Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Indian Residential Schools by Ronald Niezen (review)

In my own writing about truth commissions and their reports, I have been reluctant to call them, as they are so often called, “truth and reconciliation commissions.” It seemed to me that truth was one thing, reconciliation another, and that truth alone did not necessarily result in reconciliation: the rote connection—truth-and-reconciliation—was wrongheaded. Ronald Niezen’s brilliant and dense book has helped me to appreciate the accuracy of this intuition. Truth and Indignation is the result of a detailed research project that examined the still-ongoing work of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (its last event will occur in late March 2014) that is respectful both of the work and the participants and yet highly critical of the enterprise. It is a tremendous step forward from a scholarly human rights culture that has been overly awed by the truth commission phenomenon and far too slow in probing beneath the surfaces. If we start from the premise that truth commissions have something valuable to offer, we must move beyond it to the questions of their limitations and dark sides.

Niezen writes: “In spite of their lofty goals, truth commissions, by their nature, make poor historians.”¹ Truth commissions offer a counter-history, one that can go a long way in correcting the hegemonic master narrative of the state, in that they provide venues for the formerly silenced victims (or the preferable word, “survivors”) of state injustice and violence to tell their stories. But, as Niezen points out, not all stories get told. Too often with public testimony, an “acceptable” template arises, and the witnesses shape their stories to fit it. This is not to say that witnesses lie, not at all. Yet as with all storytelling, parts are selected and parts left out. Some people choose to speak and others do not. The counter-narrative that emerges is molded by the commission’s and the audience’s expectations. Stock characters inhabit the stories—victims and perpetrators—rather than real human actors with a complexity of emotions, motives, experiences, and truths. Yes, truths—not truth. And I take that to be one of Niezen’s primary points. The history of the Canadian Indian residential schools is not a pretty one, but it is far more complex than the “history” that is being promulgated by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

By way of background: the Canadian Indian residential schools resulted from a Canadian government policy for Indian education and assimilation that lasted from the late 1860s until the 1990s when the last schools closed. The government collaborated with a variety of Christian churches, which took over the administration of the schools. Canadian law required that all Aboriginal children attend a government-sponsored day or residential school, and for many Aboriginal children, residential schools were the only option; 150,000 Aboriginal children attended these schools. By the time the last schools closed, it was widely acknowledged that many of the children were not only cruelly separated from their families and their cultures, but also were physically and sexually abused at the schools. In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper publically apologized to the Aboriginal people and shortly afterwards, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established. The Commission sponsored public and private venues for testimony from the victims of harm at the schools, as well as some testimony, largely apologies, from representatives of the churches that ran the schools.

The genesis of Truth and Indignation was Niezen’s project of interviewing Oblate priests, brothers, and nuns who had been involved in running the schools and who, as a result of the Commission’s work, were lumped into the category of “perpetrators.” Niezen found that many of the “perpetrators” saw themselves as victims and that the history of the schools was far more layered and complicated than what was being revealed by the official Commission; Niezen...