The federal government is facing severe and widespread criticism for cutting funding to search for the remains of Indigenous children said to have never returned home from their residential schools.
The Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund (RSMCCSF) allowed organizations and communities to receive up to $3 million per year for an unspecified number of years. Now, the funding has been capped at $500,000 annually, a six-fold cut—significantly lower than what Indigenous organizations claim is required to continue their work.
The RSMCCSF was established in 2021 as a $321 million knee-jerk reaction to the disputed May 27, 2021, Kamloops Indian Band’s announcement of “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” buried next to the long closed institution.
No such “confirmation” has ever taken place either at Kamloops or elsewhere because only excavation of alleged burial plots can do so. Such excavation has rarely been undertaken, presumably because it has always yielded inconclusive or problematic results.
Still, this has not prevented 146 funding agreements providing more than $216.5 million to indigenous communities and organizations to support “community-led and Survivor-centric initiatives to document, locate and commemorate the children that did not return home [sic] and unmarked burial sites associated with former residential schools” as of March 31, 2024.
None of these agreements required excavation to confirm ground penetrating radar (GPR) results, a crude search tool that can determine only subterranean soil disturbances.
According to Tanya Talaga, the Globe and Mail’s strident reporter on Indigenous issues, “It was Canadian law and policy to make Indigenous children disappear,” an assertion based on no logical or empirical evidence.
Not only did Talaga demand a restoration of funding, she also asserted that “Canada needs to create permanent funding for research and site searches of residential schools now.”
As for other Indigenous activists, “We should be investing additional funding into the supports for communities, not removing them” in their search for almost exclusively nameless missing children, said Kimberly Murray, the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites, in response to the spending cuts.
This is a bizarre comment coming from an Indigenous activist who, on March 21, 2023, stated there are no missing Indian Residential School children in her testimony before the federal government’s Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples, “The children aren’t missing; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried.”
Yes, some children never came home because they were transported to hospitals and sanitoria and hence buried elsewhere. But this doesn’t mean their families were not informed or that their deaths and place of interment were not properly recorded.
Murray also complained that the funding criteria currently exclude searches at locations other than residential schools recognized by the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA).
“The funding wouldn’t cover searches of non-recognized residential schools that Indigenous children were taken to and died at,” said Murray.
“It also excludes searches for the children who were taken to residential schools and later transferred to hospitals, sanitoriums or other institutions,” Murray said.
Unwilling to observe the conditions of her contractual mandate or that of the IRSSA, Murray recently released an unauthorized report titled Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience dealing explicitly with hospitals, sanitoria, and other institutions.
Murray is supposed to be answerable to the Minister of Justice. However, she’s always been a loose cannon, most recently falsely opining that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada provided “indisputable historical evidence of genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass human rights violations in the Indian Residential School System.”
Chantalle Aubertin, a spokesperson for Justice Minister Arif Virani responded to a CBC interview request by stating, “We will take the time to give proper consideration to the Special Interlocutor’s recommendations as we await her final report expected this fall,” implying that Murray’s latest report was unauthorized.
This did not prevent Murray from complaining that groups that qualify for funding will face restrictions on how they can use them. She said that memorialization efforts like purchasing headstones on unmarked graves or putting up fences to protect burial sites don’t qualify, ignoring the elementary fact that any unmarked graves found in reserve cemeteries would have received simple wooden crosses that have long disintegrated or that Indigenous community cemeteries are generally unkempt, neglected, and full of unmarked graves.
Murray also noted “We have to follow the truth where it takes us, and Canada is putting up barriers and roadblocks to following the truth and revealing the truth. And quite frankly, it’s in breach of their international obligations.”
As for “international obligations,” Murray is undoubtedly referring to the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, a land and power surrender declaration overwhelmingly and hypocritically adopted by countries whose indigenous people disappeared or were fully assimilated millennia ago.
“It’s just a continuing process of Canada creating amnesty for itself by pulling the plug on all these searches,” she also complained.
Murray ignores that the real “barriers and roadblocks” and “plug pulling” have been erected by the Indigenous leaders who have refused to unearth the soil anomalies revealed by GPR searches or even search provincial archives to quickly discover the fate of children who died while registered as Indian Residential School students..
Other indigenous groups have heavily criticized the funding cut. The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs said it was outraged at the decision and that the funding cap was disrespectful to survivors and families impacted by residential schools.
A third twist on this funding reduction came from Leah Redcrow, executive director of the Acimowin Opaspiw Society, which represents the former students of Blue Quills residential school in Alberta, who said federal officials told her last month the cut was because they were waiting for Murray’s final report due later this year.
Murray’s overall position is, “What they should have done is just increase the funding,” ignoring that the $216.5 million already allocated has yielded the remains of not a single missing Indian Residential School child who never came home.
In an emailed statement to the CBC, a Crown-Indigenous Relations spokesperson said the government’s adjustments to the funding program are aimed at allowing it to be distributed to as many community-led initiatives as possible.
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree took a somewhat different position on this cut when he claimed “We had limited resources allocated to us as a department. We had to make a difficult decision. I apologize for that.”
A final twist on this funding reduction occurred on Friday, August 16 when it was suddenly cancelled by Anandasangaree who claimed there was a mistake in not being flexible enough. “Communities know best what is needed to undertake this important work, on their own terms,” he said.
What this funding brouhaha really shows is hard to determine apart from the strength of Indigenous lobbying and Liberal Party guilt about the downtrodden status of the country’s Indigenous people.
Still, it is surely not a sign that this federal Liberal Party government is finally beginning to recognize that continuing to feed what even the left-wing Toronto Star has termed the Indian industry – an army of Indigenous politicians, activists, hangers-on, consultants, lawyers, and accountants who are sucking hundreds of millions of dollars out of Indian Reserves and from federal government coffers – is a fool’s errand that only earns Canada’s ruling regime contempt from all sides.
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
