Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

94 • Truth & Reconciliation Commissionwere properly trained, and, most significantly, that food was purchased in sufficientquantity and quality for growing children. It was a decision that left thousands ofAboriginal children vulnerable to disease.Health: “For sickness, conditions at thisschool are nothing less than criminal.”The number of students who died at Canada’s residential schools is not likely ever tobe known in full. The most serious gap in information arises from the incompletenessof the documentary record. Many records have simply been destroyed. According toa 1935 federal government policy, school returns could be destroyed after five years,and reports of accidents after ten years. This led to the destruction of fifteen tonnes ofwaste paper. Between 1936 and 1944, 200,000 Indian Affairs files were destroyed. 348Health records were regularly destroyed. For example, in 1957, Indian and NorthernHealth Services was instructed to destroy “correspondence re routine arrangementsre medical and dental treatments of Indians and Eskimos, such as transportation,escort services, admission to hospital, advice on treatment, requests for treatment,etc.” after a period of two years. Reports by doctors, dentists, and nurses were similarlyassigned a two-year retention period. 349Often, the existing record lacks needed detail. For example, it was not uncommonfor principals, in their annual reports, to state that a specific number of students haddied in the previous year, but not to name them. 350 It was not until 1935 that IndianAffairs adopted a formal policy on how deaths at the schools were to be reported andinvestigated. 351There can be no certainty that all deaths were, in fact, reported to Indian Affairs—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has located reports of studentdeaths in church records that are not reported in government documents. 352 In somecases, school officials appear not to have recognized a responsibility to report studentdeaths to provincial vital statistics officials, meaning that these records may also bedeficient. 353As part of its work, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has establisheda National Residential School Student Death Register. The creation of this registermarks the first effort in Canadian history to properly record the number of studentswho died in residential schools. The register is made of up three sub-registers:1) the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students (the“Named Register”);2) the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students(the “Unnamed Register”); and