"The road we travel is equal in importance to the destination we seek. There are no shortcuts. When it comes to truth and reconciliation, we are all forced to go the distance."
-Justice Murray Sinclair,
Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada,
to the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples,
September 28, 2010
Introduction
Purpose
This interim report covers the activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada since the appointment of the current three Commissioners on July 1, 2009. The report summarizes:
- the activities of the Commissioners
- the messages presented to the Commission at hearings and National Events
- the activities of the Commission with relation to its mandate
- the Commission's interim findings
- the Commission's recommendations.
Background
Up until the 1990s, the Canadian government, in partnership with a number of Christian churches, operated a residential school system for Aboriginal children. These government-funded, usually church-run schools and residences were set up to assimilate Aboriginal people forcibly into the Canadian mainstream by eliminating parental and community involvement in the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual development of Aboriginal children.
More than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children were placed in what were known as Indian residential schools. As a matter of policy, the children commonly were forbidden to speak their own language or engage in their own cultural and spiritual practices. Generations of children were traumatized by the experience. The lack of parental and family involvement in the upbringing of their own children also denied those same children the ability to develop parenting skills. There are an estimated 80,000 former students still living today. Because residential schools operated for well more than a century, their impact has been transmitted from grandparents to parents to children. This legacy from one generation to the next has contributed to social problems, poor health, and low educational success rates in Aboriginal communities today.
The 1996 Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and various other reports and inquiries have documented the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse that many children experienced during their school years. Beginning in the mid-1990s, thousands of former students took legal action against the churches that ran the schools and the federal government that funded them. These civil lawsuits sought compensation for the injuries that individuals had sustained, and for loss of language and culture. They were the basis of several large class-action suits that were resolved in 2007 with the implementation of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history. The Agreement, which is being implemented under court supervision, is intended to begin repairing the harm caused by the residential school system.
In addition to providing compensation to former students, the Agreement established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada with a budget of $60-million and a five-year term.
The Commission's overarching purposes are to:
- reveal to Canadians the complex truth about the history and the ongoing legacy of the church-run residential schools, in a manner that fully documents the individual and collective harms perpetrated against Aboriginal peoples, and honours the resiliency and courage of former students, their families, and communities; and
- guide and inspire a process of truth and healing, leading toward reconciliation within Aboriginal families, and between Aboriginal peoples and non-Aboriginal communities, churches, governments, and Canadians gen-
