(DOWNLOAD) "Afterword." by English Studies in Canada # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Afterword.
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 166 KB
Description
The essays in this special issue of English Studies in Canada employ a variety of scholarly approaches to engage with Canada's unfolding reconciliation process--clearly no small undertaking. Yet, this work, and this collection, is of monumental importance to Indigenous people and to the future of our relationships with the people of Canada. It is also of great importance to the descendents of settlers and other immigrants who make up the rest of Canada's population. Unfortunately, most know little about residential schools, and too many do not care. As my mother used to tell me, "Ignorance is bliss." Bliss, in this instance, is predicated on erasure and denial of Canada's colonial past and present. Worse yet, the Government of Canada continues to perpetuate this ignorance through its public denial of our shared history. In their introduction, Pauline Wakeham and Jennifer Henderson confront Canadian policies, practices, and strategies of denial by holding up for critical examination Prime Minister Stephen Harper's claim that Canada has no colonial history. They go on to theorize the ideological foundation of Canada's apology to residential school survivors and find it lacking in substance and action. They argue that the limitations placed on the mandate and operations of the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) serves to preserve and protect Canada's liberal reputation and continues to deny its history of privilege and oppression. Indeed, the Government of Canada has effectively muzzled the survivors through its design of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's processes, in which all truth telling that names victimizers must be done in camera. Wakeham and Henderson's analysis reveals that reconciliation, Canadian style, has been distorted into a hegemonic process whose ideological foundation is an "implied phantasmatic past of harmony and equitable relations between Canada and First Peoples" (xxx). Clearly, this does not bode well for the many residential school survivors who are placing so much hope in the TRC.