Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Let me begin by acknowledging that we are gathered on traditional Algonquin Anishinabe territory, and say how grateful I am to be here today. I want to point out what is perhaps obvious, which is that I'm still wearing a poppy today. With no offence intended to the protocols of the Canadian Legion, I did it intentionally because, as you will hear, I want to focus our attention on remembrance.
The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was officially over three years ago, and it was the honour of my lifetime to serve as one of its three commissioners. While I appear before you today as an independent party, I want you to know that I have reviewed my thoughts for today with both of my commissioner colleagues: our chair, then Justice but now Senator Murray Sinclair, and Chief Dr. Wilton Littlechild.
I have also reviewed them with Dr. Barney Williams, the TRC elder who was a member of our survivor advisory committee. I wanted to make sure we are all still on the same page of understanding the issues before this committee as they relate to our TRC findings and calls to action. I want you to know that indeed we are. While I do not speak for them, I am assured that we are still of a shared opinion, beginning with this reminder of what we said at our official closing and what we have each said repeatedly ever since, which is that the long-term work of reconciliation has barely begun.
It's clear from private member's Bill C-369—and I want to thank Madame Jolibois for bringing it forward—and also from the convening of this committee to carefully consider it, that you are devoting efforts to following through on some of our TRC conclusions that fall to the federal government to enact. In that light, and in the spirit of reconciliation, I am indeed very pleased to be here today. I hope you will find my comments useful to support you in your work and to help you in your deliberations.
I want to begin by having all of us remember what brought us into this room today: the historic thing that happened in Canada early this century. Indigenous residential school survivors took the federal government and the churches that ran those schools to court. A massive legal settlement that supported the survivors' case included the obligation to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first national TRC in the western world and the first to focus on harms to our nation's own children.
After six and a half years of work, our 10-volume TRC final report, informed by official government and church records, documented the history of the so-called Indian residential schools. We reported that they were built on a foundation of attitudes: a belief that indigenous people were inferior; that their cultures and identities should, could and would be extinguished; and that the fastest and cheapest way to do that was to put their children in residential schools, far from parental influence and cultural teachings.
What price does a country pay for such attitudes? Almost 7,000 residential school survivors made statements to our TRC, recording the harms and heartaches of their school days: family rupture, fear, humiliation and abuses of all kinds. The most definitive harm was death itself. So many told us they spoke for the voiceless, those they had seen die and those they knew to have died or disappeared—their schoolmates, friends and siblings.
A few years ago I visited the burial ground of Regina Industrial School, one of Canada's earliest Indian residential schools. Those graves were unmarked and the cemetery overrun. I still remember the overwhelming feelings. What if the children lying here were my ancestors? What if the children and grandchildren in my life were taken away by government agents, police or religious leaders, with promises of good education, only to end their shortened lives in such an abandoned field? Let me be sure you understand that this is not the only such residential school graveyard in our country.
We know for sure that 3,200 indigenous children died at those schools—highly disproportionate for Canadian children. A thousand others were sent home in the latter stages of illness, or to “Indian” hospitals, to die there within the first year.
All told, likely double that number died. It was closer to 6,000 or more, because so many others were only partially documented: a first-name child here, a no-name child there, sometimes a home community reference for another and only maybe the gender of the child. Some were sick, some died in fires in condemned school buildings, and some drowned or froze to death trying to run away from school horrors. Too frequently, no cause of death at all was even noted. Countless indigenous children lie in school cemeteries long since abandoned. Some are in mass graves and some were buried before parents were ever told of their passing, the cause of death or the gravesite location.
Our TRC created the national residential school death register, the only national effort ever made to record all the names of all students who died and to locate their graves. We are nowhere close to finding them all. As we have said in our report, that will require much more research, analysis and resources. As well, we say that reconciliation on this front also needs ongoing education and continual remembrance that this loss of life happened on our own soil as a result of our own laws and policies.
A few years back, a farmer came across what appeared to be four burial sites at the edge of a field. There is both remembrance and reconciliation in what happened next. The church that ran a nearby residential school and indigenous spiritual leaders collaborated in a traditional sending-home ceremony for the little souls in these newly found graves, as well as for so many other former students from that school.
We have a very long history of noting the names of the fallen on public monuments to victims of war. Learning the names of the deceased makes it real, transforming them from statistics to somebody's relatives and helping us relate to the enormity of the tragedy. Even more powerful is the experience of hearing those names aloud.
That day, they were children's names. They didn't go to war. They went to school.
In the midst of such a reverent ceremony, I got thinking about Remembrance Day. My grandfather was a soldier in World War I. Several of my uncles fought in World War II, and my father served the final year of that war here in Canada. All of that influenced our family culture. I spent many bittersweet childhood days gathered around public cenotaphs learning about Remembrance Day in school. My husband and I have raised our children and grandchildren to do the same: to learn about those wars and others since, to learn to honour the fallen, and to learn to remember, lest we forget.
For me, the comparisons are obvious. Our Truth and Reconciliation Commission motto was “For the child taken, for the parent left behind”. As a country, we understand fully the heartache of a mother who has lost a son or daughter to war. We make great efforts to bring home with dignity and ceremony anyone lost, and to honour the parent left behind. Each year, as we did recently, we honour a Silver Cross Mother to represent all grieving parents. We mark Remembrance Day in a national ceremony in all our schools and at monuments throughout the country in honour of all veterans, living or dead. We acknowledge, collectively, those never found with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
When have we ever demonstrated such reverence for residential school children, also lost in a state-sanctioned context of proven harm? We have failed to keep any track of them, much less bring them home in ceremony. We have shown unceremonious disregard for any parent left behind. How many days have we ever gathered together nationally to remember thousands of children who died on Canada's own soil? As for the missing in circumstances still unknown, where is our national monument to the unknown child?
As I have said in other contexts, we are a country still learning to remember. Indeed, we are a country with much still to learn about many things, especially about each other. The 94 calls to action of our Truth and Reconciliation Commission are all about that, and some of them specifically about the missing children.
In this committee's discussions to date, specific reference was made to TRC call to action 80:
We call upon the federal government, in collaboration with Aboriginal peoples, to establish, as a statutory holiday, a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to honour Survivors, their families, and communities, and ensure that public commemoration of the history and legacy of residential schools remains a vital component of the reconciliation process.
Specifically, this call is for a national day for truth and reconciliation.
