Digitized Suffering, Actual Healing: Empathy, Reconciliation, and Redress Through a Virtual Indian Residential School

Abstract

Our chapter provides an overview and comparison of the collective experience of the many different kinds of suffering experienced in both Canadian and American Indigenous boarding schools. We are especially concerned with explaining how this suffering diminished important forms of social and cultural capital within Indigenous communities in a way we argue is consistent with Raphael Lemkin’s conceptualization of genocide. We specify and critically assess the ways in which Canadians have been working to acknowledge IRS harms, most especially through a public apology and the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), the terms of which specified the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). With reference to testimony given by residential school Survivors before the TRC on the topic of reconciliation, we will detail some of the difficulties inherent in attempts to alleviate suffering in the aftermath of the IRS system. This testimony expresses concerns about the limited potential of established reconciliatory mechanisms to redress the losses of social and cultural capital resulting from Indigenous peoples’ experiences of these schools. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities for advancing reconciliation afforded by Embodying Empathy, a critical and creative collaboration linking scholars, IRS Survivors, and technologists in an attempt to construct a virtually immersive IRS “storyworld.”