Justice Murray Sinclair Relates Commission’s Findings on Residential School Legacy

By Alan S. Hale
Kenora Daily Miner and News
May 29, 2014

http://www.kenoradailyminerandnews.com/2014/05/29/justice-murray-sinclair-relates-commissions-findings-on-residential-school-legacy

With just over a year left before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issues its long-awaited report, the commission’s head, Justice Murray Sinclair, came to Kenora to talk about some of the findings about Canada’s infamous Indian residential school system that he and his fellow commissioners have been working on gathering for the past five years.

Sinclair’s speech, which was held at Seven Generations’ Manidoo Baawaatig campus (formerly Lakewood School), was part of the Lake of the Woods Museum’s revival of its award-winning exhibit about Kenora’s residential schools, We Were Taught Differently, which has been reformatted to be taken on the road. Justice Sinclair used his time in front of a packed gymnasium to share some of the bone-chilling facts that the commission has uncovered since 2009.

“The survivors want people to know what happened to them while they were at school ... and we have recorded over 7,500 of survivor’s stories during the course of our hearings,” said Sinclair.

“As a result of that, it is our view that the level of awareness among the Canadian public has probably doubled from a low in the 30 per cent range to over 60 per cent of Canadian society. They now at least have heard of residential schools and understand that what went on in those schools was not a good thing, that there is still ongoing damage from the schools and something needs to be done about it.”

Over the course of the commission’s work, said Sinclair, they’ve been trying to fully understand the lasting impact of the residential school system on aboriginal people, even on those generations who never went to the schools. The damage done by the residential schools to generations aboriginal people is unrivaled by any other event of its kind, said the Justice, with the exception of the Holocaust; which is why the commission spent time talking to the Jewish community about the lasting impact of their victimization by the Nazis.

“There has been a recognition that the trauma of the survivors that they experienced in the camps in the one case and the schools in the other case has been passed on to their children, and lives on in the lives of their children and even grandchildren,” said Sinclair.

During their investigation of government residential school records, the commission found evidence of at least 6,000 students dying while at school or shortly after leaving because of something that happened while at school, but Sinclair said that number is certainly much lower than the reality. In some schools 40 per cent of the students died, said Sinclair. And when a health officer named Peter Bryce tried to warn the government about the unhealthy conditions at the schools in 1907, he was fired.

“It’s not merely the fact that the children died while they were in schools that really concerns us as commissioners ... what has appalled us the most as commissioners was the way the children were treated after they died, and the way their families were treated,” said Sinclair angrily. “Many of the families were never told that their child had died while at school, sometimes not for months, sometimes only after they made inquiries about where their child was after they hadn’t come home with the rest of the kids.”

Government documents from the schools revealed to the commission that many children were buried three or four at a time in common graves. And because the graves were not registered with the provinces the bodies of many children are still missing. And some bodies which were sent home ended up going to the wrong communities.

“Of all of the things that occurred in residential schools, of all of the abuse we’ve heard about both physical and sexual, of all the things we think should never have occurred, children dying in such large numbers leads the way and parents not being able to give the proper respect to their own children after they had died is right up there with that,” said Sinclair.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission also looked into the treatment of aboriginal students that went to regular public schools instead of residential schools and found that they were still exposed to the same messaging as their counterparts; that natives were savages, pagans and inherently inferior. Sinclair said that public schools deliberately under-educated their aboriginal pupils by teaching them “barely marketable skills” and not even giving them certified teachers until after the Second World War. There is no record of an aboriginal student from a public school moving on to a post-secondary education until the 1950s.

“It wasn’t really an education they were getting, it was indoctrination. And that indoctrination was severe from the beginning. Children were punished for speaking their language, children were punished for practicing their culture, children were punished for trying to speak to their brothers and sisters, and often before leaving the schools they were told they had to marry someone from the school who had also been Christianized,” said the Justice.

The goal of the commission, said Sinclair is to make sure that there is a permanent record of what happened in the residential schools before the survivors, who are now mostly in their 70s, pass away and their experiences die with them.

“We want to create a national memory for this country about residential schools so that nobody in the future will be able to say this didn’t happen, or it didn’t happen that way,” said Sinclair. “(Survivors) want anyone and everyone to be able to listen to their statements because they want Canada to never be able look back at it’s history with a whitewash brush in play.”