CANADA
The Globe and Mail
HAYDEN KING AND ERICA VIOLET LEE
Contributed to The Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2015
Hayden King is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing in Huronia, Ont. He is the director of the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Erica Violet Lee is Nehiyaw from Saskatoon, Treaty 6 territory and Métis homeland. She is a philosophy student at the University of Saskatchewan.
The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was released Tuesday, weighing 25 pounds and containing more than two million words. It is the culmination of six years of painful testimony from residential school survivors, a wide-ranging public education campaign by the commissioners, and the hope for beginnings of a substantive conversation on the meaning of reconciliation among Canadians.
But before we discuss reconciling, we need truth.
While the utility of the 94 “Calls to Action” made by the TRC in July 2015 and again today are critical as we look towards the future, it is the historical record of residential schools that is required reading for Canadians to understand the contours of the grotesque campaign. That record is confirmation of colonial crimes against indigenous peoples on this land. It is recognition that 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their homes, and yes, that is genocide.
The physical and sexual abuse, the brainwashing, the experimentation, the massive scale of disease and death defies comprehension. Chairman Murray Sinclair remarked this week that the final report underestimates how many indigenous children were lost to residential schools. We may never know the number.
We would add to the apocalyptic accounting those lives lost to sexual and gender violence, homelessness, substance abuse, suicide, and poverty; all of which remain endemic after the last residential school closed, and all of them undeniable consequences of a system designed to assimilate and erase.
It is understandable, then, that the notion of reconciliation is complicated.
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