Ronald Niezen - Truth and Indignation: Canadas Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools

This second edition of Truth and Indignation was planned from the beginning. When the project began, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian Residential Schools had not yet started its hearings and I did not know quite what to expect. Once things were under way, however, it did not take long to see how the Commission had chosen to approach statement gathering, to make ritual and symbolic forms of expression a central part of its activities, and in particular how it was limited by its mandate to what I now call survivor centric or (comparatively) victim centric forms of inquiry from certain individuals and not others. Under these circumstances, it seemed a good idea to produce a book while the Commission was still engaged in its work. This rationale was also connected to a commitment to truth or to the procedural logic of scholarly inquiry. In an institutional process of limited duration like the TRC, it is impossible for observations and conclusions to be checked against reality after the fact. By coming out with the book a year before the Commission was to submit its final report (two years, as it happened), the intention was to allow critics to check my observations against subsequent events of the Commission as it continued its work. Of course, there was always the risk that the Commission would change course and start doing something different, or that audiences in the remaining events would respond differently. As it turned out, the Commission remained remarkably consistent, despite the diversity of the indigenous peoples in Canada whose legacies of residential school experiences it was intended to address. The conditions were there for a contribution to productive critical engagement in the scholarship on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

That this did not happenand more precisely how this did not happenwas to me the most surprising result of this books early appearance. When I gave public talks, objections to the content of the first edition of this book focused on its presentation of narratives from the priests, brothers, and nuns who had been involved one way or another in the operation of the schools. One statement from an audience member, who identified herself as a residential school survivor, in the question period of a talk I gave at the Faculty of Law at McGill University has stood out in my memory as expressing the sentiment behind these objections particularly well: The priests have had the dominant discourse for more than 150 years. Now its our turn. (I honestly cannot remember how I replied.) This statement succinctly expresses a view of truth and history that is very important, and that in some ways defines the times. There is an argument here for privileging the voices of the once dominated. Truth has an inverse relationship to power. There is an us and them quality to legitimate knowledge, implying an element of political resurgence. All of this ran squarely against my (perhaps naive) intuition that the sense of offence and exclusion toward the work of the Commission by many of the people who ran the schools was something that needed to be written about and better understood.

This second edition is therefore centrally concerned with a problem of knowledge, the emergence of regimes of truth through public inquiry, and the production of history in the context of political mobilization and the quest for social justice. In taking on this topic, I have chosen to leave the text of the book largely unchanged, with only minor additions, updates, and corrections, leaving the substance of new work in an epilogue. Here my intention is first to bring the reader up to date with the work of the Commission and the public and institutional responses to the submission of its final report in December 2015. To this I have added some further reflections on the TRC and the problem of knowledge, presented in a wider context that considers victim centrism as an emerging aspect of the global project of transitional justice.

Ronald Niezen

Montreal, April 2017