Reconciling Canada

"A crucial resource for classrooms, researchers, and anyone wanting to understand the dynamics of Canada's culture of redress, Reconciling Canada offers important resources for setting Canada's projects of apology and reconciliation in context. The editors have collected in one volume timely insights from some of Canada's leading scholars on the possibilities and problems in Canada's many and manifold projects of reconciliation. The volume also reproduces historical documents on key apologies to remind readers of the long and diverse history of apology in Canada." -- Daniel Coleman, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations.

Truth and reconciliation commissions and official governmental apologies continue to surface worldwide as mechanisms for coming to terms with human rights violations and social atrocities. As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state.

In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations. The contributors offer ground-breaking perspectives on Canada’s ‘culture of redress,’ broaching questions of law and constitutional change, political coalitions, commemoration, testimony, and literatures of injury and its aftermath. Also assembled together for the first time is a collection of primary documents – including government reports, parliamentary debates, and redress movement statements – prefaced with contextual information. Reconciling Canada provides a vital and immensely relevant illumination of the dynamics of reconciliation, apology, and redress in contemporary Canada.