Truth and Reconciliation: ‘it’s about All of Us,’ Michaelle Jean Says

By Christopher Curtis
Montreal Gazette
April 25, 2013

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Truth+Reconciliation+about+Micha%C3%ABlle+Jean+says/8288569/story.html

Former governor-general Michaelle Jean, centre, speaks to workshop panelists during the first day of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the Indian Residential School system at the Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal April 24. The hearings continues until Saturday.

It may be painful and profoundly troubling, but Canadians need to have a serious conversation about residential schools.

Michaelle Jean's voice resounded sharply as she described the need for all Canadians to embrace aboriginal issues as their own. The former governor-general was in Montreal Wednesday to take part in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — a $60-million project aimed at documenting the systematic torment suffered by generations of aboriginals who were forced into Canada's residential school system.

Jean served as governor-general when the TRC was launched during a ceremony at Ottawa's Rideau Hall in 2009. She became an honorary witness at the roving commission's first national event in Winnipeg, where elders described the unspeakable acts of abuse they survived during childhoods spent as wards of the federal government.

"It was the start of a dialogue, it was very troubling to hear the testimonies, sometimes disturbing, but there was also hope," Jean told a group of reporters huddled in a hallway inside the Queen Elizabeth Hotel downtown. "Because it was about sharing, sharing of the facts about this very dark chapter of our history. ... I think the role of this commission is breaking the role of indifference. Indifference is not an option, we need to confront history together and see how we want to move forward."

On Thursday, Jean will reprise her role as an honorary witness for the TRC, while some of the 6,000 victims of Quebec's residential school system step forward and speak out publicly for the first time. In all, about 13,000 children were sent to aboriginal boarding schools in Quebec during a period that began in the 1930s and continued until the late 1970s.

"(Residential schools) ruined thousands and thousands of children, and then those children became parents and they had to see their own children taken away," Jean said. "And how do you learn to be a parent after an experience like that?"