Source: (2012) Canadian Journal of Law and Society. 27:129-148.

Narratives of trauma, suffering, and loss are central to reconciliation processes.' These narratives are often "applied in the context of the ethos of compassion that is characteristic of our era" and are "a tool used in the demand for justice."2 At the same time, scholars have suggested that therapeutic mechanisms are problematically imposed on international reconciliation processes3 and that Canada's reparation strategies are not immune to the charge of redress as therapy.4 While the grammar of reconciliation is often deployed during critical moments of political transition in post-conflict spaces, the settler society remains a site of non-transition5 where the liberal democratic system-understood as an idealized endpoint for the reconciled state-is already intact. Drawing on the distinction between settler discourses of cure and Indigenous approaches to healing, I argue that reconciliation as cure functions as a means to foreclose on the colonial past without investing in structural and epistemological "transition" to a decolonized relationship between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people. Thus, this article explores the discrete and overlapping functions of therapy and justice in assessing the implementation and efficacy of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA). To address this, I ask the following questions: What are the pitfalls of using discourses of cure or settlement to situate Indigenous- settler reconciliation in Canada? How might reconciliation be used as a strategy to strengthen state power and authority? In what ways does the reconciliation process in Canada reflect Eurocentric conceptualizations of therapy and justice which thereby resist the potential for Indigenous knowledges to enact redress?