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Reviewed by:
  • Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada
  • Molly Blyth
Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press 2010)

Will contemporary Canadian settler society eventually recognize its immense privilege, inherited as a by-product of the brutal colonization of Indigenous people? Will it wake up from the cultural amnesia that has so successfully erased that history from its collective consciousness? Will non-Indigenous citizens who do come to terms with their past learn how to become allies of Native activists? Will that be possible, given the poisonous legacy of the Indian residential schools and its effect on Indigenous communities today? Will settlers ultimately arrive at a space of healing where we resist stereotyping Native people as ill, but instead learn that the sickness exists in our society not [End Page 294] theirs? These uncomfortable questions, and many more like them, act as a persistent refrain in Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. Its author, Paulette Regan, is a “white settler” who writes specifically to a non-Native audience. Her main agenda is to provoke Canadians, even a few, to such an extent that they undertake the long, destabilizing journey towards critical self-reflexivity, the necessary first step to decolonization and one she describes as “unsettling the settler within.” Only then, she argues, can they participate with Indigenous people in “restorying” their past. This dialogue holds the potential for reconciliation between Indigenous and settler societies; however, it also involves truth telling on both sides. Unfortunately, most Canadians have proved themselves unwilling participants.

Regan is director of research for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc). While noting she does not write from that position, she recognizes that her unsettling questions come from her involvement with the trc and as an alternative dispute manager with its precursor, the Alternative Dispute Resolution Program (adrp). Her work in both arenas initiated an examination of her own complicity in the failed but still destructive assimilationist policies of the residential school system. Such knowledge has had a transformative effect, teaching her the importance of compassion and humility in her often-futile attempts to establish trust with residential school survivors. Her focus in the book, then, is to bring that experience to bear in formulating a critical, decolonizing pedagogy, one she names Critical Hope after Pedagogy of Hope, Paulo Frere’s ground-breaking book advocating radical education as central to the struggle for freedom and justice. Strategies incorporated into Regan’s project begin with truth telling and reconciliation. According to Regan, a key goal of the trc is educating the non-Native majority in Canada about the devastating effects of residential schools and, in the process, to insist that they and not its survivors take personal responsibility for it. Only then can the journey towards reconciliation begin. As a result of her focus on the trc, Regan places it in context for the first time, discussing not only the problems with the adrp that led to the founding of the trc but also the current difficulties and criticism it now faces. Her important contribution to the field also includes both a critical analysis of other forms of restorative justice, including an in-depth account of Australia’s Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, and the nature and effectiveness of official apologies to Indigenous peoples in Canada and elsewhere.

Educating the public on both the history of residential schools and their legacy, which includes the cycle of dysfunction and despair suffered by Indigenous communities throughout Canada, is a key recommendation made by the trc in its interim report released in February 2012. Teaching students in schools and universities this history as well as the Indigenous counter-narrative to traditional Canadian history is also a vital aspect of Regan’s Critical Hope pedagogy. Another important goal is to destabilize the mainstream myth of tolerance, which allows the non-Native majority to engage in what Regan calls “selective forgetting”; as a result, we live in denial over the injustices imposed on minorities by successive Canadian governments. Such denial also permits systemic racism to go, for the...

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