Library and Archives Canada is wrapping up one of its largest digitization projects after processing roughly six million federal Indian day school records.

The $25 million project began in 2022 and is expected to be completed in March.

“There’s so much reparation work that needs to be done in terms of reconciliation but I think this is a step towards that,” said Beth Greenhorn, a manager of the Day Schools Project.

The goal was to increase the discoverability of archival documents related to the federal Indian day schools system and its legacy.

Like residential schools, day schools were federally funded and often church run, with the aim of assimilating First Nations, Inuit and Métis youth into mainstream Canadian society. An estimated 200,000 pupils attended nearly 700 day schools, operating between the 1860s and 2000.

Greenhorn said digitizing thousands of boxes of archival documents spanning the 1800s to the 2000s was daunting, their biggest project since the First World War digitization initiative in 2018.

She said digitizing 600,000 service files of former military service men and women was easier because all of those files were located in the same area in the vault and organized alphabetically. 

Day school records were scattered through thousands of different archival volumes, necessitating archivists with experience in researching records of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Greenhorn said.

It was challenging because the records created by the former Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and its predecessors used arcane government categories, terminology and perspectives, she said.

Also, names of schools changed through the years or could be misspelled by the officials keeping the records, Greenhorn said.

Now, she said, the records are searchable using different keyword options and contain enhanced descriptions of what’s in the files. Then users can request the files.

Greenhorn said she credits the team who worked on the project because the material could be pretty demoralizing.

“These aren’t happy stories,” she said.

Access to records

Jessie Waldron, who attended Waterhen Lake Indian Day School in northern Saskatchewan during the 1960s and 1970s, said she hadn’t heard much about the project but she will definitely access the records.

She said she’s still in touch with some of her classmates from the school but not all of them. She said the records could help her “find out what others have gone through and just find the history of what the Indigenous people went through.”

Lorenzo Whetung, who attended Mud Lake day school in Curve Lake First Nation in southern Ontario, said the digital records should be accessible to everyone, and included in school curriculums for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

Jackson Pind is of mixed settler/Anishnaabe ancestry and an assistant professor of Indigenous methodologies at the Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont.

He said he’s happy survivors will have easier access to their day school records but believes the records should be returned to the Indigenous nations to respect their data sovereignty. 

“Then it would be up to the community to decide how they’re going to start writing their histories and telling that story,” he said, not the federal government.

Pind said the digitization came “too late” because the deadline has passed for day school settlement claims. These records could have provided historical proof for higher forms of compensation to survivors, he said.  

Most of the records are subject to federal privacy legislation, which restricts the release of personal information, and require an Access to Information and Privacy request.

Pind said, based on his research, records post-1951 tell a story about systemic underfunding and inequalities in education on reserve that still persists today. 

“When we talk about truth and reconciliation, we’re still really in the truth,” he said.