Recognition and Repentance in Canadian Multicultural Heritage: The Community Historical Recognition Program and Italian Canadian Memorializing

Abstract

In this article, we examine the multiculturalization of Canadian heritage, and, in particular, the shift to a politics of repentance that has emerged in the past few decades, recognizing specific instances of violence and exclusion that occurred in the nation’s past. Understood in relation to a duty to remember (devoir de mémoire) and a growing global discourse of reconciliation, as well as locally specific demands for redress, this shift has occurred through a convergence of institutional and grassroots activities, and it is exemplified by the Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP). To explore the implications of this shift, we analyze heritage projects, including both CHRP-funded and independently developed exhibitions and memorials, created in recognition of the discrimination and internment experienced by Italian Canadians during the Second World War. While these can be read as institutionalizing traumatic memories and promoting a legitimizing narrative of the Canadian settler nation-state, they also serve to enable communities to inscribe their own narratives in Canadian history.

Corrosive Comparisons and the Memory Politics of “Saming”: Threat and Opportunity in the Age of Apology

“…However, the two redress campaigns would significantly change tack in the early 2000s. The federal government responded positively, recognizing both internments in 2005 (Henderson and Wakeham 2013), providing significant commemorative funding for the affected communities between 2008(Gordon-Walker et al 2018, and apologizing officially for the Italian Canadian internment in 2021 (Canada. Office of the Prime Minister 2021).…”

“…Scholarly assessments have been negative. In particular, analysts have criticized the CHRP for its "assembly-line operations" (Wakeham 2010, p. 219), prioritization of social cohesion over antiracism (Gordon-Walker et al 2018), and tight eligibility criteria, which excluded from consideration projects concerned with historical injustices such as disfranchisement and slavery (James 2013).…”