Anne Godlewska

First Nations, Métis and Inuit Presence in the Newfoundland and Labrador Curriculum.

Abstract This article responds to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canada’s 2015 call for the education of Canadians about ‘residential schools, treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada.’ It is an analysis of the Canadian and world studies curricula and texts in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1 of the 13 provinces and territories of Canada. The analysis is based on academic research and consultations with First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples (FNMI) educators, educational administrators and knowledge holders. Although there is evidence of reform, as a whole the curriculum suffers from silences and lack of context, problematic placement and associations, the intrusion of settler perspectives, contradiction over judgement about issues related to FNMI peoples and inconsistency that undermine efforts at reform. This article provides guidance to curriculum designers, textbook writers, teachers and administrators participating in the decolonization of education in Canada.

Social ignorance and Indigenous exclusion: public voices in the province of Quebec, Canada

This article explores the mobilization of ignorance to uphold and perpetuate settler privilege and domination in the public voice record generated by the Bouchard–Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation, held in Quebec, Canada from February 2007 to May 2008. The Commission was a provincially funded inquiry into how the public felt about accommodating ethnocultural deviance from an assumed norm. Focused primarily on recent immigrant difference, Aboriginal accommodation, Aboriginality and Aboriginal rights were deliberately excluded from the Commissions purview, yet they are suggestively apparent in the public display and performance of ignorance in the briefs received by the Commission. The role of the intellectual elite in shaping and perpetuating ignorance is clear in the interplay between the Commission parameters established by Bouchard and Taylor and the public response to those parameters. In this article, we theorize ignorance and its role in reinforcing colonial logics; discuss the Commissions work; analyse the written briefs submitted to the Commission; discuss the Commissions final report; and reflect on the personal and collective dynamics of ignorance and its consequences for settler–Aboriginal relations. Ignorance is understood here not as an absence of knowledge but as an active, though not necessarily self-conscious, agreement to “know the world wrongly” in a way that supports settler interests and masks its own existence.

Immigration, colonisation et propagande. Du rêve américain au rêve colonial. [Immigration, colonization and propaganda. From the American Dream to the Colonial Dream]

but such stories are hardly new. With regard to law and order, the documentary record is both fragmentary and difficult to interpret. Although some exemplary cases are provided, one cannot hope for more than glimpses of what must have been a continual struggle between the good and the bad. We know from other comparable studies that robberies, rapes, rustling, domestic violence, and homicides were permanent features of local communities throughout the colonial world. What potentially made San Miguel different was its location on the northeastern frontier, hence the significance of chapter 11’s title, ‘‘Security on the Frontier.’’ But here again, one only learns of the annual review of the militia on the Day of Santiago (15 July), the perpetual threats of attack, and the limited defenses established. The most detailed chapter is the one dedicated to a reconstruction of the population of San Miguel. Here one has adequate runs (from 1760) of baptisms, marriages, and deaths to monitor the changing demographic profile. The effects of seasonality and racial ‘‘preferences’’ in marriages are illustrated, as are the impacts of the persistent epidemics that ravaged the northern settlements throughout the colonial period. The causes of death in the epidemic year of 1815 are valuable details. Censuses also provide several cross-sections of family and household structure. More than seventy pages of appendices close out the study, providing useful extracts from a wide range of period documents. Notwithstanding the valuable details concerning the settlement of San Miguel and its peoples, one has to raise the issue of the utility of such a microgeographical study: does the selected place have an exceptional richness of sources that allows us to penetrate beneath the mantle of macrocolonial generalities concerning agriculture, mining, administration, and so forth? Or does it exemplify some wider processes at an innovative levelFjust how irrigation or the labor system or marriage alliances worked at the local level. The records of San Miguel would appear to be too fragmentary to fulfill either of these requirements. Readers will also be puzzled over the lack of direct reference to the figures; no general listing is provided in the text, and mere numbers in square brackets are cited with only some figures with underline titles. Why marriages are presented on two graphs (p. 184) is not clear. Placing notes (of which there are almost 600) at the end of each chapter makes cross-referencing very difficult, and given the rather lavish production of the volume, which includes random noncited modern photos, one might have expected footnotes. The general index is at the end rather than the beginning of the volume, another unhelpful measure. If the author is to continue to work at this microlevel, more attention needs to be paid to the selection of the communityFbut with more than 2,400 municipalities to choose from, possibilities are not in short supply.