Losing Childhood: Settler Colonial Reconciliation and the Loss of Stolen Childhoods

• In Event: Decomposing Whiteness, Indigenous Soil, Intimacies, and Stolen Childhoods

Abstract

In this study, I examine the Survivors Speak Report of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which I view as a representation of survivor’s trauma and a representation of the state’s traumatic losses, particularly the loss the childhood. Drawing on literary trauma theory, I question why the Canadian settler colonial process of reconciliation focuses on the redress of the loss of stolen childhood instead of the loss of stolen land, and by extension how does the child figure and function in the report. I argue that the figures of childhood innocence that emerge in the report are colonial figures that function to forget the ongoing settler colonial trauma of the present in order to secure White settler futurity.

Author

• Neil Ramjewan, University of Toronto