Warning: This database contains distressing details.

About the project

This database contains thousands of searchable pages of documents that haven’t been made public before now. Here you will find letters from parents documenting unsafe and unhygienic conditions, reports of abuse from runaway children and countless records of serious disease outbreaks, among other important documents.

These files were created by the Canadian government and acquired by Ed Sadowski, a retired researcher at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre in Ontario. He spent more than a decade filing access to information requests to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) in Winnipeg and the federal government, through Crown–Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) and the Department of Justice.

These documents are known as narratives, created to assist in resolving claims of abuse through the Independent Assessment Process (IAP).

For most of the schools included in the database, there are two versions of the IAP narrative: one provided by CIRNAC and another from the NCTR. There are also “addendums” to 37 school narratives about staff members being charged or convicted for abusing children, usually written after most IAP claims were already resolved, along with one “appendix” for St. Anne’s residential school in Ontario, created in response to a 2014 court order.

There are different redactions in each version of the IAP narratives, so it is worthwhile checking all documents related to a school of interest.

Sadowski also requested a trove of internal federal government emails related to how these narratives were created. Those documents are available here.