Indigenous communities take lead in seeking documents
Jackie Hookimaw-Witt wants to know what happened to members of her family who attended St. Anne’s Indian Residential School as children and never returned home—including a distant cousin she believes a staff member beat to death.
A chef and freelance educator from Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario, Hookimaw-Witt says she has faced consistent bureaucratic obstacles in her search for records, particularly death certificates, that might reveal the fate of her relatives.
“It’s a very hard, hard journey, very difficult, and I am always wondering what happened … This is a humanitarian crisis and there shouldn’t have to be any more bureaucracy camouflaging the humanitarian pain that we’re trying to work with,” Hookimaw-Witt says.
Her search has centred on four people: her uncle Raphael Aitel (also spelled “Iahtail”), aunts Anna and Bernadette Aitel and cousin Lebedie (also spelled Libidie or Lebedi) Okitikwo—all of whom attended St. Anne’s, located in Fort Albany, Ont. and run by the Roman Catholic orders of Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Nuns of the Cross. All died far from home.
The ability of people to access records of missing residential-school children remains inconsistent across the country, even within the Anglican Church of Canada. While General Synod archivist Laurel Parson says the national church to the best of its ability has provided all records in the General Synod Archives to the federal government and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), other records still remain in diocesan archives.
In its 2015 Calls to Action, the TRC called upon all chief coroners and provincial vital statistics agencies that had not provided records on the deaths of Indigenous children to make their documents available to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). But Kimberly Murray—Canada’s independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools, who was appointed for a two-year term in June 2022—says many of those records are still in different archives and have not been brought forward.
“There needs to be some accounting of what the government actually produced and didn’t produce,” Murray told the Anglican Journal in a May 16 interview. On May 31, her mandate to assist survivors, Indigenous families and communities to search for missing children and deliver a final report was extended to the fall of 2024.
Murray notes that the Ontario government, for example, has released death certificates to the NCTR. However, she says she has found death certificates on genealogy website Ancestry.ca of Indigenous children who died at residential schools that are not in the NCTR database.
“We know there are still records out there, in all kinds of archives, that haven’t been produced,” Murray says. As a result, some teams doing ground searches have made their own agreements with dioceses and other church entities to access records.
“We know that there are records in museums, there are [also] records in municipal archives, provincial archives,” she adds. “It’s a slow, tedious process for communities and they have to go to multiple archives, which is unfortunate because the NCTR was supposed to be the Indigenous archive where everything was placed and people would have access. But many communities find it easier to get the records directly from the churches or from the other entities than to get them from the NCTR.”
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Hookimaw-Witt’s search to find records for her family members exemplifies many of the difficulties that confront people seeking information about what happened to relatives who attended residential schools and died or went missing. In 1941 Anne and Bernadette Aitel, ages 8 and 11 respectively, went missing from St. Anne’s and never returned home.
In June 1942, St. Anne’s discharged Raphael Aitel for being “above age,” listing him as 14 years old and in good health. Yet Hookimaw-Witt says that records indicate Raphael was “very sick” when he registered at St. Anne’s in 1939. Accounts differ about what happened to Raphael afterward.
Raphael’s younger brother and Hookimaw-Witt’s uncle Marcel said Raphael had a nervous breakdown and was taken to a hospital in Moose Factory, Ont., where—Marcel heard—Raphael died after jumping out a window. “I thought maybe they took my uncle [Raphael] to Moose Factory if he was sick… Then I wonder if he had a breakdown because of what he was seeing at that time when kids were dying and disappearing,” Hookimaw-Witt says.
However, Hookimaw-Witt eventually found Raphael’s grave at Moose Factory Catholic Cemetery; according to the inscription, he died in 1964. “Maybe they kept him in custody if he had a mental illness… That’s what I think may have happened,” she says. “Now I’m curious to know if he really jumped from the building.”
Hookimaw-Witt’s father John Hookimaw also attended St. Anne’s and gave her his account of the day Lebedie died at age 11. John recalled playing outside with his brother Toby, friend James and Lebedie kicking around a ball.
“When it was Lebedie’s turn to kick the ball, it hit the window and it cracked,” Hookimaw-Witt says. “The missionary came out, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her inside the building. [John] told me that they heard her being slapped around and they heard her scream. Then he said suddenly there was abrupt silence.”
Toby told Hookimaw-Witt that St. Anne’s staff put Lebedie’s dead body outside the building all evening. She recalls, “My dad said that ‘We were told that she died from an illness. But those boys think that she was beaten to death.’”
In her search for information about Lebedie’s death, Hookimaw-Witt has also looked into the disappearances of three boys at St. Anne’s who went missing around the same time: John Kioke, 14, Michel Matinas, 12, and Michel Sutherland, 11. The three boys ran away from St. Anne’s during the night of April 14, 1941 and were never seen again.
Hookimaw-Witt is a first cousin once removed of Matinas, who was also from Attawapiskat. A contemporary RCMP investigation into the boys’ disappearance included interviews with their families, who believe the boys were mistreated at the school, according to Ontario Provincial Police records that CBC News published in a 2018 investigative report. But Hookimaw-Witt wonders if it was Lebedie’s death that finally drove the boys to run away from St. Anne’s.
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In the course of searching for records on her relatives who died or went missing while attending residential schools, Hookimaw-Witt has failed to find any death certificates. She contacted Murray, who looked up the case of Lebedie and found records stating that Lebedie was at the St. Anne’s hospital in Fort Albany and died there. However, Murray also said there was no death certificate.
“We found it strange that there’s no death certificate and that it says that she died at the hospital, but her body was outside,” Hookimaw-Witt says. “Her dead body was outside the building prior to being admitted to the hospital.”
Searching for more information, Hookimaw-Witt contacted the Ontario chief coroner’s office and worked with Mark Mackisoc, team leader for the Residential Schools Death Investigation Team, to find information on her relatives.
In an October 2023 email to Hookimaw-Witt, Mackisoc said he was unable to find any death certificates from Ancestry.ca or the NCTR for any of the girls, but could only find information on Anna. He said one of the documents Hookimaw-Witt was looking for was in the control of the NCTR and would have to be obtained directly through them.
Mackisoc suggested she reach out to a local team consisting of people from Fort Albany and five other communities looking for residential school records to see if they had discovered anything more. But Hookimaw-Witt says when she contacted Fort Albany, nobody responded to her or gave her any copies of documents. She says organizations have repeatedly withheld records citing privacy laws.
Hookimaw-Witt says she distrusts the Ontario chief coroner’s office, because it denied her family’s request for an inquest into the suicide of her 12-year-old niece Sheridan Hookimaw in October 2015.
“When we wanted an inquest for Sheridan, they didn’t allow it,” she says. “When we wanted to put her story out, they didn’t allow it. It’s the same scenario when there was an inquiry with these three missing boys in 1942.”
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In July 2024, the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples released its report Missing Records, Missing Children, which reached conclusions similar to Murray’s on the accessibility of records of missing children. “Records are scattered across the country with no way of finding them other than traveling to a location and physically searching through dense linear feet of paper records,” the report said.
At the same time, the report cited a number of new developments that it said show some promise of being able to help people find records. These include legislation in Quebec releasing state and religious records; the hiring of family liaison support employees in Saskatchewan and dedicated staff to search for records in the Northwest Territories; and the establishment of the Residential Schools Death Investigation Team in Ontario.
Murray highlights Ontario’s effort as unique. Created in 2022, the Residential School Deaths Investigation Team reports directly to the chief coroner and comprises an Ontario Provincial Police sergeant, a civilian analyst, a municipal police officer and a First Nations police officer.
Ontario Chief Coroner Dirk Huyer says the team’s goal is to answer six questions related to deaths that occurred at or are related to residential schools: who died, where and when they died, the medical cause of death; classification of the death as accidental, natural, or other; and where the child is buried.
Huyer says the team’s work is “community-led” and its services are available upon request. When the Journal spoke to Huyer June 13, the residential school death investigation team was working with requests from 10 different communities.
“Some reach out to us when they can’t find a record and they see if we can find them,” Huyer said. “We’re really open to working on whatever way is going to be the most helpful to that community.” Most records the team accesses, he said, are available publicly, such as at the Archives of Ontario or websites like Ancestry and Find a Grave. The team meets regularly with communities to share information and provide support for record searches as well as for disinterment, examination and identification of remains.
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In other cases, Indigenous groups have worked with churches to find records.
While the Anglican Church of Canada has said it has provided all records to the NCTR, Murray says, she discovered otherwise when she was working with the Survivors’ Secretariat, which represents survivors of the Mohawk Indian Residential School that operated in Brantford, Ont. “There were a number of boxes of records that were discovered in the diocese in London, Ont., and the Mohawk Institute survivors went and tried to digitize those records,” Murray says.
Laura Arndt, chair of the Survivors’ Secretariat, says when she first approached the diocese of Huron, she was told the church had only a limited role in operating the Mohawk Institute. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England operated the institute from 1831 until the Canadian government took over management in 1922, albeit with the stipulation that the principal be an Anglican.
After the secretariat requested access to the records and documents, Arndt says, “the Huron diocese was very open. They gave us full access.” By early 2024 the secretariat had accessed all the records it needed from the diocese.
Bill Acres, associate professor of theology at Huron University College and chair of the Anglican diocese of Huron archives committee, says the initial process of providing records held by the diocese related to the Mohawk Institute was tied up with litigation—including a class-action lawsuit launched by survivors against the diocese and the New England Company, a British charity that operated the school along with the Canadian government.
“We were very clear from the beginning this was a legal process,” Acres says. “It was going to be driven by the lawyers and the diocese was taking advice from the lawyers.”
After the litigation was resolved in 2006 as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, diocesan records stayed with the lawyers until 2011. Subsequently, the diocese made its records available to the TRC, with Acres taking part in efforts to digitize them during the summer of 2012.
“We didn’t have a proper catalogue,” he recalls. “There was a lot of material. I think there were something like 13,000 separate items. We didn’t have the staff to do it and it sort of stayed there. Then it became very clear that a next step was necessary.”
That next step was made possible in the form of two grants from Library and Archives Canada, which Acres says allowed the diocese to “really shape up the collection to high-level archival standards” and help advise Haudenosaunee scholars.
The diocese of Huron currently has two Six Nations elders on its archives committee. In 2022, the diocese hired Dez Nacario as its archivist. “We got a new young archivist, different generation, and she has been instrumental in this and pulling the pieces together, getting the Indigenous communities to actually look through the material,” Acres says.
For the last two years, he says, the diocese of Huron has been working closely with partners from the Six Nations Public Library, Woodland Cultural Centre and Survivors’ Secretariat to go through diocesan records related to residential schools. The diocese first took all of its records to Woodland and hired Haudenosaunee researchers to carefully go through the material and determine what they wanted to keep.
The second grant allowed the diocese and partners to digitalize all of the records in 2023 and 2024 and to make the collection available in digital form to anyone interested, Acres says. These records are now available through the Woodland Cultural Centre.
Acres says the history of the Mohawk Institute can be confusing. The New England Company, formally the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, established the residential school in 1831 and the Government of Canada formally took over its management in 1922. However, the Anglican Church of Canada largely staffed and oversaw the school, including with clergy that the diocese of Huron appointed.
The diocese’s collection of records itself reflects changing oversight of the Mohawk Institute. Most pre-1922 records pertaining to the Mohawk Institute are located in London, England, Acres says.
“Part of the reason that Huron got so many papers was a mistake by the federal government in the 1920s that thought the diocese had run the school,” he adds. Much to the irritation of Huron bishops, he says, clergy at the Mohawk Institute “thought that they were supposed to take direction from the bishops of Huron, which led to all kinds of warfare with the Department of Indian Affairs, [with] bishops literally expressing their total frustration at this: ‘Why is this guy asking me these questions? I have no jurisdiction.’”
While the diocese of Huron was never in direct oversight of the Mohawk Institute, Acres says, “I think in the diocese, we are very well aware that there is a moral obligation that goes far beyond the legality of [it] because it was diocesan clergy,” he says.
Acres points to the example of a case in which the diocese of Huron was able to provide the burial record of a teenage girl who died at the Mohawk Institute to her relatives.
“The more material that can be brought into indigenous hands and communities, the more information could be shared widely across the country,” he says.
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At the national church level, Parson says the General Synod Archives have received specific requests for records on missing children over the years, though it does not have many parish registers in its possession outside of archival records from the dioceses of Keewatin and the Arctic. The diocese of the Arctic has a deposit agreement to hold its archival records at the General Synod Archives, since its diocesan synod office was formerly in Toronto and staff believe records would be safer there and used more often, Parson says.
General Synod Archives has provided its records to the government and to the TRC, Parson says. It received a grant to hire staff to review its records and create a database of its records of incidents involving illness or death of children at residential schools. The database includes names and whatever burial information is available.
“We have always tried to comply and to do searches for any inquiries that we’ve gotten and we’ve submitted our records to the best of our ability,” Parson says.
At the diocesan level, Parson says, “It’s unfortunate that the diocese of Huron’s story is the one that keeps getting dragged out into public because that one was handled very badly. Their lawyers grabbed the records and sequestered them for years. Then they did release them in time for the TRC and the people there did the best that they could to provide those records to the TRC.” Since then, she says, Nacario has worked with the Survivors’ Secretariat and the diocese to describe and provide records related to missing children.
Based on her experience working with Mohawk Institute survivors, Murray says, “I think that every local office, every local church needs to double-check that they’ve provided all the records.” A final national gathering on unmarked burials, organized by the Office of the Special Interlocutor and including the release of an Indigenous-led reparations framework, was set to take place in Gatineau, Que. Oct. 29-30.
For Hookimaw-Witt, trying to find death certificates and other records of her relatives has been frustrating and painful.
“I think there needs to be more honesty, more transparency, and more direct human accountability when I pick up the phone and say, ‘Hi, I’m Jackie. Could I have a record of my uncle? Could I also get a death certificate? I want to know what happened.’
“That’s what I would like to see happening—that I can just have direct information to know what happened for my own sanity, for my own healing, just to know what happened… I have a right to know as a family survivor… It’s also sacred, because you’re dealing with missing people. You’re living and you feel like you’re frozen in time. Part of your soul is frozen and to thaw it out, you need to dig to find the answers.”
To help family members seeking healing, she says, organizations with records of missing children “have to be more direct and they have to make information more accessible.”
