The red tape of reparations: settler governmentalities of truth telling and compensation for Indian residential schools

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper brings into conversation truth telling and compensation as forms of reparation for historical injustices in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine how settler bureaucracy engages with stories of Indian residential schools and former students through analysis of the Common Experience Payment program’s application form and final evaluation. This program, which provided former students with compensation for their collective experience in residential schools, erases survivor-centred forms of truth telling within the records and practices of the public service. I argue that the Common Experience Payment process both produces a new Indigenous population to be governed and perpetuates longstanding settler colonial rationalities that attempt to manage and marginalize the emotion and voices of Indigenous peoples and racialize them as inferior by way of being a ‘challenge to overcome’ for the bureaucracy. I emphasize that assimilation is not located simply in the spectacular or brute acts embedded in settler colonial policy, but in the everyday procedural instruments and mechanisms of the public service such as application forms and final evaluations which are largely taken for granted as benign.