Fontaine Phil, Craft Aimée, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. A Knock on the Door: The Essential History of Residential Schools from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

University of Manitoba Press, 2015. — 296 p."It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer… The officials have arrived and the children must go".So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC).Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residential schools and released several reports based on 7,000 Survivor statements and 5 million documents from government, churches, and schools, as well as a solid grounding in secondary sources.A Knock on the Door, published in collaboration with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), gathers material from the TRC reports to present the essential history and legacy of residential schools and inform the journey to reconciliation that Canadians are now embarked upon. An afterword introduces the holdings and opportunities of the NCTR, home to the archive of recordings and documents collected by the TRC.Phil Fontaine is a Survivor, TRC Honorary Witness, and former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations.
Aimée Craft is an Indigenous (Anishinaabe-Métis) lawyer (called to the Bar in 2005) from Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Common law, University of Ottawa. Craft is the former Director of Research at the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the founding Director of Research at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Her book, Breathing Life into the Stone Fort Treaty: An Anishnabe Understanding of Treaty One (2013) won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was established in 2008 and led by the Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair (Chair), Dr Marie Wilson, and Chief Wilson Littlechild.