Commissions and Relations: Re-Examining Reconciliation

Abstract

The Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People (1996) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) are considered key documents in the context of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’ relations in Canada.  Poetic autoethnography is an innovative process that   uses language and creative expression to research the experience of making sense of the tension.  While I propose to neither definitively define nor offer solutions, the poem that emanates from the analysis represents a re-examination of reconciliation as it is broadly understood from the respective commissions, and how it is a specific lived experience in my research.