On March 20, 2023, responding to Call to Action 46 and propelled by decades of Indigenous advocacy, the Catholic Church officially repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery. This doctrine, along with associated notions of European supremacy, was used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and Peoples. The church’s statement acknowledged that the beliefs that made Indigenous worldviews, cultures and Peoples inferior to European cultures and peoples wrongly provided the justification for the right to proselytize and conquer and that this belief “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples.”^[8]

The Doctrine of Discovery fundamentally influenced the legal and societal constructs of dominance and terra nullius, the idea that unfarmed lands beyond the European continent inhabited by non-Christians were “empty land.” Terra nullius was used and continues to be used in legal disputes to argue against the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples across the globe. Following nearly 25 years of deliberation at the United Nations, in June 2021, Canada enacted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) which incorporates language repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius.

Remnants of the intellectual underpinnings of the doctrine and beliefs that champion the superiority of Western cultures and peoples persist. Spurred on by protest movements such as Rhodesmustfall, Idle No More and Black Lives Matter, there is a growing effort to critically examine Western exceptionalism, upending the dominant paradigm that centres Eurocentric worldviews, peoples and practices to the exclusion of others.

Universities, as influential hubs of thought and innovation, have undertaken initiatives to examine the impact of participation in historical transgressions, such as slavery, forced assimilation and colonization, and to consider how these can be researched, taught and redressed with a lens that addresses the structural inequities we see today.

Many of Canada’s leading universities owe their existence to unceded land expropriated from Indigenous communities.^[9] These lands, integral to constructing infrastructure or bolstering endowment funds, underscore a sombre reality: the foundational role of dispossession in the establishment of prominent educational institutions. Canadian university lands taken from Indigenous Peoples in Canada from 1828 to the present day equal nearly half a million acres.^[10] Globally, British imperial and land-grant universities involve the disbursement of 15 million acres of Indigenous lands spread over three continents.^[11]

The University of Alberta’s North Campus is on land that was a meeting place for diverse Indigenous Peoples and a territory of the Papaschase Cree, who signed an adhesion to Treaty 6 in 1877. The adhesion promised a reserve and treaty rights in perpetuity on the land. Despite their longstanding presence on the river’s south bank, colonial authorities, with ambitions of acquiring valuable land for settlers and investors, dispossessed the Papaschase and coerced the band to settle for a reserve two miles south which was also later disbanded.

In Canada, universities often originated from denominational colleges with an ethos centred in the right to proselytize, and they later educated the clergy, teachers, administrators and politicians that created, administered and, in many instances, staffed Indian Residential Schools. As sites for the development and preservation of ideology, universities contributed to colonization by enabling characterizations of Indigenous Peoples as savage, backward and inferior, which made domination via legal and other restrictions common sense.

Inevitably, as the work of Truth and Reconciliation progresses, universities will come to learn about and share information on the organizations and individuals that participated in the Indian Residential School System.

This is uncomfortable to confront; however, robust scholarship was a key piece of the Calls to Action and at the heart of the university mandate.

For example, L.B. Pett was the head of the federal Nutrition Services Division from 1948-52. He received his medical degree from the University of Alberta (1942) and also taught at the university (1936-41). A medical doctor and biochemist, Pett was known as the architect of the “Canada’s Food Guide” and the inaugural leader of the federal Nutrition Services Division in the 1940s. During that time, Pett saw malnourished Indigenous children in Indigenous Residential Schools as an ideal set of test subjects for nutritional experiments. He utilized these children to study the effectiveness of a variety of experimental nutrition interventions and non-interventions.^[12] None of the experiments addressed the hunger or malnutrition at the schools even though, by Pett’s own calculations, the federal grant for food in most schools was half what was required to sustain a child.

Given this history, in 2022, the Lionel B. Pett Award (est. 2012) was renamed as the Graduate Scholarship in Biochemistry in order to better reflect University of Alberta values. The university is also widely examining policy and praxis as it relates to other matters. Examples include university processes for repatriating human remains and cultural objects, addressing problematic installations, art and namings. Efforts currently underway include The Medicine Hat Ancestors Reburial Project, The University of Alberta Library and Museums “Alberta History” Mural Project and Campus Saint-Jean’s decolonization process. The university is taking direction from Indigenous communities on how to navigate changes in these areas in a respectful, collaborative way.

As a further step to formalize support for this progress, in September 2023, the President’s Executive Committee endorsed the creation of a dedicated Naming Advisory Group. This group will act as a counsel and action body to support the work of U of A units in proactively reviewing functional, academic, honorific or philanthropic naming practices that may not reflect our current values, and will require the expertise and views of internal and external communities. Current naming policies and practices apply to items and events like university buildings, student scholarships, lectures, or academic programs. With this initiative the university is not interested in simply renaming or removing potentially problematic or controversial pieces of scholarship and history, but rather in holding space and engaging in purposeful dialogues, reviews or changes that best support the university’s commitment to reconciliation.

The work to bring these problematic pieces of our history in university spaces is not only an administrative task; it validates the lived experience of Indigenous Peoples. Despite the fact that the negative effects of residential schools have been well documented and that the Supreme Court^[13] of Canada acknowledged these experiences, denialism remains pervasive. Many question the validity of official records, the transparency of the research, the value of investigation in the first instance, and the motives of residential school survivors themselves. There have been some, even political leaders, who have portrayed residential schools as positive experiences for Indigenous children, citing limited positive experiences as evidence that the schools were essentially benign. Survivors have said that this is a dangerous and painful distortion of the experience in reality.

The specificity offered by scholarship is powerful: validating these truths tackles counternarratives that aim to disprove and thus diminish Indigenous experiences in what is, for many, a deeply uncomfortable part of our shared history. The burden of countering denialism should not rest on the survivors and their families.

Without truth, justice, and healing, there can be no genuine reconciliation.

Reconciliation is not about “closing a sad chapter of Canada’s past,” but about opening new healing pathways of reconciliation that are forged in truth and justice. We are mindful that knowing the truth about what happened in residential schools in and of itself does not necessarily lead to reconciliation. Yet, the importance of truth telling in its own right should not be underestimated; it restores the human dignity of victims of violence and calls governments and citizens to account. Without truth, justice is not served, healing cannot happen, and there can be no genuine reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada.^[14]