Moving with and away from Reconciliation

Abstract

"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 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 to other people telling stories at a TRC gathering, 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?"