Scarlet fever in the 1860s affected people along the Yukon and Mackenzie rivers and was perceived at the time as the most significant nineteenth-century epidemic. It was also connected to a much larger scarlet fever pandemic. Combined with influenza, scarlet fever moved down rivers, through trade posts, and into camps, illuminating how local relations with people and the land shaped the pandemic. This chapter conveys the scale of this sickness through estimates of deaths and the geographic extent of disease spread. The chapter then assesses the effects of ill health and mortality, the loss of adults and children, on the larger processes of colonial change underway in the nineteenth century, including the creation of northern residential schools.

Tuberculosis was the most devastating infectious disease of the 20th century. Spread initially in the nineteenth-century fur trade, tuberculosis rose in intensity after 1900, with its greatest impacts in the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter shows the prevalence of tuberculosis infection, its interaction with other pathogens, and the impacts of tuberculosis on children and young adults especially, including how the residential school system amplified the epidemic in the North. More than any other disease, tuberculosis changed Indigenous relationships with the land. The colonial state belatedly responded to this epidemic, relocating the sick to institutions in southern Canada. This policy of medical relocations became emblematic of Northern health history and colonialism in the decades to come.

Chapter 2 addresses early Christian justifications for organised violence and demonstrates the inherent risk of links between religion, politics, and violence. It then examines early justifications for colonisation, where conceptions of non-Christian inferiority justified expansion and transatlantic slavery. In that context, the chapter assesses the emergence of closed institutions run by church and state actors as a key development in how social orders responded to those individuals and groups that were deemed a problem, based on religious and secular motivations. The chapter concludes by documenting the available evidence and estimates of historical abuses available for harms that can today be recognised, if controversially, as gross violations of human rights.

Chapter 9 argues that apologies offer the most direct and explicit mechanism for states and churches to reframe and narrate historical-structural abuse. It argues that although apologies may address institutional or state failure to prevent historical abuses, or the illegitimacy of historical practices, few apologies take the further step of problematizing the claim by states and churches to have the legitimate power and authority to structure lives and society using violent, coercive, or dominating values and means. In doing so, they limit the capacity of the apology to impact underlying structures of power and authority in society or challenges to their fundamental self-identity or founding myth.

Chapter 6 argues that inquiries, whether traditional public inquiries, to more innovative and participatory forms of truth and reconciliation commissions, can enable episodic uses of power from victim-survivors and advocates, evidenced in the nature and extent of consultation and ownership of the process and the opportunity to engage with and influence the inquiry’s operations. Inquiries may shape the nature and function of the articulated emotions of victim-survivors but also have a significant emotional and potentially retraumatising effect for victim-survivors. The chapter argues that these episodic uses of power and experiences of emotional disclosure in well-designed inquiries or commissions will necessarily raise the expectations of victim-survivors for other elements of justice, including structural justice, to be addressed through and beyond other mechanisms of transitional justice.