Truth and Reconciliation commissioner recalls dilemma over cultural genocide finding
CBC
The residential school survivor's reference to genocide came on a cool October day in 2011, Marie Wilson recalls.
The phrase was short and direct but raised a dilemma for Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
"This was cultural genocide against my people," the Mi'kmaw residential school survivor said inside a downtown Halifax convention centre, Wilson recounts in a new book.
The remark appears about a third of the way through North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner, a first-hand account from Wilson, the TRC's lone non-Indigenous and only woman commissioner, published last week.
This survivor's story, shared at the commission's Atlantic national event, is how Wilson raises the subject of the TRC's central conclusion — that residential schools were an integral part of a conscious Canadian policy of cultural genocide.
"It was specifically not our authority" to say Canada had committed genocide," she told CBC Indigenous while in Ottawa for her book launch.
"We were specifically not allowed to pass judgment, as it were, because it was post-judicial and the courts had already dealt with it."
But Halifax was not the only place survivors called what happened to them genocide, creating what Wilson calls "a legally imposed dilemma."
A "post-judicial process," she explains in the book, meant that in the eyes of the law, the courts had already dealt with survivors' claims.
Survivors had mounted what was then the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history, culminating in an out-of-court settlement in 2006.
Genocide is sometimes called the crime of crimes, but it wasn't up to the commission, which was established by the settlement agreement, to draw any new conclusions about broken laws or name any new charges.
On the other hand, Wilson, a journalist for more than 20 years before joining the commission — and currently a CBC board member — recounts how for the sake of the TRC's credibility to survivors the commission couldn't ignore what so many of them called out as a crime.
"We chose our words really, really carefully, but it was out of respect for the survivors and how they themselves told us what had happened to them," Wilson told CBC Indigenous.
"And it was in that context that we used the term cultural genocide."
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