Truth and Indignation: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom) - Softcover

Niezen, Ronald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1442606304 ISBN 13: 9781442606302

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education Division, 2013

Synopsis

Truth and Indignation offers the first close and critical assessment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it is unfolding. Niezen uses interviews with survivors and oblate priests and nuns, as well as testimonies, texts, and visual materials produced by the Commission to raise important questions: What makes Canada's TRC different from others around the world? What kinds of narratives are emerging and what does that mean for reconciliation, transitional justice, and conceptions of traumatic memory? What happens to the ultimate goal of reconciliation when a large part of the testimony—that of nuns, priests, and government officials—is scarcely evident in the Commission's proceedings? Thoughtful, provocative, and uncompromising in the need to tell the "truth" as he sees it, Niezen offers an important contribution to our understanding of TRC processes in general, and the Canadian experience in particular.

About this title

About the Author:

Ronald Niezen is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Faculty of Law and holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Sociey and Public Policy at McGill University. His books include Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law (2010) and the co-edited volume Palaces of Hope: The Anthropology of Global Organizations (2017).

Review:

A rare combination of intellectual poetry and absolutely necessary social science. This study of Canada's attempts to come to public and national terms with one of its darkest legacies can and must be read on a number of different levels: as a superb and sophisticated ethnographic encounter with the ongoing Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as an innovative reflection on the ambiguous ways in which law constitutes its multiple and shifting objects, and as a profound meditation on the ultimate limits of public categories to capture, shape, and mobilize sentiment on a grand, social scale. (Mark Goodale, George Mason University)

A unique chronicle that unsettles our tidy assumptions. Posing questions surrounding injustice and recognition, and the wider implications of the impact of the residential schools, Niezen pushes the boundaries of our understanding of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission can and should mean. (Joanna Quinn, Centre for Transitional Justice, Western University)

A skeptical yet sympathetic analysis of how Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission creates narrative, history, victims, and perpetrators. Niezen interviewed priests, brothers, and nuns as well as former inmates of Canada's residential schools, and sat in on hearings. A brilliant book. (Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Wilfrid Laurier University)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education Division
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1442606304
• ISBN 13: 9781442606302
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192