Canada remembers Murray Sinclair, trailblazing Indigenous judge and senator

Relatives, friends and leaders say Sinclair, who died this week aged 73, and his legacy will ‘never be forgotten’.

Canada is holding a national memorial for Murray Sinclair, a trailblazing Indigenous judge and senator who led the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission into abuses committed against Indigenous children at residential schools.

The public event on Sunday afternoon in Winnipeg, in central Canada, comes days after Sinclair passed away on November 4 at age 73.

“Few people have shaped this country in the way that my father has, and few people can say they changed the course of this country the way that my father had – to put us on a better path,” his son Niigaan Sinclair said at the start of the memorial.

“All of us: Indigenous, Canadians, newcomers, every person whether you are new to this place or whether you have been here since time immemorial, from the beginning, all of us have been touched by him in some way.”

Sinclair, an Anishinaabe lawyer and senator and a member of the Peguis First Nation, was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba and the second-ever in Canada.