Full circle : Aboriginal Healing Foundation and the unfinished work of hope, healing and reconciliation

But the efforts of the past twenty years— the work of healing and reconciliation which is the subject of this book—has ensured that we will never go back to the silence and shame of the past. [...] The Japanese internments, the Chinese head tax, the tainted blood scandal and the abuse of children in provincial and federal institutions brought the notion of historic injustices to the public foreground. [...] Over the Summer of 1990, the events at Oka exposed to the eyes of Canada and to the world the poisoned and potentially deadly character of the relationship between the Government of Canada and indigenous people. [...] In no way a mere coincidence, the emergence of the Indian Residential School System was historically concurrent 11 creation of the aboriginal healing foundation with the elimination, in the Prairies, of the food supply and with the introduction of the Indian Act and the effort to create a sovereign Canada from sea to sea to sea, on what only a generation ago had been Indian land. [...] The human stories of residential school abuses and suffering were already by this time well known among senior officials in the Department of Indian Affairs, and while the members of the Chrétien Government accepted the reality of this pain, there was reluctance in some quarters to respond in the way urged by the Minister of Indian Affairs.