Identifying Indian Residential Schools

Identifying Indian Residential Schools that operated in Canada was a challenge for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRCC) in 2008-15 and remains a challenge for us today.

Three lists deserve our attention:

the TRCC's list of schools that were included in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA)¹ ⊕ ¹ Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015): Appendix 1.1: Residential schools and residences included in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, Canada's residential schools (volume 4): Missing children and unmarked burials, 141-149.
the TRCC's list of schools that were identified in Annual Reports of the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) but not included in the IRSSA² ⊕ ² Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015): Appendix 1.2: Residential schools identified in Indian Affairs annual reports that were not included in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, Canada's residential schools (volume 4): Missing children and unmarked burials, 150-151.
the Canadian government's list of schools that were submitted for inclusion in the IRSSA³ ⊕ ³ Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (2013): Requests for schools to be included in the IRSSA, 1-128.

Though these lists provide much valuable information about Indian Residential Schools, their format (PDF) makes it difficult for us to access the underlying data.

Our initial effort to overcome this difficulty involves converting these lists into machine-readable structured data, filing them in a non-proprietary format (TSV), and publishing them with an open license (CC BY-SA 4.0):⁴ ⊕ ⁴ Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.