Taking Care of the Truth: A Call for Collaborative, Community-Engaged Residential School Research

By Sean Carleton and Adina Williams, members of the Squamish Nation’s Yúusneẇas Project

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) released the executive summary of its final report 10 years ago, in June 2015. In the decade since, many Indigenous Nations have carried on the TRC’s work of putting truth before reconciliation and learning more about the residential school system and its ongoing legacy.

Following the Tkemlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s 2021 announcement about the location of potential unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, many Nations have specifically taken up the TRC’s Calls to Action 71-76 about locating and honouring missing children and unmarked burials at former residential schools.

This work, which includes the use of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) among other research practices and technologies, is not about proving anything to Canada or Canadians. Church and state records have already confirmed more than 4,000 Indigenous children died at residential schools across the country, and this part of the history is outlined in Volume 4 of the TRC’s final report. Instead, Nations are undertaking new work to continue the truth-finding and truth-telling processes needed to facilitate internal healing and justice for Survivors and communities.

Taking care of Survivors, and all those impacted by Canada’s residential school system, is a key focus for Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (the Squamish Nation). In 2021, the Nation established the Yúusneẇas Project, comprised of community members and outside experts in various fields, to learn more about the impacts of the St. Paul’s Indian Residential School in North Vancouver, British Columbia. St. Paul’s was run by the Catholic church on Skwxwú7mesh territory between 1899 and 1959.

Peter Baker, Yúusneẇas Project Sponsor, explains that truth is at the core of our work: “GPR…is just another method of analysis…to reinforce the experiences that have already been told to us by our Survivors, and it’s their truth that supersedes everything. Nothing supersedes the truths that our Survivors have shared with us, and we felt it very important to make sure that was stated with certainty.”[1] Every child matters to the Nation, and Survivor truths need to be preserved, understood, and respected.

As team members and historians committed to truth and reconciliation, we want to share some of the lessons learned so far, specifically about research and archives. In particular, we think that Yúusneẇas’s approach underscores the importance of data sovereignty, big data analysis, and the need for collaborative, community-engaged residential school research as part of the ongoing work of taking care of Survivors and everyone.

Yúusnewas –Taking Care of Everyone

In Skwxwú7mesh sníchim, Yúusneẇas means “taking care of each other,” or more fully “to take care of spirit, to take care of one another, and to take care of everything around us.” Yúusneẇas was recommended by the Squamish Nation’s Elders Advisory Committee in recognition of the importance of taking care of all those who have been impacted by the Indian Residential School system, which includes former students and intergenerational survivors. It is powerfully represented by the artwork selected for the project and designed by Skwxwú7mesh artist Calvin Charlie-Dawson.

Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw is the lead community for archival and land-based research into the former St. Paul’s Indian Residential School in North Vancouver, and, through Yúusneẇas, the Nation has effectively prioritized the voices of Survivor truth-telling to guide the process. As well, Yúusneẇas prioritizes doing the work in a good and respectful way with Skwxwú7mesh culture and protocols at its foundation. Yúusneẇas weaves together the teachings of Skwxwú7mesh ancestors and the truths of Skwxwú7mesh people to strengthen healing pathways for past, present, and future generations. The work of Yúusneẇas is carried out by a team that works across three main areas: community and cultural support, health and wellness support, and research and archives. Yúusneẇas is led by cultural knowledge keepers and elders from the community who contribute at all levels of the work. Yúusneẇas is further guided by a steering committee comprised of Squamish Nation staff and elected officials. Most significantly, Yúusneẇas is informed by Survivor experiences which have been captured through oral history recordings.

Archival Research

In terms of the research and archives, Yúusneẇas’s approach is unique. The main goal of the project, as defined by the Nation, was to learn the full truth about St. Paul’s operation to better understand student experience and facilitate community healing. An important part of our work was to gain control over existing archival records that could help shed light on this part of the Nation’s history. Data sovereignty, or the ability of the Nation to own, control, access, manage, and interpret data, was thus at the heart of Yúusneẇas’s approach. For too long, records about residential schooling have been controlled by outside groups and organizations, be it municipal, provincial, or national archives or those maintained by churches. This meant that learning about residential schooling was often controlled by those that administered the system. In short, part of “taking care of everyone” meant taking control over records relating to residential schooling.

Taking back the narrative also meant controlling and managing large amounts of data. Once obtained, the overwhelming number of archival documents needed to be organized, transcribed, analyzed, and presented in a searchable way that would aid research. Simply put: spreadsheets were not going to cut it. We needed something bigger.

After considering different content management systems, the team selected Datawalk. This is a big data platform that collects and visually builds a story that links events and entities, or people (e.g. students, parents, teachers, Indian agents etc.). The researcher can view and search existing data more efficiently. The system collects these analyses and the researcher can develop a report, adding notes, collaborating with others on the team, and setting up alerts if new related data is loaded. Working with the system adds many new layers of understanding and possibility.

As a more comprehensive understanding of the St. Paul’s experience emerged, limitations of school-specific research became clear to us as team members. Many residential schools boarded students from many different communities, and it was common for students to move from one school to another. What this meant is that while Yúusneẇas was originally pitched as understanding the experience of those who attended St. Paul’s, we realized that we needed to work collaboratively with many different Nations, often with their own residential school research teams, to obtain records from other schools to get the full picture. This was a process that necessitated deep care, but the combination of big data approaches and community collaboration helped produce new knowledge, mainly that it was common for students to attend multiple residential schools during their school years. St. Paul’s was just one part of a larger network.

As an example, the experience of “Grace G” (who we have given anonymity) shows the complicated web of school attendance. Using Datawalk, we collected a series of records, approximately 60 references, that allowed the team to trace Grace’s personal journey from birth in 1936 to residential school and day school in the 1940s and 1950s. Using records from multiple institutions, we now understand that Grace attended the Kuper Island school for Grade 2 (1947), Kuper Island and Sechelt for Grade 3 (1948), Sechelt for Grade 4 (1949), and Sechelt and St. Paul’s for Grade 5 (1950) before finally being discharged in 1951 and then attending day school. Grace’s children also attended the Squamish Indian Day School. The more data added to Datawalk, the more a complete picture emerged – and new connections became clear. As we learned more about St. Paul’s, we realized that there was a much larger story – the interconnectedness of student experience – that still needs to be told.

Next Steps

Our research is generating new questions and confirming that there is so much more to understand about the complicated workings of the Indian Residential School system.

What if, moving forward, other Nations could collaborate to populate big data platforms such as Datawalk (which we have created as National Indigenous Archives, or NIArchives.ca, because we knew from the start that collaboration with other teams would be needed)? We think this kind of approach can produce important new knowledge about residential schooling, yes, but also all of the overlapping and adjacent systems like day schools, public schools, tuberculosis hospitals, sanatoria, child welfare, and more.

The issue, however, is that big data platforms require hosting, and currently we are engaging in discussions about how to manage this moving forward so that other communities and stakeholders (including historians and researchers) can benefit. In an environment of reduced funding, creative conversations and collaboration are necessary to keep up the research capacity/momentum.

We would like NIArchives.ca to continue beyond our work, and we are looking for an entity or organization to help fund and ensure the future of the platform for Nations and researchers. If you have ideas or are interested in collaborating, please contact us: Yuusnewas@Squamish.net

Before he passed, Murray Sinclair warned that Canada was rushing reconciliation and leaving the truth behind. To help put truth before reconciliation and support the TRC’s Calls to Action, what we think is needed is an approach to research that prioritizes data sovereignty, big data analysis, and collaboration to take care of Survivors and everyone effective by the residential school system.

Sean Carleton, a settler originally from North Vancouver, is an Associate Professor of history and Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. He is also a historical consultant on the Yúusneẇas Project.

Adina Williams is a member of the Squamish Nation. She is an MA student in history at the University of British Columbia. She is also the Community Liaison for the Yúusneẇas Project.

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