Among the 2,800 names on the official memorial register are children known to recorded history only as “Alice,” “Mckay” or “Elsie.”īodies of children were not returned to families, and parents rarely learned the circumstances of a child’s death.

One quarter were marked as deceased without even their gender being noted. One third of children who died at a residential school did not have their names recorded by school administrators. A memorial erected in 2001 to commemorate the previously forgotten graves of children who died at the Dunbow Industrial School in Alberta. “In many cases, school principals simply reported on the number of children who had died in a school, with few or no supporting details,” reads the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. īut a true figure will never be known for the simple fact that death records – if they were kept at all – were often lacking even basic personal information. The chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Justice Murray Sinclair, has said the true number of deaths could be as high as 6,000. More than 2,800 names are logged on a memorial register maintained by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Eleven children are known to be buried here. Article content A cemetery north of the former Brandon Indian Residential School. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. In 2019, archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar found the crudely dug graves of as many as 15 children surrounding the former site of Saskatchewan’s Muskowekwan Residential School. In 2001, heavy rains outside High River, Alta., exposed the coffins of 34 children who had died at nearby Dunbow Residential School. The Battleford Industrial School in Saskatchewan has 72 graves that lay forgotten until rediscovered by archaeology students in the 1970s. The result is that many of Canada’s most notorious residential schools sit amid sprawling cemeteries of unmarked children’s graves. That’s a death rate comparable to the number of Canadian POWs who died in the custody of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The commission ultimately determined that at least 3,200 children died while a student at a Residential School one in every 50 students enrolled during the program’s nearly 120-year existence. One of the most painful tasks of Canada’s seven-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an attempt to quantify the sheer number of Indigenous children who died at an Indian Residential School.

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