In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada called “… upon the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors and their organizations, and other parties to the Settlement Agreement, to commission and install a publicly accessible, highly visible, Residential Schools National Monument in the city of Ottawa to honour Survivors and all the children who were lost to their families and communities.” As we reckon with this “call to action” number 81, and bear witness to recent and ongoing public repudiation of contentious monuments, it becomes apparent that the logic of such a monument must be questioned. On the surface, it would appear that a counter or therapeutic monument (for which we have models) might best suit call 81’s objectives. I argue that the 144 Indigenous-led commemoration projects funded through the Indian Residential Schools Settlement, which reflect contemporary Indigenous commemorative approaches, forms, and practices for remembering and healing from traumatic pasts and their ongoing legacies, are those most relevant to the Residential Schools National Monument project. They can inform its process, design, siting, and programming, which may enable it to resist, counter, redefine, and perhaps even decolonize the “national monument.” In this article, I both critique call 81 and seek to contribute to this possibility.

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In anticipation of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, this thesis examines Canada's federal place-based heritage infrastructure and critiques the policy and practice of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC) relative to its engagements with the history of Indian residential schools (IRS) and difficult heritage in general. Interpreting IRS Survivor-led commemoration and heritage practices as healing and decolonizing, and drawing on art-as-resistance and social activism-oriented models of commemoration and counter-commemoration, I examine alternative approaches to collective remembering and forgetting within the context of genocide, atrocity, and historic trauma. I argue for a needed shift from dominant heritage paradigms that bind heritage with conservation, to emergent approaches that recognize heritage as a healing practice. In conclusion, I present a series of recommendations to move toward bridging the gap between state practices of heritage, and the needs of Survivors and other IRS stakeholders.iii

Providing a glimpse of the ongoing wrestle with ethics and practice involved in the Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall exhibition, an iterative residential school Survivor-led reclamation project, this article considers critical methods for implementing museal projects reckoning with difficult knowledge, and the ethical latitude they require. Doing so, it discusses risks of misrepresentation/recognition and the necessity of hopeful wounding, exposing the manipulations, fakery, and the prosthetic memories that exhibitions with great affective force produce. Exploring a range of exhibition-focused museal strategies that seek both to redress and prevent the recurrence of genocide and mass violence, this article articulates the tensions between i) affective power and cultural safety, ii) absence and presence, and iii) prosthetic and “authentic” memory that permeate the process of exhibition design. Returning to the evidentiary landscape of the Shingwauk Indian Residential School, interventions hybridizing examples discussed, putting them into the service of Survivors, offer a direction for future reclamation.

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