ABSTRACT
In 2008, 3 years after the author moved from Chile to Canada to pursue the author graduate degree, the Harper government announced the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as part of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, with the purpose of documenting the historical injustices committed against Indigenous peoples. The practices around reconciliation in both Chile and Canada can be understood as the state's rationalization of violence. Nelly Richard, one of the most prominent and influential critics of the transition in Latin America, argues that the experience and memory of violence cannot be inscribed in the transitional surfaces of representation such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports, nor translated into the clean, coherent official discourse of reconciliation. Actions such as flash mobs and round dances offer alternative forms of embodiments of subjectivities, political projects, and political imaginations, based on the “interconnection of bodies,” rather than on their individual rights and bodily sovereignty.
