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Paper short abstract:

The paper centres on Canadian Residential Schools, focussing on the nature of not-knowing - mine and that of the agencies, communities and First Nations individuals whom I worked with. And the challenge of explaining and understanding the extent of conscious (or semi-conscious) ‘not-knowing.’

Paper long abstract:

CHOOSING WHAT TO KNOW - reflections on the Canadian Residential Schools

ABSTRACT

This paper first sets out, in summary form, the history of the Residential School programme for indigenous children that is now a source of deep national shame and formal apologies from both government, for initiating and funding the policy, and churches, for doing so much to implement it. This overview of the history will reach as far as recent processes of compensation and reconciliation.

The flow of this story follows the shocking and deeply troubling events taking place in the relative secrecy of government and church, as represented by internal and deliberately opaque narratives. And continues to the recent public and academic discovery of the history - and its being made known through mainstream media - especially through the discovery of many unmarked graves of children who died while attending these schools. This is now a public narrative of abuse and death.

The paper then focuses on my own experience of the narratives, or the silences that constitute the disappearance or denial of the events that these narratives now reveal. This takes me to first working within the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (as it was then called) in the late 1960s and 70s. An official visit to one school. Research with ‘Indians’ on the streets of Edmonton. And first journeys to the Arctic.

The line of the discussion here centres on the nature of not-knowing - both mine and and that of the government agencies, communities and First Nations or Inuit individuals whom I worked with. The argument turns to the overlap between lack of information - the difficulty of ‘knowing’, and the extent to which there were conscious (or semi-conscious) choices that constitute a ‘not-knowing.’

The paper will conclude with a consideration of the way in which this choosing not to know is now taking place in other nations - with the example, from my own work, of Botswana.