Residential Schools and Opinion-Making in the Era of Traumatized Subjects and Taxpayer-Citizens

Jennifer Henderson

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, Volume 49, Number/numéro 1, Winter/hiver 2015, pp. 5-43 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/610439

Access provided at 2 Aug 2019 20:06 GMT from Western Ontario, Univ of Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

Residential Schools and Opinion-Making in the Era of Traumatized Subjects and Taxpayer-Citizens

JENNIFER HENDERSON

This essay tracks the media-led production of a Canadian common sense about residential schools in the decade leading up to the 2005 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Newspaper commentary on residential schools lawsuits accentuated the already constrained understanding of the agency, duration, and effects of the schools’ harm within private law. Civil litigation was a strategy for seeking the accountability of churches and government; however, arguments in the mainstream media repeatedly asserted that the wrong of residential schooling was limited to specific, individual crimes of sexual and physical assault. These arguments reinforced the parameters imposed by tort law. The newspaper commentaries cultivated a common sense about residential schools that drew on the discourse of trauma and a neo-liberal discourse delegitimizing claims on state resources. Trauma’s biographical scale and focus on the catastrophic event reinforced the emphasis on specific crimes. The neo-liberal taxpayer-citizen could empathize with the individual traumatized by violence, whilst dismissing broader claims about residential schooling. In newspaper commentary, then, residential schools became discursively dis-embedded from the broader framework of colonial policy. The claim of a collective experience of cultural loss was key in the struggle to resituate the schools within this framework; however, the recognition ultimately won may bear the imprint of a common sense that constrained what the recovery of culture could mean.

Cet article fait un suivi de la production par les médias d’un sens commun canadien concernant les pensionnats autochtones (écoles résidentielles) au cours de la décennie qui a précédé l’Accord de règlement relatif aux pensionnats indiens de 2005. Les commentaires dans les journaux sur les poursuites liées aux pensionnats ont réduit la compréhension déjà limitée des préjudices causés par ces établissements, leur durée et leurs répercussions sur le droit privé. Le contentieux des affaires civiles a été utilisé comme stratégie pour obliger l’Église et le gouvernement à rendre compte de leurs actions, mais les médias populaires ont déclaré à maintes reprises que les préjudices causés par les pensionnats étaient limités à des crimes de violence sexuelle ou physique visant des individus. Ces déclarations ont renforcé les paramètres imposés par le droit de la responsabilité délictuelle. Les commentaires des journaux ont cultivé un sens commun au sujet des écoles résidentielles qui s’appuyait sur le discours de la traumatologie ainsi qu’un discours néo-libéral qui a délégitimé les revendications des ressources de l’État. L’échelle biographique et la convergence qui distinguent un événement

Volume 49 • Number 1 • Winter 2015 | Volume 49 • numéro 1 • hiver 2015 5 Jennifer Henderson

traumatisant contribuent à mettre l’accent sur des crimes particuliers. Le contribuable néo- libéral peut ainsi éprouver de la sympathie pour la personne traumatisée par la violence tout en faisant abstraction des revendications globales concernant les pensionnats. Dans les commentaires des journaux, les pensionnats ont donc cessé de faire partie intégrante du cadre plus large de la politique coloniale. L’expression de l’expérience collective d’une perte culturelle a été un élément clé des débats pour réintégrer les écoles dans ce cadre, mais la reconnaissance qui a été gagnée en dernier lieu est peut-être marquée par l’empreinte d’un sens commun qui a limité l’importance du rétablissement culturel.

n the early 1990s, the first major lawsuits involving abuses at Indian residential Ischools in Canada were launched. From this time to the announcement of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2005, national and regional newspapers commented on the litigation. Editorials and opinion pieces attempted to shape what the litigation said about the history of these government- and church-run institutions, the nature of the wrong associated with them, and the locus and extent of responsibility for that wrong. From the perspective of many former students and their allies, the schools had been the vehicles of catastrophic loss and were a crucial part of the settler-colonial armature of Indigenous deracination and dispossession. When their mobilization of private law for recognition and redress became mediated in newspaper commentary, however, a public common sense about residential schools was articu- lated in a discursive field that did not belong to Indigenous peoples. Like contemporaneous efforts to secure legal recognition and enforcement of Aboriginal and treaty rights, the routing of the struggle for recognition of the wrong of residential schooling through the courts was strategic. In 1998, Ernie Daniels, a member of the Long Plain First Nation and a residential school survivor, observed in an opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press that it is “unfortunate that the only way to obtain even artificial closure on the abuse [at residential schools] is the legal system” (1998, A11). He asserted, “Filing damage claims isn’t an appropriate route to go,” but in the face of persistent and widespread disavowal of “systemic abuse and discrimination” it was necessary to pursue this route: “What are we getting from the talk shows, the discussions among numerous white Manitobans? Denial” (A11). For- mer students used the force of the Western legal system to seek public reckoning with and accountability for the destructiveness of residential schools policy and the abuses attending its implementation; but engaging with the legal system that brought the “solitude of constitutional words and the illusion of benign translatability” in the case of struggles for title and rights involved similarly vexed negotiations with structures that “distorted and misdescribed” the injustice of residential schooling (Battiste and

6 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

Henderson 2000, 203, 202). The plaintiff stood “alone in a residential school case, pit- ted against the powers and resources of the state” (Feldthusen 2007, 67). The private law strategy brought with it constraining definitions of injury, liability, and damages— just as attempts to secure recognition of Aboriginal rights and title in the same period resulted in judicial decisions limiting their nature and scope.1 Beyond the wager on legal institutions and definitions, however, there was the question of what kind of mainstream media coverage residential schools litigation would generate. As J.R. Miller has noted, non-Indigenous Canadians had not demonstrated a receptiveness to Indigenous claims in the context of modern treaty and resource-sharing negotiations: “government and interest groups [had] won the public relations battle by portraying Aboriginal claims as extreme, grasping, and unjustified” (2009, 304). In the course of the 1980s, the growing attempts by Indigenous communities to resist the incursion of developers on their lands through co-ordinated symbolic actions—culminating in the barricading of sacred lands by the people of Kanesatake in the summer of 1990—were recorded through fear-mongering media constructions of a “monolithic warrior,” producing “closures of ideology and identity” (Valaskakis 1994, 70). This was the context in which the first civil suits against former residential school staff, the federal government, and the churches were filed, in an attempt to force recognition of the social violence enacted through the schools. A decade after the achievement of the comprehensive settlement for residential school survivors, the issue appearing under the banner of “Aboriginal Affairs” in Canadian newspapers today is the longstanding and ongoing problem of murdered and missing Aboriginal women.2 The official response from Prime Minister Stephen Harper to repeated demands for a national inquiry into causes has been that “we should not view this as a sociological phenomenon…. We should view it as crime” (quoted in Carlson and Mahoney 2014, A1). The federal government’s resistance to the demand for a wide-ranging investigation—voiced in the wielding of the category of crime against that of sociology, that is, the law’s dealing in the finite and the certain, as against the broad, sometimes invisible social and historical forces that constitute the “sociological phenomenon”—replays the terms of the earlier discursive struggle I track here, a struggle over the meaning of residential schools. As I shall argue, legal categories and determinations came to be deployed as devices of containment, although they had been taken up as instruments of justice- seeking. The containment produced in legal proceedings was then accentuated in many of the representations and arguments about those proceedings launched into public discourse through newspaper commentary. Narratives of abuse at residential schools were certainly “not news to Indigenous people,” as Jo-Ann Episkenew has noted, but when they “made their way into the mainstream media, they rocked the

7 Jennifer Henderson

nation and forever altered the national discourse by and about Indigenous peoples” (2009, 10). The extent to which knowledge of residential schooling could alter the narrative of Canada itself, though, depended on whether crime—or violence in the schools—would be allowed to function as a total sign, absorbing all that was wrong, all that called for reckoning. If it were, the focus on crimes committed in residential schools risked avoiding consideration of the violence of the schools themselves, as institutions of elimination, and by extension avoiding modern Canada’s predication on organized social violence against Indigenous peoples.3 In the decade stretching from the first highly publicized lawsuits in the mid- 1990s to the achievement of the out-of-court Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, newspaper commentaries engaged in the construction of public imagi- naries in relation to the unwelcome recollection of residential schooling. Versions of public reason were performed in the opinion-making activities of editorialists and columnists engaged in argumentation and judgement about residential school claims. Questions of history, justice, and responsibility were at stake, and most uncomfortably, whether non-Indigenous Canadians’ sense of “entitlement and certainty” in their present (Mackey 2014, 237) rested in some part on more than a century of Indigenous dislocation and cultural alienation through residential schooling. In this essay, then, I track the ways in which print-media commentaries on residential schools litigation accentuated the law’s already constrained understanding of the agency, duration, and effects of the schools’ harm.4 Staged on the basis of legal facts established by criminal convictions, civil litigation was part of a strategy seeking the broader accountability of churches and government, beyond the actions of individual perpetrators. The convictions and the civil suits that followed them made visible and incontestable the harm suffered by many former students of the schools; but what pulled against the value of these evidentiary gains was the way they put in place an understanding of injury that turned on exceptional, isolatable actions, specific perpetrators, and the biographical scale and stakes of the damage wrought by residential schooling, since the course of the individual complainant’s life story had to bear the burden of demonstrating the damages due in the context of tort actions. Newspaper commentaries evaluating the significance of civil actions largely reinforced the biographical understanding of residential schools. Many commentaries went further, mobilizing the truncated historical view provided by the litigant’s lifespan to make arguments for the limited liability of the individual they positioned on the other side of the equation, the individual Canadian taxpayer of the present. For a decade, voices in Canadian corporate-owned print media repeatedly asserted that evaluations of residential schooling as a whole had to be kept separate from the specific crimes of sexual and physical assault that may have occurred in

8 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

certain schools and would have to be proven through the courts. Because of their function as performances of public reason, newspaper commentaries were a pivotal terrain in the discursive struggle over the dimensions of the wrong awaiting recognition and reparation, and the scope of the accountability it entailed. In an era prior to online blogs and social networking sites, the print-media editorials and signed opinion pieces that accompanied news reporting on the litigation were the main sites for attempts to manage the meaning of residential schooling. Editorials and opinions are deliberate attempts to intervene in thinking as a collective practice; they are texts that work to shape public concerns, or what Michel Foucault called “problematizations,” framings of an aspect of experience in such a way as to make it require collective examination, worry, and action (quoted in Brat- ich 2005, 243). The concept of a concerned public, engaged in debate about correct action, is the “anchor and alibi” of any problematization (Bratich 2005, 244). A problematization is ostensibly produced both by and for the constituency of thoughtful and engaged citizens. This is especially true of broadly circulated persuasive exer- cises such as newspaper editorials and opinions, which in addition invoke a public capable of generating and reflecting a unified opinion, a manifestation of universal- ity that can legitimate policy decisions (see Bourdieu 2014, 61-64). Editorials and opinions are addressed to concerned publics even as these texts attempt to constitute such publics and to shape what might count as public opinion about an issue. A public understood in this way is a “virtual social object,” an “implied but abstract point” (Warner 2005, 55). It resides in modes of address tied to protocols for public interaction and assumptions about what is publicly relevant (51-54). Thus my object of analysis is not public opinion as an empirically verifiable object, separate from the practices that produce it, but the activity of public opinion-making, of appealing to that “implied but abstract point,” the public, with a view to modelling reasonable and humanitarian response to survivor testimony and damages claims.5 What were the discursive norms activated when residential schooling was made an object that required public discussion and position-taking? What kind of constituency was imagined as the public that would need to decide how to receive and recognize the stories of institutionalized violence surfacing in mounting courtroom testimony? Editorializing with respect to the problem of residential schooling invoked a constituency that could share a position in relation to, and at a managed distance from, damages claims. It modelled how to argue and how to feel about residential schools. Much of this opinion-making modelled a position of bounded empathy, a way of being affected by stories of individual damage in accordance with a contemporary moral sense that affirms “psychic trauma [as] the ultimate truth of humanity” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 9). This position of bounded empathy naturalized the

9 Jennifer Henderson

constraints of private law, making the wrong of residential schooling recognizable as personal injury, as damage visible and calculable within the context of the individual lifespan. This limited framework of recognition did not implicate the feeling citizen of the settler state in a continuity of institutions and policies stacked against the self- determination and flourishing of Indigenous peoples. Thus, humanitarian empathy could sit comfortably alongside the argument that the federal government, guard- ian of public funds seemingly unrelated to the expropriated land and resources of Indigenous peoples, should act to limit its legal liability for the injuries of residential schooling.

Disembedding Residential Schools

The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, representing the out-of-court settlement of a class-action lawsuit by almost 15,000 former students, and entitling survivors to compensation for the “common experience” of suffering shared by all those who attended the schools, whether or not they were physically and/or sexually abused (2006, 6), was first announced in November 2005. An Edmonton Journal editorial approved of its key elements: a recognition of the deprivations of family, culture, and language through a “blanket payment” to all former students, a “truth and reconciliation forum,” an endowment for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, and the involvement as parties to the settlement of all of the churches that had partic- ipated in the running of the schools, along with the federal government (2005a). The Edmonton Journal reasoned that the courts had become overwhelmed by residential school lawsuits, and that in spite of arguments that church and government agents in the past had been well intentioned, “residential schools had terrible consequences” (2005a). Furthermore, the federal government’s position that individual claimants should be required to provide proofs of specific injuries suffered at residential school, a position maintained in court actions and in its own alternative dispute resolution process, had not held up against the push for recognition of a shared experience of cultural loss. A mainstream paper’s support for a comprehensive settlement, especially one that included a payment to all former students capable of demonstrating attendance at a residential school, was very far from being a foregone conclusion a decade beforehand.6 Indeed, in December 1998, commenting on a new class-action suit involving claims of cultural loss and intergenerational harm, an Edmonton Jour- nal editorial had stated that it was “madness to think the government can afford to pay every former student of a residential school, plus his or her offspring” (1998). If there was a “general government responsibility” to be acknowledged, compensation to individuals was not the way to atone for it, the paper insisted.

10 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

The change from a diagnosis of “madness” to an acceptance that a claim of cultural loss could justify monetary redress represented a striking shift in the paper’s position. The possibility of a “blanket payment” to all former students of residential schools was long and widely rejected in much of the newspaper commentary on residential school litigation, and even in 2005 it was the element of the settlement that a few newspapers still saw as offending standards of reasonableness. Thus, even as the Montreal Gazette gave its support to the settlement, its endorsement was quali- fied: an editorial expressed support for the closure that the settlement would bring to a “marathon legal/financial/political nightmare” but insisted that closure for those who had experienced “the emotional damage of sex abuse” was not achieved with money (Montreal Gazette 2006). By focussing on “sex abuse,” the Gazette’s assertion recalled and reopened the key question of more than a decade of commentary on residential schools litigation: was the harm of residential schooling only to be recognized when it could be located in specific criminal acts of sexual and physical violence against children? The public argumentation about residential schooling that I track between 1994 and 2005 does not provide a narrative of the progressive growth of public understanding. Rather, it demonstrates how conceptual ground was lost early in this period. This ground was lost when residential schools became discursively disembedded from the broader framework of colonial policy, in which the removal of children from kin networks and land-based modes of life was part of an organized assault on the functioning of Indigenous communities as socio-economic orders and as polities.7 At stake in maintaining the connections between the schools and the broader framework of colonial policy was recognition of the diffuse, incalculable damage to cultures, languages, collective identities, and ways of life that the policy of forced alienation and assimilation wrought, beyond the specific acts of violence committed against children in the schools (although certainly, also, through those acts). The legal struggle for recognition and reparations thus had to be coupled with a discursive struggle to re-embed residential schooling in the context of Canadian settler colonialism. The claim of a collective experience of cultural loss, stretching the bounds of what was recognizable as an injury under the law, became the key instrument in this struggle; but as more lawsuits included the claim of cultural loss, it was anxiously warded off in arguments circulated by mainstream newspapers. In particular, it was rhetorically disqualified in a prominent strand of commentary that mobilized neo-liberal logics and identifications to deflect the question of responsibility for residential schools in the direction of a more palatable question, that of how to minimize the so-called dependency of Indigenous peoples on taxpayer dollars.

11 Jennifer Henderson

This translation of residential schools redress into a question of taxpayer dollars was enabled by the currency of what has been called market populist discourse in Canada in the last decade of the twentieth century, a discourse reaffirming the subordination of social concerns to the dictates of “the economy.”8 Paradoxically, the translation was also enabled by a psychological conceptualization of residential schooling’s harm that actually obscured the schools’ connection to economy in a broader sense. The impetus for the coerced removal of Indigenous children for compulsory Euro- Christian education was precisely the disruption of, in Athabascan scholar Dian Million’s words, “what Indigenous economy actually does as social organization, as spiritual coherence” (2013, 116)—in other words, the disruption of spiritually grounded relationships to land and kin that sustained communal, place-based existences. Residential schooling would quicken the insertion of Indigenous individuals into a “modern” order of productive, wage-earning subjects and properly privatized households, the social diagram that corresponded to the nineteenth-century settler ideal of a free-market economy.9 When residential schools were summoned up from what the 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) called the “darker reaches of national consciousness” (Jewitt 2000, 4), however, they were discursively processed through a dominant idiom of the 1990s that isolated individual selves from what Million calls “Indigenous economy” (2013, 116). Residential schools found their genre, with its biographical frame, gothic and melodramatic narrative conventions, rules for causality, style of event, and affective experience, in the narrative of trauma, and the story of child abuse in particular.10 This process was complex: it involved not only the legal parameters of testimony to damage in the context of an individual lifespan, but also the desire of survivors themselves to voice the profound psychic impacts of early abuse, what Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran call the subjective experience of a “soul wound” (quoted in Episkenew 2009, 8) that was inflicted trans-individually and intergenerationally.11 The problem was that a public imaginary formed through posthoc empathy for the vulnerable child was not the same as a public reckoning with violences that were the extensions of a policy of natal alienation, designed to erase Indigenous ways of life and peoplehood as such.12 Contests over reasonable opinion about residential schools redress were thus shaped by interanimating elements in popular culture: neo-liberal logics of government and the contemporaneous proliferation of child abuse narratives. As an explanatory concept trauma held the capacity to reorient the initial focus on criminal agents at residential schools towards a focus on former students’ experiences, underlining the severity and duration of their suffering.13 The shock and empathy that child abuse narratives are capable of generating, however, would not necessarily shake the foundations of non-Indigenous Canadians’ identifications with settler nationhood, with

12 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

the more immediate identity of taxpayers suspicious of the demands of so-called special interest groups, or with what Meg Luxton has called the “perverse form of individualism … that blames the victim by privatizing social problems” (2010, 172).14

A Different Order of Wrongdoing

As early as 1998, it had been possible for the Vancouver Sun to argue that “only those with a natural talent for disregarding fact now believe the idea behind the residential schools—forced assimilation—was other than a very bad one, even if no child had been abused physically” (Vancouver Sun 1998b). The “now” that is emphasized in this claim is already a now in which residential schools are understood to have been institutions of cultural destruction. The editorial was published several years after the release of RCAP’s final report, which had positioned the abduction of Aboriginal children and suppression of their culture as part of a whole scheme of nineteenth- century colonial policy designed to dominate Indigenous populations. Although it called for a public inquiry on residential schools, RCAP’s report discussed residential schooling alongside other measures aimed at loss of land and the destruction of social institutions, including deceptive uses of treaty-making, interference with traditional governance, arbitrary relocations, controls over mobility, prohibitions on cultural practices, and impositions of non-Aboriginal forms of conjugality. Together these instruments had produced present-day disparities between Aboriginals and non-Indigenous Canadians in health, education, housing, income, and incarceration levels. As a 1998 opinion piece published in the Montreal Gazette reminded readers, RCAP had established that the “intent” of residential schools was to “remove children from their parents and culture”; it was the “destruction” of First Nations, not their “improvement” (Deer 1998).15 In the same year that RCAP’s final report was published, the first 200 residential schools lawsuits were launched (Regan 2010, 120). Even prior to RCAP, beginning in 1991 the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council near Port Alberni in British Columbia began community-based research on residential school experiences, research that eventually resulted in a province-wide investigation by the RCMP (Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council 1996, viii). The Nuu-chah-nulth residential school study concluded that

The impact of residential schools is combined with the effects of other colonial processes which excluded Nuu-chah-nulth people from their traditional resource base, and undermined the foundations of Nuu-chah-nulth government. It is therefore appropriate to consider correction of residential school impacts within the context of Treaty negotiations. While not the only

13 Jennifer Henderson

contributor to the weakening of Nuu-chah-nulth governing institutions, the residential schools were certainly one of the largest. (207)16

A 1996 editorial in the Vancouver Province reported that the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council was threatening litigation against the federal government if treaty settlements failed to address “residential schools abuse” (Vancouver Province 1996, A34). The editorial contended with the question of how recognition of the injuries at residential schools should be weighed in relation to the urgency of dealing with the longstanding lack of treaties in British Columbia. It took the position that residential schooling—or, in its phrasing, “decades of sex abuse experienced by B.C. natives”— was a sufficiently serious issue that it needed to be dealt with separately from treaty negotiations, perhaps in a “separate complaint process or task force.” What is striking today about this editorial, written just as residential schooling was surfacing as an issue in non-Indigenous media, is the issue, present as a still-debatable question in 1996, of whether or not residential schooling constituted a separate injustice, an injustice of a different order from the illegal appropriation of traditional land and the violation of inherent rights to self-government. “Residential schools abuse,” as the Vancouver Province had called it, seemed to carry a weight of subjective victimization that made it different from issues of land title and Aboriginal rights, these latter referring, by definition, to collective rights— conferred through treaty negotiations or through recognition of the enduring cultural practices of prior occupants (see Kulchyski 2013). Subjective victimization was in the air: the abuse of children in institutional care was surfacing as a historical wrong requiring recognition and redress in other contexts. At the same time, a new “personification” of the state as morally accountable for specific “harms perpetrated in and by means of state institutions”—often conceived of as total institutions17 ripe for the violation of human rights—was gaining ground (Niezen 2013, 39). As Grand Chief Edward John of the Tl’aztz’en Nation suggested in the Vancouver Sun in 1996, in the face of the government’s and the churches’ ongoing “denial of civil liability,” First Nations had several practical examples of redress-seeking before them as guides, including the civil proceedings undertaken by victims of abuse at Mount Cashel orphanage in St. John’s, and at the Jericho Hill School for the blind and deaf in Vancouver (John 1996). Redress for residential schooling might be sought along the same lines. Others argued that there were crucial distinctions to be drawn between institutional contexts. Underscoring these, a Toronto Star editorial argued for an inquiry into “criminal offences” committed at residential schools, on the grounds that these instances of “adult abuses on young people in residential care” constituted a different order of wrongdoing, one that was indeed inseparable from the distinctive

14 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

settler-colonial provenance of the schools (Toronto Star 1994). Residential schools, the paper argued, were established with a view to bringing about the “assimilation of native groups into Western, Christian ways”; sexual and physical violence occurring in the context of these institutions required a dedicated inquiry because of the link between the acts of abuse and the “motive” behind the creation of the schools (Toronto Star 1994). The motive of assimilation necessarily entailed broader questions of church and government accountability, and pointed to present-day responsibilities for help- ing, “in money and resources,” to “rebuild the lives of those abused.” “Motive” in the Toronto Star editorial was, by implication, something more structural than the “best of intentions” through which the whole enterprise of residential schooling was defended, or at least rhetorically indemnified, in other quarters (see Deer 1998). Encoded in the Star’s invocation of motive was the context of settler-colonial policy that made the very creation and operation of the schools a form of violence, and any abuse that occurred within them extensions of that legitimated violence. The Star’s move to argue for the distinctiveness of “abuses on young people” at residential schools in 1994 was an attempt to keep those abuses conceptually embedded in settler colonialism; however, arguments about child abuse could also work the other way, to position the problem of residential schools within the framework of liberal discourse affirming a universal humanity condensed in the dignity and inviolability of the individual, and appearing in its most vulnerable form in the defenceless child. This framework risked shielding the broader violence of settler- colonial policies and institutions, and their specific rationales vis à vis Indigenous peoples as inconveniently remaining prior occupants. Perhaps there was no more bald and deliberate an attempt to insulate residential schools from political and historical questions than the 2000 statement by Shawn Tupper, an official from the Residential Schools Unit of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, quoted approvingly in a Calgary Herald editorial: “It’s not an aboriginal issue or a historic one. It’s dealing with the reality of physical and sexual abuse of children” (Calgary Herald 2000, A22).

Historical Reckoning through the Lens of Childhood Trauma

The first major civil trials in Canada involving residential schools abuses stemmed from lawsuits launched once criminal responsibility had been established by the successful convictions of William Peniston Starr and Arthur Plint in 1993 and 1995, respectively. Starr had been a director of the Gordon Residential School in Saskatch- ewan; Plint had worked as a dormitory supervisor at the Alberni Residential School in British Columbia. The prosecution of these serial child abusers had publicly exposed particular schools as the gothic settings for unthinkable acts, sites where

15 Jennifer Henderson

cruel practices had flourished in secret. Residential schools had come into public view for most non-Indigenous Canadians in direct association with stories of sexual and physical abuse and men labelled as pedophiles. When Maclean’s reported Plint’s conviction in 1995, it was in a short notice in its “Canada Notes” section under the headline “Pedophile Punishment.” The one-line piece under that headline noted that in sentencing Plint, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Douglas Hogarth had “described the residential school system as ‘nothing but a form of institutionalized pedophilia’” (Maclean’s 1995, 25). The phrase suggested a form of abuse that was institutionally legitimated, but the headline also stressed the exceptional and perverse nature of the violence. Thus in December of 1997, one year after he and 15 other claimants launched civil proceedings against Plint, it was still necessary for lead plaintiff Willie Blackwater of the Gitxsan First Nation to plead with Aboriginal leaders to support lawsuits pursuing the question of civil liability: “We’ve already gone through the hell of the criminal courts and now we need support for our lawsuit,” the Vancouver Province reported him as saying (Fournier 1997). Blackwater’s courtroom testimony in the suit against Plint, including his account of being raped weekly by Plint for three years, was covered by a range of newspapers in early 1998. “Native Recalls Sex Abuse in Residential School,” read the Calgary Herald headline (Hall 1998); “Apology Not Enough for Residential School Abuse, Natives Seek Cash,” read the Kitchener Record (1998).18 In the Vancouver Prov- ince, Blackwater’s testimony was given regular and detailed exposure. As reporter Suzanne Fournier explained, at stake in the suit was much more than “cash”: it was a judicial decision with broad implications, a decision on whether or not the federal government and United Church could be held “vicariously liable” for abuses committed by residential school staff (Fournier 1998). When Justice Donald Brenner’s ruling affirmed this shared “vicarious liability,” the Vancouver Sun’s news item ended by remarking that “experts now attribute many of the social ills on Canada’s Indian reserves to the lingering effects of residential schools” (Bell 1998). Acceptance of a broadened conception of responsibility seemed to be predicated on recognition of the diffuse legacies of residential schooling, beyond specific damages calculable in terms of individual life trajectories. More numerous, though, were the newspaper commentaries that worried about the slippery-slope implications of the “vicarious liability” decision. The Fredericton Daily Gleaner reported the United Church’s inten- tion to appeal the ruling, noting that while the ruling was “cheered by native groups [it] sent shock waves through the ranks of charitable organizations and employers, who fear that it could establish a crippling new standard of accountability” (Frederic- ton Daily Gleaner 1998a).

16 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

In May of 2001, the National Post reported a decision in a suit related to Starr, referring to him as “a notorious pedophile and former residential school supervisor.” The paper noted that the decision “vastly widened the scope of the federal government’s liability,” since the abuse was committed against a child who was exposed to Starr in activities outside of the school proper (Foot 2001b). When newspapers reported the federal government’s appeal of this decision, not on the grounds that the sexual abuse had occurred outside the scope of Starr’s employment at the school, but rather on the grounds that an insufficient causal relation could be established between Starr’s abuses and the complainant’s “lost past and future earnings,” references to Starr as a convicted abuser implicitly worked to support the government’s argument against a widened conception of liability (O’Connor 2001). The language of exceptional and perverse criminality, already served with a conviction, pulled Starr’s actions away from any readily conceivable link to government policy. Like- wise, the burden of proving a causal relation between sexual victimization and later incapacitation as a wage-earner (a burden placed on the individual’s biography, as the constraints of the civil suit required) could be spun as too great a stretch for common sense. Kevin O’Connor, writing an article in the Regina Leader-Post, clarified the question the suit raised, for a public whose scepticism he assumed: “If a boy is sexually abused by the administrator of a federally run student residence, how much should the government compensate him if he later becomes an alcoholic who can’t hold down a job?”(O’Connor 2001).19 The explanatory framework that could make the causal link necessary to prove that damages were incurred, in the course of an individual lifetime, as the result of earlier, specifiable acts committed by an agent of a residential school, was the framework of trauma. Traumatization through the experience of particular violent events, subsequently subjected to amnesiac processes, but borne out in their effects in later patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, closed the gap between the violence of residential school and the later alcoholism and unemployment. It is important to recall that there were, besides sexual abuse,20 other names, other categories of injury, being tested in the lawsuits launched beginning in the mid-1990s, including wrongful confinement, educational malpractice, assault, negligence, breach of duty and trust, breach of Aboriginal rights, breach of treaty rights, religious indoctrination, harm- ful school environment, loss of language and culture, second-generation harm, and violation of the United Nations convention on genocide.21 Litigants launched their suits on various grounds, but of these, sexual assault was singularly effective—not just because it referred to clearly criminalized actions, but also because it resonated powerfully within a discursive conjuncture of the 1990s.

17 Jennifer Henderson

Across “the advanced capitalist economies of the West,” as Roger Luckhurst describes it, the model of the traumatized subject moved through medical, legal, jour- nalistic, and aesthetic discourses, in the wake of the standardization of a new diagnosis—originally in relation to Vietnam veterans—of “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD), and more than a decade of second-wave feminist activism focussed on the disclosure of sexual violence as a pervasive but hidden mechanism of patriarchy in women’s lives (2003, 28, 29-30). The emergence of the new medical category con- verged with feminist activism to produce a “new language of the event” organized around the “idea of trauma, designating an irrefutable reality linked to a feeling of empathy, [a reality which] spread throughout the moral space of contemporary society” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 6; see also Niezen 2013, 5-6; Million 2013, 87-90). In this context, Willie Blackwater’s first successful claim in relation to the sexual and physical violence he suffered at the Alberni school was a medical, rather than a legal one: it was a disability claim with an insurance company, allowing him to take an insured work leave due to his suffering from what a psychiatrist identified as “post-traumatic stress disorder, with symptoms such as subjective anxiety, withdrawal and depres- sion with nightmares and intrusive recollections of his supervisor raping him” (Fournier 1996). If the diagnosis of PTSD provided a conceptual equation that was transferrable to the context of tort actions, however, this was not due to the authority of medical categorizations alone. Trauma was a powerful discursive lever in various contexts: it carried the allure of the “singular causation,” and an urgent moral claim for recognition that bol- stered survivors of different kinds facing steadfast institutional denial (Luckhurst 2003, 32). This is not to say that recognition of traumatization as a form of injustice was guaranteed. In the case of residential school survivors, it was necessary to link claims of childhood traumatization to irrefutable evidence of criminal actions: in civil suits, it was only when the alleged perpetrator was already a “known sexual predator” that the credibility of the plaintiff’s testimony was not questioned, and not subjected to an unjustly elevated burden of proof (Feldthusen 2007, 68). The coura- geous testimony of survivors in civil suits was accompanied by spectacular speech acts such as (then Grand Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs) Phil Fontaine’s 1992 disclosure of his experiences of abuse at residential school to a gathering of the Assembly of First Nations. Such speech acts converted “private” pain and shame about domestic violence in Indigenous communities, into what Million has called “a thesis connected to a promise for justice” (2013, 93). As Million has argued, “there are myriad reasons that First Nations peoples readily took up trauma as discourse” beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s (93). It could be connected to already- existing community-based “practices of self-disclosure” and consciousness-raising,

18 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

which addressed the emotional “numbness that was [a] felt colonization,” but— importantly—without reference to psychiatric diagnoses (89, 121). The discourse of trauma could cut through “Canadian mainstream ‘deafness’” by building on the success of the feminist reframing of incest, child abuse, and spousal rape as crimes heretofore tolerated as long as they were kept hidden (93, 88). Trauma could be rearticulated, as it was by some Indigenous scholars, sometimes following the example of studies of Holocaust survivors, as a form of state violence, a historical trauma lived intergenerationally (90-91, 97). It was the question of whether childhood traumatization could be rearticulated as state violence, as collective historical injury, that hung in the balance in the course of the decade between the launching of the first lawsuits and the achievement of the comprehensive settlement. Million makes the crucial point that a version of community healing and work towards well-being, importantly linked to cultural and political revitalization—to questions of “‘how we govern’” rather than atomized “personal ‘healing’ from dysfunction”—was being led by Indigenous women at the level of “social welfare and education,” under the radar of national politics, long before the entry onto the scene of the discourse of trauma (144, 127). As the idea of Indig- enous traumatization and healing entered public common sense, the question was whether this pre-existent sense of healing as holistic cultural restoration could be maintained, without becoming reduced to a medicalized means of subjectivation. A restoration of Indigenous culture in which culture implied a collective capacity for self-determination would likely require questioning, rather than adherence to, Eurocentric notions of personal healing tilted towards socio-economic development and market inclusion, especially when this trajectory of development would “still displace one or require one’s land” (106). As Peter Kulchyski has argued, the right to an expansive sense of Indigenous culture, implying not just cultural expression but practical economic activity associated with non-capitalist modes of production, is in many ways incompatible with the liberal doctrine of universal human rights (2013, 21), the doctrine around which rights claims on behalf of the psychically traumatized have been mounted (Million 2013, 9-12). There were voices that recognized and named the dangers of a narrowly psychological conceptualization of the meaning of residential schooling early on. In 1998, the Fredericton Daily Gleaner published a feature story about Roland Chrisjohn in which the Haudenosaunee scholar warned that a government fearful of accusations of cultural genocide under the gaze of the “international community” was resort- ing to a beneficient rhetoric of psychological healing: “What has to be fixed is the system that requires us to be broken in a particular way.... All they’ll do is sit down some native people, tell them why they’re sick, [and] give them some tips on how

19 Jennifer Henderson

to replenish their self-esteem” (Gregoire 1998). It was an important moment for the publicization of such a scathing critique of the official version of healing. After running a number of pilot projects in voluntary out-of-court settlement, in 2002 the federal government put in place an Alternative Dispute Resolution Program that maintained a private and individualized conception of harm: it provided the possibility of compensation for sexual and physical abuse only, and specifically disallowed participants from pursuing future claims related to cultural loss.22 As Paulette Regan has argued, the Alternative Dispute Resolution Program materialized a settler-state version of reconciliation that above all pursued “legal certainty,” settling claims in a program that was still founded on tort law, that is, the isolation and proof of injury and the calculation of proportionate compensation (2010, 141). The program would not hear calls for group reparation and made no space for practices that would have acknowledged survivors’ belonging to nations with their own legal systems (208). Of course, geopolitical and psychic frames need not be mutually exclusive; indeed they cannot be, if decolonization is to include coming to terms with the way a whole biopolitics of settler-colonial governance sought to implant the modali- ties of the so-called private, domestic sphere. Identities, sexualities, affective bonds, family forms, the reproducibility of Indigenous kin networks, associated governance structures, and ultimately place-based existences were the targets of what was named Indian education.23 The containment of residential school students within an institutional space that was carefully codified as domestic, as a household of “socioreligiously mandated subordination,” was designed to make children’s subjectivities the pivot of a colonial strategy of “sociospatial transformation” (Fiske 2009, 151). Thus, damage to the culturally and familially anchored psychological integrity of persons was not sim- ply the effect of specific, unfortunate incidents at certain schools: “domestic confinement” (151) was a settler-colonial technology for eliminating distinct peoples and their place-based existences. The historical codification of the schools as spaces of domestic social relations made the public naming of their violence vulnerable to recapture and containment within discourses of the private: discourses referring to intimate injuries, individual survivors and perpetrators, and even, as Jo-Ann Fiske has observed, the ingratitude of survivors towards those who had acted as self-sacrificing agents of moral work (153). Control over the means of making of public reason was not equal as former students and their allies made strategic assessments about how best to force a public reckoning with the history and ongoing legacies of residential schooling. When the Calgary Herald reported the federal official’s declaration that “it’s not an aboriginal issue or a historic one,” it was in the context of an editorial that was taking a stand against general compensation for all survivors (Calgary Herald 2000). In the paper’s reasoning, the individualized approach to resolving claims of abuse, whether

20 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

through the courts or through the Alternative Dispute Resolution Process, was pref- erable. There was a choice to be made between the case-by-case approach already rightly being pursued by the government, and what the paper called the “cookie- cutter treatment of claimants,” that is to say, a large-scale settlement dealing with survivors collectively on the basis of their shared experience. The editorial warded off this possibility by associating it with brutal impersonalism. To denounce a comprehensive settlement for all former students on the grounds of its trampling the uniqueness of individual experience was to call on a deeply sedi- mented liberal common sense. The fact that this rhymed with the philosophical basis for the private law domain of civil suits and the individual pathogenesis in the medical diagnosis of PTSD helped to situate the possibility of a “cookie-cutter treatment” beyond the pale of right thinking and sentiment. Appreciation of the singularity of experiences and healing paths is not the same as ethical recognition of “civic responsibility for bad government policy” (Regan 2010, 140) or indeed informed participa- tion in decolonization, however. The Calgary Herald’s stand against “cookie-cutter” compensation also came with a reminder of the limits of liberal empathy. The paper pointed out that an approach to redress that involved “condemning history” risked “offend[ing] non-native susceptibilities” and initiating a “racial slugfest” (Calgary Her- ald 2000). The “intimate public sphere” (Berlant 1997, 5) organized around narratives of children abused at residential schools would close up defensively if non-Indigenous Canadians were asked for more than empathy—that is to say, if they were structurally implicated in the costs of colonial policy.

Vicarious Liability and the Taxpayer-Citizen

Many residential school lawsuits were resolved through out-of-court settlements that newspapers could only track in general ways, through estimated numbers of suits in process and ranges of dollar amounts for the settlements. In 1996, headlines such as the Kitchener Record’s “Ottawa Paying Millions in Sexual Abuse Claims,” began to appear. Suits actually settled at trial provided newspapers with opportunities to publicize and compare awards for damages, as well as judicial decisions that set the parameters for future claims. The 1998 decision in the Blackwater suit assigned the federal government and the United Church 75% and 25% liability for damages, respectively. Metaphors of an impending wave of lawsuits were common in newspaper predictions of the implications of the recognition of “vicarious liability,” as discussions of an onrush of claims invoked images of churches being swept into bankruptcy or government coffers being drained.24 Some newspapers criticized the federal government for responding to the decision by attempting to shift a greater share of responsibility to the churches. There was sympathy for positions, voiced

21 Jennifer Henderson

by the different churches, that sharing liability or bearing any at all would be crippling.25 Another line of argument took the churches to task. In 2000, in an editorial titled “Churches Must Prove Their Claims of Poverty,” the Vancouver Sun expressed scepticism regarding the Roman Catholic Church’s claims of “imminent bankruptcy” (2000). The editorial suggested that taxpayers would not be eager to pay the church’s share of damages and would not accept “financial claims on faith.” After the Brenner decision was overturned in 2003 by the British Columbia court of appeal and the federal government was made solely liable for injuries at the Alberni residential school (Blackwater v. Plint 2003), a general shift was evident. As the Edmonton Journal opined in its editorial, “in the minds of many victims and the public, shared liability for sexual and physical abuse at the schools [had] seemed a reasonable way to proceed” (Edmonton Journal 2004). It was not just that newspapers were now more apt to scold those churches that resisted accepting partial responsibility. Stories and commentaries focussed less on the horrific experiences recounted in the testimony of survivors, and more on the growing number of suits being filed and the amounts of damages awarded. Accountability for the legacies of residential schooling was moving closer to home as mainstream newspapers interpreted the new “vicarious liability” of institutions, especially those connected with government, as bearing on the public in a very specific way. A columnist in theWinnipeg Free Press blamed “lawyers of opportunity” for bringing social causes such as residential school redress uncomfortably close to home: “The trick seems to be to find a popular cause or a potentially rich (read taxpayer) defendant and turn society’s collective sense of guilt into real, hard cash” (Cleverley 2000). “Vicarious liability” did not constitute an invitation to non-Indigenous Canadi- ans to consider what responsibilities might flow from their position as the vicarious beneficiaries of colonial policies.26 Such a sense of the social subject, in the gears of history, was at odds with the market-populist notion of the rationally choosing, self-making individual. Members of the public had not individually chosen that the schools should exist, after all. Rather, the legal liability of their institutions touched Canadians in their identity as taxpayers—that minimal thread constituting their tie to state power. The corresponding assumption was that any government acting responsibly in the present, on behalf of the taxpayer, should act to reduce the risk of liability for damages. This assumption, which implied a payee’s perspective on the question of the costs of residential schooling, did not seem to be incompatible with empathy for those whose losses were borne and ongoing. The potential payee affected by the overturning of the Brenner decision, then, was the Canadian citizen whose citizenship was implicitly invoked as a matter of having entrusted—having been forced to entrust—funds to government for wise

22 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

management. In a subtle but insistent refrain about the interests of Canadian taxpayers in decisions about accountability for residential schooling, many newspapers affirmed a social imaginary that was fixated on this fiduciary relationship.27 The avoidance of costly financial risks as government’s primary responsibility to the taxpayer-citizen was already a pre-existent element of public discourse after several decades of neo-liberal restructuring in Canada, but it gained new traction in commentaries on the costs of reckoning with residential schools. It both drew on and refuelled pre-existing arguments about government overspending in response to the demands of so-called special interest groups generally, and Aboriginal peoples specifically. As Janine Brodie has argued, the restructuring around market imperatives in Canada during the 1980s and 1990s entailed a corresponding “restructuring discourse” that denied social movements “moral and political significance” by dis- assembling them into “sectoral and self-interested lobby groups” and pathologized target populations, requiring corrective pedagogies of self-reliance (1996, 295). The pathologized subject and the self-interested lobbyist were set in opposition to the imaginary figure of the “ordinary Canadian,” the disinterested person unmarked by any particular history or culture, and valued according to his distance from those seeking special treatment (296). Brodie’s “ordinary Canadian” is the imaginary placeholder named “Canadian taxpayer” in the newspaper commentaries I am dis- cussing, but he or she is additionally inflected in these commentaries as bearing the reasonable expectation that government will perform its fiduciary duty by protecting public funds from unreasonable claims for damages. It was within the logic of this fiduciary imaginary that the claims being filed by survivors could be made meaning- ful to newspaper readers as financial risks that were stemming from the exhorbitant and outdated expectations of state assistance from a population characterized by unhealthy dependency, a dependency currently being reinforced, according to this view, through claims of uncompensated historical injury. The 2003 British Columbia court of appeal ruling making the federal government solely liable did not, on its own, bring the imagined interests of the taxpayer into newspaper commentaries.28 In 1998, when the Liberal government announced that it would commit $350 million for community-based healing services through a new Aboriginal Healing Foundation,29 an Edmonton Journal editorial approved of this move as a “suitable measure of atonement” for the reason that legal claims were proving to be uncontainable.30 A growing mass of “lawyers and plaintiffs” were expecting “an easy windfall” from civil suits: “Did every one [of the 200 former students of the Gordon Residential School now pursuing litigation] suffer sexual abuse at the hands of the abusive dorm supervisor? If so, he must have been a very busy man” (Edmonton Journal 1998). Whereas the Edmonton Journal saw new

23 Jennifer Henderson

government funding as an alternative to, and potential containment of, the “lawsuit genie,” a 1999 editorial in the National Post criticized any allocation of funding for healing. Modelling a position of taxpayer scepticism, it rhetorically collapsed funding for healing activities with compensation payments to individuals, referring to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation as “a $350 million ‘healing fund’ to be divvied up among claimants” (National Post 1999).31 The editorial argued, “The new funds [are granted] outside of the legal system’s rules of evidence and burden of proof” and “have been met with a sense of entitlement among Indian Affairs bureaucrats, lawyers-of-fortune, and the Assembly of First Nations.”32 The National Post continued, “Ottawa, with this giveaway, has abdicated its duty to Canadians. A strong government would not waver in its commitments to equality before the law, and historical accuracy” (1999). The National Post here invoked a newly modified notion of equality—retooled from its postwar Keynesian connotations of a state-assisted equality in at least a minimum standard of living, a social security that was the just due of all citizens—to mean abstract, formal equality. The normalization of this new sense of equality as difference-blind treatment before the law, reflecting a rejection of the very notion of structured, systemic inequalities requiring redistributive mechanisms, was one of the ideological achievements of what has been called “the Calgary School” in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s (Sawer and Laycock 2009).33 In this period, proponents of difference-blind, formal equality of opportunity found fuel in the example of the so- called sense of entitlement of those claiming damages for the legacies of residential schooling. The argument was not exclusive to Western Canadian newspapers. In 1998, an editorial in the Fredericton Daily Gleaner argued that “history has overtaken treaties signed 200 years or more [sic]” and that “the federal government must deal with individual natives in the same manner it deals with other citizens” (1998b; see also Vancouver Sun 1998a). Fiduciary duty exercised by a “strong government” required the safeguarding of “historical accuracy.” This was not the kind of historical accuracy that, recalling Canadians’ indebtedness to Indigenous peoples for so many of the publicly and privately owned resources of the present, would require something like progressive, redistributive taxation as reparative justice.34 Rather, print media addressed to the taxpayer-citizen suggested that government “giveaways” to residential school survivors were based on an unreliable version of history. In 1998, an issue of the Alberta Report featuring the phrase “Canada’s Mythical Holocaust” on its cover laid the groundwork for the suggestion that the potentially shattering public recognition of the wrong of residential schooling was based on an organized campaign of false information (Donnelly 1998). In a six-page article, “Scapegoating the Indian

24 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

Residential Schools,” Patrick Donnelly responded to the Liberal government’s allocation of resources to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and its official “Statement of Reconciliation” (Canada 1997) by denouncing what he called the emerging “political correctness” in representations of residential schooling (Donnelly 1998). The article countered a view of the schools as places of victimization by tracing this view back to the conclusions drawn by RCAP, on the basis of what Donnelly cast as unreliable testimony. As counterevidence, he proffered overwhelmingly positive experiential accounts of the schools as places providing good nutrition, introduction to sports, strict but rational discipline, tolerance of Indigenous languages and culture, use- ful skills and knowledge, and introduction to a work ethic. These testimonies were ammunition for an attack on the “scapegoating” of the schools as the result, in Don- nelly’s view, of “highly-publicized incidents of sexual abuse, coupled with white liberal guilt” (1998).35 After a human rights complaint was filed with the Alberta Human Rights Com- mission against Donnelly and the Alberta Report for inciting race-based hatred, responses to Donnelly’s article appeared for over a year, beyond Alberta Report itself, in other publications including the Financial Post (Byfield 1998), The Globe and Mail (Flanagan 1999), the National Post (Martinuk 1999), and the Calgary Herald (Wiebe 1999). In a Calgary Herald opinion, Tim Wiebe suggested that the fomenting of “white guilt” was being conducted by leftist scholars who were strategically deploying oppor- tunistic Aboriginal leaders: in his metaphor, the “white liberal academics … carved the violin of political correctness” while “talented First Nations leaders have learned to play the instrument” (Wiebe 1999). When the human rights complaint was dis- missed, Tom Flanagan of The Globe and Mail noted that it had been “with little effort [that] Alberta Report found half a dozen graduates willing to credit the schools with treating them kindly and preparing them for a successful life,” and he applauded the court decision that cited freedom of the press as its basis, since, as he put it, “in open markets, discrimination tends to be self-correcting” (1999). Here the link between a disembedded view of residential schools and the disembedded economy of free-market liberalism was made explicit: what was at stake was the protection of the market mechanism from the kinds of claims—not just legal, but also discursive, sociological, and historical—that would justify redress. In a society organized around “open markets,” there were no grounds for interfering with the “self-correcting” ethos of free exchange through which, presumably, those residential school survivors who were not victimized by specific crimes, as well as all other Indigenous individuals, would find their release from the past in the “successful life.”

25 Jennifer Henderson

The Costs and Remedies of Cultural Loss

The fiduciary imaginary did not stand uncontested as the appropriate frame for weigh- ing the costs of residential schooling. In an opinion published in the Saint John Tele- graph Journal in 1999, Alma Brooks, a member of St. Mary’s First Nation and one of the organizers of a gathering of survivors of the Shubenacadie residential school, redeployed the rhetoric of the taxpayer to interrupt arguments about Canadians having to pay for unreliable claims of historical injury. Replying to a letter published in the paper, Brooks observed that taxpayer money, which settlers ultimately derived from Indigenous territory, had funded the “shock treatment” of residential schools for more than a century. It was the very continuity of that taxpayer identity reflecting the ben- eficiary status of settlers that made the story of residential schooling “not our story but yours” (Brooks 1999). It was sometimes individual columnists writing in regional papers who carved out alternative ground to the mainstream coverage that was paint- ing a picture of large payouts and alarming grand totals laid at the feet of government and the churches. In a series of articles published in a number of regional Ontario papers, Bud Whiteye, a member of the Walpole Island First Nation, provided a first- person account of residential schooling and of the experience of attempting to apply for compensation through the federal government’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Program, beginning with an alienating 51-page application form designed to “stall the staunchest advocate” (Whiteye 2004, 5). A turning point in print-media coverage of residential schools litigation was the certification of two highly publicized class action suits. In a 2000 feature, the Toronto Star used particulars from the story of Pelican Falls Indian Residential School survivor Charles Baxter Sr., the lead complainant in a national class-action awaiting certification, to frame a survivor’s perspective. The story described how Baxter was forcibly removed from his parents and physically assaulted at school but noted that “it is when he addresses his other losses that he becomes most emotional. ‘I had to relearn my language,’ he says emotionally. ‘In 1978 I went home to see my father and you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Get out of here. You don’t belong here anymore’” (Simmie 2000). A Canadian Press story featuring Baxter’s experience as potentially representa- tive of the shared suffering of 90,000 other former students circulated in a number of regional Ontario newspapers (Sault Star 2002; see also Foot 2003; Edmonton Journal 2003). The progress of the Baxter suit was linked to a smaller class-action suit filed by 1,400 former students and families of students of the Mohawk Institute Residential School near Brantford. In 2004, a Calgary Herald article noted that the certification of this suit was based on recognition of evidence of “common suffering” among the com- plainants, alleged to have stemmed not just from physical and sexual abuse, but also

26 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

from forcible confinement, loss of language, and loss of the care that survivors proved unable to provide to their own families (Foot 2004). A Brantford Expositor editorial emphasized the significance of the suit’s certification: now group claims organized around cultural loss would be heard; furthermore, doubt had been cast on the justice of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Program (2004).36 Many commentaries were now waged explicitly against the dangers of the recognition of cultural loss. In 2001, responding to a recent letter to the editor that had connected residential schools with “organized cultural genocide,” a National Post editorial defensively recalled the “courage” that had been required to challenge the view that residential schools destroyed Aboriginal culture when the Alberta Report had published its “Scape- goating” piece in 1998 (National Post 2001).37 Charges of the unsubstantiability of the claim of cultural loss operated as rhetorical bulwarks against a fearsomely massive claim that would not have to be predicated on specific violent events. An editorial in the Winnipeg Free Press warned that, in the absence of a full national inquiry that might uncover diverse experiences, the national class action “would have people believe that all those who attended the schools were forever, irrevocably scarred” (Winnipeg Free Press 2003). An article in the National Post discounted the cultural loss claim by fore- grounding the opinions of former United Church researcher John Siebert, including the view that “other factors—such as television—are more likely to blame for the loss of native culture than residential schools” (Foot 2001c).38 An editorial in the same paper argued that only those who suffered specific abuses at the schools should be compensated and that government should “defend itself vigorously” against “vague” claims of cultural loss (National Post 2000). In 2005, a news item in the Edmonton Journal noted that an alternative to class actions existed: “lump-sum ‘reconciliation’ payments” to all former students, to “decrease the huge downside risk that the government faces from several multi- billion-dollar class actions” (Edmonton Journal 2005b). This was the alternative that a column in The Globe and Mail had recommended for similar reasons—the avoidance of “monstrous costs”—two years before (Johnson 2003). The tabulation of the monetary costs of legal recognition of cultural loss occurred at the same time that the concept of damage was acquiring materiality in a new sense, as it became more common to read of the legacies and intergenerational impacts of residential schooling— not just the damages that could be established within the bounds of an individual complainant’s lifespan, but the costs displayed in more diffuse forms. Glenn Pratt, chief of the Gordon First Nation and the host of a gathering of residential school survivors, sketched these for readers of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix in 2004. Provid- ing a broad history of residential schools that stressed their origin in a government

27 Jennifer Henderson

“misrepresentation of the treaty right to education,” he situated high addiction and suicide rates as the long-term impacts of separation from family and culture “passed down through the generations” (Pratt 2004). Injury was being recast in terms of harm to the social fabric of Indigenous communities, pressuring the boundaries of what was recognizable as injury under private law. Sorting a single survivor’s life into “piles” of causations and effects was an “artificial legal exercise” when the life in question “held a mirror up to the country,” argued one writer in the Victoria Times-Colonist (Ruttan 2001). Along the same lines, an opinion published under the headline “The Argument for Compensating Cultural Geno- cide” in the Calgary Herald recast the emphasis on the subjective experience of child abuse in terms of the technique of natal alienation. Indigenous children’s vulnerability made them the “most susceptible victims of the racist agenda of the government and churches to eradicate aboriginal language, culture, and spirituality from the face of Canada” (Vaughn 2004). The experience of language prohibition and separation from family “constituted an especially damaging form of abuse” that “multiplied with each generation” (Vaughn 2004). As with the legal concept of injury, the frame of child abuse was being stretched to point to forms of wounding that exceeded the logic of isolatable events and wrought impacts beyond the frame of an individual life and psyche. The concept of historical trauma was being put into circulation, pointing to psychoso- cial dysfunction in Aboriginal communities as the symptom of a collective and intergenerationally transmitted experience of violence, loss, and estrangement from kin and culture.39 This stretching occurred under the pressure of class-action suits signal- ling the potentially “huge downside risk” (Edmonton Journal 2005a) for government were it to continue resisting acknowledgement of the broad damage caused by residential schooling. The claim of cultural loss was gaining credibility, although it was still a damage claim: it was thus a question of risk-assessment on one side, and a question of illustrating adverse effects in families and communities on the other. Massive cultural loss occasioned by historical trauma, whilst stretching the scope and duration of injury, was a concept that retained an emphasis on wounded subjects, what Ronald Niezen refers to as “remembrances of violated bodies and broken spirits” (2013, 150), from which there was no ready language to make the link to social violence of a specifically settler-colonial form. “Structure” is Patrick Wolfe’s term for the ongoing process, as opposed to event, of settler colonialism—and Wolfe makes the point that even the stronger concept of cultural genocide (which brings residential schooling into view as a massive abuse of human rights) risks distracting attention from the specificity of a “social formation” that dispossesses in order to replace (2006, 401, 388). Settler colonialism is “relatively impervious to regime change” (402). Furthermore, the qualifier cultural implies a lesser degree of erasure, whereas “the imposition on a

28 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

people of the procedures and techniques that are generally glossed as ‘cultural genocide’ is certainly going to have a direct impact on that people’s capacity to stay alive” (399). Thus, it is important to ask whether that “capacity to stay alive” as peoples is really addressed, even by a hard-won comprehensive out-of-court settlement acknowledging cultural loss on a massive scale, requiring an official apology and a public exercise in truth-telling and historical revision. As Niezen observes, truth and reconciliation commissions stressing the therapeutic possibilities of public truth-telling, survivor-community formation, and compassionate witnessing constitute the “quint- essential human rights remedy” and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an expression of the perceived need for precisely this remedy (113). That this remedy should have come to be seen as appropriate to residential schooling is a contingent (and not uncontested) fact that may be traced, in part, to the discourses of private law, medicine, and neo-liberal governance through which plaintiff testimony was processed in the decade leading up to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

Conclusion

Did the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement constitute a re-embedding of residential schooling in what the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council had called “other colonial processes” that wrenched Indigenous peoples “from their traditional resource base, and undermined the foundations of [their] government”? (Nuu-chah- nulth Tribal Council 1996, 207). To what extent did the terms of the settlement overcome the constraints on what was sayable in the interplay of civil litigation and mainstream print-media commentary that the narration of residential schools experience encountered? The multiple resonances of damage—as a legal and medical concept, as quantifiable loss and embodied injury—suggest the meanings that residential schooling acquired as it passed through a decade of tort actions and contests over reasonable opinion in newspapers, on its way to recognition as something that made compensation the just due of every former student. Under the shadow of class-action suits claiming cultural loss, a government could be seen to be minding its responsibility to the taxpayer by agreeing to a final, comprehensive settlement with all former students. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement did not entirely repudiate the version of residential schooling focussed on the exceptionality of violent incidents and the temporality of the individual lifespan. While eligibility for the Common Experience Payment is not based on proof of having experienced specific injuries, what the text of the agreement officially recognizes is that “certain harms and abuses” were committed against children attending schools, established “for the education of aboriginal children” (Indian Residential Schools Settlement

29 Jennifer Henderson

Agreement 1996, 6).40 The words are a reminder of Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard’s warning regarding forms of liberal settler-state recognition that “implicitly or explicitly commit the colonized to the types of practices and subject positions that are required for their continued domination” (2014, 16). Limited recognition of historical injury may operate as a means of obtaining that commitment from those acknowledged to be damaged. What are the possibilities for resistance to settler colonialism from the position of the “survivor”? As Niezen observes, the category makes sense specifically in relation to the agreement’s recognized “harms and abuses” (2013, 7). Survivor carries a sense of affirmative affiliation with others who have lived through these experiences, and a rejection of shame, but it is “not a category that fol- lows from attachments to tradition” (7), the basis for cultural and political regenera- tion according to theorists of Indigenous resurgence (see Simpson 2011). One way of gauging the extent to which the recognition of a “common experience” of cultural loss has been able to transcend the limits of private law, medical diagnosis, and fiduciary imaginary would be to move beyond my focus on the years leading up to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, to examine the discursive practices associated with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was mandated by the settlement. Researchers have observed the regulation of speaker identity categories at Truth and Reconciliation Committee statement-gathering events and the minimal presence of the federal government (Niezen 2013, 79), as well as the use of templates that remind speakers of the allowable limits of testimony and prime them to tell a particular kind of story centring on traumatic memories, healing, and the reflexive theme of the “therapeutic value of providing a testimonial” (Brady 2013, 131-32, 149). Commission testimony sometimes exceeded the narrative template in these hearings, however. Some participants strayed from abuses within residential schools to catalog other, including current, injustices (Niezen 2013, 102); some engaged in acts of community-building, performatively recalling and relegitimizing Indigenous storytelling practices (Brady 2013, 137). As Jeff Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi argue on the basis of interviews with former students in Nuu-chah-nulth communities, when those practices take place in home communities, they are more likely to deprivilege the medical flavour of trauma and to speak beyond the frame connecting the labelsurvivor to a concept of rights violation that is abstracted from a specific history of dispossession and endurance. The telling of history away from the “political/legal constraints of the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] process” is more likely to enfold haa- puu-pah, “teaching stories or sacred living histories that solidify ancestral and contemporary connections to place” and address the need to “reunify and regenerate families and communities dispersed and dislocated by the trauma of the schools” (Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, T’lakwadzi 2009, 137, 140).41

30 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

What would it take to undo the discursive disembedding of residential schools fully? The long-awaited final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission— its advance summary released as I revise this article—will describe the residential school system as an attempted “cultural genocide” (Truth and Reconciliation Com- mission 2015, 1; see also Galloway and Curry 2015). The summary positions residential schooling within a settler-colonial strategy aimed at the elimination of Indigenous peoples as such and calls for a version of reconciliation that will “inspire Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to transform Canadian society” (2015, 8). This transformation will require “expanding public dialogue and action on reconciliation beyond residential schools” (8). The advance glimpse of the Truth and Reconciliation Com- mission’s final report given by the summary pre-emptively addresses the dangers of immediate shelving and/or compartmentalization. It imagines a post-commission process of change that implicates non-Indigenous Canadians as more than paid-up citizens and as more than spectators of the recovery of others. The “courage and determination” of the “the Survivors of Canada’s residential schools, who placed the residential school on the public agenda,” requires a correspondingly robust commitment from the public, invoked as the first-person plural facing “the Survivors”: “We should do no less. It is time to commit to a process of reconciliation. By estab- lishing a new and respectful relationship, we restore what must be restored, repair what must be repaired, and return what must be returned” (6). These “re-” words are relatively free of the psychological connotations of recovery: they push towards restitution of the powers, the jurisdictions, the lands necessary for the Indigenous to live as distinct peoples. The words may be received and mediated with a determined deafness, however. The Globe and Mail editorial responding to the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s summary report criticized the “cautious and defensive” response of the federal government but went on to select the summary’s recommendations for improvement of educational status and economic prospects of “indigenous citizens” as the most important (Globe and Mail 2015). There is a real danger that the 94 recommendations of the commissioners will be boiled down—at least in the mainstream media—to support for development according to an unex- amined model of progress. Indigenous “healing” need not mimic the path of the European Bildungsro- man, the narrative form that naturalizes the achievement of a selfhood adjusted to Eurocentric social, economic, legal, and political discourses and institutions as the result of a healthy process of maturation. At the level of both individual psyches and societies, the normative developmental trajectory of liberalism has required the mourning—the letting go—of alternative forms of life as “inchoate” or imma- ture “prehistory” (Lloyd 2000, 217). What is at stake in the way that the Truth and

31 Jennifer Henderson

Reconciliation Commission’s findings circulate is whether or not the six years of testimony by former students will be collected up as an argument for market par- ticipation and the relinquishment of struggle for those cultural, political, and legal conditions necessary to Indigenous resurgence. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which mandated the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was a settlement reached after several decades of “restructuring discourse” (see Brodie 1996, 225). An “intimate public sphere” (Berlant 1997, 5) had been convened in the print media around crimes against children at residential schools, and against the background of a revival of free-market orthodoxy in Canada. In this revival, human society was not just recast as an “accessory to the market system,” as it had been 200 years before (Polanyi 1944, 75); it was framed as needing to be remade so as to adhere to market norms of growth, competition, self-reliance, and privatized responsibility for risk, in all aspects of life. The “intimate public sphere” and the process of neo-liberal restructuring were not contradictory developments. One of the products of their coincidence and inter-animation, as I’ve suggested, was the way in which residential school survivors’ claims were mediated as the stories and voices of individuals within a target population characterized as dependent and in need of healing interventions. What healing from “damage” can be made to mean, on the ground, is the urgent question stemming from residential schools having found their genre, in public discourse, in trauma. Recovery and decolonization are not necessarily analogous processes.42

NOTES

My thanks to three anonymous readers for helpful comments, to Miranda Brady, Paulette Regan, and Pauline Wakeham for advice, and to Keith Denny, especially, for expert assistance in the construction of my database. An early version of this article was presented to “The Politics of Redress” symposium in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph in April 2014. That version was also shared with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 1. Lawrence (2012, 54-63) provides a summary of these Supreme Court decisions. 2. In May 2014, the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) released data collected from police files indicating that nearly 1,200 Aboriginal women had been murdered or gone missing in the previous 30 years. The release of the data followed by only a few months national coverage of the story of Loretta Saunders, a murdered Inuk woman (MacCharles 2014). 3. On settler colonialism as a structure of elimination, see Patrick Wolfe (2006). 4. A note on methodology: My analysis of opinion-making is based on an analytical sample sufficient to the tracking of broad discursive trends. A systematic review of positions taken by newspapers according to region, media conglomerate, print versus broadcast media, language, and mainstream versus alternative venues is beyond the scope of the present

32 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

study. I discuss material published in daily newspapers, with the exception of one feature article in a magazine. My focus is editorials and op-eds, but I refer to trends in news coverage for contextualization. As representations of the official position of a paper, editorials differ from signed opinion pieces in the nature of their authority and the degree to which their source of enunciation is particularized. While I distinguish between editorials and signed opinions in each instance, I do not offer a systematic analysis of their operation as different modes of opinion-making. My sample covers the years from 1994 to 2005, from the first major civil suits to the announcement of negotiations towards a comprehensive settlement. It was created through a comprehensive search of Canadian Newsstand Complete using multiple keywords, and supplemented by targeted searches in Factiva and Canadian Business and Current Affairs Complete for major papers whose commentaries were not captured by Canadian Newsstand. My searches show that the Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Herald were the most active of the urban dailies in the publication of commentary on residential schools: 34 and 18 editorials, respectively, for the period, compared to the nearest totals of 15 in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 13 in the Regina Leader-Post, and 9 in the Ottawa Citizen. At the level of national papers, the National Post was the most active, publishing 9 editorials compared to 2 in The Globe and Mail. Figures for signed op-eds on residential schools are comparable: the greatest numbers were published by the National Post, the Calgary Herald, and the Vancouver Sun. Among regional papers, those in British Columbia and, to a lesser degree, in Ontario published the most commentary. The prevalence of right-wing opinion in my analysis reflects frequency of data in my sample. This may be related to the concentration of media ownership in the period. The Vancouver Sun and Calgary Herald were purchased, and the National Post founded, by Conrad Black’s media company, Hollinger Inc., in 1996 and held by that media company until 2000; many of the Ontario regional newspapers were owned by Hollinger Inc. until 2001. 5. My study is not an empirical study of audience reception. I approach the Canadian public as a space of discourse, reflexively “conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (Warner 2005, 67). This space is regulated by norms applying to speech that could be expected to address the Canadian public at the time. Although the public is ostensibly an “indefinite audience,” speech launched out at this indefinite and abstract point, as Michael Warner notes, is regulated unequally, requiring different levels of adjustment, contortion, and self-exposure (55, 52). 6. In fact, the Regina Leader-Post went even further than the Edmonton Journal in 2005, arguing that the government had no right to insist on the finality of any comprehensive settlement, especially for survivors of sexual and physical abuse. See “Compensation idea welcome.” 7. On residential schooling as “genocide by cultural obliteration,” see Roland D. Chrisjohn and Sherri L. Young (1997, 52). 8. Market populist discourse also voices resentment of advocates and recipients of redistributive measures. See Marion Sawer and David Laycock (2009), who describe a conjunction of forces accounting for the increasing prominence of this discourse in Canada: the rise of the Reform Party nationally and other populist political parties at the regional level, newly appearing free-market think-tanks and right-wing media conglomerates.

33 Jennifer Henderson

9. On nineteenth-century Western Europe’s vision of a self-regulating economy, which involved a particular “lay-out” of society, see Karl Polanyi (1944, 196). Of particular relevance is his argument that, in order to produce the willing wage labourer, it was “first necessary to liqui- date organic society, which refused to permit the individual to starve” (165). 10. I am indebted to Lauren Berlant for the idea of a collective historical experience needing to find its genre in public discourse, and specifically for trauma as a late-twentieth century genre in which ongoing processes are made to “congeal into an object-event” (2011, 64). My reference to the gothic and melodramatic elements of the child abuse narrative ges- tures at its indebtedness to features of more established genres, specifically the gothic’s dark, enclosed setting, coded as a space of perverse practices and tortured innocence, and melodrama’s heightened emotional intensity. 11. As Roland Niezen observes, even the category “survivor” is a historically contingent self- designation (2013, 7). 12. Thanks to Daniel O’Quinn for pointing me to the concept of natal alienation. Natal alienation is Orlando Patterson’s term for the symbolic violence used to bring about the “social death” of the slave through a forced “loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descend- ing generations,” an “alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him by the master” (1982, 7). I borrow the term here not to collapse residential schooling and chattel slavery, but to underline the fact that the importance of the child in the former is as an access point for the destruction of kin affiliation and cultural transmission. The figure of the child in residential schools policy is not the same as the child in the late twentieth- century child abuse narrative. The latter sometimes functions as a vehicle of normativity in what Lauren Berlant calls the “intimate public sphere” (1997, 5). On the “tacitly white” child of sentimental public discourse, virtuous-because-innocent-of-political-agency, see Lauren Berlant (5-6). 13. This is the shift that Matt James describes in his account of how the mandate of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission came to be conceived as a truth-telling exercise that would be “victim-centred,” focussing on documenting the perspectives and needs of survivors as opposed to the responsibility of perpetrators. After experiencing a decade of official attempts to “resist, evade and callously minimize the country’s reparative obligations,” survivors involved in articulating a vision for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (that eventually would form part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement) demanded a forum that would prioritize “voice and respect” (2012, 184). 14. On settler empathy, see Jennifer Henderson (2012). 15. Thus, wrote Kenneth Deer, “editorial comments in the mainstream press” recalling the “best of intentions, given the times,” were attempts to cover “racist attitudes” in the past and the present (1998). The good intentions argument was an early manoeuvre in attempts to foreclose on recognition of a collective injury. Could the schools have produced widespread harm if they were staffed by people acting with good intentions, with the exception of a few sexual predators? The Globe and Mail took the position that the “cultural paternalism” was

34 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

“perhaps understandable”; “it is easy for us to judge harshly today people from another time who genuinely believed that they were doing good” (1998). Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young countered the argument from intentions, calling it a “rhetorical struggle” to refer the known “political, legal, and economic grounds” of residential schooling to the unknowable, private consciences of historical agents (1997, 40). The urgent task was to understand how the “complicity of the ‘body politic’ in genocide was assured” through publicly circulated, everyday myths of benevolence, racial superiority, and liberal-capitalist progress that implicated a “host of perpetrators” in seemingly individual acts (1997, 54, 55). 16. The Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council study recommended, along with public pedagogy, healing support, and support for criminal investigations, research into “options for civil action to secure compensation/resources for healing, based in part, but not limited to, findings of RCMP criminal investigation” (1996, 208). 17. The concept of total institution originates in the sociologist Erving Goffman’s essay “On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,” collected in his 1961 book, Asylums. A total institution separates inmates from the outside world and subjects the daily existence of inmates to minute regulation, resulting in a loss of agency. It is a residential setting that constitutes its own functional social system with strictly defined roles for inmates and staff. Goffman’s fieldwork was in a mental hospital (see Rubin 2005). 18. The United Church of Canada had offered an official apology for the church’s involvement in residential schooling in October 1998. 19. The article presented the arguments made by lawyers representing both sides: on the one hand, “the abuse was responsible for H.L.’s problems later in life”; on the other, “H.L. had a troubled family background and other family members had problems with alcohol that had nothing to do with Starr” (O’Connor 2001, B1). The need to establish causality within a biographical frame, and to establish government responsibility as operating vicariously through the actions of an individual abuser, made any evidence of a “troubled family background” weigh in favour of the government. 20. Bruce Feldthusen, who uses the term abuse to cover both sexual and physical violence, notes that battery is actually the proper name for the civil cause of action, but assault (the term in criminal law) nevertheless dominates in the judicial decisions he examines (2007, 63 n11). 21. On other grounds, see Jennifer Llewelyn (2002, 262, 271). On tort law’s inability to address the institutional context of abuse, see Feldthusen (2007). For newspaper mention of other grounds, see Ruttan (2001); Fournier (2001); and Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (1999). 22. See discussions of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Program by Paulette Regan (2010, 111-42) and Jennifer Llewelyn (2002, 284); and for newspaper discussion, see William John- son (2003). 23. On the erasure of conceptions of kin that informed and sustained Indigenous governance structures, economies, and geopolitical relations, see Bonita Lawrence (2004) and Julia Emberley (2007).

35 Jennifer Henderson

24. A 1998 feature in the Ottawa Citizen noted that a “flood of lawsuits” was producing an “untenable situation.” It quoted the University of Calgary’s Tom Flanagan’s description of Indigenous peoples joining a “mushrooming movement” that was a “raid on the treasury to take off with hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars” (Todd 1998a; see also 1998b). 25. A Montreal Gazette editorial described the Anglican Church Diocese of the Cariboo in Brit- ish Columbia as being forced to “wind up its affairs” (2001, B6). At times, residential school claimants and financially vulnerable churches were grouped together, as inKam - loops Daily News (2001). 26. On responsibility and the public pedagogy of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, see Roger Simon (2013). 27. This fixation occluded recognition of the fiduciary responsibility of the settler-state towards Indigenous peoples, displacing it into a responsibility to non-Indigenous Canadians. The relationship dates back to the Crown’s 1763 assumption of discretionary authority in the evaluation and protection of Indigenous interests. With the 1984 Supreme Court decision in Guerin v The Queen this authority was made a legal responsibility on the part of the federal government, “to observe a trust relationship” in handling monies derived from lands recognized as belonging to Indigenous communities (see Lawrence 2012, 306 n1). This fiduciary relationship can be interpreted in different ways: in terms of a trust principle that directs Ottawa’s decisions, according to an obligation not to mismanage, or very dif- ferently, as Glen Coulthard puts it, in terms of a power to align the interests of Aboriginal communities with “the imperatives of state and capital” (2008, 196; see also Library of Parliament 2000). 28. The Edmonton Journal had been a venue for this angle as early as 1996, when it published an argument against general compensation on the grounds that abuse was not “universal,” and that “big-government, big-money solutions” had failed in the past (Gunter 1996). An alternative was to be found in a Saskatchewan Reform Party proposal to allow individuals freedom of choice in their “entitlements” and to make bands more “accountable” (Gunter 1996). 29. The announcement accompanied a “Statement of Reconciliation.” Both were part of the government’s official response to RCAP, entitledGathering Strength—Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan (Canada 1997). Million notes that the Aboriginal Healing Foundation “was under strict government guidelines about what [its] healing plans could address. They had to be about physical and sexual abuse suffered in residential schools” (2013, 144). 30. The Windsor Star reported the view of an Indian and Northern Affairs official that the government was facing fraudulent claims: “the word on native reserves is that people just have to sign on the dotted line to receive compensation” (Tibbetts 1998, A8). 31. Protecting taxpayers was also the focus of an Ottawa Citizen editorial, which directed accusations of extravagance and mismanagement at the Office of Indian Residential Schools Resolution (Ottawa Citizen 2001).

36 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

32. Manipulation of survivors by lawyers was another theme, sometimes used to discount the claim of cultural loss as a manifestation of lawyerly greed (see, for example, Calgary Herald 2003). 33. Dave Snow and Benjamin Moffit (2012) introduce elements of social conservatism into the mix. 34. On early twentieth-century progressive income tax schemes justified by the idea of a debt to society, the cumulatively constructed “social tools” of previous generations, and the inescapable interdependence of persons within a system of production, see Rosanvallon (2013, 188-94). 35. The positive accounts were provided by a number of Alberta and Saskatchewan residential school students, a former chaplain, a former principal, and former teacher and graduate, supplemented by the reflections of a member of the National Catholic Working Group on Native Residential Schools. Their picture of the schools was not entirely unqualified: the article acknowledged rare instances of physical or sexual abuse; some of the interview- ees reported loneliness; and one observed, in what should have been, in this context, an astonishing aside (but one on which the article did not elaborate), that the schools were “practicing ‘cultural genocide’” (quoted in Donnelly 1998). 36. See also Kamloops Daily News (2003) and Bailey (2003). When the federal government removed the requirement that Alternative Dispute Resolution Program participants sign away their right to file claims of cultural loss in the future, theCalgary Herald argued that by allowing “merit to the ‘loss of culture’ argument” the government had “exposed taxpayers to unnecessary risk” (2004, A18). In contrast, a Canadian Press story foregrounded the arguments of the Assembly of First Nations on the need to compensate cultural loss. These were backed by a “panel of international experts” (Prince George Citizen 2005, 7). 37. In feature articles, the National Post revived the view that what John Siebert called “alternative, or moderating views” on the effects of the schools had been omitted from RCAP (quoted in Foot 2001a). 38. In a subsequent letter to the editor, Siebert reasserted the evidentiary basis for his claims (2001). Siebert’s arguments circulated in other papers as well (see Mutlow 2002). 39. Dian Million (2013, 91) and Ronald Niezen (2013, 114) credit Lakota psychologist Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart for the application of the concept of historical trauma to the experience of Indigenous peoples in articles she published in the mid-1990s. 40. Former students may apply for additional compensation related to experiences of sexual and physical violence under an Independent Assessment Process that forms part of the agreement. The 2008 government apology arguably went further, acknowledging the intergenerational effects of child removal, including later parenting problems, but as Eva Mackey argues, this aspect of the apology constructs Aboriginal families and cultures as “damaged and psychologically deviant today, their very beings characterized by destroyed cultures” (2013, 54).

37 Jennifer Henderson

41. Not all residential school survivors have access to home communities, however. Online forums permit former students and intergenerational survivors to locate others, to narrate their experiences, and to form “communities of affirmation” based on acts of writing and reading (Niezen 2013, 116). Whether the conditions of abstract intimacy and the opportunities for self-expression afforded by the Internet are conducive to the assertion of collective power is uncertain. Jodi Dean’s discussion of the distractions of “communicative capital- ism” is pertinent here (2012, 102-10). 42. See David Lloyd: “In the case of colonialism, the relation to the past is strictly not a relation to one’s own past but to a social history and its material and institutional effects and in no simple way a matter of internal psychic dynamics” (2000, 216). The problem is not solved when recognition of a collective injury is matched by human development programs aimed at communities. As Million has shown, the community healing projects held up as exem- plary in the human development literature of the 1990s mobilize a narrow concept of Indigenous culture as treatment: “good as individual/community therapeutic practice but unimaginable as relational practices that inform governments, ways of living in places” (2013, 116). Settler-culture assumptions about what constitutes development are protected and change “occur[s] on only one side” as communities are forced to respond to new expectations of economic self-reliance, with the recasting of treaty entitlements as mani- festations of dependency (120).

REFERENCES

B. (W.R.) v Plint (1998), 161 Dominion Law Reports (4th) 538, 52 British Columbia Law Reports (3d) 18, [1998] 4 Canadian Native Law Reporter 13, [1999] 1 Western Weekly Reports 389 (British Columbia Supreme Court). Bailey, Sue. 2003. “Backlash Risks Adding Millions to Cost of Native Residential Schools Law- suits.” Expositor, 21 August, A2. Battiste, Marie, and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood Henderson. 2000. Protecting Indigenous Knowl- edge and Heritage. Saskatoon: Purich. Bell, Stewart. 1998. “Church, Ottawa, Blamed for Native School Abuses.” Vancouver Sun, 6 June, A4. Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizen- ship. Durham: Duke University Press. ——. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Blackwater v Plint, 2003 British Columbia Court of Appeal 671, (2003) 235 Dominion Law Reports (4th) 60, [2004] 3 Western Weekly Reports 217. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2014. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992. Trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Brady, Miranda. 2013. “Media Practices and Painful Pasts: The Public Testimonial in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Media International Australia 149: 128-38. Brantford Expositor. 2004. “A Long Road to Justice.” Editorial. 7 December, A14.

38 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

Bratich, Jack Z. 2005. “Addressing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies.” Communi- cation Theory 15 (3): 242-65. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2005.tb00335.x. Brodie, Janine. 1996. “New State Forms, New Political Spaces.” In States against Markets: The Limits of Globalization, edited by R. Boyer and D. Drache, 288-99. London: Routledge. Brooks, Alma. 1999. “Abuse at Residential Schools Is a Fact Victims Must Live With.” New Bruns- wick Telegraph Journal, 18 August. Byfield, Ted. 1998. “The West’s Confidence in Ottawa Is Vanishing.” Financial Post, 14 February, 22. Calgary Herald. 2000. “Individual Justice: Ottawa Seems Clear Enough on Redress for Residen- tial School Claimants.” Editorial. 19 July, A22. ——. 2003. “Cut the Lawyers Out.” 5 August, A10. ——. 2004. “Miscalculated Risk.” 17 March, A18. Canada. 1997. Gathering Strength—Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada. Carlson, Kathryn Blaze, and Jill Mahoney. 2014. “PM Rejects Inquiry Calls after Girl’s Death.” The Globe and Mail, 22 August, A1. Chrisjohn, Roland D., and Sherri L. Young. 1997. The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada. Penticton: Theytus. Cleverley, Fred. 2000. “New Predators Are Circling.” Winnipeg Free Press, 24 July, A10. Corntassel, Jeff, Chaw-win-is, and T’lakwadzi. 2009. “Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation.” English Studies in Canada 35 (1): 137-59. doi:10.1353/esc.0.0163. Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2008. “Beyond Recognition: Indigenous Self-Determination as Prefigura- tive Practice.” In Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indig- enous Nations, edited by Leanne Simpson, 187-203. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. ——. 2014. Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Daniels, Ernie. 1998. “End the Denial, Heal the Wounds: Residential Schools Have Hurt More Than the Survivors.” Winnipeg Free Press, 2 April, A11. Dean, Jodi. 2012. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso. Deer, Kenneth. 1998. “Canada Accused of Genocide.” Montreal Gazette, 15 February, A8. Donnelly, Patrick. 1998. “Scapegoating the Indian Residential Schools: The Noble Legacy of Hundreds of Christian Missionaries Is Sacrificed to Political Correctness.” Alberta Report, 26 January, 6-11. Edmonton Journal. 1998. “The Lawsuit Genie Is out of the Bottle.” Editorial. 30 December, A16. ——. 2003. “Class Action Suit Filed for Students of Aboriginal Residential Schools.” 1 August, A6. ——. 2004. “Shared Liability Still Reasonable in Abuse Cases.” Editorial. 9 January, A16. ——. 2005a. “An Agreement for the Ages.” Editorial. 24 November, A18. ——. 2005b. “Residential School Lawsuit Gets Green Light.” 13 May, A14. Emberley, Julia. 2007. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Can- ada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

39 Jennifer Henderson

Episkenew, Jo-Anne. 2009. Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Heal- ing. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Feldthusen, Bruce. 2007. “Civil Liability for Sexual Assault in Aboriginal Residential Schools.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 22 (1): 61-91. doi:10.1017/S0829320100009121. Fiske, Jo-Ann. 2009. “Placing Violence against First Nations Children: The Use of Space and Place to Construct the (In)credible Violated Subject.” In Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, edited by Laurence Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valas- kakis, 140-59. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Flanagan, Tom. 1999. “Human Rights and Freedom of the Press.” The Globe and Mail, 20 May, A15. Foot, Richard. 2001a. “Native Commission Report is ‘Shoddy.’” National Post, 20 March, A4. ——. 2001b. “Ottawa Liable for Sex Abuse of Non-residential at Native School.” National Post, 11 May, A1. ——. 2001c. “Researcher Defends Residential Schools.” National Post, 17 March, A1. ——. 2003. “Class Action Could Cost Ottawa $12 Billion.” Vancouver Sun, 1 August, A3. ——. 2004. “Residential School Suit Can Proceed as a Group.” Calgary Herald, 4 December, A11. Fournier, Suzanne. 1996. “Native Wins Abuse Claim.” Vancouver Province, 20 June, A27. ——. 1997. “Sex-Assault Victim Says He’s Tired of Waiting.” Vancouver Province, 4 December, A3. ——. 1998. “Survivor Tells of School Abuse.” Vancouver Province, 3 February, A4. ——. 2001. “Abuse Victims Will ‘Hardly See a Dime.’” Vancouver Province, 13 July, A6. Fredericton Daily Gleaner. 1998a. “Church to Appeal Ruling over Residential Schools.” 4 July. ——. 1998b. “Money Has Not Solved Problems Natives Face.” Editorial. 20 January. Galloway, Gloria, and Bill Curry. 2015. “‘Cultural Genocide’ Cited as Goal of Residential Schools.” The Globe and Mail, 2 June, A1. The Globe and Mail. 1998. “Residential Schools, National Scandal.” 8 January, A16. ——. 2015. “From Apology to Action.” Editorial. 6 June, F9. Goffman, Erving. 1961.Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Chicago: Aldine. Gregoire, Lisa. 1998. “Native Author Tries to Debunk School Myths.” Fredericton Daily Gleaner, 13 November. Guerin v The Queen, [1984] 2 Canada Supreme Court Reports 335, 13 Dominion Law Reports (4th) 321. Gunter, Lorne. 1996. “Compensation to Aboriginals Not the Answer.” Edmonton Journal, 22 December, F8. Hall, Neal. 1998. “Native Recalls Sex Abuse in Residential School.” Calgary Herald, 3 February, A7. Henderson, Jennifer. 2012. “Transparency, Spectatorship, Accountability: Indigenous Families in Settler-State ‘Postdemocracies.’” English Studies in Canada 38 (3-4): 299-330. doi:10.1353/esc.2013.0009.

40 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, Canada, Assembly of First Nations and Inuit Representatives, and the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Presbyte- rian Church of Canada, the United Church of Canada, and Roman Catholic Entities, 8 May 2006. Indian Residential Schools Settlement: Official Court Website. www.residentialschoolsettlement.ca/IRS%20Settlement%20Agreement-%20ENGLISH. pdf. James, Matt. 2012. “A Carnival of Truth? Knowledge, Ignorance and the Canadian Truth and Rec- onciliation Commission.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 6: 182-204. doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijs010. Jewitt, Bill. 2000. “Abuse of Natives Largely Ignored.” Trail Times, 27 March, 4. John, Grand Chief Edward. 1996. “Why Canada Has a Moral Obligation to Abused Indians.” Vancouver Sun, 3 April, A13. Johnson, William. 2003. “Making the Gun Registry Look Good.” The Globe and Mail, 16 January, A19. Kamloops Daily News. 2001. “Feds Pass Buck on School Abuse.” 17 August, A6. ——. 2003. “Natives Slam Ottawa’s Attempt at Residential Schools Settlement.” 6 November, C2. Kitchener Record. 1996. “Ottawa Paying Millions in Sexual Abuse Claims.” 7 December, F14. ——. 1998. “Apology Not Enough for Residential School Abuse, Natives Seek Cash.” 3 February, A10. Kulchyski, Peter. 2013. Aboriginal Rights Are Not Human Rights: In Defence of Aboriginal Struggles. Winnipeg: ARP. Lawrence, Bonita. 2004. ‘Real Indians’ and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indig- enous Nationhood. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ——. 2012. Fractured Homeland: Federal Recognition and Algonquin Identity in Ontario. Vancou- ver: University of British Columbia Press. Llewelyn, Jennifer J. 2002. “Dealing with the Legacy of Native Residential School Abuse in Can- ada: Litigation, ADR, and Restorative Justice.” University of Toronto Law Journal 52 (3): 253- 300. doi:10.3138/utlj.52.3.253. Lloyd, David. 2000. “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?” Interventions 2 (2): 212-28. Luckhurst, Roger. 2003. “Traumaculture.” New Formations 50: 28-47. Luxton, Meg. 2010. “Doing Neoliberalism: Perverse Individualism in Personal Life.” In Neo- liberalism and Everyday Life, edited by Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton, 163-83. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. MacCharles, Tonda. 2014. “1,000 Native Women Murdered, Missing in Canada over 30 Years: RCMP.” Toronto Star, 1 May. Mackey, Eva. 2013. “The Apologizers’ Apology.” In Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, edited by Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, 47-62. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ——. 2014. “Unsettling Expectations: (Un)certainty, Settler States of Feeling, Law, and Decolo- nization.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 29 (2): 235-52. doi:10.1017/cls.2014.10.

41 Jennifer Henderson

Martinuk, Susan. 1999. “Rights Go Overboard.” National Post, 10 March, A18. Maclean’s Magazine. 1995. “Pedophile Punishment.” 3 April, 25. Miller, J.R. 2009. Compact, Contract, Covenant: Aboriginal Treaty-Making in Canada. Toronto: Uni- versity of Toronto Press. Million, Dian. 2013. Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Montreal Gazette. 2001. “Unfair to Churches.” Editorial. 7 July, B6. ——. 2006. “Closure, at Least, on Residential Schools.” Editorial. 1 May, A16. Mutlow, W.B. 2002. “Residential Schools Overused Excuse.” Star-Phoenix, 20 September, A15. National Post. 1999. “Ottawa’s Giveaway.” Editorial. 6 July, A19. ——. 2001. “Healthy Skepticism.” Editorial. 21 March, A19. ——. 2000. “Sins of the Fathers.” Editorial. 17 July, A13. Niezen, Ronald. 2013. Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council. 1996. Indian Residential Schools: The Nuu-Chah-nulth Experience. Port Alberni: Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council. O’Connor, Kevin. 2001. “Unique Abuse Case Appealed.” Regina Leader-Post, 15 December, B1. O’Hurley, Mary C. 2002. “The Crown’s Fiduciary Relationship with Aboriginal Peoples.” PRB 00-09E. Law and Government Division. Parliamentary Research Branch, Library of Parlia- ment. Parliament of Canada. www.parl.gc.ca/content/LOP/ResearchPublications/prb0009-e.htm. Ottawa Citizen. 2001. “Doing the Math on Residential Schools.” Editorial. 16 November, A18. Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press. Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon. Pratt, Chief Glen. 2004. “Residential School Impact Huge.” Star-Phoenix, 9 August, A10. Prince George Citizen. 2005. “Lump-sum Payouts Possible for Residential School Survivors.” 4 May, 7. Regan, Paulette. 2010. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Regina Leader-Post. 2005. “Compensation Idea Welcome.” 1 June, B7. Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. 1996. Report. Vol. 1, Looking Forward, Looking Back. Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2013. The Society of Equals. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rubin, Julius H. 2005. “Total Institutions.” In Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by George Ritzer, 844-46. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Ruttan, Susan. 2001. “One Man’s Life, Sorted into Three Piles of Horrors.” Victoria Times-Colo- nist, 22 July, A10. Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. 1999. “Judge Awards B.C. Man $170,000 for Abuse Suffered in Gordon Residential School.” 16 November, A4.

42 Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

Sault Star. 2002. “Native Man Leads Residential School Class-action Suit.” 7 December, D7. Sawer, Marion, and David Laycock. 2009. “Down with Elites and Up with Inequality: Market Populism in Australia and Canada.” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 47 (2): 133-50. doi:10.1080/14662040902842836. Siebert, John. 2001. “Residential Schools in Perspective.” National Post, 30 March, A14. Simmie, Scott. 2000. “Churches Reaping Harvest of Residential School Abuse.” Toronto Star, 26 August, A1. Simon, Roger. 2013. “Towards a Hopeful Practice of Worrying: The Problematics of Listening and the Educative Responsibilities of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” In Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, edited by Jennifer Hender- son and Pauline Wakeham, 129-42. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Simpson, Leanne. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resur- gence and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Snow, Dave, and Benjamin Moffit. 2012.“Straddling the Divide: Mainstream Populism and Con- servatism in Howard’s Australia and Harper’s Canada.” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 50 (3): 271-92. doi:10.1080/14662043.2012.692922. Tibbetts, Janice. 1998. “Abuse Claim Fraud Feared.” Windsor Star, 26 December, A8. Todd, Douglas. 1998a. “In Search of Native Retribution.” Ottawa Citizen, 22 December, F8. ——. 1998b. “Surge in Native Lawsuits Raises Storm Warnings.” Edmonton Journal, 20 Decem- ber, F2. Toronto Star. 1994. “Residential Horrors Cry Out for Restitution.” Editorial. 9 August, A13. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 31 May. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/ File/2015/Findings/Exec_Summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf. Valaskakis, Gail. 1994. “Rights and Warriors: First Nations, Media and Identity.” Ariel 25 (1): 60-72. Vancouver Province. 1996. “Separate issues.” Editorial. 19 January, A34. Vancouver Sun. 1998a. “A Path from Shame and Dependence.” 8 January, A18. ——. 1998b. “Residential School Decision Persuasive.” Editorial. 15 June, A10. ——. 2000. “Churches Must Prove Their Claims of Poverty.” Editorial. 11 July, A8. Vaughn, Marshall. 2004. “The Argument for Compensating Cultural Genocide.” Calgary Herald, 22 March, A11. Warner, Michael. 2005. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone. Whiteye, Bud. 2004. “Compensation for Horrific Acts at Residential School.”Pembroke Observer, 6 March, 5. Wiebe, Tim. 1999. “Native Controversy over ‘General’ Concerns.” Calgary Herald, 1 March, A16. Winnipeg Free Press. 2003. “Court Isn’t the Answer.” Editorial. 27 February, A14. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387-409. doi:10.1080/14623520601056240.