TRC

I am just beginning to learn aout the full extent of the T&R work in this country.

There is a lot to the story, and a lot behind the story. In spite of government insisting on a "no blame" mandate, the process, the accounts, the spinoff journalism and academic work are important to Canadians.

But it's a lot of work to get into and spread the stories. MI Reads was a great local place to start, and I hope more of us simple folks have the pluck to carry this treasure forward beyond vanilla.

Some Links.

Me, I bought several of the many books on Amazon about all this.

Here are just a few available books with the Amazon review copied in:

Truth and Indignation: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools

by Ronald Niezen (Author)

Truth and Indignation offers the first close and critical assessment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it is unfolding. Niezen uses interviews with survivors and oblate priests and nuns, as well as testimonies, texts, and visual materials produced by the Commission to raise important questions: What makes Canada's TRC different from others around the world? What kinds of narratives are emerging and what does that mean for reconciliation, transitional justice, and conceptions of traumatic memory? What happens to the ultimate goal of reconciliation when a large part of the testimony—that of nuns, priests, and government officials—is scarcely evident in the Commission's proceedings? Thoughtful, provocative, and uncompromising in the need to tell the "truth" as he sees it, Niezen offers an important contribution to our understanding of TRC processes in general, and the Canadian experience in particular.

Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress

by Jennifer Henderson (Author), Pauline Wakeham (Author)

amazon link

Truth and reconciliation commissions and official governmental apologies continue to surface worldwide as mechanisms for coming to terms with human rights violations and social atrocities. As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state.

In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations. The contributors offer ground-breaking perspectives on Canada’s ‘culture of redress,’ broaching questions of law and constitutional change, political coalitions, commemoration, testimony, and literatures of injury and its aftermath. Also assembled together for the first time is a collection of primary documents – including government reports, parliamentary debates, and redress movement statements – prefaced with contextual information. Reconciling Canada provides a vital and immensely relevant illumination of the dynamics of reconciliation, apology, and redress in contemporary Canada.

Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada

by Paulette Regan (Author), Taiaiake Alfred (Foreword)

Amazon Link

In 2008, Canada established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to mend the deep rifts between Aboriginal peoples and the settler society that created Canada’s notorious residential school system. Unsettling the Settler Within argues that non-Aboriginal Canadians must undergo their own process of decolonization in order to truly participate in the transformative possibilities of reconciliation. Settlers must relinquish the persistent myth of themselves as peacemakers and acknowledge the destructive legacy of a society that has stubbornly ignored and devalued Indigenous experience. A compassionate call to action, this powerful book offers a new and hopeful path toward healing the wounds of the past.

On Being Here to Stay: Treaties and Aboriginal Rights in Canada

by Michael Asch (Author)

What, other than numbers and power, justifies Canada’s assertion of sovereignty and jurisdiction over the country’s vast territory? Why should Canada’s original inhabitants have to ask for rights to what was their land when non-Aboriginal people first arrived? The question lurks behind every court judgment on Indigenous rights, every demand that treaty obligations be fulfilled, and every land-claims negotiation.

Addressing these questions has occupied anthropologist Michael Asch for nearly thirty years. In On Being Here to Stay, Asch retells the story of Canada with a focus on the relationship between First Nations and settlers.

Asch proposes a way forward based on respecting the “spirit and intent” of treaties negotiated at the time of Confederation, through which, he argues, First Nations and settlers can establish an ethical way for both communities to be here to stay.

Bad Judgment: The Myths of First Nations Equality and Judicial Independence in Canada

by John Reilly

Judge John Reilly, now retired, was the youngest judge ever appointed to the Provincial Court of Alberta. For most of his 33 years on the bench he was the circuit judge for the Stoney Indian Reserve at Morley, Alberta.

During his career he became interested in aboriginal justice and saw the failure of the “white” legal system to do justice for aboriginal people, the harm caused to them by Canadian colonialism, and the failure of all levels of government, including tribal government, to alleviate their suffering and deal with the conflicting natures of European-style law and Indigenous tradition and circumstance.

As a result of these realizations, Judge Reilly vowed to improve the delivery of justice to the aboriginal people in his community and used his perceived power as a jurist to make changes to improve the lives of the people in his jurisdiction. Along the way, he came into direct conflict with Canadian judicial administration and various questionable leaders among the echelons of both Canadian and First Nation governments.

John Reilly’s first book, Bad Medicine: A Judge’s Struggle for Justice in a First Nations Community, was a Canadian bestseller that sparked controversy and elicited praise nationwide for his honest portrayal of First Nations tribal corruption. Bad Judgment details Reilly’s battle with the Canadian justice system and the difficulties he faced trying to adapt Eurocentric Canadian law for the benefit of First Nations people across the country.

Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit

by Marie Battiste (Author)

Drawing on treaties, international law, the work of other Indigenous scholars, and especially personal experiences, Marie Battiste documents the nature of Eurocentric models of education, and their devastating impacts on Indigenous knowledge. Chronicling the negative consequences of forced assimilation and the failure of current educational policies to bolster the social and economic conditions of Aboriginal populations, Battiste proposes a new model of education. She argues that the preservation of Aboriginal knowledge is an Aboriginal right and a right preserved by the many treaties with First Nations. Current educational policies must undergo substantive reform. Central to this process is the rejection of the racism inherent to colonial systems of education, and the repositioning of Indigenous humanities, sciences, and languages as vital fields of knowledge. Battiste suggests the urgency for this reform lies in the social, technological, and economic challenges facing society today, and the need for a revitalized knowledge system which incorporates both Indigenous and Eurocentric thinking. The new model she advocates is based on her experiences growing up in a Mi’kmaw community, and the decades she has spent as a teacher, activist, and university scholar

Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools: A Memoir

by Theodore Fontaine (Author)

Theodore Fontaine lost his family and freedom just after his seventh birthday, when his parents were forced to leave him at an Indian residential school by order of the Roman Catholic Church and the Government of Canada. Twelve years later, he left school frozen at the emotional age of seven. He was confused, angry and conflicted, on a path of self-destruction. At age 29, he emerged from this blackness. By age 32, he had graduated from the Civil Engineering Program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and begun a journey of self-exploration and healing. In this powerful and poignant memoir, Theodore examines the impact of his psychological, emotional and sexual abuse, the loss of his language and culture, and, most important, the loss of his family and community. He goes beyond details of the abuses of Native children to relate a unique understanding of why most residential school survivors have post-traumatic stress disorders and why succeeding generations of First Nations children suffer from this dark chapter in history. Told as remembrances described with insights that have evolved through his healing, his story resonates with his resolve to help himself and other residential school survivors and to share his enduring belief that one can pick up the shattered pieces and use them for good.

Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

by Glen Sean Coulthard (Author)

Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources.

In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism.

Alliances: Re/Envisioning Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships

by Lynne Davis (Editor)

When Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists work together, what are the ends that they seek, and how do they negotiate their relationships while pursuing social change? Alliances brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders, activists, and scholars in order to examine their experiences of alliance-building for Indigenous rights and self-determination and for social and environmental justice.

The contributors, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, come from diverse backgrounds as community activists and academics. They write from the front lines of struggle, from spaces of reflection rooted in past experiences, and from scholarly perspectives that use emerging theories to understand contemporary instances of alliance. Some contributors reflect on methods of mental decolonization while others use Indigenous concepts of respectful relationships in order to analyze present-day interactions. Most importantly, Alliances delves into the complex political and personal relationships inherent in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous struggles for social justice to provide insights into the tensions and possibilities of Indigenous-non-Indigenous alliance and coalition-building in the early twenty-first century.

A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System

by John S. Milloy (Author)

I am going to tell you how we are treated. I am always hungry.” — Edward B., a student at Onion Lake School (1923) "[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existance that the average Indian residential school.” — N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent (1948) For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards. A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail and how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Aboriginal children.

and so on and on.

Truth, and Reconciliation , Reviews