By Taoran Li
On 25 February 2025, the Asper Centre welcomed Ms. Murray to present the bi-annual Morris A. Gross Memorial Lecture.
From June 2022 until December 2024, Ms. Murray was the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools. She is currently the National Scholar in Indigenous Legal Studies at the Queens University Faculty of Law. The formal introduction for Ms. Murray was given by Professor Kent Roach, who sat on the Expert Panel on Policing in Indigenous Communities (convened by the Council of Canadian Academies) of which Ms. Murray was the Chair of the Panel. Professor Roach also worked with Ms. Murray when she was the Executive Director of Aboriginal Legal Services.
As the Independent Special Interlocutor, Ms. Murray bore the crucial responsibility of making recommendations for a new federal legal framework to help identify and protect the unmarked graves and burial sites associated with former Indian Residential Schools across the country. In the process of formulating recommendations, Ms. Murray took part in conversations with Survivors, Indigenous families and communities who are leading the work of recovering the missing children and unmarked burials, and with governments, churches, and organizations.
In the lecture, Ms. Murray presented some of the important findings in the Final Report. She started by explaining the principles which guided her work, which were formulated with survivors and elders. The principles included that the bodies and Spirits of the missing and disappeared Indigenous children must be treated with honour, respect, and dignity, and that Indigenous families and communities have the right to know what happened to their children who died while in the care of the State and churches.
Ms. Murray outlined some of the powerful and indisputable history evidence contained in the Report of genocide, crimes against humanity and mass human rights violations in the Indian Residential School System. She also shared examples of burial locations with images of historical records that supported testimonies of survivors. One particularly harrowing story was of young boy called George Painter who was accused and eventually convicted of setting a fatal fire at the Cross Lake Indian Residential School. He was 7 years old when he was sent to the residential school and had tried to escape the school. When the fire occurred, he was charged with the crime setting the fire, but Canada did not provide him with a lawyer. He pled guilty and was given the maximum sentence of life imprisonment which he served at stony mountain penitentiary. Efforts to have George released failed, including when George’s father attempted to have the case reviewed, but the Department of Indian Affairs did not support his parole. He died in Winnipeg General Hospital at the age of 32, having spent half of his life in prison and most of the first part of his life at a residential school. He was buried in the prison cemetery along with many other Indigenous peoples, marked only with numbers.
Emphasizing the distinction between “missing and “disappeared”, Ms. Murray urged us to use the language of the latter as it more accurately reflects Canada’s culpability and responsibility in the children’s deaths and disappearances. The children did not go missing by accident; the disappearances happened because of purposeful State violence, action and force. Evidence supporting this in the Report included showing that cemeteries were part of the residential schools from the outset and that the Government had planned for the deaths of the children.
Pursuant to international legal criteria, the enforced disappearance of children requires the State to ensure that a full investigation into the deaths of the children occurs, that families be notified of the fate of the children, and that remedies be provided to the victims, including their families and communities. Canada therefore has an international obligation to establish a commission of investigations into missing and disappeared indigenous children and unmarked burials.
Because Canada cannot investigate its own wrongdoing, Ms. Murray considered Indigenous Nations, exercising their sovereignty, are best placed to lead these investigations. She found this to be best executed through legislation that upholds Indigenous sovereignty and laws.
In her cogent pronouncement, Ms. Murray said that it is time for Canada to shift from a culture of amnesty and impunity to a culture of accountability and justice. This must start with a proper Indigenous-led reparations framework of the many human rights violations, which must be developed through an anti-colonial lens that highlights the importance of Indigenous laws, international human rights and the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Finally, Ms. Murray repeated the call in the Report’s final chapter for Canadians to become upstanders to reconciliation: to be receptive about and fully acknowledge that atrocities, genocide and crimes against humanity have been committed against Indigenous people and proactively foster reconciliation based on truth, accountability and justice. She concluded the lecture with words shared by Natan Obed, President of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami at the national event in Iqaluit, who said “there is a point where we have to look people in the eye and tell them that their conduct is unacceptable and that some things are non-negotiable”.
This point in time, Ms. Murray enjoined, is now, and we must all tell the Canadian government that its conduct has been and continues to be unacceptable. It must now provide full reparations for the crimes against humanity it has perpetrated on Indigenous children, families and communities.
Taoran Li is a Research and Communications Assistant with the Asper Centre. She is an international student from New Zealand attending the Master of Laws program at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.