On June 11, 2008, the Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper stood in the House of Commons to issue an apology to former stude

House of Commons to issue an apology to former students of the residential school system for Aboriginal youth. In addition to the Members of Parliament, Assembly of First Nations leader Phil Fontaine and hundreds of former attendees and church representatives were present for the speech. Harper described the two primary objectives of the residential school system to be the isolation of the child from their families, traditions and cultures, and their assimilation into the dominant culture. “Today” he said “we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.” There is no question that the schools, and the policy of assimilation that they represent have caused harm. Over the one hundred and fifty years during which residential schools were in existence, approximately 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were removed from their families to live for the majority of the year in institutions isolated from both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. There they were subjected to highly variable living conditions and systematically taught the inferiority of all aspects of their culture. Predictably, physical and emotional abuse occurred. Though accounts of experiences at the schools are not uniformly negative, these institutions have left behind an undeniable legacy of personal and communal pain, fragmentation and loss. What is questionable about Harper’s apology is his statement that the policy they rested upon “has no place in our country.” To say so is to suggest that the policy of assimilation was part of a history that contemporary Canada has broken from entirely, as if the country Canada was when these schools were in existence can be considered a different social or political entity from the one that exists in the present. Or perhaps it is to suggest that this is a policy that Canada and Canadians are still purging; that the process of extracting actions, beliefs or behaviors related to the policy is on-going, as was demonstrated by his speech. Indeed, my argument is that this policy of assimilation still has a place in our country, and that recognizing what this place is must be part of coming to terms with its consequences both in Canada’s past, and in present relations between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in Canada. I will argue that the policies upon which residential schools were based are related to central tenets of liberal democratic social formations. These policies were not the by-products of wrong-headed decisions made by a few bad administrators or a now defunct partnership between church and state. Rather they are related to broader processes of constituting the subject of liberal democracies: to a conceptualization of social formations as subject to the willful manipulation of actors within them, and of a particular kind of subject as capable of this kind of manipulation.