Standing inside the Kelowna International Airport, a historian from Britain asked me a question that cut to the very heart of the Canadian national project.
I had spoken, two nights prior, to a convention of Canadian private school educators about the Seven Grandfather Teachings: seven truths to which the Anishinaabeg hold dear, and which many try to structure their lives by in order to lead a good life, or mino-bimaadiziwin. Those truths are, in English, best summed up by these words: love, honesty, bravery, wisdom, respect, humility and truth.
The historian said my talk intrigued him, and had left him with a big question. He had spent a lot of time over the years studying Prussia and being in Germany, he told me, and he said that the youth there don’t like to talk about Germany’s Nazi past – that many young people were saying that the Holocaust was something that happened decades ago, that it was time to move on, that was then, this is now. They no longer wanted their country to be defined by its past. The historian said he was getting a sense of the same frustration among some of the Canadians he was meeting. He wanted to know how we could possibly move forward as a country and make things right.
He also said this: “Among the seven teachings you shared, you didn’t mention forgiveness.”
It was a hard question, deserving of a long and thoughtful answer. It’s been 10 years this month since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, released its comprehensive final report. All this time later, do we know what moving forward looks like?
Here is my response.
Before the election that made him prime minister, Justin Trudeau made a sweeping election promise: that his Liberal government would enact every single one of the 94 calls to action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Those calls, first released in July, 2015, along with the six-volume final report published six months later by former senator and judge Murray Sinclair, non-Indigenous former CBC journalist Marie Wilson, and former Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations and member of Parliament Wilton Littlechild, were a gift from the 7,000 survivors and witnesses of Canada’s residential-school program who offered their testimonies.
More than 150,000 children were sent to these institutions run by the Christian churches and funded by the federal government; for decades, under the Indian Act, parents would be fined or jailed if they refused to send their children to these so-called schools. The goal was to turn Indigenous kids into good Canadians who could contribute to the national project being built by invaders to their lands who had disrupted tens of thousands of years of Indigenous existence.
It must have been terrifying: children ripped away from their parents by foreigners in strange clothes, only to be put in schools that in some cases resembled work camps. These forces came from across the sea, stole children, and assimilated them into their laws and practices. If you did not obey, punishment could be harsh, violent, and in some cases, deadly.
This sounds like a horror story, but it was reality. Still, it’s a story that too many Canadians seem unable to fully grasp, and many leaders have tried to avoid it over the decades.
So no right-minded First Nations person actually believed Mr. Trudeau’s bold promise. But we wanted to, even though his father Pierre Trudeau had tried to rescind Canada’s obligation to uphold our inherent rights with his government’s 1969 White Paper, which proposed eliminating the Indian Act and having Indigenous people assimilate into Canadian society. Many of us dared to hope that Pierre’s son would actually put his heart into it and get things done.
As of Nov. 1 of this year, however, only 14 of the Calls to Action have been fulfilled. As for the remainder, 16 have not started, while 22 have stalled.
Those that have been completed were important but relatively easy to achieve, such as creating a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, acknowledging that Indigenous rights includes language rights, and appointing an Indigenous language commissioner. These are the calls that could be described as low-hanging fruit. Others – such as national education reform, or informing the families whose children died at Indian Residential School of where their children are buried – seem to be taking an unreasonable amount of time to get around to.
These, unfortunately, are also the ones at the very heart of the mission of reconciliation, because survivors believed that solving the inequities in the education system would be crucial moving ahead. After all, it was with great meaning that the TRC’s first calls to action were about child welfare and education. The survivors of the system that tried to break generations of Indigenous children were most concerned with the well-being of the next generations.
Call number six demands special mention: the repeal of Section 43 of the Criminal Code, or the spanking law. That section of the Code allows for the justification of the use of “reasonable force” for the “correction” of a pupil or child, if that child is under their care.
Many federal bills have been introduced to repeal Section 43 over the years. Yet somehow, Canadian lawmakers just can’t seem to fix this.
Of all the calls concerning education, I can see why survivors felt this was a top priority. For them, corporal punishment – the strap, the lash, whippings – often went hand in hand with neglect, starvation, bullying and woefully inadequate medical care. Some children ran away to get away from the abuse; others died from it or died trying to escape it. Parents often never found out what happened to their children. That this call has not yet been fulfilled – hitting children is technically still legal in Canada – is perhaps one of the saddest examples of indifference this country has shown.
The TRC report summary, titled “Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future,” succinctly explains what happened here. “Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred, and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things.”
I chose this passage to be the epigraph of my first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, which was about seven First Nations youth who died while trying to get a high school education in Thunder Bay. Those young people, and many more like them, had no choice but to get on a plane and travel about 500 kilometres south from their homes high up in the boreal forests or above the treelines, leaving their parents, their languages and everything they knew behind, to come to the city. All that, to access an education: the fundamental right of every child in this country.
To this day, in northern Ontario, most children travel across the rich, vast aki – the land – which holds inside of it the resources Canada says it needs to extract and sell to keep its colonial project going as the U.S. flashes its expansionist teeth. It’s a national emergency, Canada’s political leaders say, adding that they must move fast on development – even if it means blowing past First Nations rights, existing laws and agencies, and what is best for a planet warming at unprecedented rates.
I’ve always wondered why it is not a national emergency that our children still can’t get a high school education in their home communities. The fact that kids still have to fly out and rely on boarding arrangements (which are not the fancy ones that wealthy parents send their kids to), or else remain stuck on their home reserves with no high school education, is unacceptable.
That’s often been the case at Pelican High School, built on the former grounds of Pelican Lake Indian Residential School, just outside of Sioux Lookout, Ont. Some youth wait in their remote northerly communities for a spot to open up so they can attend a high school with adequate services. And even when Indigenous youth do make it off the reserve, they sometimes die, lonely and scared, far away from home.
I think of Mackenzie Moonias, a 14-year-old who was found dead in December, 2023, at a marina in Thunder Bay, Ont., about 450 kilometres north of her home on the remote Neskantaga First Nation, in the resource-rich Ring of Fire.
Dorothy Sakanee holds a photo of her granddaughter Mackenzie Moonias, who was found dead in Thunder Bay in December, 2023, during a press conference calling for the disbandment of the Thunder Bay Police Services in Toronto on April 22, 2024.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
At the time, Mackenzie was studying at Thunder Bay’s Matawa Education and Care Centre, a high school that was transformed by huge investments by the federal government and the Matawa Council of seven northern First Nations, after the inquest into the deaths of the seven students. Neskantaga’s then-chief, Chris Moonias, said at the time that youth experience loneliness when they leave home for high school. “If we had a choice, we’d have a high school in the community,” he said. “We just don’t have the support.”
But I also think about Doris Carpenter, who was four years old when she died on Oct. 17, 1937, while attending Pelican when it was a residential school. I learned that Doris was a distant relation of mine as I was researching my last book, The Knowing; she was the daughter of Thomas Carpenter, who was born in what is now Mishkeegogamang First Nation in 1905 and was the nephew of my great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter. Doris was one of several children who died, reportedly of pneumonia along with whooping cough and chicken pox, while at Pelican in 1936 and 1937. All Mr. Carpenter got from school officials was a letter dated Oct. 19, 1937, informing him his daughter had passed away and that they were “burying her in Sioux Lookout.” He was not given the option to attend the funeral or take her back home for burial. During this time, Mishkeegogamang students Nancy Tooshenan, John Wapoos and his brother Thomas Wapoos passed away, too; so did Maggie Cromarty, Daniel Masakeyash, and Lavina Beardy. They, and so many others, died in residential schools. Often, they were buried without their families even knowing where exactly they were laid to rest.
Indigenous children have been dying, far from home, for too long. It is important we do not forget them: Doris, Mackenzie, too many more. They are why the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created in the first place. Every child deserves to have their stories told, their names remembered.
After decades of inferior treatment and lack of care, it’s time to level the playing field by closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous kids in education and training, and eliminating the discrepancy in federal education funding for on- and off-reserve First Nations kids.
Closing the gap is a catchphrase that educators like to use. But what does that actually look like?
According to Statistics Canada’s most recent data, 63 per cent of First Nations youth have completed high school, compared to 91 per cent of non-Indigenous youth. First Nations kids living off-reserve were more likely to graduate high school – 73 per cent – than those living on reserve, at 46 per cent. Statistics Canada surmises the latter result could be linked to access, as nearly half of First Nations students do not have access to a high school in their home First Nations communities. To learn, they have to leave their home communities at 13, 14, or 15 years of age.
The data on college and university education make things look even worse. Only 37 per cent of First Nations youth completed or attended a postsecondary program, compared to 72 per cent of other Canadians. Among First Nations youth, those living off reserve were more likely to go to college or university, at 44 per cent. Also, due to life circumstances, First Nations youth are more likely to take a non-traditional pathway to obtain their education. They are likelier to be young parents, live in rural areas or to struggle to pay the rent and grocery bills, or for child care. Understanding those circumstances would help produce better outcomes.
But reform has stalled. Last year, Quebec Auditor-General Guylaine Leclerc admonished the provincial government for failing to produce a plan to help improve education outcomes of Indigenous children. Nothing, she found, had been produced since 2005. And efforts to create more schools near Indigenous peoples’ communities have progressed at a snail’s pace.
In 2023, seven years after the end of the inquest into the deaths of the seven students I wrote about in Seven Fallen Feathers, the Aglace Chapman Education Centre opened in Kitchenmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation, about 580 kilometres north of Thunder Bay. This combined elementary-to-Grade-12 school is a start toward achieving the TRC’s call to action for “education legislation with the full participation and informed consent” of Indigenous peoples to close the educational achievement gaps within one generation, along with developing culturally appropriate curricula. But how long must we wait to get to a place where Indigenous children can actually access education, rather than merely promising them this right?
The numbers show that we are still nowhere near to where we need to be to close the gaps. One way to help do that is to alter school curricula, to ensure all Canadian students learn about Indigenous history and understand their lived experience. This is Call to Action number 62, and depending where in Canada you go to school, it looks different.
Curriculum changes are generally patchwork in their application, and constantly under threat of being diminished, stalled or cancelled, depending on whatever political party is in power and where they decide to focus their energies.
If every single province was serious about education, they would reform their respective Education Acts, teachers tell me. These provincial pieces of legislation set out duties and responsibilities of the minister, school boards, trustees, principals, teachers, parents and students. Instead, on the whole, we are still “marinated in colonialism,” says Tesa Fiddler, the Canadian Teachers’ Federation vice-president (diversity-designated) and an educator at the Thunder Bay Catholic School Board.
The Canadian education system is just like the health care, social welfare or the justice system: nothing was created with the health and welfare of First Nations people in mind. “The education system is built on the foundation of a racist ideology. I don’t know if we’ll ever dismantle it, but we need people to create safe spaces,” says Ms. Fiddler.
Implementing curriculum changes and safe spaces at the public and Catholic school board level isn’t an easy task. Of course, each school, department and board has its own experience, but on the whole, there are still low numbers of Indigenous teachers in the classrooms – not to mention in positions of power on school boards and in educational departments. Our children need to see Indigenous faces among school administrators, in their cafeterias, and at the front of their classrooms. According to a 2025 report on Indigenous teacher education from Indspire, the most pressing problem for Indigenous people wanting to become teachers is curriculum and cultural disconnection, followed by financial support challenges, inadequate support services and systemic racism and discrimination.
Help may be on the horizon. An initiative to create 10,000 new jobs for Indigenous teachers is under way, championed by the Rideau Hall Foundation, mostly funded privately by the Mastercard Foundation, and co-led by Roberta Jamieson, the prominent Six Nations lawyer who was the first woman from a First Nation to earn a law degree.
In July, the RHF announced 12 new Indigenous-led partnerships, from Labrador to Yukon, that focuses on the recruitment and retention of those 10,000 teachers.
Currently, the few Indigenous teachers who are in the systems often have to do double duty – teaching and also being relied upon to speak to Indigenous issues, which is never easy. “We are always on guard, not just for ourselves but for our children,” Ms. Fiddler said. They’ve got to put up with racism in the classroom and in the schoolyards too, she added: “It is all the little micro experiences that are exhausting. People don’t understand that is a form of colonial violence.”
The experience also varies wildly across Canadian jurisdictions; how up-to-date your curriculum is really depends on which classroom you are in.
Some students may be taught about the Indian Act, a race-based law that made it illegal for First Nations people to go to university, vote, politically organize or hire a lawyer; some may learn about how Indigenous peoples are treated as second-class citizens or Crown wards on their own land. Others simply may not.
And others still may go to the Dufferin-Peel District Catholic School Board, one of the largest, most diverse boards in Canada, but where the school board refused to fly the orange Every Child Matters flag earlier this year to honour the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation at its 152 schools. It took intense public and media pressure, followed by an edict by Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra, to direct the provincially appointed supervisor of the board to fly the flag.
What a terrible and confusing message. If the people running those schools can’t figure out whether or not to fly this flag of remembrance, what will their 71,000 students think?
So then, to the British historian’s second question: What about forgiveness?
“Forgiveness was a natural process,” said Sam Achneepineskum, a Marten Falls First Nation elder and survivor of three residential schools to whom I put the question.
“If someone did you wrong, it was on them to correct their behaviour and recognize it. They need to go sit on the mountain to reflect, so to speak,” he said.
You’ve been to the mountain, Canada. You’ve heard all the terrible details of what happened, the wrongs committed in the name of the national project. And here we are, still waiting for the country to fulfill the calls.
Real reform, it feels, is being left to individuals. It‘s happening among educators who decide, under their own volition, to pick up a book in basic Anishinabemowin and introduce it to their Grade 2 class, or at the school board level, where the Toronto District School Board replaced its Grade 11 English course with one on Indigenous literature. It’s happening among companies privately investing in change where money is needed – which makes sense, since the TRC’s Calls to Action were aimed at corporations, too.
But we are still waiting for many people to step up.
We can’t keep waiting for lawmakers to suddenly decide they need to change policies and correct systems. You see, it is not only Indigenous children who are still waiting for equity in a land of plenty. Not teaching all Canadian children the truth, denies them all.
Maybe some Canadians are feeling reconciliation fatigue. Maybe they want to “move on” and put the past behind them. But if that’s the case, maybe it is because our education systems have failed to produce people who understand the foundational building blocks of Canada, and understand that there is so much more work left to be done.
A lack of knowledge breeds ignorance: life spins on as it used to, with old thoughts and ideals baked into society’s fabric, all the way down the line. That doesn’t build a more inclusive, just society. It makes understanding, change – and forgiveness – that much harder to attain.