Description
The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada is a visually striking collection that combines innovative writing with images to explore how artists working across a variety of disciplines and media define, envision, and experience reconciliation. The contributors acknowledge reconciliation as contested terrain in the context of Canada as an ongoing colonial enterprise, a prominent narrative about Indigenous settler relations, and a catalyst for critical conversations about what social justice might look like. Common throughout is a refusal to accept empty words and gestures as a substitute for action and change. Contributors include David Garneau, Skeena Reece, Tanya Willard, Peter Morin, Ayumi Goto, Leah Decter, Sandra Semchuk, Christi Belcourt, Jonathan Dewar, Allison Hargreaves, Heather Igloliorte, Jamie Isaac, David Jefferess, Dylan Robinson, Adrian Stimson, Carla Taunton, Tania Willard, and Keren Zaiontz. This outstanding and moving collection of art pieces, installations, prose, poetry, interview, and found text all combine to push the dialogue about residential schools, murdered and missing Indigenous women and truth and reconciliation. Editors are Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Métis artist from Vancouver, BC and Sophie McCall, settler scholar and Associate Professor in the English department at Simon Fraser University.