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Please join us for Dr. Rück's talk, entitled "Reconciliation after Dispossession? Seeking Truth in the Case of St. Nicholas Island, Kahnawà:ke, 1906-18." This event marks National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and is presented by the Department of History EDII Committee.

In 1906, the Quebec government appropriated and privatized Kawenohkhwí:io (St. Nicholas Island), a 5 acre island in the St. Lawrence River about 500 metres from the Kahnawà:ke riverfront. The island was always considered part of Kahnawà:ke, and was owned by a Kahnawà:ke family, but in 1906 Quebec claimed it and sold it to a well-connected settler cottager. Over the next decade, the Department of Indian Affairs prioritized the interests of the province of Quebec over those of the people of Kahnawà:ke, which led to an unfavourable Supreme Court of Canada decision in 1918. Throughout this time, the people of Kahnawà:ke were resolute and united in their defense of their lands, including Kawenohkhwí:io. This presentation discusses my experience attempting to access restricted documents in the federal archives and receiving heavily redacted materials. It tells the story of St. Nicholas Island that can be gleaned from these censored documents, as well my own story of making sense of a Canadian state that claims to be in an era of reconciliation and decolonization while continuing to hide its historical land thefts. I attempt to tell this story of settler colonial dispossession and obfuscation in a way that resonates with the memories of community members and includes the expectation of Landback.

Daniel Rück is associate professor in the Department of History and the Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies at the University of Ottawa. He is a settler scholar living and working on the unceded territory of the Algonquin nation along the Kichi Zībī (Ottawa River). He is the author of the prize-winning book The Laws and the Land: The Settler Colonial Invasion of Kahnawà:ke in Nineteenth-Century Canada published by UBC Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Rück teaches and writes on the history of settler colonialism and settler-Indigenous relations in Canada, history of land surveying, law and treaty history, and global and local environmental history. He is co-founder and co-director of the newly-established Kichi Sībī Historical Research Project, a SSHRC-funded, uOttawa-based historical research collaboration with the Algonquin Nation Secretariat (ANS), representing the communities of Timiskaming, Wolf Lake, and Barrière Lake. He also continues to work with the Kanien'kehá:ka community of Kahnawà:ke. This presentation represents research for his next book “No Sale, No Surrender: Kahnawà:ke, the Crown, and St. Nicholas Island.”