A couple of months ago, I spoke with an Indian Residential School Survivor. We were discussing the impending destruction of the largest archive of Survivor testimony from the Independent Assessment Process (IAP).
He was one of the more than 38,000 Survivors who participated in the IAP in order to receive compensation for abuse in Indian Residential Schools. The fate of their IAP records - including applications, transcripts, audio recordings and decisions - were at the centre of a Supreme Court of Canada court case in 2017. The Supreme Court ruled that Survivor records from the IAP should be destroyed unless Survivors decided to opt-in to preserve them.
The Survivor told me that he didn’t remember if he had gotten a letter or email about his options following the Supreme Court decision. He knew that his records were set for destruction unless he chose to preserve them by the September 2027 deadline but admitted that he wasn’t sure what the process was.
It made me wonder exactly what the notice program consisted of and how it was informing Survivors about their rights.
This summer, our team at the Indian Residential School Records Project, spent weeks scanning over 70 boxes of documents relating to litigation of Indian Residential Schools. Since then we have been combing through them, uncovering the story of the battle over the IAP records and how the notice program would roll out.
After reading through the documents, I understood why the Survivor I spoke to couldn’t recall if he had gotten a letter or email about his options for IAP records – it was because he was never sent one.
In fact, only 34 Survivors received letters about their IAP records.
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