The TRC, Reconciliation, and the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School

IN 2015 THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION (TRC) released its final report, drawing Canadians’ attention to “the complex truth about the history and the ongoing legacy of the church-run residential schools.” Its 94 Calls to Action outlined wide-ranging initiatives to dismantle the enduring colonial attitudes and structures that gave rise to, and sustained, residential schools. In keeping with Eva Mackey’s belief that academics are positioned to help “make things right,” many regional scholars, both as educators and as members of a profession that has long reified white privilege and colonialism, have committed to the reconciliatory work of the Calls to Action.1 In some ways, these efforts have resulted in observable, if modest, changes: increasing numbers of university courses have been amended to highlight Indigenous histories and explore colonialism, inherent biases of familiar texts and narratives have been reconsidered, and pedagogical practices that reinforce structural privileging of non-Indigenous students and that disadvantage Indigenous ones are being questioned. The symbolic gesture of acknowledging that Atlantic Canada is unceded Indigenous territory has become commonplace and, significantly, some regional scholars – before and since the TRC – have applied their expertise to legal cases, some resulting in important rulings affirming treaty and Indigenous rights.2 Eight years on, however, reconciliation faces sharp critiques, both as a concept that is arguably reduced to platitudes and as a process that has been so abysmally slow that, at its current pace according to one study, all of the Calls to Action will not be met until 2057.3 The shortcomings of reconciliation are apparent regionally. That a settler scholar is exploring this topic for this