After exhausting all the research avenues, the Singawook Children Alumni Association wanted to search the government’s state register in India for the names of two boys and two girls who died while attending institutions in the early 1900s. Their offer was blocked this month by the registrar, citing privacy laws to deny a search request. “The information contained in the Registry of India is personal and is therefore limited to disclosure solely with their consent or in compliance with the Privacy Act,” wrote John Gordon, Indian Secretary of State, in a letter dated 16 March. . “You may not be granted access for research purposes.” Irene Barbeau, 78, president of the alumni association, has since written to Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu and Indigenous Crown Relations Minister Marc Miller asking them to use their power to grant access to the group. “It’s frustrating, it’s frustrating,” Barbeaeu said. “We thought there would be more reconciliation on their part, because they are the ones who created the chaos we are in right now.” The letter to the ministers states that the association only seeks to search records dating back to between 1900 and 1920 kept by the registry and any other internal databases of the department. “The only way left to identify these children is the co-operation of the departments you run,” the March 24 letter said. “We can not cure them and they can not really rest in peace until their names are known.” The Indigenous Relations Department emailed the statement to CBC News last fall, saying the federal government would be open to providing “access to information and records to support reconciliation,” but that it was subject to restrictions in federal privacy law. . The dining room of the Shingwauk Residential School circa 1890. (Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association / The Shingwauk Project)
Miller and Hajdu’s offices issued a joint statement via email to CBC News on Tuesday, saying the government had a “moral obligation to survivors to pursue the truth and gain access to documents and records.” The statement said the two ministers would work with their departments “to find a solution so that the Shingwauk Children’s Alumni Association can continue their important work”. Meagan McLean, a spokeswoman for the two departments, said in an email that officials planned to contact the union for “additional information” because previous investigations had “failed”. The department’s statement did not say where the officers had previously conducted investigations.

“There is no obstacle”

Vivek Krishnamurthy, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and director of the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Policy and Public Interest Clinic, said there was nothing in the Privacy Act that prevented the federal government from providing access to the union’s state-of-the-art registry. . “We are talking about child identification. This is a matter of the utmost importance … there is no obstacle to co-operation,” said Krishnamurthi, who is assisting the union in its efforts to access the files. India’s property register is used to determine who qualifies as a first nation. It was founded in 1951 and collected identification information for any person the government considers to have status under Indian law. It contains genealogical information about the people of the First Nations dating back to 1800. The Indian Residential School Shingwauk, presented around 1965, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. (Shingwauk Residential Schools Center, Algoma University)
The federal government has identified the registry as a possible primary source for determining who attended which home school, according to a 2003 Department of Homeland Security document describing the operation of an early compensation scheme. Records for students in Shingwauk English schools — for boys — and Wawanosh — for girls — in residential schools in the early 1900s are sparse. For example, the federal government destroyed student lists for Shingwauk from 1907 to 1939, said Edward Sadowski, a researcher who has worked with the alumni association for decades. The only evidence of the deaths of the two girls comes from a 1913 Indian Affairs report stating that they were from the Garden River First Nation and that they had died of an illness. The girls are not named, but the report notes that one girl was “always weak” and the other “a poor little paralytic”. The two boys drowned in a deep lake known as Little Lake behind Singwook between 1914 and 1915, but no record of their deaths has yet been found, Sandowski said. The only evidence comes from a video of Shingwauk reuniting in 1981 and the testimony of a former staff member. The boys’s bodies remain buried under a park built on top of the lake. Researcher Edward Sadowski has worked with Shingwauk survivors for 30 years. He says decades of school housing records have been destroyed by the federal government over the years. (Joe Fiorino / CBC News)
Sandowski said the union searched the Anglican Archives, the Library and Archives of Canada and the department’s archives using the Access to Information Act. They have all come out empty, leaving the status register and other possible internal departmental databases as the only places left to search, he said. “This is the only place left that has information about indigenous peoples and housing schools,” Sadwoski said. “We have run out of options to try to identify these children.” The alumni association has so far identified 72 children who died in the two residential schools.