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Unsettling Cures: Exploring the Limits of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Robyn Green
Robyn Green
Affiliation:
School of Canadian Studies, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6,robyn_green@carleton.ca
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Abstract

Building on a cultural studies framework, this article addresses the implementation of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement by cataloguing specific reconciliatory events, public forums, and media coverage that occurred in 2010. Revealing the contradictory nature of Canada's reconciliation project, the author situates the IRSSA within a larger infrastructure of policies and procedures that have limited Indigenous nationhood and autonomy in the Canadian settler society. Specifically, this article identifies a need to trouble categories of trauma and victimhood that may engender outcomes of cure, which ultimately constitute a foreclosure on the past in Canada's reconciliation process. While therapeutic language is less apparent in the IRSSA, the author suggests, it is still deployed under the guise of closure and “settlement.”

Résumé

Élaboré à partir d'un cadre d'études culturelles, cet article aborde la question de la mise en œuvre de la Convention de règlement relative aux pensionnats indiens en répertoriant les activités particulières de réconciliation, les réunions publiques et la couverture médiatique qui se sont produites en 2010. Tout en montrant la nature contradictoire du projet de réconciliation du Canada, je situe la CRPI dans une plus grande infrastructure de politiques et de méthodes qui ont limité le statut de nation et l'autonomie autochtones dans la société colonisatrice canadienne. Cet article établit plus particulièrement le besoin de se préoccuper des catégories de traumatisme et de condition de victime pouvant engendrer des résultats de remèdes qui, à terme, constitueront une forclusion du passé dans le processus de réconciliation du Canada. Même si le langage thérapeutique est moins apparent dans la CRPI, tout me porte à croire qu'il est toujours utilisé sous la forme de fermeture et d'« accord ».

Keywords

Canadian Truth and Reconciliation CommissionIndian Residential SchoolsIndigenous–settler reconciliationtherapyrestitutionCommission canadienne de vérité et de réconciliationpensionnats indiensréconciliation entre Autochtones et colonisateursthérapierestitution
Type
Truth, Reconciliation and Residential Schools
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 129 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 2012

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