Achille Mbembe's article on the symbolic place of archives in societies argues eloquently, by suggestion and metaphor, that archives have an essential function: to erase, constrain, and control the past. All states, according to Mbembe, exist on a foundation of "chronophagy," a swallowing of the past (Mbembe, p.23). The purpose of archives is to inter the dead firmly in the past, prevent them "from stirring up disorder in the present" (ibid.) so that they can be palatable to the state's tastes.

Mbembe has argued that archival research is aimed at erasing the "desire to repeat" and at "removing any subversive factors in the memory" (Mbembe, p.22-24). John Milloy's work, although certainly interested to eliminate the "desire to repeat." p.22, is aimed at burying the ultra-oppressive Canadian system of residential schools. With stirring recognition of his own position as a researcher, Milloy's work does not attempt to "commemorate" - and thus, according to Mbembe, devour - the subversive voices of discontent belonging the Aboriginal victims of the school system, but instead to rudely dig up the oppressive voices of the white authors of that system. It is hard to reconcile Mbembe's bleak picture of an all-powerful memory-devouring state with Milloy's ringing condemnations of the still-extant Department of Indian Affairs. Milloy's writing is in line with Bernadine Dodge's assertion that one of the purposes of historiography is to disrupt the present status quo, to present "alternative visions which suggest the possibility of respite" from the horrors of modernity (Dodge, p.364).