Truth And Reconciliation Commission Research Articles

Advancing Indigenous primary health care policy in Alberta, Canada

For Indigenous people worldwide, accessing Primary Health Care (PHC) services responsive to socio-cultural realities is challenging, with institutional inequities in healthcare and jurisdictional barriers encumbering patients, providers, and decision-makers. In the Canadian province of Alberta, appropriate Indigenous health promotion, disease prevention, and primary care health services are needed, though policy reform is hindered by complex networks and competing interests between: federal/provincial funders; reserve/urban contexts; medical/allied health professional priorities; and three Treaty territories each structuring fiduciary responsibilities of the Canadian government.In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released a final report from over six years spent considering impacts of the country's history of Indian residential schools, which for more than a century forcibly removed thousands of children from their families and communities. The TRC directed 94 calls to action to all levels of society, including health systems, to address an historical legacy of cultural assimilationism against Indigenous peoples. To address TRC calls that Indigenous health disparities be recognized as resulting from previous government policies, and to integrate Indigenous leadership and perspectives into health systems, PHC decision-makers, practitioners, and scholars in the province of Alberta brought together stakeholders from across Canada. The gathering detailed here explored Indigenous PHC models from other Canadian provinces to collaboratively build relationships for policy reform and identify opportunities for PHC innovations within Alberta.

The moral fabric of linguicide: un-weaving trauma narratives and dependency relationships in Indigenous language reclamation

ABSTRACTIn Therapeutic Nations, Dian Million highlights the complicated role that neoliberal arenas like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and international dialogues concerning human rights play in the marginalization of Indigenous communities. Neoliberal arenas are empowered by sociopolitical imaginaries, or a metaphorical moral fabric of a given community, that consist in discursive content and affective, felt knowledge. According to Million, the sociopolitical imaginaries that give weight and context to negative stereotypes about Indigenous peoples are the same sociopolitical imaginaries that empower neoliberal arenas. In a sense, the proposed solutions are ‘cut from the same cloth’ as the causes of settler colonial violence. Million does not directly apply her argument to Indigenous language reclamation, but Million’s conceptions of sociopolitical imaginaries and paradoxically imposed neoliberal arenas are useful for framing a discussion of the potential harms in some Indigenous language reclamation projects, specifically, revitalization programming described by UNESCO and those pursued by U.S. research universities. I aim to show that some of these proposed solutions to Indigenous language loss are cut from the very same cloth, justified by the same sociopolitical imaginaries, as attempted linguicide itself.

APLA and the Amnesty Committee of the TRC? An Ethical Analysis of the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa

This article examines the role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It focuses on the amnesty committee and challenges regarding amnesty applications of members and supporters of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), an armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC). These complications emanated from policies and politics of the mother-body (PAC) and APLA, which made it difficult to distinguish between acts with a political objective committed by bona fide APLA members and purely criminal acts committed for personal gain. Such policies were expressed in: 1) The APLA slogan “One Settler, One Bullet”; and 2) The policy regarding “Repossession of property” by Azanians. The position of APLA needs to be understood against the fundamental politics of the PAC that the presence of white settlers in South Africa (occupied Azania) is an act of occupation, dispossession and colonisation. Thus, all white people in South Africa are regarded as settlers and targets for APLA. This position contends that, as a result of the settler status of all white people in South Africa, everything that they purportedly own belongs to Azanians and must be repossessed. Another complication—according to the TRC—was for some applicants to meet at least one of the requirements for amnesty, since any incident committed had to constitute an act associated with a political objective. Other challenges were lack of documentation to prove membership of APLA, and the autonomy or independence of the mother body (PAC) and its armed wing (APLA).

Settler colonial archives: some Canadian contexts

ABSTRACTArchives became a central part of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Indian residential schools over its 7-year course. The Commission’s mandate included the creation of a National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: a permanent archive of residential school history as well as a place to house records of the Commission’s work. The TRC’s final Calls to Action also recommended reform to archival institutions in Canada. This paper focuses on the central role that archives played during the TRC and what these realities might offer for considering methodologies and settler colonial archives more generally. It begins with a detailed description of the TRC’s archival layers and then zooms out to larger considerations of state archives and settler colonialism. The paper then considers the settler colonial language and metaphors often used in archival research and then offers several ‘archive stories’ or field notes, from the author’s larger research. It concludes with new directions in understanding archives.

AMNESTY AND RETRIBUTION

AbstractThis paper addresses the relationship between amnesty granted to perpetrators of serious human rights abuses and retributivism. It rebuts arguments advanced by Dan Markel and Lucy Allais in support of their claim that the granting of conditional amnesty—amnesty in exchange for perpetrators’ confessing to, and disclosing the details of, their wrongdoing—by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was consistent with retributivism. Markel contends that conditional amnesty was perfectly in line with recipients’ desert, while Allais submits that the TRC secured as much retribution as was possible in the circumstances of South Africa’s democratic transition. The argument of the paper is that while retributivists have good reasons to view conditional amnesty as justified, the reasons provided by Markel and Allais are not among them.

Reshaping Policies to Achieve a Strategic Plan for Indigenous Engagement in Nursing Education

Canadian universities are developing strategies to address the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Calls to Action. There has been much attention paid to the positivist, individualistic and Eurocentric foundations of nursing and its educational curricula, but limited focus on assessing organizational structures or engaging with stakeholders. Without both approaches, the success of new initiatives may be limited. The College of Nursing at the University of Saskatchewan implemented a "Learn Where You Live" model that demonstrated a sense of place by providing access and opportunity in rural, remote and northern regions of the province. Key to this initiative was the creation of the position of Strategist for Outreach and Indigenous Engagement, whose role it is to develop strategic initiatives designed to interpret and influence socio-political and policy-level system changes. This paper shares how adding a political scientist to nursing education created an interprofessional team by introducing new ways of thinking and being that have cultural relevance and understanding for a sustainable future.

Seeing Like a Settler Colonial State

In 1998, the Canadian historian and politician Michael Ignatieff wrote: “All nations depend on forgetting: on forging myths of unity and identity that allow a society to forget its founding crimes, its hidden injuries and divisions, its unhealed wounds.” Ironically, Ignatieff's home country has belied his assertion. Canada has engaged in collective remembering of one of its hidden injuries—the Indian residential schools—through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 2009 to 2015. Australia, too, has reckoned since the 1990s with its own unhealed wounds—the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, or, in common parlance, the “Stolen Generations.”

Creating the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and Proactive Disclosure Under the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Act

More than 4,000 lawsuits were filed against Canada and the Christian churches that operated Canada's Indian Residential Schools. A settlement agreement put an end to these lawsuits. One part of the settlement agreement created Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and one part of the mandate given to the TRC was to create a national research centre, now known as the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). This paper tells the story of how the TRC created the NCTR with a particular focus on the legal documents that created the NCTR. This paper examines the contents of the Trust Deed and Administrative Agreement between the TRC and the University of Manitoba (the U of M created the NCTR). This paper also examines why a new law, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Act (which came into effect in 2015), was enacted by the Manitoba legislature and what the new law's provisions are. The NCTR Act is unique in Canada for its preamble about how Canada has treated its indigenous peoples and for expressly providing for proactive disclosure of the NCTR's records, subject to certain limitations.

Doing Theology after the TRC

Many Canadians, including the leadership of the mainline churches, are still trying to come to grips with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its Calls to Action as they rethink the colonial foundation of both the Canadian state and the churches. Given the role of Canadian mainline Christianity and the churches in this history, the work of unmasking the colonial theology that sustained the “evangelizing and civilizing” foundational projects of the state and the violence they produced becomes an urgent theological task that is yet to be tackled seriously. With a primary focus on the Catholic context, after a brief historical survey this article considers some of the key theological questions inspired by Indigenous voices and proposals that theology after the TRC can no longer ignore.

The sacramental nature of peacemaking rituals: a case for a sacramental spirituality of reconciliation

South African scholar and peace activist John de Gruchy sees a close relationship between sacraments and peacemaking processes. Even though a Protestant, he calls the Church a sacramental community and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) a ‘civic sacrament’. This raises the question of the relationship between processes and rituals of peacemaking and sacramentality. Moreover, how does reconciliation, as a core doctrine of Christian theology, relate to sacramentality and peacemaking efforts in society? Is reconciliation sacramental? Hans Boersma’s sacramental ontology provides a theological basis for an affirmative answer. Furthermore, the notion of Christ (and the Church) as primal sacrament(s) (Semmelroth, Schillebeeckx) gives a further basis to see processes of peacemaking as sacramental. The article argues for a sacramental spirituality of reconciliation (Schreiter). However, applying the arguments to two concrete cases, the TRC and the twinning of Coventry and Dresden, shows some difficulties in claiming sacramental status for reconciliation efforts.

Dislocations: The Dynamics of Memory and Perplexities of Freedom in John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth

ABSTRACTThis article questions the meanings ascribed to memory and reconciliation after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. It discusses these meanings through an analysis of the subjectivities projected in John Kani's play Nothing but the Truth (published in 2002). This play is one of the few theatrical projects that boldly address the elastic concepts of (dis)locations and disjunctures, memory, and reconciliation both spatially and temporally. Zakes Mda asserts that “the past will always be a powerful presence in the present” (Nothing but the Truth. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 2002, 3) and concludes that Kani's play intricately unpacks the perplexities of freedom. Freedom ceases to be perceived as a monolithic experience: it is as personal as it is socio-political and as vexed as it is taken for granted. Post-apartheid experiences convey a lot more than dreams of freedom. Arjun Appadurai's concept of “vernacular globalization” is used to frame this article.

Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Rita Kesselring

Reviewed by: Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Rita Kesselring Nicholas Rush Smith Rita Kesselring, Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. By now, much has been written about the politics of apartheid victimhood and particularly South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)—a multi-year series of public hearings into political crimes committed under apartheid. Scholars have written on such varied topics as the public performances of the TRC (Cole 2010) and the bureaucratic work going on behind the scenes (Buur 2002). Scholars have praised the TRC for allowing reconciliation without requiring punishment (Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts 1997) and, conversely, criticized it for forestalling justice by granting amnesty in exchange for confession (Sitze 2013). Scholars have studied the multiple forms of individual confession and storytelling performed during hearings (Posel 2008), while others have decried the focus on individuals as detracting from the collective nature of apartheid's injustices (Mamdani 2002). With such varied work having been done on the country's reckoning with apartheid's crimes through the TRC, what more is there to say? Quite a bit if one reads Rita Kesselring's excellent updating on the politics of apartheid victimhood, Bodies of Truth. One key difference between Kesselring's book and previous work on apartheid victimhood is the empirical focus. Where other work predominantly looks at the institution of the TRC, Kesselring looks at a social movement of apartheid victims that first emerged in response to the TRC process. The Khulumani Support Group, a grassroots (though increasingly professionalized) victim advocacy group, forms the main basis for this study. This lens allows Kesselring to open a novel space through which to understand the relationship between apartheid and victimization. [End Page 841] Where the TRC promoted a view of apartheid victimhood predicated on direct injury by the regime or one of the country's liberation movements, Kesselring shows, via engagement with Khulumani, how the focus on direct injury excludes other forms of victimhood, like the structural violence that apartheid's inequality produced for most of the country's population. The violence of this lingering inequality, Kesselring shows, can also have injurious effects on the body, as economic deprivation can force people into forms of labor that strain the limbs and harm the soul. Apartheid's injuries, therefore, are not only individual; they are also social. The question of the body and victimhood are not only questions for how to understand the after effects of apartheid, though. They shed general light on the globally increasing turn to law by victims of state violence seeking redress for past injuries. Where some scholars writing of this trend have argued that such lawfare may entrench victimization as one's primary subject position, Kesselring argues the opposite. For her, pursuing legal remedies does not produce subjection to a legal discourse. Rather, "it is the consequence of people's attempt to emancipate themselves from a discourse—under conditions in which the law is a more promising avenue than politics" (2). Nonetheless, legal remedies are only partial solutions to victimhood as "embodied experiences of harm are not (and cannot be) completely absorbed by legal discourse" (2). The mismatch between legal processes and the experience of bodily injury can create challenges for redressing the effects of collective injuries legally. However, it also offers opportunities for victims, like Khulumani members, to experiment with new forms of sociality and political claim making by lodging legal cases, launching protests, and relying on one another for emotional support. To make these arguments, Kesselring's first three empirical chapters look at the jurisprudence in South African and American courts that have taken up victimization since the end of apartheid and how legal procedure might work against the formation of collective, political notions of victimhood. The first of these chapters (Chapter 1) lays out the background of the Khulumani Support Group. Although it started as a small group of apartheid victims, today it claims roughly 104,000 members. The Khulumani membership, it should be noted, dwarfs the 21,000 people who applied for reparations from the TRC victims fund. Part of the difference...

Moving with and away from Reconciliation

Moving with and away from Reconciliation Laura J. Beard I want to get rid of the Indian problem […] Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian Question and no Indian Department. -Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs, 1920 Reconciliation to me is about not having to say sorry a second time. -Cindy Blackstock, First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, 2015 Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) held hearings across Canada, providing opportunities for Indian residential school survivors, their families, and others to share their stories of the Indian Residential School System and its impacts on their lives. For many, the TRC began in 2008 with a great sense of purpose, and importance was placed throughout on allowing people a space to tell their stories and to have those stories heard and received in dignity. For the TRC, "reconciliation is about establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in this country" (Final Report 6). It is not the reestablishment of a previous positive relationship, as might be thought of in other contexts. The testimonies at the TRC hearings were intended to create, in a sense, a set of shared memories to draw from in that relationship. But will the stories that bear witness to the residential school experience be enough to move non-Indigenous people in Canada beyond the racist structures of 150-plus years of colonization to a new future? Can shared stories do that? If the memories on one side are of generations of lived, residential school experiences in one's family while the memory on the other side is that of an afternoon spent listening [End Page 653] to other people telling stories at a TRC gathering,1 are those really the collective memories that create communities? In the same way, for life narrative scholars, does an afternoon reading a life narrative from another culture change our sense of community? Does reading a life narrative change us? Does it change our communities and our nations? In the end, are we moved to action by life narratives? The TRC process has clearly been a complex one, with the terms themselves particularly charged. For example, Dakota scholar Kim TallBear rejects the concept of reconciliation, noting that reconciliation implies equal complicity in colonization. In a talk at the 2016 Indigenous Feminism Workshop at the University of Alberta, she paraphrased from Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook Lynn, stating: "I don't want reconciliation. I want restitution of land." Like Cook Lynn and TallBear, Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred is also critical of what he refers to as the "pacifying discourse of reconciliation": Without massive restitution made to Indigenous peoples, collectively and as individuals, including land, transfers of federal and provincial funds, and other forms of compensation for past harms and continuing injustices committed against the land and Indigenous peoples, reconciliation will permanently absolve colonial injustices and is itself a further injustice. (182) Reconciliation is thus not a term that moves everyone to embrace the TRC project, as they see it as a "virtual minefield of assimilative dangers" that appeals to "a settler-colonial state hoping to put its genocidal past behind it" (Robinson and Martin 6). Gitxan scholar Cindy Blackstock has taken up the term reconciliation, but uses it to turn attention to the ongoing issues with First Nations children in Canada that still need addressing. In February 2007, "as Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society (FNCARES), [Blackstock] brought a landmark discrimination case to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to challenge the federal government's chronic underfunding of children's services on First Nations reserves and for First Nations children in the Yukon" ("Reconciliation"). In powerful speeches and interviews about the situation of First Nations children in Canada today, she urges the Canadian government to address current conditions, and points out, "Reconciliation to me is about not having to say sorry a second time" ("Reconciliation"). Yet others think through the TRC process differently. In the same panel at the 2016 Indigenous Feminism Workshop, Cree-Métis scholar Shalene Jobin...

Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada eds. by Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton

Reviewed by: Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada eds. by Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton Alan L. Hayes Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada. Edited by Tolly Bradford and Chelsea Horton. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017. vii + 212 pp. Contributors, index. $29.95 CAD, $32.95 USD, paper. The phrase "mixed blessings" signals that Indigenous experiences of Christianity in Canada should be seen as highly diverse, with long-term consequences that were sometimes beneficial and sometimes damaging. This theme is explored in an introduction and nine independent essays touching on a variety of periods, Indigenous nationalities, and historical figures, and reflecting different authorial points of view. Twelve authors have contributed; only two identify as Indigenous. Mixed Blessings: Indigenous Encounters with Christianity in Canada originated in a conference at the University of Saskatchewan in 2011. The conference was particularly timely, the participants knew, since Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had just begun to take stock of the legacy of the country's Indian residential schools. Indeed, the TRC saw the influence of Christianity as mixed, as Siphiwe Dube argues, the churches had run residential schools as instruments of repression and cultural assimilation, but Christian faith and caring were helping many of the survivors find healing and comfort. Dube notes that some Indigenous critics of the TRC denied any positive benefit of Christianity at all, and were dismayed that the TRC had invited the churches to participate and that its work was being shaped by Christian notions of repentance and forgiveness. The subtitle of the book is a problem, as Amanda Fehr recognizes explicitly in her chapter, and as other writers acknowledge [End Page 127] implicitly. It assumes a binary opposition between Christianity and Indigeneity, making "encounter" necessary. But did such a binary opposition ever exist? Christianity did not always come from outside the Indigenous context. Many elements of Christianity were already part of Indigenous spiritualities. Indigenous Christian evangelists and teachers often preceded the Euro-Canadian missionaries. Indeed, sometimes Jesus appeared to Indigenous peoples independently of the Europeans, as he did to the Stó:lo of British Columbia, as Fehr observes. The authors also reject other simple binary oppositions such as political and spiritual, colonizers and victims. In this postcolonial approach, the editors understand their work as following "an interpretive shift well underway in the United States." Two chapters take us to the Great Plains. Tasha Beeds shows how Edward Ahenakew (1885–1961) of Saskatchewan bridged Cree and Church of England. Fluently bilingual, he both published Cree stories and preached sermons as an Anglican priest. He was also a leading advocate for Indigenous rights through the League of Indians, until his English bishop stopped him. Jean-François Bélisle and Nicole St.-Onge rescue Louis Riel (1844–85), the rebel leader of two uprisings in the Canadian prairies, from the interpretation of English Canadian historians that his religious commitments were esoteric at best, if not lunatic. Riel's political agenda to protect Métis land rights should be joined to, not separated from, his millenarianism and his religious vision for civil government. This vision, so far from being idiosyncratic, was linked to a transnational conservative Roman Catholic movement, and it squared with the Métis experience of the Catholic Church. Like most if not all collections of essays, this one is uneven in quality, but overall it succeeds in challenging the generalizations and stereotyping that have dominated many past narratives of Christian Indigeneity in Canada. [End Page 128] Alan L. Hayes Wycliffe College University of Toronto Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Resurrection of Chanie Wenjack

The release in 2015 of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission examining Canada’s Residential School system coincided with the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the tragic death of Chanie Wenjack, who died trying to escape residential school in 1966. Migmaw singer Willie Dunn’s 1971 song “Charlie Wenjack” and Sto:lōwriter Lee Maracle’s 1976/1990 short story “Charlie” ensured that the story remained in circulation in Indigenous communities, and after the release of the final report of the TRC, Canadian musician Gord Downie and author Joseph Boyden re-invigorated the story and introduced it to Canadians with their own versions of the tragedy.While Dunn and Maracle use strategies of resistance common to the protest movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s to tell Wenjack’s story, Downie and Boyden use strategies of affect to reach their audiences. All four artists are clearly working for change, but what the tellings of the stories ultimately serve to illustrate are two conflicting approaches to reconciliation—the first promoting Indigenous subjectivity, and the second Canadian nationhood.

The challenges of structural injustice to reconciliation: truth and reconciliation in Canada

ABSTRACTLu’s distinction between interactional and structural injustice helps to clarify both the normative significance and some of the shortcomings of recommendations adopted by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). At the same time, the TRC highlights three challenges to addressing structural injustice in the context of reconciliation.

Contested Directions: Performance Studies in/from/of Canada and Québec

Contested Directions:Performance Studies in/from/of Canada and Québec Kirsty Johnston (bio) PERFORMANCE STUDIES IN CANADA. Edited by Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017; pp. 464. NATIONAL PERFORMANCE: REPRESENTING QUEBEC FROM EXPO 67 TO CÉLINE DION. By Erin Hurley. Cultural Spaces series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011; pp. 264. ROBERT LEPAGE ON THE TORONTO STAGE: LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, NATION. By Jane Koustas. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016; pp. 224. Last year, people living in Canada responded to the country's 150th year with celebration, critique, and challenge. Arguments about the country's current directions infused ideas about its past. Many people were and are still coming to grips with the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada, which over six years of public hearings had revealed the harrowing intergenerational effects and legacies of the Indian Residential School System. Shortly before a major series of public events in Ottawa to mark the sesquicentenary, Indigenous protesters erected a teepee on Parliament Hill, declaring it part of a "reoccupation," and hosted guests, among them Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In Québec, public spending, but not much public enthusiasm, accompanied the sesqui-centenary. Québécois interviewed in the press noted that this celebration, which largely ignored the French Canadian past before confederation, was one for English Canadians [End Page 411] and immigrants. Within this heady context of anger, lament, celebration, and controversy, three books arrived on my desk for review, each of which deals in different ways with the currents of history, identity, and performance running through the events of Canada 150, or "#colonialism150" as some critics dubbed it on Twitter. Read together, they suggest the ways in which performance theories and histories in Canada point to a multiplicity of national identities as well as potential futures and directions, even as the federal government promotes a centralizing vision of unity. On the face of it, these books can all be read under the sign of performance studies in Canada. Like the Canada 150 celebrations, however, the realities beneath the surface are more complex. Even if they all concern Canadian subjects broadly defined, each book tackles different places, performances, and scales and considers the category of nation in inverted commas. In Performance Studies in Canada, editors Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer have gathered a strikingly diverse and robust complement of performance studies scholarship from Canada-based scholars, but are careful to avoid drawing some essential national connection among them. Indeed, leading Canadian performance studies scholar Ric Knowles praises the editors' decision to be "rightly circumspect about what constitutes 'performance,' 'performance studies,' or 'Canadian context'" (383). As he explains in the book's afterword, [m]any Indigenous scholars, artists, and others do not recognize the borders that came late to divide the land that is Turtle Island or the colonial authority of the state apparatuses that police them. Many do not recognize the disciplinary silos that have long characterized Western systems of research and knowledge production, preferring a holistic, relational, and reciprocal approach to understanding that is lived and situated. (387–88) Thus, while the contingent performance of national identity is an explicit subject in several of the entries in Performance Studies in Canada, the collection as a whole troubles national framing. In comparatively more focused ways, the two other books raise similar themes. Erin Hurley's multi-award-winning monograph National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion also troubles the national idea—specifically, the Québécois national idea, but here it is the volume's central focus and problem. Pushing the boundaries of national theatre and performance studies scholarship, Hurley provides new modes of interpretation and paths that "alter not only what can be recognized as national (in this case, as Québécois) but also the conditions of perception for national performance" (11). She draws her compelling arguments around such diverse examples of cultural performance as Expo 67, the drama and theatre of Michel Tremblay and Marco Micone, the devised image theatre of Carbone 14, the musical stylings of Céline Dion, and feminist theatre practice of the 1970s and '80s. In another direction...

A Sinister Resonance

This article poses two attendant questions. The first asks how we might think silence as a modality of en-voicing, particularly in the work of the Truth andReconciliation Commission. I use the term en-voicing here because it offers a resonant mode of reading both image and sound, but also accounts for those sounds that we regard as absences, or non-sounds. En-voicing, as invoked by Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, accounts for the ways in which vocality might be thought of as a mode of intelligibility marked by aurality rather than orality, in the sonic rather than solely within the linguistic parameters that the phonic might connote. It can therefore be suggested that through a concept of en-voicing, the visualism in linguistic theory, De Saussure’s sound-image, might be displaced.... A second question this article asks is what it is about silence that textures the Truth Commission as an institution. By briefly turning to analyses by Adam Sitze, this article also asks how silence as invoked in the South African context would translate in other spaces in which the modality of the truth commission has been instituted, such as Canada. It therefore seeks to latch onto the impossibility of sound as a direction from which to audit the event that is the death of Lungile Tabalaza and its reverberations, but also to audit the relationship between the TRCs in South Africa and Canada.... if the gazedesignates that which can be seen, in the sense of what constitutes the limits of seeing and what organizes what is visible, the audit operates by asking what it is we hear and how we listen. Put simply, this article is concerned with what it means to encounter a sinister resonance, in terms of both the sonic and the political.

Sortir de la violence : La Commission de vérité et de réconciliation du Canada sur les pensionnats indiens

Résumé La mobilisation pour les femmes autochtones disparues ou assassinées ainsi que la Commission de vérité et réconciliation (CVR) du Canada sur les pensionnats indiens nous rappellent que la violence au Canada n’appartient pas au passé. Le travail individuel et collectif des victimes pour exprimer cette violence et le déploiement de cette parole dans l’espace public fait partie du processus de sortie de la violence que cet article se propose d’analyser. Empruntant une approche symbolique du pouvoir, cette recherche analyse la manière dont les dispositifs institutionnels de justice tels que la CVR abordent la sortie de la violence des points de vue individuel, communautaire et sociétal.

THE ROLE OF TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION IN PEACE BUILDING: NEPAL

The ten-year Maoist insurgency in Nepal ended in 2006 with Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA). A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to address the human rights violations including societal impacts which occurred during the insurgency and to bring justice to its victims and perpetrators. Hence, this paper explores the role of the TRC in facilitating and establishing peace by analysing and comparing similar TRCs’ operations in South Africa, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. For this, the study utilizes primary information data collection methods and content analysis to critically examine the role of TRCs in the peace process. It identifies the key achievements of these previous TRCs and recommends ‘6R’ measures to Nepali TRC for justice and peace establishment in Nepal.