Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism

Without truth, justice is not served, healing cannot happen, and there can be no genuine reconciliation The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of CanadaThe TRCs Final Report, released in 2015, is the outcome of many years of research and rigorous scholarship by hundreds of academics across Canada. More than 5 million documents from governments, churches, and schools, hundreds of secondary sources, and the testimonies of over 7,000 residential school Survivors informed the Commissions work.Despite six volumes evidencing the genocide that took place within the system, some Canadians choose to deny, downplay, and disparage these findings in a battle for public memory waged in popular media and across social media platforms. Denialists do not refute the existence of the schools or that abuse happened. Rather, they cherry-pick and distort facts to minimize the harms done to Indigenous communities as they seek to turn reconciliation into a partisan issue and preserve national myths of benev