$27M will soon be available to communities to help locate children who died at residential schools: feds

OTTAWA -- Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett announced Wednesday that the federal government is ready to distribute $27 million in pre-announced funding to assist Indigenous communities in locating and memorializing children who died at residential schools. Bennett said that by the end of the day, First Nations who want to move forward with burial site searches and commemorations will have information about how to access this funding, “which will be distributed on an urgent basis.”

On May 28, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in Kamloops, B.C. announced that it had found the remains of 215 children buried at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, using ground-penetrating radar. In the days that have followed this horrific discovery, there have been calls from First Nations leaders, residential school survivors, and opposition parties for the federal government to fund the research and excavation of all sites of former residential schools for unmarked graves. According to Bennett’s department the funding will be available “for a range of activities” such as supporting communities who want to conduct research, accessing professional archaeological investigation services “to identify and delineate burial sites,” and returning remains home if desired. “Indigenous communities from coast, to coast, to coast are calling for support in this important but challenging work. Our government is here there to support them,” Bennett said.

The unspent funding now ready to roll out the door comes from the 2019 federal budget, as part of what was a $33.8-million commitment to be spent over three years to fund the National Residential School Student Death Register and to help “establish and maintain an online registry of known residential school cemeteries.”

Facing questions about why it took years for this money to be made available, the minister said that it took years for the federal government to be “ready” to roll out the funding, spending the other $6.8 million on setting up the death register and online archive of known cemeteries, as well as to engage with Indigenous communities, residential school survivors, and other stakeholders such as archivists......