Reflections on reconciliation

Abstract

From 2009-2015, it has been my greatest honour to serve as a Commissioner of the historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The TRC’s huge job has had three key parts: to research, document and record the facts and impacts of over a hundred years of forced residential schooling for Indigenous children; to preserve all that information, and use it to educate the people of Canada about what we have learned; and to ‘inspire reconciliation’, so that the individuals affected, and our country as a whole, could recover from the past and live in respectful relationships with each other going forward.