Pete McMartin: Truth and reconciliation – Now what? – Vancouver Sun

June 3, 2015

It’s about reaching an understanding

It was for me anticlimactic, since the stories had been told so many times before.

The horrors of the residential schools, and even their misplaced good intentions, were old news.

“Cultural genocide?” OK, I’ll buy that, but tell me something I didn’t already know. One would have had to be wilfully ignorant of our early and recent history to be surprised by much of the testimony.

Federal governments going back to the 1980s had recognized the wrongs committed by the residential schools, and our collective culpability for those wrongs. Royal commissions and studies had been struck. Official apologies had been made and reparation monies paid out. What was left for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an exhaustive cataloguing of sorrow and heartbreak: a six-volume encyclopedia of shame to be shelved in the Library of Parliament.

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