Residential school survivors press Ottawa for more money to find unmarked graves

A group of residential school survivors and their supporters are asking the federal government to reverse what they're calling a funding cut and come up with more money to help find the unmarked graves of students who went to these institutions.

The request comes the same day Canada marks the fourth annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, established in 2021 to honour the survivors of residential schools, and the children who never came home from them.

The Survivors' Secretariat, which is parsing through decades-old records and searching the grounds of the former Mohawk Institute near Brantford, Ont., is leading the charge against a series of changes that Ottawa announced earlier this year that it says will reduce the total pool of money available to Indigenous communities to document residential school atrocities and deaths.

The issue first moved to the forefront of the national agenda after the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said in 2021 that preliminary findings from a radar survey of the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School indicated over 200 children could be buried on the site in B.C.

In the wake of those stunning claims, the federal government earmarked $209.8 million in Budget 2022 to support Indigenous communities who wanted to carry out their own investigations and "document, locate and memorialize burial sites." That money has already funded 146 projects, including research and ground searches.

But the Survivors' Secretariat says the most recent federal budget is offering less money — $91 million over two years — to continue with research they say is critical to getting to the bottom of what happened at these institutions, places where abuse was rampant and death occurred.

The change in funding means "communities are going to be pitted against each other to access a limited pool of funding," Laura Arndt, the executive lead at the secretariat, told reporters on Parliament Hill.

Arndt said communities will be forced to give up their work if Ottawa doesn't come through with more money soon.

"We're trying to uncover a history that's 150 years old, and with the limited funding we've been provided in three years — it's not doable," she said.

"There's hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work that needs to be done, and that's just a start to try to uncover the truth of what happened in all of these schools."

She pointed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's past commitment to "support communities" and "be there every step of the way to honour the children who did not return," saying the least he can do is come through with steady funding for such searches.

"We say to the prime minister — we've had enough. Promises only matter when you keep them, so keep your promise. Do it for the communities, do it for this country, so that they know what real reconciliation looks like."

Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree said the government is still committed to funding this research work, and that eligible communities can get up to $3 million each from his department.

"We will be with each and every community throughout the whole process this year," he said in an interview with CBC News.