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Through an examination of transnational advocacy and the Indigenous–Canada relationship, this article advances a compliance model of reconciliation to suggest that reconciliation might be compelled through pressure upon states to comply with their human rights obligations. Drawing upon constructivism, conflict resolution theory, and social psychology, the article proposes that compliance and reconciliation converge as a result of behavioral adjustment and the internalization of values through enforced performance. The article uses four examples for illustration: (1) challenges at the UN Human Rights Committee against gender discrimination in the Indian Act, (2) Canada's belated endorsement in 2010 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, (3) insider–outsider pressure that Canada comply with its human rights obligations with respect to its missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and (4) the Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group's land claim petition before the Inter‐American Commission for Human Rights. The article concludes that transnational advocacy in the Indigenous–Canada context has had slight to moderate effect in making reconciliation happen.

Abstract
How and why did Canada end up with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) rather than a judicially based public inquiry in response to Indian Residential Schools? Using a constructivist-interpretivist approach with interview research with twenty-three key actors, this article traces the path toward the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. It examines in particular the shift from calls for public inquiry to truth and reconciliation. In sourcing the idea of a TRC, it gauges the balance between transnational influences and home-grown elements and suggests that two different approaches to a truth commission were merged during the settlement negotiations. One approach, associated with the Assembly of First Nations, focuses on accountability and public record, and the other, associated with survivor and Protestant organizations, is more grassroots and community-focused. This article looks at hybridity and gaps in the TRC's design, suggesting that the two visions of a truth commission continue to exist in tension.

This paper traces the ways in which the language of reconciliation promotes and detracts from responsibility. What it means to be responsible and to take responsibility is explored through a reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel, Disgrace. Coetzee provokes a nuanced examination of the nature of reconciliation and responsibility in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly how deep a moral transformation is needed and of whom it should be expected. The tensions between pro forma acknowledgement and deep moral transformation are examined with respect to the competing narratives of reconciliation and responsibility that took place during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and afterwards in South African civil society. The paper concludes with a warning about the delicate balance between responsibility and vilification, reconciliation and denial.

The meaning of reconciliation in South Africa remains ambiguous and contested. A distinction is drawn between moral and political approaches to reconciliation that invoke thick and thin accounts of solidarity. The discourses of forgiveness and healing are "too thick" because they demand public coherence at the cost of private difference. The promotion of deliberative democracy protects difference, but is "too thin" to enable a substantial basis for reconciliation. Apology, as the fullest expression of "shared history," furnishes the moral transformation necessary for the democratic culture to take root. In this model, reconciliation strikes a balance between solidarity and plurality.

"Home" to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at "killing the Indian in the child" and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent.First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991–1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry.