Truth and Reconciliation in Canada: Indigenous Peoples as Modern Subjects

Abstract

This chapter considers how the traumatic history of Indian residential schools might be remembered, in particular by intergenerational survivors. Photographs that depict this history are notable for displaying the power of the Canadian state to intervene into Indigenous lives at the level of the individual through education policies. These images rely on colonial conceptions of spatial distance understood as time needed for cultural development. Understanding these conceptions is powerful for analyzing photographs of Indigenous peoples, in particular in policy and history texts. How educational policies are experienced intergenerationally by the descendants of survivors reveals another dimension of Canadian colonialism. These themes are explored indirectly, but in depth, by the German born writer, W.G. Sebald (2001) in his fictional writing. A fictional character in his novel, Austerlitz, asks: What do we know of ourselves, how do we remember? And what do we find in the end? These questions frame this chapter that discusses memory, history, trauma, and identity in relation to the history and future of education for Indigenous peoples in Canada.