Recent Residential School Narratives by non-Survivor Authors and the Education for Reconciliation

Abstract

Recent Residential School Narratives by non-Survivor Authors and the Education for Reconciliation Petra Fachinger (bio) According to the Commissioners of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee of Canada (trc), which released its final report in December 2015, "much of the current state of troubled relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians is attributable to educational institutions and what they have taught, or failed to teach, over many generations" (Final Report 234). For this reason the Final Report emphasizes that education is the key to reconciliation. According to the Commissioners, "learning about the residential schools history is crucial to reconciliation, but can be effective only if Canadians also learn from this history in terms of repairing broken trust, strengthening a sense of civic responsibility, and spurring remedial and constructive action" (240). But first and foremost, "reconciliation is not possible without knowing the truth" (271). In order to determine the truth by establishing the complete history of residential schools, it was "fundamentally important" to the Commission's work to hear the stories of survivors (271). Education about residential schools thus needs to begin by hearing the survivors' stories in a process that requires open-minded and respectful participation of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, acknowledgement of the injustices, and redress. Unlike perpetrator-centred commissions, the trc adopted listening and [End Page 111] outreach activities that included a hotline, community events, ceremonies, commemorative initiative programs, and artistic performances. As the trc Final Report suggests, the arts, including written creative expression, provide a "creative pathway to breaking silences, transforming conflicts, and mending the damaged relationships of violence, oppression, and exclusion" (279). Literary texts are expected to play an important role in generating empathy, which is seen as the essential ingredient for the instigation of social change and the reconstruction of fraught relationships. The texts that I discuss in this article, Anishinaabe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor's God and the Indian (2014), Métis author Joan Crate's Black Apple (2016), and British Canadian novelist Jennifer Dance's Red Wolf (2014), which are all in their own way concerned with education for reconciliation, are indicative of a recent shift in residential school narratives, brought about by the fact that fewer survivor authors are alive to give first-hand accounts.1 Whereas writing about residential schools used to be the ethical prerogative of survivors, the objective of the trc to involve everyone in Canada in the process of reconciliation has compelled both non-survivor and non-Indigenous writers to creatively engage with the residential school legacy.2 As Huron-Wendat scholar Jonathan Dewar observes, while the trc "was not the catalyst for residential schools-related writings," it was "a catalyst" (161). In contrast to literature written by survivors, which focuses on the childhood experience and evokes "survival, resistance, and continuance of cultures against colonial policies aimed at the annihilation of Indigenous presence" (Eigenbrod 280), texts by non-survivor and non-Indigenous writers are primarily concerned with both educating Canadians about the crimes committed in residential schools and with the renewal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships. The proliferation of residential school narratives over the last five years can be read as symptomatic of a heightened awareness of the atrocities and an increasing preparedness and willingness by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to break the silence. [End Page 112] But the process of how truth will yield reconciliation remains somewhat opaque. According to legal scholar Jennnifer J. Llewellyn, "the absence of clarity about the meaning and goal of reconciliation makes it difficult to understand the motivation and parameters of this search for truth" (191). Indigenous academics and activists have also been skeptical of the assumption that truth leads to reconciliation and reluctant to endorse reconciliation as a meaningful concept or politically viable process. Oneida psychologist Roland Chrisjohn and his co-authors, for example, have drawn attention to the harmful effects of the "residential schools syndrome," which reduces survivors to therapeutic subjects who rely on being offered healing opportunities by the settler state and its institutions to unburden themselves of the effects of trauma to become productive citizens (19–20). Moreover, in "Half-Truths and Whole Lies: Rhetoric in the 'Apology' and the Truth and...