From the Archives: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada gave voice to the violence committed in Indian residential schools. Unfortunately, it failed to fully achieve either healing or justice among many of those involved.
A Weak Commission Brought Forth Survivors’ Truths, but Has It Made Reconciliation Possible?
When the commission completed its work and submitted its six-volume final report in 2015, which included 94 recommendations or “calls to action,” it had gathered statements over a period of five years from more than 6,750 people. These statements provide a harrowing picture of the schools, including stories of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.The Survivors Speaka supplement to the commission’s report.
The result was one of the more survivor-centric truth commissions in recent years. This focus, which is becoming a trend in representations of traumatic history, makes it more difficult to fully understand the views and experiences of those who designed and operated the schools. With no power to compel evidence, the commission was left with scant information about the perpetrators and their motives, as well as the institutions that harbored them.
The commission’s public events created spaces of affirmation that were free from stigma. The commission would screen “highlight reels” of the most poignant statements of abuse, loss, and loneliness, and invite survivors who were experienced in giving testimony to be the first to present public statements. This encouraged other former students to push past whatever inhibitions they might have had about publicly disclosing traumatic experiences and made it possible for survivors of abuse to speak.
Aboriginal children were sent to schools such as the Fort Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School in an attempt to forcibly integrate them into mainstream Canadian society.One priest, proudly recalling the military drills given to students in the Fort Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, exclaimed, “We gave them personalities!” What was clearly outside the cultural values of those being educated was, to him, simply character forming.
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