“Hot shoes" – a novel (selections and summaries and a critical paper Canadian truth and reconciliation :settler-invader, damage, and trust. DAMAGE, AND TRUST

“Canadian Truth and Reconciliation: Settler-invader, Damage, and Trust” My story of Murphy and The Blue Gold ocean liner transporting non-Aboriginal people of the former Canada back to their nations of ancestry responds to contemporary Canada entering a new era of truth and reconciliation, recognizing acts of cultural genocide and persisting racism. Non-Aboriginal fiction on the damaged relationship to date has gone only so far in using accountability as catalyst and guide for a newly imagined vision of distinct peoples in a shared land. Historically, the relationship shifted from separate worlds to trade and military alliances to a colonial push toward both apartheid and assimilation. World views differed greatly. Although the Aboriginal view promised more for future harmony and environmental health, the encroaching non-Aboriginal view with its stress on colonialism, “progress” and consumption took command. Two segregated streams of literature developed, the non-Aboriginal one dominant. The myth of the “vanishing Indian” presided. Seven categories of non-Aboriginal fiction that skirts or deals in some partial way with the damaged relationship can be defined; the vanishing or vanished Indian myth generally pervades seven of these and troubles the eighth. Murphy’s story, on the other hand, asserts that Indigenous people and cultures are absolutely still here and will be long into the future. The rest of us just haven’t really seen them. If we do, we may begin to work more effectively toward the welfare of an endangered planet. As an artist who travels to an “exotic” new world (2172) where he encounters Aboriginal people, Murphy evokes the figure of the frontier artist Paul Kane, and the question arises: will he apply his art in the old colonial way or will he vie for something new that recognizes our second chance at a relationship