Our Faithfulness To The Past The Ethics and Politics of Memory

Our Faithfulness to the
Past
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Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Our Faithfulness to the Past: The Ethics and Politics
Transgression and Trustworthiness of Memory
Naomi Scheman Sue Campbell
Edited by Christine M. Koggel and Rockney Jacobsen
Our Faithfulness to the Past
The Ethics and Politics of Memory
Sue Campbell
Edited by Christine M. Koggel

and Rockney Jacobsen
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Campbell, Sue, 1956–
Our faithfulness to the past : essays on the ethics and politics of memory / Sue Campbell ; edited by
Christine M. Koggel and Rockney Jacobsen.
pages cm.—(Studies in feminist philosophy)
ISBN 978–0–19–937694–0 (paperback)—ISBN 978–0–19–937693–3 (hardcover)
1. Memory—Sociological aspects. 2. Memory—Political aspects. 3. Memory (Philosophy)
4. Collective memory. I. Koggel, Christine M., 1955– II. Jacobsen, Rockney. III. Title.
BF378.S65C36 2014 128'.3—dc23
2013048716
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Jan and in memory of Sue
There is no way of sticking to everyday truths
and no more.
(Williams 2002, 12)
{ Contents }
Preface ix
Editors’ Introduction xiii
Note on Sources xxi
Introduction: The Second Voice—A Manifesto 1
Part I Our Faithfulness to the Past

1. Models of Minds and Memory Activities 11
2. Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Value 30
3. Memory, Truth, and the Search for Integrity 50
Part II Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity

4. Inside the Frame of the Past: Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity 71
5. Memory, Reparation, and Relation: Starting in the Right Places 89
6. Remembering Who We Are: Responsibility and Resistant
Identification 114
Part III Remembering for the Future

7. Remembering for the Future: Memory as a Lens on Canada’s Indian
Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission 135
8. Challenges to Memory in Political Contexts: Recognizing Disrespectful
Challenge 165
Bibliography 205
Index 219
{ Preface }
Those of us who had the good fortune to share love, friendship, and philosophy
with Sue Campbell knew her as a person with an unusual talent for them all.
Sue was a philosopher of great integrity, with an unusually deep and original
mind, but she carried these gifts lightly and unpretentiously. Her final essays,
collected here, appropriately concerned the values associated with remember-
ing, and with sharing memories. For those of us who have memories of Sue to
share, she is also proof that there are things worth remembering.
Sue had originally hoped to write a separate book-length study of the inter-
sections among the ethics, politics, and epistemology of memory, but as the
cancer that eventually took her life began to limit her strength she started
to think of bringing together the many essays she had already written on
these topics since the publication of her Relational Remembering: Rethinking
the Memory Wars (2003). For two months over the summer of 2010, one of
the co-editors, Rockney Jacobsen, met with Sue regularly in Halifax coffee
shops—usually three or four times each week—to discuss her essays with a
view to making a selection, locating common themes, and finding the most
natural order for their arrangement. Final decisions on the arrangement of
the selected essays into three thematic sections were settled by the end of July.
The book’s title and the opening epigraph were chosen by Sue herself. As we
explain in the Editors’ Introduction, all but three of the chapters have been
published elsewhere. Our work, therefore, has been entirely editorial and the
content of the chapters has not been changed.
Only three changes have been made to Sue’s original vision for the collec-
tion. First, Sue had planned the inclusion of a tenth essay. It was to be a new
piece on the regulation of memory by the Canadian eugenics movement that
she was producing for the Living Archives Project. But only a first draft was
completed when she lost strength to continue with the demanding work of
writing philosophy. Second, Sue had hoped to write her own introduction to
the collection, but she got no further than pages of notes. The current Editors’
Introduction is based, in part, on those notes; even if we cannot capture Sue’s
authorial voice, we try to honor many of her wishes for what would have gone
into an introduction. This second change from the original plan for the book is
partially compensated for by the third change: in light of a perceptive sugges-
tion from one of the manuscript’s reviewers, we have been persuaded to move
the short essay “A Second Voice” into the position of an Introduction. In this
essay Sue speaks in a much more personal voice, she discusses the challenges
x Preface
she faced in finding a receptive audience for her ideas, and she also places her
work on memory in the context of her deep commitment to feminism. Sue
would surely have appreciated the reviewer’s suggestion. We sincerely believe
she would have been pleased with the resulting book.
Having this important work brought into the light of day was a labor of
love. It would not have been possible without the good working relationship
that developed between the co-editors over the three years since Sue’s death.
It also would not have been possible without the support we got from a whole
“cheering section” in Sue’s network of friends and colleagues. Ami Harbin and
Sue Sherwin commented on the pages of notes that Sue had prepared for an
introduction. These pieces proved useful for writing sections of the Editors’
Introduction. Alexis Shotwell organized a panel on Sue’s work at the Canadian
Philosophical Association meetings at the University of New Brunswick,
Fredericton, May 29–June 2, 2011. Revised versions of the papers presented
at this panel appear as a cluster in Hypatia called "In Relation: Exploring the
Work of Sue Campbell" (29, no. 2, 2014). Christine Koggel’s paper for this
cluster helped her gain clarity on Sue’s complex account of memory and be-
come even more convinced of its value (2014). Lorraine Code, well aware of
the significance of Sue’s work on memory, persuaded us that Oxford’s “Studies
in Feminist Philosophy Series” is the proper home for this work.
We had the good fortune of getting excellent reviews of the manuscript,
ones that displayed a good grasp of the purpose of the manuscript, and were
able to articulate clearly what Sue’s work on memory contributes to the lit-
erature. We thank the reviewers for their close reading and their insightful
chapter-by-chapter comments on the manuscript. We also had the good for-
tune of having Lucy Randall as our Oxford Acquisitions Editor. Her support
and her useful advice were indispensable in moving this project forward. Molly
Morrison guided us expertly through production. The pressed flowers on the
cover were collected by Sue and scanned from her collection by Jan Sutherland.
In addition to thanking the publishers for granting permission to reprint
previously published essays, we would like to single out David Haekwon Kim
and Jennifer Llewellyn for their help with the permissions process and beyond.
We owe special thanks to Seetal Sunga and Paulette Regan, who brought Sue’s
work to the attention of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, encouraged Sue to apply her account of memory to the work of
the IRS TRC, and helped steer us through the process of getting permission
to publish this commissioned work. These essays are the two final chapters in
the book. Finally, this project could not have gone forward without the loving
attention and commitment of Sue’s partner, Jan Sutherland. From providing
access to Sue’s notes and papers, to input on the cover design, to preparing the
index, Jan has made vital contributions at a very difficult time for her.
The epigraph that opens the book says so much more than what this book
on memory is about: “There is no way of sticking to everyday truths and no
Preface xi
more.” The everyday truths of our relationships and their significance in shap-
ing our lives is exhibited in the work that many of Sue’s friends and family did
to bring this project to fruition. This network of relationships extends to the
help and support that Rockney got from Renee Sylvain and Christine got from
Andrew Brook.
Rockney Jacobsen and
Christine M. Koggel
{ Editors’ Introduction }
This volume brings together a series of interrelated essays on the ethics and
politics of memory by the late feminist philosopher Sue Campbell. Written
between 2003 and 2010, the essays extend and develop a line of thought begun
in Campbell’s 2003 book, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory
Wars, but they presuppose no prior acquaintance with that book. The cur-
rent collection opens up a new and much needed conversation at the inter-
section of the epistemology, ethics, and politics of memory. In these essays
Campbell develops a view of remembering (more specifically, of recollection)
that is material, embodied, and focused on the diverse activities and the ethical
dilemmas of ordinary rememberers. In doing so, she once again displays her
considerable gift for bringing many different areas of scholarship and activism
into fruitful conversation with each other while also adding her own original
and powerful voice to the discussion.
In order to keep the ethical and political contexts of memory clearly before
us, and to keep the deep entanglement of epistemic and ethical norms central
to her view always visible, Campbell makes methodological use of a category
she calls “memory activities.” Memory activities include personal reminis-
cences, sharing stories of the past, and testifying to the past, but also social
practices like preserving heritage and honoring the dead. Legal institutions
and practices, such as human rights tribunals, prosecutions, reparations, and
truth commissions also qualify. These are all activities, practices, and institu-
tions that both make the past present and shape its significance for us. A focus
on the ethics and politics of memory tends to redirect attention from the psy-
chological phenomena of individual or personal memory to the social phe-
nomena of collectives, rituals, and institutions in which memories are housed.
This shift of focus threatens to obscure the distinction between memory and
history, and to leave talk of memory in the realm of metaphor. For all their im-
portance and intrinsic interest, such phenomena as collective or institutional
memories have been of little concern to epistemologists or cognitive scien-
tists. But Campbell’s work on the ethics and politics of memory refuses to turn
away from personal or individual memory, while at the same time rejecting
the epistemologist’s and psychologist’s view of personal memory as just cog-
nitive processing.
On her highly original view of the epistemology of good remembering
(what she calls—borrowing a phrase from Paul Ricouer—“our faithfulness to
the past”), the ethical and political are not confined to the public contexts and
xiv Editors’ Introduction
occasions in which epistemically capable individual rememberers are con-

tingently embedded. Concern with the epistemic competence of individual
rememberers is itself already an ethical concern. When, as in Campbell’s fem-
inist treatment of them, both memory and the self are deeply relational, the
boundaries between individuals and collectives become problematic, and
the line between epistemology and ethics is no longer secure. Indeed, on
Campbell’s account of good or successful remembering, it is often the bound-
aries between individuals and collectives that must be negotiated in our efforts
to remain faithful to the past. So while Campbell’s work remains concerned
with personal memory—the faculty of interest primarily to epistemologists
and cognitive scientists—her concern is unabashedly ethical and political.
Being faithful to the past is both an epistemic and a moral achievement, and
the aim of the essays in this collection is to show how that could be so.
The essays have been organized to reflect the relative centrality of
two themes. The first theme is that in considering what constitutes good
remembering, it is necessary to recognize an integration and interdepend-
ence, rather than a separation, of epistemic and ethical values. Accordingly,
the essays of Part I identify the source of much contemporary skepticism
about personal memory, and they jointly defend a remedy to such skep-
ticism by developing a positive account of what constitutes good remem-
bering. Campbell’s account of our faithfulness to the past invokes two
norms—accuracy and integrity—each of which places both epistemic and
ethical demands on rememberers.
The second theme that shapes the essays in this collection concerns the
importance of sharing memory for constituting our identities in relation to
others. The essays in Part II, therefore, examine the role of sharing memory
and the many activities and practices through which we explore and negotiate
the shared significance of our different recollections of the past. Views about
self, identity, relation, and responsibility (influenced by traditions in feminist
philosophy) combine in these essays with Campbell’s own relational concep-
tion of memory. The result is a transformation from our view of the activities
of sharing memories as assertions of pre-existent identities, often shaped in
contexts of oppression, to a view of them as occasions for collectively formu-
lating new identities.
An important test for the views Campbell defends will lie in their ability to
illuminate and address the challenges of sharing memory in contexts that are
fractured by moral and political difference, especially those arising from a his-
tory of injustice and oppression—contexts in which the accuracy of memory,
the integrity of rememberers, and the significance of the past for the present
and future are already contested. In the two essays of Part III, Campbell puts
her philosophical ideas to the test by putting them into the service of practical
(that is, political) goals. These final chapters further extend and clarify themes
from the earlier chapters, but they also advance new arguments in Campbell’s
Editors’ Introduction xv
application of her conception of memory to the work of Canada’s Indian

Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The two central themes of the book are not, except for expository purposes,
separable from one another—the ethical dimension of our faithfulness to the
past is enacted in the many ways that we share our pasts with each other, and
we cannot be faithful to the past without being true to others. Persuading us
that this is so is the work of the essays that follow. They were written to stand
alone and can be read as independent pieces, but Campbell’s arrangement of
the essays is intended to facilitate a better view of her picture of how the eth-
ical, political, and epistemic values of memory are interwoven. In what fol-
lows, we offer a brief sketch of the place each essay has in that picture.
The Argument of the Essays
Traditionally memory was modeled as an “archive” for the storage, preserva-

tion, and retrieval of past experience. But according to more recent “recon-
structivist” models, recollection is not the retrieval from storage of unchanged
representations of past experience; it is the selection, shading, and reconfig-
uration of past experiences, done in light of present and future interests, and
highly susceptible to influence by others. The reconstructivist model resulted
in widespread skepticism concerning the reliability of memory and the sug-
gestibility of rememberers, topics that Campbell explores in detail in Relational
Remembering, where she discusses how women’s memories of past abuse were
challenged.
During the so-called memory wars—a period during the 1980s and 1990s
when thousands of women were thought to have mis-remembered or confab-
ulated a history of child sexual abuse under the influence of their therapists—
the view prevailed that the sociality of memory distorts and contaminates
memories. On that view, those with whom we share our memories are prima-
rily a threat to the accuracy of remembering and, thereby, to the integrity of
the self. But on the view Campbell defends, although we may witness or ex-
perience the past individually, we must determine together its significance for
how we go on in the present and future. A crucial aspect of Campbell’s account
is the importance of paying attention to those whose voices have been silenced
or whose pasts have been written for them by the dominant and powerful.
In the Introduction, “The Second Voice—A Manifesto,” Campbell
self-reflectively explores the roots and genesis of her work on memory. She
makes use of insights from Relational Remembering to argue that the pre-
sumed threat to the integrity of the self posed by others makes use of an im-
plausibly non-relational conception of the self. On the alternative view, which
she draws from feminist theory, both the individual and her memories are
already fully relational, and so, the study of memory is inevitably concerned
xvi Editors’ Introduction
with “the methodological interrogation of boundaries—of the individual, of

the collective and of the disciplinary preoccupations that have delivered them
to us intact.” On the resulting account of sharing memories, the influence of
others is not intrinsically contaminating but constituting, and our relations to
those with whom we share a past, as well as those to whom we relate our past,
are deeply implicated in our identities. Hence the activities and contexts of
sharing memories with others are not merely occasions for expressing already
formed identities; they are central among the occasions on which our identi-
ties get created. For Campbell, skepticism is not an inevitable consequence
of the reconstructive turn in memory studies. The three thematic parts that
follow unpack, explain, and apply the conception of memory that emerges
from Campbell’s positive account of relational remembering.
Chapter 1, “Models of Mind and Memory Activities,” critically reviews
the shift from an archival to a reconstructive model of memory and argues
that some theorists have maintained a standard for “good” memory—as un-
changing fidelity to an original impression of experience—which derives from
the archival model of memory that they already reject. Assuring reproductive
fidelity requires the preservation and retrieval of original, unchanged repre-
sentations of the past, and so any modifications of the original representations
will make them appear suspect. On the reconstructive view, the influence of
present needs and interests, as well as the influence of others with whom we
share our memories, can only seem to distort our memories. Campbell argues
that when we dismiss the already dubious norm of reproductive fidelity for
good remembering, the reconstructivist theory will no longer encourage skep-
ticism. But this leaves us in need of a new account of what successful remem-
bering might be—an account that is adequate to our reconstructivist theories
of how memory operates.
In Chapter 2, “Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Value,”
Campbell supplies the needed account of good remembering in terms of the
dual norms of accuracy and integrity. Taken together, the chapters of Part I,
Our Faithfulness to the Past, provide a sustained examination of how accu-
racy and integrity entangle both epistemic and ethical considerations and how,
jointly, these two values comprise a better conception of what it is to be faithful
to the past. Chapter 3, “Memory, Truth, and the Quest for Integrity,” further
distances Campbell’s own account from skeptical threat by taking up the diffi-
cult but unavoidable issue of truth in memory, and by arguing that if we have
the right account of truth, the reconstructive nature of memory is fully com-
patible with the truth of our memory claims.
Central to Campbell’s view is that our concern with the accuracy of mem-
ory is a concern with getting right the significance of the past for the present
and future. Accurate recollections will then be a subset of truths about past
experience: (i) ones that have been selected for their significance to the pre-
sent and future—that is, selected in light of present needs and interests; and
Editors’ Introduction xvii
(ii) ones that have been evaluated or emotionally shaded in light of our pre-
sent values and our present affective natures (for example, nostalgic recollec-
tions fail to be accurate not because they get the facts wrong, but because they
give the wrong evaluative and emotional cast to the facts). The entanglement
of epistemic and ethical norms in our conception of accuracy is a result of
two ideas. First, the question of memory’s accuracy cannot be addressed sep-
arately from the question of the significance of the past to the present and
future. Second, the question of the past’s significance to the present and future
is, in part, always an ethical question—a question about how we should go on
from where we are. As a consequence, the accuracy of memory cannot be fully
assessed without attention to our moral concerns about how to go on from our
remembered past.
As Campbell argues throughout Part I, a concern for accuracy in remem-
bering calls upon and implicates our integrity as rememberers. When we as-
pire to accurate recollection, we are concerned to recall the facts, but we must
also be concerned to get their significance right. This further concern requires
us to develop a much richer appreciation of how our various social engage-
ments affect our characterizations of a past for whose ongoing and changing
significance we are collectively responsible. Good remembering requires us
to re-examine the inevitable influence that others—our audience, our inter-
locutors, our interrogators, and so on—will have on how we remember the
past, and this requires us to consider the ways such influence might facili-
tate good remembering as well as the ways it can distort memory. Here the
ethical-cum-epistemic norm of integrity comes into play, since integrity is a
trait in virtue of which self-consciously fallible rememberers take a stand for
their own account of the past, often in the face of compelling dominant narra-
tives that circulate in communities with which they identify. So on Campbell’s
view, integrity is a needed component of our faithfulness to the past; but any
concern with integrity is also a concern with selves and their identities.
The essays of Part II, Memory, Diversity and Solidarity, move moral and po-
litical concerns associated with sharing memory into the foreground and also
directly challenge the assumption that the influence of others on activities of
remembering is inevitably distorting or manipulative. The essays of Part II are
primarily concerned with the work of sharing memory in relationships, or in
collectives, that are marked by internal conflict and dissension. This unusual
emphasis allows Campbell to explore the use of memory activities in constitut-
ing new relations and new collectives and, thereby, in constituting ourselves
anew. For Campbell, the call to constitute new relations and collectives is par-
ticularly salient in contexts of past injustices and historic harms.
Chapter 4, “Inside the Frame of the Past: Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity,”
deploys tools from performance theory to reframe occasions of recollection
and reminiscence as performative activities and, thereby, to help us under-
stand how sharing memories within diverse cultural and political communities
xviii Editors’ Introduction
might challenge dominant representations of the past. This chapter—like the

previous one—is concerned with the potential for sharing the past as a way of
forming new relationships (and so constituting new selves). Here Campbell
explores the political use of memory activities and examines how oppressive
political hierarchies position and segregate groups precisely by controlling
who can share memory with whom. Campbell ends the chapter by discussing
the “Turtle Gals” theater performance of the Scrubbing Project, “an exploration
of the attempted genocide of Aboriginal peoples and the internalized racism
that is part of its legacy.” Campbell applies her positive account of sharing
memory to the context of exploring, together, the significance of Canada’s past
for its present and future. It is an application and context that will play an in-
creasingly important role in the chapters that remain.
Chapter 5, “Memory, Reparation, and Relation: Starting in the Right Places,”
uses the ethnocidal pedagogy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools to illus-
trate how control of memory-sharing activities can impact group identities, as
well as how non-relational conceptions of both selves and memories can ob-
scure the prospects for renewing and transforming relations between diverse
groups. Indian Residential Schools were established through the Indian Act
of 1876, operated for well over a century, separated over 150,000 Aboriginal
children from their families and communities, and had the explicit objective
of assimilating them into the dominant culture. In this chapter, Campbell
explores answers to the questions, “How can sharing the memory of harm
and wrongdoing across pasts that are linked by . . . a common and toxic his-
tory aid reparative projects, and what forms should this sharing take?” She
suggests that answers can be found if the work of the Indian Residential
Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (established in 2007 as part
of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the largest class
action settlement in Canadian history) is understood as engaging Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal Canadians in sharing memory and if non-Aboriginal
Canadians show respect for “the relational dimensions of memory prominent
in the work of many Indigenous thinkers.”
One component of a political remedy for addressing historic harms is
explored in Chapter 6, “Remembering Who We Are: Responsibility and
Resistant Identification,” which examines more closely the analogies and dis-
analogies between individuals, when they are conceived of as relational, and
the collectives to which we belong. Campbell argues here that the possibilities
for meaningful resistant identifications (identifications with collective histo-
ries of abuse or oppression of which we disapprove) may require us to take
responsibility for actions for which we cannot legitimately be held responsible,
and that doing so creates new and meaningful possibilities for solidarity with
victims of oppression.
The two chapters in Part III, Remembering for the Future (originally dis-
cussion papers written for the Canadian Indian Residential Schools Truth
Editors’ Introduction xix
and Reconciliation Commission [IRS TRC]), provide numerous ground-level

applications and illustrations of the various aspects of Campbell’s philosoph-
ical views about the personal, ethical, and political meanings of remembering,
but they also develop those views further and add much new reflection and ar-
gument in their support. Chapter 7, “Remembering for the Future,” challenges
the skeptical (and dominant) view that the past is best forgotten or just put
behind us if Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians are to move toward
a better future together. In its place, Campbell uses insights developed in the
previous chapters to defend the more hopeful view that sharing memory and
being faithful to the past “may help position the work of the TRC as directed
toward the present, the future, and the reshaping and renewal of relationships.”
In Chapter 8, “Challenges to Memory in Political Contexts,” Campbell iden-
tifies and addresses in detail several potentially “disrespectful challenges” to
sharing memory, ones that undermine the “credibility of those who testify to
historic harms” and thus “disenfranchise their voices from participation in the
collective endeavor of giving meaning to the past.” For Campbell, an account
of the possibilities and challenges facing the IRS TRC not only illustrates how
our faithfulness to the past is integrally connected with an ethics and poli-
tics of memory but it also asks non-Aboriginal Canadians to engage in an
“ethics of shared public remembering that ‘bears responsibility for the past
to the present’ and into the future.” Campbell’s deep and rich exploration of
shared memory in the context of the IRS TRC brings us full circle to where she
began: good remembering involves a faithfulness to the past that is both an
epistemic and moral achievement.
Rockney Jacobsen and
Christine M. Koggel
{ Note on Sources }
The author’s introduction as well as the essays in Parts I and II, with the ex-
ception of Chapter 6, have been previously published. The Introduction, “The
Second Voice—A Manifesto,” originally simply “The Second Voice,” was an
invited contribution to the inaugural issue of Memory Studies 1, 2008, pp. 41–48;
Chapter 1, “Models of Minds and Memory Activities,” was published in Moral
Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, edited by Peggy DesAutels
and Margaret Urban Walker (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004),
pp. 119–137; Chapter 2, “Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory
Value,” appeared in Philosophical Psychology (Special Issue: Memory, Embodied
Cognition, and the Extended Mind; guest editor John Sutton), Vol. 19, No. 3, June
2006, pp. 361–380; Chapter 3, “Memory, Truth, and the Search for Integrity,”
was published as “Memory, Truth, and the Search for an Authentic Past” in
Memory Matters: Contexts for Understanding Sexual Abuse Recollections,
edited by Janice Haaken and Paula Reavey (New York: Routledge, 2010),
pp. 175–195; Chapter 4, “Inside the Frame of the Past: Memory, Diversity, and
Solidarity,” was published in Embodiment and Agency, edited by Sue Campbell,
Letitia Meynell, and Susan Sherwin (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2009), pp. 211–233; and Chapter 5, “Memory, Reparation, and
Relation: Starting in the Right Places,” appeared in Being Relational: Reflections
on Relational Theory and Health Law, edited by Jocelyn Downie and Jennifer
J. Llewellyn (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), pp. 133–160.
The epigraph that opens Chapter 4, “Inside the Frame of the Past,” is a text
panel from the Canadian War Museum Royal Canadian Legion Hall of Honour
used with permission of the Canadian War Museum. Both chapters in Part III,
“Remembering for the Future: Memory as a Lens on the Indian Residential
Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission” and “Challenges to Memory
in Political Contexts: Recognizing Disrespectful Challenge,” were discussion
papers prepared for the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation
Commission.
{ Introduction }
The Second Voice—A Manifesto
In spring 2006, I presented a paper on memory to a philosophy workshop on

the difference that diversity makes or should make to a community of know-
ers (Campbell 2006a). My paper was the only one that talked about memory.
Specifically, I talked about how diverse audience engagement with political and
artistic projects of sharing the past might help fortify the symbolic resources
that those who are politically marginalized need to shape or maintain memory.
Disconcertingly, the presentation was met with discomfort and little engage-
ment. One philosopher did roll up her sleeves to launch a cheerful challenge for
which I was very grateful. When I thanked her afterwards, she said, “The way
you talk about memory makes epistemologists nervous.” Why is that?
Mary Warnock’s small book on memory lured me into memory studies.
Warnock writes, “we will think of memory, then, as that by the possession of
which an animal learns from experience” (1987, 6, emphasis in original). I know
that for those of us interested in episodic memory, this remark is barely a foot-
hold. Warnock herself says shortly thereafter, “what is essential for an examina-
tion of the way in which memory is valued by humans is to grasp the complexity
of the phenomenon” (13). Human memory is self-representational. It secures
our identities, is at the core of our practices of responsibility, and is the basis of
our sense of temporality. And many theorists have begun to write eloquently
about the relation of memory to place—how we remember through our envi-
ronments that then hold memory for us—and about the importance of a sense
of place to identity, an interest that was on Warnock’s mind when she turned to
William Wordsworth’s poetry. Finally, as a feminist, I also insist that we cannot
talk about memory without discussing the social power that authority over the
past secures, though this concern is absent from Warnock’s account.
Still, I have often clung to Warnock’s first description as a way to explain
other commitments that I take as central to the study of memory. We learn
from the past and need somehow to get it right. We cannot give up the idea
First published as “The Second Voice” in Memory Studies, vol. 1, 2008, pp. 41–48.
2Introduction
that memory should be faithful to the past, though we need to understand the
very complex ways in which this value might be expressed. Because of what
else I believe, I have had to repeat my commitment to faithful memory. To
learn is to understand from a position of present need and through what else
we have come to know. It is to re-experience our past selectively, as shaped by
the demand of an always new present, through the determinations of a history
that itself shifts in significance. And, of course, we remember with and in re-
sponse to other people and their needs and histories. And this makes philoso-
phers nervous: we share our memory and sharing shapes memory. Moreover,
I have refused to be alarmed by this fact.
Let me first protect my interest in what I have elsewhere called “relational
remembering” (Campbell 2003) from a certain reading, and then try to say
more about its importance to memory studies. James Wertsch says that mem-
ory theorists should pay attention to M. M. Bakhtin’s claim that any utterance
is “interindividual”—“a drama” in which a triumvirate of characters partici-
pates: the one who speaks (the first voice); the one who listens (the second
voice); and all others who have contributed to the meaning of the words that
the speaker uses (the third voice) (Wertsch 2002, 16).1 Wertsch summons this
triumvirate to argue that in theorizing memory, we need to bring the indi-
vidual and social into relation with each other, comprehending “the involve-
ment of active agents with cultural tools” (13). Contemporary memory studies
often affirm this necessity and yet the second voice, attention to sharing mem-
ory, still slips from our accounts. An ordinary way to think about this voice is
as the presence of listeners who “cue” or prompt certain ways of remembering
the past. Wertsch says, “it is, after all, standard practice to formulate what we
say in anticipation of who the listeners might be” (16). We might think that
a person’s experience of the past, however dependent at the level of schema
or expression on social resources, has little to do with the actual occasion of
sharing—but I believe that the second voice, which is rarely silent, enters inti-
mately into our experience of memory.
Sharing memory is how we learn to remember, how we come to recon-
ceive our pasts in memory, how we come to form a sense of self, and one of
the primary ways in which we come to know others and form relationships
with them, reforming our sense of self as we come repeatedly under the in-
fluence not only of our own pasts as understood by others but of the pasts of
others. Lately, I have been reading Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack
(2005). They argue that the capacity for episodic memory requires a mode
of causal/temporal reasoning that a child develops through sharing memory.
It is through coming to feel the significance of past events as guided to do
by others that she comes to gradually grasp the kinds of causal connections
1
Werstch refers to Bakhtin (1986, 121–22).
The Second Voice—A Manifesto 3
that will allow her to narratively order her past. The authors study the devel-
opment of memory capacities in three- to five-year-olds. My eight-year-old
niece, as prompted by my sister, is now learning to reorder her past . . . through
memories of her own bossiness—so that is why her friends go home. And how
I come to order and reorder my own past into identity-constituting narratives
also often depends on testing the significance of remembered events against
others’ perspectives on their past or my own, re-feeling and re-experiencing
my past whether this dynamic is chosen or unchosen, welcome, conflictual,
political or resistible.
Sharing memory is our default. When we are silent about our pasts, when
memory is guarded, protected, too traumatized to be articulable, without re-
sources for expression, or privately treasured, these experiences have some
of their meaning in relation to our natural habit of sharing the past. This is
to say that where I look for memory, I find relation and its influence on an
ever-shifting sense of individual and communal pasts and identities. David
Middleton and Steven Brown write that to understand memory “we must
view selfhood not as a ‘thing’ but as a movement continuously refracted back
through the stabilities it creates” in sharing the past (2005, viii). That is unset-
tling. I wanted to say—it’s not my view that makes you nervous; it’s memory
that makes you nervous.
And nervous not only because of a concern for accuracy. The memory wars
allegedly took the second voice seriously but only as a threat. Yet the shape of
those controversies, the focus on women’s suggestibility, their purported lack
of boundaries, indicates a deeper discomfort: that if this sharing amounts to
more than cueing, then somehow the integrity of the self as a record of its
own history has given way and is giving way all the time and in ways that we
cannot even track. “There is something so interesting about the idea that a
person is an object essentially aware of its progress and persistence through
time—a self-recorder so to say” (Wiggins 1976, 140). People sometimes chal-
lenge me with Ronald Reagan’s memory in ways that have no explicit connec-
tion to what I am talking about. They express as a concern about the accuracy
of a president’s memory a fear about the dissolution of the self.2 Yet I suggest
that the methodological interrogation of boundaries—of the individual, of the
collective and of the disciplinary preoccupations that have delivered them to
us intact is central to the work of memory studies.
Our current interest in inter-individual memory is at the same time our
commitment to interdisciplinarity in memory studies. The intersection
2
On at least one occasion, Ronald Reagan notoriously confused the events of his own past with
incidents from a film. People offer his case to me to emphasize the seriousness of ‘false memory.’ But we
are also all aware of the dissolution of the self that is the consequence of Alzheimer’s. I cannot help but
think that Reagan’s eventual diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is on people’s minds when they raise concerns to
me about his memory. A doubt about our reliability as ‘self-recorders’ is associated, through the trope
of Reagan’s memory, with a doubt about our ability to preserve the self.
4Introduction
between what we have called “individual” and what “collective” memory is now
often a place where we gather, secure that we can make a contribution whatever
our original disciplinary orientations: “no neat division of labor between the cog-
nitive and the social sciences can be maintained, because the domain is not neatly
sliced into distinct psychological and public aspects which may or may not in-
teract” (Sutton 2008, 218). What assumptions and methodological commitments
do we bring with us to this encounter? To locate a starting place, I advert once
again to Wertsch’s (2002) valuable discussion of some of the history of memory
studies.
Wertsch identifies two tendencies that have characterized our theoretical in-
teraction over individual and collective memory. First, while those who study
individual memory have been preoccupied with our need for accurate memory
representation, an interest that shapes their “concrete methodological practices”
(2002, 32), those who study collective memory have focused on how effective
memory is “in creating a useable past for the purposes of coherent individual
and group identities” (31). The latter group views “memory as being sufficiently
committed to an identity project that the notion of accuracy must be downplayed
or sacrificed” (32–33). Wertsch claims this opposition and isolation of the two
functions of memory oversimplifies the way in which memory typically involves
their mix (31). Which one predominates will vary with context. Second, many
theorists have had a tendency to analogize collective memory to individual mem-
ory, treating the collective as an individual “writ large”, and thus attributing to it
properties of “boundedness, continuity, uniqueness, and homogeneity” (Handler
1994 quoted in Wertsch, 2002, 21). Wertsch allows that although such analogies
may be fruitful to a point, they may lead to the implausible ontology of collective
memory as requiring a group mind.3 Moreover, assuming that a group’s collective
memory involves a homogeneous perspective on the past may obscure the actual
degree of social contest to which memory is subject. Thus, he argues that both the
tendency to straightforwardly oppose accuracy to a usable past and the tendency
to overhomogenize the nature of collectives must give way to a better account of
the complexities of inter-individual memory. How can a relational focus aid these
projects?
My interest in relational remembering is founded in my commitment to
feminist relational views of the self. The theorists to whom I am indebted have
often criticized the failure of their own disciplines to consider the self as fully
relationally shaped: “These critiques emphasize that an analysis of the charac-
teristics and capacities of the self cannot be adequately undertaken without at-
tention to the rich and complex social and historical contexts in which agents
are embedded” (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000, 21).4 Attention to relational
3
Some theorists believe that Halbwachs (1992) was committed to this ontology. For a sympathetic
reconsideration of the notion of a plural subject to memory see Sutton (2005) and Wilson (2005).
4
Feminists regard capacities like memory as relational constitutively and throughout our lives, and
not just as causally relational. This point is worth stressing. Attention to the second voice can disappear
complexity has its return in how feminists approach the idea of collectives.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes that theory is “not the mere production of
knowledge about a subject. It is a directly political and discursive practice”
(2003, 19). Feminists have often been suspicious of the theoretical positing of
a collective subject as “somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group
identified prior to the process of analysis” (22). This theoretical positing typi-
cally picks out a certain kind of common experience as identifying the group,
reducing the complexity of “our actual locations in the social”. But, as Mohanty
continues, “Home, community, and identity all fit somewhere between the his-
tories and experiences we inherit and the political choices we make through
alliances, solidarities and friendships” (136). In other words, feminists have
been critical of a theoretical positing of groups that involves the assumption of
shared experience because such reductive positing obscures real possibilities
for political agency. We insist that we always ask the political questions of how
relations either thwart or enable agency, especially the agency of those politi-
cally marginalized, and of how relations might be reshaped to serve a vision of
greater social equality.
From the standpoint of relational feminism the two issues Wertsch identifies
take on a different cast in diagnosis and importance. First: diagnosis. Like
Wertsch, I am concerned with how we have moved to an understanding of
collective memory, but look to the moment before we try to say what we think
about the relation between individual and collective memory. In that prior act
of separating the idea of individual memory from that of collective memory to
then ask how they are related, we may lose attention to the ways in which real
individuals are embedded in relationships that are actively making a differ-
ence to how they remember their pasts. We concentrate on the first and third
voice and neglect the second. It is, I contend, only when we lose complexity
at the level of thinking of individual subjectivities that we gain the description
of boundedness and homogeneity that we then problematically transfer back
onto our understanding of the collective. Refusing to lose this complexity,
however, might let us see important political possibilities for forming relation
through sharing memory.
Returning to Wertsch’s remarks on function, if we accept the ubiquity of
sharing memory and the importance of relational theorizing, we are obliged
to give up an individualism about the psychological that has sustained the il-
lusion that although we cannot compare our representations to the past, per-
haps we can yet unearth the past unaltered from individual memory, bounded
and inured from all influence. I have argued that this illusion was very much
a part of how the memory wars conceived accuracy (Campbell 2003; 2004). If
in the assumption that once we understand how our memory capacities are formed as a consequence
of family interaction, our interest in the interdependence of our lives as rememberers can cease unless
it recurs as epistemic crisis.
6Introduction
we see instead how our aspirations to remember well involve the attempt to
capture the significance of the past to the present in relational circumstances
in which we are always already embedded (what we want my niece to do), we
have a starting point for our epistemic inquiries that takes the usable past se-
riously as part of what we aspire to in trying to remember accurately and well.
This starting point is fully compatible with an interest in memory distortion.
It requires merely our not placing the values of accurate memory in tension
with the importance of a usable past as a methodological assumption, that is,
our not thinking that one function must predominate. Conceptualizing the
possibilities of good relational memory is politically vital: relations of greater
political equality require our capacity and willingness to re-experience the
actions and events of our personal and communal pasts, often conceiving their
significance as quite different from what we do at present.
Second, the positive possibilities of relation only become fully salient if,
when thinking about the nature of collectives, we again refuse to reduce the
complexity of “our actual locations in the social” (Mohanty 2003, 136). Wertsch
notes that there is less tendency than previously to simply analogize collective
to individual memory. Yet even in the absence of explicit analogizing, discus-
sions of collective memory still often identify the notion of a group with a kind
of common experience: a shared perspective on the past, either held in the
memories of group members or available in the texts, artifacts and rituals that
mediate the group’s understanding of its history. “Collective memory simplifies;
sees events from a single committed perspective” (Novick 1999, 3–4 quoted in
Wertsch 2002, 19). “A shared memory integrates and calibrates” the different
perspectives “of those who remember the episode” (Margalit 2002, 51).5 “It is
an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared
memory. To the extent that the memories of a society’s past diverge . . . its
members can share neither experiences nor assumptions” (Connerton 1989,
3). Ideas of cultural and political diversity can find a place within this stance,
but only as the insulated circuits of memory identified with different group
identities or as irresolvable contest amongst different perspectives on the past.
In the diverse communities in which we live, however, we need models for
conceptualizing memory that do not methodologically reinforce the “logic of
community” as homogenization (Lugones 2002, 61) and its Janus face of ir-
resolvable contest. We need to understand the actual identifications forged,
assumed, contested or made possible through relation over the past.
5
Margalit’s work does explicitly view shared or collective memory as a metaphorical extension of
individual memory. As well, both Novick and Margalit contrast the simplifying of the past through
collective memory to the historian’s recognition of complexity. The offered contrast between collective
memory and history is another way of making a conceptual divide that encourages the theoretical
over-homogenization of collective memory.
Recent work by Diana Taylor suggests that thinking about memory may, in
fact, be a powerful way to disrupt the logic of community of homogenization
precisely because remembering and forming relation are integral to each other.
She considers, for example, the work of the renowned Peruvian theatre group
Yuyachkani, who perform and reanimate Peru’s complex, ethnically diverse,
violent and often traumatic past. Taylor notes that in Quechua “I am thinking”,
“I am remembering”, “I am your thought” are all translated by “Yuyachkani”.
This blurring of who is thinking and who or what is being thought is a way for
the artists to affirm that our perspectives and memories shape each other’s per-
spectives and memories, a commitment to a “relational, non-individualistic
understanding of subjectivity” (2003, 191). Yuyachkani travels to communi-
ties throughout Peru, training in local linguistic and performance traditions,
attempting to offer through street and community theatre “a deeper vision of
what it ‘means’ to be Peruvian, one that reflects the cultural, temporal, geo-
graphical, historical, and ethnic complexity of that articulation” (200).
Taylor allows that questions and “contradictions abound” in both
Yuyachkani’s performances and in her analysis of them. We not only confront
the question of how memory is preserved and transmitted through embodied
performances—how is this reanimation of the past a kind of memory?—but
the pointed political issue of why a group like Yuyachkani, “made up predom-
inantly of Limenos”, is not simply appropriating the “memories of . . . Andean
communities”, memories to which they have no real access and no real right
(193–4). Taylor’s answer to this challenge is complicated and I draw attention
to only one aspect of it. The collective identifications at issue here are them-
selves, she points out, the result of political processes:
The very categories—criollo and Indian—are a product of . . . conflict, not its
reason for being. . . . The naming of the people called ‘Indians’ both conjured up
and disappeared a people, the many ethnic groups suddenly lumped together
as ‘Indian’. (195)
Thus while a “certain way of thinking of lineage and tradition would certainly
insist on keeping the various circuits of memory and transmission separate”
(195), Yuyachkani and Taylor challenge us to see that we make political choices
about how to shape the collectives in which we in fact participate (about what
it is to be Peruvian, for example) through whether and how we become en-
gaged with each others’ pasts.
There are many aspects of Taylor’s work that I do yet not understand well
and that make me nervous. My own disciplinary heritage, Anglo-American
philosophy, has often been fiercely individualist about the mind. The mere
talk of sharing memory makes many epistemologists tense. When Taylor asks
how Yuyachkani can “think/dance/remember the racial/ethnic and cultural
complexities and divides of a country”, the individualism of my starting place
causes me discomfort, and I am tempted to think that we are trying to make
8Introduction
the term “memory” do too much work.6 But I am far less concerned with
the ways in which “memory” is now multifariously present on our concep-
tual landscape than I am concerned that we will not take this opportunity
to welcome the complexities of its study. I believe that the term “memory” is
rich, deep and exacting. What is it about any particular engagement with the
past that compels people to speak of memory because no other word will do?
“What is essential for an examination of the way in which memory is valued
by humans is to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon” (Warnock 1987, 13).
6
That “memory” has taken over too much conceptual territory is a concern advanced by Klein
(2000).
{ Part I }

{ 1 }
Models of Minds and Memory Activities
Theorists who write about remembering now often frame their work through
the description of a dramatic and revolutionary shift in how scientists concep-
tualize episodic memory (Schacter 1996, 5). The shift is characterized as the
rejection of one model and its replacement by another, yielding “a new para-
digm” (Loftus and Ketcham 1994, 5). Scientists now reject an archival or store-
house model of memory in favour of a reconstructive model. A memory is no
longer to be thought of as the faithful reproduction of a past event, securely
stored for ready recollection and identical on each occasion of recall. Instead,
unstable traces of information about the past, whose encodings have already
been shaped by previous history, interact with the needs and interests of the
present and meld with previous knowledge and with what we have been told
to form memory reconstructions for which no originals exist, and which vary
on each occasion of recall. Our memories are never possessed.
Ian Hacking writes that “most people now accept the commonplace that
memory is not itself like a camcorder, creating, when it works, a faithful
record. We do not reproduce in memory a sequence of events that we have
experienced. . . . We touch up, supplement, delete, combine, interpret, shade”
(1995, 247). John Sutton says that “it is now no big deal to claim that human
memory is not a set of static records in cold storage.” “Memories . . . are recon-
structed rather than reproduced” (1998, 1, 2). These remarks by philosophers
of science indicate that the shift from an archival to a reconstructive model,
marked through a repudiation of certain metaphors for memory, is already
somewhat old news. To write credibly on memory requires that one identify
oneself as in the know about the change. The shift is thus described not so much
for the benefit of fellow scientists and specialists (who have already made it) as
for a non-specialist public who remain attached to the myths of memory.
First published in Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, Peggy DesAutels and
Margaret Urban Walker (eds.), Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004: pp. 119–137.
12 Our Faithfulness to the Past
Feminists should take themselves as an important audience to the call for a

new public understanding of remembering. The 1990’s debates over women’s
memories of childhood sexual abuse were a significant impetus to scientific
agreement about constructivism and to scientific activism about memory. Their
impact is clear in the writings of scientists Daniel Schacter and Elizabeth Loftus,
whose work I use in this chapter. Though feminists have expressed diverse views
on the possibility of accurate recovered memories of past abuse, we have been
characterized as captured by the myth that memories are literal recordings of
reality, securely preserved. We are addressed by the imperative to abandon old
memory models for new ones, and we have an obligation to carefully assess the
scientific understanding we are being asked to accept as a new commonplace.1
I argue that when we accept results of current scientific research about
remembering, we should nevertheless reject talk of memory model replace-
ment as a description of what we are doing. I shall assume that models of
cognitive processes have inevitable commitments to values: to what values are
important in analysing certain aspects of cognition, and to ideas of normal
cognitive functioning. While posed as a changed understanding of memory
mechanisms, much of the sense of a revolution or a paradigm shift in theoriz-
ing memory is conveyed by replacing one kind of value talk with another. Yet
this strategy is not consciously marked or defended by those who employ it.
When we see how the language of value is laced through descriptions of
the model shift, we find a decisive reason to resist the offered picture of recon-
ceptualized memory: namely, we lose our grasp on good remembering. The
proposed shift from an archival model to a reconstructive model is meant to
unsettle the idea of reproductive accuracy as the kind of faithfulness to the
past that episodic memory should offer, but we do not move to a revised un-
derstanding of good remembering that corresponds to a new view of how we
remember. When we study the shift at the level of value, we see that in fact
we are not being offered the change in models that is alleged, but instead, a
continued confused commitment to an archival view of memory accuracy.
Scientists leave the success of memory governed by an allegedly discredited
model of how memory works. Their representation of their work as a para-
digm shift disguises the fact that they have failed to throw over the archival
model in favour of constructivism, and that they have failed to offer a co-
herent account of success at remembering. I argue that the project of model
replacement is ill-conceived. How we do and should value memory is tied
to what we do as rememberers. In rejecting certain standard metaphors for
memory as naive, scientists separate memory from the real activities through
which it is expressed and materialized and through which its value needs to
1
For reference to the impact of the false memory debates on current scientific research, see Schacter
(1996; 1999) and Loftus and Ketcham (1994). I examine how these debates have influenced the shift to
a reconstructive model in Campbell (2003, chapters 4 and 5). Schacter and Loftus attempt to make sci-
entific research on memory widely accessible.
Models of Minds and Memory Activities 13
be understood. When we use activities as our starting point—in this chapter

I focus on recollecting—we see that they display both archival and reconstruc-
tive dimensions that together inform their value.
I am uncomfortable with the way that many science-oriented accounts de-
scribe memory, and one of my aims is to suggest some of the limitations of
describing memory via models of mental processes. However, I first present
the alleged shift of memory models in the terminology typical of its contem-
porary elaboration. In the following sections of the chapter, I describe the shift
at two levels: first the growing consensus on the nature of memory mecha-
nisms, then, the shift in how we value memory that is a part of our changed
understanding. In the final section, I offer a set of reflections on nostalgia and
archives as an example of how to rethink issues of memory value from the
standpoint of memory activities.
1. The Shift in Memory Models
It is important first to understand what scientists themselves take to be a new

consensus about memory. As an account of how we remember, the most sig-
nificant point of agreement is on the multi-causal or dynamic nature of mem-
ory experience, where the types of causes referenced are not just triggering
causes, but ones that affect the content of memory. A multi-causal account of
memory content is meant to attack a key commitment of the view that theo-
rists describe as the outdated storehouse or archival model: its uni-causal ac-
count of memory content.
The reliability of daily memory may have encouraged me to think of my
mind as both a recorder and as a storehouse for the records made. I may naively
think that my perceptual and cognitive systems automatically record or encode
information about experience, which information is stored in some form at
some location in my brain. I intentionally retrieve this information when it is
needed, or my mind automatically retrieves it when appropriately cued by sub-
sequent environments. Schacter writes that “many of us still see our memories
as a series of family pictures stored in the photo album of our minds.” When we
think in this way, we invoke “the longstanding myth” that “memories are passive
or literal recordings of reality” (1996, 5). According to Loftus, we imagine that
our memories “are catalogued in ever-expanding ultramicroscopic libraries. Or
perhaps they are carefully stored as bits of information on a limitless supply of
infinitesimal computer chips, or even recorded on blank videocassettes, prop-
erly labelled and filed for future use. These modern, technological metaphors
reveal a deep need for order and consistency” (Loftus and Ketcham 1994, 73).
On the alleged naive understanding of memory now rejected by scien-
tists, there are two phases of activity that result in my remembering, only one
of which contributes to the content of memory. The first phase is encoding
experience as memory. What I remember now is wholly caused by past expe-

rience. According to Mary Warnock “I must know that the past was as I say
it was because I experienced it thus, and not through the operation of any
other cause” (1987, 38). If the temporal dynamic of mnemonic causation seems
odd, Mary Warnock reminds us that the causal metaphor is one of source. “If
I tell you that the source of my knowledge is that I was there, and saw what
happened, I have given a causal explanation of my knowledge, and one of a
perfectly familiar kind” (50). An official asks me for my passport and I reach
into my left pocket. The source of the memory for where I put my passport is
the experience of placing it in my pocket. The second phase of activity is that
of retrieving the memory from storage. The events and activities of retrieving
a memory are the account of how my remembering is occasioned but add
nothing to what is remembered. The sight of an official merely occasions the
thought of where I put my passport or my action of reaching for it.
Warnock writes that both “common sense and philosophy are inclined
to describe the process of recall in terms of images” (1987, 15). If we add to
this tendency the restriction that the original experience is the sole source
of the memory’s content, the naive view of memory suggests the standard of
good memory is in its reproductive fidelity to a past experience through its
development via a process in which the experience alone determines what is
remembered. Although allegiance to this standard does warn us that not all
influences on memory are compatible with its accuracy, it turns out to be too
restrictive to allow much of what we would count as faithful memory.2
On the present, more sophisticated, scientific consensus a multi-causal
story is told about the content of memory experience; content affecting activity
takes place throughout encoding, storage, and retrieval as a normal part of the
process of remembering. Scientists now recognize a variety of influences on
the format and content that together determines what we remember. First, our
history determines how we encode the past. Schacter writes that “experiences
are encoded by brain networks whose connections have already been shaped
by previous encounters with the world. This pre-existing knowledge power-
fully influences how we encode and store new memories” (1996, 6). Although
there is a sense in which you and I might be said to perceive the same event,
our histories as individual organisms will guarantee that we will remember it
differently. Second, the continual processing of new information transforms
the information that is stored. For example, we frequently condense autobio-
graphical memory; one memory is comprised of the details of many similar
episodes and represents them. When I remember our weekly departmental
The condition is meant to give us a way of distinguishing genuine remembering from cases where
2
we were present at an event and seem to remember it, but we are, in fact, relying on what we have been
told about it. For example, one is often uncertain as to whether one is really remembering childhood
events or relying on others’ descriptions of them.
colloquia I may think of an occasion comprised of the significant and familiar

details of many such occasions, but whose details correspond to no single one
of these. Third, our present thoughts and interests, the network of expecta-
tions determined by our experience, and the overall nature of the context of
retrieval shape the content of what is recalled. Schacter explains that memory
emerges from the interaction of the cue with the engram through detailing a
study from his lab where students remembered, for example, a person’s irri-
table voice as friendly when cued to remember the emotional quality of the
voice by a picture in which the person is smiling (1996, 70–71).
A connectionist model of mind has offered scientists a vocabulary in which
to describe these influences:
The general idea that memories are always complex constructions fits well
with recent ideas about how the brain encodes, stores and retrieves memo-
ries. . . . In connectionist models . . . the very nature of distributed representa-
tions precludes any simple notion of a stored snapshot of an event: memories
are stored as patterns of activation across numerous units and connections
that are involved with the storage of many different memories. (Schacter
1995, 24)
Because memories are both distributed and superimposed—the resources
used to represent one are also used to represent others—connectionist models
seem to offer some grounding for the characteristic blending effects now noted
in psychological studies of memory, such as, for example, our tendencies to
condense or generalise repeated episodes. The language of reconstruction,
however, is not precise. For Schacter, this vocabulary seems to mark: (a) that
information about the past is only one contribution to remembering; and
(b) this information is distributed throughout different parts of the brain
and subject to multiple systems of processing. “We construct our autobiogra-
phies from fragments that change over time” (Schacter 1996, 9). Loftus’s use of
“reconstruction” is a more explicit move away from truth as a value of recollec-
tion: “My work has helped to create a new paradigm of memory, shifting our
view from the video-recorder . . . to a reconstructive model, in which memories
are understood as creative blendings of fact and fiction” (Loftus and Ketcham
1994, 5). Both explain reconstruction as a denial of the myth that remembering
is a matter “of bringing to mind a stored record of the event” (Schacter 1996, 8).
In later parts of this chapter, I will comment on the viability of proposing a
model, the articulation of which is so dependent on the rejection of a certain
familiar picture. However, I want first to concede that there is much insight
in the constructivist turn in current theories of memory. As the following ex-
ample will show, we can easily trace the causal complexity of remembering,
foregrounded by the reconstructive view, in people’s accounts of their pasts.
Contemporary German writer W.G. Sebald, born in Germany during
the last years of World War II, has been described by one of his reviewers as
“memory’s Einstein.”3 I draw here from his last work, based on lectures that
Sebald delivered in Zürich in 1997, at the age of 53. These lectures have mem-
ory as their subject: the silence and willed forgetting that characterized the
post-war Germany of Sebald’s childhood and conditioned the themes of his
writing. In “Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures,” Sebald’s specific target is
a “scandalous deficiency,” the absence of German historical, literary, or local
narrative accounts of the destruction wrought by the Allied bombing which
killed 600,000 German civilians, and reduced their cities to rubble (2003, 70).
He writes, “I had grown up with the feeling that something was being kept
from me” (70). In illustration, he refers to a local history of Sonthofen which
relates that “The war took much from us, but our beautiful native landscape
was left untouched, as flourishing as ever.”
Reading that sentence, I see pictures merging before my mind’s eye—paths
through the fields, rivers, meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with
images of destruction—and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now en-
tirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if
I were coming home, perhaps because they represent the more powerful and
dominant reality of my first years of life. I now know that at the time, while
I was lying in a bassinet on the balcony of the Seefeld house and looking up
at the pale blue sky, there was a pall of smoke in the air all over Europe, over
the rearguard actions in east and west, over the ruins of the German cities,
over the camps where untold numbers of people were burnt, people from
Berlin and Frankfurt, from Wuppertal and Vienna. . . . there was scarcely a
place in Europe from which no one had been deported to his death in those
years. . . . In one of my narratives I have described how in 1952, when I moved
with my parents and siblings from my birthplace of Wertach to Sonthofen,
nineteen kilometres away, nothing seemed as fascinating as the presence of
areas of waste land here and there among the rows of houses, for ever since
I had been to Munich, as I said in that passage, few things were so clearly
linked in my mind with the word “city” as mounds of rubble, cracked walls,
and empty windows through which you saw the empty air. (71–74)
We cannot grasp the process of Sebald’s recollection through an idea of orig-
inating scenes that wholly and discretely determine the content of the writer’s
memories of childhood. To understand what Sebald remembers requires ref-
erence not only to his many childhood encounters with fields and rivers and
urban rubble, but to broader thematic dimensions of his individual and col-
lective past and, as well, to the present circumstances that impel him “to go at
least a little way into the question of why German writers would not or could
not describe the destruction of German cities as millions experienced it” (78).
Remark by Richard Eder, quoted on the back cover of W.G. Sebald (1999).
3
As constructivists would remind us, what had already happened to Sebald

as a child—his previous encounters with ruins—affects what he notes and thus
remembers about Sonthofen, and the succession of encounters with rubble in
part explains the present unreality and generality of his memories of nature,
how parts of his past have come to seem idyllic. Sebald’s memories further
show the effect of the continual processing of information as pictures merge
before his mind’s eye forming general or composite memories of nature, and of
cities as mounds of rubble. Within the context of these generalised memories,
his memory of Munich comes to emblematize the destruction he witnessed as
a child. But Sebald also describes playing in the fields that grew over Sonthofen
ruins. To comprehend the evolution of memories of play into memory images
of destruction we must refer as well to “the powerful and dominant reality”
that Sebald now knows but did not know as a child. In other words, what
Sebald comes to know of the past as an adult makes a difference to how he
now remembers his childhood. He studies this past and “to this day, when I see
photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its
child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over
me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge” (71). Sebald’s memories
become conceptualized as images of destruction; he comes to remember his
past in this way; and, moreover, these memories of destruction have a sense of
familiarity or coming home, an emotional content that has also evolved over
time and occasions of recollecting and reflecting on the past.
Finally a distinctive feature of Sebald’s writing is his use of old and unan-
notated photographs positioned without comment in the text; in this passage
an evocative and idyllic photo of a field, meadow, river, and mountain become
a part of the memory expressed by text. I shall return to the issue of the mate-
riality of memory. What I want to note here is that this image, the passage from
the Sonthofen history, and Sebald’s reference to his own previous narratives
contribute to the expression of what is before his mind’s eye when he remem-
bers his childhood. They too help form the content of his memory.
The past and present make an inseparable contribution to Sebald’s memory;
to express with precision how this is so is a theme of his work. In the absence
of articulate German collective memory of the war, this temporal complexity
to recollection takes the form of a haunting which Sebald expresses by permit-
ting himself a digression. He relates that he encountered in Corsica, not only
memorials to those who had been deported, but a picture of Christ before the
Passion in a half-decayed church:
the picture from my parents’ bedroom. . . . The selfsame picture had hung
over my parents’ conjugal bed for many years, and then at some point it dis-
appeared. . . . And now here it was again, or at least one exactly like it. . . . Such
is the dark backward and abyss of time. Everything lies all bundled up in it,
and when you look down you feel dizzy and afraid. (73–74)

We can agree with Schacter that the nature of memory “precludes any sim-
ple notion of a stored snapshot of an event” (1995, 24). The multiple influences
on what we remember and that give a varying and complex temporal character
to recollection explain why scientists have thought it appropriate to move from
the language of photographic reproduction to the language of reconstruction.
Although this representational language is imprecise, a reproduction suggests
the copying of an original which is its sole source of representational content.
One can however reconstruct a brontosaurus or the events of an evening from
traces of evidence without having access to an original from which the repre-
sentation is made.4
As should be apparent, a certain picture of memory accuracy and integrity
is dislodged by a multi-causal reconstructivist analysis of memory and this is
part of that model’s intent. Those of us who have held that sustained repro-
ductive accuracy to an originating and sole source of content is the standard
of successful recall will have to tell a different or more complex story about
the value of Sebald’s memory. We will want to tell this story. Sebald’s writing is
meant to confront a collective amnesia for the events that he described; ques-
tions of the accuracy and integrity of memory, its faithfulness to the past, are
central to his writing. Moreover, the features of reconstructive memory that
I have identified in Sebald’s narrative do not themselves compromise its claim
as faithful memory. Yet if we look at scientific writings that argue for the re-
placement of an archival by a reconstructive model, we do not find a different
or more complex story or the recognition of its necessity. We find instead a
singular focus on distortion, and this is the second level at which the shift in
models needs to be described. This conversation about value, its significance
often suppressed by the more explicit focus on memory mechanisms, bears
close examination.
2. Memory Distortion
The scientific move to a reconstructive model seems to make available a more

sophisticated understanding of how we remember. Nevertheless, in this sec-
tion I will argue that we will do better to forsake the project of model replace-
ment, as it results in an incoherent account of memory value.
Schacter has written compelling and valuable non-specialist overviews of
current memory research. In Searching for Memory, he introduces us to the
reconstructive model by reminding us that though our memory systems are
“generally well adapted” to practical, everyday demands, “memory’s reputation
Ulric Neisser (1967) has used the analogy of reconstructing a dinosaur to explain the process of
4
recollection.
has been tarnished lately. We hear disturbing reports of false traumatic mem-
ories in therapy patients. . . . And we learn that scientists have come up with
simple ways to induce some of us to remember clearly events that never hap-
pened!” (1996, 3) Do these facts “suggest that as accurate as memory is in most
situations, it is less consistently reliable than we once believed it to be?” (3) As
we follow Schacter’s text, our move from naive confidence in accuracy to a
concern about distortion is of a piece with our learning that scientists now
reject the archival model, the idea that memory comprises “bits of data that
we coldly store and retrieve, computerlike,” for a view that references emotion,
subjectivity, and the meaning that we give to the past (4). However much we
would like to think of our memories as an album of family photos,
It is now clear that we do not form judgement-free snapshots of our past
experiences, but rather hold on to the meaning, sense, and emotions these
experiences provided us. Although serious errors and distortions occur rel-
atively infrequently, they furnish significant clues about how we remember
the past. (5)
The social importance of increased attention to distortion motivates the re-
jection of the archival view, and sustained attention to error and distortion is
simply appended without comment as our destination on shifting views. The
focus on distortion is established through our conceding the affective and sub-
jective nature of episodic memory. The association of distortion with emotion
and meaning in memory is repeated in Schacter’s text (6) and is present in
Loftus as well. Loftus writes that memory gives us not the reality of what really
happened, but a “colorized” version of the past, “waking up the dead, sparking
emotion, and inspiring a search for meaning” (Loftus and Ketcham 1994, 38).
I will return to the importance of this association.
Following Schacter through the model shift involves re-conceiving the
values of memory. We are asked to repudiate our faith that memory is reliable
and accurate, and to replace this faith with concern that memory is malle-
able and prone to distortion; our repudiation is a part of rejecting the archival
model, a part of the dialogical process through which we arrive at a new view.5
It is, in fact, the language of value, the series of oppositional value terms char-
acterizing the models—on the one hand reliable, cold, and judgement free,
on the other prone to distortion, emotional, and subjective—that makes clear
that we are not being asked to modify an understanding of memory but to re-
ject one. We may ask if shifting to a multi-causal account of memory content
would be a revolution in our understanding if the shift were not also taking
place at the level of opposed value descriptions, one giving way to the other.
Moreover, that we are moved to think simultaneously of reconstructed and
5
Scientists may exaggerate our faith in the accuracy of memory, but that they likely do so is irrele-
vant to the argument that follows.
distorted memory is, I contend, symptomatic of their actual conflation in

some recent scientific writing.
This unexamined conflation is often evident in Schacter’s work. For ex-
ample, he begins an essay on the history of memory distortion by using Akira
Kurosawa’s multi-perspectival film Rashomon to point out that “the output of
human memory often differs . . . from the input. Remembering can fail, not
only because information is forgotten over time, but because it is changed
and distorted” (1995, 1). He introduces the turn to constructivism by detailing
how “cognitive psychologists during the 1970’s exhibited increased interest in
reconstruction and distortion” (12). A particularly illuminating set of remarks
occurs in his description of the work of Richard Semon, who coined the word
“engram.” For Semon, every act of encoding information took place while
retrieving thoughts, images, and memories “activated by the current situation.
Thus a newly created engram is not a literal replica of reality but always an in-
terpretation that includes retrieved information. . . . If the input to the memory
system is not an accurate reflection of reality, then the output will necessarily
be distorted” (6). There is nothing in Schacter’s description of Semon’s theory
to suggest that it is an extraordinary commitment to memory as inevitably
distorted. The unremarked pairing of construction, change, and interpreta-
tion with distortion occurs in conjunction with the view that memory is re-
constructive; and it occurs in the absence of compensatory remarks on good
reconstructive remembering to contest the synonymy of construction and dis-
tortion. Schacter is thus challenged to say why he has not left room to talk
about good remembering.6
The alliance of construction with distortion and error, though not uni-
versal, is a common tendency of contemporary writing on memory that takes
science research as its focus. It is clear in Loftus’s description of reconstuctive
memory and I have illustrated it in Schacter. In addition, many theorists now
explain either their own move to a reconstructive model or its current pre-
eminence as an acknowledgement of memory inaccuracy and distortion.7 In
assessing recent memory research, Sutton summarizes the consensus about
the constructive nature of remembering by saying “it needn’t be unrealistically
over described. It’s not that accuracy and reliability in memory are suddenly
shown by science to be impossible. . . . Rather, the assumption is that under-
standing of mechanisms of distortion will also illuminate the processes op-
erating in veridical remembering” (2002). But it is unclear in Sutton’s own
remarks whether veridical remembering falls under constructivism since
his words, as well, subtly associate reconstructive memory with distortion.
See, as well, Schacter’s example (in the first part of this chapter) of the influence of the context of
6
retrieval on what is remembered. Schacter illustrates this influence by a case of inaccurate memory.
7
I have discussed many of these theorists in Campbell (2003). Much of the association of recon-
struction with distortion seems unreflective.
Although these accounts often assure us that we remember the past fairly well,
they leave little theoretical room to make sense of this reassurance. It is, more-
over, not clear how we are to understand the claim that memory is sometimes
distorted without a corresponding account of faithful memory.
If we are under the sway of an archival model, we may well be misled about
the multiple influences on how we remember. We require an account, however,
of why reconstruction should be understood in terms of the propensity for
memory distortion. In my view the account is quite complex.8 Here, I simply
want to draw attention to two features of recent constructivist accounts that
I take to be deeply implicated in the conflation of construction with distortion,
and which, at the same time, provide signposts for a more coherent account
of successful remembering. The first feature raises the question of how to re-
late the metaphorical language of memory to questions of memory value; the
second directs us to think of memory’s usefulness.
I began my discussion of the model shift by stating it was important to ex-
plain what scientists themselves understand by a change in accounts marked
so strongly by rejecting the metaphorical language of storage and by replacing
it with the language of construction or reconstruction. It was not possible to
give this explanation in the terms described. It is indisputable that there has
been a growing scientific consensus about memory that challenges previous
views of memory. But we cannot disentangle this consensus from the very
metaphorical language of memory that is in fact meant to give way to the new
understanding. Mary Warnock writes that there “is a strong and natural ten-
dency . . . to think of memory as a kind of storehouse” (1987, 16). Augustine
referred to his memory as “a huge court” and a “spreading limitless room”
(1945, 173). John Locke referred to memory as a “repository” while apologeti-
cally writing that he meant no more by this term than the mind’s power “to re-
vive perceptions which it once had with the additional perception annexed to
them, that it had had them before” (quoted in Warnock, 16). In the apt words
of Genevieve Lloyd, some metaphors for the mind may be “shed without leav-
ing us with nothing to say” (1993, 82). Others, even when problematic, are so
deeply embedded in our understanding that it would be difficult to see how to
proceed without their use.
That our minds store or preserve the past is deeply embedded in our un-
derstanding of memory. Scientists have been unable to dispense with store-
house imagery and continue to talk about encoding, storage, and retrieval as
the three phases of memory processes; they use this language to map how
memory works. Describing the dynamics of encoding, storage, and retrieval
8
A fuller account would, for example, need to make reference to recent public engagements over
memory. In my view, a cost of the false memory debates has been a consensus on constructivism
that has not reflexively attended to the exaggerated emphasis on memory malleability and distortion
through which the theory is being shaped.
is now meant to move us away from the idea that memory preserves the past
by virtue of storing copies of past scenes. But here too, the metaphorical lan-
guage of stored reproduction governs the analysis. We move away from our
simplistic picture of memory by invoking various metaphors of recording and
of preserving records as points of contrast. Rather than wholly repudiate the
metaphorical language of snapshots, computer files, video recordings, and
libraries as a way to understand memory, metaphors of preserving the past
remain our point of contact with memory.
The embedded metaphor of storage contributes, in these discussions, to a
confused account of good remembering. The very metaphors used to reject a
picture of how memory works continue to guide the norm for accurate recall.
Otherwise, we would have no explanation for the implication of Schacter’s
remarks: namely, that when the output of memory differs from the input, this
in itself is reason to raise concern about memory distortion. It is clear there
is a confusion here. On a dynamic multi-causal analysis, input should not be
restricted to the encoding of information from past experience. It is evident
that there are two pictures of memory in play, and it is memory as a deposit
untouched by anything but the experience that produced it that governs the
idea of accuracy. But this is the very description of memory that scientists now
reject.
Loftus also clearly holds to reproductive accuracy as the norm for faithful rep-
resentation of the past. She illustrates the distinction between the “story truth” of
recollection that we should not trust and the literal “happening truth” of the past
by recalling for us the details of a day when she appeared on a daytime television
show to explain her research on memory suggestibility. But might she simply have
imagined—she asks—much of what she relates? Loftus notes that she has a vide-
otape of the television show and this recording confirms certain facts. Otherwise,
she is not sure where “the happening truth ends and the story truth begins” (Loftus
and Ketcham 1994, 72). Reliable, accurate representation of the past is identified
as the kind of representation that video recordings supply, and video recording is
rejected as an apt metaphor for memory.
We should be concerned but not surprised at the problematic use of the
language of recording and storage in contemporary work on memory. That
memory stores or preserves the past is, in Wittgenstein’s words, a picture of
memory, (Remark 604) and the language of storage remains a part of how
scientists present the reconstructive model. If we reify this picture as a descrip-
tion of mental processes, if our minds really do encode memories at the time
of experience, store, and then retrieve them, reconstructing memory from un-
stable, distributed, and altered traces will be judged to give an inferior product
to that offered with securely stored reproductions. If we cannot dispense with
the idea of storage, attempting to replace a storehouse model with a recon-
structive model will lead to confusion, and we must give up proposing the
archival and the reconstructive as competing models of memory processes.

We must find a way to think of memory value that both acknowledges the im-
portance of our metaphorical understandings and renders them compatible
with the many influences on memory content. In order to come to this more
sophisticated understanding, however, we must dismantle a second confusion
of recent writing—the association of the subjective dimensions of recollection
with the idea of distortion.
In both Schacter and Loftus, we move from confidence in the accuracy of
memory to a focus on distortion through thinking of memory as value-laden,
emotional, and meaningful. To think of memory as emotional and meaningful
is a way of re-describing multi-causal influence: what we remember reflects
our previous experience, our developed patterns of intellectual, moral, and
emotional salience, and the interests and concerns of our present. In other
words, as well illustrated by Sebald’s recollections, memory is biographically
subjective. But that remembering is situated, that it expresses particular per-
spectives, does not thereby render it epistemically defective. As argued by
Cheshire Calhoun (1989), we must distinguish the obvious biographical sub-
jectivity of our perceptions from the traditional philosophical concern about
epistemic subjectivity—namely, the concern that when our perspective is
emotional and value-laden, it is inevitably distorted. Many philosophers now
reject the traditional framing of epistemic subjectivity as based on the illusory
ideal of a value neutral perspective. Though I cannot engage in this discussion
here, I agree with Calhoun and others that we must concede that the emo-
tional and interested nature of our perceptions is often epistemically fruitful.
It is, for example, the hauntings of Sebald’s past that provoke his confrontation
with the collective amnesia of post-war Germany. Biographical subjectivity is
not the same thing as epistemic subjectivity; nor does it invariably indicate or
cause epistemic subjectivity.
In Schacter’s introduction, the insight that our previous history shapes how
we remember explains both “why some memories have the power to induce
us to cry” and “why our recollections are sometimes predisposed to corrup-
tion by suggestive influences, and how we sometimes distort the past for no
immediately apparent reason” (1996, 6). In present descriptions of construc-
tivism, we are encouraged to blur the distinction between biographical and
epistemic subjectivity—to take the former as a sign of the latter. What seems
striking about this confusion is that memory is useful to us precisely because
of its biographical subjectivity, because we remember through and in response
to our history, needs, and interests. Thus a disturbing feature of contemporary
discussion is that the crucial selectivity of memory, its usefulness, becomes
re-described as its tendency to distortion. But we obviously need an account of
successful remembering that credits the fundamental ways in which memory
is of value.
My concerns can be seen in relation to three theses; the third will take me
into a final set of reflections. (1) We should reject the reconstructive model in
its proffered formulations. It would be unwise to endorse this model with its
focus on distortion and its depleted space for the discussion of good remem-
bering. (2) We should reject the idea that scientists are replacing an archival
model with a reconstructive model. When we trace the alleged replacement,
we see that scientists have not offered a new paradigm of memory. The archival
model continues to govern the standard of accurate representation. (3) Finally,
in rethinking the complexity of memory we should not attempt to replace an
archival model with a reformed version of constructionism. I have suggested
this project is not viable; the idea of memory as a storehouse is deeply embed-
ded in our understanding of it. We should regard the archival and the recon-
structive as complex and often complementary dimensions of memory activity
rather than as competing models of mental processes. In so doing, we’ll have
hope of a better understanding of memory value, including values of accuracy
and integrity, than talk of model replacement will allow. In the final section,
I sketch two broad considerations to support this claim.
3. Memory Activities
In her book Memory, Mary Warnock frames her investigation by posing the
question: “Why do we value memory so highly” (1987, 6). She states that
what is essential for an examination of the way memory is used and valued
by humans is to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon. . . . I am concerned
with the value we ascribe to our recollecting activities. . . . For I am interested
in the fact that memory is not merely something that we deliberately evoke,
but is also something that comes charged with emotion and is highly prized.
(13–14)
Warnock does not doubt that scientists have an important contribution to
make to the study of memory, that understanding the complexity of the phe-
nomenon requires the study of brain processes. Yet her words suggest that the
study of brain processes will not give an account of how we value memory.
We must think instead about the range and nature of memory activities. In so
doing, we will be led to a complex account of memory value. And if we look
to the values that we find in remembering, we will be led to think about the
complexity and variety of mental activities.
Archival imagery is associated with faithfully preserving the past, recon-
structive terminology with remembering the past selectively and in response
to the needs of the present or a vision of the future. At a deep level, the discus-
sion of whether to replace an archival with a reconstructive model is willing
to hold apart aspects of memory value that, in our activities, are mutually
informing and co-determining. Moreover, rejecting archival imagery as a way

of understanding memory will lead us away from the importance of real ar-
chival activity to remembering, and, in general, the importance of thinking
about the material expression of memory. I shall illustrate the first point with
a brief discussion of nostalgia and the second with a reflection on archival
remembering.
Nostalgia originally meant a painful longing for home. The term has now
taken on a more critical meaning. According to one theorist: “Nostalgia is often
seen as a conservative and regressive impulse, a form of escapism in which the
past is idealized in contrast to an unsatisfactory present” (McDermott 2002,
390).9 Another writes: “Nostalgia and remembering are in some sense anti-
thetical, since nostalgia is a forgetting, merely regressive, whereas memory
may look back in order to move forward and transform disabling fictions to
enabling fictions, altering our relation to the present and future” (Greene 1991,
297–8). Although I would not defend some of the wording in these remarks,
they point to features of the critical concern about nostalgia germane to my
present discussion. Nostalgia is a defect of memory accuracy: nostalgic mem-
ory is not faithful to the past. Moreover, as the reference to forgetting makes
clear, the criticism locates the distortion in how we selectively remember.
When nostalgic, certain details of the past are remembered—those that con-
tribute towards its idealization. Finally nostalgia is regressive. To remember
the past faithfully is to properly capture its significance to the present and fu-
ture. We must regard the past as “open to revision” (Greene 1991, 305).
When Sebald presented “Air War and Literature” as a series of lectures,
many responded by sending him their recollections of the effects of the war
upon the German homeland—a challenge to his charge of collective amnesia.
These “rather cheerful reminiscences” many of them expressing a “scarcely
concealed nostalgia” fill Sebald “with utmost uneasiness”:
We are told how Granny still works all hours in house and garden, and hear
of various gentlemen who came for dinner. . . . Karl is in Africa now, Fritz is
in the East, baby Bübchen is running around the garden naked as the day he
was born; our thoughts are with our boys in Stalingrad now . . . we only hope
the German border will keep at bay the tide sweeping in from the Steppes;
getting hold of food has become a major preoccupation these days; Mother
and Hiltrud have found lodgings with a master baker, and so on, and so
forth. (83–84)
Sebald’s writing displays that concerns about nostalgic memory are not allevi-
ated by showing that the details remembered are factual—that Karl was in fact
9
McDermott herself, however, argues that nostalgia is sometimes politically useful. I do not deny
this possibility. My comments on nostalgia are meant to illustrate a certain way in which we can be
concerned about accurate memory.
in Africa or that baby Bübchen ran naked in the garden. That we can relate
certain facts about the past does not prevent recollection from being distorted
or inaccurate in a sense having precisely to do with its selectivity or appro-
priate significance. Moreover, it is partly the context of collective memory that
determines what is distortion and this in two ways. The banal domestic recol-
lections sent Sebald are nostalgic because they are repeated; moreover, they are
repeated in the context of virtual silence about the surrounding destruction—
the firestorms, the corpses, the flies, and so on. Their repetition in this context
determines a distortion in these memories, a lack of faithfulness to the past
that morally reflects on each individual rememberer, but cannot be identified
without attention to the social dimensions of recollective activity.
There is no clear separation between our past and the pasts of others, and
when we are asked what we remember, other people’s interests and perspec-
tives are at stake in how we address this question. Claims to remember are
complex moral/epistemological assertions because of our role as witnesses
and natural testifiers to events whose interpretation can involve a number of
different perspectives and interests. Questions of memory accuracy, whether
the past is faithfully remembered, are thus often much more than questions
about whether someone got the details of the past right. They are questions
about perspective, about the significance of the past to the present; and we
are responsible because we share a past that we witness differently. The failure
to give appropriate significance to a shared history of wartime destruction in
Germany is manifest in a moral, epistemological, and emotional distortion of
individual recollection.
My discussion is meant to show that our grasp of the kinds of accuracy
that memory must express requires attention to the ways we re-remember
and reconstruct the past in order to assess its significance. At its most basic,
memory is how we learn through experience. Its value is the significance of
the past to the present. Human memory is also self-representational: the basis
of self-reflection, self-knowledge, and personal and group identity formation.
Finally our memory capacities are socialized through our engagement in many
kinds of narrative and material activities that express our relation to the past,
and how we remember determines the meaning of our shared pasts. When we
think of the significance of the past to the present expressed through human
memory, we are dealing with a facet of remembering that can be personal,
pragmatic, emotional, intellectual, social, political or ethical, and is at the same
time often identity-constituting. That we have successfully re-visioned the past
depends on complicated ideas of accuracy that must themselves be analysed in
terms of the nature and value of reconstructive activities.10
For a recent attempt to elaborate ideas of emotional truth or accuracy, see De Sousa and Morton
10
(2002).
Put somewhat crudely, because human remembering is very often an inher-

ently sociable activity—we can see this with recollecting—we should not think
we will get a rich account of memory and memory accuracy by studying what
goes on in the heads of individual rememberers. But remembering is also often
an embodied and material activity, and that this is so suggests a final reason for
not repudiating archival understanding.
Metaphors can be elaborated in a number of different directions. It is their
open-endedness that renders them useful conceptual tools (Boyd, 1979).
This open-endedness, however, may also allow a number of metaphors to be
elaborated all in one particular direction. Recent scientific writings attempt
to fix archival imagery in order to articulate by contrast the nature of a recon-
structive model. They make an archive, storehouse, or recording all stand for
something in particular—a norm of reproductive fidelity and our naive be-
lief that remembering instantiates this norm. Yet this range of imagery in fact
references different dimensions of memory value. Even in the scientific and
philosophical discussions from which I have quoted, archival imagery is used
to express different values. Loftus’s technological metaphors emphasize order
and control. Schacter’s use of the photo album emphasizes the longing, per-
haps at times nostalgic, to preserve the past. Popular writing on memory illus-
trates that “memory storehouses” come in different forms. Katie Merz, editor
of Personal Journaling advises us that writing will “unearth” all kinds of reflec-
tions “on the memories that have shaped [our lives]. Memories are remarkable
that way. It is amazing how many answers to who we are can be discovered just
by examining those old treasure trunks of memories in our minds. Have you
opened the lid of your memory trunk lately?” (May 2003, 1) Memories can be
disordered and deeply buried—the past can be long forgotten. Some of the
pleasures of recollection, and, as Sebald reminds us, some of the pain and fear
of it, arise not from our control over what we remember but from our surprise
at unbidden memory.
Merz’s question sounds silly because to think of the mind as having treasure
trunks of memories pushes what is already a cliché awkwardly and too far. But
we might nevertheless think of the kinds of activities in which we do engage
when we want to remember significant events of our pasts. We might get out
a photo album, reread some old letters, or watch a video of a ceremony. The
language of preservation and storage can be used to reference or explore a
range of memory values because preserving and storing the traces of the past
are embodied, material, mnemonic activities that themselves express a range
of interests and values. How we materialize or embody the past is an impor-
tant part of what we need to comprehend about memory activity, and the very
language of memory should give us some insight into this point. Let us look
again at the rejection of archival imagery in Loftus.
The technological metaphors that Loftus rejects as part of our under-
standing of how memory works represents some of the common activities that
we engage in as rememberers. They are not alien metaphorical imports from

a faraway object domain that has nothing to do with memory; their embed-
dedness as metaphor is related to their actual role in remembering. If Loftus
were to see making a video recording as a common way of remembering an
event, she could not use this imagery to reject notions of how we remember.
In making a video, I give salience to certain aspects of the past; I preserve the
content of my memory in a lasting medium; I structure contexts of retrieval
and the kinds of social activities they will involve—who I will remember with
and on what kinds of occasions; I determine the form that some of my memo-
ries of the event will take—that they will be detailed, iconic, and narrative.
This activity is not sufficient for my having remembered the event. I do not
remember the events unless I can recognize the images, which recognition is
itself expressed in my activities. . . . nor can this video production be thought of
as a mere aid to remembering. It is not merely a reminder of the event or a dis-
pensable externalization of the content of memory. The making and viewing of
the video is so thoroughly interwoven with what it is for me to remember the
event that to think of it as a mere aid betrays a commitment to remembering as
a merely mental activity in ways that may be sometimes assumed, but lack any
real defence. If we cannot use the imagery of these technologies to reject how
we remember—they really are how we remember—we will be left with a better
account of how we actually do keep the past straight, and less temptation to
regard memory as its distortion. But if we re-situate rather than repudiate ar-
chival imagery, thinking now about material memory activity, we should at the
same time look outward to the many ways in which people embody the past.
Contributions to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, for example, are, for those who
contribute, a way of remembering those who died of AIDS, and of shaping
the significance of the past for themselves and for others; the remembering is
archival, material, and reconstructive. At the same time, these quilt pieces con-
tribute to a WEB based project of collective memory that is also both archival
and reconstructive. The mission statement to Phase II of the “AIDS Memorial
Quilt Archive Project” intends to “preserve the Quilt’s powerful images and
stories,” in “an accessible and globally available database” that can serve many
different projects of reconstructing or re-visioning the past:
We can only begin to imagine the many ways such a resource might be used.
A student in the rural South exploring her heritage might search for all the
panels that contain kente cloth, read about the memorialized persons’ lives,
and access video interviews with the panel makers to learn about the sig-
nificance of African patterns. . . . The possibilities are inexhaustible. (AIDS
Memorial Quilt Archive Project)
The personal and collective remembering of individuals who died of AIDS
through our use of the archive supports the general reconstructive project of
its mission: that of giving new and as yet undetermined meaningfulness to the
epidemic. My point here is not that every individual use of the archive will in-
volve a personal remembering, but that the material preservation of traces of
the past, as personal or collective remembering, is a ubiquitous and complex
human activity. The attempt to repudiate archival imagery for memory not
only severs values of preserving from those of reconstructing the past, (values
brought together in the archival mission of the quilt as they are in Sebald’s
concerns about nostalgia), but severs, as well, our account of memory from
the activities of rememberers. The use of the word “memory” often itself refers
to the material locus of remembering. When my sister tells me that it would
be hard to sell our family cabin because her memories are there, I do not take
her to be speaking extravagantly or wholly figuratively. Buying the cabin was a
way of structuring the significance of our family history to our present and fu-
ture, a way of remembering it. It was as much as anything, a memory activity.
These final remarks are, I realize, no more than promissory. A great deal of
work needs to be done to see how “memory” refers, on the one hand, to mental
capacities that we share with animals and, on the other, to a range of complex
human activities. At the same time, we need sophisticated understandings of
our description of the mental that let us see how our language for describing
the mind often owes its aptness to its home in those very activities through
which we develop and express our mental capacities. Andy Clark has written
that a key problem for an account of embodied cognition is “finding the right
vocabulary to describe and analyse processes that criss/cross the agent en-
vironment boundary” (1999, 84). I suggest that our language of memory is
already a language that moves across the mental and material. In trying to
understand memory and its values, we would do well to first witness this com-
plexity. It is no wonder that in trying to banish the archive, we start to lose our
grasp on the distinction between good remembering, on the one hand, and
memory distortion and failure, on the other. We can only understand what
good remembering is in so far as we keep memory in the world.
{ 2 }

Reconstructing Memory Value
The reconstructive turn in memory theory challenges us to provide an account

of successful remembering that is attentive to the ways in which we use mem-
ory, both individually and socially. I investigate conceptualizations of accuracy
and integrity useful to memory theorists and argue that faithful recollection is
often a complex epistemological/ethical achievement.
1. Introduction
I take as my point of reflection a remark made by Paul Ricoeur in Memory,

History, and Forgetting: “To memory is tied an ambition . . . that of being faith-
ful to the past” (2004, 21). Ricoeur speaks of this ambition as a “search for
truth” (55), using “truth” as his gloss on “faithfulness” to distinguish memory
from imagination, which latter aims at “the fantastic, the fictional, the un-
real, the possible” (6). Ricoeur thus hopes to forestall, in his own work, the
“short circuit between memory and imagination” which has haunted attention
to memory in philosophy (5). Though remembering and imagining both, in
Versions of this chapter were presented at “Workshops on Memory, Mind, and Media,” Sydney,
2004, and to philosophy departments at the University of San Francisco, Syracuse University, and
Dalhousie University. I thank all these audiences for their challenging comments. I am particularly
grateful to Linda Martín Alcoff, Richmond Campbell, Michael Hymers, Rockney Jacobsen, Lenore
Kuo, Ishani Maitra, Doris McIlwain, Letitia Meynell, Jan Sutherland, John Sutton, Jacqueline Taylor,
Shirley Tillotson, and Michael Torre. I am also indebted to an anonymous referee for very helpful sug-
gestions, and to Thane Plantikow for research assistance. [First published in Philosophical Psychology
(Special Issue: Memory, Embodied Cognition, and the Extended Mind; guest editor John Sutton), Vol.
19, No. 3, June 2006, pp. 361–380.]
Reconstructing Memory Value 31
some sense, represent what is absent, they can be distinguished by the norms
for success that govern the identities of these activities. “If we reproach memory
with being unreliable, it is precisely because it is our one and only resource for
signifying the past-character of what we declare we remember. No one would
dream of addressing the same reproach to imagination” (21). Ricoeur’s words
attach the search for truth to declarative memory, unremarkably as the notion
of truth is most at home when applied to linguistic expression. In other places,
Ricoeur aligns faithfulness with veridicality, bringing memory images under the
requirement of faithfulness in ways that distinguish them from visual imaginings.
I acknowledge the importance of truth in declarative memory. I intend
to argue, however, that we must enlarge our conception of good remember-
ing, our concern, in Ricoeur’s apt words, that memory be faithful to the past,
to reflect two further facts. First, good remembering often involves getting
something right about the significance of the past as judged from the stand-
point of the present. In remembering, we often care that we are appropriately
guided by our experience of the past, and this concern reflects the nature of
memory as that set of capacities through which we learn by experience.1 There
is thus more to good remembering than that our memory declarations are
true. Second, remembering comprises a varied set of human activities. While
sometimes experienced as a feature of our interiority, human remembering
also takes place through action, narrative, and other modes of representation
in public space and in the company of others. Significance has often to be un-
derstood in ways that reflect that we share memory; judgements that I have the
significance of the past roughly right are rarely mine alone.
I suggest that the importance of significance to successful remembering
points in two directions: towards conceptions of accuracy that include signif-
icance as a dimension of accurate representation, and towards conceptions of
integrity that show how we are held and hold ourselves responsible for getting
that significance roughly right. I do not offer a complete account of faithful
memory. I do explore the idea that memory’s faithfulness to the past is, in many
cases, a complex epistemological/ethical achievement and I draw attention to
discussions of accuracy and integrity helpful to memory theorists. My strategy
is to work back and forth between our best account of memory and concep-
tualizations of our values adequate to it. I focus primarily on recollection, and
1
I make this as an obvious observation about memory akin to Bernard Williams’ observation in
Truth and Truthfulness (2002) that the ability to pool information is important to almost any human
endeavor. My account of faithful memory is similar to Williams’ account of the virtues of truthfulness,
in that it relies on observations about human capacities and interdependencies, which observations
I offer as uncontentious, and on discussions of our practices. While naturalistic, it is not an argument
in evolutionary psychology.
I do not draw a sharp line between private and public remembering. Shared
memory activity is central to our lives as rememberers.2
2. The Importance of Reconstructing Memory Value

2.1. The “Reconstructive Turn” in Memory Theory
My interest in good remembering has been provoked by a growing
cross-disciplinary consensus that remembering is to some degree reconstruc-
tive. This shift in theoretical discourse provides both an opportunity and an
imperative to reconsider good remembering, and has helped determine the
discussions of accuracy and integrity that interest me.3
The “reconstructive turn” in memory theory rejects an archival picture of
memory, in which memory is depicted as the capacity to make detailed mental
representations of our experiences, and then to store these representations dis-
cretely and in some manner that allows us to call them to mind on subse-
quent occasions. A particular memory is then faithful insofar as it represents
a past experience in ways unaffected by factors subsequent to it. In the words
of Henri Bergson: “time can add nothing to its image without disfiguring it”
(1950, 95, as quoted in Ricoeur 2004, 25).
Reconstructive accounts stress instead the dynamic nature of memory
through two closely related theses. The first is that there are many different
influences on the content and format that together yield the meaning of our
rememberings, which influences derive both from the continuous reprocess-
ing of what we have learned, and from the specific circumstances in which
we remember. We gain new ways to conceptualize the past; we form general
or composite memories of repeated experiences; certain memories become
emblematic of ways of feeling, thinking, and living; the emotional valence of
memory shifts in response to changing experience; the occasions on which we
Sharing memory with others is a fundamental way of developing relationships with them, and
2
the ubiquity of this activity needs to be credited in accounts of recollection. See Campbell (1994),
Middleton and Edwards (1990a; 1990b).
3
The shift towards reconstructive models of memory is interdisciplinary in scope. My summary
of these models draws primarily on Campbell (2003; 2004), Haaken (1998), Hacking (1995), Loftus
and Ketcham (1994), Neisser (1982), Schacter (1996), Schechtman (1994), and Sutton (1998; 2004).
Reconstructive theorists often describe themselves as having replaced the archival model of memory
with a reconstructive model. I have argued that a description in terms of models of mind oversimplifies
the ways in which both archival and reconstructive activities are involved in people’s recollective activi-
ties (Campbell, 2004). In the present paper I simply want to allow that as much of our remembering
does involve reconstructive activity, we need norms for successful memory that takes this activity into
account. For an excellent account of the reconstructive turn, directed at non-specialists, see Schacter
(1996). For an important study that traces disputes about archival and reconstructive models back into
early modern philosophy of memory, see Sutton (1998).
remember contribute personal and social meaning to particular acts of mem-

ory; and the technologies, objects, rituals, and practices of the material/social
world are intimately intertwined with the many different ways in which we
might remember a time in our past. The related thesis, which begins to refer-
ence issues of value, is that memory change over time and occasion is a normal
feature of remembering. In the words of Ian Hacking: “there is no canonical
way to think of our own past” (1995, 89).
2.2. The Usefulness of Reconstructive Memory

The reconstructive turn is an opportunity to think about good remembering
because it has encouraged reflection on the usefulness of memory in relation
to the ways in which memories evolve. Marya Schechtman (1995), for example,
argues that developing a sense of self depends on the capacity of memories to
change as we age and accumulate experience. Schechtman is interested in the
kinds of memories that play a special role in self-constitution because they
provide relations to one’s life as a whole or to particular periods of one’s life,
and not just to single events. A composite memory of repeated episodes—
a memory that seems to represent one occasion but which in fact draws its
details from many similar occasions—may help us form a “comprehensible
[autobiographical] narrative which emphasizes the most significant factors
of past experiences and depicts general and longstanding patterns” (11). This
kind of common autobiographical memory does not reproduce specific past
events with precision and could not take its place within a broader ideal of
good memory characterized by the number and persistence of exact memories
of discrete events.
Richard Wollheim (1980), one of Schechtman’s philosophical mentors,
gives a subtle example of how the memory of a particular event, a memory
that is not composite, can also provide relation to one’s history as a whole.
Wollheim’s example again requires attention to the reconstructive dimension
of memory and introduces the role of emotion which will be important to my
discussion of accuracy. In relating memory of an adolescent quarrel with his
father, Wollheim writes:
I once again sense the rage, the despair, the self-righteousness like a bitter
taste in my mouth and those sentiments deriving from the past stay on
to affect my whole being and my future. . . . And yet [the memory] has
also compromised, in ways that could never precisely be identified, with
the man’s remaining feelings, sentiments, dispositions. The despair, the
self-righteousness, the rage that I experience when I remember my adoles-
cent quarrel with my father represent the whole of me up until now as well
as me specifically then. It is thus that the affective tone of a memory comes
to stand for a man’s past. (309–310)
Wollheim’s example shows that an important way in which we are guided by

the past is through the emotion in memory that both represents the signifi-
cance of the past, and, in its evocation, continues to give the past power. But as
the word ‘compromise’ suggests, the emotional valence of memory can subtly
shift in relation to what we come to know and do and how we change. Thus,
experiential memories come to represent our biographies more generally, and
bring us under their influence, as well as under the influence of the particular
events in them. The memory of a time of loss, while re-evoking grief, may also
gain overtones of resilience as it takes its place in a personal history where one
has struggled to overcome loss.
Wollheim’s attention is to the experience of memory as inner. More
recent work in embodied cognition should prompt us to reflect on how
the complex reconstructive character of memory is also mediated through
our use of objects. Cognitive scientists now argue that we “actively recon-
struct [environments] so as to support and extend our . . . problem-solving
abilities” (Clark 1997, 32). In Treasures: Stories Women Tell about the Things
that They Keep, the authors express special interest in objects that evoke
unresolved grief, as representing and containing “psychological work in
progress” for their owners:
This kind of memento is kept long after the pain it contains has been
worked through, so that its owner can see “how far I have come” and
remind herself of new meanings and understandings. Some objects thus
become tokens of both failure and growth. . . . [O]‌thers continue to pro-
voke sadness or anger about a life that might have been . . . or the loss of
an aspect of the self that has yet to be reclaimed. The remaining grief or
anger can be shut away with the artefact and taken out at times when its
owner feels able to work on the issues it embodies. (Cairns & Silverman
2004, xx–xxi)
The women of Treasures struggle to give appropriate significance to the
past, significance that supports how they go on in the light of particular
self-conceptions, through memories whose emotional meaning is shaped,
controlled, and integrated into their biographies via their use of keepsakes.
One woman says of a journal that she kept during a difficult period when she
struggled with the diagnosis of a serious chronic illness: “I think of it as a sort
of record, a year of days, of how I got through the first year, and the one after
that. I don’t really need it anymore. But I would be very sorry to lose it. It is
part of who I am now” (Cairns & Silverman 2004, 225). She remembers the
time of her diagnosis through reading a journal that has become an expression
of her endurance. Her achievement of a sense of resilience is expressed and
partly constituted through her relation to a memento that once may simply
have represented struggle and loss.
2.3. The Need to Rethink Successful Memory

Contemporary theory of autobiographical memory, exampled above, shows
that attending to memory’s function allows for a deeper understanding of
memory change. Work on the reconstructive dimensions of memory has at
the same time opened attention to the contexts of remembering, bringing
memory back into the world and encouraging us to look at the range of activi-
ties and objects remembering can involve. But I have also found reconstruc-
tive accounts an imperative to rethink value as they often fail to reconceive
faithful memory in ways that keep pace with their insights about memory’s
complexity. I have argued elsewhere that the very features that make human
memory such a valued possession, the capacity of our experience of the past to
shift and evolve in ways that track the changing significance of the past to our
present needs and knowledge, are now too often thought of solely as tenden-
cies to distort the past in memory, making norms of faithfulness seemingly
unattainable for normal recollection (Campbell 2004). Moreover, that the
meaning of memory is shaped by factors subsequent to the event remembered
has made rememberers vulnerable to the suspicion that we are too suggestible
to reliably testify to the past. The possibilities both of accurate recollection and
of recollecting with integrity have been challenged by the reconstructive turn.
In my view, scepticism about the very possibility of good reconstructive
memory usually betrays confusion in how memory is being conceptualized.
Specifically, theorists who dispute that memory can be understood on an ar-
chival model nevertheless continue to implicitly endorse the archival norm of
unchanging, detailed, reproductive fidelity to past particular events as the sole
standard for faithful memory. I will not remake that critical case here. I believe
the confusion evidences a deeper tendency to treat the cognitive success of
memory too independently of the kind of intricate discussions of memory use
and activity exemplified in the previous section. While reproductive fidelity
and the truth of declarative memory are often important aspects of faithful-
ness, a focus on the first may make the recall of images too paradigmatic of
memory, both over-individualizing it and preventing us from seeing the value
in how memory changes over time and in response to our need. Change is
also suspect if truth in memory is thought always to involve precise, detailed
correspondence to an originary scene. Attending solely to truth in declarative
memory, however that value is understood, may fail to capture the richness
of our experience of memory—the emotional content to recollection but also
the variety of activities through which we remember. Neither reproductive fi-
delity nor the truth of declarative memory seems adequate to how successful
remembering often tries to capture the significance of the past.
I find it notable that a common and natural language for discussing the rep-
resentational faithfulness of memory is in terms of accuracy. Accuracy has a
promising role in adjudicating the representational success of memory in ways

that acknowledge memory’s reconstructive character. Accuracy involves
selection. One might have a number of different but accurate representa-
tions of the same event, as one might have a number of different but accu-
rate maps of a particular locality. Change in memory does not rule out its
continued accuracy. Accuracy is also applicable both to kinds of represen-
tations that are truth apt and to those that are not. Expressions of memory
may fall into either category. A commitment to accuracy is compatible with
a commitment to the truth of propositional memory, but might provide,
as well, a standard for assessing a wider range of memory representations.
I propose that highlighting accuracy can help us think about faithful
memory. I have found Adam Morton’s (2002) investigation of an idea of
emotional accuracy particularly useful, and I turn to it below. Wollheim’s
(1980) work offers one rationale for consulting theory of emotion: it is often
the emotional meaning of memory which determines the significance of the
past to the present, and the affective side of memory is part of how we rep-
resent the past in remembering, not a quality of memory somehow external
to its representational character. I will return to this point.
3. Accuracy and Memory

3.1. Emotional Accuracy
In a recent symposium on the viability of “emotional truth” as a concept,
Morton (2002) argues that the standard for success in how we represent
the world through our emotional responses, their appropriateness to their
evoking situations, can be understood as something like accuracy. He does
not think our emotions are true or false of the world. In order to distin-
guish accuracy from truth, Morton (2002) investigates (a) representations
which can have a dimension of accuracy that does not depend on truth,
e.g., the observational accuracy of untrue theories (272–273); and (b) rep-
resentations where notions of truth at least do not straightforwardly apply.
A work of fiction may, for example, accurately represent a certain historical
period (268).
Morton is also interested in exploring the relation of accuracy to truth
for representations, like declarations, where the truth is clearly at issue.
He claims that accuracy does reduce to truth. Truths—“music is some-
times nice”—may be vague or overly general (265). We typically want more
finely differentiated representations of the world in order to speculate re-
sponsibly on the consequences of our beliefs and statements being true
(266). Accuracy is a notion of precision, adding “value to truth” (266–267).
Accuracy makes some truths worth having. Morton makes two suggestions
about what, in general, accounts for the precision of accurate representations.
He applies these suggestions to emotions; I argue that each also provides insight
into accurate recollection.4
3.2. Accuracy and Detail

Morton’s (2002) first suggestion is that accuracy depends on the number of
details of a representation that latch onto features of the world. Morton pro-
poses that one depiction of a situation will be more accurate than others if it
has more details that reference features of the situation. It will then do a better
job than its competitors of selecting that situation from other resembling situ-
ations (267–268). Morton proposes that if we think of emotional responses
as narratives of how we attend to environments, we see that we can assess
emotions for accuracy of detail. If my story of our love fails to reflect many
features of our interactions, it will fail as an accurate emotional depiction of
our relationship.
We do often think of accurate memory as very detailed recall, as symbol-
ized in the figure of Thurlow Weed, whose tenacious memory is discussed by
William James (1890/1950, 665–666). Weed had an ambition for politics and
so trained his memory, first by recalling to himself and then, for 15 years, by
relating to his wife Catherine, the details of his day—what he had for lunch,
the names of people met, and so on. Weed’s detailed recall of what he ate and
to whom he talked would presumably allow him to pick out one specific day
from a blur of resembling days. Precise, detailed recall as an explanation of
memory accuracy may seem to merely repeat the archival norm, and I have
questioned its adequacy. However, a closer analysis of Morton’s first suggestion
does give us deeper insight into good remembering.
The applicability of Morton’s first dimension of accuracy to memory makes
the minimal and uncontroversial point that truth is too limited an idea of
representational success for memory. This point stands even if we correct for
Morton’s overgeneralizations about the relation of accuracy to detail. Precision
involves the right selection of information; a wealth of detail is only a particu-
lar context-specific way in which precision might be achieved. Excessive de-
tail can, on some occasions, confuse the information we are trying to convey,
detracting from accuracy or at least adding nothing to it.
It is worth pausing then to ask why wealth of detail has been so firmly asso-
ciated with accurate memory. I may remember that something happened on
Tuesday because I recall only a few salient details that distinguish that Tuesday
from other days. But we do not know in advance what details we’ll require
for our mnemonic projects—e.g., will I need to distinguish Tuesday from
Wednesday or to distinguish two different conversations had on Tuesday?
4
Morton does not sharply distinguish the two dimensions of accuracy in his text, so I should be
taken as offering a particular reading of his account.
Noting our inability to predict what we will need to remember vindicates the
value of capacities for detailed recall. At the same time, however, it fosters the
insight that the importance of even very detailed recall is sustained by the fact
that good remembering consists in our ability to recall what is significant in
the context of our recollections.
That detailed recall supports accurate memory in many contexts should
not then lead us to conflate accurate memory with detailed representation.
Certain contexts may require a type of precision that involves extracting sa-
lient facts or themes from a morass of detail. In a famous study comparing
John Dean’s memory for conversations with Richard Nixon to the recordings
of them, psychologist Ulric Neisser (1982) concluded that Dean “gave an accu-
rate portrayal of the real situation, of the actual characters and commitments
of the people he knew, and of the events that lay behind the conversations he
was trying to remember” (142). Neisser does not, however, attribute Dean’s
accuracy to a facility for detailed recall. Though Dean thought he had an excel-
lent memory for detail, there was “surprisingly little correspondence between
the course of a conversation and his account of it” (142). Dean’s ability to get
“altogether right” facts about Nixon’s knowledge of Watergate depended on
Dean’s capacity for what Neisser labels “repisodic” memory. Dean was able
to extract “common themes that remained invariant across many conversa-
tions” (157–158). A recollection that takes the purported form of an episodic
memory—Dean’s memories took this form—can represent, typify, or drama-
tize such themes (157–158).
Neisser’s (1982) study may seem to vindicate the suspicion that reconstruc-
tive memory is inevitably distorted or inaccurate, but this reading would
presuppose that accurate memory requires the detailed recall of particular
episodes, conflating accurate representation with detailed representation.
Neisser, himself, argues that if we want conceptualizations of good remember-
ing adequate to the ways in which Dean’s testimony succeeded in “establishing
the real facts of the matter—the ones worth remembering” (139), then we must
complicate our notions of accurate recollection.5 Neisser complicates accuracy
by arguing that what is significant to the context has an ineliminable role in
specifying what counts as precise remembering. He argues that the norm of
detailed recall of particular episodes is an inadequate view of memory accu-
racy sustained, in part, by the structure of laboratory studies where the ma-
terial to be remembered “has no reference beyond itself ” (142), i.e., where
considerations of what is worth remembering do not enter into the evaluating
memory.
5
Neisser (1982, 141) notes that Dean’s memories were considered accurate, even when the tran-
scripts of the original conversations became available. No attempt was made in subsequent Watergate
trials to discredit Dean’s testimony.
I draw as lessons from discussing the relation of accuracy to abundant de-

tail that truth or veridicality is not sufficient to characterize faithful memory,
that determinations of accuracy require reference to the function of our rep-
resentations, and that while detailed recall of particular episodes is often im-
portant to faithful memory, it cannot be our sole model of accurate memory.
Neisser’s articulation of repisodic as contrasted to episodic memory attempts
to develop a more complex idea of memory success that, like Schechtman’s,
attends to the varying functions of recollection. Morton’s second suggestion
about accuracy is interesting when we think more specifically about the im-
portance of recollection in determining how we go forward.
3.3. Accuracy, Significance, and Response

Morton’s (2002) second suggestion tries to capture a dimension of accuracy,
independent of wealth of detail, that he believes is especially important for
successful emotion. I shall argue that it is equally important for memory.
Whether an emotion fits or is appropriate to its evoking situation will, claims
Morton, depend on whether the response rightly depicts the situation’s posi-
tioning within a broader context that includes what is actually the case but
also what possibilities are inherent in the context (272). This dimension of ac-
curacy, the accurate depiction of the possibilities of a context as a whole, is
crucially linked to the function of emotion in guiding action. Emotions are
patterns of environmental attention that direct and pressure acting, thinking,
and desiring, and their representational success is related to their purpose.
Morton’s point is best seen through illustration. He imagines a variety of
emotional responses that might be had by an engineer who is laid off by her
company, and parses them into two series. Here is a response from the first
series:
An engineer is laid off by her company. She realizes that the economic cli-
mate is not good for getting another job of the same kind, feels relieved that
she does not have to face more boring programming disguised as design,
and goes back to university to do an MBA. (269)
An example of the second series is:
An engineer is laid off by her company. She thinks of all the desired things
that will now never happen and is overcome with sorrow. She becomes very
unhappy at the fate of abandoned animals and cries whenever she sees a dog
walking without a leash or a non-fat cat. (269)
Morton claims that while the engineer might have a number of equally ac-
curate emotional responses to her situation, those from the first series are
more accurate than those from the second, that in the second series one has
to imagine the engineer “somehow misconstruing and misrepresenting . . . the
connections between events” in ways that distort possibilities for acting and
thinking in her present situation (270). For example, her response seems to
represent a connection between her being laid off and animal suffering; they
are aspects of the world brought into relation through her response but in ways
that are unclear and that give rise to desire—that there be no non-fat cats—
that cannot lead to successful action. But, as Morton writes,
emotions are action guiding, taking action in a very general way to include
strategies of thought. . . . They will not serve this role if they are unhinged
from the actual situation of the agent; and they will not serve it if they do not
respect what is actually possible and impossible, in fact what possibilities are
more or less remote. (271)
I am far more cautious than Morton about judging how well emotions fit their
evoking situations without paying equal attention to the norms of intelligi-
bility we use in evaluating others’ responses. Nevertheless I agree that there
are considerations of accuracy in our emotional lives. Because our emotions
select significance by limiting attention, often in powerful ways, we do and
should care that we are not somehow misrepresenting the possibilities of a sit-
uation through patterns of attending that lead to inappropriate or futile action.
Though notions of accuracy that apply to this type of significance—one that
maps out possibilities and directions for further response—are and should
be highly contestable, how we represent the world through our emotional
responses is challengeable by others. Such challenges often attempt to redirect
attention in ways that reshape significance and reconfigure possibilities. I want
to draw out three points about the relevance of Morton’s second dimension of
accuracy to an enlarged understanding of faithful memory.
3.3.1. Learning from Theories of Emotion

Morton’s account of emotional accuracy offers a methodological lesson to
memory theorists. An important feature of contemporary emotion theory is
that theorists have linked the representational success of emotions very clearly
to their function. They have been committed to models of evaluation that
are attentive to the fact that we represent the world through our emotions in
ways that make certain possibilities for thinking and acting more compelling
than others. This commitment is expressed in two ways. Thinking about the
function of emotions has been important in comprehending how they rep-
resent the world. Emotional responses can select possibilities and pressure
us towards certain kinds of action because they involve patterns of environ-
mental salience—the engineer sees neglected animals everywhere. Theorists
have thus moved away from the tendency to model emotions too closely on
beliefs or judgements. They have, however, been careful not to thereby move
away from ideas of successful emotional representation; they do not want to
repeat the idea that if emotions are not beliefs or judgements, then they are
somehow arational or irrational.6 They have instead tried to explore the com-
plex notion of appropriateness or fit, an evaluation sensitive to how we repre-
sent the world through responses that have a central role in guiding action via
framing attention.
Memory theorists need to bring a parallel sense of complexity to examin-
ing faithfulness. Reflections on the usefulness of memory have moved many
theorists to think about how we represent the past. They have abandoned
conceptions of memory as static or unchanging, and have, at the same time,
encouraged us to reflect on the complex of activities that count as remember-
ing—e.g., rereading a diary passage that depicts a difficult time and feeling a
sense of resilience. Yet these reflections have not sufficiently moved theorists
to analyze faithful memory in ways that do not easily reduce to veridicality or
truth. I have offered Neisser’s work as a notable exception to this claim.
3.3.2. Significance and Reconstructive Memory

The second insight I draw from Morton is that attending to the possibilities of
the context as a whole is important to the accuracy of psychological states that
have a key role in directing ongoing response. Recollective memory as well
as emotion can be assessed along this dimension of accuracy. There are many
circumstances of recall in which the pragmatic demands on memory clearly
delineate the significance of the past to the present, and whether we can recall
a certain fact, or experience, or what to do next determines whether we have
remembered successfully. But context does not always predetermine the sig-
nificance of the past to the present. Like emotion, recollective memory often
involves our grasp of patterns of significance that shape possibilities for how
we go on, and the patterns we find are challengeable by others. Part of what it
is to learn through experience is to be able to bring aspects of that experience
into relation with each other and with facts about the world, and to be able to
contextualize and recontextualize information, assessing its importance and
its implications in and for a variety of contexts. One way of challenging how
someone is remembering is to bring memories that may very well be true of the
past into association with what else was happening then, and with what is hap-
pening now. I shall show, using an example from contemporary Argentinean
memory performance, how this critical dynamic is meant to reshape memory
in ways that reconfigure possibilities for future response.
In “ ‘You Are Here’: the DNA of Performance,” Diana Taylor (2002) studies
the generational links between the performative strategies of those who pub-
licly remember the 30,000 individuals who were disappeared during the years
of the Argentinean Dirty War. The intricate ways in which these performances
6
For influential contemporary examples of this approach, see Rorty (1980), De Sousa (1987),
Greenspan (1988), and Calhoun (2003). De Sousa identifies Descartes’ theory of the passions as an
early version of this approach.
utilize body, public space, photographs, maps, and actions as modes of rep-
resentation strains the idea that any reflection on accuracy would suffice to
explain their force and success. I do, however, want to focus on one aspect of
a performance witnessed by Taylor. In 2000, when Taylor visited Argentina,
the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who for many years have walked in the Plaza
wearing the photo IDs of their disappeared children, had become less active,
and political memory performance had to some extent passed to the Children
of the Disappeared, HIJOS (Children for Identity and Justice Against Silence
and Forgetting) whose key performative strategy involves staging acts of pub-
lic shaming: escraches.
Escraches are large, “loud, festive, mobile demonstrations” designed to
target those perpetrators of the Dirty War who have not been brought to jus-
tice (Taylor 2002, 151). In the weeks before an escrache, the protestors re-mark
public space. They post maps reading “USTED ESTA AQUI”/“YOU ARE
HERE,” which show citizens their proximity to places where people were tor-
tured, and they erect street signs which incorporate the photograph of a per-
petrator and mark the distance to that person’s house. On the evening of an
escrache, the protestors parade through the street with music, banners, giant
puppets, “floats” of military pigs on wheels and placards with the photo IDs of
the disappeared. They lead participants to the perpetrator’s house, and mark
the person’s name and crimes in yellow paint on the sidewalk. On the evening
of Taylor’s attendance, the protestors used loudspeakers to induct the specta-
tors as participants, calling, “Neighbours, listen up! Did you know that you
live next door to a concentration camp? While you were at home cooking veal
cutlets, people were being tortured in those camps” (150). So the protestors
make spectators participants by critically engaging memory.
In mapping both where people were tortured and where the torturers now
live, the protestors remake Argentinean space explicitly as a place of memory,
of the past experienced from the standpoint of the present. Ricoeur (2004)
writes that
the specificity of testimony consists in the fact that the assertion of reality is
inseparable from its being paired with the self-designation of a testifying sub-
ject. The typical formulation of testimony proceeds from this pairing: I was
there. What is attested to is indivisibly the reality of the past thing and the
presence of the narrator at the place of its occurrence. (163)
In using “you are here” as a variation of the testimonial declaration “I was
there,” the HIJOS reposition spectators as testifiers and call on them to rewit-
ness the past in ways that more accurately depict its significance.
The protestors obviously mean to challenge spectators as well as perpetra-
tors about what they did or did not do at the time and about what they are
prepared to do now. I read this situation as involving a challenge to memory.
What is demanded is not whether the memories that one might have of events
at that time, cooking veal for dinner, are true of one’s past. Nor is the point
I think even that the spectators may be remembering the wrong details, and
that their memories somehow misrepresent the past for that reason. What
I take to be at issue is how one’s memories of the past allow one to under-
stand and connect experiences in ways appropriate to directing present and
future attention and response to the situations that evoke memory. The kinds
of memories one has of a time of political repression might, e.g., be detailed
memories of domestic life because attention to what was happening in close
proximity constituted forbidden knowledge. One might be now remember-
ing, as one was then living, in ways that restrict attention, and that prevent
one connecting one’s own experience to the experience of those who were tar-
geted in the Dirty War. More faithful memory might require bringing one’s
memories into relation with different aspects of experience at that time, with
what else is vivid to memory and what only vaguely recalled, and with what
one now understands about that time. What is clear is that the protesters, as
well as shaming perpetrators, call on spectators to rewitness the events of their
pasts in order to be appropriately guided by them. If we remember via stages
in our life marked as places—“when I was in college”—in remarking space,
the protestors re-periodicize memory, pulling our autobiographies into his-
torical time. Their challenge is part of a critical activity whose object is the
appropriate way to remember given that this activity shapes the possibilities
for how we go on. The HIJOS demand that spectators remember in ways that
are “sustainable in the face of an accurate grasp of the facts and possibilities” of
the context as viewed from the present (Morton 2002, 271).
3.3.3. Memory and Emotional Representation

But how does the critical dynamic described above actually result in memory
change? One might counter that the content of memory is after all the same—
that one remembers cooking veal and can call to mind doing so. In reply, we
can notice the direct relevance of Morton’s discussion of emotional salience to
memory. An important way in which memory evolves is through the emotion
with which recollection is imbued. It is likely that the spectators to the escrache
experience shifting emotions directed on the past through their re-induction
as witnesses. Contented, fearful, or shameful memories of cooking veal are dif-
ferent representations of the past. The affective shift in memory may reshape
what spectators find significant, instigate new patterns of salience that range
over both memory and the present environment, and open different possibili-
ties for response.
Wollheim (1980) uses the example that he does to make the comment that
even philosophers who have had a great interest in episodic memory have
paid little attention to the affective dimension of such memories. In some
recent influential work on memory, discussion of emotion has been limited to
how strong emotion, emotion in response to personal or public trauma, might
either enhance or distort what we remember, where memories are regarded

as a kind of representational content cordoned off from emotional meaning
(though not from the effects of emotion; see, e.g., Schacter, 1996, chap. 7). But
recollection is complexly cognitive, active, and affective, and emotions are
themselves rich in representational quality. The emotion through which we
represent the past is a significant component of recollective accuracy.
The reconstructive turn in theory of memory obliges us to think in a more
complicated way about accuracy as a value of faithfulness. In the remaining
sections I will connect accuracy to integrity in memory, continuing to show
how a more complex view of faithfulness puts us in better touch with the real
demands that rememberers confront.
4. Integrity and Memory

4.1. Integrity as a Personal/Social Virtue
In challenging spectators to rewitness the past, to remember it differently, the
HIJOS are obviously appealing to a sense of integrity about how we repre-
sent the past. The value of their performative strategies depends on its being
true that to have integrity as rememberers is in some cases to make an ef-
fort to remember a personal past differently. Yet some theorists have argued
that precisely because memory is reconstructive, we cannot guard against
systematic unwitting distortion of the past. As recent intense concern about
memory suggestibility has evidenced, reconstructive views of memory often
raise questions about the very possibility of integrity in recollection.7 The
resultant stress on integrity can be somewhat alleviated by asking, as with
accuracy, whether our conceptualization of a particular virtue is adequate
to what we know about memory. I shall argue that on one understanding of
integrity, reconstructive memory creates no new problems for integrity, but
simply directs our attention to responsibilities with which we are familiar.
I also argue that we need to see integrity as sometimes connected with accu-
racy in faithful recollection.
Cheshire Calhoun (1995) remarks that familiar philosophical conceptions
of integrity—whether understood as self-integration, or as fidelity to the
principles that define one’s identity, or as the ability to maintain one’s own
The assumption that reconstructive memory is the same thing as suggestible and unreliable mem-
7
ory is problematically evident in recent legal writings and decisions concerning women’s reports of
sexual harm. For example, in The Prosecutor v. Anto Furundzija, “the first war crimes prosecution in
which rape and sexual assault was the single charge” (Charlesworth & Chinkin 2000, 322), the Defense
charged several reasons that Witness A’s memory was unreliable, including that “her recall of events
and identification were reconstructions for postwar political activists and investigators” (Campbell
2002, 162). Noting that memory is reconstructive is offered here, as in many cases, as sufficient reason
that it should be judged unreliable.
judgements against influence—all miss a core value of integrity. Philosophers,

she argues, tend to regard integrity as a personal virtue, “intimately con-
nected with protecting the boundaries of the self—against disintegration,
against loss of self-identity, against pollution” by influence (254). Whether,
how, and with what autonomy we can remember our past puts a self at risk in
all these senses. Calhoun argues, however, that integrity is a personal/social
virtue that consists not only in one’s having a right relation to oneself, but also
to others. We value integrity—the importance of forming and exemplifying
one’s own point of view (250)—“because it is only within individual persons’
deliberative viewpoints, including one’s own, that what is worth doing can be
decided” (258):
None of us can answer the question—‘What is worth doing?’—except from
within our own deliberative points of view. . . . As one among many delib-
erators, each can only offer her best judgement. . . . [But] as one among
many deliberators who may themselves go astray, the individual judgement
acquires gravity. . . . Something now hangs for all of us as co-deliberators
trying to answer correctly the ‘What is worth doing?’ question, on her
sticking by her best judgement. Her standing for something is not just some-
thing that she does for herself. She takes a stand for, and before, all delibera-
tors who share the goal of determining what is worth doing. (257)
Although Calhoun applies integrity to the traditional area of judgement, her
words are apt to the fact that we share a past that we remember in highly
individual ways while having together to determine its significance. Integrity
as a personal/social virtue mirrors the nature of recollection as a complex
personal/social activity. Moreover, Calhoun says that “the more authoritative
or coercive the external demands,” or “the greater the risk of being held to
account,” the more intense “the integrity question” becomes (251). The author-
ity of others’ views of the past and questions of responsibility for its effects are
never far from us when we remember. The integrity with which we remember
has to do both with how we understand our own past in ways that contribute
to self-knowledge, identity, and the shape of personal responsibilities and pos-
sibilities, and also with whether others can rely on our memories not only for
what they do not know but also as a contribution to a social grasp of the sig-
nificance of a shared past. All these demands together form the circumstances
of recollection, not in the sense that we direct our recollections to meeting all
of them at all times, but in the sense that what and how we remember is an-
swerable to them. Finally, if the importance of integrity in memory is partly
grounded in how we contribute to other people’s grasp of the past, integrity is
an epistemic virtue that serves the complex notion of memory accuracy dis-
cussed in the previous section of this chapter.
I have argued that we must allow for some notion of rewitnessing in rec-
ollection. One of the demands of recollection is that we are prepared to be
critically attentive to the concepts, narratives, feelings, and self-conceptions

through which we experience the past. I now want to look briefly at some of
the other ways in which faithful memory implicates integrity. I draw both on
a roundtable of responses to the direction of public memory of September 11,
2001, and, once again on Taylor’s article, to show that integrity in memory is
an uncertain achievement, but one with familiar challenges.
4.2. Integrity in Reconstructive Memory

For the Autumn 2002 issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
the editors invited feminist artists, scholars, and activists from a number of
countries to reflect on the developing cultural memory of the attacks on the
World Trade towers. They recognized that writing memory would be problem-
atic, given the rapid change in events. Many of the writers who did contribute
reflected on the difficulties of remembering in relation to an “ever-changing
present moment” (Hirsch & Smith 2002, 14).
What is happening now is continuously determining of the meanings of
the past. Ann Cvetkovic (2002) writes: “I find it difficult to commit myself
to writing, especially because the temporality of journal publication means
that things will be different when this piece finally appears in print” (471).
We are accountable for what we have attended to as expressed through our
memory, but what we are accountable for and to whom cannot be determined
at the time that we attend. We can only do our best about this by being reflec-
tive about how our present moral attention selects the details of significant
memory. Susan Winnett (2002), writing from Germany about a right-wing
politician’s exploitation of women in Afghanistan to argue for Germany’s
participation in a military alliance, writes, “I remember to take cynical note
of when the likes of Laurenz Meyer remembers to remember the women of
Afghanistan” (462).
When Chana Kai Lee (2002) considers the way in which September 11th
is being remembered in the U.S. as an occasion to unite and protect democ-
racy, she comments from the outsider-within perspective of a black lesbian
feminist: “Something is at once incomplete and excessive about our ‘national’
memories. The political moment is hardly a democratic one for other historic
memories and reactions” (439). Lee’s terms ‘incomplete’ and ‘excessive’ chal-
lenge whether the direction of the public memory in which one’s own memo-
ries might participate is accurate to the possibilities of the context as a whole,
whether, in particular, it is being brought into association with the memories
and histories of those U.S. citizens who do not experience their country as
democratic. We are responsible for at least some of the ways in which our
memories reinforce or resist those of others since personal memories can
both exemplify and shape cultural patterns that foreclose on a wider grasp of
significance.
Others’ memories can always impinge on the way we remember, even when
our memories seem very personal. Lee writes:
In so many ways I am comforted that my earliest moments are personal ones
involving family. But since that moment, I have struggled daily as my pri-
vate memories have collided with the public memories of a wounded nation.
I find myself fighting the intrusion of national memories. (439)
People need often to decide whether to stand on memory, whether to try to
maintain the categories, associations, and feelings of their memories. But even
as we attempt to do so, the significance of the past becomes somewhat dif-
ferent as we find ourselves clinging to memory for comfort or experiencing
it as resistant. The shifting emotional valence to guarded memory is a deep
challenge to the possibility of an archival norm of unchanged recollection. We
often struggle with the emotional appropriateness of our most personal mem-
ories, asking, e.g., whether they are faithful or have become nostalgic in their
isolation. There are then complex questions about when to share memory and
when to try to insulate and protect it.
4.3. Integrity and Accuracy

The writers to the roundtable struggle for integrity in memory, for care in how
they form and exemplify their experience of the past through their contribu-
tions to the journal discussion. This care is focussed on what counts as signif-
icant detail and to whom, how memories take a wider context into account,
and the emotional appropriateness of memory, thus, is focussed on what I have
argued are dimensions of accuracy in memory.
When we deal with more complex notions of accuracy to which recon-
structive theories give access, we can see the close interweaving of integrity
and accuracy in a concern for faithful memory even in expressions that are
not truth apt. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo care to remember the past with
integrity. For example, they perform publicly as a mode of recollection be-
cause the political disappearance of their children requires public acknowl-
edgement. What I find particularly interesting in Taylor’s (2002) analysis is
her attention to the performers’ use of objects. Her specific interest is in how
the Madres’ wearing of their children’s photo IDs became an intergenera-
tional performance strategy transmitted to their grandchildren. The Madres
have worn the kinds of IDs used to mark people for disappearance, then often
destroyed by the military to try to obliterate the traces of the disappeared.
On Taylor’s astute reading, the Madres “turned their bodies into archives”
(160). “They literally wore the photo IDs that had been erased from official
archives” (155)—establishing lineage, affirming the identity of the disappeared
using their bodies as evidence. Performing these photographs appropriates
the notion of the archive as a place where certain people have the authority
to say what information is preserved and how, to whom it will be accessible,

and who can authenticate it as documentary proof. The performance is thus a
direct challenge to the epistemic authority of those who dominate public mem-
ory in Argentina by attempting to control the evidence of the past. The photo
IDs are also an expression of precisely what should be remembered. Taylor notes
that the use of the IDs is a way of resisting “surrogation”—the cultural process
of filling in loss by attempting to find satisfactory replacements or alternatives.
“The strategy of using photographs of the disappeared . . . is . . . a way of high-
lighting, rather than filling those vacancies created by the disappearance” (158).
The Madres convey that accurate memory of Argentina’s past requires specific
remembrance of each victim of the Dirty War, at least until each perpetrator is
brought to justice.
In Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams (2002) defends accuracy and
sincerity as virtues of truth: “you do the best that you can to acquire true beliefs
and what you say reveals what you believe” (11). Truth itself is an epistemic
value intrinsically related to both belief, which aims at the truth, and asser-
tion, as that action through which we convey information to others. Williams
argues that accuracy and sincerity have their status as virtues of truth because
of our need to share information. I have made a parallel kind of case for ac-
curacy and integrity as virtues of faithfulness: namely, their importance given
practices foundational to human sociability. On Williams’ account of truth and
truthfulness, one can have a commitment to accuracy without a corresponding
commitment to sincerity; there may be many reasons for asserting what one
knows to be false while caring, at the same time, that one’s beliefs are true. In
exploring faithfulness in memory, I have argued for a much closer relation of
accuracy and integrity.
5. Conclusion
Certainly one can have great integrity as a rememberer and misremember the
past. We are all imperfect rememberers. For the most part, Dean took great
care in how he remembered the events of Watergate. Yet, according to Neisser’s
(1982) analysis and diagnosis, Dean’s ego also led him to consistently exag-
gerate his own role in events. Finally, the functions of memory are complex,
and any occasion of memory may involve multiple personal/social purposes.
We often find that the requirements for faithful memory are in tension and
cannot all be met.
I am aware that we do not always remember well. My argument has been
that taking care to get the past right involves at least our implicit account-
ability to others and thus implicates our integrity. And when we attempt to
remember with integrity we are often concerned not just simply with truth,
but with complex dimensions of accuracy.8 The roundtable and Taylor’s (2002)
analysis offer public and political exemplifications of the interdependence of
these virtues, but I would hope that my investigation suggests more general
insights into faithful recollection. Recollection is commonly shared and our
autobiographies are always in historical time.9
The reconstructive turn in memory theory requires that we provide
accounts of memory’s faithfulness that do not reduce to always accessible,
unchanging, individual, mental representations of particular past experiences,
a norm that forces a sharp distinction between personal and social memory.
I have argued that a good thing about the reconstructive turn is that it con-
figures memory as responsive to the concerns of the present, and as respon-
sive to the ways that other people remember. The integrity people strive for in
recollection is best understood through a reconstructive view that credits our
responsibilities for grasping the significance of the past, and through a corre-
sponding account of the dimensions of accuracy that integrity in recollection
supports. Rather than undermining the possibilities of accuracy and integrity
in memory, an insistence on the reconstructive aspects of remembering opens
up our attention to the nature and complexities of these virtues.
8
The ways in which these virtues are taken to inform each other in recollection is evident in our
critical vocabulary for memory. To criticize recollection as suggestible, nostalgic, mythic, or as exhibit-
ing historical amnesia is to call into question both the accuracy and integrity of that memory. For an
interesting account of mythic memory, see Sarat (2002).
9
For a complex and intelligent set of reflections on the relations among individual and social mem-
ory, history, and moral responsibility, see Poole (2004).
{ 3 }
Memory, Truth, and the Search for Integrity
In a reflection on the rapid emergence of memory studies as an interdiscipline,

Susan Radstone identifies three linked aspects of contemporary memory
research that place it at the heart of many political debates: “Its urgent and
committed engagement with various instances of contemporary and histor-
ical harm, its close ties with questions of identity—and, relatedly, with iden-
tity politics—and its bridging of the domains of the personal and the public,
the individual and the social” (2008, 32). This thematic configuration requires
renewed attention to the epistemic value of memory claims—their status as
true or accurate. Expressed memory of harm often demands a political re-
sponse, especially so when the harm is linked to membership in a vulnerable
or marginalized group. Yet recognition of the multiplicity of social influences
on our changing experience of the past can cast significant doubt on the re-
liability of persons’ claims to have been harmed, and on the very integrity of
selves formed, in part, through remembered experience of harm. Such doubt
became intense during the “false memory debates” of the 1980’s and 1990’s
when many women’s claims to have remembered child sexual abuse came
under intense public, legal, and theoretical scrutiny. It was alleged that the
inappropriate suggestions of therapists caused vulnerable women clients to re-
interpret their childhoods through a narrative of repressed abuse, searching
for its signs. This quest was said to have resulted in widespread false memories
of abuse where no such abuse had occurred, and in self concepts shaped by
illusion.1
I am grateful to the editors and to Jan Sutherland for many useful comments on earlier drafts
of the paper. [First published as “Memory, Truth, and the Search for an Authentic Past” in Memory
Matters: Contexts for Understanding Sexual Abuse Recollections. Janice Haaken and Paula Reavey (eds.).
New York: Routledge, 2010: 175–195.]
1
For a range of different perspectives on these debates see Brown et al. (1998); Campbell (2003);
Haaken (1998); Hacking (1995); Loftus and Ketcham (1994); Ofshe and Watters (1994); Pope (1996);
Schacter (1996). For an extensive list of resources, see the WEB bibliography maintained by John
Sutton: http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/Recoveredmemory.htm
Memory, Truth, and the Search for Integrity 51
This chapter does not re-enter these debates but engages their legacy. We
scrutinized memory in a context of public alarm about potential false accusa-
tions of serious harm. Our distrust of the social dimensions of memory, of
how others influence the ways in which we re-experience our pasts, may not
have been remedied by changes to therapists’ practice, and it may continue to
threaten inappropriately the credibility of those vulnerable to harm.2 I chal-
lenge memory theorists to recognize that we have not yet bridged the indi-
vidual and the social in ways that deal adequately with excessive skepticism
about memory. There are obviously many occasions on which it is sensible to
distrust the reliability of our recollections. Nevertheless, in order to avoid a de-
structive skepticism about a fundamental source of knowledge, we also need
ways to understand the basic compatibility of our memories being true to the
past and often shifting interpretations of this past.
In what follows I examine and support a recent attempt by Paula Reavey and
Steven Brown (2006) to develop a framework that can credit both the reality
and interpretative dimensions of child abuse recollections. The theoretical ap-
proach advanced by Reavey and Brown (2006), supported by a close reading of
survivor narrative, is important for two reasons. First, while the authors work
in psychology, they make use of theory from a variety of perspectives and dis-
ciplinary orientations, including work of social remembering, feminist writing
on gender and power, and philosophical reflection on the nature of time. They
offer an exemplary text in memory studies that displays the importance of
interdisciplinary facility to new ways of conceiving epistemological questions
about memory. Second, Reavey and Brown attempt to dissolve the purported
tension between truth and interpretation in memory through a complex and
sophisticated account of the dynamics of our self-constitution as agents. Their
work suggests that bridging the individual and social requires rethinking the
nature of the self.
I argue that Reavey and Brown’s framework would be further enriched by
incorporating philosophical work on truth and accuracy. As I show below,
2
Although I cannot prove this assertion, it seems to me a plausible one. The assumption that social
dimensions of remembering are sufficient in themselves to raise strong concerns about memory re-
liability was still problematically evident in the mid to late 1990’s. For example, in the first interna-
tional war crimes prosecution that focused solely on rape and sexual assault (The Prosecutor v. Anto
Furundzija), the Defense gave several reasons that Witness A’s memory was unreliable, including that
“her recall of events and identification were reconstructions for postwar political activists and investi-
gators” (Campbell 2002, 162). Noting that memory is reconstructive is offered here, as sufficient reason
that it should be judged unreliable. In a quite a different context, Indigenous Canadians’ reports of their
traumatic experiences in government sponsored Indian Residential Schools were often suspected to
have been the result of picking up exaggerated ways of describing their experience from sharing memo-
ries with other students. As these experiences were difficult for students to talk about, and many said
they were doing so for the first time, there were no compelling grounds for this concern. The kind of
skepticism about influence generated by controversy over women’s purported abuse memories seemed
easily transferable to this different context. See Donnelly (1998).
memory theorists have often adopted an instrumental attitude towards truth

in memory. That is they have regarded truth as only important given the goals
of specific recollective contexts; they have, moreover, sometimes suggested
that truth easily gives way in identity projects. This chapter attempts to fortify
Reavey and Brown’s account of the self with Michael Lynch’s critique of instru-
mentalism about truth. Lynch examines the role of truth in autobiographical
contexts, arguing that a commitment to knowing the truth about our lives
is a necessary part of the other values that we strive for in self-constitution
(Lynch 2005). His work supports Reavey and Brown’s own attempt to explore
the compatibility between the reality and interpretability of the past via a more
complex and adequate model of the self. These authors direct our attention
to the ethical dimensions of self-constitution, and challenge us to grasp the
necessary interdependence of epistemic and ethical values in our attempts to
move forward through a remembered past. I propose that neglect of this value
of interdependence can lead to a destructive skepticism about memory—one
with troubling political implications.
I first present Reavey and Brown’s account of the contemporary tension be-
tween truth and the kinds of interpretive activity that signal autobiographical
memory and trace a compelling articulation of this tension in key writings
from the false memory debates. I then move to a discussion of the nature of
truth as a value, its place in memory research, and its relation to our autobio-
graphical projects.
Deconstructing the Forensic Self
Reavey and Brown offer a reading of survivor narratives that seeks to illu-
minate how a survivor of child sexual abuse negotiates memories of abuse
and victimization in the context of shaping her ongoing identity as an agent.
They consider how this identity project registers a contemporary tension in
our conceptualizations of memory. The tension is now a familiar one. The shift
to a social reconstructive model of remembering stresses the multiple inter-
pretability of the past. This interpretability seems hard to reconcile with the
idea of true or accurate memory that is linked to an older model. Western
theorists, arguably since the time of Plato, have tended to conceive of memory
as the storehouse of an individual’s experience, preserved as durable and dis-
crete representations, “experiences . . . laid away for later retrieval in their orig-
inal form” (Schechtman 1994, 6). I am interested in how Reavey and Brown
frame the tension in terms of an underlying view about the indeterminacy or
determinacy of the past, and the ramifications of this framing for an account
of the self.
A social reconstructivist approach to memory emphasizes that we often
remember with others in complex relational settings, causing the project of
clearly demarcating individual from social memory to give way (Halbwachs

1992/1925; Middleton and Brown 2006; Mitzal 2003, ch. 4; Prager 1998; Sutton
2008). As children, we learn to remember through activities of joint reminisc-
ing with our caretakers that foster close relationships through encouraging
shared perspectives on the past (Fivush 1994; Hoerl and McCormack 2005;
Waites 1997). As adults, we continue to co-construct autobiographical mem-
ory. Those with whom we have shared experience add details to our narratives;
friends, colleagues, or therapists offer interpretations of our actions that re-
shape our experience of the past; we often use resources for constructing a per-
sonal history made socially available in the very context of recollecting; and we
inevitably use social narrative schemas that impute a certain causal structure
to the events we relate (Campbell 2003; Engel 1999; Haaken 1998; Hacking
1995; Middleton and Brown 2005; Middleton and Edwards 1990; Schacter
1996). Because of the various and repeated ways in which we might revisit an
occasion, the “past is not given once and for all in a particular memory, but
may be manifested in multiple and often contradictory recollections” (Reavey
and Brown 2006, 180). Reavey and Brown note that “this relative indetermi-
nacy of the past,” our multiple and contradictory recollections of it, has led
many theorists to contemplate that “the question of the true accuracy of recol-
lections” is “less important than understanding the effects that a given version
of events has on the present” (180).3
Yet Reavey and Brown point out that the reconstructive model remains un-
comfortably positioned against the older storehouse model of memory. The
storehouse model remains entrenched in key institutions that can aid the sur-
vivor in managing a traumatic history, in part because they credit the reality
and impact of abuse as evidenced through her memory (Reavey and Brown
2006, 180). Law and some approaches to therapy assume there is a determinate
meaning to the past, a true or accurate representation of what really happened,
credentialed as such by the fact that memories are impressed directly on our
consciousness by our experience of the events remembered; they are not con-
stituted, even partly, by post-event influence. Put somewhat differently, Reavey
and Brown see both projects as committed to what they term “the forensic
self ” (183)—the idea inherited from John Locke that memories are caused by
our experience of the past and constitute a continuous self, conscious of and
thus responsible for its past actions, a “forensic” self capable of law (Locke
1961/1706, 171). David Middleton and Steven Brown comment that on Locke’s
account, “to be a person is to be endowed with a chain of successive memories
that map out what we have seen, what we have done, what we are” (Middelton
and Brown 2005, 180). One consequence of this view of the self is that, pro-
vided we speak sincerely, the accurate representations of the past recorded in
3
In this chapter, I focus on multiplicity. I believe that genuinely contradictory recollections are quite
rare and that when assertions really are contradictory, only one can be true.
memory allow others to trust our accounts of this past. The forensic self seems
one apt for disclosing the nature of the past to others.
We need further explanation, however, of why the past should not allow of
multiple descriptions through memories that are all nonetheless true. Reavey
and Brown locate the key point of conflict in memory models as one of deter-
minacy/indeterminacy that seems to correspond to conflicting possibilities for
truth in memory, and it is worth pausing to ask about this connection. Why
might we think that the idea of a determinate past, contrasted to a multiply
interpretable one, supports truth in memory? Determinacy is a complex and
ambiguous notion. The idea of a determined state directs our attention back-
wards to cause. But when applied to representations, the idea of “determinate”
always carried implications for meaning, implying that meaning is fixed and
will not change. I take Reavey and Brown’s understanding of determinacy in
the context of discussing memory models to carry both these senses. The store-
house model represents memories as not only caused by the past, but as sin-
gular and stable in meaning as a reflection of what we assume to be the nature
of the past itself. If the past has a singular meaning, the mere fact that I might
remember it in many different ways seems to jeopardize truth in memory. We
might otherwise consider that there are several true readings of a past event.
Legal systems have the task of assigning liability and penalty for actions
that fall under determinate categories of harm, like sexual assault. It is at least
understandable that law would rely on a determinate meaning to the past, and
on memory testimony as its direct and transparent representation.4 It seems
odd that the interpretive project of therapy would be similarly committed to
determinacy rather than encouraging a range of perspectives on one’s past.
Reavey and Brown note that in the case of the trauma survivor, in particu-
lar, therapists have often assumed that the singular truth of the past, the pain
of trauma as given in memory, whether or not this memory is accessible to
consciousness or dissociated or repressed, determines the identity of the sur-
vivor in the present (2006, 180–81). Fundamentally, however, it is the forensic
self—both supporting and supported by the storehouse view of memory—that
requires our memories to have stable meaning. If we just are the memories that
our past delivers, the coherence and stability of the self must be found in the
character of our memory. Historically, unstable, shifting, gappy, or contradic-
tory memories have been taken to indicate the presence of a disturbed self, of
fragmentation, dissociation, or other psychopathology (Hacking 1995).
The tension between the interpretability of the past and our seeming need
for its determinate meaning, as reflected in long-standing commitments to
the forensic self, reached a point of crisis during the false memory debates.
The identity of someone who has survived traumatic harm may present as
Legal theorists, however, have certainly turned attention to reconstructive views. See, for example,
4
Campbell (2002), Sarat (2003).

extraordinarily fixed and marked by the memory of trauma—identity as a

seeming testament to the forensic self. And as Reavey and Brown point out,
therapy may reinforce this sense of determined identity. But it was, in fact,
the very investigation of survivor memory that gave considerable theoretical
impetus to a cross-disciplinary consensus about the reconstructive nature of
memory (Sutton 2004a).
Two particularly powerful and influential texts, devastating for the forensic
self, were Janice Haaken’s Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of
Looking Back (1998) and Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality
and the Sciences of Memory (1995). These texts deconstruct the forensic self as
expression and evidence of interpretive dynamics of memory. Haaken argues
that the seeming singularity and determinate meaning of memory manifest
in some survivor narratives is in fact evidence of a particular reconstructive
process at work. She elaborates a theory of transformative remembering as a
process in which certain social narratives—for example, a feminist narrative
of the devastating impact of child sexual abuse—come to have “superordinate
explanatory power” (1999, 16) in our reinterpretations of a personal past.
Hacking offers a history of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) as a diag-
nostic category that supports Haaken’s insights about the power of social nar-
rative. For many years, MPD was regarded as a severe dissociative response
to child sexual abuse. A significant number of therapists contended that those
who suffered from MPD would only become reintegrated as continuous, co-
herent selves by recovering their memories of the trauma, that “memories
of early cruelties are hidden and must be recalled to effect a true integration
and cure” (Hacking 1995, 20). They assumed a forensic self as the model of
self-stability. Hacking argues compellingly that because we remember human
actions through concepts and narrative schemas supplied by our present,
recall is always as much redescription as recovery of the past:
It is rather that the multiple finds or sees the cause of her condition in what
she comes to remember about her childhood, and is thereby helped. This is
passed off as a specific etiology, but what is happening is more extraordinary
than that. It is a way of explaining oneself, not by recovering the past, but by
redescribing it. . . . The past becomes rewritten in memory, with new kinds of
descriptions, new words, new ways of feeling, such as those grouped under
the general heading of child abuse. The events as described, which the mul-
tiple in therapy comes to feel as the cause of her illness, did not produce her
present state. Instead, redescriptions of the past are caused by the present.
(1995, 94)
On Hacking’s account, memories are not the key to the self by virtue of being
caused by the past. Rather memory gains meaning through acts of interpretive
self-creation in the present that often misunderstand their own character.
Haaken and Hacking’s analyses stress the illusion of the forensic self5 involved
in autobiographical projects, problematizing the extent to which our ways of
remembering are compatible with self- and social knowledge. Yet both their
projects are guided by ethical/political concerns that direct us to the importance
of such knowledge. Haaken’s critique of the hegemonic edge to abuse narratives
is deeply political: she believes that the kinds of transformative rememberings of
victimization that have sometimes characterized feminist consciousness-raising
projects can oversimplify aspects of women’s choice and agency that are required
in a liberatory politics. Hacking’s account extols the value of self-honesty as a
part of our “best vision of what it is to be a human being” (1995, 267), even if
he is skeptical and pessimistic about its attainment. The tension between true
and reconstructive memory recurs as an internal point of difficulty in recon-
structive approaches motivated by the ethical/political imperative of adequate
self-knowledge. I contend that our response to this imperative requires confron-
tation with skepticism about truth in memory.
Whatever one’s assessment of some of the very complex dimensions of the
false memory debates, one of their effects was to fortify a theoretical con-
sensus about the reconstructive nature of remembering in the context of a
growing social skepticism about the epistemic fidelity of women’s projects of
self-constitution. Some of the most publicly influential voices in these debates,
for example, forensic psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and sociologist Richard
Ofshe, explicitly encouraged this skepticism (Loftus and Ketcham 1994; Ofshe
and Watters 1994), and women who suffered sexual abuse have certainly felt its
effects, in, for example, the increased legal scrutiny of their therapy relation-
ships (Busby 1997; Bowman and Mertz 1996; Campbell 2002), and in responses
to their disclosures or suspicions of abuse (Brownlie 1999; Williamson 1998).
Lynch describes skepticism as the “Janus face” of a concern for truth (Lynch
2005, 29), provoked in part by the very critical practices in which we engage in
trying to ascertain the truth (see also Williams 2002). There is no easy remedy
to a skepticism that comes from a deep suspicion about the reliability of a core
area of knowledge and our knowledge of the past is especially vulnerable. The
past is beyond the reach of our perceptual checking and it requires no great ef-
fort to find inaccurate histories or autobiographies. The false memory debates
gave impetus to interdisciplinary collaboration on memory. Theorists came
together from neurobiology, psychology, the social sciences, and humanities,
and many turned attention to issues of suggestibility and memory distortion.6
Critical as these concerns are, an equally important legacy of the debates will be
As far as I can determine, neither Haaken nor Hacking use the words “forensic self ” in their texts.
5
The topic of distortion, for example, was chosen for first sponsored conference of the interdisci-
6
plinary Harvard Center for the Study of Mind, Brain, and Behavior in order to encourage academics to
contribute to public debate. Contributions are in Schacter (1995).
our ability to develop epistemic approaches to memory that are sensitive to the
momentum of skepticism, and can respond effectively to unwarranted doubt.
Reavey and Brown suggest two possible courses of response to the ten-
sion they isolate, each of which answers skepticism in a different way. The
first strategy, which they reject, affirms the importance of interpretation over
truth in autobiographical memory, mollifying skeptical anxiety by downplay-
ing the importance of truth in self-constitution. Though I shall argue that this
response is both unstable and inimical to our projects of self-constitution,
examining its role in the memory research yields important insights about
models of truth in memory. The second strategy contends that reconstruc-
tive remembering is compatible with truth, self-honesty, and self-knowledge.
I take Reavey and Brown to be exploring this strategy and I argue that we can
think about truth in ways that fortify this response. It is important to note that
both strategies reject the forensic self: the claim that we are the memories that
our past delivers. Our choice is not whether to reject the forensic self but how.
Truth in Memory Research
In the last chapter of Rewriting the Soul, Hacking asks if we can simply be util-
itarian about the importance of truth in autobiographical memory: “What is
wrong with mistaken memories that do no harm?” (1995, 258) Mistaken mem-
ories might after all serve our goals as well or better than true memories. The
former might bring us happiness or self-stability. Hacking is made deeply un-
comfortable by the suggestion that we should only care about true memories
when there is an instrumental reason to do so; that is, when true memories
would serve our goals better than mistaken memories or fantasies. What is
perhaps surprising is how reasonable and unremarkable this instrumental lens
on truth is for many memory theorists. The idea that we should be modest
about epistemic demands on memory is not simply the consequence of recent
reflection on issues of indeterminacy, but has a broader base in the traditions
of memory research, its division of labor and discourse of function.
I note that the discussion of epistemic value of memory typically takes place
not in terms of truth but rather the associated value of accuracy. There seems
to have been little direct attention to the differences in these terms, and they
are most often simply used interchangeably. Adam Morton suggests that we
typically use “accuracy” to describe representations that are both true and pre-
cise (Morton 2000), where what counts as precise will depend on the context
in which the representation is being assessed.7 It is a natural vocabulary for
7
For example, remembering truly that I left my glasses somewhere last week may be sufficiently
precise to be accurate if I am deciding whether to keep searching my office, but hopelessly vague if my
objective is to actually recover them.
a science of memory where the amount of detail to recall is often an impor-

tant part of how good memory is assessed. The contrasts offered for accurate
memory—memory as false, distorted, or a good story—show that memory
theorists take accuracy to presuppose truth, and for the purposes of this chap-
ter, I follow most theorists in using the terms interchangeably.
James Wertsch contends that “a major divide in memory studies” (2002,
31) is marked by an interest in different functions that correspond to different
criteria for good remembering. Individualist studies of memory in empirical
and cognitive psychology have tended to focus on accurate representation
as the function of memory, “the standard against which empirical results are
measured” (32). Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been more
concerned with theories of memory “in rhetorical or political processes con-
cerned with identity and a usable past” (32). Wertsch warns against a simple
opposing of functions, saying they tend to operate in tandem “vying for posi-
tion in any particular instance of remembering” (31). Yet, although theorists
of social memory may not believe that accuracy is completely unimportant,
Wertsch notes that they do “view memory as being sufficiently committed to
an identity project that the notion of accuracy can be downplayed or sacrificed
in the service of producing a usable past” (33).
The tendency to affirm the importance of one kind of value over another
given different functions of memory is common in our current interdisci-
plinary conversations. For example, at a 2006 symposium on the conceptual
foundations of individual and collective memory, the participants were asked
to provide preliminary statements on a number of issues, including the im-
portance of accuracy in studying memory. Most tied the importance of accu-
racy to memory function. Here is a sample of the response: “This depends on
which type of memory performance we study. For some memory tasks in daily
life, accuracy is crucial (e.g., Where did I put my keys? When does my plane
leave?). For other tasks, it is much less important whereas aesthetic, symbolic
and other communicative values of memory may be central and cause mem-
ory distortions at the level of accuracy [sic].” “The answer here is unequivocally
ambiguous: It depends. . . . Accuracy matters in many contexts. A good story
matters more in other contexts.” “It depends on the situation, particularly
the person’s goal.” “Accuracy matters if accuracy helps individuals and social
groups deal with current life circumstances. Otherwise it is not so important.”8
I want to highlight three contestable assumptions that help diagnose this func-
tional approach.
The first is that accurate memory is of only instrumental value. Accuracy
is important, for example, when the function of memory is to represent past
8
The symposium was “Individual and Collective Memory: Conceptual Foundations,” May 12–14,
2006, Washington University in St. Louis. The remarks on accuracy are, respectively, by Dorthe
Berntsen, Roddy Roediger, Larry Jacoby, and Michael Ross.
actions, events, and places in ways that make possible our negotiations of pre-
sent environments. The relevant contexts are often exampled through our
ongoing daily quotidian needs to remember names, dates, directions, tasks,
and the location of objects (Where are my keys? What time does my plane
leave?). Other functions of memory may not require true and detailed rep-
resentations of the past, but, rather, a good story. We might reinforce group
cohesion and identity by misremembering the rain, the bugs, and the petty
resentments of our recent trip, co-affirming instead that for all of us, every
moment was enjoyed. Lynch writes that “we care about [instrumental goods]
for what they can do for us” (2005, 10). When Wertsch and most symposium
participants easily contemplate that whether memories are true or accurate
can be downplayed given our objectives, they treat truth as an instrumental
good. Instrumentalism about truth is not our only option. Lynch, who I dis-
cuss below, regards truth in our representations as a non-dispensable value
“worth caring about for its own sake” (16).
The second assumption is that we can understand accuracy by isolating it as
a value and researching it in a context sealed against the complicating nature
of interpretive projects. To note that memories can be subject to different stan-
dards of functional assessment may seem to place our interest in truth and
accuracy in the context of a broader discussion of the value of memory. This
seeming placement is illusory. The history of empirical memory research has
fragmented our inquiry into value through narrowing the context of investiga-
tion so as to exclude the interpretative dimensions of rememberings and the
values that might be at stake in such contexts. According to Haaken, classic
positivist memory research assumes “that there is an objective reality that can
be established and consensually verified, independently of the subjectivity of
the observer” (1998, 43). This assumption is enacted in the experiments by
minimizing interpretability—the past is rendered objective and verifiable
through a list of what is to be remembered. The significance to people of the
events remembered, and the contested interpretations that attend this signif-
icance, are rendered irrelevant to the study of accurate memory through the
structure of these experiments (Neisser 1982).
Third, the development of classic memory science has failed to dislodge
an assumption about how memories come to be true that is at the core of our
discourses of memory legitimacy. It is common for theorists to hold that we
form true perceptual beliefs through causal interaction with the objects of
our environment, as long as conditions are present for our perceptual mech-
anism to operate reliably (Lynch 2005). For example, we must be near enough
to objects to see them clearly. Memory has often been understood on analogy
with perception (Warnock 1987), and classic memory experiments encode
this understanding. Namely, memories are made reliably true by our causal
interaction with a piece of the world—words on a page, for example—as long
as we are in the right conditions for that process to be reliable, as long as we
minimize interpretability. The experiment presents what is to be remembered

not only as fixed and stable but as available for perceptual checking. There is
little space for engagement over what the past was really like or about whether
we can ever ascertain what it was like. The classic empirical study of memory
has ceded theory of interpretation to the humanities and social sciences while
commandeering truth. At the same time it has entrenched a picture of how
memories come to be true that is inadequate to interpretive contexts, and
makes it difficult to talk about true and interpretive memory.
The symposium answers illustrate that although memory research is in-
creasingly sophisticated and interdisciplinary, the indexing of truth or ac-
curacy to function continues to be offered as an accommodation to the
complexity of memory. But when we use a functional approach to memory as
the ground for a discussion of value, we need to recognize that remembering
in ordinary contexts is a complex and multidimensional activity. A remember-
ing may, all at once, help me to negotiate my environment, contribute to an
ongoing self-narrative, and be an act of identification with others, supporting
a particular social identity as my own. I may add to or contest a social grasp of
events, either intentionally or accidentally. Moreover, my expressing memory
typically licenses others to take what I say as a source of testimony about the
past. The multi-functionality of memory, its unstable potentiality as testimony
and history, makes the willingness to downplay truth in interpretive contexts
a problematical resolution: “There is no way of sticking to everyday truths and
no more” (Williams 2003, 12).
I believe that the commitment to truth or accuracy as of merely instru-
mental value too easily licenses the thought that these are unimportant values
in many memory contexts. This thought is reinforced by a research history
that isolates truth through its methods of testing and so fails to see truth’s
interconnectedness to other values. But at most I seem to have argued that be-
cause memory is unpredictably multi-functional in ways that implicate truth,
that truth is an instrumental value of memory in most or all contexts; it is in-
strumental but indispensable. In the next sections I read Reavey and Brown’s
rapprochement between truth and interpretation through the lens of Lynch’s
defence of truth as a non-instrumental value to show that witnessing our re-
spect for truth enriches an account of self-constitution.
Truth and Self-Constitution
Reavey and Brown ask whether the “truth of an event (i.e., child sexual abuse)
can be positioned alongside its transformation in the present” (2006, 183). Their
exploration of the compatibility of truth and interpretation rightly argues that
our memories do not have to be fixed and singular in meaning, as is suggested
by the storehouse model, to bear witness to the reality of the past. This section
will support their contention. The theorists invoke Henri Bergson’s model of
the continuous flow and progression of our experience as an option to thinking
of lived time as a linear series of time phases each of which can bear meaning
independently of those that follow. Instead, a past event will gain its meaning
and character in the context of a continuously evolving life, and will have com-
plex significance within that life: “a given recollection is always partial . . . it fails
to exhaust the manifold sets of relations it can potentially bear on the totality of
ongoing experience” (190). The past, then, is not determinate.
Hacking points out that our most significant memories are of what we or
others do, and that it is in the nature of action to be interpretable (1995, ch. 17).
How we might describe an action may change given the context of description
(Haaken 1998), the accumulation of effects, or the evolution of our conceptual
frameworks. Yet Hacking worries that the indeterminacy of action complicates
our accounts of agency and responsibility. Reavey and Brown contend that
acknowledging indeterminacy is a necessary enrichment of our grasp of agency.
Bergson’s account directs attention to how explicit recollection can “extract” a
partial and contextually relevant perspective on the past from the flow of du-
ration. A child sexual abuse survivor must cope with the harm in her past in
ways that allow her to go forward as an agent. In analyzing a survivor’s narration
of this process, her attempts to understand her present agency through reflec-
tion on past responsibilities and choices, Reavey and Brown exemplify strategies
through which we “tame” the past through recollection (2006, 190). At the same
time, the narrative shows how the very indeterminacy of the past, its legitimate
interpretability, can form the heart of intelligent self-reflection.
In the first excerpt, taken from interviews with women survivors of child
sexual abuse, the narrator, Sara, uses spatial features of the environment of
abuse to construct and consider dilemmas of choice she may have faced as
a child:
I used to go and stay with my grandma, for most weekends, because my

mother was having a hard time with my two brothers, and she used to cross
me over the road, for me to go and visit these people who lived across the
road, and it gave my grandmother a break in the afternoon. Er, and it was at
this house where it happened. (Reavey and Brown 2006, 191)
As the narrative progresses, crossing the road comes to symbolize the com-
plex issue of whether a child has choice and responsibility. Sara describes how
important it was for her to give her grandmother a break although she didn’t
want to cross the road and be subject to abuse. Sara could proceed to the play-
ground angering her mother and frightening her grandmother, or she could
“cross the road”:
But at 6 years old, do you think all those things, I don’t know, I mean I think
children are quite responsible, aren’t they, in many ways, they feel they’re
responsible for choices, and things, they do ask questions, but you know,
I didn’t want to be a naughty girl, really I wanted to do the right thing. (192)
Reavey and Brown comment that “the working up of choice . . . through the
spatial distribution of objects is a significant feature of establishing coher-
ence in retrospect” (193). In more recent work, Reavey and Brown (2007),
and Reavey (Haaken and Reavey 2010) have continued to explore the material
environments through which people articulate memory in order to forefront
the complex and ambivalent ways in which sexual abuse survivors understand
their own past agency. My own use of Sara’s narrative, in the discussion that
follows, focuses on the specific issue of her struggle for integrity, and what that
struggle might tell about the nature of truth as a value.
The complicated issue of how to understand a child’s agency is by no means
resolved through the coherence that Sara establishes, which rather structures
the past as an occasion for self-reflection. In the second excerpt, Sara pur-
sues the issue of child agency and responsibility by imagining what different
groups (i.e., men and women) might say about a sexually abused child who
later becomes promiscuous and sexually active. Though Sara wants to know
“that the child had no choice” (195), she imagines that men’s and women’s per-
spectives on this will differ. Men will be more likely than women to straight-
forwardly affirm that the child had no choice. Here again, now through use
of different social perspectives, Sara renders her past intelligible and apt for
self-reflection in a way that highlights rather than forecloses the interpreta-
bility of action.
It may be that Sara comes to a quite definite resolution about her degree of
agency as a child. What I take Reavey and Brown to be encouraging is our rec-
ognition that memory does not transparently deliver the meaning of behavior
or desire. Self-reflection is the hard work of interpreting our own and others’
behaviors and of apportioning responsibilities. Our status and self-conception
as agents is vested in this capacity. Moreover, the agentic project of reflection
on responsibilities involves much more than determining whether we could
be blamed, praised, or excused for particular choices. Although it is common
to think of responsibility as a backward looking issue of praise or blame, many
theorists have pointed out that there are equally important forward looking
senses that involve taking responsibility for people and situations (Card 1996;
Walker 1998). I can choose to be the person who takes care of particular oth-
ers, or who makes myself accountable for how the people around me are far-
ing. In reflecting on her mother’s and grandmother’s needs and burdens, and
in saying that children feel responsible not only for choices but for “things,”
Sara engages the issue of the responsibilities to her mother and grandmother
that she may have undertaken. She wants to know what was true, not only of
those choices for which others might hold her accountable, but also of her own
commitments.
Bergson’s model of experience eliminates the idea of an originary memory

impression that acts as the stable, singular meaning of a time or event. The
significance of the past is multiply and diversely constructed through the dy-
namics of recollection. Lynch would argue that the multiplicity of perspectives
is in itself no threat to accurate memory. He points out that our descriptions
of the world are context responsive and utilize many different kinds of concep-
tual resources depending on the context (2005, 41–44). Memories represent
different maps for the same area of the past. Allowing multiple diverse descrip-
tions of an event is no concession to a destructive relativism about truth as
long as we acknowledge “that not every story of the world is true” (41). “It is
the way the world is that matters for truth” (11).9 I will return to a more spe-
cific concern about moving the vocabulary of truth into highly interpretive
contexts that I find in Reavey and Brown’s text. I first consider how Lynch
makes room for the importance of truth in self-interpretive projects through
challenging our assumptions about this value.
Sara is committed to grasping what’s true of her past as required for
self-understanding. For Lynch, her narration exemplifies one of the key projects
for which our need to know what’s true is of more than instrumental value: the
very project of self-constitution. “One of the things that makes you plausibly
the kind of person you are is the nexus of commitments, beliefs, principles,
and so on that constitute what you care about. This nexus of commitments
might be called yourself, in a certain sense of that word” (145). The narrator’s
knowledge of what she cares about is partly constitutive of her sense of self. To
have an intelligible sense of self is a fundamental good, the ground of our other
projects, and Lynch stresses that knowing what one cares about is not simply
one means of attaining a sense of self, it is an important part of what it is to have
one. Seeking what’s true about one’s own commitment is thus of more than in-
strumental value (124). Further, Lynch goes on to propose that having a sense of
self is itself a constitutive part of other deep values. It is “essential for a certain
network of attitudes we need to have towards ourselves” (123). Lynch’s account
investigates the relation of truth to self-respect and authenticity. My own in-
terest is in the narrator’s struggle for integrity.
Recent feminist accounts of integrity have stressed that it is both a per-
sonal and social value, formed in how we narrate our lives and commitments
to others (Calhoun 1995; Walker 1998). Margaret Urban Walker, for example,
argues that it is both for moral purposes and “purposes of intelligibility
over time that we read and reread actions and other events backwards and
9
Lynch grants that truth is difficult to define partly because it is such a contested concept. However,
he believes that we all share a fundamental understanding of it, and have since the time of Aristotle,
as an interest in trying to make sure our representations of the world correspond to what the world is
really like. Aristotle famously remarked that ‘to say of that which is, that it is, and of that which is not,
that it is not, is true” (quoted in Lynch 2005, 11).
forwards, weaving them into lives that are anything more than just one damn
thing after another” (1998, 110). Walker hypothesizes that we interweave three
types of stories—stories of relationship, identity, and value—in order to shape
a self that can live “responsibly a life of one’s own” (110), in other words a
life that has integrity. Each story line is evident in the narrative that Reavey
and Brown discuss. To understand her commitments, the narrator must, for
example, reread and reflect on her relationships with her mother and grand-
mother, their “developed expectations, [their] basis and type of trust” (111).
Her interpretation is imbricated with reflection on her own identity, on “what
she cares for, responds to, and takes care of ” (112). Narratives of relationship
and identity inform each other:
The narratives of relationships I sustain, the way I combine and order them,
the continuations I find more valuable than others, the losses I am willing to
accept or impose, are controlling structures of the moral life that is specifi-
cally mine, even when its matter includes an unpredictable lot of demands
that originate with others with whom I’m connected by history or occasion.
(Walker 1998, 112)
Finally, Walker contends that these two kinds of narrative thread require the
support of a third, a story of our shared understandings of “the moral terms
themselves” (110). The narrator’s reflections on the notion of responsibility
“span and support” the relational self she reads into her past (113).
In Reavey and Brown’s analysis, Sara interprets her childhood through
memory to help determine her present agency. The sense of self and the
moral understandings described, though nascent and tentative, are impor-
tant to the narrator’s capacity to make her life her own in a fashion that sus-
tains a central virtue of agency: integrity. Such integrity consists in the ability
to shape a self-constituting narrative that integrates who one is in particular
with one’s accountability to others (Walker 1998, 115–120). Lynch and Walker
would emphasize, moreover, that our shared moral understandings of integ-
rity require our commitment to truth: that we do not deceive ourselves or
others about who we are and what we stand for.
My argument has not been that the narrator holds an accurate memory of
her past. I cannot know that she does. Rather the way she rereads her past can
help us see that seeking the truth of one’s past is importantly interrelated to
other values in the very kind of interpretive identity context in which many
memory theorists are willing to downplay the importance of getting the past
right. To understand truth in these contexts, we must also move away from a
simple perceptual model of how our memories come to be true.
In countering skepticism about the possibility of truth, Lynch contends that
we must not only give up the idea that truth is a merely instrumental value, but
also the assumption that all beliefs come to be true in the same way. “When
it comes to beliefs about the physical world around us . . . it is likely that the
truth of [a]‌belief is realized by its being causally responsive to some bit of the
concrete world. . . . But even so, this doesn’t mean the job always gets done in
the same way” (99). The truth about what we care about is, for Lynch, an illus-
tration of why we need a more complex account of how certain beliefs come
to be true.
First, in clarifying what we care about, the concepts and standards that we
use in interpreting action and types of responsibility will be social ones. The
objectivity of our self-interpretations will be answerable to how our commu-
nities apply social and moral concepts such as responsibility. While standards
will be contestable, there will be clear applications and clear misuses of the
terms. Second, how I represent myself is never simply an act of description but
is always creative of who I am: “the self that answers questions about who a
person is . . . is both expressed and created by the process of self-representation”
(Flanagan 1996, 69–70. Quoted in Lynch 145–46). Lynch remarks that the cre-
ative aspects of self-constitution do not mean that we can make our identity
“out of whole cloth” (146). There are many constraints on what we can truly say
of ourselves that range from verifiable facts about us to our ability to respond
to others’ challenges to our self-perceptions; we can make mistakes about what
we care about, what we are committed to (146). I agree with Lynch but want to
make a more particular point about memory.
We cannot make our memories out of whole cloth. It is a condition of my
remembering an event that I experienced that event. Yet, the articulation of
the self, including its expression in memory, is always forward looking and our
self-representations are made true partly by how we go on to act. The narra-
tor’s memories of the nature of her relationship with her grandmother at a cer-
tain time—that she cared about her grandmother’s need for a break or that she
wanted to be good girl and not a naughty one—are responsive for their truth
to ways in which she acted subsequent to the time remembered. In this way,
what we remember about our actions, commitments, and responsibilities can
never simply be caused to be true by interactions with the world at that time
and in the absence of post-event influence. How we determine what commit-
ments we have had and have now reinforces Reavey and Brown’s Bergsonian
approach to lived time, where “the character of a given region of the past
becomes reconfigured by the ongoing expansion and extension of experience”
(2006, 189). To remember an action or event is to be carried beyond that time,
and to be shaping a sense of self that is as much commitment as description.
Our self-constituting memory narratives may involve plural perspectives on
our past; our accounts and moral understandings will be contestable by others;
and our self-perceptions will be forward-looking, tentative truths seeking fur-
ther confirmation in how we go on to act. Nevertheless, Lynch insists that if we
give up thinking that truth is merely instrumental, singular, free-standing as a
value, caused in one way, representing a mind-independent reality, or requir-
ing certainty, we will have gone a long way towards making room for truth in
these narratives. Moreover, we will see that indifference to truth is not compat-
ible with our care for the integrity of the self.
Our Responsibilities to Rememberers
Lynch’s expansive and complex defence of the importance of truth to our

projects of self-constitution is a powerful challenge to skepticism about its
possibility. Lynch requires us to systematically isolate and interrogate the
assumptions that seem to render truth unattainable, rather than complex and
contestable. I have attempted to mark assumptions in the history of memory
theory that block truth from a place in interpretive contexts. I want to conclude
by briefly taking up two challenges to my own optimism about the compati-
bility of truth and interpretation in memory. I respond to both by noting the
responsibilities we may have as witnesses and interpreters of others’ memories.
The first challenge involves my promissory note to address what I read as
Reavey and Brown’s concern with moving the vocabulary of truth into inter-
pretive contexts. In considering survivor narratives, the theorists acknowledge
our concern about the facts of the past but allow that the resources we use to
shape its significance can compromise the literality of memories. For example,
recognizing the narrator’s symbolic use of the road should lead us to accept
that the physical environment may have been slightly re-organized to give
expression to her dilemma of choice. Reavey and Brown’s negotiation of the
tension between our need for literality and our ability to grasp the symbolic
use of representations is contextual and nuanced. How we remember reflects
the influence both of present needs and of discursive contexts. They thus pro-
pose that a survivor might express memory with a high degree of determinacy
and literality in the context of a forensic inquiry; “however, on other occa-
sions . . . it is perfectly plausible that the same experience might be reconfigured
and extracted in a less determinate manner” (190). I believe they are right to
stress our willingness and ability to credit the distinction between occasions.
But Reavey and Brown carefully shift from talk of truth on the latter kinds of
occasion to that of our license to assume the reality of the events described.
I want to firmly keep truth for interpretive contexts, in part because I have
insisted that remembering is a multidimensional activity that may always con-
tribute to a social grasp of the past. We need to collectively shape, respond to,
and judge the social and moral significance of past events. We must thus take
responsibility for the hermeneutical skills that allow us to epistemically assess
memory without always insisting on its literal presentation.10
I should not be read as suggesting that we enlist different ideas of truth, for example, forensic
10
versus personal truth or historical versus narrative truth (Spence 1984). Adverting to varieties of truth
often sets up a situation in which so-called personal or narrative truth becomes, politically at least, the
I do not think that Reavey and Brown would reject the above suggestion.
But it may lead to a deeper worry: namely, that the hermeneutical skills that
we have have led reasonably to the skepticism I resist. As Bernard Williams
reminds us, skepticism is provoked by the critical practices that help constitute
our concern for truth (2002). We might take the analysis of narrative remem-
bering in Haaken and Hacking, for example, as evidence of the power of the
social narratives to inevitably compromise our integrity as rememberers, com-
pelling us to remain skeptics about the compatibility of truth with interpreta-
tion. I do not read Haaken’s argument in this way, and will indicate why as a
way to return to my initial dictum that we should think about how we want to
give up the forensic self. Do we downplay the importance of truth in autobi-
ographical contexts suspecting it is unattainable, or insist that reconstructive
remembering is compatible with self and social knowledge?
I have argued in previous writing that a number of theorists during the
false memory debates presented women sexual abuse survivors as having little
regard for the truth of their memories (see Campbell 2003).11 I was partic-
ularly disturbed by some representations of women during these debates as
so suggestible as to be incapable of a commitment to truth. I contended that
we cannot hope to arrive at a reasonable view of memory if we start with a
distorted view of rememberers. Lynch’s account requires us to interrogate the
assumptions that make us skeptical about the possibility of truth, including
assumptions about the moral character of rememberers. The narrator in Reavey
and Brown’s text may be wrong about her past, but unless we assume that she
cares about the truth we cannot credit her with aiming at self-knowledge or
integrity. We are not always willing to credit particular individuals with caring
about self-knowledge or integrity. But it was this kind of failure of credit to
women as a group, I contended, that helped fuel a destructive skepticism about
memory in autobiographical contexts. Our respect for others requires that we
credit them with a sense of integrity about their pasts, even when we recog-
nize the difficulties of achieving self-knowledge. I thus reject the strategy of
devalued side of a dichotomy—not really truth at all. See Loftus and Ketcham (1994) for this devaluing,
and Waites (1997) for an articulation of concerns like mine. Lynch’s account does not offer different
kinds of truth, but asks us to take on the complex task of assessing the truth of different kinds of repre-
sentations. I believe that this view puts complexity and responsibility in the right place.
11
I was particularly critical of the writings of Loftus (Loftus and Ketcham 1994), Ofshe (Ofshe and
Watters 1994), and some members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in this regard. I also
raised concerns about the representation of women in Hacking’s account (Hacking 1995). Chapter 5 [in
Campbell 2003], in particular, develops the argument that both historically, and at present, our theories
of memory reflect our beliefs about the character of rememberers. I recognize that many people read
these particular debates differently than I did. For a range of views, see note 1, above. My concern about
respect is a general one that has application to a broad range of political contexts in which group vul-
nerability to harm is at issue.
downplaying the importance of truth. I believe that unless we recognize its

importance to people, we will not understand the difficulties they may face in
their projects of self-knowledge and self-constitution.
Haaken’s analysis positions women as struggling to articulate what’s true of
their experience within particular political circumstances. Her work resituates
some of the difficulties of self-knowledge as an issue of social responsibility tied
to the fact of oppression. Haaken writes that “for all oppressed groups, emanci-
pation involves struggling to achieve a more authentic account of the past, out
from under the dominant, repressive accounts of the powerful” (1999, 14). In
other words, oppressed groups find themselves in circumstances of a kind of epi-
stemic injustice: “the injustice of having . . . significant area[s]‌of one’s own expe-
rience obscured from collective understanding” and from self-understanding
(Fricker 2006, 100). Haaken’s account is concerned, for example, with the daily
intrusions and violations that women have lacked a vocabulary to articulate,
and to which, she argues, incest narratives powerfully respond.
Such circumstances of epistemic injustice give rise to certain moral risks
for oppressed groups, including the risk of developing narrative resources
that oversimplify the past and compromise the integrity of self-constitution.
Haaken’s analysis of narratives makes these risks clear and calls on oppressed
groups to give them more attention. But for the argument of this chapter, what
is also important to see is that we cannot even get a grip on this distinctive kind
of injustice, and our responsibilities to help ameliorate it, unless we believe
that those who are oppressed are trying to get at the truth of their experience.
{ Part II }
Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity

{ 4 }
Inside the Frame of the Past

Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity
The Northwest Resistance was remembered in many traditional European

ways with medals, monuments, and naming opportunities. First Peoples
remember the conflict with their own customs.
Text panel from the Canadian War Museum Royal Canadian
Legion Hall of Honour used with permission of the Canadian
War Museum
1. Introduction
A critical resource that cultural and political diversity brings to a community is

that of different and often oppositional perspectives on that community’s past.
These perspectives offer the potential epistemic enrichment of a more accurate
grasp of collective histories, and their acknowledgment offers the potential po-
litical enrichment of conceptions of community that reflect rather than suppress
heterogeneity of membership and relation. Yet dominant representations of the
past, even ones that we might think of as discredited, can remain surprisingly
compelling for dominant groups, and their persistence raises issues of how op-
positional perspectives can be constituted effectively enough to have an impact
on how a community experiences its past.1 I contend that to support oppositional
I owe thanks to Richmond Campbell, Lea Caragata, David Checkland, Nancy Daukas, Rockney
Jacobsen, Christine Koggel, Duncan Macintosh, Letitia Meynell, Jan Sutherland, and Alison Wylie
for conversations that helped me develop the paper’s themes. Michelle St. John (The Turtle Gals
Performance Ensemble) kindly corrected my memory of some lines from The Scrubbing Project.
John Sutton drew my attention to the relevance of work by Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack,
and Christoph Hoerl was kind enough to immediately e-mail me their study. Letitia Meynell, Susan
Sherwin, Seetal Sunga, and Jan Sutherland provided valuable and detailed feedback to an earlier ver-
sion. [First published in Embodiment and Agency, Sue Campbell, Letitia Meynell, and Susan Sherwin
(eds.). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009: pp. 211–233.]
1
Susan Babbitt (2005) has raised the challenge of how we can be said to truly understand others’
pasts if our knowledge of these pasts makes little difference to our identities or the directions in which
72 Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity
perspectives, we need to grasp how we share in the work of making others’ pasts
meaningful without this activity assuming prior common experience, perspec-
tive, or sensibility.
This chapter explores performance theory as one resource for under-
standing how we participate in others’ experiences of the past. Recollection
is often publicly expressed and shared among those who do not share a past.
Thus, when people remember, they often direct the imaginings of appreciators
who may not share a past with them but who become participants in recol-
lective activities.2 I argue that as audience to memory performances, we make
important contributions to how the past can be remembered. Our imaginative
engagement can both facilitate or thwart the intentions of particular acts of
memory, and fortify or undermine the resources that others need to re-expe-
rience their pasts in ways that meet their present needs and interests, including
those of challenging dominant views of the past.
Sections 2 and 3 assert the social nature of recollection and introduce the
importance of performance theory to its analysis. Using performance theory is
one way to meet the demand of contemporary memory theorists that we con-
ceive memory more dynamically and more relationally. Performance theorist
Diana Taylor writes that performance “places us within its frame, implicating
us in its ethics and politics” (Taylor 2003, 33). I am particularly interested in the
capacity of performance theory to highlight the importance of communicative
uptake to the constitution of memory meaning and to how we form relation-
ships over the past. In sections 4 and 5, I focus on Taylor’s contention that the
meaning of memory performance is in situ and dependent on its audience.
Section 4 examines the dynamics of reanimating the past for one another
in conversation. Even in circumstances where the past is not shared, such
reanimation can create an environment of relationships, objects, and prac-
tices—“a potentially habitable world”—that invites imaginative participation
(Middleton and Brown 2005, 122). As audience, we engage emotionally and
kinesthetically in others’ memories, a process of self-imagining that puts us
inside the frame of alternative views of the past, affirming or contesting their
values. But while Section 4 addresses the importance of audience appreciation
to the meaning and success of memory performance, the conversational ex-
ample I use focuses on memory engagement where participants arguably share
a social imaginary, easing their way into the memory.
Section 5 considers a Canadian First Nations theater performance before
a diverse audience in order to widen the scope of my analysis. As a white
Canadian who attended, I consider the possibility that my participation in
others’ reanimations of the past can fortify the resources of a social imaginary
we act. This chapter attempts to model a kind of experiential understanding of others’ pasts that meets
her challenge.
2
I take the notion of following others’ directions for imagining from Walton (1990).
Inside the Frame of the Past 73
other than my own; and I move beyond straightforward recollection to con-

sider the creative reanimation of a past through which one such imaginary
is offered. I show that audience engagement can help enable a shift from the
dominant social imaginary as conflicting frameworks for memory interact in
the imaginations, emotions, and bodies of audience members. Thus, I suggest
that the performative and relational approach to memory that this chapter
explores illuminates important possibilities for thinking about projects of
sharing memory in diverse communities.
2. Recollection and Relationality
Propelled by studies of memory from a variety of theoretical orientations,

researchers in the sciences and across the humanities now stress the dynamic,
embodied, reconstructive, and social nature of human recollection.3 We
remember selectively and in response to the demands of the present and fu-
ture; we remember with others and in response to their perceptions of the past.
Though memory theorists have by no means abrogated the project of grasping
how the mind retains information, they have increasingly turned attention to
the contextual factors of memory’s occasionings—to the where, why, how, and
with whom we remember—as necessary to explain our sophisticated memory
capacities and as contributing to the meaning of recollective events.
The turn to present context in the study of the recollected past acknowledges
a complexity to memory that has a number of ramifications. The one I wish to
highlight is the importance of sharing memory to thinking about the nature of
recollection. Even the most rigorous of memory scientists use the metaphor
of time travel to convey the complex temporal experience of a creature who
learns to live in a present, self-consciously, with and through its past (Schacter
1996, chap. 1; Tulving 2002, 3). This type of self-consciousness involves sophis-
ticated cognitive abilities that are initially shaped in contexts of family or group
reminiscence. Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack argue, for example,
that episodic memory requires attending to the past in ways “that grasp the
causal significance of the temporal order in which events happen” (Hoerl and
McCormack 2005, 279),4 particularly the understanding that later events “can
change the effect of earlier ones” (270). Their research suggests that it is through
the activity of joint reminiscing that children develop the causal-temporal rea-
soning necessary for episodic memory, as their caretakers direct their attention
to the significance of the sequencing of past events: that though first the child
3
For useful overviews of current interdisciplinary trends in memory research, see Sutton (2002)
and Wertsch (2002).
4
The philosophical import of Hoerl and McCormack for theorizing social memory is discussed in
Sutton (2006).
hurt his finger, because then his father put a bandage on and kissed it (chang-
ing the significance of the child having hurt himself), after that there was no
reason to cry. An aspect of the research of particular interest to its authors is
that to learn this type of reasoning is to be at the same time engaged in a kind
of social interaction that fosters mutuality, as it is the development of a shared
outlook on the past, a shared perspective on the significance of events, that
facilitates the child’s ability to grasp the import of temporal sequencing (Hoerl
and McCormack 2005, 282).
To reframe their point to my purpose, the importance of memory to rela-
tionships is interwoven with the development of our memory capacities
and memory experiences. Studies of joint reminiscence, such as Hoerl and
McCormack’s, focus on what seems to be clearly shared past experience, such
as a family event or outing, where reminiscence takes place among those who
were all present at the event, and can or do remember it under a particular
description. Such examples may lead us to believe that having experienced the
same past in roughly the same way is the prior condition of joint reminiscence.
However, the authors offer a more dynamic picture. It is through the child’s
coming to experience and sequence the past as encouraged to do so by another
that the occasion becomes one of joint reminiscence through the participants’
development of a shared perspective (Hoerl and McCormack 2005, 282).
I contend that if we think about it at all, we will readily affirm that in adult-
hood sharing memory continues to be one of our most significant kinds of
interpersonal engagement—one that shapes and reshapes our experience
of the past, and thus who we become through the forming and negotiating
of relationships with others. We do not know how different or shared our
pasts will seem, even as to how we describe events, until we attempt to share
memory. An expectation of joint reminiscence can become the sharing of dif-
ferent pasts. You and I may sit beside each other at a meeting and conclude
recollectively that we were at quite different events. The significance of the
remembered event may, in fact, shift again for each of us as we recognize the
contrasting distinctiveness of our experiences, and our failure to find a com-
mon perspective may forestall our inclination to talk about how we remember
the event. There is an inverse dynamic as well. Events are part of larger events
and collective identifications are often contextual. In sharing distinct autobi-
ographies, we may find common perspectives and identifications that cause us
to harmonize the scope of events toward moments of joint reminiscence. We
may jointly reminisce about a strike, though we were on different picket lines,
or the war, though we fought in different theaters.
In other words, what my past is, the descriptions under which I remember
and re-experience its events, is partly the unstable consequence of continu-
ously sharing memory with others. I have elsewhere used the term “relational
remembering” to capture the thought that we are often deeply involved in
each others’ experiencing of the past (Campbell 2003). How the events are
experienced may depend on prior identifications—a child is perhaps disposed

to remember a past as encouraged to do so by a parent—and sharing the past
can shape or disrupt our identifications. I understand psychologists David
Middleton and Steven Brown to be making something like these points when
they call memory “the site at which the singularity and collectivity of experi-
ence intersect” (Middleton and Brown 2005, 15), and the self “a movement that
is continuously refracted back through the stabilities it creates” (viii). Like me,
Middleton and Brown are interested in how we move into engagement with
others’ pasts. They say that to understand the complexities of this activity “we
need to get a handle on the complex and often ambiguous forms of experience
that are central to how remembering is performed” (14).
In what follows, I draw out the significance of the language of performance
for recollection. Performance theory has recently turned its attention to mem-
ory, and in the next two sections I look at everyday cases of recollection, in-
cluding a developed example from Middleton and Brown, to show how the
tools of performance theory can enhance an analysis of relational remember-
ing. But performance theorists have also been specifically concerned with the-
orizing the possibilities of oppositional agency (Roach 1996; Taylor 2003). In
the final section, I shall suggest that performance theory is one way of examin-
ing how we might share a past with others whose experiences may be opposi-
tional to our own, as well as the kinds of mutuality and identification that may
be possible in that encounter.5
3. Performing Recollection
Performance theorists study what we might think of as traditional staged per-

formance—for example, theater and dance—and train the methodological
tools used for doing so as a lens on the significance of social behavior (Taylor
2003, 3). They have revealed how our reiteration of forms of embodied beha-
vior, such as the postures and activities of femininity, incorporate or induct us
into dominant practices, norms, and identities, for example, those associated
with being women in our culture (Butler 1990; Case 1990). Because perfor-
mance theory turns its attention to what its theorists refer to as “restored”
behaviors (Roach 1995), behaviors that we learn, adapt, and transmit from our
5
I use the language of relational rather than social memory in this chapter. I prefer with Middleton
and Brown “to deliberately blur the boundaries between the individual and the collective, between
what is held in common and what is most intensely personal” (2005, vii). Even when accounts of collec-
tive memory are formulated so as to accommodate diverse interpretations and valuings of a collective
history, they tend to index the idea of shared memory to the idea of preexistent subgroup affiliations.
Thus, they often position us as locked in group contest over the meaning of the past. A performative
account of relational memory may be a more optimistic aid to projects of sharing memory in diverse
communities.
cultural repertoires of how to sit, eat, gesture, and so on, it has been an impor-
tant tool for theorists interested in the type of social memory that might be
thought of as tradition. For example, in the widely referenced How Societies
Remember, Paul Connerton studies how commemorative performance works
to conserve and transfer values intergenerationally. He argues that disciplin-
ing bodies to perform ritual movements, such as kneeling in submission or
laying a wreath in respectful remembrance, which, if performed correctly,
enact the value, is essential to such transfer (Connerton 1989). Subsequent
performance-minded theorists have flagged as foundational Connerton’s
claim that accounts of social memory require an analysis of embodied “acts of
transfer” (Hirsch and Smith 2002; Middleton and Brown 2005; Taylor 2003).
I contend that we can give performance theory wider scope in an analysis of
memory than its role in explaining the embodied conservation and transfer of
tradition. What we lack are theoretical vocabularies for conceiving of recollec-
tion as a primarily relational activity, and the analysis of memory as perfor-
mance can compel this focus.
Theorist Diana Taylor describes performance as the live embodied com-
munication of information in the here and now, a description I adopt for
this chapter (Taylor 2003, chap. 1). Performative activities, for Taylor, thus
include theater, dance, and ritual, but also political protest, acts of testimony,
the teaching of skills, and conversation. Taylor’s performance theory has a
natural affinity with memory studies. She writes that through performance,
“forms from the past” can be animated and “experienced as present” (24). She
suggests that to understand how this is so, we must look beyond the idea of
a cultural past conserved archivally to think of our embodied repertoires of
skills, movements, and shared modes of expression; our social scripts and
ways of embodied relating; and the material spaces in which our interactions
take place. Taylor says we might begin to get at the performative qualities of
our interactions by interpreting them through the theatrical lens of a sce-
nario: attending to the material environment and the information encoded
within it; to aspects of communication through movement; and to “the social
construction of bodies in particular contexts,” all of which may be necessary
to a grasp of what is being communicated by the performance (28). Finally,
Taylor contends that the meaning of performance is in situ and dependent on
its audience: “As participants, spectators, or witnesses, we need to be there,
part of the act of transfer” (32). She writes more provocatively that “the sce-
nario places us within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics” (33).
Taylor’s account of performance first seems to me apt for reframing quite
ordinary occasions of recollection. The sharing of memory through prac-
tices of recollection is a performative activity. It is live embodied commu-
nication to an audience in the here and now. As our capacities for episodic
memory require that we learn special skills of attending to the past (Hoerl
and McCormack 2005), sharing memory with others requires that we learn to
direct their attention to episodes in the past as we have experienced them. We

reanimate the past for others, shaping salience through choice of detail, mode
of expression, gesture, emotional tone, and the sharing of objects and place,
and they participate in and help to shape our recollective scenarios.
I recently went hiking with a colleague in the Nova Scotian woods.
Attending to the material environment and his embodied presence and move-
ment within it were important to sharing his past—the granite boulders where
we rested and the vistas that I followed the turn of his body to locate became
the setting of his valued recollections. He had walked and run over the un-
even ground so often that he moved without conscious attention to where he
stepped. I was aware of walking with someone who had been there many times,
and my attention to his embodied ease and familiarity with the trail helped me
to experience it as part of his past. My own presence shaped his experience of
the past into which I was drawn, as many of the people who became present
to him as we walked, those who had accompanied him on past hikes, were
people that I knew as well. It was easy to move into joint reminiscence about
them. My being there, part of the act of transfer, contributed to how, who, and
perhaps why he remembered, as he tried to make me comfortable in an unfa-
miliar environment by drawing me, at the same time, into a comfortable world
of mutual friends.
To think of memory as the stored psychic record of episodes now beyond
the effect of time, place, and context on their meaning takes us far away from
the kind of daily recollection among intimates I have just described through
the lens of a performance scenario. But I also want to explore whether per-
formance theory allows us to enter the more challenging domain of thinking
of how we shape relationships through coming together to share the memory
of more unfamiliar pasts. To adapt language from Maria Lugones, we can be
more or less “at ease” in each others’ world of recollection. Lugones specifies
different ways of being at ease in a real, imagined, or, I shall add, recollected
world: 1) we may share a cultural history that gives us a stock of shared refer-
ences; 2) we may understand the norms of that world and thus how to “move
confidently” in the environment; 3) we may be “normatively happy” in the
world; we may “love the norms” of that world; 4) we may have important rela-
tionships in that world (Lugones 1989, 283–84).
My entrance into my colleague’s past was eased by our overlapping autobi-
ographies, our mutual sense of Nova Scotia as a home where one might expect
to encounter friends in common, our shared ways of thinking and speaking,
our joint values, our fondness for each other, and my fondness for those he
remembered. Being at ease in all of the ways that Lugones specifies, I was
“maximally at ease” in my colleague’s memories (Lugones 1989, 283–84). In
the remainder of this chapter, I focus more closely on how performance works
to draw people inside the frame of an unshared past, the ways it can implicate
appreciators in the values being expressed, and the potential of sharing the
past for forming rather than simply affirming relationships. I shall ask whether
our capacity to be at ease in one another’s pasts sets limits on the nature of
these engagements over memory.
4. Memory and Membership
In a recent fascinating study of conversational remembering, Middleton and

Brown premise their analysis of memory on a view of our temporal experi-
ence as a process in which the past and present are not sharply separated from
each other, as they were not sharply separated in my hike in the Nova Scotian
woods. They are intrigued then by how we mark out the past from the present
by performing or “actualizing” the past for others through sharing memory
(Middleton and Brown 2005, 74–79). They contend that in order to nego-
tiate present environments, we etch out the past from its embedded and often
inchoate life in experience, describing it in different and creative ways to provi-
sionally secure its character and influence in the present. We often remember
through relating scenarios, a type of conversational performance in which we
direct the imaginings of appreciators who may not share that past with us but
who become active participants in our recollecting. In analyzing participation,
the theorists seek to show that processes of sharing memory are also used to
give people a personal investment in others’ versions of the past (Middleton
and Brown 2005, 6, 86), and to create bonds of membership “that are made
relevant” by the occasion of recollection (86).
Middleton and Brown draw much of their data from reminiscence groups,
groups of elderly people brought together to share memories of their different
pasts. In one such group, the joy of drinking has been the topic, and Sue, a
former churchgoer and present teetotaler, enters the conversation to relate an
event involving her younger self. Expecting a visit from the parson, she con-
fronts her father about the bottle of stout he has warming on the fire grate or
hob. Her father refuses to remove it and instead tells the parson, who says,
“well, I’ve never heard such a thing in me life. I like one occasionally meself ”
(Middleton and Brown 2005, 121). In describing her actions as the object of
her father and the parson’s incredulity, Sue pulls up and describes a past that
marks out her present identity as someone who may not like the taste of drink
but who can be counted on to be a willing appreciator of others’ drinking
stories (95).
Sue describes her past by offering a vivid generalized image of her home life,
perhaps drawn from many similar occasions, a very common kind of autobio-
graphical memory (Middleton and Brown 2005, 125). She weaves others’ expe-
riences and voices into her account, positioning herself as having a place in a
group “on whose behalf [she] presume[s]‌to speak” (122). Maurice Halbwachs
argued that our tendencies to summate recollections from different times and
project them onto the past as vivid images of group life create a shared reper-
toire of prototypical images that group members use to communicate about
their pasts (Halbwachs 1992/1925, 60). They can locate or “localize” their past
experiences around these images. Our use of objects and places to organize
our accounts of the past—the objects of Sue’s environment play a crucial role
in articulating the relationships—is so integral to this process of developing
resources that the material environment often seems to hold memory for
group members—a process Middleton and Brown describe as “territorializa-
tion” (Middleton and Brown 2005, 42, 121).
Yet even in circumstances where the past is not shared, the authors contend
that use of a prototypical scene can create an environment of relationships,
objects, and practices that invites imaginative participation. Sue’s remember-
ing creates “a potentially habitable world,” and her directions for visualizing
the scene facilitate a form of temporal engagement in the scenario (Middleton
and Brown 2005, 122). Her interlocutors can attend to the details of the imag-
ined material environment—in this case the patriarchal home—and to the
social construction of bodies in a specific context—the two male authority fig-
ures and the young Sue—to anticipate the possibilities of the action. Through
this anticipation, they can and do contribute to the scenario’s development,
anticipating and supplying details as the narrative unfolds. For example, when
Sue describes the stout bubbling on the fire grate, Ted says “warming” (120).
Ted’s contribution to the memory is not an act of joint reminiscence, as
the occasion remains focused on an episode of Sue’s past, but I contend it is a
closely related process. Sue and Ted are involved in the joint project of re-expe-
riencing Sue’s past from her present perspective. Middleton and Brown write
that “the detailed description of Sue’s home” serves “as a means of incorporat-
ing the listener into a localized set of personal relationships, to vicariously
experience what it might be like to move through that physical environment”
(124). They stress that this experience is embodied and affective, “a matter of
feeling that one could physically engage” as Ted imagines taking a sip of the
warming stout, or as his eyes move back and forth, visualizing the interactions
described (124). In other words, in imagining the scene, Ted is engaged in an
act of self-imagining through his embodied uptake,6 and Sue’s memory sce-
nario has been performed to invite exactly this type of participation. She has
brought Ted inside the frame of her past to re-experience it with her.
One way of reading Taylor’s claim that when a performance brings us
inside the frame that it implicates “us in its ethics and politics” is that such
self-imagining participation affirms the values of the scenarios in which
we participate. Though I shall argue below that this may be only one of our
responses to our engagement with scenarios, it will be useful to examine the
6
See Walton (1990) c hapters 1 and 6 for a detailed account of how our engagement with representa-
tions involves us in self-imagining.
dynamics of value affirmation through sharing memory; Middleton and Brown’s

remarks about forming bonds through memory seem to depend on this kind of
affirmation.
The authors note that memory performances often establish a particular moral
order embedded in the details of the scene and the activities. They thus find it
quite remarkable that the interlocutors, who may never have experienced such an
environment, and who “may take issue with the moral order,” do not question or
resist the moral order, but in fact participate so as to give the values weight in the
present (Middleton and Brown 2005, 123). Their discussion of how this weighting
comes about opens important possibilities for how our response may contribute
to shaping the significance of the past for those who share memory with us.7
Middleton and Brown first point out that the moral order embedded in
scenarios, in this case the Christian and patriarchal world of Sue’s home, is
often the taken-for-granted setting of the memory. It becomes the ground
of the shared project of the memory’s elaboration. Second, the values are
expressed through the description of activities (hard-working fathers drinking
beer by the fire); they are not articulated as available for explicit contestation
(Middleton and Brown 2005, 126–27). Third, the description of the activities
often has a sense of ritual to it. Our embodied participations in a scenario—
Ted’s incipient bodily movements as he lifts the glass of stout to pronounce
it warming—“carry with them a set of moral sensibilities” (126). The authors
here use Connerton (1989) to argue that some degree of value affirmation
occurs through our imaginative participation in these activities.
Finally, because such scenarios are generalized and prototypical, the past
becomes not historicized, but oddly somewhat naturalized. In recalling “the
way things were” or “when I was young,” in ways that do not seem to map
onto a specific date in historical time, rememberers are “able to partially con-
flate their own recollections with an ahistorical past in general,” placing their
audience in the position of having to take issue, not just with the meaning of
a particular episode, but with the “entire weight of the past” in order to chal-
lenge the values “lacquered around” the objects and activities in the scenario
(Middleton and Brown 2005, 131). Interlocutors may challenge, but the pro-
cesses of reminiscence, the summation and projection of the past, mitigate this
possibility. Giving values present weight by embedding them in the activities
of a past invoked as somewhat timeless is, I would suggest, a critical function
of actualizing the past that requires much more political attention.8
Middleton and Brown (2005) use several examples to fund this discussion. I am applying insights
7
drawn from other examples back to Sue’s scenario.

8
For example, when three firefighters raised the U.S. flag amidst the destruction of the World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001, the action also, for many Americans, actualized the past through the
summated image of many occasions of flag-raising, the most powerful reference being Iwo Jima in
1942. The action projected an image of courage, defiance, hope, and resolve, with these values given
Audience engagement with Sue’s memory establishes her relationship in the

group. One of the most important foci of Middleton and Brown’s analysis is
how we negotiate our identities and form relationships through the ways in
which we participate in and shape the significance of one anothers’ pasts. It
is of course the nature of the present occasion that prompts Sue to communi-
cate a particular memory. But the participation of her audience in shaping the
significance of her past goes far beyond the role of their presence in eliciting a
certain recollection. It is only if the appreciators affirm a certain significance to
the scene, which they do by laughing at the younger Sue’s discomfort, that the
performance succeeds in its intent of gaining Sue the present identity of one in
no position to take the “moral high ground,” that the affirmation of this identity
becomes the meaning of her past as re-experienced and shared on that occa-
sion (Middleton and Brown 2005, 123). It is through this identity that she bonds
with the other members of the reminiscence group in their stories of happy
drinking. Her audience is brought under the influence of her past in ways that
affect how they go on to relate with each other. Ted is sharing a re-experiencing
of Sue’s past from her perspective and affirming its values in ways that give Sue
membership in a new community of memory.
Middleton and Brown’s analysis, read explicitly through performance theory,
does give us a rich array of tools for thinking about heterogeneous communi-
ties of memory. But their example does not really identify such a community,9
and seeing why this is so is significant in thinking of the kinds of relationships
that sharing memory makes possible. Middleton and Brown suggest that we
invest in each others’ pasts through affirming the values of remembered ways
of life via embodied engagement in the activities that express these values; and
that this investment helps create membership made appropriate by the occa-
sion. The performance of Sue’s memory is an example of the above dynamic.
But the very intent of drawing someone into the past may be to encourage the
contesting rather than affirmation of values; if this alternative is a significant
one, affirming value cannot be a straightforward effect of the performative pro-
cesses of memory. In fact, in modeling value affirmation as an effect of memory
processes, the authors tend to ignore the ways in which Sue’s appreciators may
already be multiply at ease in the world of her recollection.
I shall say that those who share normative understandings and a body of
cultural references, comprising two of Lugones’s grounds for “ease” in a world,
share a cultural imaginary. Sue’s interlocutors may well share her imaginary.
There is no confusion about the nature of the place and objects that anchor
the relations of Sue’s scenario—they all seem to know what hobs are—and Ted
knows that the norms of the environment make the stout his for the tasting.
weight in the present through a past invoked as somewhat timeless. For a description of the flag raising
that captures this aspect of it, see http://www.bravestfund.com (accessed May 24, 2006).
9
I do not mean to imply that they intend to identify such a community.
We might also suspect that Sue’s interlocutors are normatively happy in her
world. They do laugh at her embarrassment rather than objecting to the patri-
archal norms that have determined it. Her securing this laughter helps form
her relationships with the reminiscence group while giving weight to the ap-
propriateness of her embarrassment.
It is crucial to think about how people are at ease in recollection in order to
assess the role of common experience and understanding in the affirmation of
relations. Although Sue’s interaction does create new bonds of membership by
drawing others into an unshared past, the structure of the interaction is quite
similar to my engagement with my colleague’s memory. My colleague made
me feel at ease in an unfamiliar environment by actualizing a past within it
that made the environment the familiar and shared one of friends in common.
Sue negotiates an environment in which she is perhaps uneasy by performing
a past into which she draws others. She enters the world of happy drinking
through engaging others in a past in which the values of drinking are affirmed,
again creating a familiar and now shared environment. Thus, in both cases,
the significance of performing the past on a particular occasion is to create
an environment in which the participants have experience and perspective in
common—in the first case to affirm relationship, in the second case to create
it. Resting the analysis here might seem to limit the possibility of forming rela-
tionships via sharing the past to occasions on which we can be at ease in each
other’s recollection.10
5. Performing Oppositional Memory
If we are not and perhaps cannot be at ease in others’ worlds of recollection,

what kinds of possibilities for engaging with the past and forming relation-
ships might we nevertheless encounter? This is a pressing political question,
and I want to use the theoretical tools so far developed to make some very
preliminary suggestions about possibilities for engagement. Though I have
challenged Middleton and Brown’s reading of Sue’s performance, I will use
my participation at a recent theater forum, a forum at which I was ill at ease
in a number of ways, to argue that the processes they describe can, if under-
stood properly, also give insight into the sharing of oppositional memory. In
entering worlds of memory in which we are not at ease, we can nevertheless
engage with values, give weight to fragile cultural imaginaries, support identi-
ties, and undertake new relationships that I will characterize as relationships
of solidarity.
Letitia Meynell made many useful comments on the Sue example, and Jan Sutherland has helped
10
me see the parallel import of the Sue and colleague cases.

Margaret Atwood, Canada’s most famous novelist, wrote in 1972 that “the cen-
tral symbol for Canada” as expressed through its literary traditions “is undoubt-
edly survival” (Atwood 1972, 32): the survival of explorers, colonists, and settlers
in the harsh Canadian geography; the cultural survival of French Canadians in
English Canada; and the survival of English Canada in a U.S.-dominated con-
tinent. In writing Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Atwood
located what was, at that time, a dominant cultural imaginary. Indigenous peo-
ples have never been positioned as the subject of that imaginary, but they have
been subjected through it: portrayed as a part of the harsh environment, or as
engaged in a self-subordinating willingness to support the acts of appropriation
necessary to white settler survival, or as those who have not survived but have
irrevocably lost their culture and identity.11 Many of us came as children to learn
what Canada is by drawing the routes of explorers and fur traders, unaware of the
ways in which these maps overlaid Indigenous paths and projects. We physically
participated in the values of the imaginary of survival, and those of us who are
white were probably quite at ease there. Although the dominant imaginary has
no doubt shifted somewhat over the last thirty years, it remains compelling for
some of us schooled in it.
In December 2005 a group of theater artists, cultural critics, and academics
came together in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the theater forum “Canadian Theatre
Identity Crisis: Challenging Eurocentricity through Aboriginal Myth and Ritual”
(OneLight Theatre 2005). The topic was provoked in part by the plans of a group
called Theatre 400 to stage a commemorative reenactment of the Theatre of
Neptune in New France on the four hundredth anniversary of its original per-
formance at the site of the former Port Royal colony in Nova Scotia. Thought to
be the first European play produced in the so-called “New World” the Theatre of
Neptune was devised by a Port Royal lawyer and historian, Marc Lescarbot, to dis-
tract the colonists from the anticipated hardships of their third winter (Lescarbot
1982).12 In the course of the play’s action, four “Indian” men speak in turn to af-
firm the sovereignty of the French in New France, pledge the devoted service of
their skills, and symbolically offer up their land through furs and their women
through love trinkets. Written and performed to aid white settler survival, the
play positioned the “Indians” as willing contributors to the appropriations that
would support this survival; and it was originally performed to an audience in
which Mi’k Maq and their Grand Chief Membertou were present as spectators.13
11
In Atwood’s words: “The Indians are, finally, a yardstick of suffering against which the whites can
measure their own and find it lacking” (1972, 99).
12
My information about the play and the plans for its reenactment are drawn from a presentation
and text by Donovan King (2005). King invited the public to participate in the “open-ended participa-
tory ‘meta-performance’ ” of Sinking Neptune (26). The reflections of this chapter are my contribution
to this meta-performance.
13
“Lescarbot had claimed the new world in a new way by enlisting the spectating bodies and appro-
priated voices of its inhabitants in his imaginary theatre.” Alan Filewood (2002, xiv–xv), quoted in
King (2005, 8).
There was no indication that the reenactment was meant to animate or bring into
“our” sense of the past what it may have been like for the Mi’k maq to be made
spectator/participants to this complex appropriation. Perhaps remarkably, only
the theme of settler survival seemed salient to the planners of the reenactment.
One of them said: “Good theatre, real theatre has a purpose. This play was aimed
at guaranteeing the survival of this group of people for the rest of the winter”
(CBC Arts 2004).
The plans for the reenactment did not receive project funding from the
Canada Council, and the performance did not take place. The lack of insti-
tutional support for the reenactment as well as the protest at its prospect may
indicate that some white Canadians are no longer normatively happy in the
dominant imaginary of survival. Lugones notes that our being ill at ease in a
world may help encourage us to travel to others. But our being ill at ease in this
one way is compatible with the persistence of the dominant imaginary. The
questions remain: how do those subjected by this dominant imaginary muster
the resources needed to re-experience their past and reshape their identities
outside of it, and how do those of us who are not normatively happy as the sub-
jects of this imaginary act in solidarity to precipitate this shift? Lugones argues
that other people will be one of the primary resources for those in the process
of becoming “non-subjected subjects” if we can help make sense of each other
outside of the “rhetorical spaces” that affirm some people’s identities through
subjecting or degrading the identities of others (Lugones 2002, 56).14 Different
performances of the past can provide new rhetorical spaces but challenge us
to learn to contribute to each other’s meanings without the assumption that
shared experience, perspective, or sensibility will ease this contribution.
At the same theater forum, the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble per-
formed the very powerful Scrubbing Project, an exploration of the attempted
genocide of Aboriginal peoples and the internalized racism that is part of its
legacy. I acknowledge that the complex meld of memory and imagination
characteristic of many aesthetic representations of the past may complicate an
epistemology of memory. I put this issue aside here, however, in order to focus
on analyzing audience engagement.
The Turtle Gals take their name from Turtle Island, the Anishinabe
name for North America, part of it now “territorialized” through count-
less acts of dominant imagination and memory as the Canada of Atwood’s
Survival. The intent of the performance is to remember Turtle Island: “We
14
Lugones takes the phrase “rhetorical spaces” from Code (1995). Code defines “rhetorical spaces”
as “fictive but not fanciful or fixed locations, whose (tacit, rarely spoken) territorial imperatives struc-
ture and limit the kinds of utterances that can be voiced within them with a reasonable expectation
of uptake and ‘choral support’: an expectation of being heard, understood, taken seriously” (ix–x).
Lugones suggests that there are “infrapolitical rhetorical spaces” (2002, 63) where the intentions of
non-subjected subjects do have credibility. I take Shulamith Lev-Aladgem (2006) to have recently
argued that community theater can be such a space. I thank Cate Hundleby for this reference.
will build memory/A war memorial/A wailing wall that will stretch across
this Grandmother Turtle” (Turtle Gals 2002). In trying to build the memory
of Turtle Island, a wailing wall whose presence will challenge or replace a
dominant cultural imaginary, the performers have the task of developing
the resources through which memories of Turtle Island can be shared. The
Scrubbing Project uses the technique of “storyweaving to entwine stories and
fragments of stories with words, music, song, film, dance and movement”
(Turtle Gals 2005). In particular, it uses vaudeville as “a madcap metaphor
for the way we navigate our identities. It allows us to explore deep, sorrowful
stories with zany comedy and character transformations that happen in the
blink of an eye. Much like the way we live” (Turtle Gals 2005). Thus, in build-
ing memory through performance, the performers are also navigating their
identities. At the end of The Scrubbing Project the performers pass up into the
audience large paper scrolls with the names of their ancestors—which the
audience simply holds. The end of the performance signaled the possibility
that the participation of a diverse audience in The Scrubbing Project could
contribute to the building of memory and the affirmation of identities that
the performers intend.
I have used Middleton and Brown’s discussion of Sue to provide some con-
crete reflection on how we might think of an audience as inside the frame of
a memory scenario, contributing to the situated meaning of representing the
past on a particular occasion. We can see these processes they describe: the
creation of prototypical images that make the environment imaginable, our af-
fective and embodied participation in value, and the affirmations of identities
and creation of bonds though sharing memory also at work in our engagement
with The Scrubbing Project. I reflect from my own audience position.
The activity of scrubbing in the title refers to a recurring image that emerged
in the early conversations of the writer/performers: “Either we or someone we
knew had at some point tried to scrub off or bleach out their colour” (Turtle
Gals 2005). The title image of The Scrubbing Project functions as a prototypical
image that has facilitated the communication of memory for the performers;
they have localized and shared experience through this imagery. Its description
in the program projects “the scrubbing project” onto the past as a vivid image
of subjugation, and its dramatic development in the performance anchors our
imaginative entrance into the scenario. Our participation in the performance
may give weight to this image as one that complexly emblematizes both signif-
icant effects of colonization and the spirit and creativity to resist and overcome
these effects. How the audience understands this imagery develops in our en-
counter with the performance.
The Turtle Gals direct salience by talking and singing about the past to
one another and to the audience using vivid generalized images drawn from
many occasions. Like Sue, they weave others’ experiences and voices into
the account, creating an entitlement to speak about the past. They position
themselves as having a place in many groups. They do not, however, speak on

behalf of these groups so much as they themselves try to imaginatively engage
the groups’ experiences while at the same time engaging the embodied partic-
ipation of the audience:
All: he said, he said, he said, he said, he said

Esperanza: “I always knew when there’d been a massacre
by the shoes . . .”
I see the scattering of forlorn shoes
abandoned in the plaza
orphaned
left to lie on their sides upside down. . . .
A man’s oxford here, sneaker there
but mostly women’s shoes
tacones
pink, turquoise, white and black high heels
debris. . . .
Ophelia: Did they jump straight out of those shoes?
Esperanza: I wonder
Branda: Did they bend to untie them?
Esperanza: Did they struggle to squirm a foot out
over the back of the shoe with a desperate heel?
Ophelia: did they step on glass as they ran?
ALL: as they fell
(TURTLE GALS 2004)
In this sequence, as in Sue’s scenario, a moral order is given weight in the

present. It is the ground of an enacted and invited imagining. It is expressed
through activities, and through the summated presentation of different occa-
sions of massacre. It is actualized for us with a kind of timelessness. The per-
formers encourage the audience’s embodied engagement with this racist and
genocidal political order made present and vivid through the objects and
activities of the performance. We do not affirm these values, but the perfor-
mance invites a discomfiting physical participation that compels us to feel
their force. While Middleton and Brown suggest that we often take on others’
pasts with a kind of personal commitment via enacting and thus affirming the
values imaginatively engaged, their analysis does not reach this objective, nor
ought it. Our mere bodily willingness to engage in activities does not affirm
values in the ways that Connerton’s account makes plausible. Our kinesthetic
anticipations may sometimes affirm values. They may also cause us dis-ease
and compel a confrontation with the values given weight through their pres-
ence in recollection. This confrontation may have been part of the intent of
engaging the participation of a diverse audience.
The Scrubbing Project was a staged performance that will be restaged. But
Taylor stresses that however repeatable the images, plots, and paradigms that
form our repertoires, scenarios have situational meaning; they are “intelli-
gible in the framework of the immediate environment and issues surrounding
them” (Taylor 2003, 3). Part of the significance of performing The Scrubbing
Project on the occasion I have described was one of helping to expose the myth
of Eurocentricity in Canadian theater through performance founded in a dif-
ferent cultural repertoire. But I believe that there are other ways that the per-
formance has situated meaning. Though I cannot presume to speak for the
Turtle Gals’ intentions, their description of The Scrubbing Project suggests this
actualizing of the past is part of a project of becoming non-subjected subjects.
Lugones has written that those who must travel between worlds, and who are
subjected to degraded identities in some of these worlds, often develop the
sense of having plural selves. They must develop different skills than those
who simply remain in the worlds where they are maximally at ease. She affirms
world-traveling as “skilful, creative, rich, and enriching” (Lugones 1989, 275).
The Turtle Gals deliberately shape the past to emphasize the intelligibility and
creativity to character transformations “undertaken in the blink of an eye.
Much like the way we live.” They do so by exploring “deep and sorrowful sto-
ries with zany comedy” (Turtle Gals 2002). The range of audience uptake—our
imaginative involvement with imagery, our laugher at the comedy, and our
uneasy embodied confrontation with racism as its perpetrators or victims—
may be relevant to how the artists are able to affirm the intelligibility and cre-
ativity of their and others’ identities.
Finally, the performance was partly about the development of transient
bonds made relevant by the occasion of remembering as we were brought
physically and briefly into community with the names of the dead. I recog-
nize that the nature of these bonds will differ radically depending on audience
membership. I want to conclude by saying something about the nature of these
bonds for those in the audience of European heritage.
Contemporary political theorists have argued that if we are interested in
relations of political solidarity with others, we must move away from the
search for shared experience and shared perspective, and instead seek out
common interests.15 Lugones’s work suggests that people’s desire to become
non-subjected subjects can be one such common interest, and the ability to
appropriate one’s own past in memory is essential to any such project of be-
coming. I hope to have made it plausible that to be brought inside the frame
of another’s past to aid in shaping its present significance does not require that
we somehow share the same kind of experience of that past or perspectives
15
See especially the work of Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003). I take Lugones’s work to be endors-
ing this same view of solidarity and, in “Impure Communities” (2002), to be giving it a quite radical
application to how we interpret one another’s meanings.
that encourage our ease within it. Our engagement with the values performed
through the activities of that scenario may nevertheless help give meaning
to another’s past, whether this is the situational affirmation of identities; the
reinforcement of schemas, prototypes, and modes of expression that may give
weight to a different cultural imaginary; or the acknowledgment of our own
presence in that past. In other words, we can form relations of solidarity made
relevant by the occasion of recollection.
I do not want to either exaggerate or trivialize the possibility or importance
of these relationships. There are a number of reasons not to exaggerate the
prospects of solidarity. To act in solidarity with others over remembering the
past requires our accountability to them for the ways in which we are impli-
cated in the ethics and politics of those projects. Insofar as the performance is
a unique event, we need to see how we are contributing to the aims of actualiz-
ing the past on a particular occasion. Insofar as the performance develops the
transposable resources of social memory, we need to reflect on the resources
to which we contribute. Our reflexive understanding of ourselves as apprecia-
tors in others’ worlds of memory may help us notice the added weight of our
response in shaping prototypes and advancing acts of territorialization that
support or undermine dominant or fragile imaginaries. To become aware of
these possibilities, we must become critics to our own self-imaginings. I have
chosen the setting of a theater forum that was meant to encourage this kind
of reflection and accountability. Other settings may fail to encourage appro-
priate uptake. Moreover, we cannot expect that others will want to share their
recollections with us or give us the opportunity to form relations. Making
sense of one another outside of the institutional and “rhetorical spaces” that
give only some people’s intentions full credibility is, according to Lugones,
a fragile project (Lugones 2002, 56). It is fragile in part because without the
assumptions of shared experience, values, or perspective, one must attempt to
shape the significance of one’s experience in relational circumstances that are
“without trust or assured reciprocity” (61). The Turtle Gals mark the fragility
of this project in passing scrolls with the names of their ancestors into the
hands of an audience they do not know and have no reason to trust.
Nevertheless, part of what seems most insightful to me in Middleton and
Brown’s (2005) analysis is their contention that sharing memory can give us
an investment in each others’ past and create bonds of membership made rel-
evant by the occasion of recollection. Our moving inside the frame of others’
pasts and thus investing their pasts with some influence on who we take our-
selves to have been and on who we become is one of the central ways in which
we affirm our identities as in-relation-to-others. The relationships formed in
sharing memory may often be brief and occasion specific. But because of the
importance of recollection to affirming identities and developing different cul-
tural imaginaries, they do not seem to me trivial.
{ 5 }
Memory, Reparation, and Relation

Starting in the Right Places
For Native peoples, the discussion about reparations is not an intellectual

exercise. It is a discussion of how the past, present, and future are
conjoined and interdependent.
Tsosie 2006, 43
One important recent strand in the complex cross-disciplinary discussion of

memory is the role of remembering in facilitating or thwarting justice in po-
litical contexts characterized by historic harms (Blustein 2008; Booth 2006;
Simon 2005; Taylor 2003). How can sharing the memory of harm and wrong-
doing across pasts that are linked by (and in some sense) a common and toxic
history aid reparative projects, and what forms should this sharing take? Since
reparative initiatives typically take place between different cultural groups and
are meant to help establish or re-establish relations of mutual equality, trust,
or respect (De Greiff 2006, 451; Llewellyn 2006; Walker 2006), Rebecca Tsosie
has argued that reparative frameworks must be intercultural (Tsosie 2006, 43).
Writing from a Native-American perspective, she is particularly concerned
that work from within the “moral universe of Western liberal thought” con-
tinues to misrepresent Native perspectives on the integrated nature of the
assault to Indigenous cultures, identities, and sovereignty that has character-
ized Native-Settler relations (55). Hence, it misrepresents what could count as
reconciliation from these perspectives, specifically the enactment of respect
for sovereign cultures (Tsosie, 44).1 Given the inherently relational setting of
This chapter draws on research undertaken for the Indian Residential Schools Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. I am especially grateful to Paulette Regan, Seetal Sunga, and Bob Watts
for encouraging this research. I am also grateful to the contributers to this volume and especially to
Jocelyn Downie, Jennifer Llewellyn, Carolyn McLeod, and Sheila Wildeman for their helpful sugges-
tions on this chapter. I thank Jan Sutherland, as always, for her critical acuity. I am also grateful for
the close and accurate readings of this volume by two anonymous referees. [First published in Being
Relational: Reflections on Relational Theory and Health Law. Jocelyn Downie and Jennifer J. Llewellyn
(eds.). Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012: pp. 133–160.]
1
Tsosie (2006) writes that even many Western theorists who stress the importance of attending
to context still “appear to conceive of reparations under a ‘tort model’ of compensation,” assuming
reparative justice contexts (Llewellyn 2006), theorists from Euro-Western tradi-

tions must exercise vigilance in maintaining that our predilection for abstract dis-
cussions of justice does not simply repeat and reinforce the cultural imperialism
that is an integral part of the harm done to Indigenous groups.2
In a spirit of vigilance, the present reflection on the importance of relational the-
orizing about memory to projects of reparative justice seeks to exemplify the cen-
trality of concrete contextual analysis to relational theorizing (Koggel 2009, 250).
My context is the current attempt between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peo-
ples in the Settler society now known as Canada to make progress in renewing rela-
tions damaged by colonialist practices of forced assimilation and attempted cultural
genocide. In undertaking this renewal, we act toward ideals of well-being that are
central to the concerns of this volume [Being Relational, 2012]. I thus follow Jennifer
Llewellyn in understanding the initiatives of reparative or restorative justice. I use
these terms interchangeably—not on a model of material compensation for harm
even though such compensation may be involved in specific initiatives. Rather,
I understand reparative justice as being committed to “taking the fact of relation-
ship and connection as central to the work of justice,” which “aims at realizing the
conditions of relationship required for well-being and flourishing” (Llewellyn 2012).
To highlight one instance of the genocidal practices that have been at issue
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, the Canadian government,
in collaboration with the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches,
has operated a system of Indian Residential Schools for well over 100 years,
removing Native children from their communities in order to re-socialize and
assimilate them into the economic and cultural order of the colonial state. The
architects of this system intended this re-education to eradicate the Indigenous
cultures whose practices resisted European notions of progress, destroying the
relational networks that helped to sustain Indigenous identities, both personal
and communal (Baylis 2012).3 In 2006, after years of activism and advocacy by
the survivors of residential schooling, the Assembly of First Nations, and groups
of allies, the court-ordered Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement
was endorsed “by the Survivors’ legal representatives, churches, and the federal
government” (Castellano, et al. 2008; Indian Residential Schools Settlement
Agreement 2006). The comprehensive settlement agreement includes a five-year
Truth and Reconciliation Commission,4 which is
that “Native claims can be parceled out into claims for ‘ownership,’ for ‘equal opportunity,’ for ‘past
wrongdoing’ while still factoring in the equitable interests of contemporary citizens, both Native and
non-Native” (48).
2
For a discussion of cultural imperialism, see Iris Marion Young (1990). I shall refer to theorists
from Euro-Western traditions as Western theorists for the remainder of this chapter.
3
See Françoise Baylis (2012) for reflection on the importance to our personal and social identities
of how we are allowed to be by others.
4
Castellano, Archibald, and DeGagné (2008): “The Settlement Agreement provides for a cash pay-
ment to Survivors living in 2005 or their estates if deceased, as well as providing an individual assess-
ment process for adjudication of more serious claims of abuse, the creation of memorials, a five-year
Memory, Reparation, and Relation 91
mandated to promote education and awareness about the Indian Residential

School system and its legacy, as well as provide former students, their families
and communities an opportunity to share their Indian Residential School
experiences in a safe and culturally-appropriate environment. (Indian and
Northern Affairs Canada, Federal Representative of Indian Residential
Schools 2006)
Explicitly adopting an intercultural framework, the mandate directs the com-
mission to recognize “the significance of Aboriginal oral and legal traditions
in its activities” (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Federal Representative
of Indian Residential Schools 2006). I shall argue that, as non-Indigenous
Canadians, our respect for these traditions requires that we reflect on the im-
portance of sharing memory in the dynamics of group identity formation.
While all political projects of nation building and destroying are infused
with attempts to shape and control the significance of the past in order to le-
gitimate and serve a future vision, assimilationist policies implicate the pol-
itics of memory in deep and complex ways. Gail Guthrie Valaskakis writes
that “assimilation involves repressing old identities by, in part, taking on new
social memories” (Valaskakis 2005, 211–6). We need detailed analyses of the
specific ways in which these processes of obliging others to take on new social
memories have been instigated and enacted as well as of the ramifications of
these processes for present reparative action that once again involves memory
sharing across groups. Critical to such analyses is a fundamental recognition of
the deeply relational nature of individual and group identity formation—what
I will often call the co-constitution or “co-implication of identities” (Mohanty
2003, 203).5 Attention to memory is important to this recognition, and this
chapter seeks to encourage it in a number of distinct but interrelated ways.
I first examine an increased willingness among Western theorists to regard
remembering as itself a relational capacity interwoven with identity forma-
tion. Second, I situate relational remembering within a general, fluid, rela-
tional model of group identity formation found in the work of Valaskakis, Iris
extension of funding for the Aboriginal Foundation to support community healing initiatives, and the
establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
5
Though for me, the terms “co-constitution” and “co-implication” try to get at the same phe-
nomenon, each has a different resonance, and I vary their use in this chapter to capture this fact.
“Co-constitution” brings attention to the reality that peoples’ identities are reciprocally and dynam-
ically shaped through their relationships. For Mohanty (2003), we must understand “co-implication”
in order to comprehend “ ‘difference’ as historical” as well as relational, recognizing in particular that
we share “certain histories and responsibilities” and that we are relationally implicated in each others’
identities through the ideologies that define groups that are typically posed in binary opposition to
each other (203). The ideologies of concern in this chapter involve the varied representations of groups
as kinds of rememberers. See Constance MacIntosh, (2012) for additional reflection on the importance
of historical and intergenerational relationships in considering health law and policy as applied to
Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Marion Young, and Constance MacIntosh—a model both illuminating and

illuminated by the process of Residential Schooling. Remembering is often a
key dynamic in the co-implication of group identities. I attend to how the as-
similationist agenda of Residential Schooling depended on positioning people
as different kinds of rememberers and on privileging certain conceptions of
memory in order to control how memory could be shared and with whom.
I thus highlight how memory interactions worked to structure the colonizing
relations we now seek to repair.
Third, in attending to relational identity constitution, I illustrate that such
contextual theorizing can also provide critical insight into the limitations
of some recent Western theoretical approaches to memory, justice, and re-
parative action. While Western theorists would agree that how we negotiate
the meaning of the past is critical to political relations, they tend to think of
memory as further unifying a group whose relative internal homogeneity
and whose independence from other groups is, in fact, already assumed and
marked in the invocation of collective memory. Since they lack an adequately
relational account of identity, there is no place to consider how practices and
conceptions of remembering both enter into the relational co-constitution of
identities and might be used to help reform or renew them.
The failure to understand how group identities can be shaped through rela-
tions of power that control the sociability of memory would, I contend, make
it difficult for these theories to support the intercultural mandate of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission for the Indian Residential Schools and to
support its goals of fostering truth, reconciliation, and healing.6 Indigenous
writers speak and write very differently about memory, and I have used their
reflections to frame the critical investigation of this chapter.7 I conclude by
suggesting some possible reparative roles for sharing memory in the work
of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission if we can show the kind of re-
spect for the relational dimensions of memory prominent in the work of many
Indigenous thinkers.
6
The mandate of the commission states: “[T]‌hrough the Agreement, the Parties have agreed that
an historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be established to contribute to truth, healing,
and reconciliation” (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada 2006, 1). While I believe and argue that un-
derstanding the importance of sharing memory is critical to the commission’s objectives, I do not use
the language of healing in this chapter to frame my discussion. It is a language that has been often
appropriated by non-Indigenous Canadians with little understanding of its significance for various
Indigenous groups or individuals (Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, 1997) and at this point in my
own research I might well use it inappropriately. See the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (http://www.
ahf.ca) for excellent research that represents a diversity of Indigenous perspectives on healing and rec-
onciliation. I am committed to the view that de-colonizing relationships is necessary to any possibility
of intergroup healing and reconciliation and that reflection on memory must aid us in this process.
7
I draw on the work of John Borrows (2001); Fred Kelly (2008); Lee Maracle and Sandra Laronde
(2000); Stan McKay (in Castellano et al. 2007); Neal McLeod (2007); Richard Morris and Mary Stuckey
(2004); Tsosie (2006); Valaskakis (2005); Winona Wheeler (2005).
Relational Remembering
The last decade has witnessed the rapid emergence of memory studies as an
interdiscipline in the Western academy, drawing theorists from the empir-
ical and cognitive sciences into conversation with those from the humanities,
arts, social sciences, and law. The possibility of collaboration among those
who have traditionally treated memory as the individual’s capacity to re-
call or re-experience one’s personal past and those who have focused on the
social processes and institutional structures that embody collective visions of
the past has been made possible by more sophisticated analyses of socially
situated rememberers. Theorists now recognize that recollection, as the core
human capacity through which we learn by experience, is a multi-variant set
of practices with cognitive, affective, interpersonal, and political dimensions,
engaged in by social and historically embedded agents in particular contexts—
material and spatial as well as social—and for a variety of overlapping pur-
poses (Warnock 1987).
There have been two important insights at the heart of this more dynamic
approach to remembering. The first I will assume, and the second I will
explore. First, theorists have moved away from an ideal of the memory archive
as the storage of unchanging representations impressed at the time of experi-
ence. We remember selectively and interpretively in response to the demands
of the present and future (Blustein 2008; Campbell 2003; Engel 1999; Schacter
1996; Sutton 2008). Second, we remember with others and in response to their
perceptions of both their pasts and our own. Even the recollection of an in-
tensely personal past is often an interactive undertaking. It is worth sampling
this new Western consensus on the sociality of memory to see what it makes,
and fails to make, salient. Psychologists Paula Reavey and Steven Brown, sur-
veying the interdisciplinary trauma literature, describe the “shift from consid-
ering ‘memory’ as a faculty . . . that produces discrete ‘memories’ to a concern
with ‘remembering’ as a socially constructed practice . . . [one that] transcends
a neat opposition between the individual and the social since personal ‘mem-
ories’ may be co-constructed and elaborated by others” (Reavey and Brown
2006, 179–80). Our involvement in each other’s memories and our vulnera-
bility to others’ influence has instigated an associated focus on remembering
as an “ethical act, involving questions of responsibility, accountability, and the
negotiation of substantive moral” issues (179–80).
Barnier et al., working in an interdisciplinary cognitive science context,
write that from a social cognition perspective remembering is a powerful ex-
ample of how “we live [our] cognitive lives, and engage in the activities that
constitute them, in the company of others” (Barnier et al. 2008, 35). It is with
these others that we forge, maintain, and share an accurate view of the past or
fail to do so. Reliving and re-appropriating the past in memory is also contin-
uously self-constituting, and our evolving self-conceptions, the shifting lenses
through which we re-experience the past, are sensitive to how others affirm,
correct, or doubt our interpretations. They also note that we engage in remem-
bering “to teach and inform others, to develop or maintain intimacy, to elicit
or show empathy, and to share mundane or significant stories” (35). While
these researchers distinguish the epistemic and relational functions of remem-
bering at the analytic level, there is no clear separation at the level of action.
For example, to develop intimacy by sharing an important part of one’s past
invites relation that will inevitably refract back on one’s own self-conception,
through conveying knowledge both of the past and of who one is.
To observe that remembering is intimately interwoven with capacities to
form relations and relational self-conceptions is unremarkable when we con-
sider that we learn to remember by being shown how to attend to, and then
recall, events by others who are, at that same time, socializing us through and
into relational affiliations. Psychologists such as Robyn Fivush and Elizabeth
Waites describe how early relations with our caregivers regulate the attention
that is necessary to memory, both explicitly and through their embodied,
affectively laden activities, marking what is salient, supplying the concepts
and informing the emotions and perspectives through which we come to re-
member, and teaching us skills of revivifying the past through co-constructing
memory narratives (Fivush 1994, 136; Waites 1997). In learning to remember,
we are thus encouraged to form shared perspectives on the significance of
actions, places, and events, which, even as children, we may sometimes resist.
Other studies stress that learning to remember necessitates that our interpre-
tations, perspectives, and self-narratives evolve with our need for a usable past
and our maturing moral agency. For example, we learn to narratively order
and reorder our experience, again as guided by others, through coming to un-
derstand that the meaning of later events can change the significance of earlier
ones (Hoerl and McCormack 2005, 270). Perhaps an action had unintended
consequences that demand its retrospective re-experiencing. I unintention-
ally hurt someone’s feelings and now remember with regret—perhaps when
I learn what happened to a friend, a bad experience of my own feels trivial in
retrospect.
Maurice Halbwachs notes that in adulthood, as in childhood, we re-
member from perspectives that are never just ours alone but that reflect the
shifting contours of the group identifications that are themselves shaped
through sharing memory (Halbwachs 1992/1925). While theorists find it no-
table how early these capacities take shape, the tendency of early childhood
studies to focus on shared perspectives and group identifications can sub-
merge the most interesting implications of this research. We become mature
rememberers through developing capacities to re-experience aspects of our
past selectively, as shifting in meaning, and as embedded in dynamic causal
and narrative structures as a part of forming and negotiating relations and
relational self-conceptions while also contributing to shared or conflicting
understandings of the past: “We share a past that we remember in highly in-

dividual ways while having together to determine its significance” (Campbell
2006b, 374). Remembering thus involves the work of judgment, since this, too,
is relationally shaped and negotiated (Nedelsky 2012).
In adulthood, practices of sharing memory are often mediated by, and
expressed through, the development of more complex intra-psychic struc-
tures and our abilities to imaginatively engage with others’ subjectivities as
they are first personally expressed in narrative or art or witnessed and re-
lated by others. For example, John Bond, a member of Australia’s Sorry Day
committee, discusses the effect that the report Bringing Them Home had on
non-Aboriginal Australians.8 He comments that “the gulf between Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal Australians was simply too immense for even their pain
to flow across it” and that Bringing Them Home often exposed this gulf (Bond
2008, 271). He relates the following encounter with the report:
I thought back to my primary school classroom. I can remember the name
of every person in that class except the four Aboriginal boys who sat at the
back of the class, never asked a question, stuck with each other in the play-
ground, never played with the rest of us. I looked on them as incredibly dull.
When I read, Bringing Them Home, I began to understand what they had
probably endured, and why they acted as they did. And I felt ashamed. (271)
This passage expresses a memory that is shifting in meaning as it is pub-
licly shared. We often relive the significance of our school days through relat-
ing stories of students and teachers whose names we will remember all of our
lives, and we may do so to make connection with others through the oppor-
tunity to share like experiences. For this Australian, brought under the influ-
ence of others’ pasts as encountered in Bringing Them Home, a familiar kind
of remembering becomes the occasion for affectively reliving its significance
as a forgetting of those who had been found dull and not worth the care or
attention that is marked in naming those we remember (Margalit 2002). The
writer re-experiences a problematically remembered past with its vivid so-
ciability as the public commitment to a more accurate grasp of school days
structured by ignorance, racism, and neglect as the partial grounds for their
sociability. To re-remember with shame is potentially to mobilize a shift in
understanding and relational self-identification that opens up new political
possibilities.9 Alexis Shotwell describes white shame as an “uneasy optic,”
where recognition through the eyes of those subject to racism can reveal to
8
The full name of the report is Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the
Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Australian Human
Rights Commission, 1997), http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_ justice/bth_report/report/index.html.
9
This potential is often not realized. See Sara Ahmed (2004) for an insightful analysis of the con-
tinued exclusory dimensions of national expressions of shame as expressed through Sorry Book entries.
white people (as it does to the earlier writer) our implicit and habituated ways
of “knowing how” to be racist—for example, the ways that children learn who
is worth befriending—while, at the same time, the hope and desire for more
appropriate ways of relating and being in relation to others (Shotwell 2011,
77). As Shotwell explains, “[t]‌he fact of feeling shame indicates a site of poten-
tial re-identification in process” (95). In the case at hand, the process involves
remembering as it is brought under the influence of others’ pasts. I also use
this example as a preliminary comment on the limitations of Western perspec-
tives where reflection on what I have elsewhere called “relational remember-
ing” is still in its infancy (Campbell 2003). First, while the earlier example
shows that it is important to attend to the ethics of remembering, in the liter-
ature this focus has been somewhat disappointingly dominated by concerns
about accurate recollection that position sociability primarily as a reason for
epistemic anxiety:
On many dominant views in both philosophy of mind and cognitive psy-
chology, the sharing of memories is only of limited significance. The pres-
ence and contribution of other people . . . is seen at best, as only one external
causal trigger for and influence on the real memory in the individual; or,
at worst, as a disrupting or contaminating influence on individual autobio-
graphical memory. (Barnier et al 2008, 35)
The residual fantasy that uninfluenced memory sets the standard for good
remembering obscures both the profound social importance of sharing mem-
ory and the complexity of its epistemology.
To introduce a theme to which I shall return, sharing memory is a crit-
ical way in which we share time with others. Sharing memory revivifies a
past in which others can imaginatively, somatically, and affectively engage
(Margalit 2002; Middleton and Brown 2005; Taylor 2003). We reanimate our
pasts for others through expressive choice of detail, narrative strategy, ges-
ture, emotional tone, and the sharing of objects and place while often explicitly
encouraging their participation through inviting association, identification, or
imagined response (Middleton and Brown 2004). The past is made present
through acts of memory, and this sharing of the time I shall now refer to as
the “present past” enters our relational lives at many levels. Since people are
historical beings, we do not come to feel that we know them well until we
have shared their pasts. In a daily way, sharing significant or trivial memories
with others, as made possible and relevant by our ordinary interactions, is an
unconscious and habituated way of finding and testing grounds for common
understandings, perspectives, or identifications while making our own his-
torical self-identifications vulnerable to the affective force of others’ revivi-
fied pasts. Moreover, revivifying the past may be a way of calling people into
community. The practice of publicly memorializing at wakes or funerals, for
example, brings mourners together as a community that shares the present
past—the life or legacy of the person mourned. Sharing memory is such a con-
stant and vital attribute of being in relation to others that it is the failure of its
possibility that often requires our critical scrutiny.
With respect to epistemic concerns, although most memories are reason-
ably assessable or challengeable for their fidelity to what happened (some are
simply obviously accurate), the example of re-remembering through the com-
plex affective/epistemic/relational optic of shame shows that accurate recall is
“neither simple nor singular” (Barnier et al. 2008, 35). As a separation of the
epistemic and relational dimensions of memory is an artifact of analysis, so
our faithfulness to the past is often a complicated aspiration where accuracy
implicates the ethical values of integrity, responsibility, and attentiveness as
we together try to understand not only what happened but its significance for
how we go on.10
A second limitation to the present approaches, which is implicit in the focus
on mutuality in psychological studies and more evident when memory theo-
rists confront historic harm directly (see the discussion later in this chapter), is
that Western theorists pay little attention to the dynamics of intergroup mem-
ory. I include in this group most philosophers, psychologists, and interdisci-
plinary memory theorists. As my discussion illustrates, there is a limited body
of sophisticated reflection on memory as a relationally supported self- and
group-constituting process in families. However, to get a reasonable rendering
both of the nature of our socialized capacities and of how their expression in
turn configures relationships, we must consider how such capacities are de-
veloped, exercised, supported, or undermined within the wider sets of social,
political, and economic relations in which we find ourselves located (Koggel
1998; 2012; Sherwin 1998; 2012). We need to understand the shifting nature
of identifications that can occur through sharing memory, not only through
actually sharing it but also through structuring the possibilities of its soci-
ality. The next section situates relational remembering within a more general
account of group identity formation. I illustrate the importance of remem-
bering in the relational co-implication of identities through the context of
Residential Schooling where controlling how memory could be shared and
with whom was the cornerstone of a genocidal pedagogy.
10
I have argued at length elsewhere that the relational and re-constructive aspects to memory, and
the consequence that the meaning of remembering an event may shift as our contexts and concerns
change or as our values evolve, in no way diminishes the importance of accuracy or truth in the assess-
ment of memory claims. In fact, we need to understand the reconstructive and relational dimensions of
memory to properly assess its complex epistemology. For example, because how we remember the past
shapes how we go on both as individuals and as communities, whether or not we remember the past
faithfully will depend not only on whether we have the facts rights but also on whether we have given
them appropriate significance. Though the ways the past is valued will always be contestable, some
ways of valuing can be characterized as more accurate than others. For discussion see Blustein (2008)
and Campbell (2003; 2006b; 2009).
Substantial and Relational Approaches to Social Identity
In assessing the contemporary work on identity politics, Iris Marion Young

argues that many political writers tend to assume a substantial, rather than a
relational, conception of group difference. When we think of groups substan-
tially, each “group is defined by essential attributes that constitute its iden-
tity. . . . Individuals can be said to belong to the group insofar as they have
the requisite attributes” (Young 2002, 87). Young offers a detailed critique of
substantial conceptions. She contends that they typically imply agreement
on values or politics that rarely map the reality of group life. Moreover, such
conceptions reify the nature of groups and freeze “the experienced fluidity of
social relations, by setting up rigid insider-outsider distinctions” (88). Young
proposes an alternative relational conception of a social group as a “collection
of individuals, who stand in determinate relations with one another because of
the actions and interactions of those both associated with the group and those
outside or on the margins of the group” (89):
Considered relationally, a social group is a collection of persons differenti-
ated from others by cultural forms, practices, special needs or capacities,
structures of power or privilege. . . . Social groups emerge from the way peo-
ple interact. (90)
For Young, “[r]‌elational encounter produces [the] perception[s] of both sim-
ilarity and difference” through which people are grouped and come to group
themselves (90).
In locating assumptions about shared values and politics as sometimes
contributing to a substantial identity model, Young is obviously not ac-
cusing other authors of biological essentialism about groups. Rather, I take
her to be pointing to the problem that Cressida Heyes labels “methodological
essentialism,” a politically problematic generalization about a category of
people—one fully compatible with a commitment to constructivism about the
category—that nevertheless implies that one must have certain properties to
be a member (Heyes 2000). Such generalizations are often rendered striking
in anti-oppression theorizing, given our very commitments to diagnose the
norms or processes that construct groups in complex hierarchical relations.
Methodological essentialism occurs when we generalize about the character
of groups at the very moments that we should be more deeply investigating
political processes of identity formation and when we can be called politically
to account for our failure to do so. For example, Angela Davis intervenes in the
second wave feminist critiques of the centrality of women’s “unpaid” house-
work to their oppression and the consequent “wages for housework” cam-
paigns to note that “cleaning women, domestic workers, maids . . . know better
than anyone else what it means to receive wages for housework” (Davis 1983,
237). She thus challenges these accounts of “women” as a group that is partly
constructed through practices of labour exploitation with erasing the specific

exploitative practices and resistant values constituting the positionality and
experience of women who were not bourgeois, implicitly excluding them from
the analysis of “women.” I will return later in this chapter to challenge Western
memory theorists with methodological essentialism.11
It is not uncommon to illustrate the co-implication of identities by refer-
ring to the configurations of Indigenous identities that arose through colonial
encounter. Diana Taylor notes of Peru that “the very categories—criollo and
Indian—are a product of . . . conflict, not its reason for being” (Taylor 2003, 195).12
Young, herself, notes that “[b]‌efore the British began to conquer the islands
now called New Zealand . . . there was no group anyone thought of as Maori”
(Young 2002, 90). More substantively, Valaskakis, in “Blood Borders: Being
Indian and Belonging,” offers a powerful and detailed analysis of how a sub-
stantial approach to social categories would be wholly inimical to grasping the
complexities of contemporary Indigenous identities in Canada and the United
States (Valaskakis 2005). Noting that the “right to Indian identity has been con-
trolled and curtailed by government policies since the formation” of these coun-
tries, Valaskakis details the confusions and complications of colonialist policies
involving blood quantum or parentage, complicated by gender, intermarriage,
registration, and treaty status, and interacting with the powerful and thorny pol-
itics of tribal membership and enrollment that were critical to pronouncements
of Native sovereignty (212). This ongoing relational interaction led to complexi-
ties of being Indian in ways that resulted in unstable insider-outsider distinc-
tions and confused and conflicted experiences of identity. As a concrete example
of these complexities, Constance MacIntosh discusses the importance of status
under Canada’s Indian Act to the access of health care resources and writes:
The biological and descent-based criteria of the Indian Act sever connec-
tions by imposing divisions and separations that are at odds with biological,
11
It is precisely this kind of essentialism that a contextual analysis focusing on relations of power (in-
cluding the power of the theorist to make generalization) can render more challengeable. See Mohanty
(2003) for essays that drive home this point. See also Koggel (2009). Since the charge of methodological
essentialism is a challenge to generalizing practices, one possible response is to try to defend the validity
or importance of generalization in a particular theoretical or political context, as, for example, when
theorists defend the political necessity of a provisional identity politics (see, for example, bell hooks
1990). Such defences are themselves open to challenge but show the theorist’s willingness to engage with
the theoretical and political complexities of group identity formation, including her own potential com-
plicity as a theorist. See Constance MacIntosh (2012), for a self-conscious engagement with generalizing
in the context of discussing Indigenous identities. I thank Carolyn McLeod for asking me to respond to
the challenge that generalizations about the characteristics of a group are appropriate in some contexts.
12
Like Young, Taylor is very critical of the extent to which “these antagonistic positions have been
polarized and cemented into the social imaginary.” She notes that “this way of thinking of lineage and
tradition would certainly insist on keeping the various circuits of memory and transmission separate”
(195). I am indebted to her work in thinking through the importance of sharing memory across, and in
spite of, this cemented social imaginary.
affinal, and historic relationships. Individuals without status often report

being treated as though the fact of not meeting statutory criteria for status
signals that they lack something at their core which is possessed by status
individuals, that they have lost some sort of authentic connection to indige-
neity. (MacIntosh 2012, 241)
While Valaskakis and MacIntosh describe the “colonial codes that ricochet
through time and space to cut across and construct Native identity and tribal
affiliation,” as obscuring Indigenous “constructions of membership,” they also
argue that these constructions have persistently re-emerged as Indians “build
their own collective subjectivities and social boundaries in a politicized pro-
cess that expresses not only their resistance, but their cultural continuity”
(Valaskakis 2005, 212 and 217).13
Valaskakis considers the theoretical momentum toward a relational
approach as “an opening to understand colonial experience, nationalist dis-
course, and identity politics as epistemological and representational knots”
(213). While fully alert to the economic politics that fuelled these relational
identity constructions—initially “forcible acquisition over land and re-
sources”—she is also interested in how “North Americans’ representations of
themselves and of Indians are linked in articulation to ways of knowing and
experiencing otherness” (213). The rest of this section follows a key thread in
these epistemological and representational knots. Groups are often identi-
fied through the idea of collective memory as their shared conception of the
past. Yet the obvious role of memory in colonial assimilationist policy sug-
gests that this is precisely a place where we need a relational conception of
the co-constitution of identities through memory processes or otherwise risk
methodological essentialism. My analysis makes use of the idea that represent-
ing groups as kinds of rememberers, as those who have certain memory capac-
ities, defects, or virtues is a powerful way of positioning people relationally and
politically. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, in response to historic claims
of child sexual abuse, women as a group were represented as having extremely
suggestible memory. This representation of defective capacities compromised
possibilities for abuse survivors to credibly share their pasts (Campbell 2003).
Positioning Indigenous peoples as certain kinds of rememberers in order
to control the sociality of memory was a damaging epistemological and po-
litical representation that responded to their refusal in the 1800s to cede their
tribal and national identities and disappear into Canada in exchange for
13
MacIntosh (2012) discusses some of the penalties as well as promises of engaging in these politi-
cized processes in the context of access to health benefits. See Françoise Baylis (2012) for an account of
the complexities of black identity and belonging that I take to be similar in spirit to this discussion of
Indigenous identities. Baylis’ discussion marks a very different set of historical, political, and relational
complexities and has a sharper focus on the relational constitution of individual or personal identities.
enfranchisement and small individual land grants (Milloy 1999). In response,

as John Milloy writes in his chapter on the “founding vision” of Residential
Schools, it was decided that assimilation must take place by other means, by
the complete re-socialization of Indian children, so that finally “there is not a
single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and
there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department” (46).14
The founding vision, I contend, was one of different kinds of remem-
berers, one that recognized the importance of sharing both narrative and
embodied memory in the dynamics of group identifications and relational
self-constitution. Children were, and were understood to be, vulnerable
rememberers whose unmaking and remaking, by preventing some relation-
ships while compelling others, could destroy the bonds of intergenerational
teaching and learning that sustained Native communities. Hayter Read, who
was an official from the Department of Indian Affairs, instructed that “every
effort should be directed against anything calculated to keep fresh in the mem-
ories of children habits and associations which it is one of the main objects
of industrial institutions to obliterate” (43). This intended obliteration of the
habits and associations of memory was galvanized, for example, through geo-
graphical separation from communities, sometimes for years as children were
denied holidays and parents were denied visits; harsh and routine punishment
for communicating in the languages that sustained Indigenous world views
and helped narratively to constitute Indigenous identities; and the impression
of a wholly different temporal rhythm to childhood in order to alter embodied
habit. As Milloy explains, “[s]‌etting the child’s cultural clock from the ‘savage’
seasonal round of hunting and gathering to the hourly and daily precision re-
quired by the Industrial order was seen by the Department as an issue of pri-
mary consideration” (36). Repressing old identities via new social memories
required both retraining children in the embodied practices that would in-
still European forms of discipline, punctuality, and above all obedience meant
for the labouring classes, while schooling children into Christian perspectives
through which they were meant to re-remember their families.15 Anishanaabe
Elder and spiritual advisor, Fred Kelly, invites us into a childhood remember-
ing of his mother, who was already unwell:
In the darkness of the dormitory and alone in bed, I am suddenly overcome
by a cold sweat. Although baptized into the Catholic faith, my poor unsus-
pecting mother still adheres to her traditional spirituality. A boy so loves his
14
Quoting Duncan Campbell Scott, Superintendent of Indian Education, in a 1920 speech to a
Parliamentary Committee in Ottawa.
15
See Paul Connerton (1993), for an account of social memory as embodied acts of transfer where
the proper performance of a practice instantiates, and so conserves and facilitates, the intergenera-
tional transfer of cultural values.
mother that he never wants to see her hurt. Yet, in these circumstances she
is so precariously close to the door of hell. (Kelly 2008, 15)
This “essentially violent . . . onslaught on child and culture” through the sev-
ering of intergenerational memory and the imperative to re-remember their
communities as heathen and their parents as damned, did not, as intended,
kill the Indian in the child (Milloy 1999, 42). As Kelly recalls, “[c]‌ertainly there
was serious and irreversible damage, but no policy could assimilate us” (24).
The schooling did create unstable insider-outsiders to both Indigenous and
Settler communities, often with confused and conflicted experiences of isola-
tion and belonging. At the same time, it dramatically reshaped the economic,
cultural, and relational dynamics of the communities from which children
were removed, sometimes generation after generation (Haig-Brown 1989).
While the removal of children from their homes, the forbidding of Indigenous
language, and the strict gender segregation that prevented siblings from com-
municating at school obstructed the sharing of family memory, the pedagog-
ical imperatives and deliberate isolation of the schools, as well as the trauma
and shame of violence and abuse, prevented Indigenous and non-Indigenous
children from sharing childhood and school day memories of similar kinds of
experience. These are often the memories that we re-share as adults to foster
a kind of generational intimacy. To reframe these points through the insights
of Françoise Baylis’s account of personal identity, the retraining of memory
forecloses on specific possibilities for narrative co-constitution of identities in
family and peer relationships (Baylis 2012).
To illustrate the founding vision of the schools, which was the repre-
sentational matrix through which Indian identities were to be relationally
reconceived, Milloy comments on a Department of Indian Affairs photo-
graph: “Quewich and his children at the Qu-Appelle Industrial School”:
The . . . “influences of Indianism,” the father, stooped and wrinkled, already

a figure of the past, having reached the limits of evolution, appears to be
decaying right in front of the camera, dying off, as was his culture. In sharp
contrast, his children, neatly attired in European clothing, the boy’s cadet
cap a symbol of citizenship, are . . . examples of the future, of the great trans-
formation to be wrought by separation and education in the residential
school. (Milloy 1999, 28)
I have argued elsewhere that such representations also positioned parents

and Elders who had refused to give up their way of life to colonial impera-
tives as kinds of rememberers in order to manipulate the possibility of sharing
memory through a politics or representation (Campbell, Chapter 7). Adults
were precisely not young and vulnerable rememberers: they were not receptive
to the savage experiments on identity intended and prosecuted by the “total
institutions” of the schools (Goffman 1961, 1). As long as they could teach their
children, however, “they were a hindrance to the civilizing process” (Milloy

1999, 26). In being represented by the architects of residential schooling as
“the old, unimprovable people”—as those who could not learn and as those
who had nothing to teach—adults were marked, I contend, as those who could
not share memory (26).16 Department of Indian Affairs inspector J.A. McCrae
wrote: “The circumstances of Indian existence prevents him from following
that course of evolution which has produced from the barbarian of the past,
the civilized man of today” (27). As his words illustrate, being declared unfit
for transformation, parents and Elders were representationally consigned to
the position of the barbarian of the past, a figure that was already lost to a no-
tion of time as progress toward the modern industrial age. Anishanaabe legal
scholar John Borrows notes aptly that Indigenous cultures have been located
in “once upon a time” rather than in time (Borrows 2002: 60). Shown as being
lost to an unrecoverable past, parents and Elders were represented as those who
could not share the present past, while they were, in fact, prevented from pre-
serving a flexible living heritage through sharing their language, stories, skills,
ceremonies, and traditions and by living with their children on lands imbued
with spirituality and ancestral presence. In being categorized as barbarian,
parents and Elders were relationally positioned through what Johannes Fabian
has described as “temporal concepts and devices as a political act,” specifically
through the denial of coevalness understood as “a common, active ‘occupation’
or sharing of time” (Fabian 2002, xl and 31). If barred from sharing the present
past with their children or with Settlers, Indigenous parents and Elders could
not co-determine its significance.
Author Lee Maracle, a member of the Sto:loh Nation states: “We are an
oral people: history, law, politics, sociology, the self, and our relationship to
the world are all contained in our memory” (Maracle 2000, i). It needs finally
to be noted that Western conceptions of memory were, and are complicit in,
the powerful representational assault on the performative memory practices
of Indigenous cultures. Performance theorist Diana Taylor writes that “part
of the colonizing project throughout the Americas consisted in discrediting
autochthonous ways of preserving and communicating historical under-
standing” (Taylor 2003, 34). That is, colonialist practice did not just attempt
to “stamp out,” but also to “discredit,” embodied and oral memory, typically
by recording in writing that these mnemonic practices could not preserve the
past. As she writes, “if the ancestors of the people called Indians had known
writing in early times, then the lives they lived would not have faded from
view until now” (34).17 In other words, Indigenous cultures were lost to an
16
This infamous description is by Reverend E. F. Wilson, founder of the Shingwauk Residential
School.
17
Quoting from the sixteenth-century Huarochiri Manuscript written down by Friar Francisco de
Avila, held in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, Spain.
unrecoverable past partly because their ways of remembering could not pre-
serve the past, justifying their representation as “decaying right in front of the
[eye of the European] camera” while shifting and twisting the agency of pre-
serving Indigenous culture (now lost rather than living) to colonial historians
and their institutions (Milloy 1999, 28).
Western writings often continue to situate oral memory practices of the
past as of a piece with situating oral cultures—cultures such as the Sto:loh
in which oral memory practices both were and are central to a sense of cul-
tural integrity—as themselves having passed. For example, Barbara Misztal,
in a well-regarded account of theories of social remembering, writes that,
“[s]‌ince memory has traveled from oral expression through print literacy to
today’s electronic means of communication, we can conclude by saying that
memory has its own history” (Misztal 2003, 25). However, while attachment to
print does not render us anachronistic—electronic communication has trans-
formed, without obliterating, the idea of text—Misztal misrepresents oral cul-
tures as pre-literate cultures rather than as, for example, the contemporary
Sto:loh nation to which Maracle belongs. Although oral cultures begin the
story of memory, they become lost to a progress they were allegedly not even
able to recognize because, as rememberers, they are incapable of the necessary
historical sensibility: “In oral cultures, people assumed things were as they had
always been, because oral transmission accumulates actual alterations uncon-
sciously” (28, emphasis added; for further discussion see Campbell, 2008b).
Non-Indigenous Canadians have rarely participated in activities of sharing
memory that would allow the narratives and embodied practices of First
Nations, Inuit, or Métis peoples to have force in re-shaping our experience
of pasts that we thus continue to re-live from the colonialist perspective of
our forebears. At the same time, as I have so far briefly suggested, Western
memory theorists have failed to politicize and historicize the conceptions of
memory that are entangled not only with the constitution of Indigenous iden-
tities but also with that of Settler identities. In his written attempt to “preserve”
Great Lakes Indigenous cultures, physician Edward Walsh writes: “Their
History is as mysterious as their fate is severe. . . . They are gliding from the face
of the earth like guilty Ghosts, leaving no memorial, no record that they had
ever existed” (cited in Phillips and Johnson 2003, 150). Museum curators Ruth
Phillips and Elizabeth Johnson point out that “[f]‌or two centuries and more,
educated Europeans and Euro-Canadians like Walsh collected and recorded
in the belief that they were acting in the noble cause of preserving memory”
through the technologies that could do so, showing a collective distortion of
character, a self-deceptive confusion of nobility for the arrogance that was
consequent on the co-implication of Settler/Indigenous identities (150).
Although the persistent stereotype of Indigenous peoples as the frozen past
has been critically engaged, I believe it needs to be more thoroughly concep-
tualized within a complex colonialist politics of assimilation/exclusion that
depends on controlling the sociability of memory. Eduardo Mendieta has

counselled political and legal philosophers to deepen their analyses of racism
by looking from institutions such as the law to the dynamics of moral psy-
chology in which they are embedded, since the state maintains racist affect
through the control of intimacy. His telling illustration is the continued de
facto segregation of US schools. He thus focuses on the control of space and
place. I hope to have illustrated that there is a significant temporal dimen-
sion to possible intimacy—namely our capacity to share the present past with
each other—that is also subject to powerful political and ideological moulding
(Mendieta 2007, 206).
Methodological Essentialism versus Reparative Remembering
How can non-Indigenous Canadians now take responsibility for the past and
act to help de-colonize the relations that are its legacy? One might expect
to turn to explicit discussions of memory and justice for a deepened under-
standing of our task. A number of Western theorists have indeed resisted the
current tendency to critique remembering historic harms as an indulgence in
a politics of grievance.18 They have instead argued that since memory is essen-
tial to our individual and collective capacities to take responsibility for what
we have done, remembering wrongdoing is essential to justice. The accounts
that I have referenced in this chapter are theoretically sophisticated, morally
serious, and politically sensitive. However, while they recognize the centrality
of memory both to identity and to intergroup justice, they have a persistent
tendency to elide the relational dynamics of sharing memory in favour of
implicating social memory in a substantial logic of group definition. Thus,
I challenge them with moments of methodological essentialism inimical to
their commitment to reparative justice, and I position sharing memory across
groups as potentially critical to intercultural reparative initiatives in Settler
societies.19
The theories that I discuss are offered as generalized frameworks for con-
sidering memory and responsibility for historic harm. They are not committed
to close contextual analysis of specific group conflict.20 The idea of a social
18
For a recent and influential politics of grievance account, see Torpey (2006).
19
I offer Taylor (2003) and Simon (2005) as striking exceptions to the tendencies I locate in this
section.
20
As indicated by references and examples, however, concern with specific groups and conflicts
often implicitly underlies these accounts and in my view restrict their vision. The accounts that I ref-
erence all make the Holocaust of the European Jewry central to their understanding of historic injus-
tice and contemporary responsibility. They pay very little attention to the harms of colonization. This
would not be a problem unless they purported to be offering general frameworks for understanding the
role of memory in addressing historic harm.
group in these theories—whether it is family, community, tribe, or nation—

arrives in the discussion of justice and the past as the substrate of social mem-
ory, typically named as collective memory. Although memory is offered as an
explanation of the group cohesion that these theorists believe is necessary for
political agency, that groups are internally homogeneous and independent of
one another, rather than heterogeneous and interdependent in their develop-
ment, is assumed in the invocation of collective memory.
For example, James Booth in Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity,
and Justice characterizes memory (both habit and narrative) as part of the
related boundedness and persistence of a group, “in short . . . its identity”
(Booth 2006, iii). The idea of a group enters here:
Memory collects: it gathers in a past that is mine/ours and that together with
future-oriented . . . projects maps out my/our persistence and distinctness. . . . It
. . . sets boundaries, distinguishes one person or community from another. . . .
Autobiographical memory individuates me; group memories define who we
are in a world in a way that distinguishes us as a community. (11)
This memory involves “storing the interpretive work of previous generations,”
building the public institutions of memory and the absorption of memory as
habit, as “a tonality of sentiments” that characterize “our life in-common” (21).
Collective memory is wholly insular, an “in-gathering”: “the group . . . draws its
distinctness, its separateness from others by the (manifold) in-gathering of its
past. Collective memory as the continuity of life in common does not readily
extend beyond the group” (24–25).
This same undefended homogeneity and insularity to a group characterizes
Avishai Margalit’s influential The Ethics of Memory. Margalit offers a descrip-
tion of natural communities of memory comprised of those who already share
“thick relations”—families, communities, and citizenry. For Margalit, as for
Booth, how individuals re-experience significant past events is the entrance to
a discussion of social memory. Margalit conceives of social memory as shared
memory in the sense of an affectively laden representation of a significant
communal event that evolves through communication among witnesses: “A
shared memory integrates and calibrates the different” and fragmented per-
spectives of those who remember the episode (Margalit 2002, 51). Those who
have not witnessed the event become involved in remembering it through oth-
ers’ revivifying descriptions and through their access to archives and sanc-
tioned mnemonic sites such as monuments and memorials. A community
maintains cohesion through the idea of a shared past, and Margalit refers to
shared or collective memory as “cement” (67).
Although memory practices are meant to explain the integrity of the com-
munity, the assumption that there is an extremely cohesive community is al-
ready assumed in the idea of integrating perspectives into a representation of
the past that allows for a singular description and has a singular significance.
The discussion takes for granted that there is a collective perspective on the
past that defines the community in question, though it requires developed
articulation. Even here, the process is mysterious—when Margalit writes that
it is the “shared memory [that] integrates and calibrates” different perspec-
tives, he mystifies the agency involved in social memory since the explanation
simply substitutes a reference to shared memory for the communal processes
that are meant to explain it.
Some theorists are certainly aware that not all group members share a view
of the past. Jeffrey Blustein notes that “the possibility of conflicting interpreta-
tions of the past within a single political community complicates the process
of taking responsibility for past wrongdoing” (Blustein 2008, 140). However,
when we follow out the implication of this insight in his thought, we find that
“[m]‌emory disputes have to be taken seriously because taking responsibility
for the past . . . depends . . . on a more-or-less shared understanding between
the perpetrators and those who inherit the burden of responsibility on the
one hand, and the victims and those who represent them on the other” (140).
Conflicting past perspectives become the markers of different groups: perpe-
trators and victims.
In these discussions of intergroup justice, a group is identified or picked
out via its perspective on the past, and group members are those who share,
or should or will be educated to share, this perspective.21 Although Booth and
Margalit take collective memory to unify community, a prior assumption of
homogeneity underwrites the possibility of the group as the substrate of such
memory. A shared perspective on the past is already inchoate in Booth’s idea of
a life in common and in the naturalness of Margalit’s communities of memory.
Memory itself is personified as an agent releasing these theorists from con-
fronting the agents and character of actual memory practices.
These approaches—and here I add Blustein’s unmarked assumption that
memory conflict spawns group distinction—imply a level of agreement in per-
spective that does not map onto the reality of group life, be it family, community,
or citizenry. Groups subject to aggressive assimilationist strategies will cer-
tainly not share a tonality of sensibility from a life in common or form a natural
community of memory. Those who claim Indigenous identities often belong
to geographically fragmented communities and may be engaged in revitalizing
and learning their languages, stories, practices, and ceremonies in response
to the colonialist assault on the possibility of a life in common. These theo-
ries reify the nature of groups and create sharp insider-outsider distinctions,
but, according to theorists such as Valaskakis and MacIntosh, confused and
conflicted experiences of belonging are often the norm for those who identify
21
Margalit’s (2002) account depends on a mnemonic division of labour. As community members,
we are not all responsible for every shared memory, although we are responsible for doing our part to
see that they are all preserved.
as Indigenous in Canada or the United States.22 The close inter-definitional

relation of group and memory in these theories—social memory as collective
memory with an always already-formed group as its substrate—fails to open
space for a discussion of memory processes as a key dynamic in the relational
formation of group identities. Thus, I challenge these theorists with method-
ological essentialism. It is their intent to provide frameworks that illuminate
our ethical/political responsibilities in the context of historic harms. However,
as they describe the circuits of memory as intra rather than intergroup, and as
memory practices serve precisely to separate groups from each other rather
than to explain their co-constitution, we gain no understanding of assimila-
tion. They thus inadvertently remove an enormous area of historic harm and
its effects on communal life from our purview.23
I do not deny that practices of sharing the past often contribute to group
identity and group cohesion—we would then again have no account of the
harms of assimilation. The embodied practices that enact communal values
and are transferred through intergeneration learning are especially signifi-
cant, and all of these theorists credit a diverse range of memory activities. But
those outside or on the margins of the group may also become involved in
supporting these values through participation in the activities or in making
their pasts and self-identifications vulnerable to the shared experience of
others.24 Thus, it is finally important to signpost the methodological essen-
tialism consequent on an inadequate account of relational identity formation
because of the imaginings that it may preclude for renewing and changing
relations through sharing memory. The idea of coming together and form-
ing new relationships through sharing memory seems to be prevented by the
very function of memory in consolidating extant group identities, and, on the
accounts canvassed in this section, the prospects for more diverse communi-
ties of memory are indeed dismal. Margalit writes that “the most promising
projects of shared memory are those that go through natural communities of
22
Bringing Them Home (1997) is an excellent source of evidence for the difficulties of belonging
faced by those whose history includes forced removal from their communities. Although I do not have
the space to pursue further illustration here, I thank an anonymous referee for indicating the relevance
of this work to the argument of this chapter.
23
While I have no wish to do violence to individual accounts by over-generalizing the source of this
fairly static approach to identity, it is worth noting that all analogize social to individual memory, treat-
ing the social as an individual writ large and thus implicitly de-socializing individual memory though
all would in fact affirm our conception of individuals themselves as socially constituted. In an earlier
section of this chapter, I sketched the move to an understanding of memory that credits the extent to
which personal memory is shaped through relational memory processes and that moves away from a
core understanding of memory as a psychic representation of a singular event impressed at the time of
experience. If we become rememberers through sharing and re-experiencing an evolving sense of the
meaning of our own pasts in relation to diverse others, analogizing social to individual memory may be
the wrong place to start in understanding how memory enters into group constitution.
24
See Campbell (2009) and Paulette Regan (2007) for developed examples of participation in oth-
ers’ memory practices so as to give weight to different values and resistant social imaginaries.
memory” (Margalit 2002, 82). Booth writes of our possible responses to occa-
sions when others share family memory:
[T]‌hey would be detached, which is not to say unmoved or without impact,
but rather removed from the group whose identity is (in part) these memo-
ries. This memory defines one community; but outside that framework it is
little more than an assemblage of images, stories, names. (Booth 2006, xii)
Finally, for Blustein, the shared conceptions that characterize the unified
groups that have his attention arise from intragroup interaction where “those
who belong to the group interact and interrelate in ways that constitute it
as a collective body and that are mediated by a conception of community”
(Blustein, 2008, 122–3). These theorists, of course, witness the importance of
acknowledging intergroup harm through an accurate and credible under-
standing of history that would be shared by perpetrator/victim groups. In
much writing on reparations, social memory stands as representing harm
rather than as being often intimately involved in its constitution, and the
idea of sharing memory becomes reduced to a shared understanding of his-
tory. To return to my context, this reductive approach to sharing memory,
which is manifest, for example, in Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s
hope that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will encourage “a
relationship based on the knowledge of our shared history,” does not respect
Aboriginal oral and legal traditions and would fail the intercultural mandate
of the commission (Government of Canada, 2008). To treat sharing experi-
ence as another source of historical evidence is to misunderstand the nature of
Indigenous memory practices and so to continue to marginalize them.25 Cree
scholar Winona Wheeler writes that many non-Indigenous historians treat
Indigenous oral histories as just another source of “documentary” evidence
and do not understand the ways in which a Cree culture “is an oral culture, a
listening culture” and that “the Cree are a people to whom understanding and
knowledge comes by way of relationships” (Wheeler 2005, 190). According to
Wheeler, non-Indigenous historians have little patience for the sharing of time
that sharing memory in the spirit of learning involves:
Let’s face it, doing oral history the “Indian way” is hard work. . . . The study
of kayâs âcimowina, stories of long ago, has taken me moose-hunting and
taught me to clean and prepare such fine feast food delicacies as moose-nose
and smoked-intestine soup. Traditional copyright teachings come in the wee
25
I thank Jennifer Llewellyn here for recognizing my implicit commitment to this distinction, caus-
ing me to recognize and sharpen it. Although in thinking of reparations, some writers would place
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the stage of acknowledging harm as a preliminary to its
redress, the argument of this chapter suggests, in keeping with other writers such as Llewellyn (2006);
Kelly (2008); McKay (2008); and Walker (2006), that they offer more substantive possibilities for
reparative activity.
hours of the morning over cold Tim Horton’s coffee in a 4 X 4 truck heading
down the Peace River Highway. . . . Cree education is based on interactive
and reciprocal relations and all knowledge comes with some degree of per-
sonal sacrifice. (199)
According to Richard Morris (Mescalero/Kiowa) and Mary Stuckey, when
four Lakota Sioux testified before the 1976 Senate hearings on Wounded Knee
by sharing the stories of the massacre in a way that their audience likely found
“unnecessary, circular, repetitive, and irrelevant,” they were not attempting to
give evidence that would settle the historical account:
Rather the witnesses sought to include every potentially meaningful mo-
ment of recollection that could help the living understand how to live. In
order to find for themselves an appropriate space in national, collective
memory, Indigenous speakers were more interested in opening rather than
closing spaces within that memory. (Morris and Stuckey 2004, 24)
In the 1960s, even when in ill health, Cree Elder John R. McLeod “was unable to
turn away from many invitations to speak to non-Indian audiences . . . because
he sincerely believed in the importance of creating a better understanding
between his people and non-Indians” (Dyck 1992, 135). Using a matter-of-fact
style of Cree storytelling, he would recount his experiences as a farmer on the
Prairies. McLeod “never said what the point of his stories was; he forced the
listeners to discover this for themselves”:
[L]‌isteners were usually staggered to hear, and sometimes almost unwilling
to believe, that Indian agents and farming instructors had so completely
dominated their Indian charges as recently as the late 1950’s by means of
sales permits, travel passes, and a variety of other social control mecha-
nisms . . . non-Indian listeners would sooner or later have to confess to either
him or themselves “I didn’t know that.” (138)
At that moment, McLeod would know the people there were relating to him,
not to the stereotypic figure they had imagined in his place, and only then
would he “turn to some of the contemporary issues that meant much to him”
(138).26
In expressing respect for Aboriginal oral and legal traditions, it is important
to follow Young, Valaskakis, and MacIntosh and refuse a substantial notion
of Indigenous identities, especially in response to the essentializing tenden-
cies of “North American narratives of dominance” that place “Native people
in a time-distanced past that cannot be fully retrieved from the recesses of
Indian oral culture” (Valaskakis 2005, 215). In light of these narratives, it is
26
I have been made familiar with Dyck’s account through the writing of John McLeod’s grandson,
Neal McLeod (2007).
imperative to recognize “dynamic expressions of culture that emerge, move,

and fuse today in response to a changing environment” (215). Contemporary
Indigenous revaluings of oral tradition and sharing memory respond to: their
devaluing by historians; the discrediting of Indigenous peoples as testifiers; the
failure to honour Indigenous ways of preserving and transferring knowledge
in North American legal systems; the assault on intergenerational memory
and learning by Residential Schools; the still extant stereotypes of a frozen
Indigenous past; the specific nature of the traditions that those of different
Indigenous nations engage; and the importance of re-appropriating control
over the values that ground Indigenous belonging.
Non-Indigenous Canadians can respect this non-essentializing impera-
tive along with the very different and valuable models of sociable memory
evident in Indigenous teachings. These teachings express and revitalize rich
traditions of public remembering that assume remembering is most naturally
an interactive, collaborative, and profoundly ethical activity; that sharing the
past is critical to the epistemic and ethical fidelity of memory; that memory
plays a fundamental role in making and maintaining relations; and that it is
an important way to renew and transform intergroup relations. I want to con-
clude by offering two suggestions about the reparative role of sharing mem-
ory in the context of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation
Commission.
First, the reparative possibilities of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission cannot be adequately enacted through agreement about his-
tory for reasons in addition to the continued marginalization of Indigenous
memory practices. I have argued that Indigenous/Settler identities have been
co-constituted “through temporal concepts and devices as a political act,” spe-
cifically through the denial of a “common or active ‘occupation’ . . . of time”
(Fabian 2002, xi and 31). Pauline Wakeham describes the Settler imaginary as
expressing a “taxidermic semiotics” that attempts to “freeze-frame its speci-
mens in an ‘allochronic’ or ‘other time’ of suspended pastness” (2008, 17;
Taylor 2004, 23).27 The Indigenous peoples whose territories Canada appro-
priated and non-Indigenous Canadians might agree that, for example, John
Milloy’s A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential
School System is a fairly accurate rendering of some dimensions of our shared
history without affecting the force of this destructive semiotics. I have sug-
gested in this chapter that sharing memory—sharing the present past—is a
common active “occupation” of time. In so far as non-Indigenous Canadians
27
By social imaginary, I mean the deep background of concepts and discourses, expectations, and
representational schemas that shape (most often implicitly) “the ways people imagine their social
existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows” (Taylor,
2004, 23).
participate in this sharing, they can act in a decolonizing spirit to defeat, rather
than to re-enforce, this semiotics.
Second, there are potent issues of re-identification at issue in sharing
experience. The intent of Residential Schooling was to shift the nature of group
identifications so as to extinguish Indianness by controlling how memory was
shared across groups. Though not all of our relational self-conceptions shaped
through sharing memory are group identificatory, many are, and this fact raises
the question of whether sharing memory through the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission might transform the group boundaries constituted through colo-
nialism. Given the history of Native/Settler relations, Tsosie is understandably
wary of what she terms a reparative strategy of re-identification—she has in
mind the call for all Americans to identify themselves “as victims who survived
the experience of slavery and of the civil war” (Tsosie 2006, 59)—as incompat-
ible with Native sovereignty.28 However, Valaskakis points out that Indigenous
cultural resurgence or “survivance,” including reclaiming the heritage of
sharing experience, aims to shift power in order to reappropriate the criteria
of belonging. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission may fortify this exer-
cise of power in a number of interesting ways, and I conclude, speculatively, by
mentioning a few of these.
To aid in renewing and transforming relations, non-Indigenous Canadians
might witness and credit the types of Indigenous activism implicit in the work
of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Through public remembering
in this context, Indigenous peoples will act powerfully, pragmatically, and
symbolically to reinforce the structure and flow of intergenerational memory
that is indeed critical to the flourishing of community and the very process
that Residential Schooling sought to disrupt. Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred
condemns Canadian Aboriginal policy as insisting “if we are to have a fu-
ture, it will be one defined by and allowed only at the discretion of the dom-
inant society” (Alfred 2005). The resistance to the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission that its supporters anticipate, which is that it does not contest the
truth of Indigenous accounts but, rather, their relevance, should be read pre-
cisely as resistance to the current Indigenous contending of a colonialist social
imaginary that still seeks to control who can share memory in ways that serve
the future.29
Valaskakis also writes that “in the circulation of Indian narratives . . . Native
people retell and resist, building the oneness of different First Nations in
28
John Ralston Saul’s provocative claim that Canada is “a Métis civilization” which is an attempt to
encourage acknowledgment of the deep influence of Indigenous nations on the values that Canadians
cherish, has recently confronted both Indigenous people and non-Indigenous Canadians with similar
questions about the politics of re-identification (John Ralston Saul 2008).
29
Sheila Wildeman has pointed out to me that this point is closely connected to the previous one
since witnessing and supporting the flow of intergenerational memory is one way to defeat a taxi-
dermic semiotics.
tribal representations of identity and community. . . . But the cultural differ-

ences of individual Indian nations are also overlaid with a spreading sense
of pan-Indianness,” itself a consequence of sharing “narratives of pain and
empowerment” (Valaskakis 2005, 215–6). Thus, stories of the fragmentation
of community, the degradation of culture, and the resistance to both may
resonate with the experience of Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups who
have been targeted by aggressive assimilation potentially encouraging both
pan-Indian identifications and more diverse communities of resistance to
colonial legacies.
Finally, and despite Tsosie’s concerns, Indigenous leaders have invited
non-Indigenous Canadians (both those of Settler heritage and newcomers)
to share the past in the spirit of a renewed and shared identity. In anticipating
the pedagogical function of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Elders
such as Fred Kelly and Stan McKay remind non-Indigenous Canadians of
what we have forgotten: that we are all treaty people. McKay writes that treaties
do not have a “best before date” and “they do need to be revisited so that the
spirit may be kept alive in each generation” (McKay 2008, 113). Kelly says to the
imagined priest who hears his confessions about Residential Schooling: “[L]‌et
me put it more succinctly, Father, you and all Canadians have treaty rights too”
(Kelly 2008, 23). Offering the living presence of the treaties as a perspective
through which to witness the experience of Residential Schooling opens the
possibility of a national level of re-identification that reinforces, rather than
undermines, Native sovereignty.
At the moment when we begin to discuss reparations, either in a par-
ticular context or at a theoretical level that abstracts from context, we often
begin by marking out reparation as a political process that that takes place
between groups set out and differentiated as perpetrators and victims or
as former adversaries (Rice and Snyder 2008, 46; Kelly 2008, 22). This can
be a dangerous moment for the kind of essentialist view of group identities
criticized by Young, Valaskakis, Heyes, and others to creep into an account.30
I have argued through illustration that understanding the intercultural con-
text in which reparation initiatives take place requires analyzing the continued
co-implication of identities and that memory can be a powerful node of inter-
action in this co-implication. Whether the Indian Residential Schools Truth
and Reconciliation Commission can make it possible to shift the power and
dynamics of relational identification through sharing memory will depend
on who controls the imaginings through which the past is revivified and the
willing sociality of their engagement.
30
This despite the fact that reparative contexts should be particularly valuable sites for thinking
through the relational nature of identities, as they seek to shift self-identification and social norms
through encouraging relational interaction.
{ 6 }
Remembering Who We Are
Responsibility and Resistant Identification
I am rereading Lorraine Bethel’s (1979) “What Chou Mean We, White

Girl?” and June Jordan’s (1980) “Where Is the Love?” two pieces written
about ten years apart, and a layering of voices of women of color comes
to my mind, crowding my thinking space: voices that I have heard keenly,
attended to with the gladness that fills one when one hears really good
news, voices that have accompanied me sweetly. The voices all speak this
knowledge to me: One does not go around alone (lonely maybe), but
not individual-style alone making or remaking anything, ignoring the
relations one has, the ones one does not have, the good about the good
ones, the bad about the bad ones and the good ones. To know oneself
and one’s situation is to know one’s company or lack thereof, is to know
oneself with or against others.
Lugones 1991, 35–36
White man, hear me! . . . the great force of history comes from the fact
that we carry it within us, we are unconsciously controlled by it in many
ways, and history is literally present in all we do. It could scarcely be
otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our
identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that
one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess
the history which has placed one where one is and formed one’s point of
view. In great pain and terror because, thereafter, one enters into a battle
with that historical creation, Oneself.
Baldwin 1998 [1965], 722–23
Introduction
Although relationships of political solidarity may require an ability to identify

with people whose lives and backgrounds we do not share, I shall assume in
Remembering Who We Are 115
this chapter that they often also require an ability to understand and identify
with the collectives to which we belong, and that this may be especially so
when these collectives have harmed the groups with whom we aim to stand in
solidarity. When this is the case, we may feel ourselves called upon to take re-
sponsibility for the harm, even when we have not contributed to it and cannot
be held liable for it. I am interested in exploring the emotional strategies that
allow for “resistant identification,” identification with a collective history of
which one disapproves.1 I explore this theme through an analysis of three
texts: Joel Feinberg’s “Collective Responsibility” written in 1968; Genevieve
Lloyd’s “Individuals, Responsibility and the Philosophical Imagination”
which, 32 years later, revisits the issues that Feinberg raises; and Minnie Bruce
Pratt’s “Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart” written in 1984 as a narrative of resistant
identification.
Many accounts of collective responsibility remain in conversation with
Feinberg’s paper which argues that collective responsibility can be assigned
to groups only when there is sympathy-based group solidarity.2 Part of what is
important about Feinberg’s work is his exploration of whether emotional com-
mitments can play a central role in determining issues of collective responsi-
bility. I use Feinberg’s text to position the problem of resistant identification—I
shall argue that an experience he relates in the text invites us to raise this issue,
but his focus on assigned responsibility and on bonds of sympathy as a condi-
tion of responsibility prevent an understanding of such identification. Lloyd’s
text offers a crucial critical refinement to Feinberg—she challenges the de-
pendence of responsibility on prior emotional bonds. Lloyd argues that when
we attend to the temporal process of forming identities, we can see that our
connection to others, our sense of ourselves as collectively shaped, comes into
being partly through our taking responsibility. While Lloyd continues to focus
on relations of sympathetic identification, I show that her text also offers the
resources to understand certain occasions of resistant identification. Minnie
Bruce Pratt’s narrative of responsibility, for example, illustrates precisely the
kind of self-understanding that Lloyd’s text explores; moreover, Pratt’s text
shows that coming to think of oneself collectively through taking responsi-
bility can involve many emotions besides sympathy.
Part of the conceptual task of this chapter is to show that taking responsi-
bility can be itself identificatory—it offers a way to identify with a harm-doing
1
As I am using the term, “resistant identification” involves a level of acknowledgment that one is a
member of a group—it is to pause on the way to rejection or disaffiliation to explore this identification
as a grounds for one’s responsibility. The possibility of rejecting one’s identification, at least in public
ways, is often connected to power—those who lack social power are often not allowed to disaffiliate
from the collectives with which others identify them. See Michael Stocker (1996, 310–12) for a discus-
sion of identification as it figures in prejudice.
2
Besides Lloyd, see, for example, Virginia Held, and James Muyskens, both collected in Larry May
and Stacey Hoffman (1991), and, especially Howard McGary (1999).
group that does not require positive emotional attitudes toward the group
or its activities. This does not mean emotions are not involved—taking re-
sponsibility may be expressive of a range of different emotions. My more gen-
eral aim in this chapter is to contribute to contemporary discussions about
the possibilities of collective response to past harms through reflection on a
series of connections among emotion, identification, and responsibility. Many
accounts of collective responsibility stress the moral importance of disaffilia-
tion with harm-doing groups through acts of condemnation, disavowal, and
disassociation. While not denying that types of disaffiliation are often mor-
ally required, this chapter supplies an alternative focus. I argue for the impor-
tance of expressing responsibility through identifying with one’s own group; it
should be noted at the onset, however, that the kind of identification I describe
is compatible with a wide range of disaffiliative acts.3
I. Framing the Issue
In “Collective Responsibility,” Feinberg comments, in passing, on his inability

to feel solidarity with other members of the white race. He writes,
it is natural . . . that an American Negro should feel solidarity with all other
Negros and speak of what has been done to “the black man” by “the white
man” and what moral relations between “the black man” (all black men)
and “the white man” (all white men) ought to be. But I, for one, am quite
incapable of feeling the same kind of solidarity with all white men, a motley
group of one billion persons who in my mind are no more an “organiza-
tion” than is the entire human race. I certainly feel no bonds to nineteenth
century slave traders analogous to those ties of identification an American
Negro must naturally feel with the captured slaves. Precisely because of this
failure of imagination, I can feel no shame on their behalf. (1968, 679)
3
McGary, for example, holds that we are morally liable when we do not sufficiently dissociate our-
selves from a group practice we know to be wrong, even if we are not participating in the practice. He
notes that “dissociation from the practice may require dissociation from the group” (1999, 89). Larry
May argues that in cases of “metaphysical guilt” that arise from membership in a harm-doing group,
we must take responsibility for who we are. “By condemning or disavowing what one’s community
has done, one changes that part of oneself which is based on how one chooses to regard oneself. Such
changes dissociate oneself from one’s fellow group members and diminish one’s shared responsibility
for what others have done” (1991, 247). I am not sure why May thinks that diminishing one’s share of
responsibility is what ought to be aimed at in being accountable for who one is. For reasons argued
later, I hold that strategies of dis-identification may limit our ability to respond appropriately to harm.
However, as I note, the type of identifying strategies I discuss are completely compatible with the con-
demnation of group practices.
He adds, making clear that the bonds are emotional ones, that a European
appalled by US foreign policy will only feel shame as opposed to anger if he has
sentimental ties with the United States.
Feinberg’s comments take place within a discussion of the relationship of
solidarity to collective responsibility. Systems of justice that assign liability to
an entire group for the actions of particular group members are acceptable or
“prudent,” Feinberg argues, only where there is strong de facto solidarity as
a consequence of “mutual interests, bonds of affection, and a ‘common lot’ ”
(677). Bonds of affection are central to Feinberg’s account of solidarity in two
ways he does not clearly separate. First, he suggests that the sort of acting in
concert that can result in collective liability is most likely when parties are
largely “of one mind to begin with” and this, Feinberg elaborates partly in
terms of sympathy involving the imaginative sharing of others’ perspectives
(677). “Fraternal” pride and shame, which he takes as an index to solidarity
and which are responses that motivate accepting responsibility, will be felt, he
thinks, only for those with whom one can sympathetically identify.4 Second,
where there is such fellow-feeling, group members may undertake collective
responsibility voluntarily, and the will to take responsibility renders a system
of collective responsibility further natural or reasonable.
It is important to note these two distinct strands in Feinberg’s discussion.
Because liability is Feinberg’s grip on the notion of responsibility, he is inter-
ested in situations where responsibility can be assigned. He also sees that peo-
ple can willingly undertake responsibility for the actions of others, but in the
context of his argument, this simply increases the reasonableness of holding
them responsible. Many contemporary theorists are interested in the indepen-
dence of taking responsibility from issues of liability. Claudia Card points out
that if we understand responsibility “as locating ourselves as morally relevant
centers of agency” there are a number of ways in which we can take respon-
sibility in and for situations where we could not be assigned blame for what
was done. In the remainder of this chapter, I am interested in responsibility
that is undertaken rather than in liability. Two of the senses of taking respon-
sibility that Card distinguishes—the accountability sense (“agreeing to answer
or account for something”) and the care-taking sense (“committing oneself to
4
May elaborates a similar view holding that what group members have relevantly in common is
a shared culture providing “common experiences and viewpoints.” These shared attitudes create sol-
idarity as evidenced by pride or shame; also and crucially they “allow for the amalgamation of indi-
vidual actions and attitudes into something more than the mere sum of its parts” (1991, 246). In others’
accounts, like Held’s, the “collectivizing of action” is brought about by the existence of a group decision
procedure. McGary is right I think to identify the term “solidarity” with “a level of political and social
consciousness” (1999, 85–6). His account requires a weaker notion of identification than solidarity.
I suspect that this is because McGary takes social practices and group relations as more fundamental
than many philosophers who write on collective responsibility, so doesn’t see the primary argumenta-
tive task as one of giving an account of how individual actions can lead to valuations of the group. For
McGary, our actions reflect and participate in social practices.
stand behind something, to back it, support it, make it good . . . and following
through”) will be useful in thinking about strategies of identification (Card
1996, 28).5 Feinberg himself, however, does not distinguish different dimen-
sions of responsibility and simply concludes that collective responsibility
makes little sense as a system where strong de facto solidarity is lacking.
Feinberg means his discussion of sympathetic identification to explain what
he takes to be “some puzzling variations” between groups—and it is here that
he comments on his lack of feelings of solidarity with the white race. Because
he feels no ties of sympathetic identification with slave traders, and therefore
feels no shame, Feinberg seems also to reject the notion of collective responsi-
bility for slavery. His account, in requiring sympathetic bonds, explains why it
would not be natural or prudent to assign him this “vicarious” responsibility.
If we concentrate on the relation between identifying with others and taking
collective responsibility, there are two political issues that arise from Feinberg’s
reflection. The first issue is this: Feinberg suggests that one may belong to a
group that has harmed others but because one does not emotionally identify
with the group, one may not feel a sense of responsibility for the harm. One
might think: “What they did has nothing to do with me.” Feinberg identifies
two groupings of the white race with whom he does not identify: “a motley
group of one billion persons” and “nineteenth century slave traders” (679).
In the first case, he feels no identification with a large, impersonal, and very
mixed collective: in the second, we can suppose he feels disapprobation for
nineteenth-century slave traders. If one feels disapprobation for a group, one’s
disapprobation may lead to emotional disaffiliation rather than identification.
I describe this as an issue because we may think at times that we or others
ought to take collective responsibility for the harm that our group has done
to another group. Being out of sympathy with the group may be a barrier to
doing so but will not be a justification for not doing so. How does one in some
sense continue to identify with group history when one is quite legitimately
out of sympathy with the group? How does one take responsibility for what
lies outside one’s own agency if not through sympathetic identification with
those who did the harm? It is not my intent to try to determine when people
should take collective responsibility. When it is appropriate for people to do so
depends on a complex range of factors outside the scope of this chapter.6 I am
5
Following earlier work by Herbert Fingarette, Card characterizes taking responsibility as involv-
ing acceptance, commitment, care, and concern (1996, 28). Card further distinguishes types of
responsibility as backward-looking and forward-looking, categorizing the care-taking and accounta-
bility senses as both forward-looking. I do not follow her in this terminology as Lloyd’s work suggests
the temporal dimensions of responsibility are too complex to be talked about in this way.
6
The factors may include the complexity of an individual’s group identifications, the seriousness of
the harm, an individual’s position with respect to benefit, whether an individual could have acted so
as to influence the group, whether an individual attempted to disaffiliate, the penalties for disaffiliation
and whether the failure to disaffiliate strengthened the group, and, importantly, whether and in what
circumstances one is called to responsibility. For an excellent and extended argument that an account
interested here in the role that emotions may play in rendering the taking of
such responsibility possible or difficult.
The second issue that I extract from Feinberg’s remark concerns the role
of identifying with one’s own group in widening possibilities for political un-
derstanding and political solidarity across groups—one of the reasons I think
group identification is often important. I raise this issue by pointing to a gap
in Feinberg’s explanation of the contrast between black men and white men.
Feinberg, first, does not raise the question to himself of why he thinks that it
is natural for an African American to feel solidarity with all blacks and across
considerable historical time while he, himself, is unable to think that way about
whites. That it does strike Feinberg as “natural” is probably partly a response
to the North American discourse of the 1960s when many African Americans
did speak about the moral relationship between “the black man” and “the
white man.” But what is striking to me about Feinberg’s text is that what he
identifies as a potentially puzzling variation—that blacks form a collective in
some sense that whites do not—does not appear as a variation in black speech
about the relation of the black man to the white. More precisely, it doesn’t ap-
pear as a variation in Feinberg’s description of this speech. But Feinberg does
not take this as part of what needs explaining. Why isn’t it, for Feinberg, at least
an additional puzzling variation that (on his view) blacks view both blacks and
whites collectively but Feinberg views blacks collectively and not whites? That
many blacks view whites collectively and address whites in ways that reflect
this, as for example in James Baldwin’s “White man, hear me!” (1998, 722),
receives no comment in Feinberg’s text. It might be thought that Feinberg is
in fact responding to this puzzle in rejecting identification with whites: that is,
that he is saying blacks are wrong to view and address whites collectively. But
this suggestion is made implausible by the fact that Feinberg thinks it’s natural
for blacks to identify whites collectively. So what Feinberg fails to address in
his explanation of puzzling variation between groups is the contrast between
how he takes others to see him and how he sees himself when he has identified
both as natural. Yet, at the same time, in exploring responsibility in the way
that he does, Feinberg is evidently responding to being collectively addressed
by African Americans.
Feinberg’s experience suggests a motive for trying to identify with one’s
group that is not fully explored or articulated in his text, namely, to try to un-
derstand how one is seen as part of trying to assess and acknowledge others’
moral claims. We can sharpen this point by thinking about what might be
an adequate alternative response to harm. Patricia Greenspan suggests that
if we are fundamentally opposed to the way our group acts and if we have
some control over our identificatory responses, we can drop out of the group
of how a society negotiates its practices of responsibilities provides a map of its moral understandings,
see Margaret Urban Walker (1998).
in imagination and instead identify directly with the victims, experiencing

sympathy and outrage on their behalf. “Why,” she asks, “should I punish my-
self for something I would never do—for wars or witch trials I know I would
have resisted” (1995, 163). Sympathetic identification with the victims of harm
“does represent an alternative way of exhibiting moral solidarity in these cases”
(164). But if the victims see me as part of the group collectively responsible and
I cannot see myself that way, I will fail to successfully identify with the victims.
I will fail to fully understand how they see me. I may be confused at their rejec-
tion of my outrage on their behalf, failing to grasp that from their standpoint,
this outrage simply manifests my failure to understand their perspective on
the harm and their moral demand for my responsibility.
The connection between identifying with how we are seen and under-
standing the people who see us has been made eloquently and repeatedly by
Maria Lugones, who, addressing Anglo women, puts the point in terms of
noticing others. “We are noticed,” she writes,
when you realize that we are mirrors in which you can see yourselves as no
other mirror shows you. . . . It is not that we are the only faithful mirrors, but
I think we are faithful mirrors. Not that we show you as you really are; we
just show you as one of the people that you are. . . . In blocking identification
with that self you block identification with us and in blocking identification
with us, you block identification with that self. (1991, 42–43)
To understand ourselves collectively is not necessarily to understand ourselves
as others understand us; Lugones suggests this latter involves a more complex
identification. As well, this latter would involve the affirmation that others see
us with some accuracy, and of course, they may not. But in identifying with
our group, we may at least take ourselves to be addressed by others in ways that
might motivate thinking about how they regard us. It does not aid in under-
standing others and in assessing the significance of their moral claims to feel
simply misaddressed. Thus, the ability to understand oneself collectively may
be necessary to forming wider bonds of solidarity, to understanding others’
moral claims, to knowledge of others that depends on noticing them, and to
knowledge of the self that depends on noticing the way one is seen.
I am interested in this chapter in people who are out of sympathy with their
groups but continue to at least resistantly identify with them. In “Identity: Skin,
Blood, Heart,” Minnie Bruce Pratt, white, southern, and Christian raised,
writes of a dream of her father:
I wanted it to be my lover, but it was my father, walking unsteadily, old, car-
rying something heavy, a box, a heavy box . . . with what I had feared . . . my
responsibility to change what my father had done, without even knowing
what his secrets were. I was angry: why should I be left with this: I didn’t
want it. I’d done my best for years to reject it. (1984, 5253)
Rian Malan in My Traitor’s Heart explains why he returned to South Africa,

first describing why he left. “And that my friend was why I ran away. . . . I ran
away because I hated Afrikaners and loved blacks. I ran away because I was
an Afrikaner and feared blacks. You could say I suppose that I ran away from
the paradox. . . . I was without honor: as an Afrikaner, as a liberal, as a reporter
and as a human being” (1990, 102). Pratt and Malan grapple with the problem
that I have used Feinberg’s text to motivate. How in the service of political
understanding and wider relationships of solidarity can one come to emotion-
ally identify with one’s group or with one’s history in order to take collective
responsibility? Their texts are emotionally driven, but the fear, anger, and even
hatred that they describe as part of their response to the collectives with which
they identify suggests that we need to look beyond sympathy-based solidarity
for an account of their attachments.7
In section 3, I offer a reading of Pratt’s text inspired by Genevieve Lloyd’s
recent reflections on collective responsibility and on the role that concrete
experience should play in challenging the philosophical imagination.
Feinberg’s earlier work shapes the contours of Lloyd’s reflection, and in the
next section, I sketch her project.
2. Lloyd and the Temporality of the Self
Significant attempts to redress past harm often rest with people who under-
take acknowledgment and reparation in ways that others cannot effectively
compel. In “Individuals, Responsibility and the Philosophical Imagination,”
Genevieve Lloyd shifts attention away from questions of when responsibility
can be assigned to individuals to those who do in fact take responsibility
for others. Lloyd wants to understand some of the mechanisms of sympa-
thetic identification through which people take responsibility for what lies
“beyond the scope of their individual agency” (2000, 113) and beyond the reach
of assigned liability.8 In the background of her inquiry are such questions as
how, for example, Australians can take responsibility for the unjust historical
treatment of Indigenous peoples, for a past in which those who now feel called
7
One of the very few philosophers to take issues of closeness and identification seriously in an
analysis of emotion is Michael Stocker (1996, 306–20). Stocker cautions that “both closeness and iden-
tification come in a huge, even a bewildering number of varieties” (307). In this chapter I am primarily
concerned with exploring notions of identification that are not empathy based. Stocker himself seems
particularly interested in “different closenesses and identifications of feeling called upon to answer
for others” (307), a kind of identification that, as I shall argue, is best understood as partly constituted
through taking responsibility.
8
Lloyd follows Hannah Arendt here in wanting to distinguish types of responsibility that focus on
guilt and blame from those that focus on remedy. I am not persuaded that in the case of historic wrong,
taking responsibility can be freed from issues of liability. But I bracket these issues for the remainder
of this chapter.
to take responsibility may not even have existed (121). Moreover, Lloyd claims,
when we look at actual cases of individuals who take responsibility for others,
we will find that our familiar theoretical model of the responsible self is an in-
adequate model for thinking about collective responsibility.9
Lloyd identifies the most familiar theoretical model of the responsible
self as a sharply bounded, self-sovereign individual with a formed and stable
identity who acquires responsibilities through autonomous decisions and is
capable of freely opting in and out of collectives and contracts. She calls this
model spatial and I will return to this description. Lloyd also contends that
our understanding of collective responsibility has had little impact on this
model except to further entrench it. She says that when we think of collective
responsibility, we let our imagination run from the individual to the collective.
Concentrating on agency, we ask to what extent a collective can be thought of
as a kind of big individual, apt for the assignment of responsibility; we ask, for
example, if corporations can be regarded as persons, or be held accountable
in the way that persons are held accountable (114). If we cannot regard the
collective as itself an individual, we regard it as a fiction that dissolves into the
responsibilities of individual agents or, for Feinberg, as an imprudent site for
the attribution of collective responsibility.10
Fundamentally, for Lloyd, to let our philosophical imagination run in a
better direction in considering historic harms is to let it run from the col-
lective to the individual, first, through looking at how individuals are shaped
through their relationships with others. When we add memory and consider
how people are conscious of themselves in time, we can understand the shap-
ing of individuals through a collective past that remains available to them.
Lloyd claims that when we reflect in this way on the temporal dimensions
of selfhood, the individual “takes on something of the complexity and multi-
plicity of a collective” (121).
9
I do not have room to do justice to Lloyd’s thoughtful reflections on philosophical methodology.
Briefly, she concentrates on the philosophical imagination because she thinks that confronting a fa-
miliar theoretical model of the self with an under-theorized area of concrete experience can lead to a
“dissonance” that should cause us to reflect in two directions—first, about what model of the self would
be more adequate for understanding the concrete experience, second, on how remodeling the self for
this area of experience also newly illuminates the commitments or assumptions of our standard theo-
retical models by making some of their features particularly salient (113). It is no part of Lloyd’s intent
to suggest that there is one best theoretical model of the self.
10
I suspect that Lloyd actually has Feinberg’s text in mind in her remarks. Feinberg gives, as exam-
ples of appropriate types of collectives to hold responsible, business partnerships, joint authorships,
and sports teams where individuals act in concert to achieve joint ends. These examples entrench the
familiar model on two levels: the collectives can be regarded as individual agents and the individuals
within them are themselves freely contracting agents. Interestingly, these examples to do not in fact
engage well with the puzzling variations Feinberg himself raises about identifying with one’s culture
or race. Denying reasonably that a motley group of a billion persons is an organization like a business
partnership is not a satisfying explanation for lack of identification, because those who do have this
identification don’t have it through their participation in a tightly structured organization.
Lloyd’s central illustration of this re-imagining is constructed from Jacques

Derrida’s memoire for Paul de Man.11 When scandal erupts over de Man’s al-
legedly anti-Semitic writings, Derrida feels called to answer for his friend.
Derrida does not simply speak for de Man because de Man cannot speak for
himself; that is, he does not simply take it upon himself to represent de Man
in the controversy from what knowledge he has of his friend. Derrida does
not know how his friend would answer the charges. Moreover, as Derrida
describes it, he answers for himself in answering for de Man. Nor, however,
does he speak as if he and de Man are one person, speaking for de Man by
replacing him. This is captured in Derrida’s sense that he is answering to de
Man, responding to him as well as for him. What Lloyd refers to as Derrida’s
experience of “uncertain boundaries—somewhere between the self and am-
biguously other self of the friend” (116) is conveyed by Derrida’s description of
his answering: “Before answering, responding for oneself and for that purpose,
in order to do so one must respond, answer to the other, about the other, for
the other, not in his place as in the place of another ‘proper self ’ but for him”
(Derrida 1989, 30, quoted in Lloyd, 116).
Superficially, Derrida’s text presents a puzzle for understanding responsi-
bility as he has done nothing for which he need account. The incidents in de
Man’s life that provoke the scandal predate the friendship and Derrida remains
unaware of these incidents until the scandal. Lloyd’s central point is that we
need to understand taking responsibility partly through its generative role in
commitments and relationships. There are three ways in which her analysis
of the sympathetic identification of friendship adds a necessary complexity to
Feinberg’s sketch of the relation between emotion and responsibility, summa-
rized in Lloyd’s claim that Derrida’s answering, his making himself account-
able, enacts the structure of his friendship with de Man (116).
First, although Lloyd does not put the point this way, what is illuminating
about her account is her insistence that taking responsibility is often an emo-
tionally expressive act. Taking responsibility is part of the expressive behavior
that constitutes our emotional attachments to others. This is not just to re-
peat Feinberg. For Feinberg, bonds of sympathy as exemplified by friendship
underlie responsibility; primarily through their role in promoting common
interests and facilitating acting in concert, they determine when responsi-
bility is appropriately assigned. For Lloyd, these bonds come into place partly
through taking responsibility. One does not form emotional attachments with
others, and then find oneself assigned responsibility on this basis. Taking re-
sponsibility brings us into emotional relation with others.12 For example, we
often take responsibility for others as part of our commitment to them in
For a range of responses to Derrida’s defense of de Man, see Critical Inquiry 15 (Summer 1989).
11
12
As there are intimations of this view in some of Feinberg’s remarks, there is no reason to believe
he would reject it as a critical refinement.
friendship. One pledges to friends to support them in need, to not desert them
when they are in trouble, to answer for them to skeptical or critical others—
this is part of what it means to be a friend.13 Second, taking responsibility both
helps constitute our emotional attachments and constitutes them as identifica-
tory. One sense of what it is to identify with another is to blur or resist a sharp
distinction between self-concern and concern for the other. This identifica-
tion is enacted in taking responsibility for the other. “The ambiguities of self
and other . . . are expressed in our being called upon to take responsibility in
circumstances in which we cannot be appropriately held responsible for what
has been done” (116). So again, it is not that identification simply underlies
or makes psychologically possible our taking responsibility—identification
explains our taking responsibility because taking responsibility helps consti-
tute one important sense of identifying with another.14
Finally, Lloyd does not simply reverse the ordering of emotional attachment
and responsibility found in Feinberg’s text but argues that taking responsi-
bility and forming bonds with others are mutually and reciprocally constitu-
tive in the process of becoming the people that we are. In taking responsibility,
Derrida expresses his friendship for de Man. Taking responsibility is part of
the commitment of the friendship, but the friendship also explains the respon-
sibility. It is the nature of the friendship that determines how responsibility is
taken for the scandal. “Since this was a friendship imbued with intellectual
life, the response involves assuming an intellectual responsibility to meticu-
lously read the whole body of journalistic writings that form the context of the
offensive remarks” (115–16), encouraging, as well, close readings by others and
unlimited discussion.
To speak of blurring the distinction between self-concern and concern for
others is not yet to speak of an individual who has taken on the complexity of
13
For a more sustained argument that expressive action is constitutive of emotion, see Sue Campbell
(1997).
14
The inability to sharply distinguish self-concern from concern for others is also striking in
Lloyd’s second example, which involved Pat Barker’s fictionalized account of poet Siegfried Sassoon’s
return to the line in World War I. In the first novel of Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Sassoon no
longer supports the war and is able to avoid returning to the trenches. His decision to return cannot
be understood, Lloyd thinks, as either egoism or as patriotic altruism. Instead, she writes: “Solidarity
with the dead sustains the character’s sense of self, and with it a responsibility to those . . . doomed
to death:
Out of the gloom they gather about my bed
They whisper to my heart, their thoughts are mine.
“Why are you here with all your watches ended?
From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the line.”
In bitter safety I awake, unfriended. (“Sick Leave,” cited in 2000, 117)
The poem is by the historic Sassoon. I take Lloyd’s point to be this: to try to pry apart self-concern
from other-concern in order to give one explanatory priority would violate the character of Sassoon’s
experience of selfhood.
a collective, but I want to pause and comment briefly on Lloyd’s use of the idea
of blurred boundaries and her worries about a common theoretical model of
the responsible self. Feminists who have stressed the relational dimension of
people’s identities have had relatively little to say about the phenomenological
and affective dimensions of relationality. Lloyd’s text focuses on the familiar
but under-theorized experience of taking one’s identity to be bound up with
the interests and concerns of others as a broad and significant part of one’s
moral life. She evokes this experience to help shift our perspective in thinking
about responsibility. Our support of those we care about and our willingness
to answer for who they are is a part of forming bonds that shape our identi-
ties and the experience of our identities. As these practices are also modes of
taking responsibility, many experiences of feeling bound up with others will
be on occasions when we feel ourselves called to take responsibility. Lloyd’s
concern is that to think of a person as self-sovereign is often to be guided by
the spatial metaphor of a self-governing territory. This imagining of a bounded
self obscures the pervasiveness and importance of feeling bound up with oth-
ers and thus obscures the generative role of taking responsibility in commit-
ments and relationships.15
Lloyd’s insistence that we attend to the temporal dimensions of selfhood
in contrast to the spatial is meant to draw our attention to two other features
of the relation between taking responsibility and forming identities, features
that complete her claim that reflecting on the collective dimensions of respon-
sibility requires reflecting on the collective dimensions of selfhood. First the
reciprocal nature of coming into relation with others through practices of
responsibility and being further defined by the responsibilities consequent on
15
An interesting recent example of a bounded self is in Marilyn Friedman’s discussion of the bound-
ary blurring that occurs in romantic love (Friedman, 1998). Friedman is concerned about women’s au-
tonomy in romantic heterosexual love given the risks of identity merger. She defines a self as a person
with a coherent self-identity, who is capable of self-understanding without self-deception and who
corresponds with a distinct human body—a modified modernist perspective (163–4). Her model for
romantic merger is a federation of states where separate states retain individual powers and capacities
but “combine in joint ventures for the production of certain other ends” (165). The person who loves
or is loved is an embodied territory over which he or she keeps independent jurisdiction. Friedman is
thus guided by a spatial metaphor for the self, motivated by her concern for women’s self-governance.
I want to draw two quick lessons from Friedman’s account. If we fail to see the self as ordinarily having
something of the complexity of a collective, the idea of blurred boundaries or identity merger seems
like an exceptional phenomenon, one that happens only in very special circumstances like roman-
tic love, and one that challenges us for a coherent explanation. Second, when we apply the model of
a self-governing, embodied territory to the very area of concrete experience that needs explaining,
feeling one’s identity to be bound up with another, the spatial aspect of the model becomes particu-
larly salient and, for me, unsatisfying. A model that is familiar through long philosophical history and
a connection to autonomy, and what’s more is a legitimate and useful perspective on the self can’t do
everything well. When I think of myself as a body I am sharply bounded. I know that I am no other
spatial object nor in any danger of becoming one. I am less sharply bounded when I think of the people
in my past. It is when I think of them that I become most uncertain of who I am or of which identity
I am expressing.
these relations means that coming to have an identity is an ongoing process.

Lloyd’s understanding of collective responsibility requires a model of the self
where, in her words, identities are constantly shaped and reshaped through
“the assuming of responsibilities in contexts of interdependence.”16
Second, thinking about the temporal dimensions of responsibility and its
relation to memory requires a shift in focus from a self-sovereign individual
who is secure in her or his identity to a self who lives with the tensions, insta-
bilities, and possibilities of time consciousness and a concomitant sense of un-
certainty about boundaries and responsibilities. Derrida’s reflections on the
lived experience of time is interwoven with his articulation of his responsibili-
ties to his dead friend.
For Derrida, first, his responsibility “comes from the future” (Derrida, 160,
quoted in Lloyd, 115). The future makes determinate the meaning of the past
and of the present in which we act and answer. Derrida’s answering to and for
de Man is implicit in their friendship but indeterminately. The responsibilities
of friendship cannot be contracted to in advance of what actually happens.
According to Lloyd, Derrida’s responsibility is the answering of an “unforesee-
able” appeal, the commitment to stand by his friend in ways that are unchosen
and unpredictable as the future makes the meaning of the past determinate
and demanding (115). Derrida cannot know how his self-understanding will
be shaped or even seriously altered or disrupted by his answering for de Man.
But Derrida also says that “what is recalled to memory calls one to respon-
sibility” (Derrida, xi, quoted in Lloyd, 115). Who we are and take ourselves
to be involves a history of attachments that remains emotionally vivid and
compelling in our memories of others. Because of what is happening now,
my remembering others may always be an occasion on which I feel called to
responsibility. “The fact that a self is something that intrinsically has a past
means that there is an internal multiplicity of selfhood, an open-ended source
of possibilities for what a self can appropriate and enact” (Lloyd, 122).
Lloyd hopes that her illustrations of friendship, loyalty, and solidarity will
give insight “into the formation of social wholes” while acknowledging that
“responsibilities that arise in the context of friendship operate in some respects,
of course, very differently than responsibilities in the context of larger more
impersonal collectives” (118). Lloyd suggests our capacity to conceive ourselves
as having a past will aid in thinking of these other kinds of responsibilities:
We find much the same view of the self in Margaret Urban Walker’s recent ethics of responsibility
16
where she describes the necessary narrative form to making intelligible our moral agency:
A view of selves that fits with this ethics is one in which the self is understood in terms of a
history of relationships among its various temporally distinct and concurrent aspects. We are
layers of overlapping histories of traces of many encounters and relationships. . . . The layered,
nested and “ensemble” subjectivity might sound a little exotic: I have tried to show that it and
its kind of integrity are familiar. (Walker 1998, 119)
the capacities for memory and imagination although they may be precondi-
tions for rational agency, are also sources of instability, of a lack of fixity. The
capacity to have a past and reflect on it are crucial to selfhood, and having,
in the relevant sense, a past is not something that admits of tidy boundaries
between the individual existence that is mine and the collective existence
that precedes me, into which I was born. (122)
Nevertheless, the issues of collective responsibility that in part motivate Lloyd’s
reflection—how we come, for example, to take historic responsibility for injus-
tice to other groups—remain untested in her account.
In discussing Minnie Bruce Pratt, I use Lloyd’s analysis of identifying
through responsibility to return to the two themes of section 1: how we iden-
tify and take responsibility for a collective past of which we disapprove, and
the role of such identification in our desire for political solidarity with others.
Lloyd’s concern about a particular theoretical model—a self-sovereign, firmly
formed, and sharply bounded individual—causes her to focus on felt interde-
pendence rather than on the way that we experience ourselves as bounded,
separate, or distant from others. And yet, experiencing ourselves in this latter
way, as Pratt’s text shows, is not incompatible with understanding ourselves
collectively. Letting our imaginations run from the collective to the individual,
we can attempt to understand how our collective history has shaped our
responses to exclude possibilities of our feeling in relation to certain others.
3. Emotion and Responsibility in Pratt
Minnie Bruce Pratt’s text “Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart” is one of three that
comprise a multi-vocal feminist narrative of identity and responsibility, Yours
in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism. Her con-
tribution is an autobiographical account of how she came in “a complicated
way to work against anti-Semitism and racism” (Pratt 1984, 19), and the narra-
tive is a complex description of her coming to activism. In bringing Pratt into
relation with Lloyd, I ignore much of the emotional complexity of the text, but
without, I hope, distorting Pratt’s political concerns about the expression of
responsibility.
The form and themes of Pratt’s narrative indicate that I do not mean the idea
of resistant identification to involve initially imagining oneself as unencum-
bered by relationships or identifications. Pratt identifies herself as a woman
who is southern, Christian-raised, and white, “a woman who lives in relative
security in the United States, and who is trying to figure out my responsibility
and my need in struggles against injustice” (15). Moreover, her desire to take
responsibility is linked to a yearning for solidarity with women. Pratt’s desire
is the longing of a woman “who loves other women passionately, and wants us
to be able to be together as friends in this unjust world” (15). However, neither

Pratt’s yearning for solidarity nor her positioning herself by reference to her
birth culture involve her in relations that express or display bonds of sympa-
thetic identification.
Pratt’s text, in fact, starts on the striking note of others who are physically
present to her (on the street in her Washington neighborhood) but with whom
she has no relations and has no idea how to interact. She does not know how
to speak to them or what that speaking means. The voices in her head are all
her own.
Each speaking-to another person has become fraught, for me, with the his-
tory of race and sex and class; as I walk I have a constant interior discussion
with myself, questioning how I acknowledge the presence of another, what
I know or don’t know about them, and what it means how they acknowledge
me. It is an exhausting process. (12)
Moreover, her yearning for solidarity is often experienced as the desire to re-
ject her own culture. When Pratt first addresses her own need to change, she
offers a memory: how, when she was eight, her father tried to take her to the
clock tower of the courthouse where her grandfather had judged the people of
her southern town for 40 years. Although she imagines what she would and
would not have noticed from that perspective—she would not, for example,
have seen “the sawmill, or Four Points where the white mill folks lived, or
the houses of the Blacks in Veneer Mill quarters” (16)—she does not make
the climb:
When he told me to go up the steps in front of him, I tried to, crawling on
my hands and knees, but I was terribly afraid. I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.
He let me crawl back down: he was disgusted with me, I thought. I think
now that he wanted to show me a place where he had climbed to as a boy, a
view that had been his father’s or his and could be mine. But I was not him.
I had not learned to take that height, that being set apart on my own. . . . later
I knew more clearly that I did not want his view of the world. (16–18)
Lloyd claimed that our identities are formed and reformed through the taking
of responsibilities and within the deliverances of memory. Within the deliver-
ances of memory, Pratt rejects the responsibilities that are given to her by her
culture and rejects her father’s view of the world.
Discussions of collective responsibility, including Feinberg’s and Lloyd’s,
have generally focused on positive affiliative emotions that explain soli-
darity when it is present. Pratt’s text opens the question of how emotions
other than sympathy can inform expressive acts of responsibility and iden-
tification with others. Lloyd’s work on responsibility illuminates Pratt’s text
in a number of ways. Lloyd focuses on how we experience relatedness to
others in terms of the boundaries of our identities; she shifts attention to
our consciousness of being in time; and she explores the expressive dimen-
sions of taking responsibility. The articulation of these themes in Pratt sup-
ports Lloyd’s account but also lets us see how to move away from friendship
and sympathetic attachment to think about some of the responsibilities of
political identification.
First, Lloyd attempts to de-familiarize the notion of the sharply bounded
self by asking us to think of the emotional experience of feeling our identities
to be bound up with others. This should also encourage us to think of what
kinds of experiences contribute to a sense of self as sharply bounded. Much
of Pratt’s emotional experience is the experience of her identity as involving
distance from others. She is scared of people outside her narrow circle. She
feels a “clutch of fear around her heart” when she must deal “with the fact of
folks who exist, with their own lives, in other places besides the narrow circle”
in which she was raised (17). And she is lonely: “the narrow circle of self is not
only a fearful thing, it is a lonely thing” (18). Her experience of fear, loneliness,
and yearning is an experience of the self as bounded, not in the sense of being
autonomous, but in the sense of being separated and alienated from others.
Pratt’s emotions are ones that reflect the absence of sympathetic identification
with others, mirrored in her inability to speak to them or understand what it
means when they acknowledge her.
Like Lloyd, Pratt understands the possibilities that taking responsibility
offers for affecting the boundaries of the self:
When I acknowledge what my people, what those like me have done to peo-
ple with less power and less safety in the world, I can make a place for things
to be different, a place where I can feel grief, sorrow, not to be sorry for the
others, but to mourn, to expand my circle of self, follow my need to loosen
the constrictions of fear, be a break in the cycle of fear and attack. (18)
But her inability to know how to speak to others also causes her to “reckon
the rigid boundaries set around my experience, how I have been ‘protected’ ”
(13). Her text thus raises the political problem of how to express solidarity for
others when one’s emotional life may have been formed by their exclusion. To
understand what the desire for solidarity requires, it is necessary for Pratt to
see how her yearning for community with others has been shaped.
Put more generally, we learn our emotions as politically nuanced responses;
this is a critical part of the way we are taught to relate to others. According to
Margaret Urban Walker, our emotional attitudes
are a learned repertoire of highly discriminating responses that embody
very different attitudes to different sorts of people. The formation of these
responses and feelings is one way to entrench and propagate unequal, and
unequally advantaged, moral standings that reflect social ones. (Walker
1997, 63)
A crucial part, Walker states, of a child’s emotional learning “will be learning

with whom one should identify . . . and with whom one should or must not”
(70). To yearn for solidarity with those with whom we have been taught not
to identify might seem to be a simple good thing that gives us the energy to
resist and overcome our other, more discriminatory responses. But there is
good reason to suspect that our schooling in emotions affects the shape of
even those desires through which we seek to overcome the distance between
us. And this returns me to Lloyd’s temporal perspective.
In Pratt, the temporal dimension of selfhood is marked by a text that shifts
through the different times and locations of Pratt’s “homes”: her present in
Washington, DC, her home as a young married women in Fayetteville, North
Carolina, where she becomes politically active, and also falls in love with a
woman and loses custody of her children, and, finally, the southern childhood
home of her memory. The narrative deliberately blurs the distinction between
Pratt’s past and the collective past she was born into; the past appears in her
text on many occasions as both memory and as her discovery of the local his-
tories of racial exclusion and conflict that characterize each of the locations
that is Pratt’s home and that shapes her identity. Pratt’s sense of “being in time”
involves her consciousness of being emotionally shaped by the “growing-up
places” alive to her in memory (13). Her text offers a politicized etiology of her
emotional responses.17
I do not mean to oversimplify the complexity of Pratt’s emotional responses
or suggest we are molded as children in ways that we cannot reshape. Pratt’s
desires for community are complicated and their understanding requires our
attention to all the locations and times of her writing. Some of her loneliness,
for example, is that of a young wife, in school and pregnant with her second
child, in a military town during the early days of second wave feminism.18 But
to take responsibility out of a yearning for community also requires that Pratt
realize how this yearning has been shaped by a past, and is, in fact, sometimes
for a past, that is characterized by racial hierarchy. In particular, Pratt’s desire
for the comfort of community is often evoked by her memories of home and
is also a yearning for home.
On one occasion, the familiar quality of voices in her Washington neigh-
borhood and the uncertainty of how others will respond to her fills Pratt with
desire for her southern childhood home. “I am grateful to hear a joking that
reminds me, with a startled pain, of my father, putting on his tales for his
friends, the white men gathered at the drugstore. . . . I just want to feel at home
17
For other examples, see Lillian Smith (1949), especially Part 2, Chapter 1; Maria Lugones (1989);
and Malan’s discussion of love (1990).
18
When Elizabeth, the campus radical feminist, tells Pratt that she is brave to stay in school and
wishes her well, Pratt cries the 10 miles home: “the men in my department had begun to joke that they’d
get stuck with me in the elevator, and I’d go into labor. . . . She had spoken to me as a woman, and I’d
been so lonely, without knowing it” (23–4).
where people know me” (12). But she tells us right after this that Mr. Boone,
the “dark red-brown” janitor of her building, does not raise his eyes to her
when she speaks. When he does speak to her she hears her voice replying “in
the horrid cheerful accents of a white lady” (12). Pratt recognizes that insofar
as her yearning for community is a yearning for home, “a place of forced sub-
servience” (12), it is, in part, a discriminatory emotional response that reflects
who she has been taught to identify with and miss and remember. It is also
at home where she has learned that security requires loneliness—the being
set above and apart on the clock tower of the courthouse—and that safety
requires protection from others. Pratt’s longing for community is interwoven
with her loneliness and fear of others, the very emotions that keep her separate
from them.
In relation to Lloyd, Pratt’s text raises the politically compelling issue of
what it is to experience ourselves collectively in ways that can grasp the signif-
icance of absence—of the exclusion of others—to how we have been shaped. It
is the time consciousness of Pratt’s text, the shift between memory, local his-
tory, and the present, that allows the excluded others of her present, those like
Mr. Boone who are alienated from her through her embodiment of her past, to
become part of her historical understanding of herself as collectively shaped.
Recognizing how the rejection and exclusion of others informs who she is and
how she can be in relation is, for Pratt, to experience a shift in boundaries. She
experiences herself not only as lonely but as bereaved—she feels the absence of
others as a loss or diminishment of who she is. But to experience this kind of
collective dimension to her identity sets moral limitations on what Pratt can,
given her own desires, “appropriate and enact” in taking responsibility.
In returning then to the final theme that relates Pratt’s reflections to Lloyd’s,
I have argued, in interpreting Lloyd, that responsibility is both expressive of
emotion and can be a way of identifying with others. In Pratt’s text, as in Lloyd’s
example, it is both. However, in Lloyd’s work the expressive dimension of
responsibility and the identificatory dimension take the same object—Derrida’s
answering expresses his friendship and grief for de Man and is a way of iden-
tifying with de Man. In Pratt’s text, the expressive and identifying dimensions
of taking responsibility to some extent come apart. Pratt’s taking responsibility
expresses a yearning for solidarity with other women and her grief at their
absence. But for this yearning to be expressed successfully through taking re-
sponsibility requires Pratt to understand how the collective dimensions of her
responses often hamper or distort her relations with others by making her
desire the safety and company of those like herself. She takes responsibility
by identifying with her own culture in the following sense: she makes herself
answerable for the ways she has been shaped. This identification is marked late
in the text by her description of herself as her “father’s daughter in the pre-
sent” and her commitment to “honor the grief of his life by striving to change
much of what he believed in” (53). Her responsibility is expressed through her
activism. For example, her text displays her awareness of how new political
communities can merely repeat the need for safety of those from “families
and a culture that enforced, either overtly or subtly, separation by skin and
blood.” She challenges her readers “to look seriously at what limitations we
have placed in this “new world” on who we feel ‘close to’ ” (49), or comfortable
or safe with. Put simply, Pratt’s text suggest that if we yearn for solidarity with
others, taking responsibility for who we are now requires us to take responsi-
bility for the way that history has shaped our relationships. Making ourselves
accountable for this history is to identity with those in it, as Pratt identifies
with her father, through resisting the distinction between answering for one-
self and for those others.
4. Conclusion
This chapter does not offer a recipe for collective responsibility. That some
individuals strive for a collective sense of self is not of course sufficient for a
broadly based sense of communal responsibility for the past. I have concen-
trated on the limited but I think important issue of some of the emotional
dimensions of taking responsibility. I have suggested we follow Lloyd and
think of taking responsibility as a way of expressing our commitments and
attachments to others. I have also suggested that the route to solidarity with
others may be a circuitous one of coming to understand the collective dimen-
sions of our separateness from them. More broadly, acts of identification with
others and practices of taking responsibility are closely intertwined and help
shape who we are and become in relation to others. These complicated prac-
tices can express a range of desires and emotional dispositions that are them-
selves inevitably collectively shaped. Our moral reflections need thus to attend
to the dynamism of taking responsibility as an expressive, identificatory, rela-
tional, and self-transformative practice.
{ Part III }
Remembering for the Future

{ 7 }
Remembering for the Future

Memory as a Lens on Canada’s Indian Residential
Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission
For the First Peoples of Canada, the past cannot be forgotten, deliberately
overlooked, or discarded as no longer relevant. The past is still present,
but in a different form that must be addressed again in the new conditions
in which it appears, now and into the future.
Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures, 2005, 24
Part I. Introduction
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are about memory. The Indian
Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (IRS TRC) “is
mandated to promote education and awareness about the Indian Residential
School system and its legacy, as well as provide former students, their fami-
lies and communities an opportunity to share their Indian Residential School
experiences in a safe and culturally-appropriate environment” (Indian
Residential Schools Resolution Canada, Settlement Agreement Highlights,
2006). One of the most direct descriptions of what former students will be
doing when they become involved with the activities of the Commission, in-
cluding statement taking, is that they will be sharing their memories of Indian
The research for this chapter and the next was funded by the Indian Residential Schools Resolution
Canada Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The themes addressed in each are in dialogue with
issues discussed in a training session at the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, facilitated by the International Center for Transitional Justice, June 2007.
I was very grateful to have had the opportunity to attend this session. I am also grateful to Lisa Kretz
for research assistance, to Rodger Hill and Paulette Regan for stimulating and helpful correspondence,
and to Seetal Sunga and Bob Watts for encouraging and supporting this project. I have received a great
deal of helpful feedback from the people listed. Paulette Regan, in particular, took the time to provide
extensive comments. Finally I owe a great deal to Jan Sutherland for her careful reading and insightful
remarks on every section in this chapter.
136 Remembering for the Future
Residential Schooling with the Commission, with other Aboriginal and with
non-Aboriginal Canadians, and with the wider international community.1 At
the same time, in seeking to promote public education and awareness, the
work of the Commission hopes to affect public memory of Indian Residential
Schools, that is, how Canadians both collectively and individually remember
and re-experience their pasts. It is hoped that non-Aboriginal Canadians will
come to remember in ways that engage and no longer suppress and ignore the
history and legacy of Residential Schooling.
Yet “memory” is often not spoken of explicitly in descriptions of TRC pro-
cesses.2 There is, for example, no mention of memory in the description of
the Truth and Reconciliation Principles that will guide the IRS TRC. I suggest
that the primary reason for the absence of “memory” is that TRCs are cre-
ated and represented as public and political processes, concerned with justice,
truth-telling, and the determination of responsibilities for past harm, whereas
memory is often thought of as private, personal, and subjective—a psycho-
logical rather than a political matter.3 Because survivors will be remembering
their pasts and doing so will be an important part of their experience of the
TRC, and because the collective remembering embodied in the work of the
TRC will be a crucial contribution to Canada’s perception of its past, it is im-
portant to think explicitly about the role of the memory in the IRS TRC pro-
cess. It may be important to weave talk of memory into the representation of
the Commission’s work, its public face.
This chapter attempts to identify the most significant locations where is-
sues of memory may enter into the process of the IRS TRC. For those involved
in shaping the process, the chapter offers ways to think about memory that
(1) bridge current scholarly and public conceptions of memory to the work of
the IRS TRC; and (2) highlight the distinctiveness of the IRS TRC as a truth
commission.
TRCs are about both the truth of the past and the possibilities of the future.
Though their necessity and value may be recognized in transitional societies,
countries, like Canada, that conceive of themselves as stable and progressive
democracies may have more resistance to a TRC. Aboriginal peoples may take
non-Aboriginal Canadians’ reluctance to remember a problematic past as ev-
idence of the refusal to move forward or to truly endorse the possibilities of
new ways of relating; conversely, some non-Aboriginal Canadians may locate
the idea of remembering, of focusing on the past, as evidence of a refusal of
1
I use the term “Aboriginal” to reflect the language of the Settlement Agreement. For criticism of
the use of this term to refer to First Peoples, see Alfred (2005).
2
Even at the level of analyses, explicit discussions of memory are rare in the literature of reparative
justice, including the literature on truth commissions. Such discussion as there is does not often draw
on rich, recent analyses of memory. See, however, Minow (2002); Ross (2002); and Shaw (2005).
3
It has even been suggested that the collective (political) and individual (psychological) dimensions
of reparations are in conflict with one another (Hamber 2006).
A Lens on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 137
Aboriginal peoples to move forward. The core theme of this chapter is that
remembering is forward-looking. Memory is, in fact, the human capacity
that equips us for the future. The chapter thus highlights the forward-looking
nature of memory in the context of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and
Reconciliation Commission.
Part II. Context

1. Conceptions of Memory—The Theoretical Shift to
Forward-Looking Memory
Focus
When asked recently what memory is for, Harvard scientist Daniel Schacter
replied: “a primary function common to many forms of memory is that they
allow us to prepare for the future” (Schacter 2005).4 Memory is not just about
the past. Memory is that set of human capacities by which we learn through
experience (Warnock 1987, 6). It is thus about the significance of the past to
the present and the future (Campbell 2003). Thinking about memory in this
way may help position the work of the TRC as directed toward the present, the
future, and the reshaping and renewal of relationships. Remembering for the
future allows us to highlight positive and forward-looking notions of taking
responsibility. A recent shift in how Western theorists discuss memory can
aid the IRS TRC in stressing the forward-looking nature of memory. It is thus
important that the Commission be aware of this shift.
Discussion
A shift in models of memory
Human memory is a complex set of capacities that allow us to learn from our
pasts. Recognition of the complexity of memory has led most theorists to re-
ject the dominant Western-European storehouse view of memory in favor of a
more dynamic reconstructive account. Dominant Western-European concep-
tions of memory have encouraged people to think of memory as both a mech-
anism for recording experience and as a storehouse for the records made.
I may naively think that my perceptual and cognitive systems—my eyes and
my mind—automatically record or encode information about experience,
which information is stably filed in some location in my brain. I intention-
ally retrieve this information when it is needed, or my mind automatically
retrieves it when appropriately cued by my environments (Campbell 2004).
4
Schacter has written extensively and influentially on the shift to a dynamic view of memory traced
in this chapter. See Schacter (1996).
Schacter writes that “many of us still see our memories as a series of . . . pic-
tures stored in the photo album of our minds” (1996, 5). Although specific
metaphors for memory have changed, often to reflect a change in Western
technologies (from the photo album or the library to the video or the com-
puter), the view of memory as a storehouse or archive of a person’s un-
changing pictures of his or her own past experience has been at the heart of
Western conceptions of memory for hundreds of years. Over the last 20 years,
however, research in neuro-science, in psychology, and in the humanities has
shown that the storehouse or archival view of memory is a simplistic and in-
accurate picture of how we remember.5
Reconstructive accounts stress the dynamic, complex, and social nature of
human memory.6 They acknowledge that there are many different influences
on the meaning of someone’s memory experience—that person’s reliving of
the past—which influences derive, broadly, from the many ways and contexts
in which we revisit, re-experience, and re-process the past. We gain new ways
to think about our history; certain of our memories may become symbolic for
us of a particular time in our life, or of an important relationship; the emo-
tional tone of our memories often shifts in response to changing experience;
the occasions on which we remember contribute personal and social meaning
to those experiences; and our activities with others in our material and social
environments are intimately intertwined with the many different ways in
which we might remember a time in our past. (For discussion, see Campbell
2003; 2006b; Haaken 1996; Hacking 1995; Middleton and Brown 2005; Reavey
and Brown 2006; Schacter 1996; Sutton 2004a.)
It should be emphasized that though reconstructive accounts stress our
dynamic relation to the past, they do not compromise our understanding of
memory as our access to the truth of the past. Memory is our access to the
past, and all forms of representation of the past, including history depend on
it (Ricoeur 2004). We can of course remember inaccurately. But even when we
remember the past accurately and with integrity, what the past means to us, its
significance, can and often should change (Sutton 2004b).
Finally, as the introductory quote to this chapter suggests, the dominant
Western-European storehouse conception of memory has never character-
ized how many persons and groups understand their relation to the past.
Aboriginal writers have stressed that their traditions reject a linear view of
time that posits a separation between the past and the present (McLeod 2007;
Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures 2005). Cree scholar Winona
5
For an overview of this research and a discussion on perspectives and disputes in the cognitive
sciences of memory, see Sutton (2004). For an important historical and political reading of the devel-
opment of memory science, see Haaken (1996). Western views of memory are not monolithic. See
Middleton and Brown (2005) and Reavey and Brown (2006), for example, for engagement with Henri
Bergson’s view of the past as always informing the present.
6
This approach to memory is also referred to by some theorists as “constructivist.”
Wheeler writes: “Our histories are infused in our daily lives—they are lived
experiences” (2005, 197). Thus, while Western theorists often offer a recon-
structive model as a new and decisive shift in theories of memory (Schacter
1996) the model might also be used to forefront perspectives that have never
accepted the Western storehouse view.
The major themes of reconstructive accounts

Reconstructive accounts of memory can focus on any or all of the following
themes:
1. We always remember from the context of our present needs and
interests. Memory is not ever just about the past. Memory is about
the significance of the past to the present and future.
2. How we remember an event or time can change as our needs
change. Memory is how we learn from the past. It would not be a
useful human capacity unless we could remember the same event
differently given our changing needs and perspectives. At times it
is important to us to try to preserve the exact ways in which the
past is remembered. But moral and spiritual growth often requires
re-remembering and re-feeling our past.
3. We remember the past in many different ways. We can remember and
give significance to the past through oral and written narrative but
also through ceremonies, rituals, and traditions, through visiting
places or handling familiar objects, through public apology and
political protest, through re-learning a language or a heritage of
skills. How we remember is often very important to being able to
give appropriate significance to the past in our present context.
4. Memory is sometimes experienced privately but we often remember
with others and in response to their views of our pasts or their own.
Remembering our pasts is one of the most important ways that we
form, shape, and maintain relationships.
All of these themes are present in Isabelle Knockwood’s Out of the
Depths: The Experiences of Mi’kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School
at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia (1992). Knockwood begins her account by iden-
tifying the present need that is calling on her memory, as well as what she
hopes to learn through remembering with others:
I am holding the Talking Stick. I have been talking about the Indian
Residential School in Shubenacadie for many years, and I still don’t under-
stand why the hurt and shame of seeing and hearing the cries of abused
Mi’kmaw children, many of them orphans, does not go away or heal. I hope
that the act of writing it down will help me and others to come up with some
answers. (7)
In remembering through the Talking Stick Ceremony initiated in her writing,

Knockwood expresses herself as someone who has sought to claim her identity
“through the rediscovery of Native spiritual traditions” (158). This journey has
given a different kind of meaning or significance to her memories than they
once had. She had always remembered the Residential School as physically
abusive. Yet now, “Some of us have come to realize that we were abused not
only physically but spiritually” (158).
How Knockwood remembers, the kinds of activities she is engaged in,
is critical to her ability to understand both her experience of Residential
Schooling and to the possibilities of individual and collective healing.
Knockwood’s account shows that Residential School survivors are not only
faced with trying to express the memory of the attempts of others to destroy
their cultural identities, but also they are often forced to remember using, in
part, the language and narrative structures learned at the Residential Schools
as part of the practice of “killing the Indian.”7 Knockwood relates that when
she first began to write about her experiences, her stories took the form of
school assignment presentations with her name and address written neatly
at the top of each one, and she ripped up each story when she had finished
writing it. This isolated, painful, repetitive remembering is transformed
through Knockwood’s engagement with her culture, her use of the Mi’kmaw
language that allows her to give voice to important ideas, and her participa-
tion in practices of communal remembering.
Knockwood’s remembering of her experience continues to take the form
of narrative. But she is now engaged in many activities with others in order to
remember the school. She is taking a writing course, walking around the school
building, taking pictures of the school, re-learning the Mi’kmaw language she
was denied as a school child, listening to others’ stories and recording them,
and showing others the pictures she has taken to help them remember their
own experiences. Her narrative of the school is multi-vocal. Her remembering
is a communal and not just an individual endeavor.
Finally, Knockwood in remembering with others is shaping her relation-
ships with them. In returning to the Indian Brook reserve, she reencounters
Betsey Paul, “who’d been a student at the Residential School with me nearly
forty years before,” and they spend many hours walking and remembering
together. “Now I realize that as we walked and talked, going over our memo-
ries and telling each other our dreams, we were healing each other through
our friendship” (10). Memories are central to identities. In forming or renew-
ing relations with others we often share our pasts and try to make connection
with each other through our pasts. In passing the Talking Stick to the reader
7
Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of the U.S. Training and Industrial School at Carlile, used the
words “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” in a paper given to the Nineteenth Annual Conference of
Charities and Correction (1892). http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/. Last accessed, April 21, 2008.
at the end of her narrative, and in inviting that reader to remember and share
experience that will contribute to Knockwood’s comprehension of her past,
Knockwood is inviting relation.
Advantages and challenges of reconstructive accounts

A reconstructive view of memory has many advantages. It allows us to see
remembering as dynamic, as for the present and future, and as an important
and familiar way of shaping relationships with others. Because memory is
often shared, this more dynamic view shows that there is not a sharp distinc-
tion between personal and collective memory. Knockwood and others share
personal memories and in doing so help shape together and for each other the
significance of their experiences at Shubenacadie. The model encourages us
think about how people can share memory across quite different pasts; about
what kinds of public and social resources (narrative, symbolic, cultural, rela-
tional, or material) can help people remember; about the many kinds of activ-
ities involved in remembering; and about the responsibilities of those with
whom memory is shared, especially the memory of harm. How we participate
in and respond to others’ rememberings will be part of the context that affects
how and what people can remember—the significance they are able to give to
their past for their present and future. Specific applications of the reconstruc-
tive view of memory to the IRS TRC will be examined in section 3.
The shift to a reconstructive view has also, however, given people a more
sophisticated language for challenging the memories of others. On the store-
house view, the idea of good memory is memory that is caused by the past with
no other influence on the memory. The memory is stored and then unearthed; it
should stay the same on each occasion that it is recalled. Reconstructive views
have shown that there are many influences on how the past is remembered
on any particular occasion, but theorists have not yet shifted to an account of
good memory that fully accommodates these insights. Rather than regarding
influence positively and as a way to think about what support people need for
their memory, some theorists and members of the public have seen the many
influences on how we experience the past as a reason not to trust memory.8
This distrust has especially affected groups that are politically oppressed or
marginalized, because challenging memory is a powerful way to contest claims
for justice. The present chapter focuses on the potential importance of the re-
constructive approach for the IRS TRC. The chapter that follows explores the
kinds of challenges to memory that can characterize contexts in which domi-
nant versions of the past are contested.9
8
See, for example, Schacter and Coyle (1995).
9
“Challenges to Memory in Political Contexts.” Discussion paper prepared for the Indian
Residential Schools Resolution Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Chapter 8).
2. The Indian Residential Schools Truth and

Reconciliation Commission as a Distinctive Process
Focus
At a training session for the IRS TRC, facilitated by the International Center
for Transitional Justice, there was discussion of the ways in which the IRS
TRC will be a unique Truth and Reconciliation Commission.10 There are a
number of ways in which the IRS TRC will be similar to previous Truth and
Reconciliation Commissions. All TRCs are, in their conception, non-judicial
processes. Like other TRCs, the IRS TRC will be concerned with truth-telling;
its work will aim at a broad and comprehensive (and not just legal) under-
standing of harm to victims; the commission’s recommendations will specify
and recommend that those responsible for the harm undertake various
responsibilities for its redress; and the commission will address the legacy of
intergenerational harm. There are also many features of the IRS TRC, however,
that are unusual for truth commissions and that will together make the IRS
TRC a unique process.
Discussion
Both the context of the IRS TRC and its structure will help to make it a very
distinctive TRC. With respect to the context of the IRS TRC:
1. Canada is a stable democracy, thus not the kind of country in which
most people would expect a TRC. Most TRCs have taken place in
societies in transition to democracy;
2. The IRS TRC has arisen as a part of a comprehensive negotiated
settlement among Aboriginal peoples, the government of Canada,
and church leadership entities. Most TRCs have been initiated by
governments although often in the face of public pressure;
3. The IRS TRC will deal with a long period in Canada’s history. The
Indian Residential School system was in place for approximately
100 years. Most TRCs deal with a shorter time period;
4. Many of the kinds of violence and violation at issue in the IRS
TRC are unique in the context of TRCs. Like other TRCs, the IRS
TRC will be concerned with human rights violations. Article 7
(2) of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples states: “Indigenous peoples have the collective right to live
in freedom, peace and security as distinct peoples and shall not
be subjected to any act of genocide or any other act of violence,
including forcibly removing children of the group to another group.”
10
This training session organized by the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada, Truth and
Reconciliation Commission took place in Ottawa on July 31, 2007. The discussion that follows is from
my notes.
Article 8 states: “1. Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right

not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their
culture. 2. States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention
of, and redress for: (a) Any action which has the aim or effect of
depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their
cultural values or ethnic identities” (United Nations 2007). But the
kinds of specific harms to identity and culture that characterized the
intent of Indian Residential Schooling, while not themselves unique,
have not been the subject of a previous TRC;
The direct victims of the harm were children.
5.
With respect to the process of the IRS TRC:
The TRC is uniquely positioned within the Settlement Agreement
1.
to be forward-looking. Many TRCs are partly oriented toward
fact-finding that will support reparations or other forms of
redress. The IRS TRC will commence its work while reparations
are in process. It was negotiated to be forward-looking, oriented
toward learning, reconciliation as a process, and the support of
healing;
The process will take place over a five-year period, and involve both
2.
national and community events, with a report due after three years.
TRCs typically have a shorter time frame and submit their report
and recommendations at the conclusion of the process.
The reconstructive view of memory can be a useful lens for reflecting on
the distinctive nature of the IRS TRC. Thinking about memory may help the
Commission make clear to Canadians why our TRC is unique in a way that
will allow the Commission to emphasize both the Guiding Principles of the
IRS TRC and its important place in the Settlement Agreement. It is not the
opinion of the author that the Commission should explicitly use the language of
“reconstructive memory” rather than consistently emphasize the idea that mem-
ory is forward-looking, that in supporting the IRS TRC, Canadians are “remem-
bering for the future.”
Part III. Applications

1. Resisting the Demand for Closure on the Past
Focus
The IRS TRC was negotiated to be forward-looking, oriented toward learning
and reconciliation as a process, while also supporting healing. Yet some people
may criticize the IRS TRC as “digging up” a past that was set to rest through
the dismantling of the Residential School system, and through the Common
Experience Payment, funding for commemoration and healing, and forms

of legal redress for abuse. Reflecting on memory may help the Commission
understand and resist inappropriate demands for closure while also recogniz-
ing that for students, their families, and their communities some expectation
for closure on their Residential School experience may be wholly appropriate.
Discussion
The need for truth-sharing, education, and awareness
In critiquing the Dispute Resolution process in place prior to the Settlement
Agreement, the Assembly of First Nations identified as one of the common
criticisms expressed by survivors that “the model does not address the need
for truth-sharing, public education, or awareness of the Canadian public about
Residential Schools” (2004, 17). The IRS TRC is the part of the comprehensive
negotiated settlement that is most explicitly forward-looking. The survivors
of Indian Residential Schooling; First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities;
church leadership entities; and the government of Canada have recognized
that non-Aboriginal Canadians must learn about the long period of Indian
Residential Schooling and its ongoing legacy. Transforming public conscious-
ness and social memory is necessary to any possibility of renewing relations
(Alfred 2005). Yet the Commission will inevitably face those who believe that
what Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians require is closure on this
period of our history. These people may further expect that the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission will give this closure, helping to put to rest “the
unquiet past” (Torpey 2001b, 334).
Inappropriate demands for closure on the past

The Commission may face two different kinds of inappropriate demand for
closure on the past. First, there may be those who object to the very idea of
a truth commission, wondering why Canadians should continue to focus on
the past. Second, there may be those who see the need to respond to historic
wrongdoing and the role of a truth commission in this response, but who insist
that the Commission’s work should help bring closure on the past harm so that
Indian Residential Schools are no longer a focus of conscious public attention.
The Settlement Agreement was represented to Canadians in the press as
directed toward closure: “Ottawa’s 2 billion residential-schools agreement,
announced yesterday to bring closure to what has been called the most dis-
graceful racist act in national history, took more than $200-million in legal
fees to achieve” (Globe and Mail, November 11, 2005). Moreover, the public’s
conception of truth commissions may play into an expectation for closure
on the past. The genesis and work of TRCs in transitional societies has been
linked to a pressing need for political stability, and thus some truth commis-
sions have themselves emphasized the importance of putting aspects of the
past to rest. For all truth commissions, a language of correcting the historical
record, or of healing, or of reconciliation may encourage the public to antici-
pate that TRCs are meant to resolve the past rather than help keep it alive. The
Canadian government sometimes still conceives of the work of the IRS TRC in
terms of closure. For example, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat states
in a recent report on Plans and Priorities:
The Settlement Agreement will provide the establishment of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and increased funding for Commemoration
projects with the following goals: enhance the well-being of former students,
their families and communities; bring closure to the Indian Residential
Schools experience; and help former students, their families and communi-
ties to move forward. (2007)
The October 2007 Speech from the Throne announced that the prime minister
would use the occasion of the launch of the IRS TRC “to make a statement
of apology to close this sad chapter in our history” (Government of Canada,
2008). The implication seems to be that families, communities, and Canadians
will only move forward through closure on the past. What view of memory
might be at work in this assumption?
Metaphors associated with the storehouse view of memory (and not the
more dynamic view implicit in the conception of the IRS TRC) can play into
the idea that a focus on the past prevents going forward. Memory as a store-
house suggests that the past is held in a place separated from the present. This
imagery of separation may be used to suggest that the past will not influence
the present unless it is disturbed in memory, and that when this happens it will
take our attention from the present and future.
The image of the past as sharply separated from the present is sometimes
explicit in writing on reparations. Sociologist John Torpey, for example, refers
to the commitment to reparations as our attempt “to lay to rest the unquiet
past” (2001b, 334)—a past that has not stayed at rest but is disturbing the
present.11 Recently, he challenged the contemporary will toward remember-
ing harm in these words: “Not since the Romantics has so much energy been
spent on digging up the past, sifting through the broken shards, and ponder-
ing what people think about them” (2001a, 251). Torpey refers to this activity
as a “memory industry” and links attention to memory to an inability to go on
in forward-looking ways:
11
Torpey has written extensively on reparations (2001a; 2001b; 2003). In the paper quoted he does
not oppose the importance of reparations but argues that memory is subjective and individualistic, a
poor option to the history. For other recent challenges to the contemporary attention to memory see
Klein (2000) and Misztal (2004).
In the absence of any plausible overarching vision of a more humane future

society, that past and what people think about it becomes magnified: right-
ing past wrongs supplants and replaces the search for the vision of a better
future. (2001a, 251)
Torpey represents memory as something like a place normally separated from
the present where the past is held or buried. He suggests to his audience that
the past will not bother people unless they dig it up. He considers memory as
an “individualistic” response to harm suggesting, in line with the storehouse
model, that memories are private and will not contribute to a collective sense
of how to move forward.12
Demands for closure on the past may be judged as inappropriate when
they fail to recognize the continuous role of the past in shaping the present.
Aboriginal peoples are well aware of the life of the past in the present. In the
Introduction to an anthology of Native American writing, Sioux scholar Vine
Deloria Jr. describes Native writing as a “reflective statement of what it means
and has meant to live in a present which is continually overwhelmed by the
fantasies of others of the meanings of past events” (1985, x). Moreover, cultures
that value oral traditions recognize that acknowledging and shaping the sig-
nificance of the past to the present is the core of individual and communal
learning: that memory is dynamic, shared, and necessary for our sense of who
we are and how we should go on in the world. Author Lee Maracle, a member
of the Sto:loh Nation states: “We are an oral people: history, law, politics, so-
ciology, the self, and our relationship to the world are all contained in our
memory” (Maracle 2000, i).
Distinguishing the public demand for closure from

survivor’s needs for resolution
But to stress forward-looking memory may seem disrespectful of painful and
traumatic memories that many former students experience. It may be impor-
tant for the Commission to distinguish inappropriate public demands for clo-
sure from the legitimate importance of survivors’ desires and needs for types
of resolution on their Residential School experience. This need might be stated
in the language of closure. It might also make use of the language of healing.
As the example from Knockwood suggests, for some survivors of traumatic
harm, it may be important to re-experience and re-remember the past with a
different kind of spiritual consciousness and a particular purpose, in order to
transform its meaning. For others, healing may require a shift in energy and
12
It is important to think about who is being addressed by Torpey’s remarks. The reference to the
Romantics and the occasion of his paper suggest that his remarks are to an audience of predominantly
Western European heritage. I thank Bob Watts for flagging this point.
focus of attention that they might describe as a process of forgetting or of put-

ting the past behind them.
According to anthropologist Rosalind Shaw, during the Sierra Leone TRC
process, some communities decided not to allow the past a certain signifi-
cance in the present via refusal to participate in the public, verbal articulation
of memory. She suggests that these decisions were cohesive with practices and
traditions of remembering that acknowledged forms of historic violence ritu-
alistically or in visionary experience but not verbally. For example,
In Temne-speaking areas, when child ex-combatants were returned to their
home communities after demobilization, their family members adapted or
created rituals to “cool the heart” of the child. “Cooling the heart” reversed
the work of the combatant groups that had made the child into a fighter,
restoring the child’s relationship with God and the ancestors—and thereby
also with the family and community—through prayer, the application of
consecrated water, and small offerings. In some rural communities, religious
leaders introduced group rituals or church ceremonies for returning com-
batants (both child and adult) involving confession, prayers, and offerings,
in which the whole community participated. Because having and maintain-
ing a “cool heart” requires a transformation of social identity, ex-combatants
were discouraged from publicly talking about the war after these rituals, and
reciprocally community members were enjoined not to call child or adult
ex-combatants “rebels” or other combatant labels, not to ask ex-combatants
about their past actions, and not to discuss the war in public after rituals of
reintegration. (Shaw 2005, 9)
Though Shaw refers to such practices as “social forgetting,” they obviously do
recognize the powerful ways that the past lives on in the present and seek to
direct this power. To mark the place of the activities that she describes within a
reconstructive view, Shaw refers to them as belonging to “a diversity of mem-
ory practices” (Shaw 2004).
Aboriginal individuals, families, and communities will develop a sense for
themselves of how participation in “a diversity of memory practices” will meet
their own requirements for giving appropriate significance to the past. But to
recognize practices of healing, social forgetting, or shifting energy and atten-
tion as a part of shaping the significance of the past is very different from the
idea that the past is dead, buried, or somewhere else and will not disturb the
present unless we dig it up through memory. Practices of healing or shifting
energy and attention recognize the embodied, emotional, communal, and spir-
itual dimensions of memory (Rodger Hill personal communication; Wheeler
2005), dimensions that descriptions like Torpey’s obscure and devalue.
The very way in which the IRS TRC has been planned and negotiated is to
keep the past alive in the present through a deeper and fuller understanding of
the legacy of Residential Schools as a part of Canadian public consciousness.
In a recent article on the function of archives, Canadian archivist, Terry Cook

asked: “What kind of past should the future have?” (2006, 169) People involved
in intergenerational harm can experience a kind of despair, frequently turning to
anger. They may think that the past cannot be changed and that all they have to
offer is their guilt.13 Although closure on the past may seem like an attractive op-
tion, this demand is often a denial of how the past continues to influence relation-
ships. The reconstructive view of memory does not suggest that we can undo or
remake facts about the past or will away the damage of the past by thinking about
it differently. It rather stresses that how we remember can change the significance
of the past for the future. What is clear is that the history and legacy of Residential
Schooling needs to be alive to the memory of non-Aboriginal Canadians to sup-
port any prospect of the renewal of relationships.
2. Memory and Forward-Looking Responsibility

Focus
What is recalled to memory calls one to responsibility.
Derrida 1989, ix
One of the most specific and important ways in which memory is

forward-looking is that capacities to take responsibility for the present and fu-
ture require our ability to re-remember and re-feel our past. The IRS TRC has
been conceived in ways that allow for focus on forward-looking dimensions
of responsibility in answer to the question of why Canadians are now remem-
bering this history: our purpose in establishing and supporting the IRS TRC.
Conceptions of forward-looking responsibility may aid the Commission in
encouraging a move beyond a dynamic of blame/guilt when considering how
we might respond collectively to the legacy of Indian Residential Schools. At
the same time, a discussion of forward-looking responsibility can actually be
used to deepen the public understanding of the harm of Residential Schooling,
with the perversion of responsibility at its core.
Discussion
The link between memory and responsibility
Memory and responsibility are intimately connected. First, we would not hold
others responsible for their actions unless we thought they could remember and
reflect on what they had done.14 Second, re-experiencing the past with different
13
A number of theorists, including Regan (2010) and Walker (2006), have made arguments that we
can and must replace the paralysis of guilt with critically informed notions of hope in seeking to repair
relations damaged by serious historic wrongdoing.
14
This is not to say, of course, that we don’t hold people responsible for harms, for example, that
they have forgotten. Forgetting the wrongs we have done may lead to an additional level of criticism.
meaning and different emotion is how, as children and as adults, we learn to

take responsibility for the people we are becoming. As a child guided by oth-
ers, I learn to re-understand and re-experience as mean or thoughtless actions
I once thought were funny. As an adult, I am prompted to re-understand a re-
mark I believed was innocuous as racist or insensitive. Moral learning is a pow-
erful example of how the significance of the past often changes as we remember,
and needs to do so for memory to be a valuable human capacity. Third, we
can only care about what has our attention. To care about what is not directly
present to our senses requires that it be alive to our memory (Margalit 2002).
Finally, we share a past that we remember in highly individual ways while to-
gether having to determine its significance. To remember is always to be called
to the responsibility of shaping the collective significance of the past (Campbell
2006b; Sutton 2006). Though memory is related to many kinds of responsi-
bility, the following discussion focuses on forward-looking responsibilities.
Forward-looking responsibility
We can think of responsibility as having both backward- and forward-looking
dimensions. To the extent that a process is concerned with determining lia-
bility for past acts, it is focused on backward-looking responsibility, or what
philosopher Claudia Card calls the “credit” sense of responsibility—blame and
praise for what we have caused to happen. That TRCs are public processes ex-
plicitly concerned with justice leads many people to think of them in terms of
credit or blame sense of responsibility even though all TRCs have been con-
cerned with future and not just with past relationships.
Awareness of the current challenge of renewing relationships profoundly
damaged by colonialism and other types of oppression has led a number of
theorists to concentrate on describing types of forward-looking responsibility
that are necessary to any possibility of reconciliation (Card 1996; Thomson
2002; Walker 2006; Young 2006b). The forward-looking nature of the IRS
TRC is compatible with a significant focus on forward-looking responsibility,
ideals of “taking responsibility.”
Card says that when we take responsibility, “we locate ourselves as morally
relevant centers of agency” (28). We can do so in at least three distinct ways:
(1) the administrative or managerial sense of responsibility—undertaking to
size up and organize possibilities comprehensively, deciding which should
be realized and how; (2) the accountability sense of responsibility—agree-
ing to answer for something or account for something, or finding that
one should be answerable, and then doing so; (3) the care-taking sense of
The point is the more general one that unless we had the capacity to re-remember and reflect on the
past, and unless people in fact did so widely and often as prompted to by others, our practices of re-
sponsibility would make little sense. I thank Seetal Sunga for suggesting clarification.
responsibility—committing oneself to stand behind something, to back it,

support it, and make it good (or make good on one’s failure to do so), and
then following through. (28)
Card acknowledges that an occasion of responsibility often involves both
forward- and backward-looking dimensions. As examples, praising or blam-
ing others often plays a part in teaching more forward-looking responsibility;
we might be blamed if we do not take responsibility where we should; and
making ourselves properly accountable may also sometimes involve assessing
our liability for a situation, though in other cases it need not. If you drop your
coffee on the floor and I say “Don’t worry, I’ll clean that up,” I have made my-
self accountable for improving a situation that I did not cause, and for which
I could not be held liable.
Some authors have suggested that while Western-European ethical tradi-
tions tend to overuse a language of rights, ideas of forward-looking responsi-
bility play a more important role in the articulation of Aboriginal ethical and
spiritual traditions. Mohawk legal scholar Patricia Monture-Angus writes:
When I went to law school, I learned all about rights. It was rights, rights,
rights all the time. Do you know what kinds of rights you have? Elders taught
me that I have only one. Do you know what that one right is? It is the right
to live as a Mohawk woman because that is the way the Creator made me.
That is the only right I have. After that I have a series of responsibilities, as a
Mohawk woman, because that is how I was made. (1995, 87)
Responsibilities are often described as a part of articulating the importance of

cultural practices. In discussing the connection between Indigenous languages
and a sense of place, for example, the Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and
Cultures speaks of care of the land:
The relationship reflected by our language means that we are not separate
from the land. It also means that we have a responsibility for the land and
all that is on it. . . . Taking care of the land takes many forms. Among the
Anishnabe of Ontario and Manitoba, for instance, harvesting the wild rice
that gives sustenance to the people is a life-long commitment and sacred
responsibility to be carried out properly in accordance with strict protocols
within designated families. Responsibility for the land for the Anishnabe
means passing that responsibility on to worthy members of the younger
generation within an extended family to ensure that those not yet born will,
in their turn, be able to benefit from the land. (2005, 23)
Aboriginal writers also stress the forward-looking responsibility of preserving
collective memory. For example, in describing the poetry of Louise Halfe, Cree
scholar Neal McLeod writes: “She sees collective memory as a gift and respon-
sibility, an intergenerational process. The stories found in memory help people
find their way out of colonialism” (2007, 9).
But though Western moralities may downplay the language of responsibili-

ties in favor of a language of rights, all Canadians are familiar from their own
daily lives with the senses of forward-looking responsibility that Card details.
Advantages of forward-looking responsibility

Put simply, in the context of the IRS TRC, forward-looking senses of respon-
sibility are politically powerful because they give people a sense that there is
action that can be taken for the future. To talk of taking responsibility can
move non-Aboriginal people away from the sense that they are being blamed
to think about what they can now do, and this language allows people to make
themselves accountable where they would reject blame. Perhaps a blame/guilt
dynamic is not a part of a person’s cultural understanding of responsibility;15
perhaps she was born at a time when the Residential School system was being
dismantled and is angry at the suggestion of blame; perhaps she belongs to a
group that has itself been the subject of political marginalization; or perhaps
she is a new Canadian. Moreover, backward-looking responsibility may be ap-
propriate for a situation that has a terminus—a harm that has been done and
needs to be redressed. Forward-looking responsibility may be more appro-
priate to responding to ongoing structures of injustice that require reforming
and dismantling (Young 2006b). The legacy of Indian Residential Schools is an
ongoing harm to which we must respond in forward-looking ways.
We have evidence already that ideals of taking responsibility can allow peo-
ple who are very differently positioned with respect to the causes and legacy of
Residential Schooling to all find a place within a collective response to the harm.
For example, in negotiating the Settlement Agreement and in participating in the
IRS TRC, Aboriginal Canadians are taking forward-looking responsibility. They
are exercising care for their communities and their descendants, as well as being
willing to support the possibilities of renewed relations with non-Aboriginal
Canadians. In making apologies and in participating in the Settlement Agreement,
church leadership entities and the federal government have not only accepted
backward-looking responsibility in the sense of blame but express forward-looking
responsibility in the sense of making themselves accountable for living out the
commitments expressed in the apologies or statements of reconciliation.
Residential Schools and the perversion of responsibility

Though the language of forward-looking responsibility has appealed to people
as a politically optimistic language, talk of forward-looking responsibility ac-
tually helps make deep sense of the kind of harm of the Indian Residential
School system and reflection on it may be important in setting the context
for the Common Experience Payment. The title of John Milloy’s history of
the Indian Residential School system—A National Crime: The Canadian
15
See Alfred (2005, 153) for the observation that guilt is not valued by Indigenous spiritual traditions.
Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986 (1999) clearly evokes
the credit or blame sense of responsibility. But in the introduction Milloy says
that the question Canadians must now face is “how were Christianity and
responsibility perverted?” (xiv) in both the existence of the Residential School
system and in the management and running of the schools. In posing this
question, he identifies the perversion of forward-looking responsibilities at the
core of Residential Schooling.
Taking responsibility can be done arrogantly and with horrific conse-
quences when people misidentify the moral agency that is appropriate to their
positions. Canadian Colonial administrators and churches inappropriately
took on the managerial responsibility of Aboriginal education in the service of
a policy of assimilation. They took on care-taking responsibilities for Aboriginal
children who were often abandoned to disease, neglect, and abuse. They made
themselves accountable for the running of the schools and with continuing
and irrefutable evidence of the failure of the system, they consistently failed to
respond to their knowledge and responsibilities. Having perverted the idea of
taking responsibility in the establishment and management of the Residential
School system, non-Aboriginal Canadians now have the opportunity to take
responsibility in more appropriate forward-looking ways.
What will be required to take responsibility?

The organizations, entities, and individuals involved in the Settlement
Agreement have taken and will continue to take a great deal of responsibility
in determining the types of processes, events, and activities that are appro-
priate in realizing the work of the IRS TRC. I will conclude this discussion
by making two general remarks about non-Aboriginal Canadians and the
forward-looking responsibilities of memory.
First, because remembering shows where we have put our interest and atten-
tion, for non-Aboriginal Canadians to show support for former students and
their communities will require an active remembering of students’ experience
of Residential Schooling. Second, Milloy’s book sets a certain explicit responsi-
bility. Stating that his text “only suggests the extent and context of neglect and
abuse that were the indelible characteristics of the school system,” he says that
“it must fall to the reader, to all of us, to go further, to answer the question, why
did it happen?” (xviii–xix). In posing this question to all his readers, I would
argue that Milloy identifies a collective responsibility of making ourselves ac-
countable for understanding our history in ways that will aid us to change the
structures, policies, and attitudes that kept the Residential School system in
place and continue to fuel its legacy. But this responsibility has a distinctive
form for non-Aboriginal Canadians.
Milloy is clear that in order to make ourselves accountable non-Aboriginal
Canadians must re-remember the past so that its significance shifts. Speaking to
other non-Aboriginal Canadians, he contends that we must make it “our story,”
that we must quit marginalizing the history of the schools “as we did Aboriginal
people themselves to reserve it for them as a site of suffering and grief ” (xviii).
We may think, as well, of Knockwood’s passing the Talking Stick to her readers
at the end of her narrative, her inviting relation with us, as a call to sharing on-
going responsibility for the history and legacy of the schools.16 It may be that if
non-Aboriginal Canadians practice a more responsible remembering, the sig-
nificance of the past may then also shift for Aboriginal Canadians. Again this
is not to deny the extent of the harm of Residential Schooling. It is to recognize
the possibility that the legacy of the Residential School system will not con-
tinue to be experienced as a source of uncaring national neglect. Why should
non-Aboriginal Canadians undertake this accountability for re-remembering
the past? How we experience our history is a profound influence on how we
envision and act toward the future. Non-Aboriginal Canadians who value their
integrity cannot be content to have their own futures shaped by fantasies about
the past.
The language of forward-looking responsibility, of taking responsibility, is
a rich and often positive moral language that the Commission may be able to
utilize though not in the naive or wholly optimistic ways envisioned by some
political theorists. The idea of taking responsibility makes space for everyone
in the work of the IRS TRC and may encourage a shift from guilt to a realistic
hope that one can contribute to more positive relationships.17 Notions of taking
responsibility that have their home in Indigenous traditions might provide a
pathway for the language of taking responsibility that can be utilized in the
work of the commission. At the same time it is important to recognize the per-
version of taking responsibility that was at the root of Residential Schooling.
It may be that taking responsibility can engage the will of the Canadian public
while being an indispensable critical tool for guiding the memory and learning
necessary for accountability.
3. “Vulnerable Rememberers”: The Assault on Memory

in the History of the Schools
Focus
Memory is significant—we are who we are by what we remember
and what we do not.
Maracle 2000, i
The IRS TRC is a unique process, both in some of the kinds of violence and
violation at issue, and because the most direct victims of the violence were
I thank Paulette Regan for noticing this connection.

16
See note 14.
17
children. Whatever the differences in the individual experience of students

throughout the long history of the Residential School system, part of students’
common experience was their exploitation as children in an official colo-
nial policy of assimilation. The strategy of this policy cannot be understood
without attention to memory. The Canadian policy of assimilation deliber-
ately exploited children as a group of especially vulnerable rememberers in
order to destroy intergenerational community. In exploiting children, it also
profoundly disrespected, as rememberers, their parents and Elders. In the
context of the IRS TRC, those subject to this assimilationist policy will now
publicly reclaim a position as members of intergenerational communities
who remember to support their cultures, traditions, nations, and the poten-
tial flourishing of future generations. It may be that highlighting the symbolic
and historic importance of memory in the IRS TRC process is one way of
providing a context for the Common Experience Payment while stressing the
importance of respecting and honoring those who are making a gift of their
memories to Canada’s future.
Discussion
Children, memory, and intergenerational community
Intergenerational community is possible because skills, knowledge, traditions,
and values are conveyed from previous to subsequent generations through
practices of remembering that keep the past alive in the present. Children are
“the vulnerable future” of a community (Milloy 1999, 9). They gain a com-
munal identity, a legacy to one day be passed on to new generations, in actively
remembering and revitalizing their heritage through their language, their hab-
its, and their actions.
Processes of colonization always disrupt intergenerational remember-
ing through dispossession, dislocation, violence, and family rupture. But
Residential Schooling was a special kind of violence—colonization took place
through a direct attack on memory.18 Residential Schooling was an explic-
itly articulated strategy to destroy cultural identities through severing chil-
dren’s memories from communal support. J. A. Macrae wrote to the Indian
Commissioner in 1886: “all the circumstances of life . . . educate the Indian
child at home, but its parents, fellows, and existence being Indian, it is trained
in Indian life, not in the life of the white man upon a knowledge of which its
future existence depends” (quoted in Milloy 1999, 26). It was assumed by the
government and churches that without this reinforcing context of home and
family life, children would quickly forget their cultural pasts, and thus be un-
able to carry them forward into the future.
See Diana Taylor (2003) for a compelling argument that processes of colonization cannot be
18
understood without seeing the primacy of the attack on social structures of memory.
Many sources have detailed with power and clarity how the attack on
Aboriginal languages through Residential Schooling was fundamental to the
Canadian government’s policy of assimilation.19 I raise their work in this con-
text to situate it as violence against memory. In forbidding children to speak
their language and punishing and often abusing those who resisted, the schools
implicitly recognized and sought to undermine the profound importance of a
living language to oral cultures. For an oral culture it is speaking the language
that makes and keeps the past alive to the present and future.20
Here is just one kind of example: Communities who participated in hear-
ings for the Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Cultures particularly
stressed the fundamental ways in which First Nations, Inuit, and Métis lan-
guages relate people to the land as the source of their identity and spiritu-
ality in ways only accessible through particular activities of intergenerational
remembering—practices of oral recounting:
The memory of these [sacred] places and their significance are preserved in
the oral tradition of the various First Nations, Inuit and Métis Nations. The
tradition of oral recounting in the language of a people is the special pre-
serve of the Elders and other uniquely qualified individuals whose sacred
responsibility is to preserve and hand down the stories that reflect the dis-
tinctiveness of the people and the places and the events that define them.
(2005, 23)
Children were most the most vulnerable link in a chain of intergenerational
remembering that was specifically oriented toward defining and supporting
one’s identity as a distinctive people. If, as was intended, the children could no
longer understand or even be present to hear these stories, it was anticipated
that the Elders’ sacred responsibility of preserving identities could be broken.
As fundamental as was the assault on language, when viewed through the
lens of memory, it is equally important to recognize that Residential Schools
were initially intended to be “total institutions.” Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri
Young use this description (following Irving Goffman) to describe “walled
off ” institutional settings that control every aspect of their inmates’ lives and
are oriented toward unmaking and remaking persons to accord with a certain
set of institutional imperatives (1997, Ch. 5). As the institutional imperative of
the Residential School system was clearly the destruction of Aboriginal ways
of life, Hayter Reed, a senior official for the Department of Indian Affairs, ad-
vised, “Every effort should be directed against anything calculated to keep fresh
19
See, for example, Chrisjohn and Young (1997); Haig-Brown (1989); Milloy (1999); Task Force on
Aboriginal Languages and Cultures (2005).
20
For an eloquent defense of the importance of Indigenous language and intergenerational narra-
tive memory to the persistence and renewal of Indigenous cultures, see McLeod (2007): “Every time a
story is told, every time one word of an Indigenous language is spoken, we are resisting the destruction
of our collective memory” (66).
in the memories of children habits and associations which it is one of the main
objects of industrial institutions to obliterate” (quoted in Milloy 1999, 43).
Reed’s injunction recognizes that we remember and learn through many
types of activities, not all of them using language. Many kinds of communal
memory involving cultural, moral, and spiritual values require learning
through observing the actions of others and acting as they do. Aboriginal writ-
ers have noted the particular importance of experiential learning in their own
traditions. Gitxsan artist Doreen Jensen describes being taught how to prepare
salmon for smoking by her mother:
She didn’t say, “this is how you cut it,” she just did about three and then
she said, “Ok, you can do it now,” and then she left. And I had the knife in
my hand and I thought, “What am I going to do?” I really tried my best to
remember how she had done it because our teaching is voiceless. We have
to learn to watch and understand what’s going on. . . . The Western way is
with words—a steady flow of words which you have to retain. With us the
teaching is wordless. I think it’s important to notice these differences be-
cause there are many ways of learning. (2000, 141–42)21
Experiential learning transmits not only cultural practices, skills, and tra-
ditions but, crucially, the values embedded within them. In How Societies
Remember (1989), historian Paul Connerton brings special attention to how
ethical or spiritual values are transmitted intergenerationally through their life
in our activities. Connerton points out that performing an activity in an appro-
priate way enacts or makes present a value, and this is how values are remem-
bered. His account focuses on learning and remembering through embodied
performance. For example, a person who learns to lay a wreath properly suc-
ceeds at performing an act of respect, carrying the knowledge of that value
into the future through its continued embodied practice. Knockwood tells the
story of how sitting and listening in the proper way is learning respect for
Elders.
Sometimes they talked all night and throughout several days. Children were
never allowed to interrupt or walk in front of the people or in between them
when they were talking. Mukk petteskuaw we were told. The underlying
meaning is “Don’t walk in front of people who are talking.” This custom
stems back to the old belief that everyone is a spirit and a conversation be-
tween people is a spiritual experience because they are also exchanging their
most valuable possession, their word. I usually sat by my mother’s knee and
kept very quiet because I did not want to be told to leave. I wanted to hear
all the interesting stories of my ancestors. I was listening and learning. Now,
I realize that I was witnessing the Talking Stick Ceremony. (1992, 14)
21
See also Alfred (2005); Wheeler (2005).
Knockwood is participating in intergenerational remembering through lis-

tening to what is said about her ancestors, but she is learning as well (partly
through instruction and partly through observation) to sit quietly during
the Talking Stick Ceremony, to not interrupt, and to not walk in front of the
person speaking, She is contributing to the intergenerational transmission of
values—respect for Elders and for speakers—by learning to make these values
alive and present in her own actions. Her writing suggests that remembering
these values through how she sits and listens is as important to the experi-
ence and meaning of the ceremony as the words spoken. The total institutions
of Indian Residential Schools were designed to destroy the intergenerational
transmission of values.
Who can remember for the future?

While children were exploited as vulnerable rememberers, parents and Elders
were also profoundly disrespected as rememberers through Indian Residential
Schooling. In initially being called “the old, unimprovable people,”22 they were
marked as those whose memories and heritage were not a valuable resource
for their descendants, as those who could not remember for the future. One
of the most dehumanizing stereotypes imposed on Aboriginal peoples is
their representation as people who are of the past. Mohawk scholar Taiaiake
Alfred and the late Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, former director of research at the
Aboriginal Healing Foundation, each note the persistence of this representa-
tion. Valaskakis writes that “ethnographic reconstructions of traditional cul-
ture wind through North American narratives of dominance, placing Native
people in a time-distanced past that cannot be fully retrieved from the recesses
of Indian oral tradition” (2005, 215). Alfred condemns contemporary Canadian
Aboriginal policy as “based on the idea that what is integral to our cultures is
frozen in the past . . . and that if we are to have a future, it will be one defined
by and allowed only at the discretion of the dominant society” (2005, 131).
I refer to this representation as morally vicious and de-humanizing because
to be denied recognition as people who preserve and transmit culture is to be
denied recognition as those who participate in the uniquely human value of
preservation.
Philosopher Iris Marion Young describes the value of being able to pre-
serve home and community as a type of remembrance that allows one to
face the future “by knitting a steady confidence in who one is from the joys
and pains of the past retained in the things amongst which one dwells”
(2006a, 143). Preservation is the work of keeping the past alive in the present
through intergenerational living and teaching. The Task Force on Aboriginal
22
As described by Reverend E. F. Wilson, founder of the Shingwauk residential school. See Nock
(1988, 73).
Languages and Cultures identified the responsibility of preservation as one

of its guiding principles:
We believe that each generation of speakers carries the responsibility for
preserving and revitalizing the unique and irreplaceable values, spiritual
and traditional beliefs and sacred ceremonies. (3)
In a similar spirit, Young’s account stresses the revitalization of meaning and
the activities of intergenerational teaching:
The work of preservation entails not only keeping the physical objects of par-
ticular people intact, but renewing their meaning in their lives. Thus pres-
ervation involves preparing and staging commemorations and celebrations,
where those who dwell together amongst the things tell and retell stories of
their particular lives and give and receive gifts that add to the dwelling world.
The work of preservation also importantly involves teaching the children the
meanings of the things amongst which one dwells, teaching the children the
stories, practices, and celebrations that keep the particular meanings alive.
The preservation of the things among which one dwells gives people a con-
text for their lives, individuates their histories, gives them items to use in
making new projects, and makes them comfortable. When things and works
are maintained against destruction, but not in the context of life activity, they
become museum pieces. (Young 2006a, 142)
The idea of remembrance that characterizes preservation is reconstructive, it
is for the future. Young writes that “part of the moral task of preservation is
to reconstruct the connection of the past to the present in light of new events,
relationships, and political understandings” (144).
Preservation as a human value has often been ignored in Western European
philosophies because of its association with the work of women, and the ten-
dency to devalue this work. Preservation, however, has been more deeply
valued in the practices of Aboriginal cultures. It is related to the care-taking
sense of responsibility that has played a fundamental role in the traditions of
Aboriginal peoples, to the work of community Elders, and to respect for them.
It is clearly understood as remembering for the future. In writing of the impor-
tance of participating in intergenerational memory, of “coming home” through
stories, as a response to Indigenous spatial and spiritual exile, McLeod writes:
While “coming home” is a return to Indigenous memories and narratives,
“home” has changed through new layers of experience and new ways of
occupying the same space. However, this is experience grounded in older
memories and older narratives, which serve as a map for people to find their
way through life. (2007, 56)
Moreover, there is explicit recognition in Aboriginal writings that each genera-
tion carries the responsibility for the preservation of Aboriginal ways of being.
It is, I would suggest, important for non-Aboriginal Canadians to under-

stand the profound disrespect that has characterized the representation of
Aboriginal peoples as unable to remember for their future and the assault
on memory through Residential Schooling that, though it failed to make this
representation a reality, was meant to do so. In the context of the IRS TRC,
Aboriginal peoples will publicly act to re-enforce the structure and flow of
intergenerational memory critical to the well-being of families and to the
preservation of identity and community, the very process that Residential
Schooling sought to disrupt. It may be that highlighting the importance of
memory both in the history of the schools and in the present IRS TRC process
will aid the Commission in encouraging the kind of respect that is a prereq-
uisite for renewing relations. The Commission may also be able to stress to
non-Aboriginal Canadians the intergenerational responsibility “to reconstruct
the connection of the past to the present in light of new events, relationships,
and political understandings” (Young 2006a, 144).
4. Shaping Relation through Sharing Memory

Focus
The IRS TRC will take place over a five-year period, and involve both national
and community events. Most TRCs have had a shorter time frame in which
to complete their mandate. The unique structure of the IRS TRC will create
challenges for the Commission but also the opportunity to maximize the en-
gagement of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians at the national and
community level. In this final application of reconstructive memory, I suggest
that the idea of remembering for the future is one useful lens for thinking
about the importance of this engagement. Reconstructive approaches stress
that we remember through a diverse range of activities, and that remembering
together is one of the fundamental ways in which we shape our relationships
with each other. The activities through which we remember are critical to how
the meaning of the past is shaped on any particular occasion, including its sig-
nificance for relationships. The IRS TRC is an opportunity to contribute to the
renewal of relationships between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Canadians
through encouraging and supporting ways of remembering that are them-
selves transformative of these relations, and by modeling and enacting the
guiding principles of the TRC mandate.
Discussion
Sharing memory shapes identity and relationships
Memory is central to our identities. Our individual and communal pasts shape
who we are, and though memory has too often been thought of as private or
subjective, sharing our pasts through remembering together is how we come
to know each other. Sharing memory is fundamental to forming, maintaining,

and negotiating relationships with others, which relationships in turn affect the
meaning of our own pasts and thus who we become. The perspectives through
which we remember and re-experience the events of our pasts are partly the
consequence of continuously sharing memory with others (Middleton and
Brown 2005).
The process of sharing memory begins in childhood. Psychologist Elizabeth
Waites describes how early relations with our caregivers regulate attention;
provide “the emotional content that makes certain experiences memorable”;
contribute the concepts and perspectives through which we remember expe-
rience; and prescribe “evaluations that help the child differentiate what should
be remembered and what forgotten” (1997, 65). Our capacities for memory and
our capacities for relation are intimately interwoven: When children are guided
in their memory they are being encouraged to form shared perspectives on the
significance of events or places that will help determine their membership in
the communities that shape their identities. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs,
the first important theorist of social memory, argued that no matter how per-
sonal memory might seem, we remember from perspectives that are never
ours alone but reflect and express the perspectives of the communities of in-
teraction that shape our attention (1980/1950).
Though I now experience the past through the perspectives of those with
whom I have identified, those with whom I am already in community, our
identities also shift through activities of sharing memory. When I encounter
the possibility of an important relationship with another person, I want to
know that person through her past; and the sign of a deepening relationship
is that I am willing to let my understanding of myself and my own past come
under the influence of sharing memory with her. Her understanding of her
past or mine can contest or conflict with my own. I may then need to deeply
reconsider my perspectives and identifications in ways that are transformative
not only of memory but of the self who remembers.
In the context of IRS TRC, Aboriginal Canadians will be sharing mem-
ory with a people who have collectively refused to hear their memory. Most
non-Aboriginal Canadians have not participated in activities of sharing mem-
ory that would allow the memories of First Nation, Inuit, or Métis peoples
to have any force in shaping the experience and significance of their pasts.
Insofar as this is the case, many non-Aboriginal Canadians experience their
own past from the colonialist perspective of their forebearers and communi-
ties—they have never engaged in the sharing of memory that could truly chal-
lenge this view of the past. Through the Settlement Agreement and especially
the work of the IRS TRC, non-Aboriginal Canadians have committed them-
selves to renewing relations with Aboriginal peoples. They have said these
relations are important to them. The question is, What kinds of activities of
sharing memory will support these possibilities of relation?
Colonizing memory
We must first think of what colonial relations are with respect to memory.
Theorist Diana Taylor has offered an important way to think about such rela-
tionships by distinguishing two broad kinds of social memory: the archive and
the repertoire. Taylor associates the archival view of memory with the idea
of permanent storage, especially of written texts. It is the Western European
storehouse view of memory thought of on a social rather than individual
level: “ ‘Archival’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters,
archeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly re-
sistant to change” (2003, 19). The repertoire “on the other hand, enacts embod-
ied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing” (20).
Although the repertoire—remembering that is live, embodied, and com-
municated through activities with others—has often been thought as imper-
manent and ephemeral, Taylor points out that “performances function as vital
acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of iden-
tity” (2). She argues that the dismissal of diverse kinds of memory activities
has been an expression of the specific power dynamics of colonial relations
that sought to destroy the social structures of Indigenous cultures sustained
through oral and performative traditions:
What is at risk politically in thinking about embodied knowledge and per-
formance as ephemeral, as that which disappears? Whose memories “disap-
pear” if only archival knowledge is valorized and granted permanence? (36)
Taylor’s work details how both attempting to destroy and at the same time
discrediting embodied memory systems was central to the colonizing project.
While the many edicts against traditional practices and ceremonies (which
were to be replaced by Christian observances) in fact implicitly recognized
that these practices were central to preserving and teaching Indigenous cul-
tures and spirituality, Indigenous cultures were also being recorded by the
colonizers as having already disappeared because they had not been preserved
archivally. Taylor quotes the works of 16th-century Friar Francisco de Avila: “if
the ancestors of the people called Indian had known writing in earlier times,
then the lives they lived would not have faded from view until now” (34). The
ways in which colonizers sought themselves to “preserve” Indigenous cultures
was to record their disappearance through describing them in writing as ways
of life that had passed, while appropriating and storing objects alive with cul-
tural meaning in the warehouses and display cases of European museums.
These colonizing practices have reinforced the current self-serving perspective
that Aboriginal peoples are “stuck in the past.”23
Paulette Regan. Personal communication.

23
Respecting Indigenous cultural and legal traditions

One of the problems with the relative neglect of memory in the analysis of truth
commissions is that the kinds of embodied, performative memory activities—
legal traditions, ceremonies, rituals, songs, celebrations, and other cultural
practices—through which groups may remember the past can be marginal-
ized in the process of taking and recording the testimonies and gathering the
archive that is so critical to reforming a distorted historical record. However
important the recording, protection, and preservation of this information,
in the context of the profound ignorance of most non-Aboriginal Canadians
of Aboriginal cultures, traditions, and ways of being, the Commission may
be concerned that its work will not be sufficiently transformative of colonial
relationships of memory. However, the structure of the Commission responds
to this concern in a number of positive ways. The relatively long time frame
of the Commission and its focus on national and local events offers oppor-
tunities to support many different kinds of memory activities. Moreover, the
Commission has a principled commitment to respect for Aboriginal oral and
legal traditions, to performative ways of remembering, revitalizing, recording,
and witnessing the past. Finally, while memory makes its most significant ap-
pearance in the literature on reparations in discussions of the importance of
commemorations, commemorations are often regarded as a type of “merely”
symbolic reparation, an idea that can marginalize the importance of memory.
However, the IRS TRC’s commitment to honoring Aboriginal traditions in
conjunction with the Settlement Agreement’s additional funding for commem-
orative activities allows for a comprehensive support of Aboriginal practices of
remembering that forefronts rather than marginalizes these traditions.24
Concrete reflection by Paulette Regan on her participation in an apology
feast to make restitution to the Gitxsan people shows how important the rec-
ognition and respect for Indigenous traditions of remembering may be to the
project of renewing relationships. The intent of Regan’s work is to urge us to
rethink the idea of reconciliation that should guide the work of the IRS TRC.
Calling on her experiential learning as one of the hosts of the potlatch cere-
mony, she reframes reconciliation as a “shared encounter of truth-telling and
testimony between indigenous peoples and Canadians” (2007, 42). In focusing
on testimony, Regan makes clear the centrality of thinking about memory to
the work of the Commission—reconciliation is itself conceived of in terms of
the encounter of testimony—but for Regan the encounter itself takes place
through practices of remembering that respect and revitalize rather than fur-
ther damage Gitxsan legal traditions.
24
See Regan for a discussion of the ways in which Indigenous legal traditions have been “relegated
to the status of commemorative activities” (2007, 51).
The feast hall is a space that has traditionally supported different activities of
honoring, witnessing, and testifying to the past. It is a space where testimony
is given, exchanged, and witnessed; where “diplomatic relations are forged,
legitimized and recorded in the oral history of the potlatch” (quoting Oman
2004); where the articulation of different perspectives on past events is meant to
encourage reflection on a “multiplicity of . . . truths” of people’s lives; and where
wrongdoings “are made right through highly symbolic acts of restitution and
apology that are embedded in the tradition of the potlatch” (63). Testimony, res-
titution, witnessing, and apology are all ways of giving meaning to the past—
they belong to a diversity of memory practices. But Regan’s account suggests
that we consider how the meaning and significance of those practices is shaped
through the traditions in which they have evolved and in which they are embed-
ded. These traditions are multiply performative, involving very particular cer-
emonies, and practices of gifting and feasting, as well as the oral practices of
testimonial performance including apology, and its witnessing and recording.
The occasion that Regan describes was one whose theme was to welcome
and symbolically reintegrate survivors of the Edmonton Indian Residential
School into Gitxsan Society, with apology and restitution by Canada and the
United Church as an integral part of repairing the deep wrongdoing to relation
that characterized the survivors’ internment in the school. The potlatch was an
act of preservation, revitalizing and “reconstructing the connection to the past
in the light of new events, relationships, and political understandings” (Young
2006a). Regan writes:
The decision to bring Canada and the United Church in to the feast hall
not as guests but as hosts with particular responsibilities to fulfill is a
powerful act of diplomacy and leadership that demonstrates the resilient
capacity of the Gitxsan to use their legal traditions creatively in the face of
new circumstances. (41)
The activities through which the past was remembered on this occasion
were fundamental to the kind of reshaping of relationships envisioned in its
theme—one of repairing damage and loss. According to Regan, the partici-
pants sought “to break down old ways of interacting,” “taking concrete steps to
ensure that power and control shifted from Western hands to Gitxsan hands”
(63). As hosts, Canada and the United Church undertook specific responsi-
bilities and participated in the experiential learning necessary to undertaking
restitution according to Gitxsan law. Under the guidance of Gitxsan Elders,
they were brought concretely under the influence of a constitutionally pro-
tected legal tradition that differed from their own, and they participated in
the ongoing embodied enactment of its values. For example, the apologies
offered “become part of Gitxsan oral history, spoken in the feast hall, accepted
or rejected by the simgigyat assembled there, and duly witnessed by all those
who attended” (65).
It is not my intent, and is certainly not Regan’s, to recommend any par-

ticular practice of remembering in the context of the work of the IRS TRC.
Regan writes that to avoid the appropriation or trivialization of indigenous
legal traditions that would constitute a repetition of colonial interactions, “a
foundational principle” for the IRS TRC “must be that indigenous peoples re-
tain control and decision-making over whether or not they choose to practice
their legal traditions as part of the TRC process and under what conditions, if
at all, non-indigenous people may participate” (44). The intent of her writing
rather is to stress the importance of acknowledging the work of reconcilia-
tion as “pedagogical” (62), one that requires “new, decolonizing, transform-
ative ways of working together to repair the damaged relationship that exists
between indigenous peoples and Canadians” (41). Such work must be under-
taken with consciousness of how fundamental practices of memory have been
to colonial projects and their destructive legacy.
Theorists and the public alike have sometimes expressed skepticism about
the value of public memory of injustice and damage, contending that remem-
bering the harm of the past can only further entrench relationships founded in
grievance. I suggest that this response misconstrues the possibilities of sharing
memory to shaping and transforming relationships. To grasp these possibili-
ties, we need to attend critically to the role of memory in the kinds of colo-
nial racism and contempt enacted in the Indian Residential School system. We
also need to attend thoughtfully and creatively to how respect for Aboriginal
people as rememberers can characterize the work of the Commission.
{ 8 }
Challenges to Memory in Political Contexts

Recognizing Disrespectful Challenge
1. Introduction: Respectful and Disrespectful

Challenge to Memory
Focus
In commenting on the challenges to reconciliation faced by a Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in a Settler society like Canada, Brian
Rice and Anna Syder point not only to the ongoing legacies of colonialism
in such societies but also to the existence of myths and narratives that ration-
alize continued unequal treatment of those formerly colonized (2008). The
Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (IRS TRC)
will be a challenge to the myths that have rationalized Canadian colonization
of Aboriginal peoples, and the Commission may expect some public resist-
ance to its work.1 One expression of this resistance may involve contesting the
credibility of those whose memories question or contend Canada’s legitimat-
ing narratives. It may thus be useful for the Commission to be aware of some
of the contemporary ways in which memory can be contested as an expres-
sion of political disrespect. Exploring disrespectful challenge to memory is
not merely a cautionary project; doing so may aid the Commission in encour-
aging a public response to students’ memories and perspectives that embodies
the IRS TRC’s commitment to supporting the establishment of “new relations
embedded in mutual recognition and respect” (Indian Residential Schools
Resolution. 2006b. Settlement Agreement. Schedule “N”).
1
I use the term “Aboriginal” to reflect the language of the Settlement Agreement. For criticism of
the use of this term to refer to First Peoples, see Alfred (2005).
Discussion
Events are remembered in different detail in different social contexts and from
many perspectives. Their significance is negotiated, shared, and expressed
through diverse memory activities ranging from casual conversations to feast
hall ceremonies, to embodied commemorative practices. In addition, the sig-
nificance of the past for the present and future shifts as our needs, contexts,
and ways of understanding evolve.
In recognizing that we can and should find diverse meanings to the past
dependent on present needs, contexts, and relationships, Western memory
theorists have moved away from a traditional storehouse model of memory as
an individual’s set of stored unchanging mental pictures of his or her past to-
ward a more dynamic social reconstructive model of memory. A reconstructive
model explicitly acknowledges and credits the function of human memory in
preparing us for the future: “By critically examining the past in light of current
needs, interests, beliefs, and values (and from what other standpoint could
one conduct the examination?), the past can become a force for . . . political
and social betterment” (Blustein 2008, 13). It thus better captures the nature of
human memory as that set of psychological capacities and social and narra-
tive practices by which we learn through experience (Warnock 1987). A recon-
structive model is cohesive with Aboriginal understandings of the importance
of social memory activities—for example, sharing stories—in transmitting
knowledge and culture:
For the First Peoples of Canada, the past cannot be forgotten, deliberately
overlooked, or discarded as no longer relevant. The past is still present,
but in a different form that must be addressed again in the new conditions
in which it appears, now and into the future. (Task Force on Aboriginal
Languages and Cultures 2005, 24)
Affirming this model in the context of the IRS TRC may allow the Commission
to highlight some of the complex practices that characterize “remembering for
the future” for various Aboriginal peoples.2
However, the turn to a reconstructive view of memory, and away from the
view that memories are safely stored and preserved beyond the influence of
others’ perspectives, has also motivated both Western theorists and the pub-
lic to be newly alert to the ways in which memory can be distorted by the
many influences on how we experience the past. Skepticism about memory is
often especially intense in political contexts in which dominant meanings are
2
For a more extensive discussion of models of memory and the potential importance of the
reconstructive model for the work of the IRS TRC, see Chapter 7 of this volume, “Remembering for the
Future: Memory as a Lens on the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
This chapter (Chapter 8) is best read as continuing the discussion of “Remembering for the Future.”
Challenges to Memory in Political Contexts 167
contested.3 In such contexts, challenge to memory is sometimes an expression

of disrespect meant to undermine the credibility of those who testify to his-
toric harms and thus to disenfranchise their voices from participation in the
collective endeavor of giving meaning to the past. There is nothing inherent
in the sociality of memory that should lead to the conclusion that memory is
always distorted by our social interactions, and the Commission will need a
balanced view of both the values and weaknesses of memory that reflects its
dynamic and social nature.
A reconstructive view of memory grants that there may be different but
equally accurate memories of a past time or event. We might think of diverse
memories as various maps of a region of the past. There may be an assortment
of accurate maps that vary in detail and mode of representation depending
on their functions, but some maps may simply be inaccurate (Lynch 2004).
Even granting a range of legitimate perspectives on the past, we do not always
remember well. We may misremember the details of events and/or we may
misconstrue their meaning and significance for our present and future. In
these two broad ways, our memories can fail to be faithful to the past.
Learning to assess memory and to re-experience our pasts with integrity is
neither easy nor beyond our collective capabilities. Learning to share memory
in ways that are respectful, reflective, and appropriately challenging is an eth-
ical responsibility. We often remember the past in highly individual ways while
having to determine its significance together (Campbell 2006b). Memory the-
orist John Sutton writes:
Remembered events . . . especially ones that matter, are themselves com-
plex and structured. We often find ourselves striving for the needed affec-
tive shifts in relation to . . . memories through renegotiating in company the
meanings of the personal past. These ordinary ways of sharing memories, in
co-constructing, jointly re-evaluating, or just actively listening, bring obliga-
tions and accountability with them. (2008, 221)
In sharing, witnessing, and responding to memory, it is important that the
Commission and Canadians learn to distinguish respectful from disrespectful
challenge, and that we make ourselves accountable for doing so.
This chapter attempts to give guidance in recognizing potential forms
of disrespect to students’ memories4 by focusing on three ways in which
3
For example, concerns about memory distortion that dominated the 1990s were provoked by
women’s memories of child sexual abuse. Some of this challenge to memory was respectful but much
was disrespectful. For a range of responses to the “memory wars” see Campbell (2003); Haaken (1998);
Hacking (1995); Loftus and Ketcham (1994); and Schacter (1996). Donnelly’s use of the courtroom
imagining (see section 2 of this chapter) became a very common way of contesting testimonial narra-
tive during this period as did the terminology of “false memory.”
4
Disrespect for Aboriginal peoples as rememberers has been an expression and strategy of colonial
racism (Campbell, Chapter 7; Taylor 2003); thus, one might expect this disrespect to have a contem-
porary manifestation.
memories of Indian Residential Schooling have been contested in the recent

past, particularly after the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal
Peoples (RCAP) and the subsequent Canadian Government Statement of
Reconciliation that recognized the harmful legacy of the Residential School
system.5 Challenging people’s status as testifiers; suggesting their accounts are
the result of the contaminating influence of sharing memory; and devaluing
memory by contrasting it to written history can all be quite general strategies
for positioning groups as unreliable rememberers. The specific forms these
strategies take are dependent on interests, histories of relation, available myths
and stereotypes, and kinds of ignorance. When the strategies operate interde-
pendently to help shape a context of response to memory (as they arguably
did subsequent to RCAP) this interdependence can itself be taken as a sign of
disrespectful engagement. The strategies can act comprehensively to limit who
can speak about the significance of the past.
The discussions of this chapter are not merely cautionary. Disrespectful
ways of contesting the memories of Indian Residential Schooling may often
be the resistance of non-Aboriginal Canadians to taking responsibility for the
history and legacy of Indian Residential schooling. RCAP proposed that
the incredible damage—loss of life, denigration of culture, destruction of
self-respect and self-esteem, rupture of families, impact of these traumas
on succeeding generations, and the enormity of the cultural triumphalism
that lay behind the enterprise—will deeply disturb anyone who allows this
story to seep into their consciousness. (RCAP, 579, quoted in Castellano,
Archibald, and DeGagné 2008, 2)
Support for the IRS TRC and the possibilities of reconciliation it embod-
ies require that all Canadians find a way to make the history of the schools,
“including the enormity of the cultural triumphalism that lay behind the enter-
prise,” “our story” (Milloy 1999, xviii). In 1996, RCAP called for a public inquiry
that would encourage Canadians in this responsibility, and Canada has now
moved forward to recognize the necessity of this collective reremembering. As
noted by Cree spiritual leader Stan McKay, the IRS TRC “is not about revising
history. This conversation is about the present injustices and the possibilities
for creative participation in shaping the future” (2008, 114). It may be that re-
flecting on disrespectful challenge will provide insight into how non-Aboriginal
Canadians can now respond to the work of the IRS TRC in responsible and
forward-looking ways.
5
The Royal Commission on Aboriginal People held meetings over the period 1991–95, releasing its
report in 1996 (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada). The Statement of Reconciliation was delivered
by the Honorable Minister Jane Stewart January 7, 1998. Isabelle Knockwood’s work (1992), discussed
in section 4, predates both.
2. Contesting Testimony

Focus
One other matter should be cleared up: what is the nature of the
testimony before the [Royal] Commission? We have already noted that
it was not legal testimony, and to pretend that it was was merely an old
tactic. . . .However, we should be clear that it is not data either.
Chrisjohn and Young, 1997, 26
When former students appear before the IRS TRC to share their experience of
Indian Residential Schooling, they will be regarded by many Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal Canadians as testifying to their experience. The language of
testimony and witnessing has become one of the powerful political languages
of the contemporary era because of the recognized importance of acknowl-
edging and responding to historic harm; because of the often official nature
of the processes through which this harm has been communicated to others;
and because of the richness of a language that conveys ideals of truth, respon-
sibility, authority, spirituality, and remembrance (Felman and Laub 1992; Ross
2003; Simon 2005).
While powerful, the language of testimony is not unproblematic. It may
allow for the public contesting of memory through the inappropriate and
often disingenuous imposition of a Western legalistic understanding of tes-
timony on people’s accounts of their experiences. For example, National Post
columnist Susan Martinuk wrote of RCAP that “alleged victims . . . were not
cross-examined, there was no corroboration of testimony and no opportu-
nity for churches or government to defend themselves. . . . [W]‌e must reject
the tendency to treat alleged victims as being above the legal requirement to
provide evidence that stands up under scrutiny” (National Post, February 18,
1999). Further, the language of testimony may create a restrictive representa-
tion both of participants to the IRS TRC and of the TRC process (Colvin 2003;
Ross 2005). Finally, this language may not be culturally cohesive with some
Aboriginal understandings of the process of sharing stories.
Yet despite its limitations, the language of testimony is a forceful way to
position people as truth-tellers who are concerned for the future and whose
accounts are owed ethical deference. In addition, testimony, more than any
other mode of speech, shows how deeply our abilities to share memory are
shaped by the responses of others to us; and it turns attention to the nature of
those responses in ways critical to thinking about transforming relationships
profoundly damaged by colonialism. Finally, when people are denied the posi-
tion of testifiers, we must ask how their memories are being received: are they,
for example, being treated as data for others’ more socially authoritative narra-
tives? Thinking about testimony can be a critical lens for the Commission on
how memory can be devalued or respected, but only if we move away from a
narrow, Western legalistic conception of this kind of speech.
Discussion
Natural, Legal, and Political Testimony
The mandate of the IRS TRC does not make use of the language of testimony,
but this language will inevitably arise during the work of the Commission,
especially during the statement-taking part of the process. Giving testimony
may be how some of the participants understand their contributions and will
almost certainly be how the media and scholars sometimes choose to rep-
resent the narratives of former students. Witnessing testimony may be how
some members of the Commission and public understand their own role in
the TRC process. The notion of witnessing the truth was explicit in the invi-
tation to submit nominations for commissioners (Indian Residential Schools
Resolution Canada 2006a). Giving and witnessing testimony is not one kind
of activity. Testimony is a complex language that directs us to think both about
truth and about our relations to each other in seeking it.
Fundamentally, testimony is a kind of speech concerned with the truth of
the past, with one who is in a position to convey this truth, and with the re-
sponse of others to the speaker’s words. Philosopher C. A. J. Coady, charac-
terizes the occasion of testimony as any occasion on which “we are . . . invited
to accept something or other as true because someone says it is, where the
someone in question is supposed to be in a position to speak authoritatively
on the matter” (1994, 27). Coady’s words make clear that people gain status as
testifiers because they are taken to have or are granted the authority to convey
their knowledge. To understand the issues of power and contest that may arise
about authority, it may be useful to think of three kinds of testimonial posi-
tion: natural, legal, and political.
If we think of how often in daily, ordinary ways we are in the position that
Coady describes, we can see first that natural testimony is one of our most
fundamental sources of knowledge. For example, I know much personal infor-
mation about myself—where I was born, what I was like as a child—because,
in the first instance, my parents told me these things, and I trusted them.
“Testimony stands as a constant reminder of how little of anyone’s know-
ledge . . . could be acquired independently” (Code 2000, 186). The knowledge
we acquire through testimony is central to knowing our place in the world.
Anishanabek legal scholar, John Borrows, reflects on the family knowledge
received from his Aunt Irene:
Then one day when I was in graduate school, I went to ask her about the
history of the reserve. . . . [I]‌n her unforgettable way, she told us the his-
tory of our family as it related to Cape Coker. She knew details about my
great-great-great-grandfather and grandmother, and everyone down their

line until my generation. . . . I finally caught a glimpse of the world that had
made me so uneasy as a boy. I realized the discomfort I had once felt was due
more to my disorienting unfamiliarity with the people she talked about than
to any unusual behaviour on her part. In fact, from her stories I came to take
great comfort in the knowledge that I fit into this world she described and
was related to it in more ways than I even knew. (Borrows 2001, 2)
But natural testimony is also simply important to our daily ways of negoti-
ating our environments. “Giving someone directions to the post office, re-
porting what happened in an accident, saying that, yes, you have seen a child
answering to that description” (Coady 1994, 138) are all instances of giving
testimony, and memory is obviously its key source.
Testimony has often been devalued and ignored in contemporary European
accounts of knowledge, which pay little attention to oral practices. Yet medi-
eval philosopher Thomas Aquinas considered lying a sin precisely because it
interferes with each person’s need “to stand with as much certainly on what
another knows but of which he himself is ignorant, as upon truth which he
himself knows.” Aquinas’s recognition that “faith is necessary in order that one
man gives credence to the words of another” (quoted in Coady 1994, 17) brings
attention to a second important point about natural testimony: The ability of
people to speak authoritatively and convey their knowledge requires that we
trust them to speak truthfully. In other words, the kind of trust that we bring
to our encounters with others determines how they can speak and what we can
know. We do not always have reason to trust that people will speak the truth.
For example, because Canada has not “adhered to the principles it espouses
and to which Indigenous movements have appealed” (Alfred 2005, 104) in
making claims for change and redress, Aboriginal peoples may legitimately
have reason to distrust non-Aboriginal Canadians. My point here is that our
considerable dependence on testimony compels us to think about trust and
about our reasons for distrust.
While we are all dependent on natural testimony, most people are more
familiar with the term “testimony” as marking a special kind of legal speech.
Coady characterizes legal testimony as a kind of evidence given by persons
about an issue that is in dispute. He notes that the ability to give legal testi-
mony depends on whether one can gain status to do so in two senses. First,
one must have the authority, competence, and credentials to give evidence as
determined by a particular legal system. For example, in English law “the tes-
timony is normally required to be firsthand” (Coady 1994, 33). Second, one
must be formally acknowledged as a witness in the context of a particular in-
quiry. For example, it must be judged, again as understood in ways specific
to different legal systems, that one’s speech will be relevant in the context of a
particular inquiry.
As many groups are aware, Canada has not had an inclusive history of
granting status to testifiers. Borrows draws attention to one example, a British
Columbia Evidence Act not repealed until 1968: “This Act permitted a judge
to receive evidence from an Aboriginal person only as a matter of discretion,
as it was implicitly assumed that otherwise such a person’s testimony would be
suspect and unreliable” (Borrows 2001, 24). Moreover, the setting of relevant
questions has excluded a great deal of important social knowledge from ar-
ticulation in Canadian legal contexts. But we should also pay attention to the
expected response to different types of testimony. Adversarial legal systems
encourage us to respond to testimony with skepticism and challenge. This
skepticism could not be our response to natural testimony or we would know
little. Understanding the response to different kinds of testimony—expected
levels of trust and distrust—is central to evaluating challenges to memory, and
I return to this discussion later in the chapter.
Finally, the type of testimonial position that may at first seem most rel-
evant to the positive work of the Commission is likely to be poorly under-
stood by much of the public. In The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning,
and Ethics, educator Roger Simon states that “the provision of testimony”
“convey[s]‌ . . . the historical substance and significance of prior events and
experiences” (2005, 50). The words “historical substance and significance” in-
dicate that Simon’s description is explicitly of political testimony, speech about
both the facts of the past and the significance of events, given in either an
informal setting or a formal setting like the IRS TRC. Political testimony is
typically about the nature, extent, experience, meaning, and legacy of polit-
ical harms to groups whose own accounts of the past have been suppressed by
dominant cultures. John Beverley writes that testimony represents as subjects
those excluded “from authorized representation”—women, Indigenous peo-
ples, the poor, and so on—“when it was a question of speaking for themselves
rather than being spoken for” (1992, 93). To speak for oneself is to have the
authority to give one’s own account of the meaning of one’s experience: “Being
silenced in one’s own account of one’s life is a kind of amputation that signals
oppression” (Lugones and Spelman 1992, 379).
Political testimony has considerable power as a language of forward-looking
memory. First, testimony is remembering for the future. According to Simon,
testimony’s intent is to carry forth memory (2005, 51), making sure we “keep
specific events before [our] eyes, thereby instantiating their significance for cur-
rent and future generations” (50). Second, the language of testimony, perhaps
more than any other memory language, stresses the fundamental importance
of sharing the past to our lives as rememberers. Testimony is a communicative
act that calls upon another to witness the truth of one’s speech. Testimony is
“inherently a form of address” (Code 1995, 65), which places the responsibility
on potential witnesses to respond appropriately. Third, and related, testimony
makes clear that determining the significance of the past for the future involves
many people in forward-looking responsibility. Because testimony seeks to

keep the importance of the past alive to the future, a witness must be prepared,
where appropriate, to convey the testimony to others. To be in a position to
convey testimony, to gain the trust of the testifier that one is competent to do
so, a witness must show through her own actions and understanding that her
“life has been informed by the living memory of . . . [the] testimony” (Simon
2005, 53). For example, Paulette Regan describes her participation as co-host,
on behalf on the government of Canada, at an apology feast for survivors of the
Edmonton Indian Residential School as “an act of truth-telling and witnessing”
(2007, 41). In writing about the event, she both declares and expresses her ob-
ligation and intent to honor through her actions “this gift of testimonies that
I received that day in the feast hall” (41).6 Thus, finally, testimony shows the
importance of sharing individual memory to the potential for a change in our
collective consciousness of the past.
Whether a person’s speech succeeds as political testimony is critically de-
pendent on whether potential witnesses trust in that person’s truthfulness and
thus grant that person authority. I want to put particular attention on what
might be a respectful level of trust for non-Aboriginal Canadians to offer to
former students. Disrespectful response can provide a basis for reflection.
Discrediting Aboriginal People as Testifiers

While we might think that disrespect toward previous accounts of Indian
Residential Schooling has involved denying former students the authority as
testifiers, it has often involved a more complex response to their speech. There
are different kinds of testimonial positions. A more politically effective op-
tion than straightforwardly denying that certain groups can give testimony
is to position them in the public imagination as Western legal testifiers: that
is, as those who have truth-telling responsibilities in an atmosphere of max-
imal distrust. For example, in response to the 1998 Canadian government
apology for Indian Residential Schools, Patrick Donnelly, writing for the
Western Report, referred to the statements given to the Royal Commission, as
“vaguely recounted and unchallenged testimony” (1998, 6). With these words
he invoked challenge rather than trust as the expected response to Aboriginal
speech, and the courtroom as the imagined setting of their testimony.
As Chrisjohn and Young have written, “to pretend” that former students
were giving legal testimony to the Royal Commission was “merely an old tactic”
(26). Donnelly’s article, in fact, quotes Paul Charland, Métis Commissioner
from Manitoba:
We were a body of inquiry and were not there to cross-examine peo-
ple appearing before us. We were not a judicial process. We listened to
6
For a fuller description of this feast, see Regan (2007; 2010).
submissions, applied our understanding of issues, and came up with policy

recommendations. (6)
The interesting question is why Charland’s words were not simply taken as he
intended, as a corrective to anyone who might have misconstrued the nature
of the Commission. I believe that we need to attend more closely to Donnelly’s
use of the courtroom precisely as an imagined setting, as a kind of pretense.
First, Donnelly’s use of Charland’s words to raise suspicion that the
Commission did not use appropriate standards of challenge only makes sense in
a context already characterized by a very high level of distrust. Political theorist
Margaret Urban Walker writes that sustaining inequality requires a “firewall”
that can seal off “recognizable injuries and credible complaints” (1998, 173):
It is necessary that some kinds of people are “known” going in to be liable to
irrational discontents, manipulative complaints, incompetent assessments,
childish exaggerations, dangerous wilfulness, malicious ingratitude, wily deceit
or plain stupidity. (6)
Donnelly’s rhetoric relies on the fact that Aboriginal peoples still struggle
against a history of distrust of their words when they attempt to make clear the
harms of colonization. As an example of this history, Marilyn Millward relates
that in 1936 a former pupil at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie
retained a lawyer to try to prevent the return of his younger siblings to the
same hardships that he had endured. The school principal replied to the Indian
Agent who had forwarded the letter:
To let them get away with their lies doesn’t seem the right thing to do—to
keep them from spreading falsehoods about those who try to do something
for them, seems hopeless. And why white people fall for such stories is hard
to explain. For myself, I never hope to catch up with the Indian and his lies.
(Millward 1992, 14)
Assumed Aboriginal liability to irrational discontent and malicious ingrati-
tude are patent in this reply. Invoking the image of a courtroom was not, in
Donnelly’s article, a misunderstanding of the nature of the Commission. It was,
first and foremost, a “reminder” to non-Aboriginal Canadians that Aboriginal
people are so untrustworthy that they must always be examined as if they are
in a court of law.
The “reminder” of untrustworthiness was obviously an attempt to under-
mine the political testimony given to RCAP. But it was also meant to call the
structures and standards of RCAP into doubt, making room for Donnelly to
pursue his courtroom imagery by determining the disputed issue for which
the accounts would act as evidence:
However, it remains a question, in many Indian minds as well as white,
whether the general legacy of the Indian schools may actually have been
quite good. While there have been some documented cases of sexual abuse
over the 120 year history of the schools, a handful of which still operate, the
available evidence is vague and almost entirely anecdotal. (7)
Thus, second, in setting the question, Donnelly’s pretense is meant to pre-
vent former students from speaking for themselves, from giving their own
meaning to their experience. In using the words he does, Donnelly speaks as
a white Canadian and for Aboriginal Canadians. At the same time, he deter-
mines and limits relevance, looking for evidence that the legacy of the schools
was good while restricting harm to criminally liable abuse. The Aboriginal
people in the article, whether they speak of the schools favorably or unfa-
vorably, are all doubly disenfranchised from speaking for themselves. They
are both Donnelly’s informants (data for his more authoritative account) and
imagined Western legal testifiers who direct their evidence only to the ques-
tion set by the court. Here, some informants fare better than others. Evidence
that the legacy of the schools is quite good is allowed to stand. But Donnelly
also quotes three Aboriginal people who are critical of the schools. One fails
to speak relevantly in the context of the legal imagining Donnelly has invoked.
Although this student speaks of the pain of losing his language, this depri-
vation is not a recognized legal category of harm. Thus Donnelly positions
the student as conceding “that he suffered no abuse worse than having his
hair cut” (9). Two other students mention their subsequent problems with
addiction. Their attempt to share experience is exploited through this imag-
ined context of distrust to reinforce stereotypes of unreliability. It would be
naive not to recognize this exploitation.
Third, and finally, to suggest that the former students who appeared before
RCAP should have been treated as legal testifiers, but were not, acts to motivate
the question of how to re-categorize their speech. Because the speech failed to
be legal testimony, the only way that the public understands testimony, it could
be re-categorized by Donnelly as anecdote. The use of the word “anecdotal” for
any negative experience implies this speech not only failed as testimony but was
wholly unreliable as data, barely more than rumor. This denial of the impor-
tance of personal perspective is also a deep misunderstanding of the modes of
remembering of many Indigenous peoples (see section 4).
Trust and Testimony

The preceding analysis suggests that it might be useful for the Commission
to reflect on two related issues—the possibilities both of encouraging a
level of public trust that embodies respect for Aboriginal testimonies and of
broadening public understanding of testimony. All Canadians are potential
witnesses to the work of the IRS TRC, but the Commission’s existence and
mandate are themselves testament to the fact that Aboriginal people have been
granted little opportunity to speak for themselves—to convey the meaning of
their pasts with authority—within dominant Canadian culture. A firewall of

distrust has been built around their words.
Thus first: Because the kind of disrespect encouraged by Donnelly involves
willful ignorance about Aboriginal perspectives and thus, ultimately, indif-
ference to the significance of the past, it may be that the provision of trust
should be regarded by non-Aboriginal Canadians as the ethically appro-
priate attitude toward students’ testimony. In reflecting on the willful igno-
rance of harm that characterizes anti-black racism in the United States, James
Baldwin wrote that what he would never forgive his fellow citizens was not
for the harm, but for their ignorance: “they do not know it and do not want
to know it” (Baldwin 1993, 5). The provision of trust would be a respectful re-
sponse to Aboriginal testimonies. Non-Aboriginal Canadians would thereby
enact forward-looking responsibilities of attempting to understand the history
and legacy of Residential Schooling in order to better participate in shaping a
future free of the colonizing attitudes and actions that both persist and were
responsible for the schools. They would do so by resisting and countering the
kind of politically motivated ignorance that Baldwin found unforgivable.
African American philosopher Laurence Thomas affirms that we can
sometimes think of trust as owed to those who have been harmed—as a type
of “moral deference” (1992–93)—and he explicitly ties this deference to what
we can learn. Thomas points out that the kinds of injustice endured by those
marginalized will have a profound effect on their self-concepts, memories,
and emotions. No kind of imagining on the part of those whose lives have
not been subject to such injustice—not even goodwilled imagining—will
provide access to the significance of the experience from the standpoint
of those who have been harmed. Therefore to understand and be mor-
ally responsive to those who have been harmed requires deference to their
accounts. Thomas does not suggest that those harmed cannot be wrong about
the character of their experience; rather, he argues that there should be a pre-
sumption in favor of their accounts, warranted because they are “speaking
from a vantage point” to which those who are politically dominant simply
do not have access (244).
Thomas offers a concrete test for moral deference that accords with the
forward-looking responsibilities of witnessing political testimony outlined
earlier. He regards deference as the kind of attention that might eventually win
the confidence of the person testifying that the listener could bear witness for
them as evidenced by a change in the listener’s own understanding and actions.
This change should be imagined as an ability and willingness to convey to oth-
ers the perspective of the person testifying: “it is to have won her trust that one
will render salient what was salient for her in the way it was salient for her”
(245). To make oneself this “open to another’s concern” is “to allow oneself to
become affected in a direct interpersonal way” by injustice (247). Because such
deference is the only way to grasp perspectives that have been suppressed or
distorted by dominant accounts, it is fundamental to responding to the harms

of oppression and colonization. As Baldwin’s words attest, the “studied refusal”
to engage in this learning adds “insult to injury” (5). Were non-Aboriginal
Canadians to work to gain trust that they could witness Aboriginal testimony
respectfully, this action would be one significant move toward transforming
and decolonizing current relationships.
Second, the Commission may need to consider ways to broaden pub-
lic understanding of testimony as truth-telling about the past. Some
non-Aboriginal Canadians may believe that if Canadians picture the search
for truth as an aggressive courtroom challenge, we will be doing our best to
grasp the nature of the past. They may not fully comprehend the strategic
use of this pretense to (1) render former students’ own perspectives on the
meaning of their experiences inaccessible; (2) exploit stereotypes of unre-
liability; and (3) trigger the re-categorization of students’ speech as data or
anecdote. Because many who testified before RCAP did so through storied
memories that spoke of others’ experiences as often as their own (Chrisjohn
and Young 1997, 36), their speech may have been especially vulnerable to this
last disrespectful characterization.
There are a number of possibilities for both broadening and deepening
public understanding of testimony: The South African TRC at the onset iden-
tified its commitment to different kinds of truth (Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of South Africa, I, 110–14). This strategy does not employ the
language of testimony. But as the first type of truth identified was forensic or
factual while personal or narrative truth was then associated with perspective,
the IRS TRC may need to consider whether a similar strategy would be appro-
priate for the Commission. The strategy can establish a hierarchy of truth with
a courtroom of challenge continuing to dominate the public imagination, and
falsely imply that the nature of the past is somehow detachable from its signif-
icance to people’s lives.
The Commission might also make self-conscious use of the idea of political
testimony. It might declare its responsibility and intent to witness students’
authority to give their own accounts of the meaning of their experiences, to
make clear the legacy of the schools from their perspective. It is the denial
of the importance and credibility of these perspectives that constitutes dis-
respect. I have suggested that explicit language of political testimony is not
without its challenges. It may always be confused in the public mind with the
language of legal testimony. Even when understood, it has often been asso-
ciated with notions of traumatic harm and with healing through the artic-
ulation of this harm. The language of testimony may not be congruent with
how some participants understand their contribution. The terminology may
help impose a hierarchy on narratives of experience, privileging traumatic
harm as the most significant for the IRS TRC (Colvin 2003; Ross 2005). It may
encourage a problematic positioning of students as passive victims of traumatic
harm when, even as children, many enacted resistance toward the punitive
assimilationist agenda of the schools. I shall revisit some of these concerns in
sections 3 and 4. I make the point here that the idea of political testimony can
be affirmed in different kinds of language—for example, through the talk of
witnessing already present in the Commission’s work.
Finally, part of the Commission’s pedagogical task may be to make the
public aware of the deep ethical commitments with which Aboriginal peoples
regard acts of public remembering (see section 4). These commitments were
expressed through the very kinds of narrative actions re-categorized as anec-
dotal by writers like Donnelly:
But before I make my last point, one person was asking me to mention
the atrocities at the Residential School that were put on the reserve for
Aboriginal People: There was no mention of the sexual harassment that was
given to Aboriginal People, just as was seen in the Mount Cashel orphanage.
One person asked me to mention that and I didn’t want to forget it. (Quoted
in Chrisjohn and Young, 36)
Charles Joseph Bernard Jr., in testifying to RCAP, here bears witness to testi-
mony he himself has received, modeling the respect and care that one gives
to the speech of another in trying to overcome and repair ignorance about
historic harm.
It may be that the “courtroom challenge” to students’ experience will be
a less ready response to the IRS TRC than it was to RCAP. As the aggressive
assimilationism of the schools becomes more widely publicly acknowledged,
its harms are difficult to sideline through a courtroom imagining. Yet this
acknowledgment is consistent with the charge that Aboriginal peoples ought
to now forget the past, and with challenges to memory that support this
dismissive sentiment. These challenges are the focus of the following two
sections.
3. Narrative Contagion: “Why Do All their Stories

Sound the Same?”
[A]‌lmost as an afterthought, Mr. Goodstriker remarks that the schools

were practicing “cultural genocide.” Asked to elaborate, he declines.
Donelly 1998, 8
If the bias of the interviewer seems to repeat itself in the words of the
informants, if tales are suspect because they are unrelentingly one-sided,
if some memories appear distorted, still there is something of value in
expressing and writing about the perceptions of personal experience.
Millward 1993, 24
Focus
Donnelly’s article for the Western Report implied that the Aboriginal testi-
mony given to RCAP was suspiciously homogeneous: that students had likely
picked up ways of thinking and relating their experience from others; that
they were reading their school experience through the most negative of narra-
tive frames and through the use of concepts like “cultural genocide” that they
did not understand well enough even to explain. Marilyn Millward’s review of
Isabelle Knockwood’s Out of the Depths: The Experience of Mi’kmaw Children
at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie (1993) expresses similar suspi-
cions. These responses to students’ narratives attempt to provoke the concern
that memory is too suggestible to others’ interpretations of events to be relied
on as an accurate representation of the past. I shall refer to the concern as one
of memory’s susceptibility to “narrative contagion.” Some theorists consider
memory very prone to the influence of others’ understandings. Ian Hacking
writes that “there is no canonical way to think of our own past. In the endless
quest for order and structure, we grasp at whatever picture is floating by and
put our past into its frame” (1995, 89).
Worries about narrative contagion have become intense with the move to a
reconstructive view of memory that emphasizes that our experience of the past
often shifts precisely through sharing memory with others. While the suspi-
cion of contagion may sometimes lead us to disbelieve people’s accounts of the
past, the Commission may be more concerned with the importance of solicit-
ing a representative variety of experiences and perspectives. Commissioners
may worry that their own questions, or potential use of notions like “testi-
mony” and “witnessing,” will suggest ways of remembering Indian Residential
Schooling that shape and solicit similar sounding accounts while masking an
actual diversity of experience. The Commission will quite legitimately want
to avoid contributing rigid narrative structures that compromise its ability
to more fully understand the history and legacy of the schools. At the same
time, the question “why do all their stories sound the same?” can be the disre-
spectful attempt to suggest that a group keeps digging up its past in unneces-
sary and tiresome ways.
It is the view of this author that complaints about repetitive or
similar-sounding stories contain layers of meaning that it may be useful for
the Commission to disentangle. The first discussion following takes up the
most direct reading of Donnelly’s and Millward’s remarks: the suspicion that
there has been too much post-event collaboration for memory to be trust-
worthy. I suggest it is important to recognize that memory must be thematic
in order to be useful; generalizing the past is not a corruption of memory but
part of its nature. Moreover, students’ capacities to find relevant commonali-
ties to their experiences and new and more adequate ways to articulate types
of harm, resilience, and resistance is a necessary and powerful response to
the dominant narratives that have suppressed their perspectives. The second
discussion focuses on the presence of dominant colonialist narratives that
may also be regarded as “stories that sound the same.” I suggest that when
Indigenous memories sound unnecessarily repetitive, this is often a symptom
that there is a lack of social and political space for Indigenous perspectives. The
third discussion uses reflection on the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission to further explore how particular spaces, including TRC’s, may
restrict the narrative resources available for remembering. It calls on witnesses
to memory to take responsibility for interpreting others’ stories in ways sen-
sitive to the limitations of the context and to their own position as listeners.
Discussion
The Need for a Usable Past: Finding Themes in Memory
As the Commission is an opportunity for Canadians to learn through remem-
bering, it may be important that those shaping its work understand how
natural and necessary giving themes to the past through memory is to our
capacity to learn. Celia Haig-Brown’s Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the
Indian Residential School (1989) illustrates some of the relevant dynamics of
reconstructive memory. Haig Brown’s book was one of the first studies to
“present Native perspectives” (1989, 21) on Residential Schooling by bringing
together students’ memories of the Kamloops Indian Residential School
(KIRS) to illuminate the themes of “cultural invasion and resistance” (21).
Under the sway of the storehouse model of memory, Western memory
theorists once assumed that good memory reproduces the detail of individual
events as captured at the time of experience without reflective interpretation.
As each individual’s experience is unique, this model can breed suspicion
about memories that sound similar in the themes they express or in the lessons
they draw. We may then suspect we do not have “pure” memories, but memory
restructured as narratives that meet social needs or expectations.
The shift to a reconstructive model, however, was encouraged by evidence
that many, perhaps most, of our ordinary autobiographical memories do not
consist in pure snapshots of experience; rather “we have memories of peri-
ods of our lives, ways we used to feel or act, or things we used to believe”
(Schechtman 1994, 7). For example, Haig-Brown frames her study of the KIRS
through the memories of the late George Manuel, Shuswap Grand Chief and
international Indigenous activist: “Three things stand out in my mind from
my years at school: hunger; speaking English; and being called a heathen be-
cause of my grandfather” (Manuel and Posluns 1974, 63).
Like Manuel, we often remember the past in generalized, thematic ways.
Though we can all recall particular events in vivid detail, we often do so
precisely in order to express and give examples of kinds of experience. The
tendency to thematize the past is essential to memory’s use and function as
the set of capacities through which we learn from the past. Theorist Marya
Schechtman writes:
We have a great many experiences, and receive an overwhelming amount
of information about our own lives—too much information to be of some
sort of use without processing. If memory is to provide us with a useful sort
of information about our own histories, we need to condense the informa-
tion we receive. It makes sense, therefore, that . . . the information . . . that is
constantly coming in should be reconstructed as a more concise and com-
prehensive narrative which emphasizes the most significant factors of past
experience and depicts general and long-standing patterns or activities with
representative examples. (1994, 11)7
Haig-Brown could introduce her work with Manuel’s words because many of
the memories narrated to her were representative of the kinds of experiences
that also stood out to Manuel’s memory. Nevertheless, there is a rich variety of
detail and perspective to the narratives that example these themes:
In my time, we were always hungry. . . . I seen them bringing in boxes and
boxes of apples not too far from the dairy room. So I got those young women
and I said, ‘how are we going to get some apples?’. . . So for days and days girls
were scrounging for strings and my job was to look for spike nails. . . . [W]‌e
tied the strings together and there was an air hole in the root cellar. So we’d
have these girls watching out for us . . . and we’d try to spike apples. That’s
how we used to get our apples to feed the little ones. . . . [W]e got caught and
we got punished but it took a long time because we supported each other in
our crime. (1989, 89)
Robina Thomas (Lyackson Snuneymuxw and Sto:lo) conducts research on
Indigenous storytelling. She stresses both the purposive nature of storytelling
and the importance of the listener’s respect: “these are not our stories and we
must respect the storytellers” (2008d). Honoring the storyteller’s voice need
not be understood as the claim that the memory related invariably expresses
an individual rather than a shared perspective. Because of the social/relational
nature of memory, sharing experience often will reasonably lead to collective
7
Moreover, this very common kind of memory is “at the same time knowledge of who we are and
what we are like” (Schechtman 1994, 11), thus a critical source of self-knowledge. Sam, for example,
remembers his introduction to the boy’s side of the school: “The first night I had three scraps on account
of my brothers. You always got tested out. I showed them . . . I was more out-going ready for anything
on account of my [public] schooling over there” (Haig-Brown 1989, 50). In this brief narrative Sam
remembers a period of his life and the ways he used to feel and act through a representative example
and as an act of self-knowledge, both an affirmation and explanation of his own resilience. Schechtman
insists that we think about what memory is for—the creation of a usable past—in order to understand
how we process the potentially infinite complexity of our experience. Were the Commission to look for
pure snapshots of the past, they would fail to attend to memory as an expression of perspective and of
self- and social knowledge.
and not just individual perspectives on the significance of the past. The impor-
tance of this sharing and its effect on perspective is exemplified in at least two
different ways in Haig-Brown.
First, because we are always in relation with others, we often attend to envi-
ronments from the perspective of those with whom we identify (Halbwachs
1980/1950). We thus often remember our own experience as having a shared
rather than individual significance:
We were not allowed to sleep with each other and they were very strict about
that. . . . And at night the watchman would come around and we [were] very,
very scared of him. We often thought he was wicked and ready to get us.
I don’t know where we got that idea from. (Haig-Brown 1989, 69)
We might imagine that as this experience has been shared and its meaning
discussed, it would be articulated in similar ways by other students. In fact, in
testing our own recall and understanding, we often seek the confirmation of
others’ memories.
Second, we frequently re-experience our past in the company of those with
whom we have not shared experience, and their perspectives may have influ-
ence on how the past is subsequently remembered. Such influence was cer-
tainly a part of the project of the schools, as staff at the KIRS, for example,
attempted to publicly compel the children as a group to remember their fami-
lies and homes as ways of life to be rejected:
And then we marched from there down to the chapel and we spent over an
hour in the chapel every morning, every blessed morning. And there they
interrogated us on what it was all about being an Indian. . . . He would just get
so carried away; he was punching away at the old altar rail . . . to hammer it
into our heads that we were not to think or speak or act like an Indian. And
that we would go to hell and burn for eternity if we did not listen to their way
of teaching. (Haig-Brown 1989, 54)
The sway of the storehouse view can prevent recognition that we are social-
ized from childhood into attending to our pasts thematically in ways meant
to guide future action—the Indian Residential School system could not oth-
erwise have been a strategy of colonialist assimilation. More positively, those
with whom we share our memories can aid us in developing perspectives that
serve the needs and responsibilities of the relations we affirm.
Haig-Brown’s interest in cultural survival was definitely implicit in her in-
terview questions. She solicited many memories that were not just of cultural
invasion but of resistance to it, and she contextualized many memories as rep-
resenting this theme. Nancy, for example, is described as holding “defiantly
to her language within herself because there were few others in K.I.R.S. who
spoke it” (94):
I remembered trying to remember some words. . . . I was trying to remember

one word and that was squirrel and it was so easy. . . . I remember struggling
with it all day and trying to remember. And then at night when I went to
bed, I kept thinking about it and I thought and thought and then it came
up—‘dltg.’ (94)
When others’ interpretations are resonant for us, they take us into the future
through our capacity and willingness to re-experience our pasts with new
understandings. Haig-Brown says of Nancy: “Although she worked alone to
remember, she felt a strong need to keep the words in her thinking vocabu-
lary. The time for reunion with other Chilcotin speakers was inevitable” (94).
In making this comment, Haig-Brown suggests that actions such as Nancy’s
helped make cultural preservation a certainty. She offers a narrative frame that
relates individual acts of resistance to cultural survival and renewal, a frame
through which Nancy and others might now be proudly re-experiencing
actions they once remembered as private and futile rebellions. This narrative
is not peculiar to Haig-Brown. Manuel writes, “At this point in our struggle
for survival, the Indian peoples of North America are entitled to declare a vic-
tory. We have survived.”8 As the significance of the past and the meanings of
actions genuinely change over time and the course of events, reinterpretation
is a legitimate and important part of how we might come to a more collective
grasp of the significance of the past. Whether particular reinterpretations are
legitimate will often be a complex and contestable issue. The point is that they
cannot be discredited by the completely implausible idea that good memory
requires that we always protect our understandings of the past from others’
perspectives on our experience (Blustein 2008; Campbell 2003).
Did Haig-Brown succeed at representing “Native perspectives” on the
KIRS? Or did participants pick up ways of narrating the past from an author
who at the same time contributed framings that would encourage others to-
ward further similar sounding narratives? These are the kinds of questions
that might concern the Commission about its own work, and might be pressed
on it by the public or by participants. Yet Haig-Brown’s work shows that rep-
resenting genuine perspectives while offering interpretive possibilities are not
incompatible projects.
Haig-Brown’s study is meticulously transparent about its own method-
ology. The author undertook her research with the explicit intent of respecting
Shuswap oral traditions and the participants’ account of the ethical obligations
of public memory. One participant told her “there is no distinction between
telling lies and not remembering or exaggerating” (142). Haig-Brown trusted
people’s accounts as both natural and political testimony. She was concerned
8
Manuel’s words are quoted on the website for the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, http://www.ubcic.
bc.ca/about/george.htm. They are from Manuel and Posluns (1974).
to represent accounts from different periods of the school’s history, and to

represent positive as well as negative experiences, with “the acceptance of all
people’s experience as legitimate and the sharing of perceptions and biases in
true efforts to arrive at common understandings” (151). She also recognized
that memory is naturally thematic; we can mistake people’s intent in sharing
memory if we do not recognize that they are usually trying to communicate
what is significant to them about the past: “Rather than seeing time as distort-
ing, we might consider it a filter which allows clearer vision of the matters
of importance of a person’s life” (142). The final identification of themes was
collaborative (unlike Donnelly, Haig-Brown did not exclude perspectives by
authoritatively determining relevance) and Haig-Brown’s editing of the par-
ticipants’ words and her contextualizing of their memories was retrospectively
approved by most who had participated. Thus, while Haig-Brown solicited
memories that represented the themes of cultural invasion and resistance to
it, and while she obviously brought her own interests and perspectives to her
research, there is little reason to suspect that students were overly suggestible
to pat narratives, or to question whether the book exemplifies students’ per-
spectives on their experiences at KIRS.
People often share memory for the collective purpose of understanding the
past as a source of learning and direction. Haig-Brown aligned her purposes
with those of her collaborators, which were clearly future-looking.9 The study
was undertaken with the support and in the spirit of the Secwepemc Cultural
Education Society whose goal is “to work in unity to: Preserve and Record—
Perpetuate and Enhance our Shuswap language, history and culture” (Shuswap
Cultural Education Society, 1982. Quoted in Haig-Brown 1989, 144). The impli-
cation that similar sounding memories do not confirm each other but call each
other into doubt—that we have not confirmation but contagion—is some-
times grounds for legitimate suspicion that memories of Indian Residential
Schooling will only be allowed into Canadian public consciousness if they
do not reflect and contribute toward the development of forceful, collective,
future-oriented perspectives on the history and legacy of the schools.
Some authors have suggested that groups that are politically marginalized
are prevented from theorizing their own experience, and instead positioned
as simply offering “data” for others’ more authoritative interpretations (Alcoff
and Gray 1993)—Donnelly’s attitude toward Residential School narratives.
The storehouse view of memory can facilitate the resistance to Aboriginal per-
spectives by misreading the dynamics of thematizing memory, regarding this
activity, not as one necessary to the creation of a usable past, but as illicit,
9
Like the IRS TRC, Haig-Brown’s work affirms and emphasizes the dynamic importance of
shared memory to opening space for dialogue about the history and legacy of the schools: “With an
understanding of the past, people can participate in dialogue with one another to make a different
future” (151).
after-the-fact reinterpretation of “pure memory.” The model blocks recognition

of the ineliminable influence of interpretations, old and new, on how people
can find meaning in their pasts, and of the responsibilities of non-Aboriginal
Canadians to reconsider their own pasts in light of Aboriginal perspectives
on Residential Schools. Moreover, it compromises our ability to understand
Residential Schooling as a strategy of intended cultural genocide that was in
large part enacted by restricting who could share memory and experience.10
One disrespectful meaning of “Why do all their stories sound the same?” may
be that of denying the political power that can come from remembering to-
gether, of an unwillingness to witness or participate in making more inclusive
space to find new futures from the past.
Why Do All their Stories Sound the Same? Colonialist Narrative

and Social Memory
What does it mean for space in collective memory to remain closed in ways
that resist new interpretation? In Cree Narrative Memory, Neal McLeod writes
that “words are like arrows that can be shot at the narratives of colonial power”
(2007, 67). McLeod’s words suggest that there will be dominant narratives al-
ready in place that testimony to the IRS TRC may disrupt. These repetitive
narratives help explain resistance to the development of new perspectives, and
their presence may direct the Commission to think more about the potentially
varied contexts of sharing memory supported by its mandate.
Paulette Regan, for example, identifies “the Canadian as peacemaker” as
a powerful myth that conditions how non-Aboriginal Canadians view past
and contemporary relations with other nations, including with Aboriginal
peoples (2010, chap. 3). Regan acknowledges that myths, in the sense of sto-
ries, symbols, and rituals that can ground and unify collective understandings,
are an important part of social memory, of how we experience a collective
past. As something like tools or frameworks for interpreting our histories,
they may not in themselves be true or false, but we can ask whether and how
they contribute to a usable past and an imagined future. With respect to the
peacemaker myth, Regan traces “the persistence of this myth from its roots in
nineteenth-century treaty-making to a contemporary reconciliation discourse
that purports to be transformative but actually replicates colonial relations,
reinscribing a national narrative that celebrates settlers as peacemakers” (2010,
14). A challenge for the Commission will be that myths destructive of its man-
date can be reinforced by some of the very mechanisms used to confront them.
In other words, sharing different perspectives on the past requires strategies
that will not simply reinforce the myths of the dominant culture, but work to
challenge these myths.
10
For a fuller elaboration of this claim, see Campbell (Chapter 7).
Richard Morris (Mescalero/Kiowa) and Mary Stuckey (2004) provide an

example of the inadvertent reinforcement of colonialist myth, and thinking
about their work is an opportunity to reflect on strategy. They investigate the
competing arguments around two bills introduced by Senator Abourezk to the
US Senate Committee on the Judiciary in order to compensate survivors or
their descendents for the 1890 massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek.
The bills were introduced in 1976 and the US Army had a great deal at stake
in resisting them. Two dozen Medals of Honor had been awarded to soldiers
at Wounded Knee, and these medals would have to be revoked if the incident
was re-categorized from battle to massacre.
Despite the army’s predictable stance, one might think that even the intro-
duction of the bills was some evidence that space had been created in US social
memory to acknowledge the massacre. What is of interest to the authors is the
way in which people who argued both sides of the case shared assumptions
about US national character, assumptions that limited the possible interpreta-
tions of Wounded Knee. Abourezk understood the United States as a nation
committed to democratic values of equality and fairness. He called on these
values as the motive for reparation. Positioning Native Americans as “citi-
zens like any other citizens” (Morris and Stuckey 2004, 7), he was outraged
by the violations of decency that had occurred at Wounded Knee Creek, and
he “sought to redress that wrong to realign America with its core values” (6).
The army’s case was supported by Robert M. Utley, a “highly regarded
authority on Indian history” (15), who also drew on the powerful democratic
rhetoric, in this case the importance of a fair and balanced view of everyone’s
perspectives and interests:
Big Foot’s people were neither deceitful, bloodthirsty fanatics or [sic] unof-
fending, defenceless Indians. The soldiers of the 7th cavalry were neither
vengeful butchers nor heroic guardians of the frontier. All, rather, while
products of differing cultures, were decent, honorable people trapped by his-
torical and cultural forces largely beyond their control. (Quoted in Morris
and Stuckey, 15)11
This act of sharing responsibility and misfortune among the participants “has
the appearance of being genuinely inclusive and profoundly democratic” (15)
in ways that read these values into both history and the future.
Wounded Knee was a massacre. To believe otherwise given the “official and
very public policy” aimed at the “assimilation, removal, and extermination of
American Indians” (14) and the indisputable facts surrounding the incident
is, the authors assert, to surrender to “social amnesia” (14). Yet Abourezk’s in-
sistence that a fair-minded, inclusive, democratic, and principled polity would
11
Utley’s testimony is from Wounded Knee Massacre: Hearings before the Committee on the
Judiciary, February 5–6. United States Senate, Ninety Fourth Congress, Second Session (1976).
want to make amends affirmed a description of the United States that erected
a boundary against this interpretation. To see the slaughter of the Sioux as a
massacre without unrealistically picturing soldiers as vengeful butchers would
have required regarding Wounded Knee as an expression of an aggressively
self-interested US Indian policy, as treatment that Native Americans might
have regarded as emblematic rather than aberrant. The picture of US char-
acter Abourezk appealed to as a source of rectification resisted this interpreta-
tion and reinforced a self-deceptive reading of the events. The only acceptable
re-description of Wounded Knee that could draw attention to harm and suf-
fering without rattling dominant democratic self-conceptions was that the in-
cident was a “terrible tragedy”; and this was in fact Utley’s conclusion (17).
“Tragedy” and one’s sorrow at it is a deeply Western European way of con-
ceptualizing harm to others that blocks the perspective of those harmed by
keeping attention on the fundamentally good character and sorrowful emo-
tional responses of those who cause harm (Spelman 1988, chap. 2).12
On the one hand, Morris and Stuckey’s discussion can prompt us to con-
sider the profound challenge to Canadian self-conceptions at the center of
the Commission’s work. Regan argues compellingly that the “myth of the
peacemaker” that orients many Canadians toward the future was founded,
not in Canadian foreign policy during the Pearson era, but in the very pro-
cess of treaty-making (2010, chap. 3). This process, as interpreted by key fig-
ures in the formation of Canada’s Indian policy, inspired a self-congratulatory
self-portrait of Canadians as benevolent peacemakers in contrast to the more
violent responses to “the Indian problem” in the United States. There may be
no more fundamental challenge to a mythic self-portrait that blocks recog-
nition of Canada’s very public policy of intended cultural genocide than the
work of the IRS TRC, which contests the meaning of those relations in which
the myth is founded.
It might be thought, that unlike the United States in 1976, space has already
been opened in Canadian social memory for a more realistic and accurate grasp
of the history of Canadian-Indigenous relations. RCAP was meant to open this
space. Yet Regan argues that “the peacemaker myth is resilient and flexible”
(2010, 109), able to incorporate acknowledgment of past mistakes and failures.
The Statement of Reconciliation delivered by then Minister Jane Stewart, for
example, does frame the harm and abuse in the schools using the Western lan-
guage of tragedy (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1998). Moreover, if we
look for the vision of the Canadian peacemaker as a tragic figure, we can see
that those new to Canada are even now being inducted into this resilient myth.
In a televised Canadian Heritage moment meant to teach core Canadian values,
Sitting Bull affirms his intention to stay peacefully in Canada. Unlike the US
Spelman’s book in an indispensable account of how attending to the suffering of those we’ve
12
wronged is often a way to turn some nice attention back on ourselves.

officials that he castigates, North West Mounted Police officers McLeod and
Walsh have never lied to him.13 The voiceover is McLeod’s saying that they did
not know then that Sitting Bull would be starved out of Canada. “Walsh would
resign over it and Sitting Bull would be murdered.” The camera gives equal
attention to the faces of Walsh and Sitting Bull to fix the viewer’s attention on
their friendship. Walsh is the tragic figure of a peacemaker who through na-
iveté and limited power is complicit in the betrayal of his friend. The sense of
tragedy that pervades this moment obscures the meaning of the suffering from
the perspective of Sitting Bull and his people while the portrayal of Walsh as
the tragic peacemaker removes attention from Sitting Bull’s own acts of lead-
ership and diplomacy. The lesson for non-Aboriginal Canadians is not that we
need to quite profoundly change who we are in relation to Indigenous peoples;
rather, it is that we should act out our good character with more forethought
and consistency.
On the other hand, Morris and Stuckey are actually helpful in thinking
about how the Commission can avoid reinforcing dominant Canadian myths
in its work and leaving the same repetitive peacemaker stories in place. The
IRS TRC is structured to genuinely open space for new perspectives through
the kind of commitment to Aboriginal legal and cultural traditions missing
from US Senate hearings. This commitment may be helpful in avoiding two
kinds of problems Native American testifiers faced.
First, Morris and Stuckey’s work helps identify another undertone to “Why
do all their stories sound the same?” as charged against Aboriginal memories.
The complaint often seems to be one of unnecessary repetition and the IRS
TRC can resist contexts that fuel this unwillingness to witness multiple testi-
monies of Residential Schooling. Only four Native Americans gave testimony
to the Senate Hearings about Wounded Knee. The issue to be decided—battle
or massacre—had been set; the hearings were not an attempt to understand
Indigenous perspectives on the events. The authors describe the Native
American testimony as “multi-layered, personalized, and often emotional”
and as producing “a detailed rendering of the massacre” (2004, 23). Yet even
with so few Native American speakers, Morris and Stuckey write that “from
a non-Indian perspective, such testimony may appear unnecessary, circular,
repetitive, and irrelevant” (23). Put simply, since the Sioux were not attempt-
ing to settle the past by arguing one side of an issue, their words failed to gain
focus, direction, and efficacy from relevance to the task at hand. The Sioux had
quite a different objective:
Rather the witnesses sought to include every potentially meaningful mo-
ment of recollection that could help the living understand how to live. In
order to find for themselves an appropriate space in national, collective
13
Available at Historica: Your Place in History, www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10174.
memory, Indigenous speakers were more interested in opening rather than

closing spaces within that memory. They were more concerned with the
possibilities of redefinition than with its dangers. (24)
The lack of space for Sioux narrative memory was for a kind of remembering
and its purpose.
Though Morris and Stuckey use the idea of social space metaphorically,
their pessimism about change to social memory might well be linked to the
real space they examine. The space of a Western judicial setting presets the
boundaries, not merely of relevant content, but of the objectives of memory,
and of ways of communicating and relating.14 The Commission’s commit-
ment to respect for Aboriginal legal and cultural traditions and thus to the
varied activities of sharing the past endorsed through these traditions may
be an effective way to prevent this charge of “Why do all their stories sound
the same?” But the Commission may need to take some leadership in helping
non-Aboriginal Canadians imagine themselves as participants in new spaces
of memory. Once again, the appropriateness of the language of testimony can
be considered, as this is not the only language that links the telling of expe-
rience to the values of truth. Cree spiritual leader Stan McKay, for example,
offers principles that should guide the challenge of undertaking reconciliation
in the present context. Advising that all should enter this engagement with
humility and respect, McKay considers that
The potential for new ways of relating to each other is most likely to be
experienced in a sharing circle. Within this circle, the role of the listener is
to recognize and accept differences. Verbalization gives the speaker a place
in the community to speak his or her truth. Others, who sit in participatory
silence, gain an understanding of themselves as they hear the stories of fear,
strength, and hope. (2008, 107)
McKay uses the language of “sharing stories” and “sharing truths.”
The commitment to respect may also help the Commission avoid a second
way in which the public representation of voices can inadvertently close space
for new perspectives, especially in a stable democracy. The Commission will
need to position the non-Aboriginal rememberers who contribute in ways that
respect their experiences and the gift of their memories without reinforcing a
portrait of Canadian liberalism that seeks to close off discussion of the schools.
There is no more powerful support for a narrative of liberal tolerance and
respect for diversity than the homogenizing of voices through the objective of
representing all perspectives.
The Australian government was faced with a recommendation by its own
national inquiry into the removal of Aboriginal children that it support
14
See Regan (2010, chap. 3) for discussion of this point in the Canadian legal context.
recording and access to “Indigenous testimony” about the experience of re-

moval (Mellor and Haebich 2002, 300). The minister at that time decided,
however, that it was important to hear all perspectives, and the Bringing Them
Home Oral History Project commenced on this revised basis (Mellor and
Haebich 2002, 5). Echoing the democratic rhetoric of Utley at the Wounded
Knee hearings, the Introduction to Many Voices: On Experiences of Indigenous
Child Separation (Mellor and Haebich 2002) affirms that no “single story pre-
vailed” (6), that the experiences needed to be understood through the com-
plex lives of all the participants, and that it “became evident that there were
tales of sacrifice and heroism on all sides” (7). Critiquing the “liberal spirit”
of Many Voices is not intended to devalue the experiences of those who at one
time participated in the enactment of colonialist policies. The point, rather,
is that the desire to represent all voices equally reinforces a dominant demo-
cratic self-conception that will erect barriers against the emergence of the
Aboriginal perspectives that contest it. But again this reinforcement of a myth
destructive to new ways of relating requires a particular context for its full
effect. Many Voices is comprised of independent interviews in which people
who experienced and participated in the removals are not sharing experience
with each other.
As guided by their oral traditions, the Sioux who spoke about Wounded
Knee sought to make relation through remembering together for the future.
Rather than try to settle the past and separate it from the present, “Native
witnesses sought to place [the] events within the living present . . . so that
Americans—Native and non-Native alike—could remember, understand, and
learn” (Morris and Stuckey 2004, 6–7). The IRS TRC is a negotiated agreement
that links respect for Aboriginal legal and cultural traditions to the possibility
of transforming relationships. It may be that some of its most important work
will be in supporting encounters that take their leadership from Aboriginal
traditions of making relation through practices of memory.
Lessons from the South African TRC

The importance of understanding context can lead to a final reflection on “Why
do all their stories sound the same?” We can view the question as one that may
come from former students about the limited social resources they might face
in trying to share their experiences with the IRS TRC. Thinking about the
question from the perspective of the students shifts some of the responsibility
for its answer onto those who witness and respond through their actions to the
Commission’s work. While different in structure and objectives than the IRS
TRC, it is worthwhile considering the issue of similar-sounding narratives that
did confront the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SA
TRC). The problems were identified partly from the perspective of those who
had been harmed and who testified before the Commission, forefronting the
responsibility of witnesses.
The SA TRC had the important but restricted focus of revealing the truth
of grievous human rights’ violations during the Apartheid era as a way to pro-
mote the social healing necessary for the transition to a non-Apartheid state.
Both victims and perpetrators testified. Some of the former would receive
reparations; some of the latter, amnesty for full disclosure. The Commission’s
mandate encouraged a particular style of testimony from victims that one
commentator describes as “traumatic storytelling” (Colvin 2003, 72). On the
one hand, the forensic facts required for determinations of reparations and
amnesty encouraged testimony that offered a “clear chronology, a clear rela-
tion between component parts, and a climax phrased in terms of the experi-
ence of a gross violation of human rights” (Ross 2003, 328–29). On the other
hand, the agenda of national healing was served through the association of the
act of giving testimony with catharsis and closure. Christopher Colvin sug-
gests that “release and closure were privileged as the core emotional concepts
of the Commission” (2004, 79).
According to Colvin and Fiona Ross, victim testimonies became increas-
ingly formulaic and routinized over the course of the SA TRC. This tendency
was exacerbated by intense academic and media interest in the Commission’s
work, as scholars, reporters, and the Commission itself tended to excerpt and
re-represent narratives in ways that emphasized their sensationalism, com-
promising the complex ideals of personal, social, narrative, and forensic truth
meant to guide the work of the SA TRC. Finally, and notably, the framework
offered—traumatic storytelling—seemed to give rise to something like nar-
rative contagion. Ross did research with communities during that period.
She writes that “during and long after the Commission’s work, interviewees
used the narrative model popularized by the Commission, even when the
topic under discussion had nothing to do with the Commission’s work” (2003,
329–30).
There were significant ways in which the kind of testimony encouraged
by the Commission’s mandate limited the degree to which victims were able
to share their experiences and perspectives. Traumatic testimony “is a kind
of storytelling that does not easily admit the ambiguous or unspectacular”
(Colvin 2004, 74). It did not allow for a straightforward articulation of some
kinds of harms, for example, the profound damage that Apartheid caused
to family and community structures, damage not easily captured in the
language of grievous human rights violations. Those who testified became
themselves identified with the experience of a certain kind of harm. They
began to be replaceable to an international imagination that did not regard
them as complex human beings whose perspectives might differ from each
other and from the State’s. Many who testified as victims found occupying
a pre-established place in a State agenda increasingly problematic. Colvin
notes, for example, that “the kind of reconciliatory storytelling promoted
at the TRC was incapable of contributing to . . . [a]‌developing political fight
against the government for reparations” (73). This fight would have required
allowing narrative as angry political critique.
Some of this participant dissatisfaction with the SA TRC is now fairly well
known. The IRS TRC might want to first consider whether the South African
experience raises issues for privileging testimony as a form of a remembering.
I suggested that the association of political testimony with trauma and healing
may impose a hierarchy on narratives of experience, making it difficult, for
example, for a student who wants to share more ambivalent or even positive
experiences with the IRS TRC. Studies of the SA TRC suggest further that
privileging testimony can encourage a one-dimensional picture of testifiers.
While Ross reminds us, on behalf of a reconstructive view of memory, that
people remember “at particular times for particular audiences” (2003, 332) and
may go on to remember differently in other contexts, public response to the
idea of testimony as trauma and closure may be to identify the testifier with a
single act of sharing memory in a very particular context. Unfortunately, the
IRS TRC will undertake its work within a wider setting of profound Canadian
ignorance about the complexity and variety of Indigenous nations, cultures,
and traditions, combined with a ready propensity toward one-dimensional
stereotyping of Aboriginal people and a desire for closure on the past.
Yet I suggest that the criticism of the SA TRC also offers some additional
final insight into charges of narrative contagion. The issue of similar-sounding
stories is not well explained by just supposing that we naturally pick up oth-
ers’ ways of thinking and talking about the past. In South Africa, narratives
were compelled toward sameness at least partly by the purposes of the SA
TRC. Colvin and Ross both write of the political activism around the issue of
restricted narrative resources in this context. Yet at the same time it is not sur-
prising that traumatic storytelling was adopted by those who were not direct
participants in the TRC process. The desire to share memory requires that we
find common points of reference and ways of communicating with others that
we think will make sense to them given their own needs and objectives. Morris
and Stuckey point out that while Native witnesses to the US Senate hearing
tried to actively influence ways of remembering, they also
consistently attempted to translate their experience into values that the
mainstream could comprehend: “Mr. Chairman. I have no quarrel with the
military. I spent almost three years of my life wearing the uniform of this
nation and shouldering a rifle in its defense.” (2004, 22)
That we make use of available resources returns us to the responsibilities
of those who witness memory. Ross asks not only what it means to be asked
to speak in a certain context, but what it means to be asked to listen (2001,
253). Another fairly well-known fact about the SA TRC is that women more
often testified of human rights violations done to men—usually husbands and
sons—than to themselves (Ross 2001). Paying close attention, however, to how
women positioned violence in reference to domestic space and family rou-

tine, Ross is able to listen through their narratives to hear of the profound
disruptions to family and community under Apartheid. Her work might be
read as an important lesson for non-Aboriginal Canadians. Remembering is
a communicative act that may sometimes take place through the restrictive
resources provided by a particular context. Moreover, when people try out
new ways of understanding and re-experiencing their pasts, they may need
to try on categorizations and narrative frameworks that are not a good fit, not
fully expressive of experiences and perspectives that have yet to find a space in
public memory. These facts about the social resources we provide for sharing
memory can lead to similar sounding narratives. Ross does not burden testi-
fiers with the full responsibility for their attempt to communicate experience.
Her work suggests that respectful witnessing must exhibit not only respon-
sibility and deference to others’ memories but its own kinds of creativity in
attempting to grasp what is salient to people from their own perspectives.
4. Devaluing Oral History

Focus
One reason that Celia Haig-Brown felt compelled to justify the method-
ology of Resistance and Renewal was that she was working with memory. She
expected some of her readers to regard memory as an unreliable source of
information about the past, and she tried briefly to acquaint them with eth-
ical commitments that shape practices of sharing memory for the Shuswap
people. Sioux witnesses to the US Senate also tried to explain the impor-
tance of the memory practices they brought to the hearings. In Cree Narrative
Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times (2007), Neal McLeod tells
the story of Treaty 6 through family narrative memory while at the same
time teaching the reader about Cree memory practices. All are responding
to the tendency of non-Aboriginal audiences to misunderstand and devalue
Indigenous traditions and practices of public memory; McLeod is respond-
ing as well to colonial damage to these traditions and the importance of their
renewal, of “coming home through stories” (2007, 71).
Many Aboriginal elders, teachers and scholars, activists, artists, and com-
munity members as well as their allies are involved in the project of revaluing
the purposes, integrity, importance, and vitality of Indigenous oral tradi-
tions and practices. One dimension of the challenge they face is a Western
conception of proper historical methodology that disqualifies oral narrative
as history. While many critics approach this issue through the standpoint of
reconsidering the canons of Western historical method, it may also be useful
to again use memory as a lens. This concluding section tries to reveal a prob-
lematic tendency to use memory as the point of contrast for defining history.
This methodological dogma precludes the idea of oral history by defini-

tion—even when paying lip service to its existence; it eliminates room for the
self-consciously critical/ethical practices of public remembering described by
Aboriginal writers; and it relies on an ill-founded, Eurocentric picture of the
historical development of memory practices. That is, writers sometimes repre-
sent oral practices of preserving the past as a kind of archaic style of memory
that has given way to history, fortifying a view of Aboriginal peoples as unable
to remember for the future. Their ways of remembering are themselves a part
of the past.
If non-Aboriginal Canadians are to participate in decolonizing Canadian
Indigenous relations, they must be willing to comprehend practices of remem-
bering that may differ from their own. The Commission’s own respect for these
practices may aid in their ability to do so.
Discussion
Contrasting Memory to History: Millward’s Review of Out of the Depths
To see how discussion of memory acts to position Aboriginal memory as
non-history, it may be useful to work with an example that relates directly to
Indian Residential Schooling. In March/April 1993, New Maritimes: A Regional
Magazine of Culture and Politics published Marilyn Millward’s “The
Demons of Memory” (1993a), a review of Isabelle Knockwood’s Out of the
Depths: The Experiences of Mi’kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School
at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia (1992). A controversy resulted and dominated
letter and editorial sections of subsequent issues of this progressive magazine,
which had the reputation of presenting marginalized perspectives. Critics,
including the Metro Coalition for a Non-Racist Society, specifically accused
Millward of misunderstanding oral history, and thus perpetuating “a more
general attitude in the dominant society . . . that operates on the assumption
that its ways are overall superior” (New Maritimes, May/June 1993, 2). Both
Millward and the editors replied. Stressing the positive aspects of her review,
Millward also asserted that it “only attempted to bring some balance to the his-
tory” (Millward 1993b, 4). The editors concluded that it was “precisely because
Millward had taken Knockwood seriously . . . that her review has been attacked
with such intensity. What is important in these attacks . . . is the idea that no
criticism, however mild, should be made of a MicMac writer writing about
MicMac history” (Millward 1993b, 5). I think there is reason to be concerned
about Millward’s methodological commitments when positioned in relation
to Aboriginal descriptions of memory practices. The following analysis does
not suggest that Millward should have known of these descriptions, and I hope
that it does not problematically conflate the memory practices of different
Aboriginal peoples. Its intent is to look for the kinds of general understandings
of memory in Millward that may cause problems in respecting traditions other

than Millward’s own.
Knockwood’s book initiates a narrative of students’ experiences at
Shubenacadie through a Talking Stick ceremony: that is, Knockwood poses a
problem and invites the reader first to listen to her account and then to relate
everything he or she, the reader, might also know about the situation:
I have been talking about the Indian Residential School in Shubenacadie for
many years, and I still don’t understand why the hurt and shame of seeing
and hearing the cries of abused Mi’kmaw children, many of them orphans,
does not go away or heal. I hope that the act of writing it down will help me
and others to come up with some answers. (1992, 7)
The Talking Stick is passed to the reader at the end of the book.15
As “The Demons of Memory” understands Knockwood’s book to be an
act of remembering, it is both appropriate and interesting to follow the con-
cept of memory through the review. Millward begins by situating the book
as “first a personal quest for recuperation and second an oral history” (1993a,
24), distinguishing a personal from a historical intent. There is no reason to
think that Knockwood would separate and rank her objectives as Millward
does. The reclaiming of Mi’kmaw tradition expressed through invoking the
Talking Stick ceremony, which activism Knockwood associates with healing,
requires telling all she knows about her situation. The telling is not a secondary
objective but is integral to the ceremony she describes. Knockwood’s objec-
tives are best understood through her own description of them, which de-
scription forefronts a particular Mi’kmaw memory practice.
Though Millward calls Out of the Depths an oral history, she immediately
raises the issue of memory as a source of truth about the past:
The problem of memory is seeing the past through the long distance
between now and then which leaves the reader . . . left wondering how much
of everything remembered is true. Yet what is truth and is mine the same
of yours? What is important about oral history is that it reveals what the
speaker believes to have happened. (1993a, 25)
Millward suggests that if there is truth in memory, it is not truth about what
happened but about what the speaker believes happened. She mentions “her
constant difficulty discerning fact from fiction and persistent inclinations to
challenge the accuracy of recollections” (26). She concludes nonetheless that
there is value “in expressing and writing about the perceptions of personal
experience” (24), especially in the case of Residential Schools. But why this is
so is surprising. It is “the only way to uncover the one side of the story that has
15
For more discussion of Knockwood’s work in the context of memory and the IRS TRC, see
Campbell, Chapter 7.
scant surviving documentary evidence” (24). Millward implies that documen-

tary evidence would be preferable to present memory in providing the stu-
dents’ experiences of Shubenacadie. But why and from whose standpoint? The
review seems to suggest that the students’ words would be better for purposes
of the historian if they were embedded in Western structures of documentary
evidence. Millward may believe that it would have been better to have stu-
dent’s words recorded at the time the students were in school—the problem of
memory is “seeing the past through the long distance between now and then.”
Yet many Aboriginal speakers and writers contest the “long distance” view of
memory, pointing out that for oral cultures, the past is kept alive to the present
through memory practices that involve its conscientious recounting. A his-
torian who valued these practices would not automatically prefer documen-
tary evidence, or believe, as Millward does, that the “value” of oral history is
that “it gives documentary history another perspective” (Millward 1993a, 25).
Gitxsan artist Doreen Jensen writes: “I am a historian because I go and seek
out the people who have the knowledge, the old knowledge, nothing that you
can read in books” (2000, 140). The point here does not depend on whether
Knockwood, in particular, kept her memories of Residential Schooling alive
through oral recounting; rather Millward’s general commitments about the
nature of memory are not those of many Aboriginal writers and may limit her
understanding of Aboriginal memory practices.
When discussion of memory enters Millward’s review, it does so to devalue
as history a book that is only necessary because there is “scant” documentary
evidence of Mi’kmaw perspectives. Given the devaluation, there is a question
of whether Millward’s conception of memory can accommodate Knockwood’s
account as history. Does Millward’s use of “oral history” really mark what she
believes to be history? In fact a memory/history dichotomy is developed in the
review and in Millward’s response to critics. I want to focus on one point in
particular—how the personal and emotional quality of memory in Out of the
Depths is used to position history by contrast.
Millward considers Knockwood’s memories personal in the sense of indi-
vidual: “There is no question that memory is an individual thing. . . .[E]‌ach is
certainly true to itself ” (1993b, 5). She also comments frequently on what she
finds to be the painful emotional quality of Knockwood’s writing. It is true
that memory is often both personal and imbued with emotion—the question
is how Millward and how Aboriginal theorists might view the relation of these
qualities to the possibility of history. I shall understand history as the attempt
to thoughtfully represent a dimension of meaning to a configuration of past
events (themselves represented accurately), where this meaning is thought by
the historian to be of public importance.
Memory, even social memory of historical events, is about how we
re-experience the past; it is the past personally felt. Moreover, our emotional
grasp of the world is how it has value for us; to describe the past emotionally
is to convey its significance.16 Richard Morris and Mary Stuckey describe the
Sioux witnesses at Wounded Knee as offering memory that was both per-
sonal and emotional. “The point was to share a story with profound spir-
itual and ethical implications . . . so that Americans—Native and non-Native
alike—could remember, understand, and learn” (2004, 6). Legal scholar John
Borrows writes that the courts often misunderstand oral traditions in sup-
posing their intent is the mere retention of information about the past. His
writing suggests that often an oral tradition draws “its strength from the par-
ticipatory element” (2001, 6). Renderings of the past can be faithful to what
happened “while drawing on the skills and understanding of people in the
group to make the message meaningful,” perhaps even “a part of each person”
(6). McLeod repeatedly stresses that the Cree narrative memory is a perfor-
mative engagement between storyteller and audience. McLeod’s grandfather
offered his stories as “traces of experience” meant to help listeners make sense
of their own lives (2007, 13). These authors suggest that memory can not only
convey the nature and significance of a past of public importance, but that the
qualities of memory may do so in ways that make that past personally mean-
ingful for the listener as well as the speaker. Borrows and McLeod have no
problem using oral history in their descriptions; Morris and Stuckey identify
the desire to bring Wounded Knee in the living present as rescuing it from his-
tory (2004, 6). I take their saying so to represent the history/memory contrast
from an Indigenous perspective, where doing history might be understood
as a Western colonialist practice that has consistently misrepresented Settler/
Indigenous relations, and Indigenous memory practices.
The previous perspectives on Aboriginal oral traditions are not available
to Millward precisely because, for her, the emotional and personal quality of
memory is used primarily to generate a contrast with history: “The issue is not
merely sensitive, but so emotional that it is impossible for residential school
survivors to tolerate any objective consideration of this piece of history: there
is no such thing as emotional objectivity” (Millward 1993b, 5). Millward elabo-
rates the objectivity she takes to characterize history as the kind of balanced
perspective that emotion prevents. “There is the question of intellectual dis-
course and the idea that everyone deserves to be heard” (5). Because of its
painful memory, Out of the Depths is “unrelentingly one-sided” (Millward
1993a, 25), “a dark book of dark memories” (25), and thus is not a part of the
intellectual practice Millward describes herself as pursuing. Knockwood’s
book should be read and will “take its place beside other personal accounts
of the residential schools” (Millward 1993b, 5) while Millward’s own review
attempts “to bring some balance to the history” (4).
16
For sustained arguments that our emotional responses are essential to our identification of value,
see Scheman (1994), de Sousa (1987), and Stocker (1998).
Finally, Millward’s use of memory to establish history by contrast ren-

ders not only Aboriginal perspectives on oral traditions inaccessible to the
reviewer, but also Knockwood’s perspective as it informs the author’s project.
Millward grasps emotional, personal memory primarily through the Western
therapeutic language of individual self-realization and healing in order to con-
trast it to the public, intellectual pursuit of history: “Memories should allow
some self-realization and some understanding of others, not bolster a lifetime
of regret” (1993a, 27). Thus, in the end, she places memory on only one side of
the split objectives she has initially attributed to Knockwood’s work—as recu-
peration, not history. The Talking Sticking ceremony is itself drawn into this
therapeutic language:
The nightmare that has become a book has lived inside Knockwood most of
her life, and perhaps through the years her demons have grown out of pro-
portion, but if the talking stick functions for her as it should, it may be that
now, on the “long trek back home” she will be set free. (27)
Millward misrepresents the Talking Stick as a personal healing device rather

than an attempt to engage others in a reflective understanding of the past that
faces the pain and damage of students’ experiences. For Millward, Out of the
Depths is personal, not analytical; emotional, not objective; one-sided, not
balanced; and oriented toward personal healing, not public understanding. It
is thus the contrast for how a “serious student of native educational history”
(1993b, 5) might understand Residential Schooling though it is an important
resource for such a student.
Who can Remember for the Future? From Memory into History
When memory is used to generate, by contrast, a picture of history that
excludes oral tradition, we may misunderstand and misrepresent Aboriginal
memory practices. Moreover, this dynamic of contrast and exclusion is not
exceptional to Millward. Arguably, it has played a more systematic role in pic-
turing Aboriginal peoples as of the past, by representing oral traditions as hav-
ing been replaced by history, as themselves of the past.
Barbara Misztal’s well-regarded survey of memory theory (2003) offers an in-
structive look at the dynamic. Misztal initially claims that “remembering submits
the past to a reflective awareness and it permits, by highlighting the past’s dif-
ference to the present, the emergence of a form of critical reflection” (10). She is
also careful, in an explicit discussion of the contested relation of memory to his-
tory, to point out that in contemporary scholarship, many theorists have argued
that the boundaries between these forms of representation are blurred (107).
Theorists now oppose commitments to a sharp memory/history distinction, one
supposedly connected with the fact that memory tends to mythologize
the past, to look for similarities and to appeal to emotions and is thus
considered arbitrary, selective, lacking the legitimacy of history and ulti-

mately subjective, while history calls for critical distance and documented
information. (99)
Misztal does conclude that it is important to keep some distinction between
the critical reflection that characterizes history and the communal bonding
and support of identity that she takes to be supplied by collective memory
(107–8), and I will return to this point. But, given what she says about memory
and history, we might initially think of her account as one that makes room to
revalue Aboriginal memory practices.
Aboriginal scholars might be thought, moreover, to be contributing to
the blurring of boundaries that Misztal endorses, to be engaged in the same
project. In McLeod’s explorations of Cree narrative memory, remembering
and relating history come seamlessly together in a notion of responsible pub-
lic remembering:
This concept of remembering publicly is important because it gets to the
heart of Cree narrative history. These storytellers remembered because they
felt they had a moral duty to do so. Stories were offered as traces of experi-
ences through which the listeners had to make sense of their own lives and
experiences. My grandfather told stories about what he knew; he derived
stories from his experiences and he told stories in which he or his ancestors
were participants. (2007, 13)
Borrows’ work on Aboriginal oral traditions in the Canadian legal context
explores how the multi-faceted nature of these traditions renders them poten-
tially both challenging and insightful for the courts. Borrows describes a web
of complex cultural practices that a sharp distinction between memory and
history would distort and oversimplify rather than illuminate:
Oral history in numerous Aboriginal groups is conveyed through interwo-
ven layers of culture that entwine to sustain national histories over the life
of many generations. The transmission of oral tradition in these societies is
bound up with the configuration of language, political structures, economic
systems, social relations, intellectual methodologies, morality, ideology and
the physical world. These factors assist people in knitting historic memo-
ries more tightly in their minds. There are many types of tradition that are
a product of this process: memorized speech, historical gossip, personal
reminiscences, formalized group accounts, representations of origin and
genesis, genealogies, epics, tales, proverbs and sayings. In their integration,
each of these cultural strands wound together and was reinforced by spe-
cific practices. These practices include such complex customs as pre-hearing
preparations, mnemonic devices, ceremonies, repetition, the appointment
of witnesses, dances, feasts, songs, poems, the use of testing, and the use and
importance of geographic space to help ensure that certain traditions are
accredited within the community. Oral tradition does not stand alone but
is given meaning through the context of the larger cultural experiences that
surround it. (4)
Yet I believe that McLeod and Borrows cannot be understood as contributing
to the same project as Misztal, and this is because the oral cultures they de-
scribe are not a living presence in Misztal’s account of social memory. Rather,
the idea of an oral culture is used to describe a primitive form of memory that
gives way to history.
Misztal’s comments on blurred boundaries of memory and history are pref-
aced and framed by earlier chapters that tell the history of remembering. If
we read her later discussions in light of these chapters, we find no room for
the contemporary cultures that McLeod and Borrows describe. Misztal mis-
represents oral culture as pre-literate culture that begins the story of memory
and then disappears to a progress it is not able to recognize: “In oral cultures,
the past was fused with the present” (28, italics added). “In oral cultures, peo-
ple assumed things were as they had always been, because oral transmission
accumulates actual alterations unconsciously continuously adjusting the past
to fit the present” (28, italics added). While Misztal initially situates memory
as allowing critical reflection on the past, as these quotes show, her discus-
sion of change in forms of memory reneges on this insight. Misztal explicitly
identifies the progress from orality to writing as necessary to the possibility
of historical reflection, removing the possibility of history for oral cultures.
Characteristics of oral memory are again used to establish history by contrast.
“While speech can preserve memories over a long period of time, it is too
fleeting to permit any listener to pause for recollection. . . . As the pastness of
the past depends on a historic sensibility, this can scarcely begin to operate
without permanent written record” (24). Contemporary Indigenous oral cul-
tures are not, of course, pre-literate, and as Borrows and others make clear,
they involve a complex web of memory activities that support and stabilize
the numerous functions of oral transmission. The point is that Misztal identi-
fies the very idea of an oral culture as pre-literate in order to tell a narrative of
memory’s progress into history.
Misztal’s book tells a story of the development of memory: “Since memory
has traveled from oral expression through print literacy to today’s electronic
means of communication, we can conclude by saying that memory has its own
history” (25). She means simply to provide an accurate and fairly comprehen-
sive history of memory theory; in doing so, she unreflectively supports a par-
ticular colonialist narrative of progress that leaves some people in the past
while allowing others to preserve the past for the future through the intellec-
tual discipline of written history. In her writing, situating oral memory prac-
tices as of the past is of a piece with situating oral cultures—cultures in which
practices of oral memory are central to a sense of cultural distinctness and
integrity—as themselves having passed, as frozen in time and lost to progress.

Today’s societies “are no longer societies of memory” (Hervieu-Leger 2000, 13.
Quoted in Misztal, 12). The implication is that a society that values and relies
on oral tradition is not one of today’s societies.
Aboriginal scholars are well aware that the revaluing of oral tradi-
tions requires resistance against the positioning of such traditions as
“pre-historical”: “Cree narratives have often been subjected to a lower status
because of Western historical conventions. Such beliefs are often dismissed
as a ‘mythology’ and prehistorical within the confines of mainstream histo-
riography” (McLeod 2007, 18). Borrows discusses the noted historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper who advised that historians should not bother with “tribes
whose chief function in history . . . is to show to the present an image of the past
from which, by history, it has escaped” (quoted in Borrows 2001, 4). McLeod
and Borrows point to now contested conventions in Western historiography
as responsible for the positioning of oral cultures as of the past. Using the
lens of memory offers additional insight. The misrepresentation of memory to
support a colonialist narrative of memory into history has exacerbated polit-
ical exclusions by situating oral traditions as part of memory’s past, as them-
selves relics of a lost way of life. At the same time, the way this narrative guides
non-Aboriginal understandings may also restrict a grasp of the important
political possibilities of public remembering.
A Model of Public Remembering

This chapter concludes by again drawing attention to a particular way in which
memory is characterized in order to situate history by contrast—a way that
reflects on the possibilities as well as the challenges of the IRS TRC. Misztal’s
account offers a suggestion for what is truly important about a memory/his-
tory contrast that she shares with a number of other theorists: namely, that
the function of social memory is that of unifying and supporting a particular
group identity in contrast to reflecting on the diverse perspectives on the past
available through historical research. Many memory theorists and some histo-
rians have identified social memory as a group’s committed perspective on the
past.17 This account of memory’s function makes the possibility of remember-
ing for the future across different pasts and different groups simply a recipe for
conflict. Roger Simon writes that we need
a form of public memory quite different from the reiteration of valued sto-
ries that attempt to secure the permanence of collective . . . identifications in
17
See Wertsch (2002) for an illuminating discussion of this tendency in both memory theorists and
historians. The idea of a committed perspective to social memory goes back to Halbwachs (1980/1950).
Common wisdom is that we must now allow for competing voices, but this suggestion almost always
positions these voices as conflicting.
stable notions of a meaningful past. . . . What needs to be offered within a

practice of public memory is not the sameness of common memory but the
discontinuities of an always incomplete remembrance. (2005, 101)
Such memory would be “a gesture that bears responsibility for the past to the
present” (101).
As an activist from a particular tradition of memory practices, McLeod’s
grandfather, Cree elder John R. McLeod, understood and enacted the kind of
public remembering “that needs to be offered.” According to his friend Noel
Dyck, McLeod “was unable to turn away from many invitations to speak to
non-Indian audiences . . . because he sincerely believed in the importance of
creating a better understanding between his people and non-Indians” (Dyck
1992, 135). Using the traditions of Cree narrative memory, McLeod would
recount stories of his life as an Indian farmer on the prairies. He would offer
his stories matter-of-factly and with humility. Moreover, he “never said what
the point of his stories [was]; he forced the listeners to discover this for them-
selves” (138). Dyck relates that McLeod’s
listeners were usually staggered to hear, and sometimes almost unwilling to
believe, that Indian agents and farming instructors had so completely domi-
nated their Indian charges as recently as the late 1950’s by means of sales per-
mits, travel passes, and a variety of other social control mechanisms. (138)
McLeod’s “non-Indian listeners would sooner or later have to confess to either
him or themselves ‘I didn’t know that’ ” (138). At that moment, the moment of
history becoming personal for a listener through recognition of his or her own
deep ignorance, McLeod would know his audience was listening. Then, he
“would turn to some of the contemporary issues that meant much to him” and
Dyck notes that he would often secure quite a good discussion (138).
Can non-Aboriginal Canadians likewise engage in an ethics of shared pub-
lic remembering that “bears responsibility for the past to the present” and to
the future? Iris Marion Young suggests that taking forward-looking respon-
sibility means understanding the roles that we occupy, and “often requires
transforming institutions and the tasks they assign. This is everyone’s task
and no one’s in particular” (2004, 385). One of the most disturbing features of
Millward’s review of Knockwood is her claim that the Talking Stick ceremony
acted to prevent reflective, critical engagement with Knockwood’s memory:
I did want to hear the author speak, but then apparently violated the privi-
lege of the talking stick which requires that a listener must neither agree nor
disagree with someone who has spoken. I am not sure how to review a book
with such restrictions. (Millward 1993b, 5)
As a scholar who had done some very interesting research on the Shubenacadie
Residential School, Millward was in an ideal position to actually contribute to
the Talking Stick ceremony that Knockwood initiates. An earlier New Maritimes
article (Millward 1992) shows that Millward knew a great deal, for example,
about the time spent working as opposed to studying at Shubenacadie, about
why parents enrolled their children, about common parent misunderstand-
ings of loss of guardianship, and about institutional resistance to allowing
Aboriginal parents a continued say in their children’s lives. Millward’s contri-
bution of what she knew about the situation might even have disagreed with
what Knockwood wrote. Millward could have stated an account that disagreed
with that offered by others; she simply wouldn’t have been able to pronounce
on the authority of others’ representations. Listeners are responsible for their
own understandings.
Reviewing Knockwood in this way would have perhaps been difficult: “The
possession of history has compelled not merely the ‘facts,’ but the perspectives
of the account, and the methods of representation as well” (Blaeser 1995, 38).
It would definitely have been a creative act “more concerned with the pos-
sibilities of redefinition than with its dangers” (Morris and Stuckey 2004, 24).
At least contemplating this act, rather than concluding that the Talking Stick
ceremony forbade the attempt to engage, might also have been Millward’s re-
sponsibility. The controversy over Millward’s review can help us see that the
disrespect for and misrepresentation of Aboriginal memory practices are often
not the result of individual ill-will, but are tied to specific roles and functions
within structures that keep power relationships in place.
The forms of disrespect that this chapter has examined involve the will of
dominant groups to keep hold of narrative forms and standards that determine
who can speak truly and from their own experience and perspective about the
historical significance of Indian Residential Schooling. The IRS TRC’s man-
date and guiding principles inspire reflection on possibilities of public remem-
bering that are more genuinely transformative of relationships.
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{ Index }
Aboriginal people (Canada) Borrows, John 103, 170–71, 172, 197, 199–201
assimilationist policy and 101–05, 154–56 Bringing Them Home 95, 108n22, 190
colonial policy and 99–105, 154 Brown, Steven 3, 51–57, 60–61, 64, 65, 66–67, 75,
memory practices of 109–11, 139–40, 156–57, 85–86, 88, 93
184, 194–96, 199–200
as of the past 100–04, 157, 193–98 Calhoun, Cheshire 23, 44–45
responsibly in 150, 153, 158 Card, Claudia 117–18, 149–50, 151
sharing memory 109–10, Charland, Paul 173–74
temporal views of 109–10, 138–39 Children of the Disappeared, HIJOS 42–44
as unable to share memory 102–05, 154–56, 159, child sexual abuse, recollections of 51–52, 61–62
167n4, 193–98 Chrisjohn, Roland 155, 173
as unreliable testifiers 174–75 Clark, Andy 29
accuracy of memory 3–4, 5–6, 16, 26, 35–36, 44 Coady, C.A.J. 170–71
(see also truth) co-implication of identities. See relational
as detailed recall 37–38 identity constitution
distortion and 18–24, collective memory 4–6, 17, 26, 28, 141, 150, 184,
and emotion 34, 36–37, 39–40, 43–44 199 (see also memory)
functional approach 5–6, 58–59 distortion and 26–27, 185–90
as reproductive fidelity 12, 14, 27, 35, 37–39, 97 homogeneity and 4–7, 75n5, 92, 105–08
significance and 31, 39–44 collective responsibility 115–21, 152–53
AIDS Memorial Quilt Archive Project 28 and disaffiliation 116, 118
Alfred, Taiaiake 112, 151n15, 157 and liability 117
Apartheid 191, 193 and resistant identification 115, 127–32
Aquinas, Thomas 171 and solidarity 116–120, 128, 131–32
archival model of memory 11, 18, 53–55, 60, and sympathetic identification 115–20, 123–25
137–38, 161, 166, 182–84 “Collective Responsibility” (Feinberg) 115
and accuracy 24, 32, 160 colonialism, memory and 153–154, 160–61, 164
metaphors in 12, 19, 21–22, 27–28, 145–46 colonial practice ( see also Indian Residential
as uni-causal 13–14, 141, 180 Schools)
Arendt, Hannah 121n8 assimilation 101–05, 152, 154–56
Argentinean Dirty War 41–43, 48 contrasting history to memory 193–202
Aristotle 63n9 discrediting aboriginal traditions 103, 161, 164
Atwood, Margaret 83, 84 and identity constitution 99–100, 112–113
Augustine, St. 21 colonial myths
Canadian as peacemaker 185, 187–88
Bakhtin, M.M. 2 tragedy and 186–88
Baldwin, James 119, 176, 177 United States as equal and democratic 186–87
Barker, Pat 124n14 Colvin, Christopher 191, 192
Barnier, A.J. 93 connectionist model of mind 15
Baylis, Françoise 100n13, 102 Connerton, Paul 76, 80, 86, 156
Bergson, Henri 32, 61, 63, Cvetkovic, Ann 46
Bernard, Charles Joseph Jr. 178
Beverley, John 172 Davis, Angela 98
Blustein, Jeffrey 107, 109 Dean, John 38, 48
Bond, John 95 Deloria, Vine Jr. 146
Booth, James 106, 107, 108 de Man, Paul 123–24, 126, 131
220Index
Derrida, Jacques 123–24, 126, 131 James, William 37

digging up the past 145–46 Jensen, Doreen 196
Donnelly, Patrick 173–75, 176, 178, 179, 184 Johnson, Elizabeth 104
embodied cognition 29, 34 Kelly, Fred 101–02, 113

escraches 42–43 Knockwood, Isabelle 139–41, 153, 156–57, 179,
194–98, 202–03
Fabian, Johannes 103 Kurosawa, Akira 20
faithful memory. See accuracy of memory;
integrity of memory Lee, Chana Kai 46
false memory debates 3, 5, 21n8, 50, 52, 54–56, Lescarbot, Marc 83
67, 167n3 Llewellyn, Jennifer 90
Feinberg, Joel 115–19, 121–24, 128 Lloyd, Genevieve 21, 115, 118, 121–32
Fingarette, Herbert 118n5 Locke, John 21, 53
Fivush, Robyn 94 Loftus, Elizabeth 12, 13, 15, 19, 20, 22–23,
forensic self 52–57, 67 27–28, 56
Friedman, Marilyn 125n15 Lugones, Maria 77, 81, 84, 87–88, 120
Lynch, Michael 52, 59, 60, 63–66, 67
Germany, allied bombing of 15
Gitxsan apology feast 162–63, 173 McCormack, Theresa 2–3, 73–74
Greenspan, Patricia 119 McCrae, J.R. 103, 154
McGary, Howard 116n3, 117n4
Haaken, Janice 55–56, 59, 67–68 MacIntosh, Constance 92, 99–100, 107, 110
Hacking, Ian 11, 33, 55, 55–57, 61, 67, 179 McKay, Stan 113, 168, 189
Haig-Brown, Celia 180–85 McLeod, John R. 110, 202
Halbwachs, Maurice 78–79, 94, 160, 201n17 McLeod, Neil 150, 158, 185, 193, 197, 199–202
Harper, Stephen 109, 145 Madres de Plaza de Mayo 42, 47–48
healing 92n6. 140, 146–47, 191–92 Malan, Rian 121
Heyes, Cressida 98, 113 Manuael, George 179–80, 183
Hoerl, Christoph 2–3, 73–74 Maracle, Lee 103, 104, 146
Holocaust 105n20 Margalit, Avishai 6n5, 106–08
How Societies Remember (Connerton) 76, 156 Martinuk, Susan 169
May, Larry 116n3, 117n4
“Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart” (Pratt) 115, 120, 127 Merz, Katie 27
Indian Residential Schools 51n2, 90, 111–13 memory
assault on language and 101–03, 140 155 and emotion 17, 19, 23, 33–34, 41–44
assault on memory and 102–05, 112, 154–59 and identity constitution 1, 2–3, 26, 33–34,
assimilation and 101–05, 154–56 52–57, 62–66, 78–82
Indian Residential Schools Settlement mechanism 12–13, 137
Agreement 90, 143–45, 152, 160 metaphors of 11, 13, 21–23, 27–28, 73, 138, 145
Indian Residential Schools Truth and as relational. See relational remembering
Reconciliation Commission 90–92, 109, memory activities 12, 24–29, 34, 41–43, 47–48,
111–13 108, 135–36, 156–57, 161–64, 166, 200 (see also
distinctiveness of 142–43 performance)
and forward-looking responsibility 148, 151 memory, challenges to
mandate of 91–92, 135–36 contrasting memory to history 194–201
memory in 135–37, 162 demand for closure 144–48
indigenous cultures as of the past 161 discrediting rememberers 173–76
indigenous storytelling 181 disrespect 154, 157–59, 167–68
“Individuals, Responsibility and the Philosophical distrust 174–75
Imagination” (Lloyd) 115, 121 limiting testimonial possibilities 173–75,
integrity of memory, 3, 18, 24, 35, 44–46, 97 191–92
and accuracy 46–49 narrative contagion 51n2, 178–80
and responsibility 26, 31 memory distortion 18–24, 26, 44, 166–67
in self-constitution 52–57, 62–66 memory studies 2–4, 50, 58, 93–95
Index 221
memory value 12–13, 18–24, 26–29, 35, 45–48, 57– Reagan, Ronald, memory of 3
62 (see also accuracy of memory; distortion; Regan, Paulette 148n13, 162–64, 173, 185, 187
integrity of memory) Reed, Hayter 155, 156
memory wars. See false memory debates relational identity constitution 4–5, 7, 62–64,
Mendieta, Eduardo 105 72–75, 90–92, 94, 96, 98–102, 108, 112, 124–27
methodological essentialism 98–100, 105–08 relational remembering 1–2, 4–7, 52, 74–75,
Middleton, David 3, 53, 75, 78–82, 85–86, 88 92–98, 112, 182–83
Milloy, John 101, 102, 111, 151–52 remembering for the future 137, 148–50, 182–83,
Millward, Marilyn 174, 179, 194–98, 202–03 190
Misztal, Barbara 104, 198–200 reparative justice 90, 105
models of memory 11–15, 18, 19, 24, 32n3, 54, responsibility ( see also collective responsibility)
137–39, 166–167 (see also archival model of emotion and 116-132
memory, reconstructive model of memory) forward-looking sense of 105, 149–51, 201–203
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 5, 91n5 in identity constitution 61–65, 114, 123–27, 149
Monture-Angus, Patricia 150 liability and 62, 117, 149
moral deference 176–77 perversion of 151–52
Morris, Richard 110, 186–89, 192, 197 to rememberers 66–68, 141, 169, 172–74, 176,
Morton, Adam 36–37, 39–41, 43, 57 184, 189, 192–93
Multiple Personality Disorder 55–56 and solidarity 105, 128, 152–53
spatial dimensions of 122, 125–26
Native-Settler relations 83, 89, 90, 102, 104, 112–13, the taking of 107, 115–18, 123–25, 129–32, 137,
197 149–53, 168
Neisser, Ulric 18n4, 38–39, 41, 48 temporal dimension of 122–27
Nixon, Richard 38 Rice, Brian 165
nostalgia 13, 25–26, 29 Ricoeur, Paul 30–31, 42
Ross, Fiona 191–93
Ofshe, Richard 56 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 168.
oral history 103–04, 109–11, 146,194, 198–201 169, 173–78
Out of the Depths: The Experience of Mi’kmaw
Children at the Indian Residential Sassoon, Siegfried 124n14
School in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia Schacter, Daniel 12, 13, 14–15, 18–20, 22–23, 27,
(Knockwood) 139, 179, 194–98 137–38
Schechtman, Marya 33, 39, 181
performance 7, 41–43, 48–49, 72, 75–78, 156–57, Scrubbing Project (Turtle Gals Performance
161–63 Ensemble) 84–87
Phillips, Ruth 104 Sebald, W.G. 15–18, 23, 25–26, 27, 29
Plato 52 second voice see sharing memory
Pratt, Minnie Bruce 115, 120–21, 127–32 Semon, Richard 20
preservation 157–59 sharing memory (see also memory activities;
testimony)
Radstone, Susan 50 and group identity formation 105–09
Rashomon (Kurosawa) 20 and identity formation 2–3, 78–82, 97, 160
Read, Hayter 101 and Indian Residential Schools Truth and
Reavey, Paula 51–57, 60–61, 64, 65, 66–67, 75, Reconciliation Commission and 135–36,
85–86, 88, 93 144, 159–60,
reconstructive model of memory 1, 14–15, 24, and intergenerational community and 76, 101,
137–39, 166–67 154–57
accuracy and 12, 44, 51–54 and intergenerational transfer of
distortion and 18–21, 38, 44, 48–51, 87, 141, knowledge 2–3, 73–74, 94–95
166–67, 179 and historical evidence 109–11
functionalism about 4, 5, 58–59 and reparation 89, 111–13
and the interpretability of the past 41–43, 52, and respect 66–68, 141, 169, 172–74, 176, 184,
54, 139, 167, 179 189, 192–93
as multi-causal 13–18, 22–23, 32 and solidarity 82–88, 105, 111–13
and norm of reproductive fidelity 12, 21–24, 35 Shaw, Rosalind 147
222Index
Shotwell, Alexis 95–96 truth 36–39 66-67, 74–75, 82, 93, 94

Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation indeterminacy of the past and 51–54, 57, 59–64,
Commission 147 66–68
significance of the past 6, 26–29, 31, 34–36, 41–43, instrumentalism regarding 52, 57–60
49, 63, 80, 91, 137, 139, 146–49, 166, 182–83 skepticism and 56–57, 66–67
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46 Tsosie, Rebecca 89, 112, 113
Simon, Roger 171–72, 201–02 Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble 84–88
solidarity 82–88, 114, 115–122, 123–24, 126, 127–32
Sorry Day (Australia) 95, 189–90 usable past 4, 6, 58–59, 94, 180–85
South Africa Truth and Reconciliation
Commission 177, 180, 190–93 Valaskakis, Gail Guthrie 91, 99–100, 107, 110, 112,
Stalker, Michael 121n7 113, 157
storehouse model of memory. See archival model
of memory Waites, Elizabeth 94
Stuckey, Mary 110, 186–89, 192, 197 Wakeham, Pauline 111
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Walker, Margaret Urban 63–64, 118n, 126n16,
Literature (Atwood) 83, 84 129–30, 174
Sutton, John 20, 167 Walsh, Edward 104
Syder, Anna 165 Warnock, Mary 1–2, 14, 21, 24
Watergate 38, 48
Talking Stick ceremony 139–40, 153, 156–57, 195, Weed, Thurlow 37
198, 202–03 Wertsch, James 2, 4, 5–6, 58, 59, 201n17
Task Force on Aboriginal Languages and Western Report 173, 179
Culture 150, 155, 157–58 Wheeler, Winona 109–10, 139
Taylor, Diana 7, 41, 47–49, 72, 76, 87, 99, 103 Williams, Bernard 31n1, 48, 67
testimony 163–64, 169–73 (see also sharing Winnett, Susan 46
memory) Wittgenstein, Ludwig 22
and anecdote 175, 177 Wollheim, Richard 33–34, 36, 43
as data 184 Wordsworth, William 1
legalistic 169–70, 171, 173 World Trade Center bombing 46–47, 80n8
natural 170–71 Wounded Knee Massacre Hearings 110, 186–87,
political 172, 177–78 188–90, 197
as relational 172–73
as remembering for the future 172, 176–78, “‘You Are Here’: the DNA of Performance”
201–02 (Taylor) 41
trust in 171–78 Young, Iris Marion 92, 110, 202
Theatre of Neptune in New France (Lescarbot) 83 on relational conception of group identity 98–
Thomas, Laurence 176 99, 113
Thomas, Robina 181 on the preservation of past 157–58, 162
Torpey, John 145–47 Young, Sherri 155, 173
traumatic storytelling 191–92 Yuyachkani 7–8

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Our Faithfulness to the

STUDIES IN FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

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Philosophy of Science after Feminism Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender

Edited by Christine M. Koggel

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Part I Our Faithfulness to the Past

Part II Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity

Part III Remembering for the Future

occasions in which epistemically capable individual rememberers are con-

application of her conception of memory to the work of Canada’s Indian

The Argument of the Essays

Traditionally memory was modeled as an “archive” for the storage, preserva-

with “the methodological interrogation of boundaries—of the individual, of

might challenge dominant representations of the past. This chapter—like the

and Reconciliation Commission [IRS TRC]), provide numerous ground-level

The Second Voice—A Manifesto

In spring 2006, I presented a paper on memory to a philosophy workshop on

Our Faithfulness to the Past

Models of Minds and Memory Activities

Feminists should take themselves as an important audience to the call for a

be understood. When we use activities as our starting point—in this chapter

1. The Shift in Memory Models

It is important first to understand what scientists themselves take to be a new

experience as memory. What I remember now is wholly caused by past expe-

colloquia I may think of an occasion comprised of the significant and familiar

As constructivists would remind us, what had already happened to Sebald

2. Memory Distortion

The scientific move to a reconstructive model seems to make available a more

distorted memory is, I contend, symptomatic of their actual conflation in

archival and the reconstructive as competing models of memory processes.

3. Memory Activities

informing and co-determining. Moreover, rejecting archival imagery as a way

Put somewhat crudely, because human remembering is very often an inher-

we engage in as rememberers. They are not alien metaphorical imports from

Our Faithfulness to the Past

The reconstructive turn in memory theory challenges us to provide an account

I take as my point of reflection a remark made by Paul Ricoeur in Memory,

2. The Importance of Reconstructing Memory Value

remember contribute personal and social meaning to particular acts of mem-

2.2. The Usefulness of Reconstructive Memory

Wollheim’s example shows that an important way in which we are guided by

2.3. The Need to Rethink Successful Memory

promising role in adjudicating the representational success of memory in ways

3. Accuracy and Memory

3.2. Accuracy and Detail

I draw as lessons from discussing the relation of accuracy to abundant de-

3.3. Accuracy, Significance, and Response

3.3.1. Learning from Theories of Emotion

3.3.2. Significance and Reconstructive Memory

3.3.3. Memory and Emotional Representation

either enhance or distort what we remember, where memories are regarded

4. Integrity and Memory

judgements against influence—all miss a core value of integrity. Philosophers,