num_pages: 368
description: Since the 1980s successive Canadian institutions including the federal government and Christian churches have attempted to grapple with the malignant legacy of residential schooling including official apologies the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In Residential Schools and Reconciliation award winning author J. R. Miller tackles and explains these institutional responses to Canada's residential school legacy. Analysing archival material and interviews with former students politicians bureaucrats church officials and the Chief Commissioner of the TRC Miller reveals a major obstacle to achieving reconciliation - the inability of Canadians at large to overcome their flawed overly positive understanding of their country's history. This unique timely and provocative work asks Canadians to accept that the root of the problem was Canadians like them in the past who acquiesced to aggressively assimilative policies.
language: English
title: Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History
publisher: University of Toronto Press