Reparations are a band-aid solution to settler colonialism.

This paper draws on the rich body of work that examines reparations in the form of truth commissions, formal apologies and compensation by interrogating the problem and limits of truth telling in the Canadian settler colonial context. As a point of departure, I am inspired by Paulette Regan’s critique that truth telling can deflect attention away from the ‘settler problem.’11 Part of the settler problem is a large-scale resistance to examining current bureaucratic systems and how they contribute to colonial violence.12 I am also inspired by Lara Fullenwieder’s point that Canada shields the specifics of settler colonial violence from its record.13Together, I take these critiques as a call to interrogate truth telling as a settler problem within the more mundane dynamics of settler colonialism14 and to turn towards the records and everyday work of the Canadian public service. With notable exceptions,15 the bulk of the literature that touches on the concept of truth telling naturalizes it as the work of truth commissions. This paper considers truth telling outside of the TRC context by interrogating sites and actors other than the TRC. I question what a compensation program like the Common Experience Payment, as briefly described above, can tell us about the possibilities and limits of truth telling. Specifi-cally, I ask, what story does the Common Experience Payment ‘tell’ in terms of a narrative about residential schools, this program’s purpose, and former students within the records of the Canadian public service? Concerned with the ‘slow genocide’ that is brought about by seemingly ‘innocuous bureaucratic practices’ 16 this paper traces how the stories and experiences of residential school survivors ‘travel by paper through the bureaucratic pathways’17of contemporary Canadian settler colonial administration. Given Canada’s role as a perpetrator of the colonial violence that was the residential school system, I emphasize the importance of examining the Common Experience Payment program as it is one measure mandated by the IRSSA which was under the responsibility of the Canadian public service to administer. I demonstrate that the Common Experience Payment program is a site that makes visible the settler colonial‘double-move’18of avowing responsibility for residential schools, while simultaneously disavowing Indigenous sovereignty.19The program makes visible that settler bureaucracy reconfigures this compensation to former students of residential schools to be a form of service provision. I argue that, through this reconfiguration, the program both produces a new Indigenous population to be governed and perpetuates longstanding settler colonial rationalities that attempt to manage and marginalize the emotion and voices of this ‘population’ while racializing them as inferior by way of being a ‘challenge to overcome’ for the bureaucracy. I demonstrate that this reconfiguration takes place first through the eleven-page application form that must be completed by former students in order to access the Common Experience Payment. The form acts as a gatekeeper that depot-liticizes the program and sidelines the voices and experiences of former students before they can enter the records of the public service. Second, the program’s finale valuation distances the public service from residential schools by recontextualizing this form of reparation as a service provided to a ‘target population’ of Canadians who present unique challenges in comparison to a ‘general population’. This paper takes seriously the TRC’s assertion that developing respectful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples involves ‘dismantling a centuries old political and bureaucratic culture in which, all too often, policies and programs are still based on failed notions of assimilation.’20 In taking this call to action seriously, I emphasize that efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples are not found simply in the spectacular actions or overt policies of settler colonization, but in everyday instruments and mechanisms, such as application forms and evaluations, which are largely taken for granted as benign.