Arts and Humanities Commons^™

They Made Us Unrecognizable To Each Other: Human Rights, Truth, And Reconciliation In Canada, Jaymelee Jane Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

Presented herein are the findings from an ethnographic analysis of the perceived efficacy of Canada’s transitional justice framework; an approach being used to address human rights violations that occurred via the Indian residential school system. With these findings and archival research, I argue that transitional justice is not perceived as an effective solution for nation-states with long histories of colonialism and institutional violence. From the 1840s until 1996, Canadian Aboriginals suffered forced assimilation, sexual abuse, and physical abuse in government-sponsored and church-administrated boarding schools. The Canadian government began to actively address these crimes in 2006 with the negotiation of the …