ABSTRACT

Former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland launched the first-ever inves- tigation into the United States Federal Indian Boarding School Program to ad- vance a long overdue healing process for Native communities. But without a mul- tidisciplinary, dynamic, and pragmatic analytical framework guiding it, the reconciliation initiative circumvented a critical—and far more contentious—re- parative step: returning Native lands to Native hands. The social healing through justice framework emerges at a time when the United States is flirting with elec- toral autocracy and forsaking its commitments to the rule of law and reparative justice. Drawing on insights from the international human rights reparative jus- tice regime and Native reconciliation practices, social healing through justice can assess, guide, and recalibrate the initiative so it fosters genuine, comprehensive and enduring social healing. This Article provides a modest theoretical grounding in effective reconciliation efforts, detailing crucial tenets of social healing through justice—recognition, responsibility, reconstruction, and reparation. Against this theoretical backdrop, this comparative law Article analyzes Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and attendant efforts to redress the harms of its resi- dential schools. Its key part, however, describes and critiques the United States’ budding reconciliation initiatives, including Secretary Haaland’s investigation and the proposed Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Pol- icies Act. It ultimately posits that Canada’s initiative and the United States’ efforts as currently conceived will not meaningfully heal the persisting wounds the schools inflicted until the ancestral lands they helped take are returned.

“Ke kala aku nei au iā ʻoe a pēlā nō hoʻi ʻau e kala ia mai ai, or, I unbind you from the fault, and thus may I also be unbound from it.”
— Mary Kawena Pukui