Changing the Subject: The TRC, Its National Events, and the Displacement of Substantive Reconciliation in Canadian Media Representations

Abstract

The findings and recommendations of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 2008–2015) offer Canadians and their public institutions an opportunity to better confront the ongoing injustice of their colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, but this task requires also assessing the specific contributions of the TRC. The specific contribution in which this article is interested is the discourse of reconciliation that the commission has made Canada’s master keyword for debating Indigenous-settler relations. The article analyzes representations of reconciliation in the mainstream Canadian print media before and over the life of the commission, concluding that the commission during its national events did much to promote a relatively quiescent notion of reconciliation that in fact displaced conceptions with more substantive connotations of the return of land, jurisdiction, and resources. This finding has implications for how Canadians discuss reconciliation in the future and for the broader literature interested in the role of reconciliation discourse in truth commissions and other enterprises of transitional justice.