Below is the abstract from a Journal Article written in 2012.

Building on a cultural studies framework, this article addresses the implementation of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement by cataloguing specific reconciliatory events, public forums, and media coverage that occurred in 2010. Revealing the contradictory nature of Canada’s reconciliation project, the author situates the IRSSA within a larger infrastructure of policies and procedures that have limited Indigenous nationhood and autonomy in the Canadian settler society. Specifically, this article identifies a need to trouble categories of trauma and victimhood that may engender outcomes of cure , which ultimately constitute a foreclosure on the past in Canada’s reconciliation process. While therapeutic language is less apparent in the IRSSA, the author suggests, it is still deployed under the guise of closure and “settlement.”

The article demonstrates that the implementation of the IRSSA has generated inequitable access to compensation and health supports (and, ultimately, health outcomes) as a result of the omission of particular schools from the official list. The author suggestes that the reconciliation process in Canada warrants further decolonization, since First Nations, Inuit, and Métis control over service provision has receded (thus minimizing the diversity of approaches to healing) with the closure of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. The IRSSA’s focus on individualized trauma experiences undermines efforts to decolonize political, legal, and educational institutions and disavows any discussion surrounding restitution. Left unacknowledged, these elisions may ultimately compromise the efficacy of the IRSSA and of the reconciliation process writ large.

Green, R.(2012). Unsettling Cures: Exploring the Limits of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 27(1), 129-148. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved October 14, 2013, from Project MUSE database.