After Redress

Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Struggles for Justice

Edited by Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Mona Oikawa

UBC Press

Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians have demanded justice from the Canadian state for its discriminatory systems of colonialism and racial management. Since the early aughts, critics have argued that state apologies co-opt those demands. Meanwhile, many Canadian institutions still attempt to control narratives about residential schools and other violences committed against Indigenous peoples, as well as the internment of Japanese Canadians.

After Redress examines how struggles for justice continue long after truth and reconciliation commissions conclude and state redress is supposedly made. Contributors to this trenchant volume analyze the complex, often paradoxical process of redress from the perspectives of the communities involved. In a context where mechanisms for reconciliation and redress have been defined by the settler state, this book reveals how Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians have responded to Western liberal notions of justice, whether by challenging or conforming to them or pursuing their own approaches. It asks: What are the links between knowledge systems and governance, between narrative tactics and political strategy?

After Redress uncovers the effectiveness and the effects of demands for reparations and strategies to assert resistance.

This collection will have broad appeal for scholars and students of Japanese Canadian and Asian Canadian studies, Indigenous studies, critical race studies, and sociology. It is also necessary reading for activist members of Japanese Canadian and Indigenous communities, and for all those concerned with social justice alliances with Indigenous peoples and other racialized groups.

RELATED TOPICS: Critical Race Studies, Indigenous Studies, Race & Ethnicity, Sociology

Grounded in community-based research, and featuring a strong line-up of authors, After Redress makes many new and powerful points. It is the only collection to my knowledge that focuses on both Indigenous and Japanese Canadian redress and reconciliation movements, offering readers a new lens for considering the long histories of colonialism and racialization in Canada, and the various ways the nation-state has addressed and/or ignored them Christine Kim, author of The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America

Kirsten Emiko McAllister is a professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Among her publications are Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, Terrain of Memory: A Japanese Canadian Memorial Project, and Migration and Methodology: Doing Fieldwork, Decentring Power, and Foregrounding Migrants’ Perspectives.

Mona Oikawa is a faculty member in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University and a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction. She is the author of Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment.

Introduction: Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Writings on Justice “After Redress” / Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Mona Oikawa

1 Redress Settlements as Colonial Recognition / Bonita Lawrence

2 Web of Recognition: The National Association of Japanese Canadians and the 1989 Task Force on First Nations Peoples / Mona Oikawa

3 The Reconciliation That Never Was: Political Skulduggery on Indigenous Lands / Dorothy Cucw-la7 Christian

4 Whither Redress? Interrogating Liberal Multicultural Accounts of Japanese Canadian History / R. Tod Duncan

5 Narrating the After of the Moment of Redress: Fred Kelly’s "Confession of a Born Again Pagan" and Roy Miki’s Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice / Smaro Kamboureli

6 The Political Act of Defining Ourselves After Redress: Japanese Canadian Activism, Identity, and What Can Be Learned from the Principles of Indigenous Storytelling / Kirsten Emiko McAllister

7 Post-Redress Japanese Canadian Scholar Activism / Audrey Kobayashi and Jeff Masuda

List of Contributors

Index

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