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INTRODUCTION
In Canada, the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report in 2015 prompted many sectors of Canadian society, and many individual Canadians, to re-examine the country's history and relationship with Indigenous Peoples. As the Commission stated in the first volume of its report:
“Canada's residential school system for Aboriginal children was an education system in name only for much of its existence. These residential schools were created for the purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into a new culture – the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society, led by Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A Macdonald. The schools were in existence for well over 100 years, and many successive generations of children from the same communities and families endured the experience of them. That experience was hidden for most of Canada's history, until Survivors of the system were finally able to find the strength, courage, and support to bring their experiences to light in several thousand court cases that ultimately led to the largest class-action lawsuit in Canada's history.
“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was a commission like no other in Canada. Constituted and created by the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which settled the class actions, the Commission spent six years travelling to all parts of Canada to hear from Aboriginal people who had been taken from their families as children, forcibly if necessary, and placed for much of their childhoods in residential schools.”1
The Report includes 94 Calls to Action “[i]n order to redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation[.]”2 Calls 25-42 relate to Justice. Two of those calls make it clear that the legal profession and law schools have significant work to do:
“(27) We call upon the Federation of Law Societies of Canada to ensure that lawyers receive appropriate cultural competency training, which includes the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal Rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal-Crown relations. This will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism.
“(28) We call...