A look at residential schools commissioner

Metro
May 31, 2015

http://metronews.ca/news/canada/1382954/a-look-at-residential-schools-commissioner/

Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Photo by Nick Ghattas

As Justice Murray Sinclair prepares to wrap up his work as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he spoke to Torstar News Service about his what it was like to bear witness to the legacy of the residential school system in such painful detail and his vision for relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada.

How did you convince non-Aboriginal Canadians to engage in the process as participants and not just observers?

What we said to people was, “We don’t need you to feel that you are connected to this history. We need you to feel that you are part of the future and that you’re part of the solution, and therefore we have to talk about what your role is going to be going forward . . .” We ran into a lot of the people at the beginning, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, who said reconciliation is never going to happen. My (response was) you don’t have to believe that it is going to happen. You have to believe that it should happen.

What does reconciliation look like to you?

Reconciliation is always about relationships. It’s about bringing balance to the relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. At an individual level, people often ask, “What can I do?” My answer to that is always, “Look at how you believe and how you behave and how you think and change that.”

What can efforts to promote awareness of Canada’s history with residential schools learn from Holocaust education?

You have to look at the history of how the Holocaust was treated publicly after the Second World War. It could have disappeared from the memory of everybody if world leaders hadn’t done certain things as a result of that phenomenon . . . There are laws in place that say you actually can’t deny the Holocaust. If there were laws in place that said you cannot deny the fact of residential schools and the abuse that occurred, that would certainly move this conversation into a better framework.

How do you expect the federal government to respond to the commission’s report?

The reality is that the situation that we have now came about at the hands of Liberal governments and Conservative governments, so there is no particular political party that is going to have the ability to say, “We can do better than these guys.” Everybody has shown that they can’t do better. So what we are saying is that we need you to listen to what the people are saying and we want the people to be the ones to lead this discussion. A lot of good reconciliation work can be done without government action and that’s what we want people to understand and embrace.

Will the report recommend doing away with the Indian Act?

What I can tell you, and it comes as no surprise, is that we can’t continue to do things the way we have been doing them . . . Everybody says, “We don’t like (the Indian Act). It’s not good, we have to change it.” The problem is, people can’t agree on what they need to put in its place and that’s the issue . . . So, the question is: “What kind of legislation needs to be in place in order to ensure that the relationship between Aboriginal people and the government of this country is a proper, balanced relationship as it was intended when the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued?”

What effect did hearing these stories of abuse and intergenerational trauma have on you personally?

As I said to the commissioners, it will do no good for anyone if we all break down and can’t function anymore. But at the same time, we have shed many tears with survivors and we have shed many tears amongst ourselves.

What do you plan to do next?

I have a trailer attached to my truck right now that I want to live in for a while. I would like to find a quiet space and just clear my head a bit. And then I’m scheduled to retire next year, so I might do that. I probably have a book or two that I have got to write. I am putting all of those thoughts aside for the moment because I want to finish this work, and there is so much detail around the next several weeks that I can’t afford to start thinking about other things.