Reconciliation

"Confronting the truths of Canada’s Indian residential school system has been likened to waking a sleeping giant. In The Sleeping Giant Awakens, David B. MacDonald uses genocide as an analytical tool to better understand Canada’s past and present relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples.

"More than thirty years ago, section 35 of the Constitution Act recognized and affirmed 'the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada.' Hailed at the time as a watershed moment in the legal and political relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler societies in Canada, the constitutional entrenchment of Aboriginal and treaty rights has proven to be only the beginning of the long and complicated process of giving meaning to that constitutional recognition.

"Fragile Settlements compares the processes through which colonial authority was asserted over Indigenous people in southwest Australia and prairie Canada from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. At the start of this period, there was an explosion of settler migration across the British Empire. As a humanitarian response led to the unprecedented demand for land, Britain's Colonial Office moved to protect Indigenous peoples by making them subjects under British law.

"Between 1867 and 2000, the Canadian government sent over 150,000 Aboriginal children to residential schools across the country. Government officials and missionaries agreed that in order to “civilize and Christianize” Aboriginal children, it was necessary to separate them from their parents and home communities.