U of W student, Sen. Murray Sinclair receive Red Cross humanitarian awards

Sen. Murray Sinclair and a University of Winnipeg student developing a Swampy Cree language app were honoured with awards from the Canadian Red Cross on Friday, celebrating their work as humanitarians.

Sinclair and Cameron Adams, an education and Indigenous studies student from Gimli, were named Humanitarian and Young Humanitarian of the year by the national organization.

Adams, who is about to launch an app to help people learn his ancestral tongue of Swampy Cree, said he was inspired by Sinclair's work on the 2015 report for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, released while Adams was in high school in Gimli.

"Language is something that I've taken as a personal objective from that report, because we need language for identity as Indigenous peoples," Adams said Friday at the award ceremony at the Fairmont hotel in Winnipeg.

Adams, whose family is from Norway House First Nation and Berens River First Nation, said he first started learning Cree in Grade 10 or 11 at Gimli High School, using the online resource Cree Simon Says.

"With that I did the cafeteria special, all of Grade 12," he said, referring to a particular video he used to learn the language.

From there, he enrolled in a Cree language course at the University of Winnipeg. Now, he's about to start studying education, with the hopes of teaching Cree in northern Manitoba.

"I don't do anything for any recognition. I just do it because I want a better world," he said.

"That's why I want to become a Cree language teacher in northern Manitoba, and see little kids run around talking to each other in Cree and yelling in Cree," he added, laughing.

'It's about being who you are'

In his own speech, Sinclair reflected on the frustrations he felt in his early years as a lawyer, seeing unfair treatment of Indigenous peoples, and the advice he sought from an elder who urged him to embrace his own Anishinaabe heritage.

Sinclair went on to become the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba and only the second in Canada, and to serve as a co-commissioner on the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

"He said, 'It's not about being satisfied. It's about being who you are,'" said Sinclair of the advice he got years ago.

Sinclair passed on advice Friday.

"I want to say to Cameron again, to all young people here, that when you learn what it means to be what it was that you were intended to be, then you are making this a better place," he said.

Sinclair said it's crucial for people working in the justice system to help people maintain their sense of self-respect.

"The vast majority of people who end up in the criminal courts are worth saving," he said. "We need to do our work in such a way that we do not throw them away."