Power through Testimony: Reframing Residential Schools in the Age of Reconciliation

From the publisher:

"Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a forum for survivors, families, and communities to share their memories and stories with the Canadian public. The commission closed and reported in 2015, and this timely volume reveals what happened on the ground.

Drawing on field research during the commission and in local communities, the contributors reveal how survivors are unsettling colonial narratives about residential schools and how the churches and former school staff are receiving or resisting the “new” residential school story. Part 1 details how residential schools have been understood and represented by various groups and individuals over time and how survivors’ testimonies at the commission are changing those representations. Part 2 examines whether the stories of abuse and trauma now circulating are overpowering less sensational stories, preventing other voices and memories from surfacing in local communities. Part 3 explores how the churches and former school staff have received this new testimony and what their response means for future relations with Aboriginal peoples across the country.

Power through Testimony shows that by bringing to light new stories about residential schools and by encouraging the denunciation of other historical wrongs, the TRC was more than a symbolic act. Ultimately, however, the contributors question the power of the TRC to unsettle dominant colonial narratives about residential schools and transform the relationship between Indigenous people and Canadian society.

As one of the first books published on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Power through Testimony will be of interest to students and scholars of Aboriginal studies, anthropology, and colonial studies and all Canadians interested in transitional justice and human rights." 

Excerpt from Author's Introduction, Page x-xi:

"The fact that oversimplified messages arise almost naturally out of an effort to correct a condition of ignorance suggests that there is something important and unrecognized about the public reception of knowledge, particularly knowledge about rights and the harms of the state. What are the conditions that produce widespread public knowledge of a rights cause, as well as dissidence under circumstances in which acting on that knowledge is opposed by the state? Is there something inherent in new media that intensifies the memetic effects of communication, effects that at the same time diminish people’s capacity to see beyond the enclosures of rediscovered identity and their own self-interest? To put this in more concrete terms, does the production of knowledge about residential school experiences encourage the creation of closed communities based on oversimplifications of complex realities? The emerging body of research on Canada’s Truth and The fact that oversimplified messages arise almost naturally out of an effort to correct a condition of ignorance suggests that there is something important and unrecognized about the public reception of knowledge, particularly knowledge about rights and the harms of the state. What are the conditions that produce widespread public knowledge of a rights cause, as well as dissidence under circumstances in which acting on that knowledge is opposed by the state? Is there something inherent in new media that intensifies the memetic effects of communication, effects that at the same time diminish people’s capacity to see beyond the enclosures of rediscovered identity and their own self-interest? To put this in more concrete terms, does the production of knowledge about residential school experiences encourage the creation of closed communities based on oversimplifications of complex realities? The emerging body of research on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools, in which this book has a central place, suggests that the legal structures that limit what is sayable and the media that communicate what is said within those limits each contribute to narrowness and distortions of opinion. This circumstance means that to achieve its central goal – reconciliation on a grand scale out of an ambitious production of knowledge – the TRC was challenged by more than government obstruction and a lack of public interest in the truths it sought to make known. It first had to overcome new forces of enclosure, of non-reconciliation, particularly the tendency for communities to form around ideas that provide security and a sense of belonging while overlooking the costs of intolerance." (x-xi).