Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series
presents
Ronald Niezen
McGill University Faculty of Law
Templates and Exclusions in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on
Indian Residential Schools
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada on Indian Residential Schools, released in early June 2015, provides us with a reconsideration of the history of the state in the light of Survivor experience. The statements from former students offered in this context put into relief the suffering and memories of assault and torture of children. This has resulted in widespread recognition of the need for changes to Aboriginal policies and to institutional practices in such areas as child welfare and criminal justice. The weak mandate of the commission, however, favored the expression of a certain type of voluntary testimony, thereby shaping the dominant narratives of trauma, institutional crime, and national history in a way that misinforms as much as it enlightens. Its essentialization of testimony leads me to question the ability of the TRC to effectively reveal the diversity and dynamics of the residential schools, the reasons for their establishment, the causes of the corruption of their goals, and the common features they might have with ongoing, enduring forms of abuse and institutional power.
Ronald Niezen holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the faculties of Law and of Arts, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Law, and is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology. Professor Niezen researches and teaches in the areas of political and legal anthropology, indigenous peoples and human rights. He is an anthropologist with wide ranging research experience: with the Songhay of Mali, the Cree communities of Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba, and the Sami of northern Europe. Professor Niezen has taught legal anthropology and anthropological theory at the Faculty of Law and the Anthropology Department of McGill University. He has taught for nine years at Harvard University and held visiting positions at the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg and the Institute for Human Rights at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Professor Niezen earned his B.A. in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. He completed his M.Phil. and Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, England. His research has been funded notably by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Research Chair programme and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, Infrastructure Fund. His most recent books are The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Difference (University of California Press, 2003), A World Beyond Difference: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization (Blackwell, 2004), The Rediscovered Self: Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law(Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press, October 2013).
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
