Canada's Impossible Acknowledgment

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/canadas-impossible-acknowledgment
Date Written:  2017-11-07
Publisher:  The New Yorker
Year Published:  2017
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23047

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its final report in 2015 with ninety-four calls to action, and renewed hope that the nation would finally confront its darkest history with tangible action. This article looks at why this process has yet again stalled, one which repeats the cycle of promises and yet again does not deliver.

Abstract: 
--

Excerpt:

The indigenous crisis goes to the heart, not just of the legitimacy of our law but of our desire to grow up as a country. Canada has never had a revolution, but we're too old to be a colony anymore. It's getting embarrassing. The potential of the Canadian multicultural future is intimately bound up in overcoming the colonial past. They are, in essence, the same project: decolonization. When Syrian refugees arrived in Calgary, shortly after Trudeau's election, a Blackfoot elder greeted them with a smudging ceremony, the traditional sage-burning welcome. (Last year, the oath of citizenship was changed to require new Canadians to pledge to honor indigenous treaties.) The new Canada contains a terrible incongruity: every refugee is a settler. Reckoning with that contradiction will be figuring out who we are.