Propaganda, Truth, and Reconciliation

Dr. Jan Hare's last lecture touched on the pervasive nature of propaganda readily distributed for decades to further the cause of assimilation within the residential school system. While I had always understood the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to represent a desire to reconnect Aboriginal people with non-Aboriginal people as part of a healing process, it was not until some of the testimony we watched that I learned that some of the reconciliation is about Aboriginal to Aboriginal relations. In the video, a man described his strained relationship with his mother because he did not speak her mother tongue. Language is representative and critical to the survival of any culture. Without it, traditions risk becoming forgotten to the point of extinction, hence the stress some residential school educators placed on eradicating it from the minds of their pupils with methods hidden from propagandist material. The man's story that we discovered during the lecture surely resonates with many others' experiences of losing their native language and thereby losing a precious connection to their culture, their communities' traditions, and most importantly their own family. If reconciliation is to be understood as a process of making peace with what could essentially be interpreted as an enemy, then it follows that a similar rapprochement must (first?) be made between the individual and his loved ones, as well as with himself or herself.