After spending years conducting research for the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, local historians have revealed that legal issues are preventing the information from being made public anytime soon.
According to Julie Harris, a former QTC director of research, the commission is attempting to make all of its information accessible to Inuit communities. But since Harris says some of the material – which includes eyewitness testimonies – was meant for research purposes only, releasing everything will not be an easy task.
“It’s sitting there in that database, but we don’t have a legal right to give it to everybody else,” Harris says. “So how do you handle that? There are copyright issues.”
Harris made the comment at an Ottawa Public Library event on Sep. 15 that brought together historians who have extensively researched aboriginal history for various truth commissions.
In particular, the QTC was independently founded in 2007 by the Qikiqtani Inuit Association in order to create a more accurate history of past life in Nunavut’s Baffin Region.
Philip Goldring, a local expert on northern history, who served as the QTC’s senior historian, said he feels Canadians are not as educated about aboriginal culture as they should be.
“I read the comments at the bottom of CBC news stories and there are a lot of trolls down there. I call it the open drain running at the bottom,” he said. “A tremendous amount of public education needs to be done to reshape public memory of how people have been treated in the past.”
The speakers did exactly that by sharing anecdotes about their work.
Marianne McLean, a former Library and Archives employee, who served as an archives adviser to the commission, revealed an unforgettable moment during her research into the controversial residential school system.
While attending the commission’s 2010 national event in Winnipeg, she received a small handmade coat measuring around 30 centimetres in length.
“The child was either four or five years old,” McLean said. “The coat that she wore was handmade by her mother with love. When she was brought to the school, it was taken off and she couldn’t keep it. That coat was a symbol of taking away children from their families at a very young age.”
Other injustices were discussed, such as the killing of Inuit sled dogs in Nunavut by RCMP officers between 1956 and 1970. According to Goldring, that was part of a “widespread range of coercive measures” enacted by the federal and territorial governments to control the population.
“The QTC’s main objective is to ensure an accurate history of the events,” Goldring said. “Didn’t say an Inuit history, it said an accurate history.”