Aboriginal reconciliation in Canada is a project with numerous parallels to the Australian experience. Notably they include a conceptual looseness around the meaning of 'reconciliation' itself. Canada's reconciliation project got a serious roll-on in June, when the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) held its first hearings into the so-called Indian Residential Schools at the Forks in Winnipeg.
The TRC has been a long time coming in Canada. These church-run schools began forcibly co-opting Aboriginal children in the 1870s. When the last one closed in 1996, about 150,000 children had been through the system. Along the way, the anger of survivors became a groundswell that forced an out-of-court settlement with the churches and the federal government in 2006. That agreement mandated the TRC, along with funds for commemoration and compensation provisions totalling CA$1.9 billion.
Over the four days of the event, survivors of the schools 'told their stories' before 'sharing circles' of their peers, or in private testimonies delivered out of the public gaze. All these testimonies showed that Canadian policies of removing children from their homes and depriving those homes of children involved a fundamental violence.
A relatively fortunate minority of survivors took pains to assert they had not been abused at their residential schools, typically attributing this to the goodness of specific teachers. They still testified to the basic trauma of the separation from family, friends, culture and language, which remained a burden on the rest of their lives.
But most survivors who testified complained of shocking treatment. Violence was the norm, not an exception. Most described sexual abuse by the staff employed to teach and look after them and/or by fellow students, themselves already brutalised. Testimonies at the Winnipeg event leave no doubt that Canada's churches were heavily culpable for the abuse — particularly the Catholic religious orders, who ran 70 per cent of the schools.
Many children who went into residential schools did not come out alive, without any record of escape or death. Before the Winnipeg event, the TRC's chief commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair declared that the missing may number 3000 children, and that it would be an urgent priority to findout what happened to them.
Historical witnesses from the early 20th century onwards reported that less than 50 per cent of children survived at some residential schools, especially in the west. At the Winnipeg event, a survivor from one prairie school remembered the graves on its grounds. Only in