Fragments of Truth: Residential Schools and the Challenge of Reconciliation in Canada

"Fragments of Truth is Naomi Angel's analysis of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 2008 to document the abuses of the Indian residential school system and to provide opportunities of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Focusing on visual media, this book examines how the Commission, itself a fraught project, served as a vehicle through which memory, trauma, and visuality were able to surface in often startling ways. Angel explores howarchival images of the residential schools produced by the Canadian government have been reclaimed by Indigenous communities, thereby pointing to the unstable and shifting nature of what documentation of abuse signifies. The Commission thus offers a unique optic through which to survey the long history of colonial oppression of First Nations populations"--
In 2008, the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to review the history of the residential school system, a brutal colonial project that killed and injured many Indigenous children and left a legacy of trauma and pain. In Fragments of Truth Naomi Angel analyzes the visual culture of reconciliation and memory in relation to this complex and painful history. In her analyses of archival photographs from the residential school system, representations of the schools in popular media and literature, and testimonies from TRC proceedings, Angel traces how the TRC served as a mechanism through which memory, trauma, and visuality became apparent. She shows how many Indigenous communities were able to use the TRC process as a way to claim agency over their memories of the schools. Bringing to light the ongoing costs of transforming settler states into modern nations, Angel demonstrates how the TRC offers a unique optic through which to survey the long history of colonial oppression of Canada’s Indigenous populations.
Naomi Angel analyzes the visual culture of reconciliation and memory in relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Canada established in 2008 to review the history of the Indian Residential School system, a brutal colonial project that killed and injured many Indigenous children.