Later this week I will be an honourary witness in Edmonton at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) final national gathering of survivors of Indian Residential Schools. It promises to be an emotionally painful, but also healing, experience.

The TRC was set up as part of a class-action settlement, the largest in Canadian history, of a lawsuit brought on behalf of tens of thousands of survivors of the schools. They are called "survivors" because the horrific physical and sexual abuse so many endured didn't kill them. The TRC's mandate is to uncover these uncomfortable truths and help us move toward reconciliation with aboriginal peoples in Canada.

Over the past five years, the TRC has heard from thousands of survivors. They have spoken tearfully, angrily, wrenchingly, about being forcibly taken from their families to be crowded into spartan boarding schools plagued by hunger, abuse, disease, and death.

There are more residential school survivors living here in Saskatchewan than anywhere else. Of the estimated 80,000 survivors alive today, roughly 19,000 live in this province.

A similar TRC event was held in Saskatoon in 2012.

Inflicting this trauma on aboriginal peoples in Canada was not accidental. In the 1870s, the schools became part of an official Canadian policy of forced assimilation designed to "kill the Indian in the child," drive what was left of aboriginal populations onto remote reserves and permit "whites" to settle the West.

The legacy of this policy is visible on the streets of nearly every Canadian city to those who know the story. But most Canadians never learned about it, and indifference is the result.

I grew up in Winnipeg in the 1950s. My upbringing was unusual: racist stereotypes, so common then, had no place in our home. My father saw everyone as equal. He treated everyone with respect.

Aboriginal people have always had a positive influence on my life. My father would take me to Shoal Lake every weekend, where we camped in the heart of a First Nations community and fished from their shores. As a young man, I took a job that involved living and working in First Nations communities throughout Manitoba.

But while I made friends and learned from the wisdom of Elders, I learned nothing about residential schools. Only years later, when I became assistant deputy minister for child and family services in Manitoba, did the deep, enduring impacts of the schools on survivors and their families hit me for the first time.

It helps to remember the schools were established under Canada's first prime minister and were not abolished until the 1990s. Over 150,000 children passed through them. Psychological trauma is inherited by the children of survivors, as a recent study by University of Ottawa and Carleton University researchers shows. When multiple generations attended the schools, the negative effects are cumulative.

This helps explain why aboriginal people in Canada lag behind the rest of us on indicators of well-being such as education, employment, and health. Yet many of us cannot see the connection between the challenges facing aboriginal people today and the impacts of ruthless government policy. Perhaps our indifference stems from what we were taught in school, or more accurately, what we were not taught.

Wilful blindness to the horrors of the schools was federal government policy. Dr. Peter Bryce, hired by the government in 1907 to report on health conditions, found that between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of the children entering residential schools in the western provinces died within a year.