Ottawa should allow use of status register to find lost residential school children, survivors say
CBC
The discovery this summer of suspected unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools across Canada was a stark reminder that the actual number of child deaths at these institutions is a dark unknown.
A true accounting remains elusive because over the years, key residential school files were destroyed during periodic federal government-wide document purges.
The historical record of the schools remains fragmented and incomplete — the names of thousands of students and how they died have been pulped and erased.
But there's one place no one has looked outside of the residential school record, says Mike Cachagee, 82, who attended three residential schools himself.
It's a database called the Indian status register.
"Each one of those children had a mother, each one of those children had a father, each one of those children had grandparents, they had ... aunts and uncles," Cachagee said.
That's why the federal government needs to allow the Indian status register to be used to locate the lost names of First Nation children, he says.