Residential schools commission opens Winnipeg office

With the simple cutting of a ribbon, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission officially opened its headquarters Thursday in Winnipeg, two years after it was first created.

The $60-million commission, whose work was stalled in its first year of operation because of infighting, is to hold its first national hearing in Winnipeg next month, followed by six hearings across Canada.

Some of the surviving former students of Canada's residential schools for aboriginals have waited decades to tell their stories, and on Thursday, dozens of them crammed into a downtown Winnipeg office building — shoulder to shoulder with dignitaries — for the opening of the commission's central office.

Lyna Hart, who attended three residential schools in Manitoba, is relieved the commission's work is finally underway.

"My heart is singing today, as a result of it," she said.

Winnipeg is a good location out of which to run the commission's work, Hart said, since most of Canada's residential schools operated in the west.

Commission chairman Murray Sinclair, a former Manitoba judge, has been traveling the country listening and consulting with those who attended the schools and said he has come back convinced that people's stories need to be heard.

"From our perspective at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the survivor communities really need all the help that they can get in order to be ready for the work that we have to do," he said.

Gord Williams, who left residential school in the 1950s and has not lived on a reserve since, agreed that the commission's focus should be on helping people victimized by the residential school system

"I feel that the whole purpose of all of this is for the survivors," he said.

"It's not for any other reason. And we're losing them at an accelerated pace, and the sooner we get our act together, the better off we're going to be."

Original commissioners resigned last year

The federal government formed the commission in June 2008 at the same time that it issued a formal apology in the House of Commons to aboriginal people for the abuses they suffered at residential schools.

But less than four months later, the chairman of the commission, Justice Harry LaForme, had resigned and by January 2009, his two fellow commissioners announced they would be stepping down, too.

The three couldn't agree on whether the commission's mandate should be reconciliation or historical documentation.

They were replaced in June 2009 by Sinclair; Marie Wilson, a senior executive with the N.W.T. Workers' Safety and Compensation Commission; and Wilton Littlechild, Alberta regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations.

About 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were placed in more than 130 residential schools across Canada from the late 1870s until the last school closed in 1996. The schools were government-funded and meant to prevent parents from being involved in the "intellectual, cultural and spiritual development of aboriginal children," according to the commission.

Many students were forbidden to speak their native language or otherwise engage in their culture at the schools, which were run by churches and funded by the federal government. Some were physically, sexually and psychologically abused while at the schools.