More deaths at Quebec residential schools than previously reported, investigation reveals
CBC
WARNING: This story contains distressing details and images.
New information uncovered by Radio-Canada's investigative program, Enquête, suggests there were perhaps dozens more deaths in Quebec residential schools than the 38 officially reported by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Combining newly uncovered photographs, previously unpublished reports and interviews with survivors, Enquête found several instances of deaths of Indigenous children in Quebec that aren't reflected in the official numbers.
Some of the children died from illness. Some were victims of abuse who later died under nebulous circumstances.
Janie Pachano remembers one such case.
Pachano is a survivor of St. Philip's Indian Residential School on Fort George Island. She told Radio-Canada that the discovery of unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., in June 2021 awakened a 70-year-old memory in her.
"I started crying," Pachano said. "I couldn't stop."
When Pachano was 10, on a cold day in February 1951, she says she saw a young girl named Ellen Bobbish sitting on the floor with her head resting on her knees.
Pachano said a supervisor ordered Bobbish to dress to go outside, but Bobbish replied that she was too ill.
"The supervisor kicked her in the ribs and back, and she slid to the door. The supervisor eventually kicked her outside," Pachano said.
"A few days later, they announced to us as we were lining up for supper, they announced that she had died," Pachano said.
"And they said don't you talk about this. She's gone. Don't talk about this anymore," Pachano said.
Bobbish's name doesn't appear on the official list of those who died, but Pachano believes her remains are probably on the site of the former school.
Radio-Canada discovered traces of twelve other children who may have died at one of the two residential schools on Fort George Island.