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OTTAWA
Residential school survivors say they hope records now being gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) will finally tell the stories of the children who lived and died while attending Canada's residential schools.

In January, Justice Stephen Goudge ordered Canada to provide all residential school documents and photographs housed in Library and Archives Canada to the TRC, said Kimberly Murray, the TRC's executive director.

However, eight months have now passed and the government still has not determined how or when it will gather and distribute those records, Murray said.

With less than a year left before the TRC's mandate finishes in June 2014, Murray said the government decided to provide $400,000 to the TRC to dispatch its own team, which will now spend the next few months gathering information. The federal government is then expected to hire its own team and take over.

Murray said the TRC team's research includes looking through Health Canada documents, such as students' medical records.

Access to those records will help determine how and when children died, which is vital to the TRC's Missing Children's Project. The project aims to identify how many children died while attending residential schools, who they were, and the circumstances of their deaths.

"The last information we had is they got sent to the hospital, but we don't know what happened in the hospital and what happened after," Murray said. "There is a break in the chain of evidence."

Photographs found in the archives are essential to piecing that evidence together, Murray said.

Photographers at the time often took photos of students standing in front of their school building, which can provide researchers with a variety of information, such as whether the school had a cemetery.

"We can see behind the school and see in the background of the photo that there is a cemetery," Murray said. "That's very important because it may be a cemetery we didn't know existed because that school is no longer there."

Murray said sometimes, photographs were even taken at the funerals of children who died at the schools.

"We have photographs in our possession of funerals taking place with kids standing around a coffin," she said. "There is just so much information in these photographs that it's very important that we get them."

A National Research Centre has been established at the University of Manitoba to house the information gathered by the TRC, including documents, statements and photographs, which will all be publicly available.

Murray said the hope is that other organizations and groups will continue to contribute information to the database.

"We know there are records that are not in Canada's possession, but are in provincial governments' possessions and provincial police services, in coroner's offices and different institutions that have information about residential schools," Murray said.

The database will also allow individuals to look for their own records. This could aid those going through the independent assessment process, which provides monetary compensation to people who can prove they attended a residential school, Murray said.

"There is a level of mistrust in Canada's search of the records, so this will allow those individuals to also be able to access and look for their own records," said Murray.

Most importantly, Murray said, is that the database will serve to educate the world about Canada's residential schools and their impact on aboriginal people.

"There is just a wealth of information about the truth of the history in Canada and how we treated First Nations, Metis and Inuit kids," she said. "Moving forward, we can see there will be a lot of academics wanting to look at those records to learn from that and to share that truth with Canada and internationally."

Sharing that truth and accepting the consequences is fundamental to healing, said John Banksland, a member of the TRC's 10-member Indian Residential School Survivor Committee.

"You gotta earn that respect and I believe earning that respect is by acknowledging the wrongs of the past on other people," he said.

Banksland, originally from Ulukhaktok and living in Inuvik, attended Aklavik's Immaculate Conception Residential School for 11 years.

Banksland said his experiences changed how he viewed himself when he was growing up.

"I don't find myself as a normal human being because of the way I was treated from the time I was five until I was 20," he said.

Banksland said being treated as a "subhuman" is an experience that stays with him today.

"I'm 71 and I was in there at five, so for the past (66) years of my life, that's the way I was perceived to be and that's the way I was treated," he said.

Banksland is one of more than 150,000 aboriginal people who attended Canada's residential schools from the 1870s until 1996.

"These government-funded, church-run schools were set up to eliminate parental involvement in the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual development of aboriginal children," according to the TRC's website.

"The ongoing impact of residential schools has been felt throughout generations and has contributed to social problems that continue to exist."

Only about 80,000 former students are still alive today.

"It's called assimilation, but I really think it was genocide," said Banksland. "To me, it's genocide and there are no two ways about it."

Banksland said while there is still a long way to go, progress is being made.

In 2012, education departments in both the NWT and Nunavut announced high school curricula in both territories would include lessons on residential schools, a decision Banksland said pleased him.

"It's step by step, but those little steps become very, very big eventually, which is good," Banksland said. "It's starting."

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