Integrating NCTR geodata into the OIRS_2022-12-19-1

What’s here

Background
Geodata
- National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation
- x
Recap
Next steps

Background

So far our datasets provide only basic information (town/city, province/territory) about the location of Oblates’ Indian Residential Schools. We now want to draw upon two sources for more precise geolocation data.

National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation

One part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and mandated the TRC to create a permanent archive for all of the statements, documents and other materials it would gather over its years of operation. This led to the creation of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) has published a Memorial Map to forever remember and honour the children who never returned home from Indian Residential Schools. The map relies upon three datasets:

Indian Residential Schools.
Home Communities of students who never returned home.
Health Centres where students were sent for treatment.

We have aligned OISR_2022-12-19-1 with the NCTR’s geodata of Indian Residential Schools and found matches for all entries.

We have published our worksheets and the final product – OISR_2022012-19-2 – as a machine-readable, Open Data Spreadsheet (ODS), which appends these additional fields from the NCTR’s geodata:

Field	Comment
NCTR_SOURCE	National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Memorial Map, accessed December 19, 2022.
NCTR_SOURCE_URL	https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ResidentialSchools_rev2.geojson.txt
NCTR_IRS_NAME	Primary name assigned to the institution.
NCTR_IRS_AKA	Alias assigned to the institution.
NCTR_OPERATING_DATES	Opening and closing dates of the institution.
NCTR_AFFILIATION	Religious affiliation of the institution.
NCTR_LOCATION	Town, province/territory.
NCTR_AFFILIATION	Religious affiliation.
NCTR_LATITUDE	Latitude of institution.
NCTR_LONGITUDE	Longitude of institution.
NCTR_COORDINATES	Latitude, longitude of the institution.

Next Steps

A comparison of our list and the IRSSA’s initial and final lists of Indian Residential Schools reveals many discrepancies in the primary names and aliases that were assigned to these institutions. To reduce these discrepancies, we next look to the Oblates’ names for their Indian Residential Schools.

Credits

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If you use this work, please credit Paul Allen, paul@hartallen.com.
Our initial dataset of Oblates’ Indian Residential Schools (OIRS_2022-12-17-1) contained basic identifying information gleaned mainly from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

We wanted to enrich the initial dataset with information obtained from other sources – and began by integrating the initial and final list of institutions that were covered in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA). We then integrated the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s geodataset of Indian Residential Schools.

We now turn to integrating other geodata that were published recently as part of an effort to raise awareness of Indian Day Schools. The accompanying map of Indian Day Schools includes these geodata of Indian Residential Schools:

We have aligned OISR_2022-12-19-2 with the subset of the Indian Day Schools geodata that pertain to Indian Residential Schools and found matches for all entries.

In fact, since the Indian Day Schools geodata includes multiple entries for some Indian Residential Schools, we can’t simply append these entries to OISR_2022-12-20-1. We have published the final product – PRE-OISR_2022-12-20-1 – as a machine-readable, Open Data Spreadsheet (ODS). We will deal with the issue of multiple entries in a later version of OISR_.

Next Steps

Credits

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If you use this work, please credit Paul Allen, paul@hartallen.com.