Truth and reconciliation commissions and official governmental apologies continue to surface worldwide as mechanisms for coming to terms with human rights violations and social atrocities. As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state.

In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations. The contributors offer ground-breaking perspectives on Canada’s ‘culture of redress,’ broaching questions of law and constitutional change, political coalitions, commemoration, testimony, and literatures of injury and its aftermath. Also assembled together for the first time is a collection of primary documents – including government reports, parliamentary debates, and redress movement statements – prefaced with contextual information. Reconciling Canada provides a vital and immensely relevant illumination of the dynamics of reconciliation, apology, and redress in contemporary Canada.

Jennifer Henderson is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Sociology/Anthropology and the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University.

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Pauline Wakeham is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario.

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‘”A historicization of redress” is a stated objective of the collection, and the editors have marshalled expertise from across the disciplines to achieve this end.’

University of Toronto Quarterly vol 84:03:2015

‘Reconciling Canada is the first text to comprehensively unpack Canada’s unique position in history, marking it as an important contribution to both Canadian and reconciliation studies.’

Canadian Literature Spring 2014

“This serious engagement with the challenges posed by the culture of redress in Canada is an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand our history and for imagining alternative futures.… A milestone in Canadian interdisciplinary scholarship, this book repays the effort it demands. If Northrop Frye was correct in diagnosing the central Canadian question as “where is here?” then this book shows “here” to be a complex place in which healing and hope are yet to be achieved but can be imagined differently. “

University Affairs, December 3, 2014.