CONTEXT AND PURPOSE

What do we mean by “witnessing” in the context of this toolkit and as a humanities-informed method of public scholarship? Our approach here is informed by Deborah Wong’s assertion that “any methodology for witnessing must build in the radical determination and willingness to take in the action of others without the intent to own it. This methodology is fundamentally different from the impulse to collect information or things” (195). Witnessing should therefore not be ethnographic but rather rooted in participatory collective action with a “willingness to attend deeply to the moment, to inviting a shift in subjectivity” (abstract). Witnessing is also an Indigenous principle and a specific objective of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), where “witnesses are called to be the keepers of history when an event of historic significance occurs” (“Honorary Witnesses”). 

Sometimes naming a mass atrocity as an actual genocide and/or combatting genocide denialism can come with personal and political consequences. The TRC reminds us that we must have truth before reconciliation. Canada officially declared the residential school system a genocide in October 2022 after the discovery of multiple mass gravesites at former residential schools, and there are still deniers of Indigenous genocide. Unlike Canada, the U.S., which has an equally horrific record of abuse and death at Indian boarding and residential schools, has to this day never even issued an official apology let alone declared Native American erasure a genocide in any form. Despite vast evidence and witness testimony, there are still Holocaust deniers. Though the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded in 2005 that a genocide was committed in Srebrenica, there is still rampant denialism, posing a “‘serious challenge’ to reconciliation efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Alice Wairimu Nderitu, United Nations). 

At the time of writing this toolkit, the International Court of Justice has declared that we are witnessing a plausible genocide in the Gaza Strip (Summary of the Order of 26 January 2024), a place where all universities and most cultural institutions have now been damaged or destroyed, the vast majority of victims are women and children, and the existing population is now experiencing famine or “catastrophic food insecurity.” Polio, a debilitating virus that primarily affects children, is now at “high risk” of spreading through the region. A June 2024 investigation by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory determined Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.