Phew, Creative Conciliations is now live in the www! I truly understand now how a book project can travel with you for a significant part of your life. I am glad to be part of this club.
This publication represents many layers of relationships. On one level, it represents the partnership between Wilfrid Laurier University Press and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, who helped bring this project to life and supported the final stages of our writing. Much gratitude for this! On another level, it represents the wonderful writing relationship developed over many years between myself and Tarah Hogue as co-editors. It has been a joy to be pen-pals across time and space to see this through. Finally, this book represents the many relationships — built on respect and love — that have made possible the acts of conciliation shared through the writings of our contributors. To all the authors whose knowledge and energy fill these digital pages, thank you, thank you for being with us.
ABSTRACT: Creative Conciliations emerges from long-standing dialogue among artists, curators, scholars, knowledge holders, and community members engaged in the ongoing labour of reckoning, reclamation, and restitution through artistic practice. Marking the ten-year anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report, the publication offers a critical lens on the limitations of institutional reconciliation agendas while making space for the relational and often unruly work of creative conciliation. Through essays, conversations, and artistic gestures, contributors return to past projects, reflect on shared and divergent responsibilities, and foreground methods rooted in friendship, hospitality, embodied memory, and collective process as ways of working across difference—without the promise of resolution.
