A lack of information on arranged marriages forced on Canadian Indigenous people is hindering efforts to trace lost children, the author of a major report on residential schools said Thursday.
An estimated 150,000 children were sent to residential schools in Canada between 1831 and 1996. Many of them did not return.
Hundreds of suspected burial sites were recently found at the schools.
Kimberly Murray, the special interlocutor that Ottawa appointed to study the unmarked graves, said arranging marriages was one of the tactics Canada used to prevent young Indigenous people from leaving the schools and returning to their traditional lifestyles at home.
Many children forced into residential schools died from disease or malnutrition.
The fact that a child went missing, “doesn’t mean they are dead,” Murray said. “It is just that they never made it back home.”
Murray, whose mandate expires next week, said she wanted to highlight the issue of arranged marriages, which have not received significant attention, because they can shed further light on where young Indigenous people, especially young women, may have ended up.
“If a girl is in a residential school and then she gets put into an arranged marriage with a boy from the institution, she loses her identity with her community,” Murray said.
Murray, herself a member of the Mohawk community of Kanehsatake, said arranged marriages were part of Canada’s effort to promote “civilization” among Indigenous people.
The government and church leaders who ran the residential school system would try to pair Indigenous youths, aiming to steer them towards a Western lifestyle.
But Murray said it has been difficult to establish the prevalence of the practice due to restrictions on accessing records.
“We don’t know how many people were put into arranged marriages. We don’t know when it stopped,” she said.
She reiterated a call made in her final report, released in Oct. 7, for Canada to implement a “public interest override” to privacy restrictions that have hindered access to government records.
Murray said she has not received an official response from Ottawa on her report, which called for an independent commission to probe the deaths and disappearances of Indigenous children from residential schools.
She has also recommended criminalizing rhetoric denying the abuses which took place at the schools — a phenomenon which has gained traction over the past year.
