Chair hopes TRC wind-up inspires new beginning for Canada

More than 3,000 residential school survivors and their supporters poured across the Portage Bridge and Victoria Island in Ottawa May 31 in the Walk for Reconciliation. Some people estimated that up to 10,000 may have participated in the event, which included an afternoon of speeches and entertainment at Ottawa City Hall. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)

Members of the congregation of St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Ottawa, which many Inuit attend, display their solidarity with residential school survivors May 31 in Ottawa. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)

“Never forget this day. Today is the day when we began to change the history of this country,” Justice Murray Sinclair said May 31 at the end of the Walk for Reconciliation. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)

Though the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he’s chaired since 2009 will wind up its work this week, Justice Murray Sinclair urges all Canadians to build and maintain a new relationship with Aboriginal peoples that recognizes the truth of their common history.

“Never forget this day. Today is the day when we began to change the history of this country,” Sinclair said May 31 in a speech that followed a walk for reconciliation in Ottawa to mark the start of the TRC’s closing public events this week.

More than 3,000 Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people poured across the Portage Bridge and Victoria Island into downtown Ottawa at noon May 31, drumming, singing and bearing signs and banners displaying messages like “Breaking down walls for reconciliation” and “A new way forward.”

On June 2, the commission will release a 300-page executive summary of its final report at an event to be held inside the Delta hotel in Ottawa, where this week’s TRC activities are focused.

“In that report, you will find the truth of residential school history in this country,” Sinclair said.

And he said that while getting to that truth was hard, achieving reconciliation will be even harder.

That’s because getting many Canadians to accept the brutal reality of residential schools has been a difficult process.

It’s still difficult for many Aboriginal survivors of residential schools as well because even now some people do not believe their stories, Sinclair said in his speech.

“We told them that telling the truth about residential schools was going to set them free, but first, we knew it was going to piss them off,” Sinclair said.

“We knew that and it’s turned out that a great deal of anger has been expressed over that story,” he said.

Beverly McLachlin, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, sparked more anger in some quarters when she said in a speech given in Toronto last week that Canada’s residential school system amounted to an attempt at committing cultural genocide.

Sinclair does not disagree, saying that if Canada were to develop its residential school system today, it could face prosecution under the 1948 UN convention on genocide.

Though the UN convention does not use the term “cultural genocide,” a provision in Article II of the convention prohibits the forcible transfer of children, Sinclair said May 30 on the CBC radio current affairs program, The House.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, who also spoke at the end of the Walk for Reconciliation, said she agrees with McLachlin.

“She used the language of the 21st century to call this what it was, an attempted cultural genocide,” Wynne said.

Sinclair said the commission will release its enormous final report later, after it’s translated into various Aboriginal languages.

“We’ve finished writing it, but we’re still trying to print it. It’s going to cover two million words. The reason I know that is that we’re going to have to pay the translators,” Sinclair said.

It’s based on documentary research and oral testimony gathered from thousands of residential school survivors since 2009, including Inuit who appeared before a special Inuit sub-commission that toured northern Canada in 2011, holding hearings in about 20 Inuit communities, many of them in Nunavut and Nunavik.

On that tour, the Inuit sub-commission heard evidence from survivors of the infamous Sir Joseph Bernier School in Chesterfield Inlet, to which many Inuit were sent between the late 1940s and 1960s.

In 2008, the late Marius Tungilik of Repulse Bay told Nunatsiaq News that Inuit who attended the Roman Catholic residential school at Chesterfield Inlet “were treated like dogs” and told repeatedly that they belonged to a primitive, second-class race.

The TRC also heard from Inuit survivors of St. Phillip’s Residential School near Fort George and hostels attached to federal school day schools that operated in Inukjuak, Kuujjuarapik, Kangiqsualujjuaq, and Kangirsuk.

Numerous Inuvialuit and western Nunavut survivors attended a diverse range of residential schools, including Grolier Hall and Stringer Hall in Inuvik, and schools in such places as Aklavik, Yellowknife and Fort MacPherson.

The TRC gathered more than 1,000 survivor statements from Inuit and in another process, made common experience and independent assessment payments to thousands more.

The commission is not an agent of government, but the product of a settlement agreement financed from the $2.1 billion out-of-court settlement agreement that Ottawa negotiated in 2006 with lawyers representing many thousands of residential school survivors.

The commission estimates that at least 150,000 Aboriginal people attended residential schools.

And in one of their most chilling findings, they estimate that at least 6,000 children, and likely more, died while attending those schools, many of them buried in unmarked graves without the knowledge of their families.