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By Joanna Smith
As Justice Murray Sinclair prepares to wrap up his work as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he spoke to the Star 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.
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.
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