IN 1958Eugene Armand from the nation Masket -Krri was delivered to the Indian school of residential premises of St. Michael. There he was assigned a number – 781 – and he lived under a constant threat of abuse. Arcand began to play hockey after noticed that school athletes were the only ones who were properly fed. At hockey tournaments, he and other children from St. Michael were forced to always wear their equipment so that they could not escape. At the final report ceremony, Arkand launched a black and white photo showing a group of thirty-two little boys and girls who are laughing and smiling in the sun-grade of the second class in Saint-Mikhail. Only nine of these children, he said to the crowd, is still alive.
Arcand is one of more than 6,500 survivors and witnesses School of a residential school Which spoke with the commission in truth and reconciliation, when the three commissars, led by Murray Sinclair, spent six years, collecting evidence and millions of federal records. On December 15, 2015, TRC submitted his final report on the impact of residential schools, just eighteen years after the last institution closed its doors.
What the TRC collected was records of a system designed for the violent assimilation of children of indigenous peoples, including at least 3200 that died there. Sinclair, who died in November last year, argued that the true number of deaths was much higher.
How Justin TrudeauThen, the recently elected prime minister accepted the Sinclair's report, he thanked the survivors for their courage, saying: “Today there is a reason for hope … We need nothing more than a complete renewal of relations between Canada and indigenous peoples.” He promised to “fully realize” Ninety -four calls to action The final report, which sets out the changes necessary to restore these relations.
But ten years later, most of these calls were not an answer. Trudeau left, making his shameful exit in the midst of an international crisis of relations between Canada and the USA. Mark Carni took his place and published a new vision of Canada as an economic energy-plan, which requires the indigenous peoples and their resources of territories in order to get aboard. Meanwhile, the indigenous peoples are furious with new national laws, in particular, the law on the construction of Canada, part of the C-5-boiled bill, apparently fully go around your rightsWith the leaders who go through protests, file legal problems and go to the Prime Minister. There is a separate atmosphere of national impatience: can we not get away from this reconciliation? Didn't Canada say enough, is done enough? What can the indigenous peoples complain about?
IT seems to be Each new federal regime in Canada is accompanied by reckoning with fraught relations between indigenous peoples and crown. TRC, launched in 2008, was not the first attempt to improve this dynamics. In 1982, after the eighteen -month international campaign of indigenous peoples, Section 35 He was added to the law on the Constitution, confirming, if not clearly defined, the existence of the inherent innate rights of natives and contracts. And in 1991, the royal commission on the natives of the people was created to “restore justice to relations between the Aborigines and not aboriginal in Canada” after Kanehsatà: Ke ReviepanceThe seventy -eight -eight days on the camps of the Iroquois camps by the police of Quebec, the Royal Canadian Police and the Canadian army are also called the Oka’s crisis.
After five years and consultations in almost a hundred communities of indigenous peoples, RCAP issued a report with 440 recommendations. The response of the federal government was muffled, and the vast majority of recommendations have never been considered or implemented.
A year later, in 1997, the federal government finally published its “Aboriginal Action Plan” in response to RCAP, which included the obligation to solve the role of Canada in the school school. Ten years later, an agreement was concluded on settlement in Indian residential schools, which offered compensation to all applicants who attended a housing school, as well as a secondary compensation avenue for the survivors who testified about physical or sexual violence. The latter received 38,000 complaints.
TRC was another condition of this Agreement. “Canadians believe that [TRC] He came out of the kindness of Canada, and not as a product of the largest lawsuit about class actions in the history of Canada, ”says Yan Mosby, associate professor of history at the Toronto Capital University. Since the commission’s budget went through settlement, “survivors spent their own money” for the existence of TRC, he says.
When Mosby first thought to check how many challenges to TRC was completed in 2016, he was surprised to find that no one was tracking progress. “I remember how they were in the room when they released the final report, and all these government ministers and leaders of churches and other important people were there, dedicated to completing the work of TRC. It was very emotional. The tears of politicians seemed sincere, ”he recalls. This is a general dynamics between Canada and the indigenous peoples: the conflict that revealed the continued injustice, which is faced with the indigenous peoples, which caused the confidence of changes from the embarrassed nation – compensation, which decreased in tandem with public pressure.
Ninety-four TRC calls to action take place in many sectors-condensation of children, education, sports, business and each is directed to a certain level of government. In 2016, Mosby discovered that five calls were completed; In 2017 and 2018, three more were fully implemented, as a result of which the total number is up to eight. Then, in 2019, he and colleague Eva Juell, also a teacher TMU and Anishinaabekwe from Deshkan ZiBiing, published Their first report Through the Yelloued Institute, the research and educational center, headed by indigenous peoples, based at the university. Their fifth report, published in 2023, definite This is only thirteen calls completed – and not one of them this year. At this speed, according to them, Canada will not fulfill all calls until 2081. (Federal government said In December 2024, “more than 85 percent” out of seventy -six calls, for which they were directly or partially responsible, were “now completed or are being conducted.”)
Estimates from CBC And non -profit Indigenous patrol landscape List only fourteen or fifteen calls as complete, and in some cases Canada moves back: APTN reported that fifteen indigenous peoples died in custody in the police during the three-month period in 2024, and the indigenous peoples are even More excessively represented In the prison system than they were ten years ago. Federal financing to search for grave in former residential schools was almost reduced by more than 83 percent last year before the community was restored, and the expert committee to support searches was protected in February.
On the last pages of their report, Mosby and Juell asked the question: “Perhaps the ongoing failure of Canada to keep their promises when it comes to calls to action, emphasizes the limits of“ reconciliation ”as a basis for significant and long -term changes,” they write. “And we should ask ourselves: should we just refuse reconciliation” in general? “
THat question delayed. Today, the bestseller in the Amazon category “First Nations in Canada” is not a fiction or scientific literature from the author of the indigenous peoples; This is a book that denies and distorting the history of residential schools. Endism at a school school Currently, it is a common occurrence, and, based on emails that I receive whenever I write about the history of these institutions, an increasing number of Canadians strive to believe that the evidence collected by TRC and confirming federal and church records are a deception.
Since Donald Trump threatens and blasphemes Canada, federal and provincial leaders responded with the legislation, which, in the visible one, completely sweeps the rights of indigenous peoples with shocking speed. Stunning inequality remains, many of which are associated with the system of the school school system – the excessive representation of children of the indigenous peoples; Higher prison, poverty and dependence, as well as those that are clearly the fault of governments, such as inadequate financing of services and housing for reserves. Many communities of indigenous peoples in Canada are still in long-term recommendations for alcohol consumption years later, after the federal government promised to allow them, while the leaders of the provinces in Albert and Ontario argue that federal legislation on pure water in reserves may undermine business interests. Since Karni determines the direction for the relationship of Canada with indigenous peoples over the next few years, it is worth thinking about where we are going, until it was too late to change the course.
The work of Mosby and Juella, monitoring the implementation of prizes to action, reveals an unimportant scheme: when national attention is paid to reconciliation, a change occurs. Five calls were completed in the first year after the publication of the final report by TRC; Five more were completed in 2021 and 2022, after the opening of the nameless graves in the territory of the former school of the Indian residential school of Camps and the global outpouring of grief and horror. “When we talked about the truth and reconciliation before violations in Camallups, I noticed that in 2022, Arkand wrote in 2022.
Old regimes do not give me hope, but the children do. This is an incentive for the truth and reconciliation and hope of its implementation. Ten years ago, Sinclair said: “The story of the truth of residential schools in this country is the history of the stability of children.” For Theland Kicknosway, the then twelve-year-old drummer from the First Nation Nation Island Walpole, he said: “Understand it loudly and do it forever, my young friend will come to understand what could always be because of you.”
