Front Burner - Encore: How Murray Sinclair changed Canada

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

Murray Sinclair — an Anishinaabe lawyer, judge, senator, and, most consequentially, the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation commission — died in November at the age of 73. Sinclair helped bring to light the stories of thousands of Indigenous residential school survivors and advocated for justice for them. He's been recognized by many as someone who fundamentally changed the country and what Canadians know about ourselves and our history.Today we have a documentary featuring the voices of three people who knew Murray Sinclair well, about the personal lessons he taught them and how he transformed Canada.We'll hear from journalist and filmmaker Tanya Talaga; Phil Fontaine, the former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations; and Kim Murray, the Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.A national Indian Residential School Crisis Line is available to provide support for survivors and those affected. People can access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour service at 1-866-925-4419.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcriptsThis episode originally aired on November 11, 2025.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem, brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everybody, Jamie here. I hope that you all are enjoying this final day of 2024. Today I want to take the opportunity to replay an episode that I think tried to capture a little bit of what made Marie Sinclair such a monumental figure. His passing was a huge loss, of course, for Indigenous communities,

but also to the country at large. Have a listen. Hi, I'm Allie Janes, and I'm a producer here on FrontBurner. Just a warning before we get started that this episode contains descriptions of abuse at residential schools. Please take care. Tanya Talaga, the Anishinaabe journalist, author, and filmmaker, clearly remembers the first time she met Marie Sinclair in Toronto. He was here because he was interviewing people as part of his role as an investigator into the Thunder Bay Police Board. And I remember it was a meeting room that was above a red lobster, downtown Toronto. And, you know, just totally nondescript place.

And I remember walking down this hallway and just feeling really overcome with emotion that I was finally going to meet this man, this great man who had changed so many lives for my people, for my family, for my community. And I was just totally overcome. I couldn't get my grandma's face out of my head. And I remember holding out my hand and he touched my hand and it was just, I just started to cry. And he touched my hand and I just started to cry. But I thanked him. I thanked him on behalf of my family and of all First Nations families, really, for the work he had done with the TRC and the work he had done in Manitoba.

I mean, everywhere, really. And he laughed and he said that he gets this reaction a lot. He has led the way for so many of us to follow him. I think he is one of the greats. I know he is. And that I believe this country owes him a great debt. One that it may not realize until many years from now. Marie Sinclair, an Anishinaabe lawyer, judge, senator, and, most consequentially,

the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, died last week at the age of 73. This important work of reconciliation is not a one-day affair. As we say, it will take us several generations, as it took us several generations to create this situation that we now face. He's been recognized by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people across Canada as someone who fundamentally changed the country and what Canadians know about ourselves, our history. As commissioners, we and those who accompanied us have been touched by all that we have witnessed, all that we have heard, and all that has been shared with us and with the rest of Canada. We cannot say that we are the same as when we started. We are not. But then again, neither is this country.

As chair of the TRC, he and his fellow commissioners, Wilton Littlechild and Marie Wilson, spent six years traveling across Canada and collecting the testimonies of nearly 7,000 people who survived abuse in the Indian residential school system. As a survivor of the Shubenag, the Indian residential school, I am here to verify we were treated like a herd of animals. I was beaten.

I was told that I was stupid, dumb, lazy, ugly, that I was a savage. I didn't learn a thing. I didn't learn anything in that school. 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children were forced into those institutions. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has now documented the deaths of more than 4,000 children at the facilities. Although Sinclair estimated that the true number could be several times higher.

that the true number could be several times higher. I spoke with three people who knew Sinclair well about the lessons he shared with them personally and how he transformed the country. Well, the fact that it's 10 years after the TRC and everybody still is talking about the calls to action, working to implement the calls to action, knows who Murray Sinclair is, I think says it all. Kimberly Murray is the independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves associated with Indian residential schools. She's a Haudenosaunee lawyer and

she worked at the TRC with S residential schools. She's a Haudenosaunee lawyer, and she worked at the TRC with Sinclair. I think he really changed the narrative in the country. He and the commissioners really started to get people to recognize this is, like, Canada is Indigenous land, that we are an Indigenous country, and settlers need to understand that for us to have respectful relationships. Here's Tanya Talaga again.

He held up a mirror to Canada. He forced Canada to see what it is. He, you know, he used the phrase cultural genocide. He talked about the inequities of what our people have faced since the beginning of Canada, the systemic racism in the bureaucracies, the agencies, the governments, everywhere you look. And he tried to blow it apart with his work. I mean, for so long, people were just going on and no one knew what Indian residential schools were. I mean, we knew, our families knew what they were. We know what the Indian Act is. We know what Indian hospitals are and tuberculosis sanitaria.

But it's like there was this willful blindness in Canada because it was never taught in the schools whatsoever. It was like it didn't happen. And what Murray did was show Canada, try and educate Canada, that this is your truth and face it, right? He always said to me, education got us into this mess, education will lead us out of it. When we crafted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we didn't want to cause further harm to the survivors of the residential school experience. Phil Fontaine is Anishinaabe and was a three-time national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. He was one of the first people in Canada to speak publicly about the abuse that he endured at residential school. And he later played a key role in negotiating the Indian

Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which gave rise to the TRC. The money was important, but that wasn't the first priority. We knew that the lasting legacy of the settlement agreement was going to be the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, because it was about our history. It was about shining light on the darkest chapter in Canadian history. That process had gotten off to a rocky start, with the three original commissioners eventually resigning. That's when Sinclair stepped in. And Murray had come to me and said, look, I would be honoured to serve on the commission.

And that's all I wanted to hear. Fontaine says that for the panellists who had to choose a new chief commissioner, Sinclair was the natural choice. He had a large presence and he carried himself with confidence and but also with humility. He was a humble guy and he was very much about the underdog. And that's what the survivors were in this discussion about the residential school experience and the abuse that our people had experienced in residential schools. We needed someone that could in effect carry the torch for the voiceless and the nameless up to that point. Through an ongoing process of personal, political, and cultural action, we can and we must rectify

the harms of the past and bring about a more just, equal, and inclusive country. I'm going to go. National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together.

To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. While Sinclair is best known for leading the TRC, it's far from his only impact on the country. He chaired or co-chaired three other extremely consequential inquiries. A 2018 investigation into the police board in Thunder Bay, Ontario. This is the one Tanya Talaga mentioned off the top. An inquiry into the deaths of children at a Winnipeg hospital. And the groundbreaking 1991 Aboriginal Justice Inquiry,

which exposed systemic racism in Manitoba's criminal justice system. Kimberly Murray says that that report became incredibly influential on legal cases and inquiries throughout the country. So it was one of the first systematic sort of reviews of the systemic racism against Indigenous people in the justice system. And, you know, at the time I was working at Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, and we cited that report in like every fact that we ever wrote at the Supreme Court of Canada, any level of court, it was always guided us in our work. Sinclair often spoke about the racism he faced in his early days as a lawyer.

Some judges confused him for the accused clients he was representing. Kimberly Murray remembers him talking about that racism the first time she met him, when she was a young lawyer and he was speaking to the Indigenous Bar Association. And he shared this story about how when he was practicing law as an Indigenous lawyer, someone had said to him, do you want to be an Indigenous lawyer or do you want to be a good lawyer? Like, how offensive is that? Right. And so, you know, his whole message to, you know, the Indigenous Bar Association was to never forget where you come from, to make sure you incorporate that into your everyday life. And it doesn't matter whether you're walking in the halls of these colonial institutions or not.

You need to be grounded in who you are. It was only one of many teachings he would eventually share with Kimberly Murray, who went on to become the executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I would say I probably learned the most about courage from that man, just because we had all kinds of nonsense being thrown at us at the TRC, and he just had so much courage. He's like, nope, we're not going there.

She says she watched Sinclair stand up to the federal government on many occasions, taking them to court to get millions of residential school documents released and putting his foot down when he felt the government was interfering in their work. Remember, this was during Harper government. So they weren't friendly to us. We had five audits that were thrown at us by the government at the time. You know, there were times where they were trying to call us into one of these cabinet committee meetings where we had

to justify our spending. And he's like, no, we're in the middle of our mandate. We can do that at the end of the mandate. And, you know, what are they going to do to us? Right. Like, we just wouldn't show up. He's like, no, we're not showing up. I'm like, okay, Murray, whatever. You're in charge. Once, she asked him if he thought that his commission would have been subjected to all of these audits and committee meetings if he weren't Indigenous. Because it just felt like racism, in my view. I mean, how did he respond to that? He was just like, it is what it is. And we're just gonna to keep we're not going to let anything take us off our track.

And this is what's important is getting this mandate done and doing it for the survivors. And so don't let it bother you, Kim. Tanya Talaga remembers from sharing similar lessons with her. That first meeting they had above that red lobster in Toronto ended up leading to a lifelong friendship. He was looking into the Thunder Bay Police Board. I had written this book on what was happening in Thunder Bay and what was happening to our children that were coming down from the north and needed to go to school. And so he said to me, you know, anytime you want to talk or anytime you have

something you can't figure out or whatever, just give me a call. And so we did. And a friendship ensued. And when I was writing All Our Relations, my second book, which is also the Massey Lectures, he helped a lot. And when I would have like crossroads, you know, in a more personal level in my life, I would tell him what happened and ask him. Talaga, who has written several best-selling books, most recently The Knowing, says Sinclair had a profound influence on her work and life. He held the door open. He told us that we have always known as Indigenous people what is best for us, what is good for us as people. We have our own laws. We have our own values and our own spirituality, our own systems of how to live this life.

spirituality, our own systems of how to live this life. Use those. Do not conform to someone else's vision of who we are and who we should be. And never to give up in that. That's what he left me with. Meanwhile. This country, in many parts of the world, sat with us, transfixed by the stories of the survivors who came forward to share their experiences, struck by the fact that what was done to them, what happened to them, what they experienced was as children. In 2015, as Sinclair was presenting the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there was a moment where he paused mid-sentence and took a sharp breath, like he was collecting himself. Each and every one of us who listened to them

would go home at the end of each day and we would hold our children and our grandchildren closer as we proceeded. Not so much to protect them from some invisible force, but to gain the strength that we would need each day to go forth and to listen once again. I asked Talaga about whether she ever spoke to him about that, about the weight of holding these traumatic stories from thousands of survivors. You know, he didn't want to do the TRC, right?

Because he knew what that toll was, what that toll was emotionally and spiritually. You're carrying and you're listening to some of the most horrific things possible. I mean, sexual abuse, physical abuse, death, murder, the death of babies. I mean, it's terrible. And you carry that. Families are gifting that to you because they've had no one else to turn to. No one else has wanted to listen or hear about it. And now you carry that. You know, he wore a medallion and we wear a medallion. So what you're carrying and all of the badness is shielded away from your heart. Murray was a very spiritual man. He was a member of the Midwaywin Society, and so that is the Anishinaabe. It is our, if you will, priests, our knowledge holders, our truth tellers, and it is a very sacred society

that is older than the Catholic Church. It's important to constantly be aware of our own spirituality and who we are as Anishinaabe in order to do this work. And he knew that. And you could see it baked into the TRC. You could see it baked into all the meetings and the sacred responsibility it was to carry those stories. He carried those stories from survivors again in 2021, after the revelation of some 200 potential unmarked grave sites on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. They came from First Nations all throughout the Thompson-Nicola region Friday, reacting to the electrifying news that for some was confirmation of what they'd suspected all along. We don't know how they came to their demise, but we do know that they're children who

deserve to be honored and respected. Sinclair spoke to Matt Galloway, host of the CBC radio show The Currents, a few days after those initial revelations on the Tkemlips to Shikwetmuk First Nation. I've spent most of the last three or four days on the phone with survivors who call me because they're so emotionally distraught at the revelation. And it's triggering survivors. They not only recall stories and recall memories of some of their friends and fellow students who were injured and died at the schools and how they were treated, but they also are now beginning to lose even what little hope they held on to,

Now beginning to lose even what little hope they held onto that maybe the children they never saw again after a certain period of time were not dead and that they simply gone on to a different life somewhere. He estimated he'd fielded three or four hundred calls from survivors. I just sit and listen. There's not much else you can do. Just sit and listen while they cry. And there's many tears. I asked Talaga what that said to her, that he would take all of those painful calls, three or four hundred, in a matter of a few days. That absolutely speaks to his character. I mean, he was always there for survivors. He always answered people by email, he would take their calls.

He meant what he said when he would tell someone, I will get back to you and I will talk to you about it. He took his responsibility as lead commissioner for the TRC so incredibly seriously, right? There's no vacation from seeking justice and equity for our people. And we keep going. And he knew that. And his big heart had room for many. Since that point, other potential grave sites have been identified at dozens of other residential schools across the country. But there's also been a backlash. Some media figures and others online have questioned whether children really were buried at these schools,

or suggested that there's been an outsized moral panic about the potential grave sites. outsized moral panic about the potential grave sites. Kimberly Murray, who just released her final report on unmarked graves a couple weeks ago, strongly refutes this. So do other experts. Her report references survivors' accounts, archival records, site plans, maps, and photos as evidence that many of these institutions did have cemeteries and burial grounds, and that children were indeed buried in them. She's also previously documented Indigenous communities being harassed by denialists.

At a number of our gatherings, community members have talked about some of their experiences, including Kupi Kazemir and Tk'emlups, where they shared that people were showing up onto the grounds that where the summiters believed to be with shovels and wanting to get onto the grounds and dig for themselves to see if there's actually barrels on the ground. And, you know, showing up at all kinds of different hours of the night,

which required them to get 24-7 security on site, you know, an additional cost to the community. Marie says that many of the communities have also been attacked online. She's been the target of violence and aggressive emails herself, especially after the release of her final report on unmarked graves a couple weeks ago. You know, I've been called Satan. I'm going to go to hell. I'm afraid of the truth. The sooner I get to hell, the better. You know, and then like for doing for putting out these reports. Yes. Yes. But the same thing was happening to Murray and to the commissioners

of the TRC when it was in operation. Anytime there was a national event or a hearing that was public, there would be those emails from deniers, you know, just get over it. None of this happened or, you know, Indigenous people, you're better off now because you got sent to these institutions, blah, blah, blah. You know, you've heard them all. because you got sent to these institutions, blah, blah, blah. You know, you've heard them all.

And so, you know, Murray taught me very, you know, you don't need to respond. You don't need to respond to these type of emails. I asked her, as she's been receiving these vitriolic emails in the past couple weeks, if there are any lessons from Sinclair that have given her comfort. Well, he always said we need to just make sure we're on the right side of history. And so I know I'm on the right side of history. And they obviously don't like what I'm saying and what I'm putting out into the public, just like they didn't like what the TRC was saying

and putting out into the public. And they're trying to hide the truth. Phil Fontaine shared a story with me that had happened earlier this year, when Sinclair was already quite ill. The two men had been honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards by Treaty One at a gala in Winnipeg, and they went on stage to receive them. And so Murray spoke before I did, and he and I hadn't talked much during the years he spent

traveling across the country with the commission. And this was a full house. I mean, there were all kinds of people at the convention in Winnipeg. And he looked at me. He was in a wheelchair. And he said to me, in front of all these people, I love you, Phil.

That was it. Touched me deeply. He was so gracious. And I said so. Such a gracious person with so much wisdom, so much kindness, so much generosity,

so much strength, caring, special. So much strength. Caring. Special. In 2015, the TRC laid out 94 calls to action for all levels of governments in Canada and all Canadians to further reconciliation. At the time, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed to fulfilling all of them. And while the Canadian government lists most of those calls as in the process of

completion, the Yellowhead Institute determined last year that just 13 of the 94 had been fully implemented. Talaga says that if Canadians really want to honor Marie Sinclair's legacy, they will commit to fulfilling the rest of those 94 calls. Our children deserve to have clean water, health care and education, a high school that they don't have to move away from their families and their language and everything they know in order to attend. Our children deserve the best in life, to live in a house that's safe, to be tucked in at night by somebody who loves them and told that they belong and that they are worth it. That's what the calls are about. Calls are about growing a Canada that is fair and equitable for our children, for the next seven generations.

That's what Murray's work is about, and that's his legacy to all of us. Who wouldn't want that for this country? Phil Fontaine says that the fact that only 13 of the calls to action have been completed so far doesn't mean this is a failure. It's just a sign to keep going. I think this is a tremendous success. When the report was tabled, Justice Sinclair reminded us that this was not going to be an easy journey, this process that we committed ourselves to. It was like climbing a very steep hill and it was going to take

a lot of people, many people walking forward on this journey to reach the top of the hill. And we've just started. We've only been 10 years in the process. We're dealing with an issue that was around, unknown for so long and affected so many. So I'm not at all surprised that it's taking a real effort. And we need markers along the way to get to the top of the hill. Justice Sinclair is an important marker to guide us up this steep hill. So let us never give in to despair around the issue of reconciliation. Let us recognize that we do have a lot of work to do, but that things are happening and we will continue to make things happening so long as we understand what it is that we still face.

All right, that's all for today. A national Indian residential school crisis line is available to provide support for survivors and those affected 24 hours a day. The number for that is 1-866-925-4419. Sound design for this episode was by Mackenzie Cameron. It was executive produced by Nick McCabe-Locos and produced by me, Allie Jeans. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.