6 This article describes the rationale and process of a content and language integrated learning initiative. An academic English instructor of international students refects on the limitations and impact of critical language teaching materials drawing on texts about First Nations history and political activism in Canada on student learning in the program. An English Language Teacher’s Pedagogical Response to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Jennifer Walsh Marr Locating My Pedagogical Self in the Landscape In 2008, the federal government of Canada convened a Truth and Recon- ciliation Commission (TRC) to bear witness, among others, to the policies and impact of the national Indian Residential School system on Indigenous cultures and communities in Canada. The Residential School System was a network of institutions “created for the purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into a new culture— the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society” (TRC 2015, Preface, v). Residential schools operated in Canada for over a hun- dred years, from the 1880s to the 1990s. The impact of the cultural genocide perpetuated across generations of Indigenous peoples include the deaths of thousands of children, profoundly damaged families, languages with few re- maining native speakers, tattered cultural identities, and strained relations between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians. Many of us in the edu- cational feld felt the impact of TRC commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair’s oft-cited call to action in the TRC report, essentially that education got us into this mess, and it will take education to get us out (National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Archives 2011). In light of both the blame leveled at residential schools and the teaching feld in general, I wondered what I could do to be a more ethical educator, and more important, what I could do to repair the state of knowledge and discourse around First Nations com- munities, cultures and address systemic barriers in Canada at large. NEW DIRECTIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING, no. 157, Spring 2019  2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/tl.20332 91