9781138896154C06.3D 107 [105–131] 10.8.2019 5:59PM Chapter 6 Re-storying Settler Teacher Education Truth, Reconciliation, and Oral History Kiera Brant-Birioukov, Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, and Kristina R. Llewellyn Canadians must do more than just talk about reconciliation; we must learn how to practise reconciliation in our everyday lives—within ourselves and our families, and in our communities, governments, places of worship, schools, and workplaces. (TRC 2015a, 20) In Australia, Canada, and South Africa, national and local governments are at times mobilizing their citizens to reconcile and re-story their past, present, and future relations with local marginalized communities. In the last 30 years alone, the Canadian federal government has offered four official apolo- gies to such communities: in 1988 to Japanese Canadians who were dis- placed and interned during the Second World War; in 2006 to the survivors of the Indian Residential Schooling (IRS) system; in 2008 to the descend- ants of Chinese Canadians who were forced to pay a head tax; and, more recently, in 2017 to members of the LGBTQ community for the historical injustices perpetrated against them. Henderson and Wakeham (2013) warn us not to read too much into these public apologies or to confuse an “ever- accumulating list of reconciliatory gestures,” with “a state coming to histor- ical self-consciousness” (7). Consequently, encouraging teachers to do apologetic readings of a Canadian past would be, we suggest, to oversimplify our present and future responsibilities for historical harms. Instead, we sug- gest that re-storying a settler-colonial historical consciousness calls for a praxis of reconciliation that asks citizens, including politicians, curriculum policymakers, historians, and educators, to not only acknowledge the wrongs committed in the past, but to act in relation to how these wrongs continue to have intergenerational impacts on those living today. A case in point is the 2008 IRS apology. It was precipitated by the 2007 class action suit against the Canadian government by IRS system survivors seeking to end settler denial of Canada’s violent colonial past. The apology, in turn, precipitated the formation of the Canadian Truth and Reconcili- ation Commission (TRC), whose members travelled across Canada listening