Rose Prince was a young Indigenous woman who lived during the first half of the twentieth century, spending most of her short life in a Catholic residential school near Fraser Lake, British Columbia, Canada. Shy and retiring in life, Rose's venerators believe that her understated devotion was rewarded by a postmortem miracle generally reserved only for God's greatest saints: incorruption. The Catholic hierarchy and Rose's Carrier people, though at odds on much else, are unanimous that the Lejac Indian Residential School unwittingly hosted a saint between its opening in 1922 and Prince's death in 1949, and the two groups seek together to honor her with an annual pilgrimage to her gravesite. But this fragile unanimity exists in dynamic tension with the two groups’ divergent interpretations of Prince's holiness, particularly as it pertains to the legacy of residential schools. For some within the Catholic hierarchy, Rose's sanctity provides a powerful justification for the much-critiqued assimilative educational system. For many Carrier, however, Prince is its starkest repudiation. For them, Rose was—and is—the heart of a heartless world, incarnating gentle compassion in a system that, while it trumpeted these Christian virtues, itself was notably lacking in them.

Two young teachers posted at an Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, Canada, sought to act as whistleblowers regarding abuse there in 1952–53. Theologian Eugene R. Fairweather of Trinity College, Toronto, acted as their advocate and spiritual advisor. A significant correspondence, mostly purged from the official record, considered the reports of the whistleblowers, their fate, and the fraught place of the Residential Schools in Canadian Anglicanism in the decades before the era of Truth and Reconciliation. This article examines the relevant correspondence, retained only in the archival remains of Fairweather at Trinity. The correspondence, which adds to existing narratives of Anglican complicity in and responses to abuse at the Schools, suggests that future research must scrutinize official as well as previously overlooked sources of information, particularly the archival repositories of universities and theological schools, in search of the truth.

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.”