After a six-year study into the experiences of those affected by residential schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its final report last Tuesday along with 94 recommendations designed to begin the process of reconciliation.
Testimonials from witnesses and residential schools survivors were collected during the lengthy examination of what occurred in residential schools. According to Greg Younging, indigenous studies professor at UBC Okanagan, the commission collected more than 7,000 testimonials through hearings as well as Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) events and gatherings.
According to the TRC’s website, the mandate of the TRC is to document the truth of anyone personally affected by the residential school experience, which includes not only first nations but also students families', the churches and school employees, among others.
“The research teams responsibilities ... were to identify gaps in the research, existing research, on residential schools,” said Younging, who also served as assistant director of research to the Commission until 2012, at which point he had completed his portion of the work.
“We identified 27 gaps and then we sought, then we endeavoured to find experts in the country would best be suited to do that research and to write those reports with the idea that these reports would be feeding in to the final report.”
The research culminated in last week’s events and ceremonies in Ottawa, where the final report and the 94 recommendations were presented. The report ultimately found that the effects of the residential schools amounted to cultural genocide.
Conservative party leader and Prime Minister Stephen Harper was among the audience at the closing ceremonies.
“There hasn’t been an official response from the government of Canada, yet,” said Younging, when asked whether the federal government has made any promises about implementing the recommendations, or even some of them. “This point was also articulated quite well by justice Murray Sinclair on Tuesday: there’s not a great deal of optimism that the current federal government is going to respond in any meaningful way or at all, to this final report and it’s recommendations.”
While the federal government has yet to make promises about what it will do, it has made clear what it does not plan to do. Recommendation 41 calls for an inquiry into the missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls in Canada. According to Younging, “the current government has flat our refused to take this recommendation.”
Another recommendation made by the final report is for the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
“I would say that it, in a roundabout way, it has been refused as Prime Minister Harper has made statements that the United Nations adoption on the rights of indigenous peoples is an aspirational document,” said Younging. “The statement ... can easily be interpreted as meaning that it’s something to supposedly aspire to but not to, you know, implement on the ground.”
The final report also includes recommendations for a new royal proclamation on reconciliation, reforms in the criminal, educational and child welfare systems in their treatment of indigenous peoples, and a commission to oversee the progress of reconciliation.
When asked what he would say to those who are angry after the TRC has found residential schools committed cultural genocide, Younging said that the term cultural genocide itself now has to be considered “and to me the big question around that is, what is reconciliation after cultural genocide?”