Readers trying to understand the many claims made about the number of children who died in Canada’s Indian Residential  Schools can be forgiven for any confusion about what they are being told. Various numbers, such as 3,201, 4,000, 6,000, and even 50,000, have been advanced by different people at different times.

So what is the actual number of documented deaths of named children who died while attending a residential school?

Fortunately, Volume 4 of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report provides the answer.

It is 423.

That is the total number of documented deaths of Indigenous children who died while attending one of the 134 residential schools that operated in Canada from 1883 until the last one closed in 1998.

(An additional 409 “unnamed” deaths are recorded, but the TRC Report  acknowledges the fact that many or all of them are likely duplicates of the named deaths).

So where did those other numbers come from?

The 3,201 is the total of the named deaths (423), the unnamed deaths (409) and a  guess by the TRC that all of the former students who died within one year after their attendance at a residential school died as a result of their attendance at a residential school. (see chart above)

But an investigation into the death records of the children who died within one year of their residential school attendance quickly shows that the number is an overestimation. For example, some of those deaths were from accidents that occurred on the child’s home reserve and had nothing to do with residential schools. Some occurred after contracting illnesses on their home reserve.

But of even more significance, there is no good evidence that the children who died at an Indian Residential School or within one year of attendance contracted their illnesses (usually tuberculosis) at the school they attended. How many of those children would have died if they had not attended is simply unknown.

An unrelated example might be helpful to illustrate this point: English poet John Keats, was one of the millions of adults and children who died of tuberculosis in the centuries before antibiotics were discovered. He died at age 25. Although he contracted the disease in England, he died at a residence in Rome. It would obviously be absurd to blame Keats’ death on that Roman residence, or on Rome.

It is equally absurd to blame a residential school for causing the death of a child if that child had arrived at the school already infected with tuberculosis. Only if the child was not infected when he arrived at the school could the school and system receive blame. It is a verifiable fact that we simply do not know how many children arrived at the schools already infected, and how many became infected at the schools.

However, the findings of the Indian Affairs Department’s chief medical officer in the early 1900s, Dr. Peter Bryce, suggest that most of the children contracted tuberculosis on their home reserve. Bryce supervised the tuberculosis testing of Indian children from eight Indian reserves when the children first arrived at a residential school. Incredibly, every one of those children entering residential school for the first time tested positive for tuberculosis, clear proof at they had already contracted TB on their home reserves. In all probability, those children’s’ tuberculosis would have progressed and killed them even if they had stayed at home.

That report(see page 253).

Bryce’s investigations also found that a stunning 92.5% of all Indian students beginning their attendance at both day and residential schools tested positive for tuberculosis. Poor malnutrition, crowded housing, and a lack of basic hygiene in their prairie reserve homes all contributed to the shockingly high tuberculosis rates.

One part of Dr. Peter Bryce’s reporting on rates of TB in Indian Residential Schools. “The primary source of the contagion is the home.”

On some western reserves, the death rate from tuberculosis was a staggering 9%. These were the reserves that the students came from, so it should surprise no one that some died.

Bryce is notably remembered as the brave doctor who blew the whistle on the worrying tuberculosis rates at residential schools that prevailed in the early 1900s.

But he also blew the whistle on the even worse tuberculosis conditions on the reserves where the students came from. The unfortunate children who died of TB while attending a residential school represent a tiny fraction of the many thousands of reserve residents who died of tuberculosis, but never saw a residential school.

We simply do not know how many of the 3201 children died because of their attendance at a residential school, and how many would have died if they had stayed home. The only things we can say for certain about the number “3201” is that it is an exaggeration, and a guess.

As for the other numbers that have been advanced — numbers such as 4,100 and 6,000 — these are simply the original 3201, with additional names arbitrarily added by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR — the successor to the TRC) at the request of anyone who wanted to commemorate an ancestor who had once attended a residential school. It is for that reason that Helen Betty Osborne, murdered years after her residential school attendance, and another former student who died at the age of 86, are two of the people named on that list.

Their deaths had nothing to do with residential schools. The NCTR “Memorial Register” is meaningless as an information source, and more closely resembles a Coutts Hallmark card.

And what about even larger numbers that have been claimed by Indigenous activists? Former TRC Murray Sinclair claimed that  “15-25,000, maybe more” children died at residential schools; former National Chief RoseAnne Archibald said that “thousands, tens of thousands” were deliberately killed; Tk’emlups Chief Roseanne Casimir said 215 victims were secretly buried on the grounds of the Kamloops IRS.

There is no credible evidence to support any of these wild claims The most likely inspiration for those numbers come from the fabulist, Kevin Annett,  who was taken quite seriously by Canada’s mainstream media, including the Globe and Mail, and by Canadian university Indigenous Studies departments . This, despite Annett’s preposterous claims that 50,000 and more students were killed in every conceivable way, and were “buried between church walls all over Canada”.

All of these numbers have been bandied about in a manner that suggests a deliberate attempt to confuse and mislead. Unfortunately, the claims are believed by many Canadians, as attested to by the hundreds of churches that have been torched since the claims started to appear

And the church burnings didn’t only start after the Kamloops claim was made in May 27, 2021. The numbers of burnings indeed spiked in 2021, but they started after the TRC Commissioners — and particularly the Commission’s Executive Director (and more recently, “special interlocutor”) Kimberly Murray — began to spread misinformation about “thousands” of “missing” and “disappeared” children.

Why did these highly paid people make these reckless claims? We now know that the entire TRC “missing children” project was inspired by former MP Gary Merasty’s viewing of Kevin Annett’s documentary “Unrepentant.” Kimberly Murray and the TRC Commissioners seized on that documentary to launch their fanciful “Missing Children” project, despite having no mandate from the federal government to do so.

And is it Kimberly Murray who is mainly responsible for inserting Kevin Annett’s “missing” and “disappeared” children conspiracy theory into the Truth and Reconciliation process, as researcher Nina Green has suggested?

After all, Murray has claimed credit for writing and editing the entire TRC Report. Arguably, she was instrumental in pushing the “missing children” theory from the outset.

Former TRC Executive Director and Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray

And a reading of Murray’s expensively produced mishmash of a report  certainly seems to reveal a deliberate attempt to confuse the reader with its conflation of real numbers, invented numbers, and conspiracy theories.

Who is chiefly responsible for the dissemination of the “thousands of missing children” myth is not clear. What is clear is that those responsible have succeeded in confusing the public by mixing bogus numbers in with the real ones. Contrary to the clear historical evidence, most Canadians now believe that illicit deaths and burials took place at residential schools.

Returning to the numbers that have some validity — numbers that are set out in Volume 4 of the TRC Report — it is clear that the figure “3201” — namely, the number of children who died at, or within one year, of attending a residential school — is definitely not higher than could be expected, given the high death rates on the reserves where the children came from.

It would therefore have made sense for the TRC to compare school death rates with reserve death rates. But Commission didn’t do that. Instead, the Commissioners compared the residential school death rate with the death rate at mainstream schools across Canada.

This was the wrong comparison. The death rate on reserves was many times higher — from 40-290 times higher on some reserves — than in mainstream Canada. The meaningful comparison was obviously the one between the death rate at residential schools and that seen in the communities from whence the children came. Instead, the Commissioners based the entirety of Volume 4 on exaggerated numbers and a false comparison

Why did they use the wrong comparison? Why did they exaggerate numbers?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that this was deliberately done to create an artificial “missing children” issue where a real issue did not exist. They literally invented a bogus issue that has seriously divided Canadians, and resulted in ongoing expenditures that may seriously compromise Canada’s economy for generations.

The reality is that there was nothing sinister or nefarious about the deaths from disease of residential school students. Those deaths  are just a sad reality of the times. Death was everywhere.

No one was “disappeared”; there were no “thousands of missing children” as alleged by Kevin Annett, Murray Sinclair and Kimberly Murray.

The deaths of children who died from the diseases of the day were properly documented, and the children were all given Christian burials — most of them on their home reserves. And those residential school school deaths represent only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Indigenous people who tragically died of European-introduced diseases.

Unprincipled opportunists created and spread the myth that thousands of Indigenous children went missing, or were “disappeared,” from residential schools. Incompetent politicians and a biased CBC cemented that myth in the minds of well-meaning Canadians.

Numbers were manipulated.

And Canadians have been gamed.