Upon leaving, Sinclair intends to focus on Indigenous law mentorship and his memoir, tentatively entitled Who We Are. “I am not going to disappear,” Sinclair said in an exclusive interview with Canada’s Globe and Mail. “I am going to continue to exercise influence where I can. I will continue to respond to the public … dialogue going on.”
In terms of his memoir, Sinclair certainly has a lot of history to mine. He served as Chairman of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2009 to 2015. That landmark program’s purpose was documenting the Canadian Indian residential school system’s last impacts on students and their families, and it also led to the creation of organizations such as the Missing Children Project. Sinclair was also the first Aboriginal judge appointed in the province of Manitoba, where he served from 1988 until 2009.
When discussing the influential findings of the True and Reconciliation Commission with the Globe and Mail, Sinclair said, “We need to recognize that this history, about the way that Canada has treated Indigenous people, is also about how Canada treated non-Indigenous people,” he said, adding that non-Indigenous people were educated to see Indigenous people as inferior and white, European society as superior. Until we get past that, we will always have a problem."
Murray Sinclair was raised on the former St. Peter’s Indian Reserve in the Selkirk area north of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He studied sociology and history at the University of Winnipeg and attended law school at the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba, where he won the A.J. Christie Prize awarded to the top student in litigation.
During his law career, he represented a diverse array of clients but was known for his representation of Aboriginal people, and he taught courses for years on Aboriginal People and the Law in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. Sinclair also served as legal counsel for the First Nations of Manitoba, representing them in the areas of land claims, legislative initiatives, funding negotiations and the negotiation of Child Welfare Agreements.
After his appointment to the Senate, he sat on the Senate Standing Committees on Aboriginal/Indigenous Peoples, Fisheries and Oceans, Legal and Constitutional issues, Rules, and Ethics and Conflicts of Interest. Sinclair also acted as a Mediator on matters relating to Indigenous issues and the Senate of Canada.
In the statement he released about his retirement, he echoed the words he used in the closing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report when reflecting upon his work in the Senate of Canada: “We have described for you a mountain. We have shown you the path to the top. We call upon you do do the climbing.”
