A Bridge to Reconciliation: A Critique of the Indian Residential School Truth Commission
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2010.1.1.3Abstract
In the past year, the Government of Canada has established the Indian Residential Schools (IRS) Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to address the deleterious effect that the IRS system has had on Aboriginal communities. This paper argues that the TRC as an alternative dispute resolution mechanism is flawed since it focuses too much on truth at the expense of reconciliation. While the proliferation of historical truths is of great importance, without mapping a path to reconciliation, the Canadian public will simply learn about the mistakes of the past without addressing the residual, communal impacts of the IRS system that continue to linger. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission must therefore approach its mandate broadly and in a manner reminiscent of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples of 1996.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2010 Marc A. Flisfeder
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
In keeping with IIPJ's Open Access policy, IIPJ has a shared approach to copyright. A shared approach means that authors do not have to waive all of their rights to the work published in IIPJ. By submitting to IIPJ, the author(s) grant(s) IIPJ the right to:
- Copy edit the article,
- Display the article in perpetuity, and
- Enforce the conditions of the Creative Commons license associated with the article.
All articles published in IIPJ carry the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives license (click here for the human-readable summary and here for the legal code).
This means that the article can be copied or redistributed without written permission from the author(s) or IIPJ if the following conditions are met:
- IIPJ is appropriately credited as the original source. The reference should include the article's DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which helps us track the dissemination of articles published in IIPJ.
- The article is not being used for a commercial purpose. Users must be able to access the reprinted or republished article without paying any fee.
- The article is not altered from its original form. This means it cannot be edited, transformed, remixed, or truncated in any way. This policy protects our authors from having their work or intent misrepresented.
Any reprints, republications, or distributions that do not meet all of these conditions must be approved in writing by the author(s) of the article and IIPJ.
IIPJ will not grant permission to any publisher that requires authors or IIPJ to waive any of their rights to the article.
Authors who wish to reprint, republish, or distribute their article published in IIPJ for any commercial purpose must obtain written permission from IIPJ and provide appropriate attribution.
IIPJ will consider accepting articles that have been previously published. However, authors submitting articles of this nature must:
- Indicate that the article was previously published,
- Provide details of all previous publications (that is, source, publication date, format, etc.),
- Describe how their IIPJ submission differs from the original publication, and
- Provide written permission to republish the article from the copyright holder(s) if applicable.