Whereas Indigenous communities have lengthy identified about deaths at residential colleges and the existence of unmarked burial websites, for a lot of Canada’s historical past, the residential faculty system was left unscrutinised.
“Canada normalized the disappearances, deaths and unmarked burials of Indigenous kids for effectively over a century on a scale that’s indefensible,” mentioned Murray, the particular interlocutor, in her ultimate report (PDF) final 12 months.
Eva Jewell, the pinnacle of analysis on the Indigenous-led Yellowhead Institute, mentioned the sensation of normalisation was prevalent even amongst residents of her group, the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation in southwestern Ontario.
Chippewas of the Thames was house to one of many nation’s first residential colleges, Mount Elgin Industrial Faculty.
“It was for a very long time simply type of seen as what was essential to occur to us, to ensure that us to slot in with this dominant society,” she instructed Al Jazeera of the residential faculty system.
However that view started to alter within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, when former college students began talking out about their experiences with the appearance of remedy, Jewell defined.
Then, within the Nineteen Nineties, teams of survivors filed lawsuits towards the Canadian authorities to demand reparations for what that they had endured, culminating within the Indian Residential Faculty Settlement Settlement of 2006.
The biggest class-action settlement in Canada’s historical past, the settlement ushered in what Jewell describes as “the apology period”.
The Fact and Reconciliation Fee of Canada (TRC) – born out of the settlement settlement – was launched in 2007, and a 12 months later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologised for residential colleges within the Home of Commons.
In 2015, after listening to from greater than 6,500 witnesses – together with survivors – over six years, the TRC mentioned in its ultimate report (PDF) that the residential faculty system “was an integral a part of a aware coverage of cultural genocide”.
“Youngsters had been abused, bodily and sexually, and so they died within the colleges in numbers that might not have been tolerated in any faculty system wherever within the nation, or on the planet,” it mentioned.
Simply months after the TRC launched its report, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Social gathering received federal elections on a promise to make fact and reconciliation with Indigenous individuals certainly one of its high priorities.
“We now have to acknowledge the reality: Residential colleges had been a actuality, a tragedy, that existed right here in our nation and we now have to come clean with it,” the prime minister mentioned days after Tk’emlups te Secwepemc positioned the unmarked graves in Kamloops in 2021.
That June, amid worldwide and home outcry, the Trudeau authorities accomplished three of the TRC’s “Calls to Motion”, together with the creation of a Nationwide Day for Fact and Reconciliation.
But Murray, the particular interlocutor, mentioned in her report that there was “systemic failure to doc the historic and ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples inside Canada, together with the failure to coach Canadians about this facet of Canada’s nationwide historical past”.
This “continues to create circumstances the place denialism can flourish”, she warned.
In response to Jewell, the concept underpinning residential faculty denialism – “that Indigenous peoples are within the first place unworthy of being sovereign peoples” – additionally stays firmly embedded within the cloth of Canada.
“We truly, traditionally talking, have solely had a really small window of time the place there was an acceptance that residential colleges had been a dangerous follow,” she instructed Al Jazeera.
“Reconciliation was by no means sturdy sufficient … within the Canadian public consciousness for us to even be saying that denialism is on the rise. It was extra like reconciliation was on the rise, and now it’s fading out,” Jewell mentioned.
“Canadians have to keep in mind that. Reconciliation is just not who they’re. Denialism is who they’re.”