In a global era of apology and reconciliation, Canadians, like their counterparts in other settler nations, face a moral and ethical dilemma that stems from an unsavoury colonial past. Canadians grew up believing that the history of their country is a story of the cooperative venture between people who came from elsewhere to make a better life and those who were already here, who welcomed and embraced them, aside from a few bad white men.on 11 June 2008, the Prime Minister (...) of Canada Stephen Harper made a Statement of Apology on behalf of the Canadian government for the Indian Residential Schools system : “The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian Residential... (shrink)

The Sámi have long desired a public process to examine and expose the Nordic states’ colonial, assimilationist practices and policies, past and present, toward the Sámi people. This article considers the truth and reconciliation process in Finland, assessing it in light of recent legislative and other measures. Employing settler colonial theory, it argues that reconciliation, although seemingly progressive, signifies a continuation of colonialism unless the state terminates its current approach of overlooking Sámi rights. The article concludes with a discussion of (...) structural reconciliation and justice and considers some concrete measures for structural change in order for the reconciliation process to be valid and successful in Finland. (shrink)

Appeals to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission haunt most post-1990s institutional attempts to address historical injustice. Comparing Canada and South Africa, Nagy notes that “loose analogizing” has hampered the application of important lessons from the South African to the Canadian TRC—namely, the discovery that “narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence.” Taking up her important specification of the Canada-South Africa analogy, we expand Nagy’s recent findings by gendering the continuum of (...) settler colonial violence in both locations and by outlining the implications of these TRCs for Indigenous and Black women in particular. In both the Canadian attempt to grapple with the legacy of residential schools and the South African effort to deal with a history of apartheid, institutional approaches to truth have been both narrow and androcentric. The simultaneous historical bounding and social consolidation of Indigenous experiences of abuse and injustice has thus produced a “double settler denial.”. (shrink)