By Tim Querengesser
Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools started its important work in Winnipeg this week. The commission will come to Inuvik next year, allowing Northerners an opportunity to share their experiences. Many are hoping it will produce healing. Some are also hoping for justice. But what should we expect? Here are a few things the most influential of these commissions can teach us.
A handful of truth and reconciliation-type commissions are currently working around the world to confront legacies of war, disappearances, ethnic violence, political repression and other national closeted-skeletons. The most well-known of these is the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa, which concluded its work in 1998. Formed in 1995 to come to terms with the former policy of apartheid, heard countless stories of wrongdoing during the racist regime, and made Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela household names around the world.
South Africa's commission has been lauded for creating an official record of truths during apartheid and for providing a forum for people to tell their stories. This has built a sense of healing.
But the commission has also been criticized for sacrificing justice in the name of reconciliation. Many perpetrators of crimes during the apartheid regime have not come forward. Those that have been identified have not publicly atoned for their acts. Fewer still have been prosecuted for crimes that have been unearthed by the commission. This has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many South Africans -- a sense that people have officially gotten away with their acts.
It appears those hoping for justice from Canada's commission on Indian residential schools, the last of which closed in 1996, might experience the same bitterness. It is expressly not a legal process. According to its mandate, viewable here, individuals cannot be identified in the commission's work unless they have been identified in earlier legal cases. Names of people who committed wrongdoings won't be made public unless these people have been convicted of a crime.
Stories of Indian residential schools being flanked by the unmarked graves of young children who died there for unexplained reasons are rife. If the accusations of wrongdoing surrounding these deaths -- let alone the thousands of accusations of sexual abuse -- are true, it's natural for people affected to seek justice. So, will Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission usher this justice forward or be a process that ultimately avoids it?
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