Senator Murray Sinclair was a judge for 28 years, the first Indigenous judge appointed in Manitoba and Canada’s second. He served as Co-Chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba and as Chief Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). He has been invited to speak throughout Canada, the United States and internationally, including the Cambridge Lectures for members of the Judiciary of various Commonwealth Courts in England and served as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Manitoba. He has won numerous awards, including the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, the Manitoba Bar Association’s Equality Award (2001) and its Distinguished Service Award (2016), and has received Honorary Doctorates from 14 Canadian universities. Senator Sinclair was appointed to the Senate in 2016 and retired in January 2021 to work on his memoir entitled Who We Are – to be published with McClelland & Stewart in Fall 2022.
Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair is Anishinaabe (St. Peter’s/Little Peguis) and an Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba. He is an award-winning writer, editor and activist who was named one of Monocle Magazine’s “Canada’s Top 20 Most Influential People” and he won the 2018 Canadian columnist of the year at the National Newspaper Awards for his bi-weekly columns in The Winnipeg Free Press. In 2019 he won Peace Educator of the Year from the Peace and Justice Studies Association based at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is an international media commentator as a part of the “Power Panel” on CBC’s Power & Politics and National Affairs panel on CBC’s The Current. A collection of his award-winning columns called Winipek will be published with McClelland & Stewart in Spring 2022.