Hope is hard won : gender and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian state’s relationship to Indigenous peoples has been characterized by genocidal policy, societal marginalization, and, more recently, efforts towards reparation and reconciliation. Such efforts include the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) - tasked with establishing a comprehensive record of the Indian Residential School System and its legacy - which concluded in 2015. In Canada, the experiences of Indigenous women sit at the nexus of patriarchy and settler colonialism, each system of oppression facilitating attendant injustices. At the outset of the TRC, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) called for the implementation of culturally relevant gender-based reconciliation, rooted in Indigenous epistemologies. I respond to this call by asking how the TRC recognized Indigenous women's gender oppressions both in practice and in analysis. Informed by transitional justice and Indigenous studies literatures, I apply a transformative reconciliation lens to the TRC. Reconciliation is frequently invoked in the praxis and theory of transitional justice, but the term remains under-specified. I define transformative reconciliation as an ongoing process that centres collective responsibility, relationality, and disrupting both colonial and patriarchal relations of power. I analyze the TRC’s setup and historical context, proceedings, and outputs using discourse analysis and NWAC’s criteria for gender-responsive truth commissions. I find that while the TRC achieved and continues to achieve broad exposure of the truths of residential schools, the commission offered few avenues for furthering transformative reconciliation and gender justice. The TRC did not purposively incorporate gender equity in its programming and outputs. I identify a discourse of absence throughout the TRC in which the political agency of Indigenous women and the specifically gendered aspects of their experiences in and after residential school are underexplored. I conclude by theorizing an alternative discourse of survivance, arguing that by furthering elements of survivance, in particular revisiting the concept of witnessing in the longer-term; incorporating resistance and refusal; and understanding the experiences of intergenerational survivors, the academic field and practice of transitional justice could see greater possibilities for furthering gender justice and transformative reconciliation.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.071 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".