Warning: This story contains details that may provoke distress or trauma in some readers.

Homalco Chief Darren Blaney has the tragic distinction of being a third-generation residential school survivor.

Like his father, and grandfather before him, Blaney was forced from his home, family, and culture in the small community of Church House in Bute Inlet along B.C.’s remote central coast.

If reconciliation has a birthplace, it is in the mostly beige West Block room numbered 371. On Feb. 17, 2005, a dozen members of Parliament shuffled into their seats, under sterile fluorescent lights, carrying mugs of tea and coffee.

Canadians may think that reconciliation was born of altruism. That the government gifted reconciliation to survivors in an act of contrition. But that’s not true.

An elder told me a story. It goes like this.

It was long ago and late summer in a remote northern village. A Cree village. Everyone still lived in tents. One day priests visited. They announced that the next time they came, they would take the children. It would be for the best, they explained. The children would go to school.

The first story I heard about “the missing” was from a Dene elder, Catherine, just over 10 years ago. She was speaking about the impact of tuberculosis on her family at a health conference. The topic triggered her memories of residential school, and of a younger sister who never returned.

Last March, about two weeks into the pandemic, Steve Teekens got a call from the police. Teekens runs an Indigenous housing agency and the officers were calling to say one of his clients had tested positive for COVID-19. It was the first case to surface at the Native Men’s Residence, an organization that provides emergency shelter, transitional housing and deeply affordable rentals to a clientele of mostly Indigenous men in Toronto.

In her 18 years as a police officer, Det. Sgt. Alana Morrison has worked some of the Nishnawbe Aski Police Service’s darkest files: homicide, domestic violence, child sexual abuse.

She has interviewed more than a thousand victims — many of them more than once.

“We’d bring them in one door, interview them, collect our evidence and then shove them out the back door with no support,” says Morrison. “Every time, my brain said, ‘This isn’t right.’”