Looking Back and Speaking Forward

TRC Indigenous Stories

In 2008, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to commence an avenue of truth, healing, and recovery. After hosting public events, speaking to survivors, and collecting stories, the TRC created an exhibit housing some of the items donated as a gesture of reconciliation. These displays grant the opportunity to gauge their audience’s moods as they gaze upon the objects, but such interactions can appear monovocal and isolating, can limit a display’s longevity and impact beyond that present moment, and may not easily invite audiences to do more than gaze upon an object in a cathartic or reflexive state. Therefore, this project’s intent is to showcase how these gestures of reconciliation are more than objects or representations of the past; they do more than allow us to look back at our history; instead they look back at us in collaborative and combative ways. You can listen to these stories by visiting the Canadian Museum of Human Rights or contacting us to add your contribution.

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Internal and External Collaborators

The exhibit's development is created by the TRC and local indigenous communities, including the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, along with museum curators, staff, and CHI fellows.

About CHI Fellows

Vee Lawson

Vee Lawson (they/them) is a PhD student in Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University with interests in digital cultural rhetorics; queer, feminist, and trans rhetorics; and community-building through ephemeral texts.

Juan Carlos Rico Noguera

Juan Carlos Rico Noguera (he/him) is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Michigan State University. Juan Carlos studies conflicts over the production of the past by concentrating on how communities with stakes over how the past is collectively elicited encounter official policies of national memory. He is also an enthusiast in regards to learning about Digital Humanities and their potentialities!

Jeff Burnett

Jeff (he/him) is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the archaeology of the 19th and 20th centuries and using community-based practices to explore the intersections of class and race in the construction, maintenance, and memorialization of place and space in the United States.

Sandy Burnley

Sandy Burnley (she/her) is an ABD PhD candidate who studies more-than-human animal representations in transatlantic literature in an effort to resurrect counter narratives to anthropocentric interpretations.