Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights

1. An Introduction to Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights

1 one An Introduction to Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights Why sexual ab(use) usury rights re treaties and reserves the book is the discourse of pain are the rights to use us colonial discourse intercourse examines the literature of damages marketability truth and telling1 If every age has its symptoms, ours appears to be the age of trauma. Naming a wide spectrum of responses to psychic and physical events often with little in common beyond the label, trauma has become a portmanteau that covers a multitude of disparate injuries. Stories that would seem to belong to different orders of experience enjoy troubling intimacies. But whatever their origins, the effects of historical trauma have a tenacious hold on the popular imagination. —nancy miller and jason tougaw2 In a 2008 news article, “Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Raises Controversy,” Adrian Humphreys asks her readers to contemplate how “Canada will take its historical place alongside such tarnished regimes as South Africa, Chile, El Salvador and Sierra Leone.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) formed in response to a successful 2006 class action suit by Canadian Aboriginal peoples for their intergenerational abuse in residential schools.3 As a result, the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement provided payments to individual victims, funds for healing initiatives in Aboriginal communities, and provisions for future commemoration and memorial programs. Sixty 2 • Therapeutic Nations million dollars was earmarked for the TRC alone to stage a forum where residential school survivors, their families, and all those Canadians who feel the necessity will speak their truth. The goal is reconciliation between Canada and Aboriginal peoples, whose relationship was characterized in the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples final report as “a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Canada.”4 The TRC can also be seen in the company of reparative initiatives emerging after a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples finished its work in 1995. Canada’s TRC bears some resemblance to the efforts to rewrite history made by earlier commissions in Argentina (one-time payment to victims), and Chile and Guatemala (commemoration and memorial programs).5 These commissions are a product of our age, an age of human rights, global violence, mass media, and neoliberalism. They appear to represent our human desires for a just peace in what appears to be an increasingly brutal world. Canada is the first western nation to use this truth-andreconciliation process in an Indigenous context. While Australia and New Zealand can be said to have used truth-seeking processes to ameliorate relations with Maori and Aboriginal peoples, Canada is the first to adopt a TRC committed solely to finding the truth of a nation-state’s abuses against an Indigenous population.6 Canada, a country that has almost no standing national army and the desire for a worldwide reputation as a defender of human rights, seems incongruous in the company of those failed regimes that have usually hosted these commissions since the early 1970s. Priscilla Hayner wrote that the commissions may “counter what psychologist Yael Danieli calls a conspiracy of silence.”7 Claire Moon observed the truth commission as “a symbolic recognition” of something widely known but “officially denied.”8 It’s our contemporary logic that any peace after state and civic violence is rarely accomplished by silencing victims. If a victim’s or a group of victims ’ experience has no voice, the experience returns through continuing discord. Reconciliation projects are carried out informed through this sensibility. But it’s a logic that itself belongs to trauma. Trauma supposes a violence that overwhelms, wounding individual (and collective) psyche, sometimes suspending access to memory.9 The victims of traumatic events suffer recurrent wounding if their memory/pain is not discharged. A theory of trauma is embedded in an internationally recognized economy of justice that reconciliation belongs to. I agree with Nancy Miller and Jason Tougaw in the epigraph I cite above: the ethos of this time is trauma.10 I ask what the implications of this trauma ethos are for Indigenous peoples. In their 2009 study The Empire of Trauma, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights • 3 observe, “Trauma has become a major signifier of our age. It is our normal means of relating present suffering to past violence.”11 Canadian Aboriginal peoples, subjects of a history of colonial violence, are thickly ensconced in the intensities, logics, and languages...