A national memorial service this week honored the life of Murray Sinclair, the first Indigenous person to become a judge in Manitoba and the former senator who became a national figure through his leadership of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada from 2009 to 2015.
At the height of the pandemic in 2021, I interviewed Mr. Sinclair several times for a profile that was published around the time that he stepped down from the Senate. We also spoke later that year after the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation had announced that a ground-penetrating radar survey had found signs that 215 people, mostly children, were buried in unmarked graves around the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
[Read the obituary: Murray Sinclair, 73, Who Reframed Indigenous Relations in Canada, Dies]
[Read the profile: He Almost Quit the Law. Instead, He Reset Canada’s Indigenous Dialogue.]
Here are a few snippets from those conservations that don’t appear in either the obituary or the profile. They have been edited for clarity and length.
Mr. Sinclair’s mother died when he was just a year old, and he and his siblings were raised by their grandparents, Jim and Catherine Sinclair, and their six aunts. He told me that at a young age, his grandmother had been sent to a Roman Catholic convent that sat next to the residential school where her sisters were pupils:
She was basically captive in the convent, which was not unusual for Catholic girls who were placed in convents. You don’t get to see your family until you become a nun.
She missed her sisters, and she really missed her mother. She would often talk about how her mother would come down by canoe and camp by the school and the convent, which were on the same piece of property that had a high wall all around it.
My mother said that she could see her mother camped out there, but they would not let her go out to talk to her. But every once in a while, she could wave and her mother would wave back.
This went on for years. Then one day, her mother never came.
My grandmother found a way to talk to one of her sisters and found out that their mother had died. She asked the nuns if they would let her go to her mother’s funeral, and they wouldn’t let her. At that point, she said that she decided she was never going to become a nun.
In addition to attending law school, Mr. Sinclair took a somewhat unconventional approach to his studies:
I would actually go into the courthouse and watch trials just to see how more experienced lawyers did their work. You learn what’s working and what’s not working by doing that. And you also learn about the foibles of judges.
I continued to do that after I became a judge. And then I was told it’s actually not good protocol for one judge to sit and watch another judge conduct a trial. Judges are very sensitive about the fact that they’re not as great as they say they are.
On the moment that made him question continuing with law:
One day a judge made a particularly racist remark in open court, saying that Indigenous people had to learn their lesson: The law is more important than they are — words to that effect.
I was frustrated by being a lawyer, by the way the law was being interpreted and even applied in such an unfair manner.
His views on the need for judges and lawyers to understand and recognize Indigenous law:
Judges get sucked into believing that the only law that they have to worry about is Western law, that those are the only legal principles at play. They lapse into that because it’s a comfort zone for them.
And so long as they fail to respect Indigenous law too, there will always be conflict, and they will be part of the conflict.
What lesson did you want non-Indigenous Canadians to come away with from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
We wanted them to to come along and to feel that they were also lied to, that they were also made to become almost like the oppressor.
They were taught the teachings of white supremacy — that colonialism was a good thing because Indigenous people have no sense of property, they don’t have a value system, they weren’t civilized, they weren’t Christianized. They didn’t have any form of government.
Their history talked about Indigenous people as if they were just like the trees and the rocks in the countryside — something that was just getting in the way. Something they had to move aside whenever they wanted to expand.
The Beautiful Game
In an earlier Canada Letter, I looked at Newfoundland and Labrador’s decision to spend 171,000 Canadian dollars to have its name, a maple leaf and a web address appear on the jerseys of Barrow A.F.C., the very low-level soccer team of Barrow-in-Furness on the west coast of England.
[In case you missed it: Newfoundland and Labrador’s Unlikely Foray Into England’s Soccer Scene]
The province hopes that its “Ted Lasso” moment will help persuade skilled workers in fields like health care to leave England for Newfoundland.
Sarah Stoodley, the provincial immigration minister, told me in September that visits to HomeAwaits.ca, the website promoted on the clothing of Barrow’s players, had risen to 58,000 a day, from between 50,000 and 55,000, following a match that month against Chelsea, a top-level team.
But this week, Roger Bill, a reporter with The Shoreline News, a community newspaper based in Conception Bay South, sent me the result of an access to information request he had filed for statistics on the site’s web traffic.
It paints quite a different picture of the power of advertising on low-level soccer teams’ clothing. HomeAwaits.ca had 58,687 new visitors. But those visitors were spread over a period of nearly three months, from July 6 to Sept. 28, for a daily average of just 690. And for that period, only 2,254 of those visitors came from Britain.
Later in the week, Ms. Stoodley’s office emailed the correct numbers to me.
“Minister Stoodley referred to daily site visitors using information provided by an external vendor,” the email said. “This information has since been clarified.”
Trans Canada
My colleague Vjosa Isai and a photographer, Ian Willms, report on the glittery “Woodstock of our generation” — now in Toronto and soon in Vancouver — that is the wrap-up of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff, The Times’s Toronto bureau chief, contributed to a report on how governments around the world and their leaders are preparing for Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House.
A chemist is confident that the mysterious white blobs washing up on Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay are an ingredient often used to make white glue. How it got there remains unknown.
As the holiday online shopping season nears, a strike has shut down Canada Post.
A teenager who is believed to have contracted Canada’s first known case of bird flu in a human is in critical condition in a Vancouver hospital.
Brian Seibert, a Times critic, finds “Frontera,” a dance work about migration by Dana Gingras and her Montreal-based company, Animals of Distinction, to be “a disappointingly superficial and unimaginative take on a matter of great importance.”
In 1975, Frederick Morgan Perigo was playing with his young son on a beach in Barbados when a wave knocked the child down. When Mr. Perigo helped the boy up, his graduation ring from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, slipped off into the sea. Now Mr. Perigo has the ring back, just in time for his 83rd birthday.
In T Magazine, Sara Cwynar, an artist originally from Vancouver, discusses why she has 400 pieces of tableware made from melamine, the plastic that reached its peak popularity in the middle of the last century.
What to Watch highlights “I Like Movies,” the story of a teenager in Burlington, Ontario, who dreams of studying filmmaking at New York University and hopes that a job at the DVD store will make a dent on the $90,000 tuition.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times and is based in Ottawa. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, he covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected]. More about Ian Austen
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