RUBENSTEIN: Murray Sinclair's tarnished legacy

Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of ManitobaMembers of the public paid their respects Sunday to Murray Sinclair, the late senator and provincial judge who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC.) The Winnipeg memorial was jointly sponsored by the Canadian and Manitoba governments, and was attended by Prime Minister Trudeau, Her Excellency Governor General Mary Simon and other dignitaries, along with Sinclair's family and friends.Following a lengthy illness, Sinclair died in Winnipeg at the age of 73, surrounded by family members.Murray Sinclair had a long and celebrated public career. In 1990, he became the first indigenous judge in Manitoba — the second in Canada — when he was appointed an associate chief judge of the provincial court. In 2001, he rose to what was then called the Court of Queen’s Bench. He went on to become Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2009-2015, that was mandated to record the history, operation, and legacy of the country’s Indian Residential Schools (IRSs.) The Commission produced a still widely cited six-volume report in 2015. In 2016, the highly decorated Sinclair was appointed to the Canadian Senate. He retired from that role in 2021.I was tempted to give Sinclair’s death a pass based on the well-known admonition not to speak ill of the dead. A reminder from Roman Catholic priest Raymond J. de Souza, a National Post columnist, that this does not apply to famous public figures, changed my mind.My need to set the record straight was also reinforced by tributes from indigenous groups, their leaders and the prime minister.Sinclair “was instrumental in bringing to light the painful history of Canada’s residential schools and the impact they had on generations of Indigenous people,” the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations said.Saskatoon Tribal Council Chief Mark Arcand said all of Canada “owes Sen. Sinclair their thanks,” adding that Sinclair’s “lifetime of service helped put us on a path to better outcomes for our people who still are suffering from the effects of residential schools.”In his own statement, Trudeau said, “As the chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he [Murray] … listened to residential school survivors and he made sure Canada heard their stories. ‘Education got us into this mess,’ he said. 'Education will get us out.’ ” Education is also needed to highlight Murray Sinclair’s roots. According to a tweet from Justice Minister Arif Virani, Sinclair was “raised in the culture and tradition of his people, the Anishinaabe.”This is a matter of interpretation. Born in 1951, he was raised in Selkirk, Manitoba, by his paternal grandparents Henry James and Catherine Sinclair (nee Simard). Selkirk had once been a reserve, but had not been so since 1907. Nor, legally speaking, was his grandfather a Status Indian, having chosen to enfranchise (i.e., to voluntarily surrender his Indian Status) in the 1930s. It was not until his later years that his grandson, Murray, was admitted into membership in the Peguis First Nation, 190 kilometres north of Winnipeg.His grandmother Catherine Simard was Metis, and taught him to speak Michif. Sinclair worked for Metis organizations in his youth, and identified as Metis for most of his life. According to Sinclair, his grandmother Catherine attended a residential school 'on the convent side'. Her experience was so rewarding that she wanted her grandson to become a Catholic priest. Sinclair had to fight her to obtain permission to go to university instead.Murray Sinclair's slim aboriginal pedigree pales to insignificance compared to his questionable findings as chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.Though it is generally accepted that the central mandate of the TRC was “to listen to 'survivors,' their families, communities and others affected by the residential school system and inform all Canadians about the residential school system and its legacy,” this does not excuse its thoroughly biased and fundamentally unscientific nature.The most incendiary and least credible of its findings is the assertion by the Commission’s chair, Judge Murray Sinclair, that the 150,000 children who attended these mainly Church-run schools between 1849 and 1996 were considered “subhuman,” a claim belied by the very raison-d’être of the schools: to give aboriginal children the chance to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to fully benefit from the challenges of living in the new country of Canada.Was this an ethnocentric goal? Absolutely. So was the goal of educating the children of the millions of disadvantaged immigrants who came from all over the world during the same period, resulting in the same acculturation spuriously called “cultural genocide” — that has occurred around the world since the origin of humankind.Unfortunately, the central TRC claim that Canada’s Indian Residential Schools perpetuated massive cultural genocide is now accepted wisdom. With its endorsements by numerous prominent Canadians and indigenous-led studies, it has achieved widespread currency in Canada: a July 2015 Angus Reid poll found that 70 percent of Canadians agreed that cultural genocide described the IRS experience.Like much received wisdom — the set of beliefs people have come to accept as true regardless of their accuracy — there is little factual evidence supporting the cultural genocide notion.As is well-documented, Christianity flourished in aboriginal communities across Canada from first contact onwards. So did a desire to internalize European ways of understanding and dealing with the world. Thus, generations of Christian aboriginal parents willingly sent their children to the church-operated residential schools to obtain an education, often alongside European classmates — the sons and daughters of missionaries, Hudson Bay Company personnel, and Indian Affairs employees — a fact the TRC and other reports chose to ignore.As late as the 1940s and 1950s, when the Indian Act was being amended, many bands and native organizations asked for the schools to remain open. In the 1960s, well after most of IRS had already been closed, several bands lobbied the Department of Indian Affairs to keep some of the remaining schools operating.The cultural genocide hypothesis also ignores the indisputable fact that human beings can simultaneously internalize features of two or more cultures, including unrelated languages. The TRC Report suggests this is impossible. However, this runs contrary to the well-known and much studied diversity of Canadian society, where people from a vast array of cultures have successfully integrated into the multicultural mainstream, while retaining many of their native languages, beliefs, values, and cultural practices.The TRC Report grudgingly (and perhaps inadvertently) acknowledges that this is as true for aboriginal Canadians as it is for millions of other Canadians when it states that, “Aboriginal cultures and peoples have been badly damaged, [but] they continue to exist. Aboriginal people have refused to surrender their identity.”This may be the truest statement in the report, and perhaps the most hopeful one. It acknowledges that as hard as many IRSs may have tried to totally absorb their students into mainstream culture, these efforts failed.When we call all aboriginal children educated in residential schools “survivors,” it erroneously implies that they are equivalent to Holocaust survivors. This libel also denigrates the sacrifices made by the many caring Christian teachers, religious leaders, and other school personnel who devoted years of service trying to enhance the life chances of their young charges, thousands of whom have benefited from their residential school experience to become productive and influential figures in Canadian society and role models for their people.Among the report’s many other shortcomings are: Implying without evidence that most of the children who attended the schools were grievously damaged by the experience; Asserting as self-evident that the legacy of the residential schools consists of a host of negative post-traumatic consequences transmitted like some genetic disorder from one generation to the next; Conflating so-called “Survivors” (always capitalized and always applied to every former student) with the 70 per cent of aboriginals who never attended these schools, thereby exaggerating the cumulative harm they are presumed to have caused; Ignoring the residential school studies done by generations of competent and compassionate anthropologists; Refusing to cast a wide net to capture the school experience of a random sample of attendees, despite a $72 million budget, which would have allowed the Commission to do so; Accepting at face value the stories of a self-selected group of 6,000 former students — who appeared before the commission without cross-examination, corroboration or substantiation — as representing the overall school experience.The report also disingenuously implies that unlike all other people on Earth, indigenous Canadians never prevaricate, exaggerate or accept money for testifying at formal hearings, as occurred under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which awarded $4.6 billion to tens of thousands of self-proclaimed “survivors.” The report’s reconciliation recommendations ask for billions more.In its eagerness to portray the native residential schools in the worst possible light and present aboriginals as weak and helpless victims of fate, perhaps the most egregious shortcoming of the report is the way it defames the tens of thousands of strong, independent and resilient aboriginal Canadians who would look at its findings and never see themselves.From an aboriginal story-telling perspective, the report is truly heartbreaking. From a traditional dispassionate social science perspective, it is bad research. This discordance is called a clash of paradigms, which, if not bridged, will never lead to reconciliation.This is why Murray’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has not lived up to its name, badly tarnishing the legacy of its chief architect in the process.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.