TRC Commissioner wants mandatory education about residential schools in Sask.

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Wilson, who was designated a commissioner in 2009, said she hopes the legacy will inspire jurisdictions across Canada to include the residential school history as a required course to graduate high school.

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“Education was the tool that was used to assimilate and Christianize and otherwise diminish and damage all of these generations. It was also the tool that was used… mindlessly, to keep the whole rest of the community ill informed and ignorant,” Wilson said. “We need to teach an honest history that includes the history of the indigenous peoples of Canada, whose homeland it is and that the history of this American continent didn’t begin with the arrival of the Europeans.”

In March 2014, Alberta joined two other jurisdictions and made the education of residential schools and First Nation treaties mandatory content for all kindergarten to Grade 12 students. Wilson said it’s a positive step for indigenous and non-indigenous children who will pave the path of the country’s future.

“So that indigenous children can start to feel that they have heroes too, they have history too, they have languages too, they have place names too, they have historic moments too, they have tragedies too… And so that non-indigenous children can learn the truth about the whole country,” Wilson said.

“If we had that in 13 jurisdictions, not just three, imagine the difference we could make. Saskatchewan is not there yet.”

The federal government estimates more than 150,000 students were forced to attend the schools over the years. A Saskatchewan facility, outside Regina, was the last residential school to close in 1996.

“We are inching forward (to reconciliation). I think that there is no room for slippage,” Wilson said.

“Whether or not we were aware of it at the time, we created this situation by Canadian laws and policies. Now we are waking up to the fact that we are going to have to work together to build our way out of it by reshaping and redesigning our notion of society and our notion of what is fair and just in this country.”

The TRC will hold its closing events in Ottawa from May 31 to June 3.

panews@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @KellyGerMalone