Challenging Reconciliation: Indeterminacy, Disagreement, and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools’ Truth and Reconciliation Commission

This article investigates some of the kinds of social work that the twinned concepts of “truth” and “reconciliation” are currently performing in Canada. Though they are intimately associated with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRCC) and Indian residential schools, it is submitted that it is important to investigate the multiple ways in which truth and reconciliation as concepts are deployed by TRCC supporters, analysts, and critics alike. I argue that there is in fact no clear consensus in what truth and reconciliation should mean for residential school survivors or for Aboriginal peoples more generally in the context of a contemporary Canada with uneasy ties to its own colonial history. Through a detailed examination of the Canadian TRCC, I demonstrate that the commission's framing of “truth” and “reconciliation” rests on a fundamental indeterminacy. It is suggested further that this indeterminacy can be seen as both problematic and productive, facilitating perspectives that undergird state legitimization and powerful critiques of that same state and its relation to Indigenous peoples. To demonstrate this ambivalent potential, the article offers a reading of selected articles from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation's report From Truth to Reconciliation: Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools. These selections, I argue, draw on the language of “truth” and “reconciliation” made available by the very ambiguity of the TRCC's own objectives and mandate in order to advance arguments and objectives that not only offer alternative visions of what “truth and reconciliation” should mean for Canada but also do so in ways that challenge state legitimacy and authority and make powerful claims in support of Aboriginal sovereign rights in Canada.