Ambitious mandate for Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

WINNIPEG

Education was a "serious and significant component" negotiated by First Nations ancestors in treaties across Canada, but none expected the 150 years of residential schooling that resulted.

And, said Justice Murray Sinclair in response to a question directed to him, the Canadian government could have fulfilled its educational obligations to First Nations without having carted their children away from their families and way of life.

On Sept. 21, Sinclair made a presentation to a full house at the University of Winnipeg, broadcast live on the Web, outlining the mandate of and the work to be undertaken by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he chairs.

"Education does not mean that you have to give up your identity," Sinclair told a U of W student, who wanted to know if an earlier school system could have been established that would have been beneficial to First Nations' children.

"If the demand by the treaty negotiators to have schools in their communities had been properly honored, those schools would have educated the children in the way that was consistent with the customs and traditions of the people where the schools were. That's the way it should have been."

Sinclair pointed out that education did not become compulsory in Canada until after the Second World War, except if you were an Aboriginal child between the ages of five and 17. From the early 1870s, the law required the government to strip children from their homes and put them in residential schools.

Sinclair stressed that while the majority of residential school students did not experience physical, sexual or psychological abuse at residential schools, they were "all made to feel helpless. They were all made to feel afraid. And the one thing that has come out of the hearings we have been able to conduct ... has been the constant refrain of fear they have talked about."

That fear centred around being taken away from family at a young age and not being able to have contact with siblings, being told "how bad it was to be an Indian person," and having language, culture and tradition taken away. Children were "Christianized" and marriages were arranged between students.

"(The government) did (all of this) with the consent of the (Canadian) people and for survivors and children who were taken to those schools, that is probably the hardest thing for them to understand. It's a recurrent theme we hear all the time: how could you let them do this to me?" said Sinclair.

He noted that government regulations went beyond the school. The law made it impossible for parents to withdraw their children from the residential schools and the law made it illegal for communities to have traditional ceremonies to pray for their children.

"Instead of becoming a tool to strengthen the communities, (education) became a means by which the communities would be undermined in the most extreme way," said Sinclair.

Not only were children who were educated in residential schools unable to function in the communities they had come from because they couldn't relate to their culture or traditional ways, but they felt betrayed by and alienated from their parents and relatives, who gave them up to the residential schools.

"But the most important skill that they lost was the skill to interrelate to each other as human beings and the skill to raise children," said Sinclair. "If you are raised in an institution ... you do not learn how to take care of a home, you don't learn how to raise children, you do not learn how to be a parent, you do not learn how to be a partner. You do not see healthy relationships in those places."

First Nations communities are still feeling the impact of the residential school legacy with high suicide rates, high crime rates, high violence levels, and high gang numbers among other social impacts.

It is Sinclair's desire to see the TRC help communities get past these hurts.

"If we are going to allow communities to heal from this, if we are going to allow the survivors to get past this, if we are going to allow families to recover from this and become fully functioning individuals and families and members of society, then we have to look for ways to get past this. We have to look for ways to get this behind us. And that is why I think we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission."

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Sinclair called the TRC's mandate "ambitious" and noted that it would take longer than the commission's five-year time frame to correct the issues that were created by 150 years of residential schools and government policies based on residential school thinking.

"What we are going to do, though, is we're going to engage you in a discussion with members of the public with this issue. We're going to get you thinking about the issue of reconciliation and we're going to show you how reconciliation can be done, how it can occur. And we're going to talk about your goal in contributing to that reconciliation. That's ambitious. I understand that. But I think at the same time it's important for us to think in those ambitious terms," said Sinclair.

By Shari Narine

Windspeaker Writer