The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret: The Limits of Non-Indigenous Knowledge and Representation

The trouble with knowing was that it wouldn’t end there. What did you do with what you knew? You could hide it away again, but you’d know that you’d done that. You couldn’t ever go back to not-knowing.

Kate Grenville Searching for the Secret River

In the Public Discourse that has Emerged in response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the residential school legacy is frequently referred to as Canada’s “dark secret,” as an occluded or repressed form of knowledge that the reconciliation process promises to “reveal” or “expose.” But despite the prevalence of this rhetoric of secrecy and revelation—the actual term “secret” figures prominently in newspaper articles, academic studies, cinematic texts, and online blogs on the topic—the legacy of residential schooling has not entered the public consciousness of non-Indigenous Canadians to nearly the same extent as the legacy of the Stolen Generations, as it is called, has entered that of non-Indigenous Australians.¹ Whereas a grassroots movement has flourished in Australia even as (and perhaps because) an official apology and compensation were withheld by the former federal government,² the Canadian administration of Stephen Harper delivered an apology seemingly pre-emptively, at least in relation to any widespread public pressure, but, thus far, there has been negligible community participation in reconciliation initiatives. Perhaps the failure of reconciliation to inspire forms of non-Indigenous activism in Canada can be attributed in part to the interrupted and as yet incomplete work of the trc, which in 2008 temporarily halted its work as a result of the resignation of former chair Harry Laforme. Yet the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (rcap) collected and published plenty of testimonies well over a decade ago, and thus far non-Indigenous Canadians have been emotionally and politically disengaged from, and relatively uninformed about, the legacies of residential schooling. Whereas the Bringing Them Home (bth) report, published by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1997, became the best-selling government document in Australian history and galvanized what is now known as the Sorry Movement, in my home country of Canada most non-Indigenous people remain willfully ignorant of this country’s parallel history of colonialism.

In both Australia and Canada, Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes and communities throughout much of the twentieth century as part of a systematic, state-led policy of assimilation. The bth report records the removal—or more accurately, abduction—of hundreds of Aboriginal children and their massive relocation in government institutions, church organizations, and white foster homes between 1910 and 1970. By way of comparison, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) documents the forced relocation of countless Aboriginal children from across the country into government-led, church-administered residential schools between 1920 and 1980. Both government documents reproduce and analyze the testimonies of survivors as part of a larger national project of bringing the “secret,” as it were, of settler colonial violence out into the open, with the ostensible aim of promoting Aboriginal healing and promoting reconciliation. Although the bth report has not (yet) translated into the transformation of Indigenous social and material conditions—a process that will certainly exceed the limited time span that frames official policy—it has arguably achieved its pedagogical aim of educating non-Indigenous Australians of colonialism and its ongoing effects. The publication of survivor testimonies served as the impetus for various forms of non-Indigenous activism, ranging from the signature of Sorry Books—blank journal-type books that allowed people to inscribe personal apologies—to participation in nationwide marches and demonstrations on National Sorry Day—a designated day of commemoration begun in 1998 and continued every year since. Although the Sorry Books, along with other aspects of the Sorry Movement, have been summarily dismissed by critics as a series of uncritical displays of sentimentalism,³ I would concur with Gail Jones in her view that they “ought seriously to be considered within the genre of the poetics of political dissent” (164). Indeed, for all its limits, the...