Website seeks to help preserve residential school claim records

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This article was published 13/01/2019 (1923 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ten of thousands of residential school survivors who received compensation for abuse they suffered were notified Monday they have one more decision to make: the fate of their settlement claim records.

Those records contain sensitive testimony about specific abuses and the trauma which affected their lives and their families for years afterward. Without express consent, the files will be destroyed Sept. 19, 2027.

Claimants also have the option to keep a copy for themselves and/or deposit them with the Winnipeg-based National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to share or preserve, with or without their names made public.

The federal office set up adjudicate the claims rolled out a program Monday to ensure survivors were made aware they are the only ones with the power to preserve the files.

“Your records are private and confidential. The choice is yours,” declared a new website (MyRecordsMyChoice.ca) set up to handle the potential responses.

“The Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat has launched (the) program to alert former students who made claims of abuse at Indian residential schools about their options on what happens to the records from their claims,” the secretariat said in a statement issued from its Regina office.

To date, more than 38,000 former students of Indian residential schools have submitted claims for compensation for abuse — sexual, physical and emotional — suffered at the institutions.

As of Nov. 30, 2018, 99 per cent of all claims had been settled and the remaining are expected to be resolved by 2020. The average compensation is just over $91,000 and has cost $3.1 billion in claims and legal fees.

In Manitoba, all but six of the 5,430 claims received have been settled.

The question of what happens to the records was the subject of protracted court battles until the Supreme Court of Canada settled matter in 2017.

“The courts were clear that IAP and ADR (the two processes that handled the abuse claims) records are private and confidential,” the secretariat’s IAP chief adjudicator, Dan Shapiro, said in a statement announcing the website.

“Claimants, and no one else, control their… records. They alone have the right to decide what to do with them.”

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation officials hope donation will be the choice most make.

“Fundamental in this, the courts have recognized… survivors do have the right to deposit their material here… (and) that these records, if survivors chose, will be added to the overall collection of history on what happened in residential schools and the legacy of harm to survivors and their families,” centre director Ry Moran said Monday.

“What is at stake is what we have in those records is the best collection of the worst abuses that were inflicted on residential school survivors,” he said.

“We’ll know that abuse occurred. We know it did occur with great frequency. We know that it was widespread, across the residential school system but (without the records) we won’t have a full and conclusive picture of the long standing nature of those harms and the specific nature of the abuse that occurred in those residential schools.”

If a person has already died without making a decision, there’s no accommodation to preserve their records, officials said. Claimants have until 2027 to make a choice.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca