Nora Bernard

Who was Nora Bernard?

Nora Bernard was a Canadian Mi'kmaq activist who sought compensation for survivors of the Canadian residential school system. She was directly responsible for what became the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history, representing an estimated 79,000 survivors; the Canadian government settled the lawsuit in 2005 for upwards of 5 billion dollars.

In 1945, when Bernard was 9 years old, her mother was told that if she did not sign the consent forms to send her children to a residential school, the child welfare system would take her children into "protective custody"; as a result, Bernard attended a residential school in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia for five years. In 1955, she married a non-native man, and consequently lost her legal status under the Indian Act; the relevant section of the Indian Act was repealed in 1985, but this did not automatically lead to reinstatement as a band member, and it was not until March 2007 that she was voted back into the Millbrook First Nation.

In 1995, Bernard began an organization to represent survivors of the Shubenacadie school; she subsequently convinced Halifax lawyer John McKiggan to represent the Shubenacadie survivors in a class-action suit. After the Shubenacadie suit became public knowledge, many other survivors' associations across Canada filed similar suits; these were eventually amalgamated into one national lawsuit. In McKiggan's words, " if it wasn't for Nora's efforts, and other survivors like her across Canada, this national settlement never would have happened. After we filed our lawsuit, a number of other students from other schools filed similar class actions."