Suchergebnisse

There is conceptual confusion in academic scholarship regarding Indigenous research methodologies and decolonising research methodologies. Scholars view these paradigms as similar yet distinct, but very few seek to define that distinction. In this article, I explore the relationship between these approaches to academic research. Both paradigms emphasise the need to transform the academy because of its tendency to marginalise non-Western epistemologies. Transformation requires the interconnection and co-ordination of many paradigms including Indigenous, feminist, and antiracist approaches to research. I propose viewing Indigenous and decolonising research methodologies as a relationship, and suggest both are dynamic practices that do not exist outside of the people who use them. What they look like and how they relate to one another will depend upon who uses them, why they are used, and where they are practiced.

This paper addresses Canada's first national monument to the Holocaust: the National Holocaust Monument (NHM) in Ottawa. I examine how public discourse surrounding the NHM constructs the Holocaust as a Canadian memory. Political spokespersons create connections between the Holocaust and Canadian history by drawing on themes of Canada's Allied role during the war, post-war Jewish immigration, and the narrative of None Is too Many. The discourse frames Canada as both a hero and villain in respect to the Holocaust. Whereas some nations seek to resolve such conflicting memories, Canadians seem content to remember their nation in both ways.

The truth commission has emerged in the last thirty years as a distinct juridical form that views the production of truth as necessary, and in some cases sufficient, for achieving justice. In his history of truth-telling in juridical forms, Michel Foucault conducts a genealogy of avowal (or confession) in western judicial practice; critical to his definition of avowal is that the truth-teller and wrong-doer must be the same subject. In my analysis, I consider avowal in light of a relatively recent judicial innovation: the truth commission, with Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a particular case. The TRC's emphasis on the testimony of victims rather than perpetrators means that truth-telling and wrong-doing are decoupled in this juridical form, suggesting that avowal is not a function of truth commissions according to Foucault's criteria. Does this mean that truth commissions are not involved in truth production, or perhaps that they are not a juridical form in the lineage of those examined by Foucault? The truth commission is a juridical form that Foucault was unable to address because it developed only after his death, and it is possible that it challenges his core understanding of avowal; however, the truth commission also appears to be consistent with trends that he predicted about the role of truth-telling in the modern judicial system.