We welcome you to the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre.

The records on our site emerge from the cultural and physical genocide that the Canadian government and churches conducted through the Indian Residential School System, including the ongoing impacts.

Bearing witness to these records may become overwhelming. If you are a Survivor or an Intergenerational Survivor and would like support, you can call the 24-hour National Indian Residential School Crisis Line at:

1-866-925-4419

Please click the button below for other cultural and mental health resources.

Wellness Resources

Current Projects

The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre ("the Centre") launched this website in April 2018 as part of the Centre’s response to the desire of residential school Survivors and their families to have increased access to records. This includes collaborating to represent records and information in ways that disrupt the colonial practices that have shaped archives, libraries, galleries, and museums. This work seeks to uphold respectful, reciprocal, equitable, innovative, and trauma-informed access to records and information. It includes working in collaboration and consultation with Survivors, First Nations, and community partners to advocate for increased release of and access to information and records.

The Centre acknowledges that disrupting colonial practices is complex, sensitive, and extensive work. This work is ongoing and the website continues to develop in alignment with our mandate, in collaboration with Survivors and intergenerational Survivors and in response to community feedback. We uphold principles of transparency and accountability, and it is in this spirit that we share the following updates regarding projects that are ongoing, currently in progress, and those that have been completed. 

If you have any questions or comments, or want to participate in this work, please contact us.

In Progress


Content Warnings
The Centre’s collection includes records related to residential schools, child welfare, health care, etc. that are offensive and can be difficult to view. The following initiatives seek to address this:
  • Content warnings on the site provide information on accessing health and wellness resources;
  • Collaborative and ongoing work ensure the Centre uses current language that respects the people and events reflected in the records, in the archival descriptions, and in the digital exhibitions

Community Names Project
The Centre’s website includes records for individual residential schools. These records provide a list of children’s home communities, which allows individuals, families, and communities to identify the schools associated with a loved one or a community. The names, which derive from historical government and church records, are often misspelled, anglicized, outdated and/or colonial impositions. The Centre is updating the community names on the school records to reflect those names by which communities wish to be known. Communities’ websites are being used as a starting point for the project, and the Centre will then engage directly with communities. In order to improve the findability of records, the Centre is creating community name records that include alternative forms of community names, both historical and contemporary. These records will link to the school records and support Survivors, their families and a variety of users to retrieve school records when using different versions of a community’s name.

See an example of a community name record here.

If you are Survivor, family of a Survivor, or a community member and are aware of omissions from the list of communities or inaccuracies in community names, please contact us.

Front-End Access Management
Currently, the records on the Centre’s website are available publicly. The Centre recognizes the need for a more nuanced approach to records moving forward, however. Plans are thus underway for  a new build to our content management system that will support differentiated access to records. The Front-End Access Management build will allow cataloguers to restrict sets of records to the alumni of a particular school, a given community, or a family. While this project focuses on residential school records, which derive from government and church archives for the most part, the build will be sufficiently malleable to support Indigenous archives seeking to restrict access to Indigenous materials according to the cultural protocols of a given Nation or community.

Ongoing


CollectiveAccess Community of Practice
The Centre is working to grow a community of practice around our content management system (CollectiveAccess), the software we use to catalogue, house, and provide access to residential school records. In collaboration with community partners, we are working to undertake system builds, generate new record types, and improve cataloguing schemes so that they better reflect Indigenous ways of knowing and support community priorities. As part of this initiative, we are also providing demonstrations of CollectiveAccess which cover topics such as preparing requests for quotations, implementing the system, and working with developers. The Centre also maintains a listserv for CollectiveAccess users in British Columbia.

Communities that are interested in a demonstration of the Centre’s content management system, or who would like to join the listserv, are invited to contact us.

Records Advocacy
The Centre continues to advocate for the comprehensive and immediate release of records through processes that are guided by and in service to Survivors and their communities.

As more records become accessible, the Centre will add them to its collections. For example, this exhibition features records related to the 2015 court case that released the Catholic Church from its obligations under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

Digitization and Access Projects
As part of our commitment to making records available to Survivors and their families, the Centre works with partner repositories to facilitate digitization and item-level cataloguing of records. This work ensures that high-quality digital copies of records are readily available to community through both the Centre and the partner repository. The Centre is currently partnering with the following organizations:

United Church of Canada Pacific Mountain Regional Council Archives (PMRCA)
In December 2017, the Centre and PMRCA digitized photographs and a preliminary selection of documents that are currently available in the Centre’s collections. The Centre and PMRCA are collaborating again to continue digitizing a larger set of documents related to the Alberni, Coqualeetza, and Port Simpson residential schools.

Royal BC Museum and Archives (RBCM)
The Centre and RBCM have partnered to facilitate and expedite community access to all relevant records at RBCM, including records from the Sisters of St. Ann and OMI (Oblates).

Records and Information Dialogues
The Centre engages with Indigenous communities, Survivors, researchers and information professionals to discuss issues around stewardship of Indigenous data, information and records.

Dialogues on Indigenous Data, Information and Records
In partnership with UBC’s Indigenous Research Support Initiative (IRSI), the Centre hosted a dialogue series supported by an Indigenous Research Capacity and Reconciliation Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The first dialogue was held at UBC Vancouver in January 2019, the second at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna in April and the third at University of Northern BC in Prince George in May. The fourth dialogue was held November 4, 2019, in Victoria, BC.

Completed


Archival Hierarchy
Archives traditionally share records in a collection (or “fonds”) based on the person or organization that created or kept the records. Within this model, archivists arrange archival collections hierarchically into series, files, and items to represent how the creator kept and used the records. Archival hierarchies are useful for contextualizing records and making visible the structure of archival collections. At the same time, the concept of archival hierarchies comes from colonial record keeping principles that privilege the perspective of records creators, rather than those whom records are about.

Previously, the Centre had only catalogued records as individual items. However, the Centre recognizes the importance of viewing records in a larger context. We developed a way to represent archival collections both within traditional hierarchies and also in ways that support more nuanced and flexible relationships. This flexible archival hierarchy holds space for collections that do not come from colonial contexts and that require new means of relating the items in a collection to accommodate different types of knowledge and information. 

See an example of the archival hierarchy records here. 

Content Warning: Photographs
The Centre has added a statement on relevant residential school records identifies the problematic use of photography in the residential school system. See an example of this statement in use here.

 
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