What responsibility do later generations have to remember and atone for the injustices of the past, even as they are perpetuated in the present? How do people come to feel compelled to act on this responsibility?

These questions are at once legal, ethical, political, religious, and financial. In this course, we will ask ourselves these questions in relation to a specific project of national public memory, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which focused on what was called the “Indian Residential School” system, which ran from 1831-1996. Canadian residential schools were a collaboration of church and state intentionally designed as a system of cultural genocide to force Indigenous children to assimilate to dominant settler society and to believe their cultures were inferior to white, Christian culture. In this course, we will dig deep into the texts and context of the TRC, listening especially to the voices of survivors and Indigenous scholars. We will think hard about what it means practically and politically for a settler-colonial nation to use stories, public memory, and ceremonies to call itself to account for its systems of genocide and territorial dispossession. We will also think comparatively about the history of US boarding schools for Indigenous children, including Harvard’s short-lived “Indian College.”