Challenging Reconciliation: Indeterminacy, Disagreement, and Canada's Indian Residential Schools' Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.062 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".