Chief Adam says IAP records need to be destroyed now

November 10, 2015

Residential school survivor Allan Adam has had enough.

After having to wait almost two decades to go through the official channels of recounting his experience at Holy Angels residential school in Fort Chipewyan at the Independent Assessment Process, he has now learned that those accounts of his dark memories could be kept for 15 years before they are shredded – if they are shredded.

“My IAP records should be destroyed because that was the arrangement I made when I went into it,” said Adam. “For anybody in their own mind to bring this up, to say this should be drawn out in the public forum, because it’s re-traumatizing everybody again, and I don’t think that’s right regardless of who it’s for.”

At the end of October, the Ontario Court of Appeal heard arguments from a number of parties on whether to uphold a lower court decision to keep the IAP records for 15 years before destroying them. That same lower court decision ordered the church entities, who signed the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, to destroy their records immediately following the IAP process. The court also ordered the federal government to destroy its records.

Dan Shapiro, chief adjudicator of the IAP, is in agreement with Adam’s stand: the records need to be destroyed in keeping with the promise of confidentiality that was made to the survivors before they spoke. Shapiro would like to see that time frame dropped from 15 years to two years.

Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has expressed his concerns that destroying all the records would be a step toward denying the damage caused by residential schools. He would like to see some of those records stored at the National Truth and Reconciliation Centre in Winnipeg. Records that would be kept would have to have the permission of the survivor and pertinent details would be blacked out.

Canada maintains that the IAP records are government property and should be held by the government and eventually stored in the national library and archives.

Adam says the court action is one more display of colonialism. Who has spoken to survivors about what they want? he asks.

“Right now, across this country, if it’s truth and reconciliation about working and trying to patch things up, this thing should be taken out of the courts immediately and say it’s because of the survivors, it never should have been brought up,” said Adam.

Adam began his claim against the federal government and the Catholic Church in 1997, well before Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for residential schools and the IRSSA was signed. Because of delays in his claim, Adam was swept into the class action settlement, something he says netted him a much lower compensation than he would have gotten if he had been able to settle on his own.

“If it was a white Caucasian person that suffered the same thing that I went through, I guarantee you, it would have been well into the millions (of dollars) they would have settled for,” he said. “Because I’m Aboriginal, and everybody else is Aboriginal, we’re always taken for granted and therefore, I don’t think we should be taken for granted again at this point in time.”

Adam says the process has been a hard one. Having to talk to the IAP, which listened to reports on sexual, mental, emotional and physical abuse, and meted out a financial settlement beyond the Common Experience Payment, had an emotional toll on him and his family.

“(The IAP) wasn’t a very good thing to go through. A lot of emotions came out of there. To come back home and relive it and make my family go through it again, let them see me go through this phase in my life again when I thought it was put to rest,” he said. Now he is doing that all over again. He is uneasy and difficult to talk to, concerned with the court outcome of his records.

If the court decides the records will be kept for 15 years before being destroyed that won’t be the end of it, says Adam. He will take legal action. And Adam is no stranger to court action, now into his third term as Chief of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. The ACFN has been involved in numerous litigations, including the most recent successful court challenge, along with five other First Nations, of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act.

“(ACFN) is not scared to take on a legal matter,” said Adam, and he is not scared to take on personal litigation. “This is a legal matter that will boil over and I guarantee you, I won’t be the only one in the line-up. There will be others following.”