I am not ignoring those issues.
But..... the investigation should start with a good statistical analysis to determine if there were statistically excess deaths (assuming things in any investigation is simply not a good starting point).
The statistical analysis will probably be complex due to the fact that the school operated for 80 or so years.
For example, how many deaths occurred during the global Spanish Flue pandemic immediately after WWI? Did WWI lead to increased food prices that could have compounded the death rate at the school?
If that question is answered "yes", then the next question should be "how excessive"? This will then serve as the groundwork to address the issues you raise.
There is a one possible good reasons to account for a certain number of the missing.
I believe than an estimated 150,000 children passed through the school. In all probability, some of the youths ran away from, or escaped from the schools for good reasons.
A certain number of these youths may have been equally reluctant to return home- also for good reasons. Indigenous youth are no more, and no less likely to have unpleasant home conditions than any other ethnic group.
I believe 150,000 students were sent to the various schools in the course of their operations. A run "double runaway" (from school and home) rate of 3% would come close to 5,000.
This possibility could be examined by a statistical running the names of the missing through national death certificates, marriage certificates, social security and say, military service records.
Fortunately, Canada probably has pretty good records, espescialy as the 20th century progressed. This will help any study that results in any conclusion.
This is painfully, woefully, a form of misinformation. ETA: In my opinion.
There is a wealth of information available to everyone on Canadian soil and elsewhere.
ETA: A good place to start— The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
I’ve linked it below.
There has been an investigation, with over 7000 surviving witnesses, evidence, records...based on this they are finding remains. Indigenous people believe there may be more than 5000 missing children.
Facts:
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” is a systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries,
within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate. The proj- ect’s research supports the following conclusions:
• The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students and the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students.
• For just under one-third of these deaths (32%), the government and the schools did not record the name of the student who died.
• For just under one-quarter of these deaths (23%), the government and the schools did not record the gender of the student who died.
• For just under one-half of these deaths (49%), the government and the schools did not record the cause of death.
• Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school- aged children in the general population.
• For most of the history of the schools, the practice was not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities.
• For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are aban- doned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance.
• The federal government never established an adequate set of standards and reg- ulations to guarantee the health and safety of residential school students.
• The federal government never adequately enforced the minimal standards and regulations that it did establish.
• The failure to establish and enforce adequate regulations was largely a function of the government’s determination to keep residential school costs to a minimum.
2 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission
• The failure to establish and enforce adequate standards, coupled with the failure to adequately fund the schools, resulted in unnecessarily high death rates at res- idential schools.
http://caid.ca/TRCFinVol42015.pdf