Records of residential schools can be destroyed

OTTAWA— The promise of privacy to encourage abuse victims to tell their story overrides the government’s wish to preserve, for future generations, individual records of the horrors of the Indian residential school system, the country’s top court ruled Friday.

The decisive 7-0 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada gives former residential school students a 15-year period to decide if they wish their stories preserved, but it leaves that decision in their hands instead of government archivists.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde called it a “good and fair decision” that respects the rights of former residential school students, but Carolyn Bennett, minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, said she was “very disappointed” because scholarly work aimed at “analysis of the system in the churches and in government has not yet been done.”

But the court said the ability to control their own story was a key part of the deal the Canadian government struck in 2008 with former students to settle a massive class-action lawsuit over the devastating legacy of the residential schools.

That settlement agreement included an out-of-court process for assessing individual abuse claims, which elicited personal accounts of “abuse ranging from the monstrous to the humiliating, and of harms ranging from the devastating to the debilitating,” justices Russell Brown and Malcolm Rowe wrote.

Dan Shapiro, chief adjudicator of the independent claims process, said the ruling means the explicit promise Canada made to survivors will be kept: that “their most intimate and painful memories would not be shared outside of the hearing without their consent” and would be kept secret “even from their families and even after their death.”

The high court said the testimony of former students disclosed assaults ranging from fondling and unwanted kissing up to repeated rape, abortions and the lifelong fallout: suicidal tendencies, substance abuse and psychological disorders.

Archiving their stories would mean “highly sensitive and private experiences would be conscripted to serve the cause of public education. But this is plainly not what the parties bargained for,” the court said.

Statements collected from more than 6,000 individuals by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission remain preserved in the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg. It documented how residential schools, funded by Ottawa and operated by religious groups from the 1860s to the 1990s, attempted to culturally assimilate more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children.