Indian Residential Schools in the IRSSA

Introduction

The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) listed 130 schools for Indigenous children when it was approved in March 2007. Nine schools had been added by the time the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRCC) published its final report in December 2015.

The IRSSA list presents a number of challenges for researchers, which the TRCC has described and worked to overcome. In the end, the TRCC identified 143 Indian Residential Schools, based on the IRSSA list, in Volume 4, Appendix 1.1 of its final report.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.

Though the TRCC's work is available in various digital formats (PDF, DOC, DAISY), none makes it easy to access data embedded in the report, such as the identifying data about Indian Residential Schools embedded in Appendix 1.1.

Guided by the Linked Open Data initiative,² ⊕ ² Tim Berners-Lee (2009): Linked data. we have taken three steps to begin to address this problem:

1. converting the information in Appendix 1.1 to machine-readable structured data
2. storing these data in a non-proprietary file format (TSV), and
3. publishing these data with an open license (CC BY-SA 4.0)³ ⊕ ³ Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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