Acknowledgments


I have been working on this book for a decade and a half, and so there are a lot of people to thank. I am grateful that on this researching and writing journey I have made many friends.

I have greatly benefited from the insights, discussions, and/or conversations with Michael Cachagee, Claudette Chevrier-Cachagee, Liv Pemmican, Marie Wilson, Murray Sinclair, Paulette Regan, Harvey Trudeau, Joe Clark, Paul Martin, James Anaya, Mick Dodson, Kim Murray, Robert Joseph, Wilton Littlechild, Heidi Stark, Robert Innes, Aimee Craft, Audra Simpson, Tasha Hubbard, Tricia Logan, Rupert Ross, Ry Moran, John Milloy, Jim Miller, Mike DeGagné, Jonathan Dewar, Pauline Wakeham, Priscilla Settee, Jennifer Preston, Joyce Green, Valerie Galley, Perry Bellegarde, Shelagh Rogers, Hedy Baum, Scott Serson, Bill Glied, Lori Ransom, Roger Epp, Linc Kesler, Alex Maass, Bill Asikinack, Wes Heber, Payam Akhavan, Alex Hinton, Louise Wise, Makere Stewart Harawira, Jeremy Maron, Karine Duhamel, Malinda Smith, Rosemary Nagy, Matt James, Jenny Kay Dupuis, Pat Case, Tony Barta, Frank Chalk, Bernie Farber, Michael Dan, Brad and Deirdre Morse, Trina Bolam, Ian Mosby, Greg Younging, Madeleine Dion Stout, Kiera Ladner, Myra Tait, Bronwyn Leebaw, Hayden King, Len Rudner, Robert Joseph, Claire Charters, Adam Muller, Frank Iacobucci, Steve Smith, Erica Lehrer, Marika Giles Samson, Greg Sarkissian, Maeengan Linklater, Ted Fontaine, Ajay Parasram, Doug Ervin-Erikson, Steve Heinrichs, Vanessa Watt-Powless, Cara Wehkamp, Rick Hill, Emily Grafton, Rachel Janze, and Tom MacIntosh.

I would also like to thank my current and former students for their hard work and insights: Chelsea Gabel, Graham Hudson, Christopher Ryan, Matthew Chaghano, Malissa Bryan, Curtis Nash, Amber Keegan, Rachel Calleja, Maya Fernandez, Lisa Phillips, David Said, Brian Budd, Jackie Gillis, Joanne Moores, and Sidey Deska-Gauthier.

I would like to thank the good people at the National Residential School Survivors Society who arranged for me to interview many Survivors, and I would also like to thank Ontario Indian Residential School Support Services; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada; the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation; Six Nations Polytechnic; the Woodland Cultural Centre, Brantford; the Aboriginal Healing Foundation; the Aboriginal Resource Centre at the University of Guelph; the Zoryan Institute; McGill law school; Saskatchewan Provincial Archives; Library and Archives Canada; Canadian Museum for Human Rights; Te Piringa Faculty of Law at University of Waikato; Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga and the law school and Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Auckland; Political Science and International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington; the First Nations University of Canada; the Political Science Department and Aboriginal Student Centre, University of Regina; the Political Science and History Departments, University of Saskatchewan; the Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Centre. Jane Hubbard at Legacy of Hope worked with me so that I could publish excerpts from some Survivor interviews.

Thank you to my parents, Olive and Bruce, and sister, Rachel, who hosted me many times as I visited First Nations University and met with many people in Regina and Saskatoon. My mom took a keen interest in this work from the beginning and collected newspaper and other articles and information for me. As well, I remember fondly conversations with my late Uncle Ivan Amichand on the legacies of residential schools in Regina.

Daniel Quinlan is a fantastic acquisitions editor: extremely helpful, resourceful, and insightful. This book would have been twice as long and half as good without his expert advice and guidance. My thanks to Doug Smith for reading over the historical sections and providing detailed and timely feedback as well as some very useful documents. Andrew Woolford kindly read over my material on genocide, as did Paulette Regan on my conciliation and TRC-related chapters. Sheryl Lightfoot also provided valuable comments and advice. A special thank you to Kent Monkman for his very kind permission to reproduce The Scream (2017) on the cover of my book free of charge.

My thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for four successive grants that have made this work possible: one Standard Grant, two Insight Grants, and a Partnership Development Grant. My thanks to the University of Guelph – in particular, the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences – which selected me as their Research Leadership Chair as I was writing this book.

My thanks to the publishers acknowledged below for permission to cite portions of my work:

• “Canada’s History Wars: Indigenous Genocide and Public Memory in the United States, Australia, and Canada,” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 4 (2015): 411–31.

• “Reforming Multiculturalism in a Bi-national Society: Aboriginal Peoples and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 39, no. 1 (2014): 65–86.

• “The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada,” with Graham Hudson, Canadian Journal of Political Science 45, no. 2 (June 2012): 427–49.

• “Genocide in the Indian Residential Schools: Canadian History through the Lens of the UN Genocide Convention,” in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 465–93.

• “Indigenous Genocide and Perceptions of the Holocaust in Canada,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Holocaust, ed. Hilary Earl and Simone Gigliotti (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).

My wife, Dana, and son, Gulliver, have always shown kindness, support, and patience with my many book projects and my travelling around. Thanks family!

This book is dedicated to the Survivors, for whom I have the profoundest respect and admiration.

All errors of fact and interpretation in this book are solely my own responsibility.

David B. MacDonald