Ghazal Azizi Kashi, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Investigative Journalism Foundation

Norman Wapachee was born around a decade after his sister Hattie, but he never got to meet her. Instead, he grew up hearing their mom tell stories about her brief time on Earth. 

In 1955, Wapachee’s parents took their seven-month old daughter to a hospital in Roberval, QC to treat her pneumonia. Soon after, the Wapachee elders received a call informing them that Hattie had died. 

“The hospital didn’t actually show [my parents] the body. But my mom recalled something was wrapped up. And they also told my parents to wait at the graveyard where they were going to bury my sister. ‘We were at the grave site for that whole afternoon, and nobody showed up.’ I heard this story as I was growing up every now and then,” said Wapachee, a member of the Oujé-Bougoumou Cree community.

It wasn’t until the late 80s when Wapachee attended university that question marks came to cloud the family anecdote. He recalls studying federal policies, residential schools and child welfare systems’ relationship to Indigenous communities and hearing a lot about missing children. 

“That’s when it really woke me up. For 20, 30 years I would drive by Roberval and think ‘I wonder if she actually died, or if she’s still alive,” says Wapachee. 

Since the adoption of Bill 79 in June 2021, Quebec law allows Indigenous families to access the medical records of their loved ones who disappeared or died after being admitted to health-care facilities within the province. 

So when Awacak, an organization working with Indigenous communities to locate missing family members, presented Bill 79 to the Cree Grand Council, Wapachee, who was deputy grand chief at the time, naturally wondered if he could find Hattie.

With the help of Awacak, Wapachee managed to get the hospital papers confirming Hattie’s death from pneumonia and to find out she was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Mashteuiatsh, QC.

The exact gravesite where Hattie rests has yet to be identified, so Wapachee’s case is ongoing. But the family has finally found some answers.

“I remember my mom walking away from the dinner table and she said, ‘After 67 years, I’m finally gonna go to bed knowing where my baby is,’” Wapachee said. 

Before his mother died in April 2024, Wapachee and his parents visited the Mashteuiatsh cemetery on Hattie’s birthday. For now, they have placed a cross in memory of Wapachee’s late sister in the area where some members of his wife’s Innu family also rest.

Tasked with building trust

Quebec’s Bill 79 came on the heels of numerous investigations into abuse, negligence and mistreatment of Indigenous families. In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) published a supplementary report for Quebec alone, given the province’s unique linguistic and religious circumstances—until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960, religious congregations operated around 35 per cent of Quebec’s hospitals. Call for Justice number 20 demands the Quebec government provide Indigenous families with information on their children who were admitted to a health centre in the province. 

According to the latest annual report on the legislation, 129 families have filed requests to find 221 children. As of February 2026, 21 cases have concluded, and four have led to disinterments to recover, identify and rebury the remains. 

When Bill 79 came into effect, Anne Panasuk was appointed as the special advisor to the minister responsible for relations with the First Nations and the Inuit. As a Radio-Canada journalist, Panasuk had produced a series of investigative stories about Indigenous children who had gone missing or died across Quebec hospitals.

In an interview with the IJF, she stressed the importance of Awacak’s role as an Indigenous-led liaison acting between truth-seeking families and the government.

“You can’t have civil servants, even though they’re very nice and beautiful, going into the community and having the families trust them. Children have disappeared in institutions, whether residential schools or hospitals. It’s the same for the families,” Panasuk said. 

Awacak was already an active organization helping Indigenous families in Quebec find their missing or deceased loved ones. Now, its mandate is explaining Bill 79 to communities and supporting them through their requests. 

Without Bill 79, the records for fewer than 12.7 per cent of the children that the Family Support Directorate is currently searching for would have been accessible to families, per the latest report. 

Panasuk, who now serves as a consultant to Awacak, says the number of closed cases doesn’t represent how many families have received records. In many cases, like Wapachee’s, families have found some answers but complications slow down the process of finding closure in full. 

“The family decides,” says Panasuk on when a file is marked closed. “Some families may be considering whether they want a ceremony or if they want to repatriate the children.” 

In one of the four disinterment cases to date, the child’s identity was confirmed, and the family chose to rebury their kin in a private ceremony. Most cases, however, have been more intricate. 

One family has been awaiting confirmation of a child’s identity since 2023, when the body was exhumed. Another disinterment in 2024, which involved federal authorities and the Anglican Church, took place “under the watchful gaze of around twenty family members and relatives” before the child was reburied in her home community, according to the annual report.

In the latest case, the disinterment took six days, since the child was buried in a communal grave. The families of the other deceased people on the same plot were contacted, some of whom, also Indigenous people, had no knowledge that a family member had been buried there. A wave of requests for searches has followed since, and the remains of the 8-month-old whose case initiated the process have been transferred to Montreal for identification. 

As of February 2026, three other families have begun the process of requesting excavations.  

Where the bill falls short

According to the report, members from most of Quebec’s 11 First Nations have filed requests to use Bill 79, except for the Mohawk, Wendat, Wolastoqiyik and Wabenaki nations, which together make up 22 per cent of Quebec’s Indigenous population.

In a written statement to the IJF, a spokesperson for Quebec’s Family Support Directorate said that families who had previously engaged with the MMIWG inquiry, mostly from Atikamekw and Innu communities, made up the bill’s early users.

Spokesperson Clara O’Farrell added that engaging with Indigenous peoples is a long term commitment. “Every visit to a new community or family is an important process that must be carried out with sensitivity, rigour, and preparation,” she wrote. 

O’Farrell assured that communities who have yet to host Family Support Directorate or Awacak will be approached soon “in accordance with their wishes and interest.”

Chief Ross Montour of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke says there is little awareness of the tool within the Mohawk nation. He added that attempts to fix past wrongdoing by governments, whether provincial or federal, often feel paternalistic. 

Since health records fall under provincial jurisdiction, Bill 79 is not applicable outside the boundaries of Quebec. Montour criticized such a limitation as just one example of the colonial outlook that the bill perpetuates. 

Kimberly Murray, the former special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites, echoed the same concerns. She argues that the federal, provincial and territorial governments’ failure to cooperate with Indigenous communities and truth-seekers constitutes continuing the crime of disappearing children. 

“We see this problem with a Manitoba family where cross-border access to information doesn’t happen…. When a child is taken from another province and territory and brought into Quebec, it sort of misses all the other institutions that the child was transferred through,” Murray explained, criticizing the lack of inter-provincial coordination to expand and adopt legislation like Bill 79.

Another barrier in finding records in Quebec is the 1992 cut off date for Bill 79. For the law to apply, families must be searching for a minor who was admitted to a health facility within Quebec before the end of December 1992. Awacak’s Panasuk says the government has provided no explanation as to why and how the 1992 cut off was decided. 

“I’m very disappointed that the bill hasn’t been changed yet and wish that date will disappear,” Panasuk said, emphasizing that medical racism against Indigenous peoples remains an ongoing issue in the province and abroad.  

Thus far, two requests have been made for children whose birth occurred after 1992, and five requests have been made for deaths or disappearances after 1992. Given the cases fall outside of the law’s scope, the report says Quebec’s Family Support Directorate is guiding the families to other available tools to conduct searches. 

Skepticism across Mohawk First Nation

A Mohawk group argues Bill 79 has actually been an obstacle in their search for answers.

Since 2022, Kanien’kehà:ka Kahnistensera (the Mohawk Mothers) have been involved in a legal battle to stop construction at the site of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, alleging the presence of unmarked graves. The Royal Victoria Hospital and its psychiatric department, the Allan Memorial Institute, are affiliated with McGill University and its health centre. From 1957 to 1964, the institutions were part of a CIA-funded mind control and brainwashing research project known as MK ULTRA. 

Mohawk Mother Kahentinetha gave birth to her daughter at the Royal Victoria Hospital and out of fear of losing the child, ran away from the hospital with her newborn, days after delivery. Now, as a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the same hospital’s expansion, Bill 79 has been used against her, she told the IJF. 

In the latest ruling by the Quebec Superior Court, the Mohawk Mothers’ request that McGill, the Royal Victoria Hospital and the McGill University Health Centre be ordered to release all files concerning medical experiments on Indigenous peoples was dismissed. The October 1, 2025  decision reads that the Mohawk Mothers’ “case is not a reasonable or effective means to bring this issue to court,” since Bill 79 already exists as “a better alternative.” 

To date, no requests for medical records have been filed through Bill 79 for the Royal Victoria Hospital or the Allan Memorial Institute, according to the report. 

Kahentinetha says the Mothers, who are often self-represented in court, have little trust in government services. When Bill 79 was used against the Mothers’ case to investigate potential unmarked graves, it further soured the group’s relations with any public agency that claims to seek answers on behalf of grieving Indigenous families, she said.

Chief Montour of Kahnawà:ke also worries that legislation like Bill 79 often passes through many government lawyers whose only concern is mitigating against liability.

“It seems like ‘we’ll do a nice, good thing, but these are the rules you have to follow.’ It’s on their terms,” says Montour. “It’s demeaning to the people who have been historically impacted and that’s wrong.” 

Spokesperson O’Farrell says Quebec welcomes requests from the Mohawk Mothers and that the Family Support Directorate “has reiterated on several occasions its desire to contribute to the searches of Mohawk families looking for a missing child.” 

Anne Panasuk says that Awacak has met with members of the Mohawk First Nation a few times, including the Mohawk Mothers, but no family has agreed to come forward with an official request yet. 

Although it was difficult to persuade the government to heed Awacak’s direction, Panasuk finds the partnership to be positive.  “It’s not perfect, but it’s working well,” she said. 

“It’s a long process for the government to work with an Indigenous association that goes in the communities and talks in their languages, in their own way, and the government has no control over. The minister was saying it’s an earthquake for us,” Panasuk said. 

Like Chief Montour of Mohawk Council, Norman Wapachee says chiefs at the Grand Council of the Crees had very little knowledge of the bill before Awacak presented their work and earned their trust. 

He urged other provinces to follow suit and called on Indigenous leaders to pay greater attention to legislation like Bill 79 that could serve community members’ searches for loved ones.    

“There are children that are still out there, that could be brought home and returned back to their communities where they belong,” he said. “Awacak’s work needs to continue.” 

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