Carly Ciufo defends J.R. Miller, Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts its History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Many onlookers would suggest that, in the last few years, there has been a veritable shift in the greater public’s understandings of Indigenous peoples’ experiences in Canada.
And they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. More and more, journalists are spotlighting the injustices against Indigenous peoples embedded within and perpetrated by Canada’s justice system. People are increasingly aware that too many Indigenous reserves across the country have limited or no access to clean drinking water. The understandings of the everyday inequities experienced by Indigenous peoples in nearly every social, economic, and political context has increased exponentially. And through examples like Idle No More, the activism of the young water walkers, and an upcoming national billboard exhibition project, Indigenous youth and women are at the forefront of intergenerational advocacy that has progressively become part of the collective consciousness of the country.
With the considerable commitments of governments, universities, and other institutions to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s 94 Calls to Action, more Canadians seem to be paying more attention to the realities, resistance, and resilience of Indigenous peoples from coast to coast to coast.
But does this increased awareness actually result in present-day reconciliation in Canada?
Maybe the 2013 David Garneau painting that graces the cover of JR Miller’s Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts its History (University of Toronto Press, 2017) is just as telling of our present as it is of our past. Miller’s use of Garneau’s Not to Confuse Politeness with Agreement may very well serve as a warning for our collective future, too.
It is perhaps anticipated that Miller would be a contender for CHA Reads 2018. His Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Native-Newcomer Relations (University of Toronto Press, 1989) and Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press, 1996) have been important texts in the Canadian history field since their publication. This is largely because both books incorporate Indigenous narratives into the more conventionally-accepted academic story of what Canada is. By starting in the 1980s, Miller’s Residential Schools and Reconciliation adds a decisively recent history of the institutional politics that surround residential school reconciliation that previous works seem to lack. In highlighting church, court, and state attempts to listen to, negotiate with, and sometimes suppress Indigenous peoples and their experiences, Miller investigates why some of the darkest foundations of Canadian history remained relatively unknown to the majority of Canadians for so long.
Residential Schools and Reconciliation is an incredibly important and timely read. As our newsfeeds, lecture discussions, and everyday conversations are striving to open up what “Canadian history” means, Miller stresses that Canada will stay under the thumb of the residential school system’s legacies if the wider Canadian public fails to accept it as a prominent part of its past.
And that is where the strength of this book lies. For Miller, there have been—and continue to be—efforts made in schools, community centres, and governments to revise the public’s knowledge of both historical and contemporary Indigenous experiences. He highlights key meetings of former residential school students with religious leaders and politicians that, eventually, lead to the TRC and its 2015 report. And, in moving through these histories, Residential Schools and Reconciliation outlines how we got to where we are now.
By opening his text with a 1984 call and 1986 response to Indigenous peoples’ demands for an apology from the United Church of Canada for its poor treatment of Indigenous folk from its first missionary activities onward, Miller recounts the apologies of Roman Catholic, Anglican, and other Christian churches that occur well into the 1990s. He then outlines the processes that went into the organization, implementation, and uneven successes of the government-directed work that was carried out by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF). From there, Miller focuses on attempts at litigating resolutions with discussions of adequate compensation and the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) before outlining the significance—and limits—of the federal government’s 2008 apology and the TRC.
Whether discussing the ins and outs of Indigenous and settler politicians, legislators, and policy workers or making space in his text for residential school survivor testimony, Miller offers a comprehensive study of the nearly four decades of attempts, mistakes, and achievements of the unfinished reconciliation that all Canadians are still living with today.
In doing so, he illustrates a longer history of reconciliation than broader Canadian understandings of the recent past usually care to admit. And this is his point. By writing an institutional treatment of Indigenous peoples’ contemporary interactions with the churches, courts, and legislatures that built and sustained the residential school system and its legacies, he presents a clear illustration of how the country has come to our current iteration of reconciliation discourse.
Whether studying Miller’s book or the intricacies of Garneau’s painting on its cover, the relevance of both lie in the strikingly obvious challenge to the Canadian public: realize that you, too, have been a crucial part of silencing Indigenous peoples’ experiences.
It is therefore Miller’s challenge to Canadian historians that, I suspect, will resonate most with Unwritten Histories’ readers. Yes, Miller mentions the current presence of various important local reconciliation initiatives that, if sustained, he thinks will continue to bolster popular support for inclusion, acceptance, and awareness of Indigenous narratives in this country’s history. And he stresses that attempts at reconciliation are not necessarily new; as his book outlines, they have been going on for decades. But it is that historians have not always taken up the opportunities to better inform text books, public policy, and museum displays with more honest narratives of Indigenous experiences that remains a central concern of Miller’s. Too few of us have taken these challenges on in our work. And, for Miller, that may have resulted in the broader Canadian public taking until 2015 to really start wrestling with the historical importance and contemporary relevance of Indigenous peoples’ experiences in, insights about, and criticisms of Canada.
This isn’t about forgiving, forgetting, and moving beyond history. Miller’s book is instead calling on all Canadians to listen, hear, and act on a more comprehensive understanding of the past and its influence in our current lives.
Miller does a wonderful job outlining the day-to-day operations of and interactions between Indigenous advocates and survivors with the churches, courts, and commissions that have, together, moved reconciliation processes forward. And, although I would have appreciated if Miller had offered a more firm grounding in the work of Indigenous scholars on this topic in the body of the book, he historicizes the processes of reconciliation in Canada through a robust use of archival sources, news media, policy papers, and interviews. This makes his book a necessary and accessible read for a settler Canadian public ill-informed of the roots of residential school reconciliation.
As a well-documented example of the kind of work that should have been crucial to Canadian history practice all along, Residential Schools and Reconciliation may very well be an implicit call to action for Canadian historians to do the work that still needs to be done.
Carly Ciufo is a doctoral candidate at the LR Wilson Institute for Canadian History in the Department of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. After defending her MA thesis on the Catholic foundations of Québécois separatism at Queen’s University, she held multiple research, exhibit, and librarian positions at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. Her dissertation focuses on human rights museums and the people who build them.
Be sure to join us tomorrow for Dan Horner’s defence of Cecilia Morgan, Travellers Through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada.
Don’t forget to check out the other posts in our CHA Reads Series!!
Carmen Nielson is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta, and the author of Private Women and the Public Good: Charity and State Formation in Hamilton, Ontario, 1846-93 (UBC Press, 2014). Her work has been published in Gender & History, Women’s History Review, and Canadian Historical Review. She is currently writing a cultural history of Grip magazine.