Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience: the Special Interlocutor’s Historical Report – FCPP

July 15, 2024

While OSI states that “the primary purpose of this Report is not to prove that these atrocities happened or that Canada is responsible,” it also declares that “understanding the scope and scale of State wrongdoing and harms makes clear that there is an ongoing need for reparations relating to the missing and disappeared children and unmarked burials.”

How can reparations be assigned without determining responsibility?

The OSI sets the scale of reparations early on: “Thousands of children … were buried instead in cemeteries at the institutions, often in unmarked and mass graves that were sometimes dug by other children.” Not only were the residential schools scenes of genocide, a whole archipelago of institutions existed to service the “systemic settler colonial patterns of genocide.”

Kevin Annett first popularized characterizing the IRS as genocidal in the 1990s, which career activists have since reified. Venal self-interests aside, are there missing and disappeared children strewn about the Canadian landscape in unmarked burials and mass graves?

Read More: https://fcpp.org/2024/07/15/sites-of-truth-sites-of-conscience-the-special-interlocutors-historical-report/