Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies

Abstract

In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in OntarioÕs social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non?Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As SimonÕs life?long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each otherÕs unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.