Day school survivors legacy fund now open for funding requests

Stefan Richard · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 09, 2025 5:51 PM EDT | Last Updated: 2 hours ago

A fund for projects for healing, connection and taste revitalization and commemoration for time schoolhouse survivors and their families is present accepting applications.

The McLean Legacy Fund is named aft Garry McLean, a Manitoba-based advocator for Federal Indian Day School survivors, who was the pb plaintiff successful a people enactment suit against the Government of Canada. McLean died from crab successful 2019 astatine the property of 67, conscionable earlier a last colony statement was reached.

Like residential schools, Federal Indian Day Schools were designed to assimilate Indigenous children while eradicating Indigenous languages and cultures. There were 699 Federal Indian Day Schools crossed Canada including 1 successful Lake Manitoba First Nation, the Dog Creek Day School, which Garry McLean attended. About 200,000 Indigenous children attended day schools.

The $1.47 cardinal settlement included a $200 cardinal bequest fund. The McLean Day Schools Settlement Corporation says the bequest money was created to enactment healing and wellness, connection and civilization preservation, commemoration and truth-telling for survivors and their families.

"We cognize the travel began with tremendous symptom and with that symptom comes a almighty accidental for healing, information telling, revitalization of our languages, strengthening our cultures, and enhancing the pridefulness of our identity," said Claudette Command, the colony corporation's CEO, astatine a quality conference in Ottawa Monday.

Elder Gloria Wells, a committee subordinate with the bequest fund, said, "I powerfully judge that ceremonial and our connection and our civilization volition beryllium the ones to assistance us."

The archetypal telephone for submissions for backing opened Monday. There are two categories: survivor committee establishment that is one-time backing of up to $25,000, and wealth for assemblage programs, up to $100,000 oregon $250,000 a twelvemonth for 4 years, depending connected the benignant of program.

Southern Chiefs Organization Grand Chief Jerry Daniels, who was a person of McLean, said he was "a almighty dependable for justness and a relentless advocator for survivors of Indian Day Schools.... His efforts led to existent alteration for thousands of our people."

With the motorboat of the bequest fund, "his bequest volition proceed to uplift survivors and their families for generations to come," Daniels said.

The exertion deadline for the archetypal round of backing is the extremity of September.