The case, the registry and the archive: reflections on truth, reconciliation and retrieval

Abstract

ABSTRACTSignificant critical interventions have refigured colonial and settler colonial archives as sites of political, ontological and epistemological struggle. The rich, interdisciplinary debates characteristic of the archival turn, however, have been insufficiently attentive to the role of court registries, their relationship to state archives and the movement of their records. This article emerged from research conducted in court registries and state archives in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada focusing on judicial articulations of reconciliation that appear in Indigenous rights and title cases and the role that witness testimony, documentary evidence, orders, motions and applications have played in shaping them. In contrast to the fixed places of domicile that Derrida and Mbembe have theorized, following Mawani, Mildon, Stoler, Hunt and Frogner among others, I position law’s archive as both an itinerant site of encounter and exchange and a system of enunciation. When not subject to losses, deliberate or otherwise, its records move between and across spatiotemporal contexts. They challenge the legitimacy of the settler state at the same time as they both reproduce and mask law’s originary violence and the masculinist triumphalism of its archival grain revealing the importance of truth before reconciliation.