‘You Can’t Have Reconciliation Without Justice’: How Non-Indigenous Participants in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Process Understand Their Roles and Goals

A central objective of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada was to foster healing and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. After six years of national and community events, statement-gathering, and archival research, and the well-publicized release of the TRC’s final report in 2015, nearly one in five settler-Canadians remains oblivious to the TRC and most have not participated in reconciliation initiatives. Nevertheless, thousands of settlers did attend TRC events and many are engaged in ongoing solidarity activities with Indigenous peoples. To understand how some settlers become engaged and how they understand their roles in the process, we interviewed forty non-Indigenous Canadians who attended TRC events. In this chapter, we examine what reconciliation means to them, what they are doing (and think they should be doing) to pursue it, and whether (and why or why not) they identify as allies. Since allyship is partly about accountability to Indigenous peoples and respecting their knowledges and voices, we also critically assess and reflect on participants’ perspectives by comparing them to those of Indigenous scholars and activists and of the TRC itself. In doing so, we shed light on the possibilities and limits of reconciliation in settler colonial Canada.