Reconciliation Relations

This article asks how the focus on relationships within the emerging public discourse of reconciliation in Canada played out in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission national events (2010–2014). In particular, the article describes the relationships engendered by the structure and staging of one of the TRC’s central forums for survivor testimony: the Commissioners Sharing Panel. I here examine several “relational” performances of reconciliation, both those that script the international significance of Canada’s reconciliation leadership and those that break away from the predetermined role of victim that the TRC’s testimonial forum presupposes. In light of important criticisms of the TRC that acknowledge its compromised spaces of “truth-telling,” I argue that to view them as exclusively co-optive denies residential school survivors and intergenerational survivors agency as anything more than victims.