December 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) Final Report and its 94 Calls to Action. A decade ago, the Commissioners captured national attention with a simple but urgent message: reconciliation cannot occur without truth. Survivors had carried those truths for generations, often at great personal cost. The Commission helped create a public record, but the responsibility to act was left to us.
Ten years later, the question facing Canada is stark: what have we done with that truth?
My recent book, By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, emerges directly from these tensions. It tells stories that northern families have kept alive. It traces the histories of two Indian residential schools in Inuvik, Grollier Hall and Stringer Hall, where thousands of northern children lived, learned, and, in many cases, struggled to survive. These stories are histories of violence and cultural oppression, but they are also histories of kinship, endurance and the fierce love that families carried through some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
For decades, northern voices were overshadowed in national narratives about residential schools. Much of the existing scholarship, media coverage and public discussion focused on provinces farther south. Yet in the Beaufort Delta, the legacies of the residential and day school systems are not abstract. They are woven into daily life, family relationships and community memory. Children who never came home are still missed. One thing remains true: Survivors’ stories—whether from the North or not—continue to shape how communities grieve, teach and care for one another. These stories are central to moving forward in this country.
This anniversary year is a moment to recognize that centrality, and to acknowledge what Indigenous Peoples—especially Survivors—have long understood: truth is not a symbolic gesture or a historical footnote. Truth is action. Truth requires responsibility. Truth requires commitment. And anniversaries are a good time to renew those commitments.
Elsewhere, I have argued that residential school denialism is an attack on the truth. Denialism takes many forms: online misinformation campaigns, public figures casting doubt on gravesites and subtle but widespread efforts to minimize the scale and severity of harm. It thrives by feeding on public confusion and political division. Most dangerously, it displaces Survivors from their own histories by suggesting their testimony is unreliable or exaggerated.
Survivors and Elders continue to speak with courage and precision about their experiences, knowing that each retelling risks being contested or dismissed. That so many continue to share these truths is a testament to collective strength.
To honour the truth, sustained, everyday commitments matter. Initiatives like 150 Acts of Reconciliation were created to push Canadians beyond symbolic gestures and into daily practices that honour truth and counter misinformation. They remind us that reconciliation is not a passive feeling but a series of intentional acts.
This year’s anniversary forces us to ask what it means for Canada to honour that strength. The Calls to Action were never meant to be a checklist. They are a roadmap — one that requires institutional change, public education and sustained accountability. Some progress has been made, but the overall record is sobering. Most Calls to Action remain unfulfilled. Many institutions have stalled or shifted attention elsewhere. Governments have shown limited willingness to meaningfully address the structural inequities that the TRC identified. And yet, the expectations placed on Indigenous Peoples — the emotional labour, educational demands and many requests for ongoing patience — have only increased.
Indigenous Peoples have always shown Canada what reconciliation should look like: grounded in relationships, guided by Elders and carried out with cultural humility. The teachings I grew up with remind us to act with one mind, to hold ourselves accountable to each other and to return to the land when the world feels fractured. These are not abstract principles. They are concrete practices that have helped Gwich’in families survive colonial schooling, forced relocation, environmental destruction and the ongoing grief of missing children.
One decade after the Calls to Action, these teachings still hold. They call us back to relational responsibility and ask us to reject the temptation to declare reconciliation “complete.” Our work is not finished, and the “our” in that statement includes all of us. Every single person in Canada — whether your family has lived here for a short time, many decades, several generations or since Time Immemorial.
As we mark this anniversary, Canadians should resist the urge to commemorate without committing. The TRC offered a path forward, but it did not promise simplicity. Reconciliation demands honesty. It demands that institutions confront their complicity. It demands that settlers learn — and unlearn — with humility and discipline. It demands that Indigenous Peoples be listened to, not only when it is convenient, but consistently and without defensiveness. Truth and reconciliation are not an event but a practice.
Ten years after the Calls to Action, the question is not whether truth and reconciliation is possible. It is whether Canadians are willing to walk toward it with clarity, courage and Accountability.
Survivors have already shown the way. The rest of the country must decide whether to follow.
