For more than 150 years, politicians, the federal government, and missionary churches misled Canadians about deaths, abuse, and the genocidal intent in residential schools for Indigenous children. More recently, the identification of suspected unmarked graves at former school sites has triggered a renewed spread of misinformation denying the harmful legacy of residential schools. To what extent does the Canadian public endorse residential school denialism? Can education counter this misinformation? In this study, we develop and test a scale for measuring residential school denialism. We find that nearly one in five non-Indigenous Canadians agree with denialist claims, while an equal share feel they do not know enough to offer an opinion. Denialist beliefs are more common among men, conservatives, those with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and white Canadians who strongly identify with their racial in-group. In an experiment, we also show that educational information reduces non-opinions and increases the likelihood of rejecting denialist arguments.

From 1493 to 1507, Hernando de Talavera, the first archbishop of Granada after the Spanish Reconquista, ran a residential school for Morisco noble boys in his palace. This article argues that Talavera’s school set the foundation for the long history of residential schooling as a tool to transform or eradicate a conquered culture through the cultural assimilation of children. A champion of Christian humanism, Talavera thought that cultivating good manners (that is, adopting Spanish customs) was the main marker of a true Christian. Thus, his pedagogy aimed to educate everyone, particularly Morisco children, in what he considered the most reasonable and natural ways of living. By examining Talavera’s spiritual pedagogy, his humanist influences, and the educational experiences of Morisco boys at his palace, this paper lays the groundwork for a genealogical study of modern European colonial residential schooling for non-European children.

This article addresses the historical justice dilemma: although critical memory is indispensable for accountability, efforts to use it are often hampered by the unjust relations and systems that caused the wrongs to which historical justice is compelled to respond in the first place. Contemporary authors tackle this problem by focusing on collective responsibility for structural injustice. This article takes a different tack. Studying closely the 2009–2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report, it argues that the structural turn may come at the expense of a focus on agency and may thus provide unwitting anonymity for wrongdoers while crimping our thinking about leadership and responsibility. Although this article strongly criticizes the TRC report, it tries to work constructively with it, developing an analysis that compensates for the report's unwitting invisibilization of perpetrators. Distilling portraits and analyses of wrongdoer agency that are latent in the TRC's postwar history volume, this article shows how we can develop the report as a resource of what I call retributive social accountability.

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report (2015) highlighted the necessity of Indigenous self-determination in addressing the legacy of residential schools, yet Indigenous aging research remains dominated by Settlers. This Indigenist study by a Cree/Settler research team asked Indigenous Elders what is needed to support the wellness of the older adults in their communities. Elders shared that the healing of older survivors comes from reconnecting to the cultural knowledges that residential schools sought to eradicate. In resuming their traditional roles as transmitters of knowledge, older adults not only support their own healing, but also that of their whole communities. This understanding of the profoundly interrelational nature of Indigenous communities means that older adults’ wellness depends on first reclaiming their cultural identity and then on their roles as intergenerational transmitters of knowledge.

The search for missing or murdered Aboriginal women as well as the enquiry of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into residential schools both serve as a reminder that violence in Canada does not belong to the past. The individual and collective efforts of victims to express that violence and the deployment of the word “violence” in the public sphere are both part of what this article will analyze: the process of making that violence visible. Using a symbolic approach to power, this article analyzes the ways in which institutional means of justice, such as the TRC, address the making visible of violence from individual, community and societal perspectives.