The Residential School Settlement Process

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Justice Leonard Marchand, Jr. is a member of the Okanagan Indian Band and grew up in Kamloops. After finishing a B.A.Sc. in chemical engineering at UBC in 1986, he worked in the oil industry for five years. He returned to law school at UVic in 1991 and graduated in 1994. He articled and practised law at Fulton & Company LLP in Kamloops from 1994-2013. His practice focused on the liability of public authorities and he appeared before all levels of court and many administrative tribunals.

Justice Marchand has dedicated a substantial portion of his career to achieving reconciliation for many Indigenous people through, among other things, advancing civil claims for abuses suffered by residential school survivors. In 2005, he helped negotiate the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. He served on the Oversight Committee for the Independent Assessment Process and on the Selection Committee for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Justice Marchand was appointed to the Provincial Court of British Columbia on September 5, 2013. As a Provincial Court judge, he had the privilege of presiding in Cknucwentn Court in Kamloops, where, with input from Elders, healing plans were developed for Indigenous offenders. Justice Marchand was appointed to the Supreme Court of British Columbia on National Indigenous People’s Day, June 21, 2017. He was appointed to the British Columbia Court of Appeal on March 24, 2021.

Michelle Good is of Cree ancestry, a descendent of the Battle River Cree and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation. She has worked with indigenous organizations since she was a teenager and at forty decided to approach that work in a different way obtaining her law degree from UBC at 43. She has practiced law in the public and private sector since then, primarily advocating for Residential School Survivors.

She graduated from UBC with a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing MFA in 2014 where her novel Five Little Indians first started taking shape. Her poetry, and short stories have appeared in a number of publications. Her first novel, Five Little Indians was the winner of the 2021 Amazon First Novel Award, the 2021 Kobo Emerging Author Prize, and the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. It has also won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize and her poetry has been included in Best Canadian Poetry in Canada 2016 and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in Canada 2017. She was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Finalist for the Writer's Trust Prize and Finalist for the Evergreen Award.