Professor: Pamela Klassen

T - 9:00 am to 11:45 am

What responsibility do later generations have to remember and atone for the injustices of the past, even as they are perpetuated in the present? This course focuses on how projects of national public memory—especially commissions of “Truth and Reconciliation”—grapple with the demands of the past as they are experienced, ignored, and/or re-narrated by successive generations. Our class discussions will be oriented by readings from the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which addressed government and church complicity in the system of “Indian Residential Schools.” We will consider the possibilities and limits of reconciliation as a Christian-inflected term often used in settler-colonial nations, comparing it to other concepts of historical reckoning, including reparations and resurgence. We will also visit local sites in Cambridge and surrounding areas, asking how places and monuments carry the past and call new generations to contend with them as sacralised, ritualized, and politicized sites of memory.