This thesis explores the concept of healing used by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and survivors as a conceptual tool to address and redress the legacy of residential schools. Using public testimony and selected interviews, I explore how the TRC’s statement-gathering process is perceived and experienced by survivors. This thesis also documents the personal tensions and political limits encountered during the implementation of a globalized, institutional process of truth-telling applied to resolve diverse and localized ‘traumas’ experienced by students enrolled in dozens of residential schools. This approach illustrates the inherent shortcomings of a top-down approach to solving residential school issues, drawing on the public testimonies of survivors to identify tensions between a national process and survivor-led and community-based alternatives for healing. Despite its intention to create a forum that allows survivors to tell their story about residential schools, the TRC has also, often, been used as space of political activism and social critique. Survivors have used the public testimonial spaces offered by the TRC to both critique the Canadian government’s commitment to reconciliation and also to demand more effective forms of redress, which have subtly shaped and transformed the TRC during its mandate. Thus, while I draw attention to institutional practices, ideologies and power relations shaping the TRC, I also emphasize how people perceive, engage and transform the process as a result.

Martha Minow argues that among the goals that a transitional justice system should pursue, reconciliation is equally as important as truth and justice. This is why in her view – and others who have argued similar lines – Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are not a “second best option” to trials. I argue that if we are to accept that reconciliation is a valuable goal, then the practical reality of pursuing reconciliation dictates a need to understand perpetrators in greater depth. This is because unlike truth and justice, reconciliation cannot be forced. Constructive participation is the only way that reconciliation can be achieved. In order to promote constructive participation, I argue that theorists need to do further research into what I call “perpetrator requirements”: the requirements that make perpetrators participate, and participate constructively. To do so, theorists should use an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing research from psychology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, and law. / Graduate

<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">This work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).</p> </font></p>

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">This work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).</p> </font></p>

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

Please read the abstract in the front section of this document. / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Centre for Human Rights / unrestricted

At the turn of the 21st century, truth commissions arose as a new possibility to address the violence and trauma of removing Indigenous children from their families and nations in what is now known as North America. The creation of two truth and reconciliation commissions in Canada and Maine marked an important step in addressing Indigenous demands for justice and the end of harm, alongside Indigenous calls for truth-telling. Holding Indigenous conceptions of justice at its core, this dissertation offers a comparative tracing of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2009-2015) and the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2013-2015) as they investigated state practices of removing Indigenous children from their homes and nations. More specifically, this dissertation examines the ways these truth commissions have intersected with Indigenous stories and how Indigenous stories can inform how we understand the work of truth and reconciliation commissions as they move to provide a form of justice for our communities. Within both commission processes, stories of Indigenous experiences in residential schools and the child welfare system were drawn from the perceived margins of settler colonial society in an effort to move towards truth, healing, reconciliation and justice. Despite this attempted inclusion of stories of Indigenous life experiences, I argue that deeply listening to Indigenous stories ¬¬in their various forms—life/ experiential stories, and traditional stories—illuminates the ways that the practice of reconciliation has become disconnected from Indigenous understandings of justice. As such, I argue that listening to Indigenous stories, not just hearing the words but instead taking them to heart, engaging with them and allowing them to guide us, moves toward more informed understandings of what justice looks like for Indigenous communities. / Graduate / 2022-09-12

Following the formal conclusion of reconciliatory processes in a newly post-apartheid South Africa, narrative remained a perdurable, centripetal force. Extending into the realm of literature, the inquiries of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were altered and enlarged. The mode of magical realism, in particular, emerged as a viable method not only for representing the world, but for working through uncertain futures and traumatic histories. Shimmering with the extraordinary and ineffable strangeness of the magical realist text, Achmat Dangor’s short story “The Devil”, offers expansive, recognizable and revelatory ways of dealing with the trauma of apartheid. Crucially, the narrative represents the private efforts of individual, personal healing in contradistinction with official processes of reconciliation. This thesis examines the ways in which “The Devil” proposes the body as a site of exploring the structuring antipodes of individual-collective and public-private, ultimately untethering these binaries through a process of bodily dis/entwining.

Post-violence periods present sub-Saharan African countries emerging from violence with the challenges of social reconstruction, the rebuilding of peace and the redressing of legacies of human rights violations. To respond to these challenges, these countries are increasingly utilising truth and reconciliation commissions. To date ten truth commissions have been established in the sub-Saharan African region. With varying mandates, the truth commissions have in their specific contexts provided public spaces to survivors of human rights violations to give voice to their personal narratives, and shed light on the forms of persecution they faced. Often missing from the work of these commissions are stories of refugees living in camps. This is an unfortunate exclusion by a transitional justice process because refugees represent a group adversely affected by rights violations. So far in sub-Saharan Africa only the Kenyan, Liberian and Sierra Leonean commissions have incorporated some of their refugee populations in their proceedings. Driven away from their homes and countries by armed strife and other forms of persecution, the stories of sub-Saharan African refugees continue to bear witness to their human rights plight. Their exclusion in the proceedings of most truth commissions is a glaring omission in the work set to champion human rights and consolidate post-violence peace and justice initiatives. Therefore, working with 33 male and female adult refugees living in Dukwi Refugee Camp in Botswana, this narrative study sought to find answers to this exclusion by exploring avenues of inclusion of refugees’ voices, perspectives and lived human rights experiences in the work of truth commissions. Participants came from sub-Saharan African countries which included DR Congo, Somalia and Zimbabwe. An analysis of the interview narratives revealed several key findings. Among others, these findings included the importance of recognising refugees as co-partners in peacebuilding. They also underscored the importance of having responsible democratic leadership promote a culture of peace and human rights and combat perpetrators impunity in post-violence African countries. The study demonstrated that future truth commissions can create opportunities to incorporate refugees’ human rights narratives and give refugees the space to offer solutions for the redress of rights violations and suggestions for promoting durable peace.