When Marie Wilson was appointed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2009, the weight of this honour sat heavily upon her. The accomplished journalist and founder of the first daily television news service in Northern Canada was the TRC’s only non-Indigenous and only female commissioner.
In the early days, she followed. the lead of her fellow commissioners, Justice Murray Sinclair and Chief Wilton Littlechild, trying to find her footing. It wasn’t until an Elder bestowed a gift upon her that her purpose on this journey became clear. “For you, the woman, the mother,” Stella Blackbird of the Keeseekoowenin Ojibway First Nation told her, handing her a braid of sweetgrass and a white eagle feather. “It is white and pure and most sacred, because you are woman and we are the life-givers. Now you are the mother watching out for all our children.”
For over a century, Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced to attend church-run residential schools. They faced physical, psychological and sexual abuse from teachers and school staff. Thousands of children would never leave the schools, and those who did carried their trauma with them. In her new book, North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner, Wilson recounts the six and a half years she spent travelling the country and listening to the testimony of these survivors. Their stories are difficult to hear, but Wilson tells readers: “Do not flinch. Do not hide. I cannot make it softer for you. This is what I witnessed. This history belongs to all of us.”
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The TRC’s goal was to come up with a way forward. After collecting statements from survivors and consulting with Elders and Indigenous councils, in 2015 the TRC revealed its 94 Calls to Action, inviting the government and citizens of Canada to recognize and repair the harms of residential schools. For the commissioners, Wilson writes, the meaning of reconciliation is “its ongoing nature, its spiritual dimension, and its basis in relationships: with self, with each other, and with the natural world.”
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Despite these calls to action almost 10 years ago, Wilson feels Canada has fallen short. Much of the country was stunned by the discovery of unmarked graves at Kamloops, B.C., in 2021 and other former schools since, but not her, and not survivors. “My dismay was that the rest of the country was so shocked,” she writes. Survivors had told of children who had never come home; the TRC’s final report devotes an entire volume to missing children and unmarked burials. “Some days, I have to work hard not to feel discouraged,” reflects Wilson, who is married to a residential school survivor. “But as we Commissioners repeatedly said, reconciliation is hard and takes time.”
This book is for those who want to do the work and take the time. Reconciliation is not something to be accomplished, but something that all Canadians must keep reaching toward each and every day.
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Olivia Vaughan is a former Broadview intern.
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