Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

The TRC was established in June 2008 as one of the mandated aspects of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA). As part of the negotiated IRSSA, a $60 million budget over five years was established for the work of the TRC to take place. The commission was founded as an arms-length organization with a mandate of documenting the history and impacts of the residential school system. About 70 percent of the schools were administered, with government funds, by the Catholic Church. As explained in the 2013 Spring Report of the Auditor General of Canada, a key part of the TRC mandate included "creating as complete a historical record as possible of the residential school system and legacy." It was also tasked with preserving collected records documenting the residential school system and those created over the course of the commission's work for future management at a national research centre. The mandate of the TRC included hosting seven national reconciliation events, collecting all relevant archival documents relating to the residential schools from church and government bodies, collecting statements from survivors, and overseeing a commemoration fund to support community reconciliation events. The TRC's mandate emphasized preserving and exposing the true history of residential schools. In March 2008, Indigenous leaders and church officials embarked on a multi-city Remembering the Children tour to promote activities of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. On January 21–22, 2008, the King's University College of Edmonton, Alberta, held an interdisciplinary studies conference on the subject of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. On June 11 of the same year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the role of past governments in administration of the residential schools. Later, in 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also vocalized an apology to those who were victims of the residential schools. The commission's mandate was originally scheduled to end in 2014, with a final event in Ottawa. However, it was extended to 2015 as numerous records related to residential schools were provided to the commission in 2014 by Library and Archives Canada following a January 2013 order of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The commission needed additional time to review these documents. The commission held its closing event in Ottawa from May 31 to June 3, 2015, including a ceremony at Rideau Hall with Governor General David Johnston. Testimonies The mandate of IRSSA required the TRC to gather testimonies from the residential school's survivors. The testimonies were claimed to be necessary in order for the mandate to create a historical record of the legacy and impacts of the residential schools. most from those who had attended the schools after the 1940s. The testimonies were gathered in both public and private settings, such as community hearings, sharing circles, Commissioners Sharing Panels, etc. These regularly consisted of memories of being stripped of their language and culture as well as experiences of abuse, sexual assault and malnutrition. In this context, reconciliation refers to the act of restoring a once harmonious relationship. The commission came under criticism for using the term in their name, however, as it implies that there was once a harmonious relationship between settlers and Indigenous Peoples that is being restored, while that relationship may never have existed in Canada. The use of reconciliation thereby perpetuates such myth by continuing to deny "the existence of pre-contact Aboriginal sovereignty." Although Dumont-Smith and Morley denied the charge and initially stayed on, both resigned in January 2009. On June 10, 2009, Murray Sinclair was appointed to replace Laforme as chairperson of the TRC. Marie Wilson, a senior executive with the Workers' Safety and Compensation Commission of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and Wilton Littlechild, former Conservative Member of Parliament and Alberta regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations, were appointed to replace commissioners Dumont-Smith and Morley. Sandy White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota adoptee from the Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota Honorary Witness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools in Canada. Missing Children Project The TRC contributed to not only educating the public about the reality of the residential schools, but also led to creating organizations such as the Missing Children Project. Over the course of the residential schools, thousands of children died as a result of diseases, suicide, malnutrition, etc. In 1917, the death rates stopped from being documented by the Department of Indian Affairs. The Missing Children Project is an organization that is dedicated to identifying the children who died during their time at the residential schools. The documentation is done through intensive research as well as analyzing the different conditions the students were facing. == Calls to action ==

In June 2015, the TRC released a summary report of its findings and "94 Calls to Action" to "redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation." The calls to action were divided into two categories: "Legacy" and "Reconciliation." Legacy The Legacy section of the calls to action focused on redressing the harms resulting from the Indian residential schools (IRS), the proposed actions are identified in the following sub-categories: • Child welfare: Residential schools often served as foster homes rather than educational settings. According to a 1953 survey, 4,313 children of 10,112 residential school children were described as either orphans or originated from broken homes. The sole residential school in Canada's Atlantic Provinces, in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was one such school, taking in children whom child welfare agencies believed to be at risk. There is an ongoing legacy of state intervention in Indigenous children lives via the child welfare system. By 2011, 3.6 percent of all First Nations children under the age of 14 were in foster care, compared to 0.3 percent for non-lndigenous children. In 2012, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child voiced concern on Canada's removal of Indigenous children from their families as a 'first resort'. • Education: Due to limited funds, a shortage of trained teachers, and an emphasis on manual labour, many students in the IRS system did not progress beyond a rudimentary education. When residential schools were phased out, Indigenous youth enrolled in provincial schools dropped out in large numbers. The education focused calls to action are to address the current school completion rates and the income gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. In addition, the calls to actions request the elimination of the ongoing discrepancy in funding of Indigenous education. • Language and Culture: Children in residential schools were not allowed to speak their native languages or practice their culture. According to UNESCO, 36 percent of Canada's Indigenous languages are listed as being critically endangered. The calls to action request increased funding for educating children in Indigenous languages and also request that post-secondary institutions provide degrees and diplomas in Indigenous languages. • Health: Healthcare for IRS students varied considerably between schools and between different decades. After the 1940s, health facilities and health care workers became more prevalent. Some schools had a nurse on staff and an infirmary, with doctors who paid visits. Testimony before the TRC reveals that a great many children were subjected to sexual and physical abuse while attending a residential school. It is often claimed that the effects of the trauma have been passed on to the children of those students. The calls to action in this connection connect the poor healthcare provided at residential school to the current gap in health outcomes for Indigenous people in Canada. • Justice: When the Canadian legal system was tasked with investigating abuse claims, few prosecutions resulted from police investigations. In many cases, the federal government and the RCMP compromised the investigations. Given the statutes of limitations, many acts of abuse have gone unpunished because the children did not have the means or possess the knowledge to seek justice for their abuses. The calls to action around justice seek to extend the statutes of limitations and to reaffirm the independence of the RCMP. They also speak to the need to develop culturally appropriate justice systems. Reconciliation The Reconciliation section of the calls to action were focused on creating better relations between the federal and provincial governments of Canada and Indigenous nations, with an emphasis on creating a reconciled relationship. The proposed actions are identified in the following sub-categories: • Canadian governments and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People • Royal proclamation and covenant of reconciliation • Settlement agreement parties and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples • Equity for Aboriginal people in the legal system • National council for reconciliation • Professional development and training for public servants • Church apologies and reconciliation • Education for reconciliation • Youth programs • Museums and archives • Missing children and burial information • National centre for truth and reconciliation • Commemoration • Media and reconciliation • Sports and reconciliation • Business and reconciliation • Newcomers to Canada Implementation The degree of implementation has been assessed differently by observers. Two of the most prominent asessements are conducted by the Yellowhead Institute at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The government also conducted their own assessment. Yellowhead Institute assessment In 2016 and 2017, historian Ian Mosby evaluated how many of the calls to action had been completed at the first and second anniversary marks. In 2016, he concluded that only five calls were complete and three calls were partially complete, leaving 86 calls unmet. In 2017, his evaluation showed that only 7 of the 94 calls had been completed. At the end of 2020, his evaluation (together with Eva Jewell) is that only 8 calls had been fully implemented. CBC assessment In 2018 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation established Beyond 94, a website to track the status of each call to action. As of March 2018, 10 were marked as completed, 15 were in-progress with projects underway, 25 had projects proposed, and 44 were unmet. As of July 29, 2019, the site has been updated to mark 10 calls to action completed, 21 in-progress with projects underway, 37 in-progress with projects proposed, and 26 "not yet started." , the CBC has marked the following 24 calls to action as "in progress": == Final report ==

In December 2015, the TRC released its final report. The report was based on primary and secondary source research undertaken by the commission and testimonies collected from residential school survivors during TRC events. The final report summarized the work of the TRC and included the following sections: • "Honouring the Truth, Reconciling the Future," • "What We Have Learned," • "The Survivors Speak," • "The History, Part 1 - Origins to 1939," • "The History, Part 2 - 1939 to 2000," • "The Inuit and Northern Experience," • "The Métis Experience," • "Missing Children and Unmarked Burials," • "The Legacy," and • "Reconciliation." The report noted that an estimated 150,000 children attended residential schools during its 120-year history and an estimated 3200 of those children died in the residential schools. From the 70,000 former IRS students still alive, there were 31,970 sexual or serious sexual assault cases resolved by Independent Assessment Process, and 5,995 claims were still in progress as of the report's release. The ambiguity of the TRC's phrasing allowed for the interpretation that physical and biological genocide also occurred. The TRC was not authorized to conclude that physical and biological genocide occurred, as such a finding would imply a legal responsibility of the Canadian government that would be difficult to prove. As a result, the debate about whether the Canadian government also committed physical and biological genocide against Indigenous populations remains open. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) was established at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, as an archive to hold the research, documents, and testimony collected by the TRC during its operation. The NCTR opened to the public in November 2015 and holds more than five million documents relating to the legacy of residential schools in Canada. == Criticisms ==

A number of critiques about the TRC have been put forward by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, ranging from its scope and motivating framework to its methodology and conclusions. Professor Glen Coulthard, a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, has argued that the TRC's focus on the residential school system positioned reconciliation as a matter of "overcoming a 'sad chapter' in [Canadian] history," which failed to recognize the ongoing nature and impact of colonialism. For Coulthard, reconciliation being tied solely to the residential school system and actions of the past explains why Prime Minister Stephen Harper was able to apologize for the system in 2008 and, a year later, claim that there is no history of colonialism in Canada. Professors Brian Rice, a member of the Mohawk Nation, and Anna Snyder agree with Coulthard's critique of the focus on residential schools as the singular issue to reconcile noting that the schools were only "one aspect of a larger project to absorb or assimilate Aboriginal people". Many writers have observed the way the TRC historicizes the events of colonialism and fails to emphasize that uneven Indigenous-non-Indigenous relationships are perpetual and ongoing. This wrongly implies that colonialism is not ongoing and is not a continuing part of current government policy. Because Indigenous "recognition and reconciliation, from a Canadian perspective, [is] focused only on the wrongs of the past, and the situation as it exists today is ignored." Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology and Rodney A. Clifton, former residential school employee in the 1960s, co-penned an editorial questioning the truthfulness of the Report. In it, they held that, while the residential school program had been harmful to many students, the commission had shown "indifference to robust evidence gathering, comparative or contextual data, and cause-effect relationships," which resulted in the commission's report telling "a skewed and partial story". According to Rubenstein and Clifton, the Truth and Reconciliation Report did not compare its findings with rates and causes of mortality among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children attending public schools. Rubenstein and Clifton noted that the report also failed to consider Indian residential schools were typically located in rural areas far from hospitals, making treatment more difficult to acquire. They describe it as "bad research". In an essay defending John A. Macdonald from the claim of having committed genocide, Patrice Dutil, a professor of politics and public administration at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), claimed that the commission was "yet another very expensive prise de conscience designed to keep the light on a painful aspect of the Canadian experience", and that the volumes on residential schools "barely pretends to be an academic document." He went on to claim that "The study makes no attempt to put things in perspective, to show how practices evolved or to compare the Canadian experience with that of other countries. It is, rather, a blunt catalogue of findings typical of Royal Commissions, providing a long list of mini-studies of various phenomena with scarcely an academic veneer." In March 2017, Lynn Beyak, a Conservative member of the Senate Standing Committee of Aboriginal Peoples, voiced disapproval of the final TRC report, claiming that it had omitted an "abundance of good" that she thought was present in the schools. Her comments were widely criticized, including by Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Carolyn Bennett and leader of the New Democratic Party Tom Mulcair, though some Conservative senators claimed her opinions were an expression of free speech. The Anglican Church also raised concerns, stating in a release co-signed by bishops Fred Hiltz and Mark MacDonald: "There was nothing good about children going missing and no report being filed. There was nothing good about burying children in unmarked graves far from their ancestral homes." In response, the Conservative Party leadership removed Beyak from the Senate committee underscoring that her comments did not align with the views of the party. == Legacy ==

In August 2018, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society announced the release of the Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada, an encyclopedia with content including information about indigenous lands, languages, communities, treaties, and cultures, and topics such as the Canadian Indian residential school system, racism, and cultural appropriation. It was created to address the Calls to Action, among them the development of "culturally appropriate curricula" for Aboriginal Canadian students. The Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland have established truth and reconciliation commissions to address the colonialization of the Saami people which are modelled on the Canadian commission. Norway created its commission in 2018, and Sweden and Finland followed in 2021. == See also ==