In 2008, Canada established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to mend the deep rifts between Aboriginal peoples and the settler society that created Canada’s notorious residential school system. Unsettling the Settler Within argues that non-Aboriginal Canadians must undergo their own process of decolonization in order to truly participate in the transformative possibilities of reconciliation. Settlers must relinquish the persistent myth of themselves as peacemakers and acknowledge the destructive legacy of a society that has stubbornly ignored and devalued Indigenous experience. A compassionate call to action, this powerful book offers a new and hopeful path toward healing the wounds of the past.
Paulette Regan is the director of research for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. She holds a PhD from the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria.
Seeking to navigate the complex terrain of reconciliation in Canada, Regan’s text is an important contribution to settler studies in Canada … Her ability to fuse literatures from the burgeoning field of settler studies and anticolonial scholarship is impressive.
Regan weaves together her own profoundly personal experiences in Indigenous communities with wider historical study and narrative analysis … most compelling.
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