Canada is holding a national memorial for Murray Sinclair, a trailblazing Indigenous judge and senator who led the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission into abuses committed against Indigenous children at residential schools.

The public event on Sunday afternoon in Winnipeg, in central Canada, comes days after Sinclair passed away on November 4 at age 73.

“Few people have shaped this country in the way that my father has, and few people can say they changed the course of this country the way that my father had – to put us on a better path,” his son Niigaan Sinclair said at the start of the memorial.

“All of us: Indigenous, Canadians, newcomers, every person whether you are new to this place or whether you have been here since time immemorial, from the beginning, all of us have been touched by him in some way.”

Sinclair, an Anishinaabe lawyer and senator and a member of the Peguis First Nation, was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba and the second-ever in Canada.

As chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Sinclair organised hundreds of hearings across Canada to hear directly from survivors of the country’s residential school system.

From the late 1800s until 1996, Canada forcibly removed an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and forced them to attend the institutions. They were made to cut their hair, forbidden from speaking their native language, and many were physically and sexually abused.

“The residential school system established for Canada’s Indigenous population in the nineteenth century is one of the darkest, most troubling chapters in our nation’s history,” Sinclair wrote in the TRC’s final report.

“It is clear that residential schools were a key component of a Canadian government policy of cultural genocide.”

Mary Simon, Canada’s first Indigenous governor general, described Sinclair during Sunday’s memorial as “the voice of truth, justice and healing”.

She said he had “a heart brave enough to expose injustices, yet generous enough to make everyone around him feel welcome and important”.

Other Indigenous community leaders and advocates across Canada also have spent the past week remembering Sinclair for his unwavering commitment to confronting the systemic racism faced by Indigenous people.

“One of the greatest insights he shared is that reconciliation is not a task to be done by Survivors. True reconciliation, he said, must include institutional change,” Alvin Fiddler, grand chief of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) in northern Ontario, said in a statement after Sinclair’s death.

Sinclair speaks at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada event in 2015 [Blair Gable/Reuters]

“Reconciliation, he taught us, is ours to achieve,” Fiddler said.

“The work ahead of us is difficult, but we share his belief that we owe it to each other to build a country based on a shared future of healing and trust. Murray encouraged us to walk the path towards reconciliation. Accepting this responsibility is a fitting way to honour his legacy.”

Pam Palmater, chair of Indigenous governance at Toronto Metropolitan University, said Sinclair was someone who “never stopped educating Canadians … and making sure we never forget”.

In an interview with CBC News on Sunday, Palmater noted that Sinclair “didn’t just conduct the TRC”; he was involved in many other initiatives, including an inquiry into child deaths in Manitoba and an investigation into the police department in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

“He’s never going to be forgotten. He’s one of those people where his legacy lives on,” Palmater said. “His impact is going to be felt for many decades to come.”