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141 Crisis of Representation: Multiculturalism, Minquon Panchyat, and the “The Lands Within Me” KIRSTY ROBERTSON AND J. KERI CRONIN In 1971, Canada became the first country in the world to declare multiculturalism as official state policy. The bold step charted the path to a vibrant and evolving cultural mosaic premised on mutual respect for Canadians of all backgrounds and ancestry. Yet the roots of multiculturalism in Canada can be seen in the country’s earliest beginnings, as three founding cultures—Aboriginal, British and French—were soon joined by many more from around the globe. Today, multiculturalism is a touchstone of Canadian national identity and a point of pride for Canadians from coast to coast to coast.1 What does it mean to be Canadian? Pointing to a pamphlet produced by the Canadian Heritage Department, scholar and artist Monika Kin Gagnon notes the paradox at the centre of a “crisis of representation” in Canada. She notes, “On the one hand, … the pamphlet states that the Department of Canadian Heritage wants ‘to promote and help sustain Canada’s cultural diversity and promote Canadian identity by ensuring that we have the community, institutional and industrial capacity and infrastructure that are required.’” But, she continues, “On the other hand, in order ‘to connect Canadians to one another’ the Department of Canadian Heritage wants ‘to help Canadians overcome differences and distances to better understand one another and increase our appreciation of the values that we share as Canadians.’”2 The impetus to both celebrate difference and assimilate is a conundrum that the authors suggest “ripples through the thought of Canada’s multicultural heritage and its visions of a pluralist society.”3 Multiculturalism is a defining symbolic ideal of Canadian identity. Introduced in 1971 by Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government and formalized as an Act of Parliament in 1988 by the Brian Mulroney–led Conservatives, citizens are regularly told that multiculturalism is a unique part of what it means to be Canadian. In Canada, the ideals of multiculturalism are celebrated and lauded (as shown in the quote at the opening of this piece). The limits and definitions of multiculturalism are also sites of intense contestation, however, where the politics of belonging are played out across a range of sites and topics. Although, as Kin Gagnon suggests above, the idea of a unifying narrative of Canadian history and culture has been an extremely Imagining Resistance 142 important part of negotiating Canadian self-identity in an increasingly globalized and post-national world,4 the extent of this is demonstrated by Eva Mackey, who argues that “Multiculturalism … has as much to do with the construction of identity for those Canadians who do not conceive of themselves as ‘multicultural’ as for those who do.”5 Multiculturalism and a perceived crisis of Canadian identity (or lack thereof) often collapse into a hegemony of tolerance where “the power and choice whether to accept difference, to tolerate it or not, still lies in the hands of the tolerators .”6 Any notion of Canadian identity, it should be noted, is thus necessarily constructed atop a history of disempowerment, disenfranchisement, and cultural genocide—primarily of Aboriginal peoples but also of a litany of others who didn’t fit a given period’s definition of what it meant to be Canadian. This short section traces two moments where the collision of interests profoundly affected and altered the state of culture in Canada. Minquon Panchyat was part of a movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s that aimed to draw attention to some of systemic inequalities in the Canadian cultural scene. This included the international film and video conference/symposium In Visible Colours (1989), the film and video conference /workshop About Face, About Frame (1992), the 1993 conference It’s a Cultural Thing, and the 1994 Writing Thru Race Conference, as well as the attempt by the Minquon Panchayat caucus to form the Association of National Non-Profit Artists’ Centres/Regroupement d’artistes des centres alternatives (ANNPAC/RACA). Each of these efforts attempted to push the cultural scene in Canada in a more equitable direction, and all are “instances of cultural spaces created by and for the valuing of artists of colour and First Nations artists’ media.”7 Some of these initiatives were more controversial than others—when the Writing Thru Race conference asked that only members of colour or writers of First Nations’ ancestry be allowed to attend daytime programming, a controversy erupted. The disagreement grew from within the ranks of the Writers Union of...

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