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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has provided this country with nothing less than aroadmap for fundamental change.

The product of five years of work and the combined testimonies of nearly 7,000 survivors of Canada’s residential school system, the 388-page document released by the commission on Tuesday is a summary of the full report, to be published later this year. It paints a harrowing picture of the policy of forced assimilation and resulting abuses visited upon First Nations people across the country.

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The use of the term “cultural genocide” by commission chairman Justice Murray Sinclair, and recently also by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Beverley McLachlin, leaves no room for misunderstanding: The federal government, fuelled by the deeply engrained colonialist mentality of the day, aimed to wipe out aboriginal identities and cultures. To that end, it adopted policies that made it complicit in the physical and emotional tormentof thousands of indigenous children, scarring them deeply and setting them — and their descendants — up for decades of dysfunction. These policies were not implemented in some distant past; the decision to close residential schools was made in 1969. And assimilationist thinking lingers still.