Canada's Indian residential schools: museums, heritage, and affect

This article examines the development of the heritage discourse surrounding Canada's Indian Residential Schools (IRS) after Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded in 2015. It analyses how this heritage is being presented in three major museums: the Royal Alberta Museum, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, and the National Indigenous Residential School Museum, examining how the IRS is discursively and affectively presented in these museums, and how they create a corrective historiography in cognitive and affective ways. The article begins by reviewing the history of the TRC and the historical amnesia surrounding the schools, and the shift towards acknowledging this previously ignored and forgotten phenomenon. Then, it examines each museum as a case study, analysing the discursive and affective elements found in the IRS exhibits. In doing this, this article tracks the turn-to-commemoration of this hitherto ignored history and examines the current shaping of heritage about Indian Residential Schools.