If all had gone according to his grandmother’s plan, Murray Sinclair, the Anishinaabe jurist who did as much as any figure in the country’s history to right the troubled relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples, would have been a Catholic priest. Instead, Mr. Sinclair dedicated himself to law and justice, charting a collision course with some of Canada’s most sacred institutions, including his grandmother’s church, which was shaken to its Vatican foundations by the Sinclair-led Truth and Reconciliation Commission, completed in 2015.
A lawyer, judge, commissioner, senator and fourth-degree chief of the Midewiwin Society, keepers of traditional Anishinaabe knowledge and values, Mr. Sinclair had an impact and influence that transcended any formal title. He led four landmark inquiries that yielded sweeping overhauls of policing, medicine, law and Crown-Indigenous relations. The University of Manitoba, his alma mater, called Mr. Sinclair an Elder-in-residence. Canada could very well have done the same.
A father of five, he died on Monday in a Winnipeg hospital at the age of 73, according to a statement from his family. Predeceased by his wife, Katherine, Mr. Sinclair leaves his children, Gazheek, Niigaan, Dené, Kizhay and Misko; five grandchildren, and extended family.
Mr. Sinclair grew up in Selkirk, Man., where he went this past spring for the unveiling of a new mural at Lord Selkirk Regional Comprehensive Secondary School.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Selkirk lies near the St. Peter's reserve, shown in an 1883 boundary map, where Chief Peguis and his people went after signing the Selkirk Treaty of 1817. Murray Sinclair grew up here.Library and Archives Canada
Calvin Murray Sinclair was born in Selkirk, Man., to Henry and Florence Sinclair, and raised on the St. Peter’s Reserve north of the city, where his first years were marked by tragedy. Before baby Murray could even walk, his mother died of a stroke at 25. Henry, a war veteran and survivor of a traumatic mine cave-in, couldn’t bear the heartbreak and left the family soon after, leaving Murray and his three siblings in the care of their paternal grandparents, Jim and Catherine Sinclair.
His grandmother had been raised in a residential-school convent, and saw in Murray a future clergyman. As he grew into a star high-school student and athlete at Selkirk Collegiate Institute, he began devouring secular books and developing other career plans. First, it was the entire Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set. Then came the works of Indigenous lawyer Vine Deloria and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, followed by histories of the Second World War that outlined the church’s role in the Holocaust.
He skipped two grades, won academic awards and earned valedictorian and athlete-of-the-year honours in 1967. Yet, he could not escape the bigotry of low expectations. His guidance counsellor placed him in a stream for future labourers rather than university entrance, as he did with most Indigenous students. The school principal, seeing Mr. Sinclair’s promise, eventually intervened and set the star student on an academic path.
“With all of those achievements in high school, I can remember feeling and believing that none of the white children who I was educated with would have traded places with me because they always saw me and my family and the community I came from as inferior,” he said in a 2021 speech to Western University law students.
When the time came to apply for postsecondary school, he was torn. He wanted to attend university for teaching, but his grandmother had already picked a seminary. “At the very last minute, she actually agreed to sign the necessary forms and paperwork for me to go to university, because she saw how determined I was,” Mr. Sinclair told the Manitoba Law Journal in 2018. “This was on the understanding that I would not waste my education. I promised I would not become what she called ‘an educated bum,’ and that I would do something with my education.”
He attended the University of Manitoba’s School of Physical Education on a scholarship with the goal of playing and teaching sports, but abandoned the path after two years, owing to a combination of loneliness and a need to care for his ailing grandmother in Selkirk. Back home, he developed an activist side, leading a protest against Ottawa’s closing of a Selkirk fish plant and advocating for Indigenous tenants in provincial housing. The activism brought him to the attention of the local MLA, Howard Pawley, who hired him as an executive assistant in the early 1970s.
In Mr. Pawley, he found a role model who had parlayed his law degree into politics, eventually serving as Manitoba’s premier. Hoping to tread a similar path, Mr. Sinclair entered the University of Manitoba law school at the age of 25. The experience proved intoxicating. He craved the courtroom and interrogating professors, guest speakers and fellow students.
Mr. Sinclair's alma mater, the University of Manitoba, is now home to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, including a carved bentwood box containing the belongings of residential-school survivors.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Infatuated with law, he delayed his entry into politics in favour of the courtroom, where he was occasionally mistaken for one of his clients.
In one of his first court appearances after being called to the bar in 1980, Mr. Sinclair stood before a judge in Fort Alexander, an Ojibway reserve north of Winnipeg. His dark hair pulled back in a braid, Mr. Sinclair was about to speak when the judge addressed him as the accused. “My debut as a leading member of the bar was soon enveloped by the loud guffaws of 120 Fort Alexander Indians,” Mr. Sinclair said in a 1988 interview.
On another occasion, a police officer tried to put him in a cell and release his white client.
He felt like he’d joined “the dark side” of a colonial justice system that discriminated against Indigenous peoples. Demoralized, he considered quitting.
Before finalizing his decision, he consulted an elder, Angus Merrick from Long Plain First Nation. They spent hours in a backyard tipi drinking tea, burning tobacco and talking before Mr. Merrick challenged him to view his position differently. “What would it mean if you were the kind of lawyer who understands the system as it presently functions, but also a lawyer who understands what it means to be Anishinaabe,” Mr. Sinclair recalled the elder saying. “We have laws, too, and you need to understand what they are.”
The encounter proved to be a major turning point in Mr. Sinclair’s life. He returned to his practice determined to embody Anishinaabe principles from within a colonial institution.
Mr. Sinclair, during his tenure as a Manitoba judge, arrives at a 1998 inquiry into the deaths of babies at a Winnipeg hospital.Winnipeg Free Press via The Canadian Press
In 1987, he received the first of several calls from Manitoba’s attorney-general asking if he would like to become a provincial court judge. He bristled at the thought of working among Manitoba’s bench, whose biases and prejudices he’d experienced first-hand. “Are you crazy? Why would I go work with a bunch of guys like that,” he told the cabinet minister. “None of them understand me and none of them I like.”
After two more pleas from the attorney-general, he relented. He was sworn in as associate chief justice of the Provincial Court of Manitoba on Friday, March 4, 1988. On the following Tuesday, a Winnipeg police officer shot and killed Indigenous activist J.J. Harper. Within hours, the police had issued a press release saying Mr. Harper had attacked the officer and tried to steal his gun, something friends and relatives said was completely out of character. The government promised an inquiry to quell an uproar around the death and sought out Justice Sinclair to lead it. He agreed, with one condition: that a non-Indigenous judge preside alongside him to maintain the inquiry’s credibility with the white population.
The Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry proved to be a bruising task. Mr. Sinclair and Justice A.J. Hamilton spent three years gathering evidence and writing a report on the deaths of Mr. Harper and Helen Betty Osborne, a Cree teenager who was stabbed 56 times near the northern town of The Pas in 1971. During the proceedings, a police officer died by suicide hours before he was scheduled to testify, prompting a death threat against Justice Sinclair and round-the-clock RCMP protection. The final report found systemic racism throughout the justice system and made 296 recommendations for reform. It also introduced the idea of entwining Indigenous and Western notions of justice.
Justice Sinclair had barely returned to his day job on the bench when tragic events led to a second inquiry under his direction. In 1994, 12 babies had died during cardiac surgery at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre. Parents pushed for a public inquiry. Justice Sinclair spent nearly five years investigating and preparing a final report that concluded eight of the deaths were preventable. He was subsequently appointed to Manitoba’s superior court, the Court of Queen’s Bench, in 2001, but the grief he witnessed during the pediatric inquiry weighed heavily upon him, such that he turned down a 2007 request to chair the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). “As much as I wanted to do it, I had to let it go,” he wrote in Who We Are, his 2024 memoir.
The TRC was established to examine the history and effects of Canada’s Indian residential schools, 60 per cent of which were run by Catholic missionaries. When internal squabbling led to the resignations of the three original commissioners, Justice Sinclair saw residential-school survivors being retraumatized. Reluctantly, he stepped into the leadership breach.
The commission’s first major gathering took place in Winnipeg in 2010. They heard from countless residential-school survivors sharing horrific stories of physical, sexual and emotional abuse. “Whenever they cried, we cried with them,” he recalled for the University of Manitoba alumni magazine. “We didn’t really appreciate just how heavy it was going to be. Winnipeg was our first major set of hearings and after that session was over and we were debriefing I can remember one of the commissioners saying, ‘My God, are they all going to be like this?’ And they all were.”
Mr. Sinclair listens to residential-school survivors in Winnipeg in 2010, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission took stock of the harms caused by the colonial institutions over more than 150 years.John Woods/The Canadian Press
Mr. Sinclair and fellow commissioners Chief Wilton Littlechild and Marie Wilson pull back a blanket to unveil the TRC's final report in 2015, at a ceremony where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, then new to the job, took part.Adrian Wyld/CP; Chris Wattie/Reuters
The TRC released its final report in 2015, after interviewing 6,500 people, hosting seven national events and spending roughly $72-million. It made 94 calls to reform myriad aspects of government and society. Perhaps the greatest symbolic victory for the commission came in 2022, when Pope Francis, yielding to a call to action and relentless Indigenous activism spurred by the discovery of possible graves on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, apologized for the church’s involvement in the “deplorable evil” of residential schools.
In 2016, Mr. Sinclair retired as a judge and looked forward to spending more time at home with his wife, Katherine Morrisseau-Sinclair. He wanted to pull back from public life, he said in interviews, and focus on reading, writing and family. Instead, restlessness set in. Over a single week of retirement, Ms. Morrisseau-Sinclair noticed that he had reorganized the household cupboards three times. She was going to encourage him to get a part-time job when, eight days into retirement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called to offer him a Senate posting. Mr. Sinclair accepted – with his wife’s endorsement.
During his tenure as a senator, he presided over yet another inquiry, examining systemic racism within the Thunder Bay police, worked closely on a bill to enshrine aspects of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and gave a moving tribute to the victims of the Orlando massacre that targeted the LGBTQ community.
In recent years, he focused on writing an autobiography with his son Dr. Niigaan Sinclair, a scholar and columnist with the Winnipeg Free Press. He called the period his swamp years, “when the water around you starts to deepen, and the ground beneath you begins to shift, and the earth becomes invisible and each step represents an unknown risk. You can become afraid to move, but you cannot stand still. Too much remains to be done. You cannot leave a life unfinished.”
Ms. Morrisseau-Sinclair died of cancer in June, 2024, a few months after the couple moved into an assisted-living residence in Winnipeg. He lived with congestive heart failure and devoted his finite energy to sharing stories with family.
“These are things that I think he wants to give to us before he travels to the west as they say in our culture, which is, enters the next spiritual phase of his life, where he goes and visits our relatives,” Niigaan said in an interview this year.
Mr. Sinclair’s traditional name was Mazina Giizhik, which translates to “The One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky” and refers to the story of a young man who seeks answers to life’s biggest questions and discusses them with his people.
He contemplated his own death in the same calm, measured manner he used to probe some of the country’s most vexing issues as a lawyer, judge and senator.
“At the end of my life I will be turned around on my spirit journey,” he told an interviewer. “They will turn me around and make me look back at the trail I created in this world and they will ask me to account for everything I did, but also everything I didn’t do and could’ve done. I have to be prepared to speak for that. I want to be able to speak about this thing when I’m ready to go.”
With reports from Kristy Kirkup and Temur Durrani
This portrait of Murray Sinclair, by Chippewa and Potawatomi artist Chief Lady Bird, was commissioned for a Globe and Mail series on Indigenous leadership in 2021, when the soon-to-be-retired senator spoke about education as the most important step in decolonization. ‘We must question what we’ve been taught and explore the possibilities of how things should be in the future.’Illustration by Chief Lady Bird
The life of Murray Sinclair: More from The Globe and Mail
From the Globe archives
Murray Sinclair: In Canada, education holds the key to reconciliation
Murray Sinclair on his life’s new rhythm, same clear purpose
For Murray Sinclair, leadership is defined by humility
A life in photos
Truth and Reconciliation commissioners Murray Sinclair and Marie Wilson are recognized in the visitors' gallery in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Tuesday, June 2, 2015.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
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