“Non-aboriginals have a legacy too”
ChristianWeek speaks with Manitoba's first aboriginal judge, Justice Murray Sinclair, a week before he takes the reigns as new chair of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Sinclair, together with commissioners Marie Wilson and Chief Wilton Littlechild replace former commissioners Harry LaForme, Jane Brewin-Morley and Claudette Dumont-Smith who resigned from the commission last fall due to "incurable" internal conflict.
What are you anticipating most about the your work with the commission?
I'm long past the point of anticipation. I'm now deeply into a sense of overwhelmed with the details that need to be addressed. We've had some briefings and some meetings—the commissioners and I—about what we have to face.
What does the task before you look like?
We have four significant aspects to our mandate. We have to engage in a fact-finding process to determine the truth story of the establishment and maintenance of the residential school system and provide a report on those findings within two years. Secondly, we have to sponsor seven national events across Canada. The third part of our mandate is the establishment of a permanent national research centre for ongoing research into residential school issues. The fourth part is to engage in the reconciliation process and recommend an ongoing reconciliation process.
What's needed to bring about deeper reconciliation?
Ideally, a reconciliation process brings together the parties involved to see if they can find some peace and establish a relationship. Reconciliation is about restoring relationships. Whether that's going to be a reality or not, I don't know, because everything depends upon the parties as well as the people involved in managing the process.
So it requires a high degree of skill. It also requires a high degree of commitment. And I'm not sure we have commitment yet. I think that we have to build towards commitment on the part of the parties to make sure they're ready for it, and that they don't engage in it until they're ready because it can be just another process of victimization if you force people to do something they're not ready for.
I want to engage the entire population of those who went to residential schools, not just those who were devastated by their experience. That includes the students, but also the people who worked there. We need to ensure there's a balanced story here. That's another difficult part, because the people who endeavoured to do good—and may have done good—are a part of the story that until this point has been missing. We need to ensure that it forms part of the record.
And the other issue is that the students who went [to residential schools] and had positive relationships and experiences with friends have been somewhat intimidated into silence because those who have been devastated by abuse have dominated the public conversation.
You, along with Marie Wilson and Chief Wilton Littlechild, replace a group of commissioners who resigned because of internal conflict. What are you going to do differently?
It's similar to the civil rights movement in the U.S. where people with significantly divergent views, and sometimes dissimilar personalities, managed to get together and work cohesively in a particular direction. An expression that everyone latched onto and kept as their mantra is to "keep your eyes on the prize." It allowed them to get past their personality differences, and that's what's important here.
Were you sent to residential school?
I wasn't, but dad and my mother and my grandparents who raised me were, so residential schools were a dominant legacy in our household. It's safe to say there's probably no aboriginal family in Canada that hasn't been impacted by residential schools at one point or another. One thing that we want people to understand, however, is that the residential school experience and its legacy is not simply an aboriginal one. The non-aboriginal population has a legacy from it too, and we want them to understand what that is.
The Canadian government was responsible for the establishment of the schools, but Canadian society at large was also responsible for the maintenance and promotion of them. They saw this as a solution as well. And just like the silent German population who said nothing while the Holocaust was going on, they have some obligation to acknowledge their contribution.
You're saying that in some ways Canada's non-aboriginal population needs this process as much as the aboriginal one does.
Absolutely.
Have you had conversations with church representatives yet?
Yes. The representatives of the churches were part of the selection process for my assignment, and I've had conversations with them at various points throughout my career What I've said to them before is that apologizing is one thing—and that's a significant step; we must never undermine the importance of that—but now churches need to say to aboriginal people: "It's okay to be an aboriginal person; it's okay to practice your faith in accordance with your teachings; it's okay to live in accordance with your culture." They haven't heard that yet.
Many aboriginal people are still conflicted by their desire to continue their participation with the churches they've been involved in most of their life and their belief that they have something distinctive about themselves that they would like to take advantage of. And that conflict needs to be healed.
Growing up, did you feel the church gave you freedom to discover your aboriginal identity?
Absolutely not. I was raised by my grandmother—a strong [Roman] Catholic woman—to be a priest. In my teenage years I gave up on that idea—not so much because of every teenage person's conflict with religion, but because as an aboriginal person I was really struggling with my identity and also my acknowledgement, my awareness that the Catholic faith did not have the ability to give me an identity of who I was as an aboriginal man?
Did that free you to reconnect with your own traditional spirituality?
Only when I became a father. Then it became more important to me. That occurred a number of years later. The importance of that to young aboriginal men and women cannot be understated. Particularly when you have children, then you realize that you have to give them something, and you want to give them what you could not get yourself: a proper sense of who they are and a proper belief in the rightness of who they are as aboriginal people. That's difficult.
But I take great hope from the fact that churches are beginning to do that. When the Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations [Phil Fontaine] met the Pope—in the private interview—I understand that [the Pope] blessed a pipe and an eagle feather brought by an elder. That speaks volumes about the openness now of the Church to acknowledge the validity of aboriginal traditions. You see it all the time now. At aboriginal ceremonies over the past couple of years I have seen more Christian leaders participating, willing to learn more and coming to an understanding that in aboriginal faith there is only one God, and that God is the same God as theirs. We just acknowledge Him differently.
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