TRUTH SEEKER
Justice Murray Sinclair had an almost impossible task: To guide a truth commission into one of the most painful chapters of Canada’s history — aboriginal residential schools. He tells the Ottawa Citizen’s MARK KENNEDY how he rescued a troubled initiative
The story of how Justice Murray Sinclair revived the troubled Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The personal discovery came about three years after Justice Murray Sinclair had begun his work in 2009 as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
By then, Sinclair had heard heart-wrenching stories of cruelty and abuse from aboriginals who had spent their childhood in the residential schools established by the federal government and run by the churches.
And yet, there was one story he had never been told: that of his own father, Henry Sinclair, who died in 1994. One day while Sinclair was visiting his uncle, the truth emerged.
“He revealed during the course of our conversation that my father had been abused in residential schools. And I had no idea until he told me.”
Suddenly, says Sinclair, “everything clicked into place for me to explain why my father was the way he was.”
Now, as the head of a national commission probing one of the most shameful aspects of Canada’s history, Sinclair had unexpectedly discovered a very personal connection.
Since the 1880s, more than 150,000 aboriginal children had been torn from their families and sent to residential schools that, in many cases, resembled violent prisons. Seven generations of children were scarred by physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
For most of the school year, they were not raised by loving parents, which meant they never learned how to become parents themselves. Instead, they were stripped of their own childhoods. The inter-generational fallout was shattering and the effects are still keenly felt today.
“I always thought there was a certain element of my father’s existence in which he wished that somebody would put him out of his misery,” Sinclair told the Citizen in an interview. “It’s like he had given up his zest for life, his wanting to be alive.”
For the past six years, Sinclair’s commission has worked assiduously to reveal the truth behind what happened to people such as his father at the residential schools, and to provide a safe place for school “survivors” to tell their stories. He has marvelled at their personal resilience after suffering so much abuse as children.
It is a story all Canadians need to understand. Yet without Sinclair’s leadership, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — once at death’s door because of an ugly spat between the three original commissioners, who resigned — would not itself have survived.
Today, many see the TRC as a huge success.
Under Sinclair, more than 7,000 former students have testified, either publicly or in private, to the reconstituted commission.
Early on, he moved the commission’s headquarters to Winnipeg from Ottawa — a symbolic act that earned the trust of former students who still associate the nation’s capital with the creators of the school system.
And he altered the structure within the TRC so that its executive director would not be accountable to the federal aboriginal affairs department. The senior administrative job went to Sinclair. He would make all the key decisions.
Thanks to Sinclair’s legal expertise and determination, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was forced by the courts to dig through its own archival records and pass them on to the commission.
On June 2, Sinclair and his fellow commissioners, former journalist Marie Wilson and Alberta Chief Willie Littlechild, will release an executive summary of their report.
The commission’s full report — totalling two million words — will span several volumes and be released later this year.
It will tell Canadians the brutal truth about their past and offer recommendations to federal and provincial governments.
“When people look back on this experience in 25 or 50 years from now, I want them to be able to say that this was a turning point in the history of this country,” says Sinclair. “That this was a time that Canada came of age in its relationship with aboriginal people. That we came to recognize not only that we had been doing it wrong, but from now on, we can do it right.”
Sinclair says he wants his children and grandchildren to one day say they live in a great nation.
“I don’t think we are there yet. Many people think we are. Many people are resentful of the suggestion that we aren’t. But we’re not there. And until we come to terms with this, as a country we are living a false dream.”
When Sinclair spoke with the Citizen recently, it was with humour, candour and thoroughness. His voice was clear and direct, and he often clasped his hands on the round table in front of him.
His life story is one of early adversity, outstanding success as a youth in what was commonly known as a “white man’s” world, and self-discovery as an aboriginal. It sheds light on why many believe he was the perfect person — perhaps the only person — who could effectively lead the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Murray Sinclair was born in 1951 in the Selkirk area, north of Winnipeg, to Henry and Florence Sinclair. When Sinclair was just one year old, his mother died of a stroke.
Henry was devastated and pulled back from the responsibility of raising four children. They were sent to live with his parents, Jim and Catherine Sinclair.
It was there — raised by his grandparents — that Murray Sinclair got his real start in life.
His father, as he would learn only much later, had been in a residential school when he was about 9 or 10; when his grandmother learned of the abuse, she moved the entire family to get him away from the school.
But the damage was done. At the age of 14, Henry lied about his age and volunteered to fight for Canada during the Second World War. “I think he was running away from his memory,” says Sinclair.
Returning home, his father took on extremely dangerous work in mines. Sinclair now recognizes that, too, as part of the damage that stemmed from his father’s school experience.
“When you see people who abuse themselves in the way that he abused himself through alcohol and drugs and also putting himself into situations of danger — living on the streets or going off to war, and the kind of jobs that he undertook — you just knew that he was taking risks that other people wouldn’t necessarily take or would think twice about.”
Murray Sinclair’s grandmother, Catherine, quickly became the most influential person in his life. She gave him an abiding sense of duty and spirituality that burns strongly to this day.
She had gone to a residential school herself, and her family had promised that she would be a nun. When that didn’t happen, she promised one of her sons would be a priest.
That didn’t happen either, so when Murray arrived in her care, he was the one designated to become a priest.
Sinclair says he “embraced” the plan. “I was fervent about it. I went to church often. Two or three times a week. I was an altar boy.”
He believed in the teachings of the Catholic Church, adding, “It’s still part of my life.
“I was always a very spiritual kid. I believed fervently in God. I still do. I was deeply spiritual in my assessment of things.”
Later, says Sinclair, once he became “distracted by the things that distract teenagers,” he had to break the news to his disappointed grandmother that the priesthood was not for him.
But Sinclair would never lose his spirituality; in fact, it became a key weapon in enduring the often horrific testimony he heard later as chair of the TRC.
As a teenager, Sinclair attended Selkirk Collegiate. There were fewer than 10 aboriginals in his graduating class of more than 400. And yet, he was the star — chosen as class valedictorian and athlete of the year. He was succeeding in another man’s culture. Many years later, in a December 2014 article he wrote for a magazine produced by Manitoba teachers, he commented on how it was wrong that he didn’t know the past of his own people.
“As an aboriginal student it denied to me any sense of pride about the role of my ancestors in the history of this part of the world. For my non-aboriginal classmates, it taught them that we were wild and savage and uncivilized, and that given the conditions of aboriginal people in modern society, we had not advanced very far from that state.
“My education lacked relevance for me, and this was so despite my success at it. But that success came at a price. It taught me and others that my people were irrelevant.
“By implication, it caused me to feel that I was, too. It taught us to believe in the inferiority of aboriginal people and in the inherent superiority of white European civilization, and in order to get the grades that I did, I was compelled to repeat that unconscious mantra.”
More recently, Sinclair’s work with the TRC has left him a firm conviction: Canada’s school system must teach about aboriginal culture and the residential schools.
When he was heading off to university — his impoverished family scraped together their meagre savings for tuition — Sinclair’s grandmother had to sign a form permitting him to enrol.
“She said to me, ‘I want you to understand that when I sign these forms, you have to promise me that you will get your education and that you will not become an educated bum. You will do something with this education.’ ”
Sinclair made the promise. To this day, he abides by a moral compass that began with her guidance. “Some things I think she would be pretty firm about in terms of wrong and right. And so that’s always been a guide for me.”
In his 20s, Sinclair worked at a local Friendship Centre, became involved with the Metis, and worked for two years as executive assistant to then-provincial attorney general Howard Pawley.
“I was growing up striving hard to be what everybody wanted me to be. But every time I looked in the mirror, I saw an Indian and I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know who that was. And I needed to find my own sense of identity.”
Eventually, he studied law at the University of Manitoba — though, as he prepared to enter the profession, he had doubts. Sinclair felt the justice system did not treat aboriginals fairly, and he worried that he would simply be hypocritically joining the system.
It didn’t help when, one day as a law student, he was in court defending an aboriginal client whose name was called out by the clerk.
The judge turned to Sinclair instead of the defendant. “So, what are you charged with today?” he asked.
He did become a lawyer, taking on cases from land claims to criminal prosecution. And he made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of Manitoba’s justice system. One speech in 1984 drew the headline: “Police prey on natives, lawyer says.”
Sinclair now says he believed then that aboriginal people were being disproportionately charged with minor offences to fill an unspoken police quota system.
Meanwhile, his sharp mind and strong ethics were drawing attention. But when he was asked to become a judge, he turned down the offer.
He simply loved practising too much as a lawyer. Several months later, he turned down a second offer to join the bench. A year later, he says, he was “cajoled” into accepting a third offer when aboriginal leaders Elijah Harper and Phil Fontaine persuaded him to do it.
In 1988, Sinclair, at age 37, became the first aboriginal judge in Manitoba’s history.
Just months later, he was appointed to co-chair, with Manitoba’s associate chief justice, Alvin Hamilton, an inquiry into how aboriginals were treated by the province’s justice system. Their groundbreaking 1991 report, with 300 recommendations, was sweeping and proposed a native justice system.
In 1995, Sinclair was appointed to head an inquiry into the deaths of 12 infant heart patients at a Winnipeg hospital.
His final report, in 2000, was as thorough as it was damning. He concluded that at least 10 of the babies might have survived with proper treatment.
Beyond his legal conclusions, his personal compassion was also clear. He made a bookmark, which he has kept to this day, containing the names of the 12 babies.
For Sinclair, a married man with four children of his own, it was personally draining. The memory of it is one reason why, several years later when the call of duty again came, he said no.
In 2007, residential school survivors reached an out-of-court settlement in a lawsuit against churches and the federal government. In addition to the former students receiving individual payments under the settlement, the parties to the deal agreed to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission would hear their stories, probe this horrendous stain on Canadian history, and try to lay the groundwork for healing.
Sinclair was asked to be its chair.
“The baby death inquiry had finished (but) was literally fresh in my life,” he recalls. “You have to put aside your emotion while you are doing it. But at a certain point, that emotion has to come back on you and has to find expression.”
And so he turned down the job. “I knew it was going to be emotionally very hard. I knew it was going to be physically very demanding.”
In April of 2008, the federal government announced that Justice Harry LaForme, of the Ontario Court of Appeal, would chair the commission. Two more commissioners were added: native health expert Claudette Dumont-Smith and lawyer Jane Brewin Morley.
It seemed the path was set for reconciliation. On June 11, 2008, the prime minister delivered a lengthy apology in the House of Commons for Canada’s role in the residential schools.
Then, it all fell apart — in a very public way. On Oct. 20, 2008, LaForme sent a resignation letter to then-Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl. He wrote that the commission was destined to “fail” because the two other commissioners refused to accept his “authority and leadership.” He complained of how Dumont-Smith and Morley wanted to use their majority to out-vote him. It was, he warned, an “incurable problem.”
Three months later, in January 2009, Dumont-Smith and Morley announced they, too, would resign. The spat was disastrous for residential school survivors.
People had put so much hope in the commission, Strahl recalls. In Winnipeg, Sinclair, too, had hoped the commission would succeed. Now, he was expecting he’d be asked again to chair it. The call came. “I said, ‘I’ve thought long and hard about it.’ And I said, ‘I feel that the survivors have really been let down by the process that has occurred in the last year.’ “
So Sinclair took the job, but with one condition for the other commissioners: The group would operate on consensus, not two votes against one.
Once the two other commissioners, Wilson and Littlechild, were chosen (and before this was publicly announced) Sinclair brought them together for a few days to get to know each other.
“That was a very wise call on his part,” says Wilson. “Just for us to get a gauge of each other, to read our own internal chemistry.”
Strahl believed the commission was getting a strong team leader.
“His reputation is stellar, but you also realize you’re not getting a patsy here. You’re not getting a guy who is a pushover. You realize that you hire him and he’s going to turn his own course, as it should be.”
Indeed, as chair of the TRC, Sinclair showed his spine at key moments, perhaps none more important than when he saw the federal government walking away from its legal responsibility to provide the commission with millions of archival records on residential schools. He took the Conservative government to court and won.
Looking back on it, Strahl says Sinclair has done a “great job.”
“He had to build this thing from the ground up and get buy-in from 600 First Nations and buy-in from people who were profoundly hurt. The thought of doing that, the magnitude of it, would scare most people off. But he took it on and he took it through right to the very end. He’s had to cajole people and encourage them and sometimes shake his fist at the government. And he’s done it all in good balance. He’s found that magic middle ground.”
Doris Young, who spent 13 years in residential schools and sat on a TRC advisory committee, credits Sinclair for making the commission a success.
“We were allowed to tell the stories about what happened to us ... So society knows about it now nationally, internationally. I feel like we’ve opened a door that will never shut again.”
Sinclair says he knew from the start the commissioners would need to draw on their own spirituality to cope with what they would hear.
“What I said to them is, ‘There are going to be times when we are going to be challenged by this. We’re going to have a lot of difficulty dealing with it at a very personal, gut-wrenching level. And there are going to be times when we ask ourselves whether it’s worth it. We’re going to ask ourselves whether we can do this or not.’ ”
The commissioners have heard many, many painful stories — including “startling information” about children who died, says Sinclair. For example, “some testified about witnessing children being murdered, babies being murdered and thrown in the furnace.”
Much of the testimony was given in private to commissioners and staff, each person often talking for four to five hours. One person spoke for 17 hours.
For those prepared to speak in front of the media, there were also public events.
“My view was that the testimony of the survivors was not merely important to their own individual healing, but that it was also important for the Canadian public to hear,” says Sinclair.
“The public would not be convinced that these atrocities occurred at the schools unless they had an opportunity to hear it from those who were actually victimized.”
Asked how he turned a disaster into a success at the commission, Sinclair is humble.
“It helps when you’re on the side of the angels, so to speak. It helps when you’re fighting a worthy and good cause.”
It also helps that the country is now listening. That wasn’t happening decades ago, when his father was suffering from the after-effects of his school experience.
“Perhaps to a certain extent it was almost like there was an element of normalcy about it,” Sinclair reflects. “It was happening to everybody and therefore, ‘My story is not special.’”
Sinclair’s commission has changed that thinking. What happened to thousands of helpless children, including his own father, was not normal. Each of their stories was special. And each deserved to be told.