The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has released the names of the now-deceased Oblate priests who worked in residential schools in Quebec, Ontario and western Canada.
“It’s a significant step forward,” said Raymond Frogner, head of archives and senior director of research at the centre, which released the scanned personnel files of 140 priests on May 29.
“It gets us one step closer to a complete understanding of the residential school system.”
The files were released in collaboration with OMI Lacombe Canada, formerly known as The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, or Oblates. The Oblates are a missionary religious order within the Catholic Church.
The Oblates operated 48 of the 139 schools recognized in the 2006 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. That landmark agreement recognized the damage inflicted by residential schools, and established a multi-billion-dollar fund to help former students of the schools in their recovery.
According to Frogner, the release of the files is important because it puts a human face on a story “that is too often only institutional.”
While the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation had lots of information about the children who attended the schools, it had very little about the priests and sisters who worked at them, Frogner says.
“We were missing that part. The story was incomplete without it,” Frogner said.
The released files include reports from priests to their superiors about life at the schools, along with some personal correspondence and other information.
They will be made available to survivors, Indigenous communities and researchers. They will also be a resource for those searching for children who never came home from the schools, Frogner says.
“We are creating a central source to examine, understand and heal from one of the longest serving and least understood colonial social programs in the history of the country,” he said.
The files will also now be easier to access, he says. They will all be housed at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba, rather than being scattered across archives in B.C., Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec.
Complicit
Father Ken Thorson is the provincial, or executive director, for OMI Lacombe. He said he is “deeply grateful” for the collaboration between the Oblates and the centre to make the files available.
“We recognize that this is only one part of a long and painful journey,” he said. “And we remain committed to continuing this important work.”
“As Oblates, we were complicit in a colonial system that harmed Indigenous people. Now we want to do what we can to make it right,” he said.
Thorson says it is standard archival practice to release personal information about deceased people 50 years after their deaths. But the Oblates decided to release the files two years after the death of a member in order to “contribute to the healing for Indigenous people,” he said.
“The survivors are getting older and passing on,” he said of the urgency felt by the order.
These files are not the only ones the Oblates have made available; they have also released to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation scans of the daily logs of the Oblate communities involved with the schools.
As with the personnel files that have just been made public, the Oblates paid for the scanning of the daily logs by the centre.
For Thorson, the decision by the Oblates to share the files is “part of the healing, given who we profess to be as Christians.”
The Oblate Order first began its involvement in residential schools in 1884 in Alberta. In 1991, it apologized for its involvement in the residential school system.
Canada’s first residential school opened in Brantford, Ont., in 1831. It was operated by the Anglican Church. The last one, operated by the federal government, closed in 1996. An estimated 150,000 First Nation, Inuit and Métis children attended residential schools.
It is about time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!