Indigenous writing and the residential school experience

"This is the Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recommendations for action to address that legacy." - Publisher

"Between 1867 and 2000, the Canadian government sent over 150,000 Aboriginal children to residential schools across the country. Government officials and missionaries agreed that in order to "civilize and Christianize" Aboriginal children, it was necessary to separate them from their parents and their home communities. For children, life in these schools was lonely and alien. Discipline was harsh, and daily life was highly regimented. Aboriginal languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed. Education and technical training too often gave way to the drudgery of doing the chores necessary to make the schools self-sustaining. Child neglect was institutionalized, and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers. Legal action by the schools'' former students led to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2008. The product of over six years of research, the Commission's final report outlines the history and legacy of the schools, and charts a pathway towards reconciliation." - Publisher

In seven volumes:

The history. Part I: origins to 1939
The history. Part II: 1939-2000
The Inuit and Northern experience
The Metis experience
The missing and unmarked burials report
The legacy
Reconciliation

"Truth and reconciliation commissions and official governmental apologies continue to surface worldwide as mechanisms for coming to terms with human rights violations and social atrocities. As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state." - Publisher

"Truth and Indignation offers the first close and critical assessment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as it is unfolding. Using interviews with survivors and oblate priests and nuns, as well as testimonies, texts, and visual materials produced by the Commission, Niezen raises some very important questions: What makes Canada's TRC different than others around the world? What kinds of narratives are emerging and what do they mean for reconciliation, justice, and conceptions of traumatic memory? And what happens to the ultimate goal of reconciliation when a large part of the testimony--that of nuns, priests, and government officials--is scarcely evident? Thoughtful, provocative, and uncompromising, Niezen offers an important contribution to our understanding of the TRC process in general, and the Canadian experience in particular." - Publisher