Canada’s Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, Marc Miller, said Ottawa has reached a memorandum of understanding with the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation to turn over more residential school records that Ottawa still has.
The federal government says the agreement specifies when it will send historical records to the Winnipeg centre, how it will make them available to residential school survivors and how it will work to preserve them.
Residential school survivors and Indigenous leaders have long called on the federal government to release the records it was still refusing to fully hand over, citing legal grounds.
Inquiries intensified last year when several Indigenous communities announced that penetrating radar had located what are believed to be the remains of hundreds of children in unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools.
Minister Miller announced last month that Ottawa was reviewing records still in its possession to determine what more it could release to help residential school survivors.
He explained at the time that he would start by sending out what are known as “residential school narratives,” which are reports prepared by the federal government outlining key events at each of the facilities.
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