Creating Canada: Education for Inclusion or Different Versions of Colonial Stories?

Abstract

In 2006, Dragon Hill Publishing released a book (the first of the series) titled How the Scots Created Canada. Since then, it has released six additional books detailing how the groups they identify as Italian, French, English, Black, Chinese, and Polish have each “created” Canada. Dragon Hill claims that their aim “is to produce and market books to the popular adult and youth markets … that will help individuals improve their self-image and that will help increase understanding and tolerance among diverse individuals and cultures.” In this article we examine how, rooted in the Canadian multicultural discourse, these “count me in” narratives of the featured ethnically and racially minoritized Canadians are presented as “add-ons” rather than integrated into the “Canadian narrative.” We explore how attempts at inclusive education and the quest to dispel, for some ethnic groups, the perpetual foreigner trope re-inscribe an uncritical embrace of Western European narratives based on discourses of whiteness, individualism, and conquest. Employing critical theories relating to decolonization, we highlight how the “counter-narratives” presented in the series serve to accommodate and simultaneously become complicit in “creating” problematic, incomplete, contradictory, and misrepresentative narratives of Canada and the featured minoritized groups.