Cultivating Canada

He is a former President of the Indian Brotherhood of Northwest Territories/Dene Nation and the Denendeh Development Corporation, a former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, former Co-Chair of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and currently is the President of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and Chief Negotiator for the Dehcho First Nations. [...] The subjects of historical wrongdoings and redress, healing, and reconciliation have many localized variants, among them the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War and the demolition of Africville in the 1960s, for examples. [...] Or the troubles that ensued when the Minquon Panchayat came together in 1992 to challenge the white autocracy of the artist-run centre scene in Canada, its very name and membership comprised of a blend of Aboriginal and immigrant, racialized and radicalized in extremis, an exercise in both alliance and inner contestations. [...] When the Aboriginal Healing Foundation first approached me to edit this, the third of three volumes addressing the complexities of reconciliation in Canada, I was asked to develop an anthology that could bring in non- Indigenous voices to somehow widen the breadth of the current discourses on the issue that, to date, have largely centred on the difficult binary of colonizer and colonized, of White [...] Acknowledging the centrality of the idea of land meant that the title should reflect this without re-inscribing simplified tropes of belonging and proprietorship, and yet we also wanted—needed—to address the vast historical and migrational complexities of working on, with, and in this geographic space.