Residential school records once held in Canada now in Rome, researchers say

WARNING: This story contains distressing details.

Researchers in Ottawa have uncovered new evidence to suggest some archival records relating to residential schools in Canada are now only available in Rome, prompting renewed calls for the Vatican to release historic documents that could help piece together what happened to the Indigenous children who were forced to attend the 48 residential schools once run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

"The records that we had looked at here are no longer in this country," said Brenda Macdougall, a professor and research chair in Métis family and community traditions at the University of Ottawa.  

"Those records belong to Canada. They belong to the people first and foremost. … They have to come back through subpoena or the church. The Pope himself can suspend canonical law and return them." 

Historians also tell CBC they were alarmed to witness some old materials from the Oblates' former headquarters in Ottawa thrown out in a dumpster about seven years ago.

Starting in the late 1800s, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Catholic order, played a significant role in the development of Indigenous schools.

The order ran institutions across the country including the three former residential schools where unmarked graves were recently discovered in Kamloops, B.C., Marieval, Sask., and near Brandon, Man.

Today, the order is small, with only a few hundred aging priests left to carry out what their current leader, Father Ken Thorson, calls the "important work of understanding the truths of what took place and owning these truths with deep humility."

According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, the Oblates have an extensive archival repository of "correspondence, reports, personnel records, financial documents, photographs and lists." 

Since 2011, thousands of Oblate materials have been turned over and digitized by the centre, but there are many more records still to be made accessible.

And many of those records were housed in the Deschâtelets Archives, formerly located in the Oblate seminary in Ottawa, near Saint Paul University.

"The Deschâtelets Archives were absolutely the repository of records for all of the western missions, for the northern missions, for the eastern missions," said Macdougall.

Until 2014, Macdougall and her fellow historians conducted research at the archives into early Oblate missions, including uncovering residential school information.

That year, however, the Oblates' Ottawa property was sold and the archives were moved.