(Victoria) The congregation of nuns who staffed many Indian residential schools and ten hospitals in British Columbia over a period of more than 160 years wants to bequeath their archives to the Royal British Columbia Museum.
Posted at 10:11 p.m.
An announcement to this effect was published Wednesday in a joint press release from the museum and the Sisters of Saint Anne. The documents should be transferred shortly and can thus be digitized by the museum.
The museum’s CEO, Alicia Dubois, stressed that transparent access to the complete records of residential schools is essential to the truth and reconciliation process in the country.
Members of the religious congregation worked at the Kamloops residential school, where the First Nation demanded access to more records to help identify the remains of hundreds of children believed to have been discovered in unmarked graves near the old settlement.
According to the statement released Wednesday, the sisters will pay an archivist to help manage the records transfer process while the museum will be responsible for providing access to information to survivors, family members and indigenous communities.
Sister Marie Zarowny, president of the Sisters of Saint Anne, said she recognizes that access to archival documents is just one more step towards reconciliation with indigenous peoples.
“Our wish is that the transfer of the documents and their digitization can contribute to a better understanding of what happened in the residential school system as well as the harm and trauma that the students suffered,” she said. said.
Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced last year that it had located what appear to be the unidentified graves of about 215 children near the site of the former Kamloops residential school. A story that was known from generation to generation by families whose children never returned home, underlined the chief of the first nation.
The Sisters of Saint Anne had provided all the documents they possessed related to residential schools to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2012. They then began working with the museum last June to proceed with a transfer of their archives in order to to make them public.