(DOWNLOAD) "Appropriating Guilt: Reconciliation in an Aboriginal Canadian Context." by English Studies in Canada # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Appropriating Guilt: Reconciliation in an Aboriginal Canadian Context.
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 220 KB
Description
IF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS, in Elie Wiesel's words, "the age of testimony," the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries might be called "the age of forgiveness." In the last twenty years, forgiveness and reconciliation have become part of an international discourse. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-98), Tasmania's apology to the Stolen Generation (2006), and Britain's apology to the Maori (1995) are just a few recent instances of reconciliation across different national contexts. In Canada, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) represented a similar gesture as the country confronted its colonial past and awakened to the insistence of that past in the present. Two years after RCAP released its 1996 report, the Canadian government issued a "Statement of Reconciliation" to former occupants of residential schools, stating it was "deeply sorry" for the collective and personal damage of these institutions on indigenous communities ("Statement"). Shaped by global politics, these attempts at reconciliation reflect a current sensibility of revisiting national history. More buried in these public attempts at reconciliation are questions about their ideological underpinnings and the interests they serve. In what ways does reconciliation function as a way for the nation to re-imagine and perform itself--less, that is, as a deconstruction of national master-narratives than a reconstruction of one? To what degree does the process of reconciliation satisfy wronged parties? Ten years before RCAP, the Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall Jr. Prosecution (1986-88) undertook a public inquiry into the wrongful conviction and eleven-year imprisonment of Donald Marshall (Mi'kmaq). (1) The Marshall Inquiry was not void of value: the commission and its subsequent report identified a crisis in the criminal justice system, particularly in its treatment of racial minorities. Beyond recognizing problems like cultural misunderstandings between defense counsel and clients, the foreignness of the courtroom to defendants of different cultural backgrounds, and institutional racism in policing bodies and the courts, the commission made a number of larger structural recommendations. On a local as well as a national scale, the Royal Commission set the ground for constitutional reconsiderations and legal reform by sounding a call for self-government, respect for treaty rights, and the implementation of indigenous, community-based models of justice. (2)