The Canadian child welfare system has been characterized as being in crisis for over a decade; the number of children in care (and dying in care) has increased dramatically, straining an overburdened system. Physical or sexual abuse is not the reason most children are removed from their homes; rather, the state deems them lacking the necessities of life, usually because their family is impoverished. Because the majority of children in care are Indigenous, the child welfare system is described as the new version of residential schools. Using the lens of historical institutionalism, this study argues that the current child welfare system reflects colonial and neoliberal assumptions that some parents are incapable of sound decision making by virtue of their race or socio-economic situation. Canada's child welfare system is both a product and contributor to the institutions and policies that reinforce intergenerational poverty, a key determinant of removing children from their families.

This article addresses the historical justice dilemma: although critical memory is indispensable for accountability, efforts to use it are often hampered by the unjust relations and systems that caused the wrongs to which historical justice is compelled to respond in the first place. Contemporary authors tackle this problem by focusing on collective responsibility for structural injustice. This article takes a different tack. Studying closely the 2009–2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report, it argues that the structural turn may come at the expense of a focus on agency and may thus provide unwitting anonymity for wrongdoers while crimping our thinking about leadership and responsibility. Although this article strongly criticizes the TRC report, it tries to work constructively with it, developing an analysis that compensates for the report's unwitting invisibilization of perpetrators. Distilling portraits and analyses of wrongdoer agency that are latent in the TRC's postwar history volume, this article shows how we can develop the report as a resource of what I call retributive social accountability.

The search for missing or murdered Aboriginal women as well as the enquiry of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into residential schools both serve as a reminder that violence in Canada does not belong to the past. The individual and collective efforts of victims to express that violence and the deployment of the word “violence” in the public sphere are both part of what this article will analyze: the process of making that violence visible. Using a symbolic approach to power, this article analyzes the ways in which institutional means of justice, such as the TRC, address the making visible of violence from individual, community and societal perspectives.

Over time, the Canadian state has used a variety of mechanisms to address its troubled relationship with its indigenous population, the most prominent of which so far was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). RCAP was mandated to develop both a constitutional framework and a comprehensive social-welfare policy. Staffed predominantly with constitutional lawyers, it articulated a sophisticated constitutional theory, which was not implemented, and did little to ameliorate the living conditions of Aboriginal people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (TRC), while arising from the settlement of a national class action, can be seen as a successor commission to RCAP. It follows in the procedural footprints of RCAP in a number of ways, including in the profile of its key appointments. This article argues that looking back at the successes and failures of RCAP can be instructive for the TRC as it carries out its mandate, allowing us to predict some areas that will be particularly challenging. In these areas, the TRC will require a departure from the RCAP blueprint if it is to achieve the ambitious goals of a TRC in a non-transitional-justice context.

When we talk about truth and reconciliation commissions, we are accustomed to speaking of “transitional justice” mechanisms used in emerging democracies addressing histories of grave injustices. Public inquiries are usually the state response to past injustice in the Canadian context. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is the result of a legal settlement agreement involving the government, representatives of indigenous peoples who attended residential schools for a period lasting more than a century, and the churches that operated those schools. Residential schools have been addressed in a series of public inquiries in Canada, culminating in the TRC. I argue that some of Canada's previous public inquiries, particularly with respect to indigenous issues, have strongly resembled truth commissions, yet this is the first time that an established democracy has called a body investigating past human-rights violations a “truth commission.” This article considers some of the reasons for seeking a truth commission in an established democracy and looks to a previous public inquiry led by Thomas Berger, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, for some useful strategies for the TRC as it pursues its mandate. In particular, I suggest that a commission can perform a social function by using its process to educate the broader public about the issue before it.

Remembering Inninimowin is a two-year-long documentary film project on the personal journey of a Cree woman, Jules Koostachin, a member of Attawapiskat First Nation, as she starts to remember her first language, Inninimowin (Cree).

Building on a cultural studies framework, this article addresses the implementation of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement by cataloguing specific reconciliatory events, public forums, and media coverage that occurred in 2010. Revealing the contradictory nature of Canada's reconciliation project, the author situates the IRSSA within a larger infrastructure of policies and procedures that have limited Indigenous nationhood and autonomy in the Canadian settler society. Specifically, this article identifies a need to trouble categories of trauma and victimhood that may engender outcomes of cure, which ultimately constitute a foreclosure on the past in Canada's reconciliation process. While therapeutic language is less apparent in the IRSSA, the author suggests, it is still deployed under the guise of closure and “settlement.”