Murray Sinclair, Indigenous senator and judge, dies at 73

Sinclair was born on January 24, 1951 on a reserve in Manitoba and was raised by his Cree grandfather Jim Sinclair and his Ojibway grandmother Catherine after his mother died of a stroke. Both of his grandparents were forced to attend residential school.

Residential schools were government funded and part of a policy to assimilate indigenous children and destroy indigenous cultures and languages.

Sinclair went to law school in Manitoba at age 25 and practiced law for 11 years before becoming the first Indigenous judge in the province, and the second in the country.

He co-chaired the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba and led the Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Inquest into the deaths of 12 children at a Winnipeg hospital before taking over leadership of the TRC.

The TRC, one of the most important agencies in Canada’s recent history, released its final report in 2015.

Sinclair’s work with the TRC and his conclusion that residential schools amounted to a “cultural genocide” reshaped Canadians’ understanding of the government-run boarding schools that destroyed generations of Indigenous communities.

In a pivot to the government’s policy of forced assimilation, approximately 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were removed from their families and placed in state boarding schools between 1874 and 1996.

The policy traumatized generations of indigenous children, who were forced to give up their native language, speak English or French and convert to Christianity.

An estimated 6,000 children died while in the schools, Sinclair found.