Errors of Commission: Canada's Legacy of Indian Residential Schools

This dissertation examines contemporary discourses of Indigenous trauma, healing, and reconciliation in Canada, and explores their social and political implications for Indigenous-settler and Indigenous-state relations. Drawing on twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, my study juxtaposes the proceedings of Canadaâ s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools with the lived experience of Inuit in Labrador, a region excluded from the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. My research responds directly to the Commissionâ s stated premise of creating a national memory of Indian residential schooling, in the hope that similar injustices will not recur, and problematizes these presumptions by making several interrelated arguments. Firstly, I show how Commission proceedings enact a pedagogy that pathologizes Indigenous anger and valorizes expressions of grief in the service of healing, in effect schooling survivors on the therapeutic nature of speech, and rescripting survivor testimonies to show evidence of reconciliation. Structuring truth-telling in this manner, I argue, hinders public recognition of the truths of survivor experience, and collective responsibility for their contemporary legacies. Secondly, I demonstrate that making Indian residential schooling the sole object of national redress obscures a broader range of colonial injuries with which it interlinks. I show how the residential school experience maps onto both older and ongoing colonial interventions, including missionization, forced community relocations, and continuing apprehensions of Indigenous children in the name of child welfare. These experiences demonstrate the recurrence of familial rupture, disruption in the intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge, and ultimately, Indigenous peoplehood, underscoring that corrective interventions in Indigenous kinship are foundational to settler colonial governance. Thirdly, I explain how the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement severely constrains Indigenous self-government, and coincides with a rise in trauma-based mental health interventions that devolve responsibility for healing onto individual Inuit, creating a form of self-government through governance of the self. Ultimately, my central contention is that the assimilatory spirit of the residential schools endures through the proliferation of new modes of reschooling Indigenous peoples, and I argue for the need to analyze pedagogy as a tool of settler colonial governance, and as a constraint upon Indigenous life and self-determination.

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