So if a student died or went missing under whatever circumstances, it was in the school’s financial interest not to report that or document it in any way because they would continue to receive funding for that student,” Jimmy said.

“So I take this information with a grain of salt, and I want that to be the storyline — that this is only the documented cases, and reasonably it could be 10 times this number.”

Institutions involved in running residential schools, including the federal government, have apologized over the years for the abuses they oversaw. The United Church — formed from the Methodist and Presbyterian churches — apologized for their part in the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples in 1986, and made another apology to residential school students specifically in 1998.

Fausak said the Remembering the Children Society’s work supporting the preservation of cemeteries of residential schools across Alberta is about making amends for the past.

“It’s an attempt to live out our apologies,” she said.

Jimmy said her father attended a residential school and later raised his family to be disconnected from his culture, never speaking his native Cree language at home.

Jimmy said she saw trauma reflected in his actions, being raised in a house filled with violence and abuse.

She said she doesn’t know what her father’s residential school experience was like because he never talked about it, but added it was important not to rank traumas.

“I think that the act of being taken from your family, the act of being absolved of your culture and language, is abuse enough. That should be the way we think about residential school,” Jimmy said. “It’s not about comparing traumas — the trauma of residential school is enough.”

With files from The Canadian Press