UNIVERSITY AFFAIRS
With a shared commitment, Canada's universities take steps toward reconciliation

In June, former judge and children's advocate Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond returned to academia to lead the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, which opened to the public in April (Dr. Turpel-Lafond will also be a professor at UBC's Peter A. Allard School of Law). "I want to make sure this is a place of dialogue that leads to change outside the university," she said. The centre provides survivors access to their records gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and, she hopes, will serve as a place where they can record their stories outside of a courtroom.

"I'm taking an approach that is trauma-informed, realizing that the legal system itself has been implicated in harming families," said Dr. Turpel-Lafond, who is Cree and Scottish with kinship ties to First Nations in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. "And so reconciliation,' a mot-du-jour that seems empty at times, maybe has to be about giving them a space for their stories that's a new space."

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