ABSTRACT
Introduction In June 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released its summary report and recommendations.1 With the report came the announcement that an estimated 6,000 children perished while held within Canadian Indian Residential Schools (IRS). From the mid nineteenth century until 1996, when the last school finally closed, about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Me´tis children were forcibly removed from their families and placed into institutions fundamentally designed to destroy their indigenous identities.2 There are presently an estimated 80,000 former students of the IRS system, who since the 1990s have been commonly identified as ‘survivors’ (often with an upper-case ‘S’), a term that inversely acknowledges the thousands of children who died in these schools.3
Many of these survivors have made public claims of ‘genocide’ in order to articulate their traumatic experiences. And because survivor testimonies are the bedrock of the TRC, an institution with national scope and stature, such claims have elicited an increasingly prominent debate in Canada in recent years.
