On our Knees: Christian Ritual in Residential Schools and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

Christian ritual dominated the lives of Indigenous children sent to Canadian residential schools for the purpose of cultural assimilation. Drawing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report (2015), I describe the complex, ambiguous, and often harmful role of Christian liturgical practices in residential schools. I provide a theoretical frame built on the work of Foucault, Asad, and Belcher to explore Christian rituals in residential schools as formative, embodied disciplines that functioned as technologies of power, self, and community. This theoretical frame exposes how religious rituals may unwittingly victimize participants, how the same ritual can be experienced as a harmful imposition by one participant and a source of personal fulfillment by another, and how ritual could be part of an ongoing process of truth-telling and reconciliation.