The last Indian Residential School closed in 1996. That is only 19 years ago. For over a century First Nations children were removed from their homes and sent to be “educated”. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission delivered their report and recommendations yesterday. It’s hard, painful truth confronts Canadians and, in particular, churches with the sin of our past.
Justice Murray Sinclair has led our country through this process. He is brilliant, well spoken, and his gentle manner delivers the truth with a punch of honesty. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has held seven national events between 2010 and 2013 where they gathered stories from former students. The collected more than 6,200 statements from former students. The Commission also led a “Missing Children and Unmarked Graves Project”, in an attempt to document the over 6000 deaths of children at the schools.
The Commission has called the impact of Residential Schools Cultural Genocide. This morning in his interview on CBC’s The Current Justice Murray Sinclair told Anna Maria Tremonti that this phrase was considered very carefully as they knew this was the phrase that the press would pick up on and the phrase that the nation would hear. Justice Sinclair said that the Indian Residential School system was racism at it’s fundamental level. Politicians and church leaders, in discussing the need for the school system, regularly used language like “pagans”, “heathens” and “savages” in order to justify the removal of children from their homes in order to inculcate them with a European education and life-style. He said this process also produced an, “unconscious victimization of first nations people” by the Canadian public.
These last few days have been heavy with emotion as some of the stories have been told and as the Recommendations of the Commission have been released. Such a painful and hard history we have to deal with. One of the young walkers, who came through Bracebridge a few weeks ago, said, “The white people are locked in their guilt and we are locked in our anger. Somehow it has to change.” He is right and we need now to figure a way to move forward and to grow into reconciliation.
I am grateful to Justice Murray Sinclair and the other Commission members for their dedication to heavy and difficult work and for their honesty in the report. Now we must all commit to making their recommendations a reality.
