Truth And Reconciliation Commission Quotes

Our era calls for a public accounting of what caste has cost us, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so that every American can know the full history of our country, wrenching though it may be. The persistence of caste and race hostility, and the defensiveness about anti-black sentiment in particular, make it literally unspeakable to many in the dominant caste. You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved.

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

Particularly in situations of massive direct, structural, and cultural violence that has been inflicted on certain communities over several centuries (and there are plenty of these places across the continents), going down the U involves a kind of healing of massive wounds that have been inflicted on the collective body. (A good example is the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.) That healing of the collective social body will be one of the central activities of such a process. It’s not just a sidelight of project work. It’s the real thing. And everything else is the context for the healing to take place.

Together, Canadians must do more than just talk about reconciliation; we must learn how to practise reconciliation in our everyday lives—within ourselves and our families, and in our communities, governments, places of worship, schools, and workplaces. To do so constructively, Canadians must remain committed to the ongoing work of establishing and maintaining respectful relationships.

minimizes the trauma, either by shifting blame for it onto fringe actors of the present (“These acts don’t represent who we are”), relative values of the times (“Everyone back then believed in slavery”), or, worst, back onto the traumatized (“They are responsible for themselves”). There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

De Kock was one of only three white South Africans who were sentenced to prison for their participation in the apartheid regime after 1994. His conviction came because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that he had not been fully forthcoming about his crimes, which was a condition for amnesty. He served 20 years of a 212-year sentence before being paroled in 2015. During his time in prison, he began engaging the families of victims, helping them to find the remains of loved ones whom he had killed. Some, therefore, have touted him as an exemplar of restorative justice. It is important to note, however, that de Kock’s supposed shift actually marks a considerable degree of consistency in his behavior. Just as he followed the law under the apartheid regime, he is following the law under the post-apartheid government. His process of ethical decision making has not necessarily changed. The critical issue for White Christians is not how they embody their humanity when the legal system supports justice, but how they do so when it does not.

South Africa, the embodiment of symphonia, the sounding of all the voices together. A living, breathing entity. Returning from a visit to a medical clinic in the township of her name, Alexandra said: “What’s so amazing is that nobody is hiding anything. All the problems of society hit you in the face. You can see the terrible conditions of the squatter camps, and the total disparity among people’s lives. It’s all in the open. And it is tolerable,” she said, “because you see that it’s not how people want it to be. It seems as though everyone knows that everybody is trying to change it. They don’t identify a particular group as being a problem. It’s the whole society that has the problem, like a broken bone. I wonder how much of this has to do with the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The way forward, I believe, will be drastic. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa can be a model for us. That commission created an avenue for claimants to step forward and ask for reparations, and for sinners to face their accusers.

A land acknowledgement or territorial acknowledgement is a formal statement, often spoken at the beginning of a public event, that it is taking place on land originally inhabited by or belonging to indigenous people. In Canada, land acknowledgements became popular after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which argued that the country's Indian residential school system had amounted to cultural genocide) and the election of liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau that same year.[2] By 2019, they were a regular practice at events including National Hockey League games, ballet performances and parliament meetings. Critics of land acknowledgements have described them as excesses of political correctness or expressed concerns that they amount to empty gestures that avoid actually addressing the issues of indigenous communities. Ensuring the factual accuracy of acknowledgments can be difficult due to problems like conflicting land claims or unrecorded land exchanges between indigenous groups. In the United States, the practice of land acknowledgements has been described as "catching on" as of 2020.

Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what’s the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless. —Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2001

Desmond Tutu (2003: 2), Chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, forgiveness and reconciliation are necessary for the creation of a better future. By contrast, Améry (1984a) depicts a bleak future, provoked by the Nazi ghetto, in which death is its inevitable conclusion

a 1907 report in the Montreal Star that cited a 24 percent national death rate of Native children in the schools (42 percent when counting the children who died at home shortly after being returned because they were critically ill). These children died of tuberculosis, starvation, or simple neglect. Many just disappeared; their parents were never informed. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported that between four thousand and six thousand children had died. The number is probably much higher, since many were simply unaccounted for. Over the course of 150 years, more than 150,000 children went to residential schools. Because the death rates were so high, the residential schools stopped counting.

Sir John A. Macdonald warned that if Asian Canadians had the vote, they would “send Chinese representatives” to Parliament, where they would enforce “Asiatic principles,” which he described as “immoralities” that were “abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles.”86

Colonialism also impacted the colonists. In 1857, the British executed those who had taken part in the Indian Mutiny by firing cannons at them at point-blank range. One young British soldier wrote to his mother, “You can’t imagine such a horrible sight.” A month later, however, he confided that “I … think no more of stringing up or blowing away half a dozen mutineers before breakfast than I do of eating the same meal.

Each of the denominations had to deal with both alleged and actual sexual misbehaviour involving missionaries and young people in their care.

In Aboriginal terms, the kinship was one that engaged concern and support with a respect for the autonomy of the individual, while, to the Canadians, it was one in which the children would obey the parent.

As part of their offensive, the British experimented with germ warfare, distributing among the Indians blankets that were from a smallpox hospital at Fort Pitt.25

Sir Francis Bond Head, who concluded shortly after his arrival in 1835 that the civilization policy was a failure. To him, Aboriginal people were a dying people who should be moved aside for settlers. He proposed relocating them to Manitoulin Island, where he expected them to live their final years in peaceful isolation.89 To achieve his goal, he organized what amounted to a forced surrender of over 670,000 hectares (1.5 million acres) of the Bruce Peninsula in 1836.

Children were sent to the schools to ‘protect’ them from the influence of their own parents and culture. Like reserves, the schools themselves were places of isolation in which children were to be ‘civilized’ and assimilated. As with all Aboriginal policies, the schools were funded in such a cost-conscious manner that, no matter what one thought of their goals, they were doomed to fail from the very beginning.

Mount Elgin students had less than one hour for recreation in a day that stretched from 5:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m.

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt,

I observed the force of communal rhythms in action when I watched Archbishop Desmond Tutu conduct public hearings for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in 1996. These events were framed by collective singing and dancing. Witnesses recounted the unspeakable atrocities that had been inflicted on them and their families. When they became overwhelmed, Tutu would interrupt their testimony and lead the entire audience in prayer, song, and dance until the witnesses could contain their sobbing and halt their physical collapse. This enabled participants to pendulate in and out of reliving their horror and eventually to find words to describe what had happened to them.

That Nohle consented to appear before the commission at all was a testament to the willingness of thousands of black South Africans to set aside their deep yearning to see their abusers put behind bars. I remember standing with her in one of the cells where Biko had lain damaged and inert. I asked her then, a year and a half before the commission set to work, whether she could ever be reconciled with the people who had so mutilated her life. She turned on me, her eyes cold and piercing, her body taut with controlled anger, and said: ‘There is hatred in me, and it is for them to try to rub out that hatred. You must have the truth first and then you can think about reconciliation. I don’t agree when they say, “Let bygones be bygones, let’s try to forget about the past and try to reconcile.” Reconcile what?

Our era calls for a public accounting of what caste has cost us, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so that every American can know the full history of our country, wrenching though it may be. The persistence of caste and race hostility, and the defensiveness about anti-black sentiment in particular, make it literally unspeakable to many in the dominant caste.

Many children did not survive. Thousands of children died in the schools. Thousands more were injured and traumatized. All were deprived of a measure of dignity and pride. We, as a country, lost the opportunity to create the nation we could have been.

he would urge his compatriots to work for and which would form part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he was going to appoint to deal with our country’s past. This man, who had been vilified and

The model for these residential schools for Aboriginal children, both in Canada and the United States, did not come from the private boarding schools to which members of the economic elites in Britain and Canada sent their children. Instead, the model came from the reformatories and industrial schools that were being constructed in Europe and North America for the children of the urban poor.

As educational institutions, the residential schools were failures, and regularly judged as such.

The churches placed a greater priority on religious commitment than on teaching ability.205 Because the pay was so low, many of the teachers lacked any qualification to teach.

It’s no use sending you Indians to school you just go back to the reserve anyway.

Under this system—which amounted to institutionalized child labour—students were in class for half the day and in what was supposed to be vocational training for the other half. Often, as many students, teachers, and inspectors observed, the time allocated for vocational training was actually spent in highly repetitive labour that provided little in the way of training. Rather, it served to maintain the school operations.

Of her experiences at the Baptist school in Whitehorse and the Anglican school in Carcross, Rose Dorothy Charlie said, “They took my language. They took it right out of my mouth. I never spoke it again.

Indian Affairs officials believed that because the department had spent money educating students, it had gained the right to determine whom they married.

Bernard Catcheway recalled that in the 1960s at the Pine Creek, Manitoba, school, “we had to eat all our food even though we didn’t like it. There was a lot of times there I seen other students that threw up and they were forced to eat their own, their own vomit.”337 Bernard Sutherland recalled students at the Fort Albany school being forced to eat food that they had vomited. “I saw in person how the children eat their vomit. When they happened to be sick. And they threw up while eating.”338 These abuses led in 1999 to the conviction of Anna Wesley, a former staff member of the Fort Albany school, on three charges of administering a noxious substance.

In the interests of cost containment, the Canadian government placed the lives of students and staff at risk for 130 years.

Parental requests to have children’s bodies returned home for burial were generally refused as being too costly.

Once parents came to be viewed as the ‘enemy,’ their criticisms, no matter how valid, could be discounted.

For Frederick Ernest Koe, it started when the Anglican minister and the Mounted Police arrived with a message that he had to leave his parents’ home in Aklavik in the Northwest Territories that morning. “And I didn’t get to say goodbye to my dad or my brother Allan, didn’t get to pet my dogs or nothing.”1

When Peter Ross was enrolled at the Immaculate Conception school in Aklavik, Northwest Territories, it was the first time he had ever been parted from his sisters. He said that in all the time he was at the school, he was able to speak with them only at Christmas and on Catholic feast days.

Canada’s child-welfare system has simply continued the assimilation that the residential school system started.

The resources committed to Aboriginal language programs are far fewer than what is committed to French in areas where French speakers are in the minority. For example, the federal government provides support to the small minority of francophones in Nunavut in the amount of approximately $4,000 per individual annually. In contrast, funding to support Inuit-language initiatives is estimated at $44 per Inuk per year.