Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Assessing context, process, and critiques

Abstract The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada was a post-judicial exercise in truth telling after seven generations of residential schooling for Indigenous children. I outline some of the strengths and weaknesses of the process and engage with a range of critiques from settler and Indigenous academics and theorists. Section One covers the lengthy process of Survivors to seek redress for their experiences. Section Two covers the judicial processes that preceded the TRC. Section Three focuses on the TRC, and some of its strengths and weaknesses through three distinct but slightly overlapping lenses. I engage with settler critics who argue that the TRC was either too pro-Survivor, too anti-state, anti-school, and anti-church. I contrast this with Indigenous critiques from the resurgence school who saw the TRC as too close to government. I conclude with the transformative reconciliation school, advanced by Indigenous and settler academics working together to take the best aspects of the TRC and apply them.