Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History

Miller (Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens) constructs a solid, objective history of Canada’s ongoing efforts to atone for its Indian Residential School system, which was labeled an act of cultural genocide in 2015 by the government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His critical exploration shines a light on decades of church and government negotiation to address a century’s worth of harm caused when white settlers separated 150,000 indigenous children from their families for forced assimilation. Miller gives life to the often dry and mind-numbing elements of bureaucratic history, providing views of unsavory backroom calculations in which compensation for horrific abuses was crunched into a formulaic points systems based on the types of mistreatment suffered. Miller ably documents groundbreaking royal commissions, caustic litigation, trauma-triggering mediation processes, and a commission that traveled across Canada gathering witness testimony and producing landmark recommendations, compressing complex history into a smoothly flowing narrative. Despite being marked by the repetition that tends to weigh down such academic titles, this book is equally useful to researchers and general readers. As colonial nations around the world seek pathways to post-conflict reconciliation, Miller’s timely work is an important reminder of both the potential obstacles and the healing possibilities of such initiatives. (Nov.)