By Anna Mehler Paperny
TORONTO (Reuters) – The judge and senator who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into Canadian residential schools’ abuse of Indigenous children has died. He was 73.
Murray Sinclair, born near Selkirk, Manitoba, was remembered Monday as a powerful voice for survivors of Canada’s residential school system and other colonial legacies.
Sinclair died early Monday morning, according to a statement from his family.
“The impact of our dad’s work reached far across the country and the world. From Residential School Survivors, to law students, to those who sat across from him in a courtroom, he was always known as an exceptional listener who treated everyone with dignity and respect,” the statement reads in part.
“The Honourable Murray Sinclair dedicated his life to repairing Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted on X on Monday.
“He challenged us to confront the darkest parts of our history – because he believed we could learn from them, and be better for it.”
Sinclair, who studied law and became Manitoba’s first Indigenous judge, chaired Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that spent six years investigating residential schools.
The schools operated for more than a century and subjected Indigenous children to physical and sexual abuse and neglect. The last one closed in 1996 but their legacy continues, advocates say, in the form of intergenerational trauma and foster care systems that disproportionately apprehend Indigenous children.
“What took place in residential schools amounts to nothing short of cultural genocide – a systematic and concerted attempt to extinguish the spirit of Aboriginal peoples,” Sinclair said in prepared remarks when he released the commission’s report in 2015.
At the time Sinclair said between 5% and 7% of students who went to the schools died there, although the commission was only able to document about 3,200 of those deaths. Most were buried in unmarked graves on school property.
The commission made 94 calls to action. Most have not been implemented.
“This important work of reconciliation is not a one-day affair. … It will take us several generations,” Sinclair said in a 2022 speech marking the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.
“We in the Indigenous community are in a constant state of grieving, it seems sometimes. For the families that were broken, for the cultures that were torn apart and for the children that never made it home.”
(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
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