Reconciling Canada: English Professor co-edits a book on Canadian redress movements in the era of official apologies
Reconciling Canada: English Professor co-edits a book on Canadian redress movements in the era of official apologies
Book Cover
Professor in the Department of English, Jennifer Henderson has co-edited a new book entitled Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. The book is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that address a range of questions relating to movements for redress of historical injury in Canada.
Canada claims the title of the first liberal-democratic nation-state of the northern hemisphere to go through a truth and reconciliation process. This book puts that claim in a historical context by placing the 2008 Government apology for residential schooling and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process alongside previous redress movements in Canada, including the movement for acknowledgement and compensation relating to the war-time internment of Japanese Canadians.
Proposing the concept of a ‘culture of redress’ Reconciling Canada suggests that each of these attempts to reckon with the past influences and interacts with others. A ‘culture of redress’ might imply that inequities and group injuries have ended, but the contributors to Reconciling Canada maintain that redress and reconciliation are ongoing, unending processes.
The book includes essays by scholars in the fields of law, Indigenous studies, cultural studies, political science, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology. The essays are organized into sections on Settler Culture and the Terrain of Reconciliation; Citizenship, Nationhood, Law; Testimony and Truth Telling; Grieving and Grievance, Mourning and Memory; Performing Redress; and Redress and Transnationalism.
It has over 150 pages of appendices which are primary source documents related to a range of redress movements and cases, including injuries acknowledged by the federal government in recent decades as well as cases of discrimination that have yet to be recognized via official state apologies. With the recent limitations put on access to Library and Archives Canada materials, having these documents (like Duncan Campbell Scott’s 1920 testimony before a House of Commons Committee on legislation to implement residential schooling) readily accessible is all the more important.
Get Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress here.