This thesis offers a critical discourse analysis of the Canadian government's 2008 apology to the former students of the Indian Residential School system. The Indian Residential School apology claims to begin to pave the way for healing and reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and other Canadians, and, I argue, it makes this claim while reiterating colonial narratives of settler innocence, entitlement to land, and moral-ethical superiority. The apology claims to right wrongs that are discursively situated in a remote and distant past, without addressing ongoing colonial violence or the historic and contemporary benefits both the state and its citizens have inherited from colonialism. I contend that the apology enables a celebratory national narrative that allows the state and its citizens, and not the Indigenous peoples to whom it was putatively addressed, to recover from (and re-cover) a violent and traumatic past (and present) while repudiating responsibility on both an individual and state level.M.A
