Murray Sinclair

Mizanay Gheezhik — Murray Sinclair — was born on the former St Peter's reserve north of Winnipeg and raised by his grandparents. He was the first Indigenous judge appointed in Manitoba and only the second in Canada, and he co-chaired the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, which examined why Indigenous people were so heavily over-represented in the province's prisons.

From 2009 to 2015 he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Over six years it took statements from more than six thousand survivors of the residential schools — institutions that removed Indigenous children from their families for more than a century, forbade their languages, and in which thousands of children died and were buried without their parents being told.

The commission's report named the system cultural genocide, documented the deaths, and set out ninety-four Calls to Action addressed to governments, churches, universities, courts and the media. The finding that children had died in large numbers and been buried in unmarked graves was in the report years before the ground-penetrating radar surveys of 2021 made it front-page news around the world; the commission had said it, and been largely ignored.

He was appointed to the Senate in 2016 and served until 2021. He argued consistently that reconciliation was not an Indigenous problem to solve but a Canadian one, and that education was what had created the damage and was the only thing that would undo it. He died in November 2024.