DB Graves’s Reviews > The Land We Are: Artists & Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation > Status Update

"...Imagine in your literature courageously questioning and examining the values that allow the dehumanization of peoples through domination and the dispassionate nature of racism inherent in perpetuating such practices. ...Imagine interpreting for us your own people's thinking towards us, instead of interpreting for us, our thinking, our lives and our stories."
(Jeanette Armstrong, "Disempowerment" 143)

We reflect here on reconciliation as something that might be understood as "always beginning" rather than an end, and as an altered relation rather than a solution to be worked toward.

[We also have no history of colonialism.]
The reception of Harper's G20 [2009] statement underscores the persistent mythology of Canada's benevolence and innocence, and the proclivity for settler's to escape accountability. I began to develop (official denial) trade value in progress in late 2009 in response... its relatively low profile, and the general acceptance of the veracity of its claim...

Land emerges as an important recurring theme--one that exposes as disingenuous a supposedly "new" era of reconciliation.

Arts-based approaches to reconciliation are often touted as a positive step forward and are viewed favourably in narratives of "moving on" and "healing" in the name of a unified nation. The widely accepted truism that art heals suggest an affective process that does not not necessarily involve institutional change. Furthermore, it implies that art's function is to smooth over, to make whole rather than disrupt.