The Department of Indian Affairs is actually one of the oldest continuous institutions in the history of Canada. It's been around since 1755 in various forms. It has changed and evolved many times, but almost always has had the same core function until relatively recently, which is the integration and assimilation of indigenous peoples into the broader Canadian society.
Over the years, the department, in its many forms, has always maintained this core role of “caring for” in an extremely paternalistic way, from the creation of schools to dictate how indigenous children should be educated to governance structures that are imposed through the Indian Act to limit how communities themselves can actually govern themselves to retain that power within the department itself.
This largely created an institution, a cultural institution, inside the department, where the department always thought it was right, so it acted in what it thought was the best interest, but often this best interest was not what was actually best for the community. It was what was best for the state or for the government at the time.
Over time, we've moved considerably away from these earlier concepts, especially since the 1950s and the 1960s, when we started to realize—“we” as the department—that the Indian Act was much more harmful than protective. We have been, over time, amending various pieces of legislation and creating new structures to address that, but as the royal commission pointed out, the structure still remains. We are still operating under the exact same structure as was established in 1966 through the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development Act.
This is an opportunity to actually break that structure to create new structures and to build on new relationships going forward that have a foundation of the original intent and the original relationships between settlers and indigenous peoples in Canada.