The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report was publicly revealed during final exams last semester. Those who attended the event at the Shaw Centre in downtown Ottawa could not help but be pulled into the heavy atmosphere that encapsulated the simultaneous tears and laughter of the Indian residential school survivors.
As the report was unveiled, the head of the commission, Justice Murray Sinclair, reemphasized Canada’s rite of passage into modern times was to partake in the reconciliatory process of repairing Indigenous-Canadian relations. Echoing the words of the report’s introduction, Sinclair reminded Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that reconciliation is a Canadian problem, not an Aboriginal one. We witnessed the Prime Minister’s guilt and heard his promise to fix the relationship between Canada and its Indigenous nations.
As a budding academic who has analyzed the report and was a spectator to the events unfolding that day, I had heard it all before.
After all, I am the son of a survivor. I have had to witness first-hand my family and relatives, my people and nation suffer the consequences of this “education” system. At the risk of revealing too much of myself, I have suffered through the consequences, finding myself at the end of the rope caused by addictions that formed while I tried to escape a society that has always been hostile to Indigenous people and our ways of life. Luckily, with the help of others I have been able to come back from the fringe.
Others I’ve known were not so lucky.
Yet despite this knowledge and studying the effects of the Indian Residential School system, my experiences still felt isolated. The revealing of the final report brought the stark realization that whatever happened to the survivors in the residential school system was not isolated and it was all too painfully real. The Canadian state truly did try to “kill the Indian in the child,” proven by the two empty chairs placed at the front of the room, reserved for those who did not survive.
The revealing of the TRC’s final report was a truly eye-opening experience.
As academics, especially in the social sciences, it is too easy to criticize the structures and operations of truth commissions, or the actions and inactions of the Canadian state towards Indigenous people. Many scholarly journals critique truth commissions for their narrow definitions of justice. Likewise, countless work has been written on Canada’s poor treatment of Indigenous people.
What are often overlooked are the lived experiences that survivors had to face. Those who came before me, for example, experienced one of the harshest realities this country has ever seen. We as academics can criticize all we want but Canada’s TRC was for the survivors who needed it. If this process was needed by survivors to heal, we should support it without criticizing the process too much.
While it is true that proper critical analyses can give way to improving such structures and operations, we must also realize there are no fast, easy answers to this situation. In spite of the Prime Minister’s comments, there is no magic reset button that will fix broken relationships—whether on a nation-to-nation basis or within ourselves and our families. If Canadians truly want reconciliation, the process will take time and effort.
This means that we should hear the stories of the survivors, even if it is through the imperfections of the TRC. If it gives survivors peace in this world, I will gladly listen.
