ICTJ in the News

June 21, 2007

Former Cobourg resident takes lead role in truth and reconciliation

Northumberland Today

By Cecilia Nasmith

Local News - A former Cobourg resident is taking a leading role in addressing the historical horrors of Canada's residential-school system.

Bob Watts, the son of Bob and Evelyn Watts of Cobourg, is the interim executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission now being formed to help the victims of this system, an era that spanned roughly 1870 through 1996.

The commission is being set up pursuant to the class-action settlement agreement that was negotiated among the federal government, the churches involved, the Assembly of First Nations, and a number of lawyers who represent survivors both individually and as a class, Mr. Watts explained.

Mr. Watts graduated from Cobourg District Collegiate Institute West (class of 1978) and holds a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University.

He is getting guidance from a number of similar commissions around the world - about 20 of them, he estimates, of which the South African is best-known - and from the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice.

"It makes a study of truth commissions and other types of commissions that are set up to deal with issues, whether it's historical issues, legacy issues, post-colonization issues or post-coup issues, and they are tremendous," he said.

Mr. Watts has been on the job three months. The commission is to be set up by fall, and it has a five-year mandate for its work. "It's a huge challenge, given the high expectations for the work of the commission, the complicated legal structure and the short time frame to get it established," he said.

"There's significant pressure on the commission and on the commissioners still to be appointed. They are expected to host seven major national events in the first two years. As well, there will be pressure to participate in more local and regional events. They have to produce a report at about the two-and-a-half-year mark, work on establishing a research centre dedicated to residential schools, be involved with commemoration events, and then tackle the very difficult issue of reconciliation," he listed.

"(Obtaining) the truth is a huge research job, receiving stories and testimony from students, people who worked at the schools - it's a massive undertaking."

It is estimated that there are 80,000 survivors of the system in Canada, and Mr. Watts says their story has been left largely untold. "It's difficult to find much in history books at any level. Its impact on First Nations and other Aboriginal people has been very profound."

Mr. Watts points to the policy statement made by Deputy Superintendent for Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, who made it compulsory for Native children to attend residential schools in 1920.

"For a number of years, he really set the policy tone by saying their job was to kill the Indian within the child," he said. "When you see and talk with survivors, the impact upon their lives - especially when you consider they were children, some of them forcibly taken from their families - the impact would be very deep, very painful.

"I was reading a story in the Globe & Mail a couple of months ago about a young man who went to Upper Canada College and had been abused when he was there. He spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions. Here's a young man who had a lot of advantages, and that was the effect on his life," Mr. Watts said.

"You consider that over all our communities, because a lot of them were touched by residential schools, and so many children - when you think of some of the problems in our communities it makes sense. This problem didn't happen out of thin air."