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We examine how 20 university students interacted with a virtual Residential School that was designed in partnership with a group of Indigenous Survivors of Canada's Residential Schools system. We begin by offering a brief history of Canada's Residential Schools system as well as the origins and ambitions of the Embodying Empathy project. We also reflect on the idea of empathy as it has been taken up both in the design and testing phases of the project and on how student participants enacted their empathy. We demonstrate how participants worked through their immersion in the virtual Residential School, selecting empathy frames that allowed them to grapple with its content and connect with the Survivor narratives presented therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A particularly egregious example of settler injustice was the murder of a young nehiyaw man named Colten Boushie in August, 2016, shot in the head by a white farmer named Gerald Stanley. An all-white jury in Saskatchewan acquitted Stanley in February 2018, touching off demonstrations across the country. This article contextualizes the Stanley trial within settler colonial history, and argues that the trial and its aftermath provide a window into the ways settler colonialism tries to silence Indigenous peoples. Divided into four parts, the article first explores the concept of settler silencing, while the second looks at the context of settler colonialism in with a focus on Treaty 6 lands in Saskatchewan, and how the Treaty has been silenced for over a century. I then move to a detailed engagement with the killing of Colten Boushie and the trial which followed. I draw liberally on the trial transcript, demonstrating various techniques used to silence Indigenous peoples while confining speech and the articulation of what constitutes the norm to a handful of non-Indigenous legal professionals. I focus here on multiple examples of how settler silencing works in practice, before in the final part make several conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1960s, some Aboriginal theorists and political leaders have opposed aspects of Canadian multiculturalism. In part this is because multicultural policies and their promise of "tolerance" (within western institutions) and formal equality insufficiently recognize the sui generis rights of Aboriginal peoples, while similarly failing to address the continuing economic, social, and political inequalities between Aboriginal and settler populations. This article proposes working towards a "syncretic multiculturalism," which might involve adopting a "binational" perspective, focusing on the need for partnership between Aboriginal and Shognosh peoples. Such a perspective can help the country move beyond "colonial multiculturalism" which privileges integration into dominant English and French settler societies. Prioritizing Aboriginal involvement in reshaping national institutions and identity, so that newcomers and the rest of us are integrated into Aboriginal ways of knowing and being, can play a role in repairing some of the harms done through residential schooling and other colonial policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent claims by Saul (2008) that Canada's federal and provincial systems of government, including its justice systems, have been strongly influenced by Aboriginal peoples, this article advances that any influence has been largely coincidental. A detailed critical appraisal of Saul's work reveals a romanticized glossing over of Aboriginal--settler history rather than a detailed engagement with it. Taking Saul's purported goals rather than his analysis as a starting point, this article seeks to examine ways in which provincial and federal government legislative institutions might better incorporate (some) Aboriginal conceptions of power, justice, and decision-making. In so doing it argues for a process of "syncretic democracy," which includes symbols, ceremonies, guaranteed Aboriginal seats in existing institutions, potentially new institutions, and a much larger process of deliberation around how best to indigenize (and change) Canada's institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]