While effecting real change in our own lives as individuals and in groups is always hard, as human beings there is also often a tendency to believe this is even harder than it is (perhaps even impossible, we tell ourselves). And through that belief, we can make change harder than it already is.
page 21, True Reconciliation by Jody Wilson-Raybould
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first saw a copy of this book around the time of National Day for Truth and Reconciliation last year at the local book store on display with a collection of books by Canadian Indigenous authors. I have been wanting to read more books by Indigenous authors so I picked this book up.
The author’s name seemed familiar, turns out this was because I had vague recollection of the news of the SNC-Lavalin affair which was a Canadian political scandal from 2019 which the author was a key player in. From what I can tell the subsequent report on the affair proved that the author acted appropriately in her role as the Attorney General of Canada.
All of that is unrelated to the book at hand, just something that came up while I was doing research on the author and who she is. Let’s get into the book.
The Book
Fundamentally this book presents the concept of reconciliation with a framework containing three core practices – Learn, Understand, Act. As the back cover of the book mentions, this can be applied by individuals, communities, organizations and governments.
For me, this book mostly served as learning and understanding – specifically learning about the interactions between Indigenous populations and the colonizer, their thoughts on various political machinations that affected their lives from the creation of Canada to the present day. The first part of the book involves a section with quotes from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices on things like the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy aka The White Paper.
[The White paper is] a thinly disguised programme of extermination through assimilation.
In spite of all government attempts to convince Indians to accept the white paper, their efforts will fail, because Indians understand that the path outlined by the Department of Indian Affairs through its mouthpiece, the Honourable Mr. Chretien, leads directly to cultural genocide. We will not walk this path.
Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians (Edmonton: H. G. Hurtig, 1969),139.
I also learned about events that I did not learn about in my high school history classes – the Oka Crisis, the publishing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report, the Doctrine of Discovery, terra nullius, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples etc.
The book concludes with defining the term “inbetweener” who bridges the distance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that has been created by a “lack of acceptance and lack of care” and then then reinforced through cultural, structural, economical and political means.
Reconciliation–true reconciliation–is about closing that distance. Through acceptance and care. And when one accepts and cares, and acts based on that, one is an inbetweener.
page 310, True Reconciliation by Jody Wilson-Raybould
To be quite honest, I am not quite seeing the usefulness of this particular concept. The book essentially concludes that the anti-colonial concerns at hand cannot be achieved with violent and harmful means which in my understanding of anti-colonial movements is fairly ahistorical. Of course, not all anti-colonial action is violent but the violent nature of colonialism begets a violent response to fight against it as Fanon astutely pointed out in The Wretched of the Earth.
That is my one criticism of this book – it paints a rather milquetoast idea of what anti-colonial action is supposed to look like.
Conclusions
This book is a good jumping off point for folks seeking learning and understanding of the history of the Indigenous peoples of Canada. The book has a long list of references to other books and source material that you can use to further your understanding. This book achieves its goal of providing those first steps.
Reconciliation as a concept is not without its flaws and I am interested in reading more about it from other Indigenous points of view. More specifically, I have Unreconciled by Jesse Wente on my to-be-read pile and that presents a more critical view of reconciliation. Along those lines I also have The Knowing by Tanya Talaga on my TBR pile.
As always with my reviews of non-fiction books, here is a quote to close it out with:
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. it is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Chief Crowfoot (Blackfoot), quoted in Susan Ratcliffe, ed., Oxford Essential Quotations, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)
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