Gender, Justice, and the Indian Residential School Claims Process

Abstract

Survivors of Indian Residential Schools in Canada are involved in one of the largest compensation processes in the world. A significant component in the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) is the Independent Assessment Process (IAP), an out-of-court process aimed at resolving claims related to serious physical and sexual abuse suffered at residential schools. This article discusses a community-university research collaboration, which set out to explore how women involved in the IAP, including Survivors, support workers, lawyers, and adjudicators, understood the capacity of the model to facilitate healing. The results suggest attention to several aspects of policy development including representations of the body and sexuality, impacts of child abuse and trauma, and colonial histories of power and control, in addition to healing and training strategies.

Gender – Diversity – Intersectionality. (New) Perspectives in Adult Education

“…As a scholar concerned with the way Canada continues to implement the IAP as a model for compensating survivors of abuses suffered at the Residential Schools, I worked with an Indigenous community organization to implement a gender and diversity analysis of the IAP. The study demonstrated how women's lives and experiences were excluded from compensation and how hetero-normative, male bodies were privileged (Hanson, 2016). Emphasizing compensation models that taken into account the many ways that discriminatory factors such as race, sex and class can combine to create inequality and exclusion is one way to build policies and programs that more truly reflect a spirit of reconciliation and healing.…”

“…Children already suffering from the pain of Indian Residential School abuses returned home to parents who could not cope with the heartbreaking loss of their children (Hanson, 2016). Many parents were IRS students and survivors themselves.…”

“…An intersectional lens points out other problems with the IAP model -that is, for example, in the design of the model the stakeholders used a unitary definition of survivor -that is, the model did not recognize gender, class, ethnicity (nationhood); class, traditional lands, communities, languages, etc. Thus when the IAP hearings compensated for harms or acts of abuse the categories in the model privileged the male body (Hanson, 2016), heterosexual relations, the English language, individual versus collective harms and so on. The impacts of this in policy and legal practices are best summed up in the words of the women who experienced the IAP as survivors of the Indian Residential Schools or as adjudicators (judges) in the process.…”

A Global De-colonial Praxis of Sustainability — Undoing Epistemic Violences between Indigenous peoples and those no longer Indigenous to Place

“…This simultaneously centres Indigenous philosophies, ethics, and ways of knowing while seeking to engage mutual understanding of relative positionings, perspectives, and knowledge systems as constituted by different colonial histories (Donald, 2009). Theoretically significant to our work is the concept of reconciliation, which with the exception of Scotland, has been present in each country (in its polyvalent forms) for some time with various degrees of effectiveness (Gunstone, 2009; TRC, 2015; Edmonds, 2016; Hanson, 2016). As articulated here, reconciliation goes well beyond truth-telling forums often accompanying political change (Short, 2005) or initiatives based on individual compensation hearings for past colonial wrongs (Hanson, 2016), to forms requiring ecological justice (Behrendt, 2003; TRC, 2015) and reconciliation at epistemological, relational, and material levels.…”

“…Theoretically significant to our work is the concept of reconciliation, which with the exception of Scotland, has been present in each country (in its polyvalent forms) for some time with various degrees of effectiveness (Gunstone, 2009; TRC, 2015; Edmonds, 2016; Hanson, 2016). As articulated here, reconciliation goes well beyond truth-telling forums often accompanying political change (Short, 2005) or initiatives based on individual compensation hearings for past colonial wrongs (Hanson, 2016), to forms requiring ecological justice (Behrendt, 2003; TRC, 2015) and reconciliation at epistemological, relational, and material levels. This more radical form of reconciliation reestablishes previous emphasis on reconciliation as ‘Indigenous claims against the State’ to questions regarding how ‘colonizing peoples might legitimately settle and establish their own sovereignty?’ (Tully in Short, 2005, pp.…”