To date what has become painfully clear is that the responsibility and burden of truth telling has fallen largely on Indigenous Peoples, communities, and Nations. Survivors have been forced to continue to fight the church and state in court to have their records released and their experiences validated. We only have to consider the infamous St. Anne’s Residential School, where Survivors are in a legal battle for their records. According to Veldon Coburn, the continued failure of Indigenous and Northern Affairs[3] to release these illustrates,
There is no difference between the suppression of the truth and denial of the truth. Both tactics – whether deployed to advance reconciliation or resist it – subordinate Indigenous Peoples and their truth of Residential Schools and the integral part this system of cultural genocide played in colonialism.
That unceded Mi’kmaw Land was occupied by a chief framer of the 1763 Royal Proclamation must give us pause. Although the Proclamation established a set of principles for good relationships with North American nations, on-the-ground military strategies and the use of Indigenous Land as reward for imperial service made it easy to ignore these principles, even by the framers themselves.
by Peter Thompson Pictou is a sleepy town of about 3000 people on the north shore of Nova Scotia. Despite its small size and its place on Canada’s margins, Pictou has been featured twice in the pages of ActiveHistory.ca over the past decade. First in Lachlan MacKinnon’s 2014 piece, “The Power-Politics of Pulp and Paper: Health, Environment and Work in… Read more »
This article is reposted, in slightly edited form and with permission, from the fourth issue of Syndemic Magazine: “The Colours of Covid-19.” Syndemic Magazine is a project of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. Brandon J. Cordeiro In Thunder Bay, Ontario, the city’s prison battled a Covid-19 outbreak through winter 2021. Overpopulated and faced with growing cases, the… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/History-Slam-212.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham On February 24, 1884, Louie Sam, a Stó:lo teenager, was accused by an angry mob of starting a fire that killed James Bell, a shopkeeper in the settler community Nooksack, in what is now Whatcom County, Washington, which borders British Columbia. Without any evidence, the assembled mob determined that Sam was… Read more »
By Kathleen Villeneuve Translated by Robert Twiss from an original publication in HistoireEngagée.ca On November 25 to 26, 2021 the Université de Montréal hosted the workshop “Settler Colonialism in Quebec: a blind spot of academic research?” Organized by professors Catherine Larochelle and Ollivier Hubert, the aim of the workshop was to survey the state of research in settler colonial studies,… Read more »
By Kathleen Villeneuve Translated by Robert Twiss from an original publication in HistoireEngagée.ca On November 25 to 26, 2021 the Université de Montréal hosted the workshop “Settler Colonialism in Quebec: a blind spot of academic research?” Organized by professors Catherine Larochelle and Ollivier Hubert, the aim of the workshop was to survey the state of research in settler colonial studies,… Read more »
By Kathleen Villeneuve Translated by Robert Twiss from an original publication in HistoireEngagée.ca On November 25 to 26, 2021 the Université de Montréal hosted the workshop “Settler Colonialism in Quebec: a blind spot of academic research?” Organized by professors Catherine Larochelle and Ollivier Hubert, the aim of the workshop was to survey the state of research in settler colonial studies,… Read more »
By Kathleen Villeneuve Translated by Robert Twiss from an original publication in HistoireEngagée.ca On November 25 to 26, 2021 the Université de Montréal hosted the workshop “Settler Colonialism in Quebec: a blind spot of academic research?” Organized by professors Catherine Larochelle and Ollivier Hubert, the aim of the workshop was to survey the state of research in settler colonial studies,… Read more »
By Kathleen Villeneuve Translated by Robert Twiss from an original publication in HistoireEngagée.ca On November 25 to 26, 2021 the Université de Montréal hosted the workshop “Settler Colonialism in Quebec: a blind spot of academic research?” Organized by professors Catherine Larochelle and Ollivier Hubert, the aim of the workshop was to survey the state of research in settler colonial studies,… Read more »