Residential school survivors press Ottawa for more money to find unmarked graves

A group of residential school survivors and their supporters are asking the federal government to reverse what they're calling a funding cut and come up with more money to help find the unmarked graves of students who went to these institutions.

The request comes the same day Canada marks the fourth annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, established in 2021 to honour the survivors of residential schools, and the children who never came home from them.

The Survivors' Secretariat, which is parsing through decades-old records and searching the grounds of the former Mohawk Institute near Brantford, Ont., is leading the charge against a series of changes that Ottawa announced earlier this year that it says will reduce the total pool of money available to Indigenous communities to document residential school atrocities and deaths.

Recent budget offers less money: secretariat

The issue first moved to the forefront of the national agenda after the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said in 2021 that preliminary findings from a radar survey of the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School indicated over 200 children could be buried on the site in B.C.

In the wake of those stunning claims, the federal government earmarked $209.8 million in Budget 2022 to support Indigenous communities who wanted to carry out their own investigations and «document, locate and memorialize burial sites.» That money has already funded 146 projects, including research and ground searches.

But the Survivors' Secretariat says the most recent federal budget is offering less money — $91 million over two years — to continue with research they say is critical to getting to the bottom of what happened at these institutions, places where