‘Reconciliation is not dead,' TRC commissioner tells Cape Breton audience

Hamilton Spectator

23-05-2025

She said that she still has nightmares.
For six-and-a-half years, as a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner (TRC), Marie Wilson and her two counterparts, Murray Sinclair and Chief Wilton Littlechild, heard testimony of 7,000 survivors of Canada's residential school system.
'All I had to do was hear about what happened,' she said. 'I didn't have to live it. Also, I'm an adult. They were children.'
Wilson spoke twice in Sydney on Tuesday as she travels the Maritimes introducing her book: 'North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner.'
She lamented that she is a 'grown up' with the ability to reach out to resources and supports, while for so many years, the injured children kept their stories to themselves.
'Yes it was hard. Yes, I have nightmares. But I also have tools.'
The children didn't have those and for many, their healing journeys couldn't start until they began to open up about their experiences. The TRC gave them a safe space to speak openly.
RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS
Wilson, a former journalist, was the only non-Indigenous person on the panel. The TRC was established to hear testimony from survivors of Canada's residential school system that forcefully removed and institutionalized children from their Indigenous homes.
Many of the children were physically, emotionally and sexually abused. Some died while in the care of the schools and their bodies never returned to their families.
Wilson's book is based on her own experiences and feelings during the six years from 2009 – 2015 when she travelled the country listening to survivors and writing a report. An excerpt from her book describes a familiar story. In his testimony, Saskatchewan's
Fred Saskamoose
, the first status Indian to ever play in the NHL, said:
'I intended not to cry. Yesterday, when I heard the testimonies, I cried with them. Does an old man cry? Give me back my life. I want my childhood back. I want my innocence back.'
Wilson describes: 'This 78-year-old father, grandfather, and great-grandfather was back to being a little kid.'
Saskamoose described being six years old and watching a big truck with crying children inside it pull up to his house escorted by the RCMP. They loaded he and his brother into the truck and remembers his grandfather being pushed aside when he tried to grab him out of their grasp. The police threatened to throw his grandfather in jail if he intervened.
What happened to him after was 10 years of horrible abuse at the hands of authorities and priests.
And yet, he triumphed over the abuse and violence and lived long enough to see himself inducted into the Canadian Native Hockey Hall of Fame. But the healing really began after he testified at the TRC and he thanked the commissioners for treating his long-held scars. His story of brutality was only one of thousands the commissioners heard.
TRIGGERING BAD MEMORIES
Wilson is accompanied on her tour by her husband,
Steve Kakfwi
of the Dene Nation, who is former Premier of the Northwest Territories and an accomplished singer/songwriter. He is also one of the 150,000 residential school survivors. In her book's introduction, she writes that she couldn't share the stories she heard with her husband, for fear of triggering his own bad memories.
She also wrote the book mindful of not triggering any readers who have suffered childhood abuse.
About 30 people met in a cozy room at the Membertou Trade and Convention Centre to hear Wilson read excerpts from her book and answer questions from Stephen Augustine, Hereditary Chief on the Mi'kmaq Grand Council and associate vice-president of Indigenous Affairs and Unama'ki College at Cape Breton University.
Four residential school survivors were in the room where she spoke. And she acknowledged the intergenerational survivors – children and grandchildren and family members who may also have been there. She said her book and tour is a commemoration of the lives lived 'and we must not forget.'
'Reconciliation is an on-going, individual and collective process among government, churches and people – all of us,' she said.
WORK CONTINUES
Wilson said she never considers that her work with the commission is done.
'I can't walk away and say I'm done,' she said. 'I wrote it down so the children and grandchildren can read it and so that the deniers cannot say it didn't happen.'
As a result of the commission's work, 94 Calls to Action were published in 2015 and tabled with the federal government. They were intended to acknowledge the harms done to Indigenous children and families and ensure that it never happens again. Only a handful of recommendations have been enacted so far.
Wilson is concerned that truth and reconciliation wasn't an issue in the last federal election.
'We cannot let Canada slide back into easy ignorance,' she said. 'We must ensure that this kind of knowledge is never gone. Reconciliation is not dead unless we kill it. And I won't be a part of that.'