Reading (Re)conciliation in White Settler and Chinese Canadian Narratives: From Liberal towards Transformative Approaches

This article explores how four settler narratives situate themselves differently within the reconciliation discourse in response to the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. In my reading of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Spawning Grounds (2016) and Jennifer Manuel’s The Heaviness of Things That Float (2016) alongside Doretta Lau’s “How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?” (2014) and Amy Fung’s Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being (2019), I show how these narratives express different degrees of critical reflection on the settler colonial state and differ in their acknowledgement of Indigenous resurgence. I adopt David B. MacDonald’s distinction between “liberal reconciliation,” which is based on a “shared vison of a harmonious future,” and “transformative reconciliation,” which “is about fundamentally problematizing the settler state as a colonial creation, a vector of cultural genocide, and one that continues inexorably to suppress Indigenous collective aspirations for self-determination and sovereignty” as a critical framework.

Forming strong cultural identities in an intersecting space of indigeneity and autism in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand

Through its hegemonic ideologies, colonialism and its constituent underpinnings of religious and racial superiority, necessitates the erasure of the cultural identity of people outside the dominant Euro-Western culture and as non-normative groups, Indigenous Peoples and autistic people disabled per colonized paradigms, experience oppression, and subjugation harmful to self-identity and mental health. This article discusses culturally responsive interventions aimed at supporting strong cultural identity formation and safeguard Indigenous and autistic people from stigmatization, misrepresentation, and erasure of identity. Promising research uses Indigenous knowledges in education and arts programming to disrupt patterns of social injustice, exclusion, and cultural genocide while promote positive identity formation, pride, and resilience for Indigenous autistics. While Indigenous and autistic people exist globally, this article reviews literature from Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

Sustaining Cultural Genocide—A Look at Indigenous Children in Non-Indigenous Placement and the Place of Judicial Decision Making—A Canadian Example

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called upon Canada to engage in a process of reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Child Welfare is a specific focus of their Calls to Action. In this article, we look at the methods in which discontinuing colonization means challenging legal precedents as well as the types of evidence presented. A prime example is the ongoing deference to the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Racine v Woods which imposes Euro-centric understandings of attachment theory, which is further entrenched through the neurobiological view of raising children. There are competing forces observed in the Ontario decision on the Sixties Scoop, Brown v Canada, which has detailed the harm inflicted when colonial focused assimilation is at the heart of child welfare practice. The carillon of change is also heard in a series of decisions from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in response to complaints from the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations regarding systemic bias in child welfare services for First Nations children living on reserves. Canadian federal legislation Bill C-92, “An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families”, brings in other possible avenues of change. We offer thoughts on manners decolonization might be approached while emphasizing that there is no pan-Indigenous solution. This article has implications for other former colonial countries and their child protection systems.

Muslim Marginalization in India: From Ethnic Conflict Perspective

With BJP arrival to power, secular face of India has received severe criticism in international community. Latest report of the American. Nationalistic patriotism with some other factors like relative development differences, discrimination at social and economic level, continuous discrimination by the ruling elite, lack of political representation and voicing out grievances have become the root cause of ethnic violence in India which can push to the generation of parochialism. Cultural genocide and deliberate unequal economic development have caused major loss of Muslim lives and property and generate issues including demographic reshaping and political disenfranchisement which has further severe implications for Muslims. This paper will try to highlight the ethnic violence on Muslims in India, analyze the reasons behind the ethnic conflict and its manifestation through primordial and instrumental theoretical framework and finally provide road maps to solution.

Cultural Diversity in Igbo Life: A Postcolonial Response to Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

In his book Chinua Achebe, David Caroll (1980) describes the novel Arrow of God as a fight for dominance both on the theological and political level, as well as in the framework of Igbo philosophy. In Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1990), famous Achebe critics C. L. Innes and Berth Lindforts consider Arrow of God as a novel with conflicting ideas and voices inside each community with the tensions and rivalries that make it alive and vital. Another profound scholar on Achebe Chinwe Christiana Okechukwu (2001) in Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe's Novels assesses Arrow of God, which depicts a community under imminent danger of cultural genocide unleashed by agents of Western imperialism who have recently arrived in the indigenous society. However, the author in this study attempts to see Arrow of God as a postcolonial response to cultural diversity that upholds its uniting and cohesive force in Nigerian Igbo life. The goal is to look at how Achebe, in response to misleading western discourses, develops a simplistic image and appreciation that persists in Igbo life and culture even as colonization takes hold. This paper also exhibits how the Igbo people share their hardships, uphold their age-old ideals, celebrate festivals, and even battle on disagreements. This study employs postcolonial theory to reconsider aspects of cultural diversity among the African Igbo people, which are threatened by the intervention of European colonialism in the name of religion, progress, and civilization.

Surviving a Cultural Genocide: Perspectives of Indigenous Elders on the Transfer of Traditional Values

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to examine how Indigenous elders perceive traditional values. This study employed Portraiture, which allowed Indigenous elders to share their stories in a culturally tailored and relational manner. The authors’ captured and present richly detailed stories that describe the intersects between human experiences and sacred beliefs. The scholars eloquently braid the first authors experiences at three (3) traditional Indigenous ceremonies with the words of Indigenous elders to tell a story about overcoming an attempted cultural genocide. The ceremony participation and elder visits helped identify ten traditional values encasing spirituality displayed in the Hoop of Traditional Blackfoot Values presented in the English language and the Blackfoot language.

Tuberculosis Stigma and Racism, Colonialism, and Migration: A Rapid Qualitative Review

Current experiences of tuberculosis policy and care among Indigenous people are interpreted and understood in light of the past colonial violence and cultural genocide. The expressed reluctance to seek health care was often grounded in experiences of colonial violence and racism, pointing toward colonial and racist practice in health care as an important driver of tuberculosis stigma. The ongoing presence of anti-Indigenous racism in Canada’s health care systems underscores the ways that these worries are not confined to historical events but manifest in the interactions across individuals and systems today. For tuberculosis stigma in the context of migration, tuberculosis policies and programs targeting migrant persons or racialized groups were seen as fuelling discriminatory and exclusionary views and practices toward these groups in the wider society and exacerbating tuberculosis stigma. Migrant detention centres were 1 of the sites where tuberculosis stigma was amplified through isolation when diagnosed. Further, the twining of immigration policy with tuberculosis policy led to worries among migrant persons about one’s tuberculosis status and its impact on one’s immigration status, and subsequently a reluctance to access health care. These findings ask us to consider the ways that tuberculosis policy, in concert with immigration policy, can generate tuberculosis stigma. Tuberculosis stigma differs across contexts. It can be both a determinant of, and determined by, other forms of discrimination. Moreover, it requires close attention to the specific setting where tuberculosis stigma is sought to be addressed. The implications of this for tuberculosis policy and care are that a universal, one-size approach to addressing tuberculosis stigma is unlikely to be successful. Rather, program-specific approaches are likely needed that engage with questions as to how different forms of tuberculosis stigma play out in the context of care. Cutting across this review findings were widespread experiences of racism in health care. These findings suggest that, in as much as tuberculosis stigma is a barrier to the uptake of tuberculosis screening and treatment, racism against Indigenous people and racialized migrants remains endemic in Canada’s health care system and may in some cases overshadow the role or experience of tuberculosis stigma. In light of these findings, and again, depending on the particular setting, engaging with anti-racist efforts and challenging white supremacy remain necessary and urgent.