After Redress: Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Struggles for Justice

An innovative examination of continuing calls for justice in the wake of state redress and reconciliation agreements in Canada.

Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians have demanded justice from the Canadian state for its discriminatory systems of colonization and racial management. Critics have argued that state apologies co-opt those demands. In addition, many Canadian institutions still attempt to control narratives about residential schools and other violence committed against Indigenous peoples, and about the internment of Japanese Canadians.

After Redress examines how struggles for justice continue long after truth and reconciliation commissions conclude and state redress is made. Contributors to this trenchant volume analyze the complex, often paradoxical redress process from the perspectives of the communities involved. Mechanisms for reconciliation are defined by the settler state, but how do Indigenous peoples and Japanese Canadians reject or conform to Western liberal notions of social justice?

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.Roy Miki is professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University. As a poet and writer who was deeply involved in the Japanese Canadian redress movement in the 1980s, he received a Governor General’s Award and is a recipient of the Order of Canada.