Moral panics, conservative contrarianism, and the polarizing debate about missing children, unmarked burials, and residential school denialism in Canada

Trauma and suicide behaviour histories among a Canadian indigenous population: An empirical exploration of the potential role of Canada's residential school system

Reviewed by: This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States by Andrew Woolford Sarah K.P. Hayes THIS BENEVOLENT EXPERIMENT: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States. By Andrew Woolford. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2015. Through the lens of genocide studies, This Benevolent Experiment illustrates how the Indigenous boarding school systems in Canada and the United States contributed to North America's cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. Woolford sets the groundwork for his book by defending the term cultural genocide; he argues that the qualifier "cultural" does not minimize the genocidal objective of the boarding schools, nor does it ignore the many Indigenous communities that persevered and survived the boarding schools' attempt at cultural annihilation. To do this, Woolford invokes Rafael Lemkin's definition of genocide, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, which includes the extermination of a group's traditions, language, religion and culture for the purpose of eliminating the group as a whole. This Benevolent Experiment applies this definition to the assimilative mission of the North American Indigenous boarding schools to assert that Canada and the United States used the boarding schools as a tool for cultural genocide. Woolford fashions the term "settler colonial mesh" to help readers understand how this cultural genocide operated on the macro-societal level (the larger social and political forces that conceptualized the "Indian Problem"), meso-societal level (specific government and non-government institutions, including the boarding schools, that sought to solve the "Indian Problem") and the micro-societal level (the individual actors, such as school officials, teachers, and staff, who interacted with students, parents and communities). Woolford visualizes each of these levels as nets, that when placed together form a mesh "that operates to entrap Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial assimilative project" (3). However, Woolford reminds us that mesh is porous, and therefore holes in the settler colonial project sometimes allowed for Indigenous resistance and survival. Woolford applies the metaphor of the settler colonial mesh to two schools in Manitoba (Portage la Prairie Indian Residential School and Fort Alexander Indian Residential School) and two schools in New Mexico (Albuquerque Indian School and Santa Fe Indian School). Through this comparative analysis, Woolford contends that while the Canadian and U.S. systems were different in many ways, both Canada and the United States aggressively pushed residential schooling for the purpose of "destroy[ing] Indigenous groups as groups" (93-4). Furthermore, Woolford analyzes these schools to demonstrate how different assimilative practices were enforced, made flexible, and resisted in order to [End Page 120] contract and expand the settler-colonial mesh, rendering it always in flux. Here, Woolford enters into conversation with scholars of the American Indian boarding schools, such as K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Brenda Child, by exhibiting how some students and parents took advantage of the porousness of the settler colonial mesh by resisting, or by taking advantage of, a Euro-American education. Woolford not only contributes to the study of Indigenous boarding schools, but also to genocide studies, as he uses the histories of the boarding schools to show how nonhuman actors can play a role in genocide. Specifically, Woolford discusses the roles of food-scarcity, land/territory, and disease in the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. Woolford argues that geography has generally been overlooked in genocide studies, and outlines the various roles that geography played in how administrators attempted to control the student body. However, as Woolford illustrates, geography also allowed Indigenous communities to influence and sometimes manipulate school administrations. This Benevolent Experiment concludes with an analysis of how Canada has attempted to unravel the settler colonial mesh. Woolford takes a close look at Canada's Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) passed in 2006, Indigenous reactions to the Agreement, Prime Minister Harper's subsequent national apology, and the possible reasons why the United States has not followed Canada in similar reparations. Woolford argues that the United States lags behind Canada in reparations because of the U.S. boarding schools' perceived use of "softer" assimilation techniques marked by fewer reported cases of physical and sexual abuse. However, Woolford asks his readers not to glorify Canada's...

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on ‘survivor’ experience in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of ‘survivor’, ‘cultural genocide’, ‘trauma’, and ‘healing’ became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canada's Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of ‘victim centrism’, including the ways that ‘truth‐telling’ can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canada's TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school ‘survivor’ as the focal point for understanding policy‐driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity.

Feminist Studies 45, no. 2/3. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 335 Val Marie Johnson “I’m sorry now we were so very severe”: 1930s Colonizing Care Relations betweenWhite Anglican WomenStaff and Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat Peopleinan“EskimoResidentialSchool” Colonial actors and Indigenous peoples have a conflicted “shared history” of residential schools in Canada.1 The conflict is reflected in seemingly unbridgeable accounts of what residential schools represent . Critics, including survivors, analyze residential schools (boarding schools in the United States) as brutal institutions with a living history involving the “theft of indigenous peoples’ lives, land and resources,” as laid out by Roland Chrisjohn et al. This history lives through survivors speaking back to these institutions’ ongoing multigenerational impacts and linked forms of colonizing damage.2 Official and staff accounts frame 1. Val Marie Johnson and Isabelle Knockwood, “Our Shared History” (Presentation , Knockwood Honorary Degree Citation for Doctor of Civil Law, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, October 19, 2013). 2. Ronald D. Chrisjohn, Tanya Wasacase, Lisa Nussey, Andrea Smith, Marc Legault, Pierre Loiselle, and Mathieu Bourgeois, “Genocide and Indian Residential Schooling: The Past Is Present,” in Canada and International Humanitarian Law: Peacekeeping and War Crimes in the Modern Era, ed. Richard D. Wiggers and Anne L. Griffiths (Halifax, NS: Dalhousie University Press: 2002), 263. See also Alice French, My Name Is Masak (Winnipeg , MB: Peguis Publishers Ltd., 1992); Abraham Okpik, We Call It Survival (Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Artic College, 2005); Pauktuutit Inuit Women’s Association, Sivumuapallianiq: Journey Forward: National Inuit Residential Schools Healing Strategy (Ottawa: Pauktuutit Inuit Women’s Association of Canada, 2007); We Were So Far Away: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools (Ottawa: Legacy of Hope Foundation, 2010); and Arie Molena, 336 Val Marie Johnson the schools as positive or at least well-meaning institutions, with abuse restricted to isolated individuals in a distant past. Some staff and their supporters emphasize the schools’ provision of care.3 Canadian Senator Lynn Beyak recently reiterated this “kindly and well-intentioned” residential school narrative, claiming to speak for “a silent majority.” Despite a 2008 national apology presenting these schools as “a sad chapter in our history,”4 their reverberations in Indigenous communities, including through state control of Indigenous resources, mean that colonization still operates through the state removal of children from their families and communities, now defined as “child welfare.” Beyak thus defended residential school staff and “foster families.” The federal government has pledged “to build a new relationship” with Indigenous peoples, but strongly resisted a 2016 Canadian Human Rights Commission ruling that upheld a decade-old First Nations complaint—that their children’s overrepresentation “in state care” (including with foster families) replicates residential school dynamics.5 “‘National Memory’ and Its Remainders: Labrador Inuit Counterhistories of Residential Schooling” in Power through Testimony: Reframing Residential Schools in the Age of Reconciliation, eds. Brieg Capitaine and Karine Vanthuyne (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017), 135– 54. On US schools, see Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). On impacts, see Amy Bombay, Kimberly Matheson, Hymie Anisman, “The Intergenerational Effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the Concept of Historical Trauma,” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (June 2014): 320–38. 3. Bernice Logan, “School Workers Find Their Voice,” interview with Solange De Santis, Anglican Journal (April 2003); Mary Harrington Bryant, 4 Years— And Then Some (Ottawa: Pro Printers, 2007); Thomas A. Lascelles, “Indian Residential Schools,” Canadian Catholic Review 10 (1992): 6–13. Some Indigenous people, including those connected with Shingle Point School, report positive experiences. See also Cheryl Gaver, “Residential Schools in Canada: Why the Message Is Not Getting Across” in Power through Testimony. 4. Lynn Beyak, Senate Debates, Senate of Canada, March 7, 2017; Kristy Kirkup, “Senator Beyak Says ‘Silent Majority’ Supports Her on Residential Schools,” Globe and Mail, April 6, 2017; Stephen Harper, “Statement of Apology to Former Students of Indian Residential Schools,” Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (June 11, 2008). 5. Mia Rabson, “Tribunal Again Tells Feds to Fund Indigenous Child Welfare, Minister Agrees,” CTV News, February 1, 2018, https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics /tribunal-again-tells-feds-to-fund-indigenous-child-welfare-minister-agrees1 .3785170; Cindy Blackstock, “Residential Schools...

The overall theme of this journal arose some time ago from conversations between many of the contributors about the term 'health' and the different ways researchers have applied it to our understanding of the Indian residential school system in Canada. The more we discussed how the term had been applied, and mulled over the possible implications of those applications, the more we recognised the importance of exploring the boundaries of the term, going beyond its traditional usage referring to hospitalisation and medical treatment. As this special issue demonstrates, health, when used in the context of Canada's Indian residential schools, is linked directly to physical education programming, food and malnutrition, language and intergenerational trauma, extra-curricular programming, military preparedness, and cultural identity. Although this collection represents a small sample of the work being carried out by researchers in Canada, we hope it opens up the possibilities for research and understanding regarding healthrelated matters stemming from the residential school system.All of the contributors to this special issue are also politically engaged in one way or another in their various fields. As such, we paid close attention to the final reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission - a federally mandated body that was responsible for collecting and documenting the history of the Indian residential school system from the perspective of the students. Although the six-year investigation ended in 2015, research into the health aspects of the system continues as Indigenous people and Canadians wrestle with complex matters tied to health. All of the articles in this collection refer to some extent to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.Ian Mosby and Tracey Galloway's article, 'The abiding condition was hunger: assessing the long-term biological and health effects of malnutrition and hunger in Canada's residential schools', explores the present-day effects of historical malnutrition on Indigenous people and Indigenous communities. Citing malnutrition studies from around the world, the authors argue that many of the health problems that Indigenous people in Canada face can be traced to the residential schools. It is a groundbreaking study in that it links food deprivation, and the lack of access to healthy foods, to biological and psychological development, thus challenging typical interventions that aim to address health-related issues, such as obesity prevention and diabetes, among Indigenous people. Their use of evidence also highlights the need for researchers to find parallel examples from history and other parts of the world to understand the implications of the Indian residential school system in Canada better.In 'Archival photographs in perspective: Indian residential school images of health', historian and archivist Krista McCracken explores the photographic evidence of sports and recreation at Spanish Indian Residential School in Spanish, Ontario. Spanish was one of the schools that had a very active sports program, as noted by former student and author Basil Johnston in his book, Indian School Days. She delves into the Father Morice Fonds, held at the Shingwauk Centre at Algoma University in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, to examine photos of sport and recreation at Spanish. Her paper focuses on representations of sport and recreation at that institution and investigates what those representations say about colonialism and health, as well as the practice of archiving and its role in helping Indigenous people reclaim their past through explorations of sport and recreation photographs.Lorena Sekwan Fontaine's article, 'Redress for linguicide: residential schools and assimilation in Canada', discusses the effects and lack of governmental recognition of the loss of Indigenous languages due to the residential school system. …

Atopoi of the Modern: Revisiting the Place of the Indian Residential School Geoffrey Carr (bio) On 11 June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal apology to the Indigenous peoples of Canada for the federal government’s imposition of the Indian Residential School (irs) system. This long-awaited gesture of contrition was proffered in the wake of a multibillion dollar reparation package and the inception of a five-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc). Increasingly, governments across the globe are partaking in the politics of regret, and as a consequence more scrutiny has fallen on the form and content of what are now called symbolic reparations: offering public apologies; expunging offensive names attached to institutions, buildings, and streets; constructing commemorative museums; and commissioning memorials. One of the more persistent critiques of such symbolic reparations is the way in which they sublimate and compartmentalize the pain of mass social trauma.1 This tendency appears in postapology sound bites circulating in [End Page 109] the Canadian media, encouraging the nation to “turn the page on this painful history.” In this way, the official politics of regret in Canada produces a disquieting sense that the teleological ends of the democratic nation-state may yet be realized. This official narrative suggests that although founded on colonial violence, the nation is at last moving to its logical conclusion—a fair, open, and tolerant society. To date, however, most talk of reconciliation, from church and state, has shied away from the more burning questions raised by the spectre of the schools: how to prosecute offenders, determine if crimes against humanity have occurred, or reassess how this history impacts the legitimacy of Canadian sovereignty. This general silence stands in sharp contrast to the objections raised by critics, many of them Indigenous, who ask these same difficult questions. In this way, the narrative structure of “turning the page” threatens to foreclose an unflinching struggle with our colonial past and present. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Architectural plan: St Eugene Indian Residential School, 1911, Allan Keefer, architect. Façade elevation. © Indian and Northern Affairs. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2009). Source: Library and Archives Canada / Indian and Northern Affairs / RG22M 77803 / 111 Item 1067. In this article, I will attempt to complicate such facile reconciliatory narratives by examining the design and construction of Indian Residential Schools to outline this architecture’s function in the application of the so-called civilizing process and in the disruption of the political, social, and cultural life of Canada’s Indigenous populations. My analysis focuses in particular on the historical and present-day operation of St Eugene, the once–Indian Residential School now luxury resort, located in Cranbrook, British Columbia (figures 1 and 2).2 I contend that the study of the [End Page 110] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Architectural plan: St Eugene Indian Residential School, 1911, Allan Keefer, architect. Ground floor. © Indian and Northern Affairs. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2009). Source: Library and Archives Canada / Indian and Northern Affairs / RG22M 77803 / 111 Item 1069. building’s design, siting, and program, the policies guiding its operation, as well as the present repurposing of this institution, reveal much about the governmental rationality that informed the construction of a second generation of residential schools—focussed on segregating the unassimilable—and much about the profoundly complicated reconciliation process now underway in Canada as well.3 Dakota historian Waziyatawin has suggested that “no one will be committed to righting the wrongs if they cannot recognize and name those wrongs” (194). I contend that part of this recognition and naming requires a rethinking of the specific material and spatial operation of this architecture, to understand the particular and localized means of enacting policy. I argue further that thinking through the buildings of the residential school system, a project toward [End Page 111] which this paper only makes an initial gesture, comprises an important part of the truth telling process and, by default, any effectual expression of contrition. To date there have been no scholarly studies of the design, siting, scale...

This heartfelt and disturbing book investigates the heinous crime of child abduction from 1900 through 1960 in Mexico City. Drawing on compelling analyses of newspapers, legislation, films, comic books, and juvenile court records in Mexico City, Susana Sosenski reveals the emotional and economic connotations of abducted children as cultural symbols and how the fears about child abduction shaped the parental experience and public perception of kidnapping. Child kidnappers, or robachicos, engaged in different (if occasionally overlapping) types of abduction or kidnapping (for example, ransom kidnapping and extortion, kidnapping by women due to a “desire to be mothers,” parental kidnapping by men who inflicted gender violence on former partners, and the abduction of children for labor and sexual exploitation). Sosenski brilliantly argues that media and citizen fears in response to the abduction of children from well-to-do families resulted in prescribed harsh punishment for perpetrators of child abduction. However, such particular moments of heightened fear in moral panics paved the way for the exclusion of children from public spaces and sustained the impunity and negligence of the Mexican authorities in relation to child abduction.Sosenski has organized her primary sources in a sophisticated argument structured in five chapters that allow her to develop the thesis on how the fear of child abduction, propagated in the print media's massive coverage, increasingly expanded to new technologies of radio, movie newsreels, and comic books and exacerbated class, racial, spatial, and gender disparities in Mexican children's lives. Chapter 1 introduces the moral panics over child kidnappers in Porfirian Mexico City; Sosenski notes how anti-Blackness shaped heightened fear in reports about the abduction of poor children for work in Oaxaca and Yucatán. Chapter 2 unveils the economic and emotional value of children in working-class and middle-class households and the strangers who seized or kidnapped children for labor and sexual exploitation. Sosenski persuasively investigates how common understandings of girls' sexuality fed into family-based concepts of honor and chastity; she shows how the practices and narratives of girls' bodies have perpetuated rape culture in Mexico. Chapter 3 shows how, in the autumn of 1945, the sensational coverage of the kidnapping of Fernando Bohigas, a light-skinned two-year-old from a middle-class family, shaped the response of well-to-do Mexicans to child abduction and resulted in the formation of civic associations and support for the return of the death penalty (which had been eliminated in 1929). The middle-class 29-year-old María Elena Rivera Quiroga, the boy's kidnapper, became a cause célèbre in the public sphere by making a case that she had abducted Bohigas because of her “desire to be a mother” (p. 131). Newspapers, including La Prensa, Novedades, El Nacional, and Magazine de Policía, also encouraged readers to participate in identifying potential child kidnappers in Mexico City.In chapter 4, Sosenski highlights that, pressured by readers in the aftermath of six-year-old Norma Granat's ransom kidnapping, lawmakers increased punishment for kidnappers from five to forty years and equated the crime of child abduction with the most serious form of homicide (p. 166). The 1955 reform of the 1931 penal code after Granat's kidnapping redefined the crime of child abduction as the “unlawful removal of a child under the age of 12 by those who do not exercise full parental authority” (p. 166). In chapter 5, Sosenski highlights how the gendered perspectives of boyhood and girlhood shaped depictions of child kidnapping in press, film, radio, and comic books while promoting the enclosure of children in homes under parents' strict supervision and the surveillance of children by police in public spaces.Sosenki's main contribution to Mexican cultural history and to the burgeoning field of the history of emotions is her employment of emotions as an analytical category, which allows her to examine how new narratives and images of child abduction were disseminated in mass media and consumed avidly by urban audiences. Sosenski convincingly engages multiple historiographies and scholarship across fields in sociology, children's studies, geography, and media studies. This book is an indispensable reference for understanding the emergence of new forms of criminal behavior and police practices that revolve around child abduction and the increasingly rapacious journalistic exploitation of violence against children in Mexico City. Although the book's focus is Mexico City, it will certainly become a reference for students and scholars interested in furthering their research on the extent to which the linkages of fear and childhood in mass media and radical journalism shaped the mechanisms by which the Partido Revolucionario Institucional ruled provincial cities since the Cold War. Future studies might elucidate how the conceptions of order and fear articulated by tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class and shaped the experiences of youth and policing in the growing informal neighborhoods that housed the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor.

Indian Residential Schools were apart of Canada’s aggressive assimilative policy for Indigenous peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), demonstrating the attempts to erase Indigenous people as a cultural and political entity. Ultimately, the schools were key to the “cultural genocide” that occurred. Upon arriving at the schools, Indigenous children would be stripped of their clothes, which was quickly replaced with foreign dress. The act of forcibly taking away and replacing the clothing of the children entering Indian Residential Schools is a direct result of the assimilative policy. This paper outlines Western dress and uniform theory. From there, an Indigenous dress theory is proposed based on Indigenous epistemologies, which emphasizes the differentiation between Western and Indigenous worldviews. Indian Residential School history is shared before examining the use of dress in the schools. Finally, Western and Indigenous dress theories are used in tandem to analyze the events and effects of stripping Indigenous children of their clothes. Understanding the individual experience is possible due to the voices of school. Survivors who shared their stories with the TRC and The Legacy of Hope Foundation, those who rote their own words down, and the voices found in the archival record.

This article explores the representation of cultural genocide in the case of Canada’s Indigenous peoples in Joe Sacco’s documentary graphic narrative Paying the Land, which focuses on the Indigenous Dene peoples in the Canadian Northwest Territories. Specifically, the article discusses Sacco’s depiction of perpetrators of the so-called Indian Residential School System (IRSS), which is contrasted with portrayals of intracommunal violence and Indigenous perpetrators. Through graphic narrative means, Paying the Land presents the latter as an aftereffect of the former and extensively explores how cycles of domestic violence and substance abuse were initiated through the attempted destruction of Indigenous peoples as a group, a process in which the residential schools played an important role. In doing so, Sacco specifically addresses a North American audience as implicated subjects who, like himself, are entangled in settler-colonial histories. He investigates the complexities of perpetratorship and accountability that involves not only the policymakers and residential school staff but also North American society at large. In respect to intracommunal violence among the Dene, Paying the Land seeks to shift public perception from inherently ‘deficient’ Indigenous culprits toward an understanding of the colonial policies that have purposefully eroded social cohesion among Indigenous peoples.

Indian residential school (IRS) sites are physical reminders of the Canadian setter-colonial system's support of sustained violence against Indigenous peoples. Using archival research, I will demonstrate commemorative strategies at IRS sites that have contributed to the construction of collective memory surrounding residential schools and are examples of the role that sovereignty over IRS sites plays in IRS memory construction. My project foregrounds four case studies: the Mohawk Institute, Alberni IRS, Beauval IRS, and the St. Eugene Mission School; which IRS buildings have undergone reuse and destruction and represent what the Tseshaht, Haudenosaunee, Ktunaxa, and Dene have prioritized in their memorial projects. Different treatments of physical evidence at IRS sites, including reuse and destruction, are ultimately both forms of memorialization. I argue that engagement with the tangible history of residential schools by Indigenous peoples provides spaces for self-determination, contributing to the productive formation of collective memories of IRS sites and experiences.

From Reconciliation to Reconciling: Reading What “We Now Recognize” in the Government of Canada’s 2008 Residential Schools Apology Matthew Dorrell (bio) In June 1991, Assistant Deputy Minister for Indian Affairs, Bill Van Iterson, offered what may have been the first governmental apology for the Canadian Indian residential schools system. While attending a national conference convened in Vancouver to examine the legacy of the residential schools system, Van Iterson apologized to the Indigenous and Métis peoples present, according to the Vancouver Sun, “on behalf of public servants” (Todd A2). Reaction to this apology and others offered on the same day by Anglican, Catholic, and United Church officials was mixed, with at least one respondent stating that the apology ought to come from “the Prime Minister and his cabinet” (Todd A2), rather than from an assistant deputy minister. On 7 January 1998, Jane Stewart, then Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, issued a significantly more detailed and specific “Statement of Reconciliation.” Speaking on behalf of “the Government of Canada,” in her address to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples “who experienced the tragedy of sexual and physical abuse at residential schools,” Stewart said, “we wish to emphasize that what you experienced was not your fault and should never have happened. To those of you who suffered this tragedy at residential schools, we are deeply sorry” (Canada, Notes). The statement was explicitly positioned as the [End Page 27] state’s response to the final report delivered by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (rcap); although it acknowledged rcap’s insistence that “The main policy direction, pursued for more than 150 years, first by colonial then by Canadian governments, has been wrong,” the statement did not, for example, respond to rcap’s call either for the dismantling of the Department of Indian Affairs or for the establishment of a separate Aboriginal parliament (Canada, Notes; DePalma). The Stewart Statement of Reconciliation was delivered on Parliament Hill during a lunch-hour ceremony from which then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was notably absent (Murphy 7). In contrast, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered the most recent apology, on 11 June 2008, to a sitting Parliament in the House of Commons. This “official statement of apology” was offered “on behalf of the government of Canada and all Canadians.”1 The apology situates itself as initiating the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission and as proceeding from the “implementation of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement agreement [which] began on September 19, 2007,” an agreement that promised a compensation package of close to $2 billion in order to settle a class-action lawsuit against the government which consolidated what had been thousands of individual lawsuits by residential schools survivors and relatives (Shingwauk News).2 Harper’s apology was spurred in part by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous peoples for the “Stolen Generations” in February 2008 (Welch). Harper’s mea culpa was also an attempt to offset negative international press for Canada’s 2007 vote against, and subsequent refusal to adopt, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a move that received, and continues to receive, widespread criticism both within Canada and abroad (see Bruner; cbc, Canada Votes ‘No’). The government’s repeated statements of contrition suggest the difficulty of attempting to preserve the dominant narrative of Canada as a progressive, peaceable, and inclusive nation, while responding to the longstanding insistence by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis groups that the state acknowledge and apologize for the egregious and systemic abuses of the residential schools system. In a 2008 open letter to Prime Minister Harper, Ted Quewezance, then Executive Director of the Residential School Survivors of Canada (rssc), summarizes rssc’s expectations for the apology, [End Page 28] insisting that the state provide a full and public accounting of, and take full and public responsibility for, the creation and implementation of the Indian residential schools system (Quewezance). The letter’s emphasis on the need for a “sincere” apology (5) can be read in part as a response to the 1998 “Statement of Reconciliation” that many found wanting. Kenneth Deer, for example, replying to the Stewart statement in the Montreal...

The intergenerational effects of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools have been widely discussed, but limited empirical work exists. I use the confidential wave of the 2001 Aboriginal Peoples Survey of Children and Youth (APSCY) to study the association between mothers’ residential school attendance and their children’s educational outcomes and experiences in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Holding a number of factors constant, I demonstrate that children whose mothers attended residential school are more likely to be suspended or expelled and have worse school experiences on average than children whose mothers did not. Children are also more likely to live off reserve and less likely to speak an Aboriginal language if their mothers attended a residential school. I also examine some contextual factors that may influence the relationship between mothers’ residential school attendance and their children’s educational outcomes. These findings suggest that dealing with the intergenerational legacy of residential schools is necessary for improving the educational outcomes of today’s Aboriginal youth.

Introduction:The "Legitimacy Gap" between Law and Culture Cheryl Suzack and Neil ten Kortenaar The typical reparations claim involves powerless victims in no way capable of contributing to the illegal acts. (Matsuda 383) The overwhelming reality of the Indian residential school system confronts Canadians with a sobering task: how to engage in social acts of public mourning that acknowledge the widespread human rights abuses practiced against Aboriginal children while also enacting forms of reparation that allow us to rebuild our broken social relationships. The grim realities of the schools are conveyed in stark terms in the Commission's summary report. Authorized to enact "hostility to Aboriginal culture and spiritual practice" (5) expressed through "institutionalized child neglect" (43), the schools' agents participated in rampant physical and sexual abuse of children under the masquerade of providing culture and learning. More than 150,000 residents passed through the schools' doors during the one-hundred-year period when they were in operation, with living victim-survivors numbering more than 86,000. Initially condemned as enacting "genocide" against Aboriginal communities (Miller 235), the schools were subsequently redescribed as sites of "cultural genocide" in carrying out the government's policy to achieve the "colonization and conversion of Aboriginal people" (43). This shift in terminology that J.R. Miller notes in Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History brought the Commission's [End Page 545] findings into alignment with the position of the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, who described Canada's policy as "a record of attempted 'cultural genocide'" (Miller 236). The modification of terms changes the victim from children to nations and forgets the bodies and their pain. "Genocide," as defined by the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, involves acts of "killing," "causing serious bodily or mental harm," "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part," and "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." In narrower terms, "cultural genocide," according to the summary report, represents "the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group" (1). If we accept that the harms directed against Aboriginal children were structural behaviours resulting in "cultural genocide," as conditions and experiences in an organized system that targeted Aboriginal culture, instead of practices designed to maim or kill people, we lose sight of the bodies that were the targets of the abuse, bodies of children who suffered helplessly at the hands of the church and state. Language becomes the means by which the human child's body fades from view while culture, as a substitute, stands in its stead. As the direct objects harmed through a form of "genocide," children's bodies represent an "incontestable reality" in the form of "bodies in pain, […] bodies maimed, […] bodies dead and hard to dispose of" (Scarry 62). The Aboriginal child's body is the object that we step across on our way to giving meaning to genocide as an act directed against culture, as the reality of genocide's violence is "[s]eparated from its source" in the body and meaning is "conferred [elsewhere]" (62). Because children's bodies were the sites upon which Canada enacted injustice towards Aboriginal communities in gross violation of their human rights,1 keeping these bodies from fading from view represents the crucial task of preventing reenactments of violence and historical erasure that perpetuate the state's injustice by obscuring the victims that are its objects of harm.2 The interplay between language, law, culture, and injustice that permits children's bodies to fade from view through a political struggle over the meaning of genocide makes apparent the "legitimacy gap"' that exists between law and culture. This gap occurs in countries, such as Canada, that have not undergone regime change or political reconstruction to alter the governing structures that put in place genocidal practices against Aboriginal peoples and used law to achieve violent and illegitimate ends. Other countries, such as South Africa after apartheid, have invoked transitional justice as part of a move from an old regime to a new one that needs to declare the former...

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released a Final Report containing 94 Calls to Action. Included were calls for reform in how history is taught in Canadian schools, so that students may learn to address such difficult topics in Canadian history as Indian Residential Schools, racism and cultural genocide. Operating somewhat in parallel to these reforms, social studies curricula across Canada have undergone substantial revisions. As a result, historical thinking is now firmly embedded within the curricula of most provinces and territories. Coupled with these developments are various academic debates regarding public pedagogy, difficult knowledge and student beliefs about Canada’s colonial past. Such debates require that researchers develop a better understanding of how knowledge related to Truth and Reconciliation is currently presented within Canadian classrooms, and how this may (or may not) relate to historical thinking. In this paper, I explore this debate as it relates to Indian Residential Schools. I then analyse a selection of classroom resources currently available in Canada for teaching about Truth and Reconciliation. In so doing, I consider how these relate to Peter Seixas’s six concepts of historical thinking (Seixas and Morton, 2013), as well as broader discussions within Canada about Indigenous world views, historical empathy and Reconciliation.

First Nations children are over 17 times more likely to be removed from their families and placed in the child welfare system (CWS) than non-Indigenous children in Canada. The high rates of parent-child separation have been linked to discriminatory public services and the Indian Residential School (IRS) system, which instigated a multi-generational cycle of family disruption. However, limited empirical evidence exists linking the IRS to subsequent parent-child separations, the CWS, and mental health outcomes among First Nations, Inuit, and Métis populations in Canada. The current studies examine these relationships using a nationally representative sample of First Nations youth (ages 12–17 years) living in communities across Canada (Study 1), and among First Nations and Métis adults (ages 18+ years) in Canada (Study 2). Study 1 revealed that First Nations youth with a parent who attended IRS had increased odds of not living with either of their biological parents, and both IRS and not living with biological parents independently predicted greater psychological distress. Similarly, Study 2 revealed that First Nations and Métis adults with familial IRS history displayed greater odds of spending time in the CWS, and both IRS and CWS predicted elevated depressive symptoms. The increased distress and depressive symptoms associated with parent-child separations calls for First Nations-led interventions to address the inequities in the practices of removing Indigenous children and youth from their families.