This paper constitutes another tentative step on a personal journey of exploration that began with an essay in a special volume of the Journal of Canadian Studies marking the beginning of the new millennium. As the witnesses to this next step are my hosts at the Korean Association for Canadian Studies who may not be familiar with it, I hope I may be forgiven for repeating elements of the earlier project in an effort to establish an adequate context for my remarks1). In the earlier essay I attempted to address the social fragmentation of Canada that has characterized the postmodern age. Naïvely (I have been told) I urged the recognition of interdisciplinarity - itself a product of postmodernity - as one important tool for the reconciliation of conflict between fragments, however defined. I wrote then that Interdisciplinarity invites a return to history, to a newly negotiated narrative in which all may participate and recognize a place in a set of relationships, each dependent on the other and together constituting the health of the whole. Recognizing that conflict between fragments, and between individual fragments and the dominant culture, has been an undeniable fact of our history, is one thing. Working towards the resolution of this conflict is quite another. The primary human referents of resolution in Canada, at least for the foreseeable future, will be terms like equality, poverty, discrimination, communication, environment and Aboriginal rights. None of these terms is the property of any one discipline.2) Irrespective of its many failings, Canada remains a noble social experiment. In Canada, as Margaret Atwood reminds us, if we are not Aboriginal, we are immigrants, regardless of how many generations may precede us. Today, Canada’s version of itself recognizes a postmodern nation comprised of fragments, often dispossessed, from elsewhere. As home to citizens from virtually every other country in the world, it is, in a sense, a mirror of that world. As a nation it has a responsibility to define itself for other nations. How is it the same, how different? What do the boundaries around and within it represent? In the lexicon of postmodernism, conflict is held out by some as inevitable, by others as virtue. My project is driven by a conviction that conflict is an expression of a desire for its own absence. Immigrants and refugees have not come to Canada to perpetuate the reasons for having left their birthplace. They have come looking for something else, and they have brought ways of seeing. Among those whom they have found here are people indigenous to the place. And the people who are indigenous to the place, however small a minority, are the human incarnation of the lands they have occupied since time immemorial. Aboriginal peoples, their land (life-sustaining and beautiful beyond words), and other settlers from everywhere, living mostly in cities. These are elements of the picture that greets the gaze of the newcomer to Canada. The issue is not whether or not there will be conflict here. Conflict exists, its resolution fleeting. Still - it is resolution, not conflict, that drives our hope. The question is, how will we continue to foster among ourselves a conversation about social justice that respects the land, the First Nations and our fellow settlers? This conversation is difficult because it must understand and accept that Canada does not yet exist, but is emerging from a perpetual process of invention. This paper is about some of the voices in search of that conversation.
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