Ng‐A‐Fook & Milne - 2014 Canadian Social Studies Volume 47 - No. 2 - Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies

Oct 15, 2026

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In 2007, Indian Residential School System survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars and the settlement led to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite public acknowledgement, the work argues that Ontario social studies classrooms still lack opportunity and historical knowledge to address intergenerational impacts of the IRS. The essay asks how to reread and rewrite individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history as shadow texts, unsettling the present to support hopeful relations across communities.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages22

Reading Time55 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Historical limits and shadow texts

Truth and Reconciliation in pedagogy

Settler colonialism and curriculum narratives

Settler denial and disavowal

Ng‐A‐Fook & Milne, 2014 Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2 Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies Nicholas Ng A Fook Faculty of Education University of Ottawa [nngafook@uottawa.ca](nngafook@uottawa.ca) Robin Milne Faculty of Education University of Ottawa [rob@itutorls.com](rob@itutorls.com) Abstract In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts ofthe IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn toreread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon toreread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice. Our project requires that we subvert a view which constitutes existing forms of social life and social consciousness as obvious, natural, and taken for granted. We need to comprehend how the limits we all live within are historical limits. (Simon & Dippo, 1986, p. 198) I am estranged from a past to which I always arrive too late (thus as I come close, I find myself moving away). Yet this boundary is not simply the limit of my social imagination condemning me to indifference, voyeurism, or an epistemological violence that renders the experience of others in terms I recognize or imagine as Ng‐A‐Fook & Milne, 2014 Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2 my own. This boundary rather initiates the terms for the reconstructions of my historical memory. (Simon, 2000, p. 21) Yet at times, unsettling questions need to be asked. (Simon, 2013, p. 133) Nicholas and Robin: What is Truth and Reconciliation for Canadians? Why and how should it matter for teachers and students across Canada? What are our pedagogical obligations toward collectively witnessing, acknowledging, and remembering the historical experiences, impacts, and consequences of establishing the Indian Residential Schooling (IRS) system to ensure the future security of a settler nation‐state? Studying such ethical, historical, and social questions provokes us to subvert, as Simon and Dippo (1986) suggest, the historical limits of what constitutes our contemporary and future normative understandings of Indigenous and non‐Indigenous peoples’ treaty relations. In Settler Colonialism, Lorenzo Veracini (2010) situates some important discursive, material, political, and psychical distinctions among the descendants of European settlers, immigrant exogenous Others, and Indigenous peoples. Although,“immigrant exogenous Others often benefit from the dispossession of indigenous people, even as their incorporation into the settler body politics remains pending,…it is, the settler that establishes himself as the normative”(p. 18) . The settler often hides behind historical narratives whose storylines describe “the metropolitan colonizer,”“labour and hardship,”and “the peacemaker”(p. 14). Though we grew up in different places, our public school history courses taught us, as diasporic settler Canadians, that our descendants did not have the right to make econo

FAQs

What settlement and commission outcome does the abstract reference regarding the Indian Residential School System?

It references a 2007 class action settlement with an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government, and notes that the settlement included establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

What central question does the essay pose about Canadian history narratives?

It asks how people might learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history.

According to the authors, what role do “shadow texts” play in teaching and learning?

They treat life writing as shadow texts (currere) as a way to revisit the past to unsettle the present and reimagine more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities.

Oct 15, 2026

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