Ottawa ends funding for national advisory committee on unmarked residential school graves

WARNING: This story contains details of experiences at residential schools.

An expert committee formed to help Indigenous communities find unmarked graves at former residential schools in Canada says the federal government has discontinued its funding.

"It's a betrayal," said founding member Crystal Gail Fraser, who is Gwich'in and grew up in Inuvik, N.W.T. "We are losing sight of our values around truth and reconciliation."

The committee will be forced to cease operations when its current funding agreement expires on March 31, Fraser said.

The decision comes after funding cuts announced in July for unmarked grave searches, as well as funding delays for residential school non-profit Survivors' Secretariat.

The committee was formed after 200 potential burial sites were detected in 2021 through ground-penetrating radar at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site, a finding that made headlines across the country and sparked international condemnation.

The National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (NAC) is co-administered by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) and the federal Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs.

In 2022, the year after the potential burial sites were detected at the Kamloops site, there were renewed federal commitments to take responsibility for what happened and support efforts toward healing. In July 2022, Pope Francis came to Canada and apologized for the Catholic Church's involvement in the schools.

It's a "shock" to learn that Ottawa is withdrawing its support just under three years later, Fraser said.

"All of the signals that we've seen from this government has been ongoing engagement with the process of truth and reconciliation," she said.

For Fraser, it's a strange way to mark the 10-year anniversary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

"When it comes to residential school histories and children who have either died or disappeared as a result of their institutionalization ... we are still very much in the truth process."

In 2015, the TRC determined that at least 3,200 children died while in federal custody at residential schools.

At the time, Murray Sinclair, who chaired the commission, told CBC News that because burial records were often incomplete, he was "absolutely convinced the number is much higher, perhaps as much as five to 10 times as high."