The discovery of unmarked graves on the site of the former Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan re-opens the wounds left by the similar discovery in Kamloops last month, and the investigations in Brandon, Man., Carlisle, Sask., and other former residential school sites, which have in turn aggravated scars left by years of mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in the residential school system. And it will keep happening as we continue to seek the truth of what happened to the thousands of children taken from their families and placed in the system, never to return home.
In order for anything to change we must also act at every level – governments, institutions, society– to redress wrongs, to challenge systemic racism, to change the laws that continue to discriminate against Indigenous people. I call on the legal profession to do what we’ve been called to do in the Truth and Reconciliation report: learn more about our history, and do more about it in our present. Never have the wrongs committed against Indigenous people been more viscerally evident to so much of the country. As practitioners within Canada’s justice system, we must seize this moment to do what we can to do right by Indigenous peoples.
Brad Regehr
CBA President