Preserving the Painful: Lessons on Agency, Preservation, and Dialogue in Acknowledging Canada's Indian Residential School Sites

Abstract

For nearly 150 years, Canada's Residential School Program sought to forcibly place Indigenous youth in boarding schools that would strip them of their Indigenous cultural knowledge and assimilate them into settler society. The trauma induced by these acts of cultural violence is now being acknowledged by the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which contains Calls to Action for how these and other atrocities committed against Indigenous Peoples might be brought to light. Among these calls to action is the mandate to work with Indigenous Peoples to acknowledge the sites of the Residential School Program. However, there are few precedents for commemorating sites of trauma associated with forced social reform. Drawing on lessons from sites of state-sanctioned social reform forcibly carried out against marginalized communities at the Sean McDermott Laundry in Dublin, Ireland, and the Holy Cross Laundry in Brisbane, Bennett House in Perth, and the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Home in Kinchela, Australia, this paper demonstrates how attention can be paid to the agency and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples in the best cases by acknowledging the diversity of survivor experiences. These projects point to the potential for preservation processes to be used as important avenues for difficult but necessary conversations regarding reconciliation and demonstrate instances where the process fell short of the objectives the TRC sets for the preservation of the Residential School sites.