Historical Justice and History Education 3030704114, 9783030704117

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Historical Justice and History Education Edited by Matilda Keynes · Henrik Åström Elmersjö Daniel Lindmark · Björn Norlin

Historical Justice and History Education “Historical Justice and History Education comes at a critical juncture for the field of history education. With a diversity of voices and case studies, this collection offers critical new perspectives and provides important analysis about the possibilities and limitations of historical education as site for historical justice.” —Anna Clark, Associate Professor, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia “This groundbreaking collection explores the pivotal role of history education in dealing with issues of historical justice in a wide array of contexts. What emerges is a rich picture of the transformation of social justice knowledge—from state-­ sponsored reconciliation projects, local memory, or other sources—into policy, materials, methods and prescriptions for schools, museums and memorial sites. It underscores what we should already know: in this field there are no easy solutions.” —Peter Seixas, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia, Canada “It was Faulkner who noted that ‘the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.’ This collection of essays shows the truth of Faulkner’s insight across an array of national contexts. The ghastly sins of the past haunt our present. If we can muster the courage to look, clear-eyed, at these sins, we can use the past to seek justice, healing, and reconciliation in the present. This bracing volume offers hope that a sober reckoning can lead to a better tomorrow.” —Sam Wineburg, Margaret James Professor of Education & History, Stanford University, USA “This long overdue volume makes an outstanding contribution to historical justice practices by compiling case studies from many parts of the world. In taking into account the relationship between historical justice and history education it also offers a critical reflection on the role of historians in these practices. The cutting-edge chapters by leading experts valuably extend our knowledge within this field and add significantly to our understanding of reconciliation processes.” —Eckhardt Fuchs, Professor, Director of the Georg Eckert Institute, Germany

Matilda Keynes Henrik Åström Elmersjö Daniel Lindmark  •  Björn Norlin Editors

Historical Justice and History Education

Editors Matilda Keynes Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Technology Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia Daniel Lindmark Department of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies Umeå University Umeå, Sweden

Henrik Åström Elmersjö Department of Education Umeå University Umeå, Sweden Björn Norlin Department of Education Umeå University Umeå, Sweden

ISBN 978-3-030-70411-7    ISBN 978-3-030-70412-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Kevin Britland / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

At Umeå University, Sweden, the research group in History and Education has been involved in two historical inquiry projects on injustices inflicted on ethnic minorities: the Swedish Government’s white paper project on the abuse of the Roma people in the twentieth century (2011–2014) and the white paper project on the historical relations between the Church of Sweden and the Indigenous Sami people (2012–2017). In addition to contributing with historical knowledge, the participating researchers were challenged to reflect on the character of historical justice practices and the historian’s role in such practices. What uses of history do such practices represent, and what are the implications for research in history education and educational history, the double focus of the research group? In the academic year of 2018–2019, the research group hosted Matilda Keynes, an Endeavour Postgraduate Scholar and doctoral candidate from Australia. Keynes’s dissertation project on historical justice and history education inspired the research group to explore the relationship between those fields from a more general and international perspective. The group decided that inviting scholars to collaborate on a book project addressing those themes would stimulate thinking and critical insights. An important step towards the realization of this book was an international symposium organised at Umeå University in June 2019. Umeå University is situated on traditional Sami territory, formerly used v

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as winter grazing land by reindeer herding Sami from Ran Sami Village. We acknowledge Sami peoples’ continuing connection to land, waters and culture and pay our respects to Sami elders past and present. The symposium was attended by scholars from various national contexts, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, South Africa and the United States, as well as the Scandinavian countries. Most of the authors contributing to this volume presented papers at the symposium, during which the overall theme of the book, its sections and central concepts were discussed and elaborated. The symposium was organised by the editors of this volume. Umeå School of Education and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Umeå University provided the necessary funding, for which we are most grateful. We would also like to thank those of our colleagues who served as commentators at the symposium sessions. Finally, we would like to extend our gratitude to all the contributors for sharing their insights, in the symposium papers and discussions as well as the final chapters. Sydney and Umeå, July 31, 2020

Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark and Björn Norlin

Contents

1 Introduction:  Connecting Historical Justice and History Education  1 Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin Part I State-Sponsored Processes and Education  21 2 Recontextualizing  Historical Injustice into Education: The Relationship Between a White Paper and a Textbook on the Abuse of the Roma in Swedish History 23 Malin Arvidsson and Henrik Åström Elmersjö 3 Taking  Responsibility for the Past: Theoretical and Educational Considerations, Illustrated by South African Experience 47 Sirkka Ahonen 4 Education  and Truth Commissions: Patterns, Possibilities and Implications for Historical Justice 67 Julia Paulson and Michelle J. Bellino vii

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Part II Historical Justice in Public History Spaces  85 5 The  Hanaoka Incident and Practices of Local History and Memory Making in Northern Japan 87 Erik Ropers 6 Historical  Narratives and Civic Subjectification in the Aftermath of Conflict107 Daniela Romero-Amaya 7 Generating  and Popularising Historical Knowledge in a Reconciliation Process: The Case of the Church of Sweden and the Sami131 Björn Norlin and Daniel Lindmark 8 The  Role of Commemoration in History and Heritage: The Legacy of the World War One Engagement Centres153 Nicola Gauld and Ian Grosvenor 9 C  hallenging ‘Comfort Women’ Discourse: Rethinking Intersections of Historical Justice and History Education177 Anna-Karin Eriksson 10 Ethics  and Historical Justice195 Göran Collste Part III Educational Materials: Textbooks, Curricula, Policy 213 11 Textbook  Revisions as Educational Atonement? Possibilities and Challenges of History Education as a Means to Historical Justice215 Eleni Christodoulou

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12 Redressing  Historical Wrongs or Replicating Settler Colonialism? Social Studies Curriculum Reform in Canada249 James Miles 13 Narrative  Justice? Ten Tools to Deconstruct Narratives About Violent Pasts269 Angela Bermudez 14 History  Education, Transitional Justice and Politics of Reconciliation: Multi- and Univocality Around Violent Pasts in South African and Rwandan Textbooks291 Denise Bentrovato Part IV Pedagogy, Teachers, and Students 315 15 Practicing  Reconciliation in a Canadian Book Club317 Jonathan Anuik 16 Developing  Historical Consciousness for Social Cohesion: How South African Students Learn to Construct the Relationship Between Past and Present341 Natasha Robinson 17 Historical  Justice and the Holocaust in History Education365 Andy Pearce and Stuart Foster

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18 Do  Teachers Care About Historical Justice? Teaching About the Holocaust, Genocide, and Colonialism in England385 Heather Mann 19 Political  Good-Will, Moral Lessons, Historical Justice? Upper Secondary School Students on the Motives and Effects of Historical Apologies405 Jan Löfström I ndex427

Notes on Contributors

Sirkka  Ahonen is Professor Emerita of History and Social Science Education at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests range from the form of historical knowledge to the formation of historical identity, history of school politics, the use of history in post-transitional countries. She is the author of Coming to Terms with a Dark Past. How Post-Conflict Societies Deal with History (2012), where she compares the use of history in post-conflict Finland, South-Africa and Bosnia-­ Herzegovina. She is the member of the editorial board of ‘Theory & Research in Social Education’. Jonathan  Anuik is an associate professor in the Educational Policy Studies Department at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. In addition to his research on reconciliation on the grassroots in book clubs, he investigates allyship in Indigenous education, nourishing the learning spirit, and how comics may be educational texts. Malin Arvidsson  holds a PhD in History from the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at Örebro University, Sweden. Her dissertation on Swedish reparation politics concerns financial redress for involuntary sterilization and abuse in out-of-home care for children. Arvidsson’s recent publications focus on how the term ‘truth commission’ was introduced into Swedish politics in recent decades and was used to make claims for historical justice, and how notions of retroactive responxi

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sibility were used in Swedish and Danish parliamentary debates about state redress. She is working as a lecturer at the Human Rights Studies division, Department of History, Lund University. Michelle J. Bellino  is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Education and co-director of the Conflict and Peace Initiative. Her research centres on youth civic development in conflict-affected contexts, examining young people’s understandings of historical injustice, civic agency, and social belonging. She is the author of Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition (Rutgers University Press) and co-editor (with J.H.Williams) of (Re)constructing memory: Education, identity, and conflict. She has been recognized as a Peace Scholar by the United States Institute of Peace and a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Spencer Foundation. Her book, Youth in Postwar Guatemala, won the Council of Anthropology and Education’s Outstanding Book Award in 2018. Denise  Bentrovato (PhD History) is co-director of the African Association for History Education (AHE-Afrika) and a researcher and extraordinary lecturer in History Didactics in the Department of Humanities Education, University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a research fellow in the History Department of the University of Leuven, Belgium, and a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History and Social Sciences at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique of Goma in eastern Congo. Her research combines interests in history education, memory politics and identity formation and primarily focuses on post-­ colonial and post-conflict societies in Africa, including Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Sierra Leone. An important part of her work relates to examining educational responses to historical wrongs within the framework of nation-building and transitional justice processes. Throughout her career, she has worked both in academia and for international organisations and NGOs in Africa and Europe, including UNESCO.  She was recently appointed Secretary of the International Research Association for History and Social Sciences Education and sits on the Editorial Boards of its International Journal for History and Social Sciences Education and of Yesterday and Today, a publication of the South African Society for History Teaching.

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Angela Bermudez  is Senior Researcher at the Center for Applied Ethics in the University of Deusto, Spain. She is interested in the contributions that history education can make to conflict transformation and peace building. Her research investigates how history education in schools and memorial museums fosters or hinders a critical understanding of political violence. She obtained her doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to that, she worked in Colombia, where she was born and raised, conducting research, developing curricula and educational resources, training teachers and teaching youth in the areas of history and social studies education, civic education and moral education. Over the years, she has been a consultant to various institutions, including the Ministry of Education of Colombia, the Secretary of Education of Bogotá, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Organization of Iberoamerican American States (OEI). She has taught, among others, at the University of Deusto (Bilbao), Northeastern University (Boston), Harvard University (Cambridge), Javeriana University (Bogotá), and at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO, Buenos Aires). Eleni Christodoulou  is a research associate at the European University of Cyprus and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) Cyprus. She is also an education consultant for UNDP creating the first bicommunal educational material as part of the Bicommunal Technical Committee on Education in Cyprus. Prior to this she was a research fellow in Global History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich as well as a researcher at the Georg Eckert Institute (GEI), a Leibniz institute for international textbook research in Germany. At the GEI she was involved in extensive analysis of curricula and textbooks in conflict settings and was also principal investigator of a project reviewing international and German approaches to preventing violent extremism, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. She obtained a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. Her thesis researched the politics of peace education and was funded by the ESRC. She has published work on history textbooks and security in conflict societies, on the relationship between education and violent extremism and on the role of international organisations in counter-terrorism. She was also a lead author of the UNESCO MGIEP Guide on Embedding Education for

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Sustainable Development, as part of achieving Target 4.7 of the UN Agenda 2030. Göran  Collste  is Professor Emeritus of Applied Ethics at Linköping University, Sweden. His research interests are in applied ethics and political philosophy, and his publications include books and articles on global justice, historical justice, the principle of human dignity, and ethical issues related to information and communication technologies. His recently published works include Global rectificatory justice (Palgrave 2015), Ethics and communication (editor; 2016), Historisk rättvisa: Gottgörelse i en postkolonial tid (Daidalos 2018) and Inledning till etiken, 4th ed. (Studentlitteratur 2019). Collste has been involved in a number of EU-funded projects, panels on research ethics, and research assessment and was Programme Director of the International Master’s Programme in Applied Ethics at Linköping University. He was President of Societas Ethica (European Society for Research in Ethics) 2011–2015 and is an expert member of the Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics and co-author of Ethical choices in a pandemic (2020). Henrik  Åström  Elmersjö  is Associate Professor (Docent) of History and Education at the Department of Education, Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests include educational history, as well as historical culture and history education. Elmersjö has specifically researched issues regarding the revision of history textbooks, peace education, historical cultures and the internationalization of history teaching, as well as on the organizational history of state authorization of school textbooks. He was the lead editor of International Perspectives on Teaching Rival Histories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He teaches both educational history and history didactics to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. He is also senior editor of the Nordic Journal of Educational History. Anna-Karin Eriksson  is a PhD student in Political Science at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. Her thesis explores historiography from the vantage of periodization and other appropriations of the past, particularly in relation to ‘comfort station’ system politics. She holds a BA and an MA in Political Science, Japanese Studies and Chinese Studies from

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Lund University. Previous to her PhD studies, she worked as a Coordinator of International Relations at Gifu Prefectural Office in Japan. Stuart  Foster is Professor of History in Education and Executive Director of both the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education and the First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme, University College London. He has written more than fifty scholarly articles and authored or co-authored six books. Nicola  Gauld  is a project manager at the University of Birmingham. Since 2006 she has worked on a number of exhibitions and outreach projects, including Children’s Lives (Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 2011), Caught in the Crossfire: Artistic responses to conflict, peace and reconciliation (Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, 2013), and Beyond the Battlefields: Käthe Buchler’s Photographs of Germany in the Great War (Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and University of Birmingham 2017–18). As the Coordinator of the Voices of War and Peace WW1 centre (2014–2019), Gauld was responsible for co-ordinating and delivering outreach activities, including a series of national festivals, liaising with academics and partner organisations, supporting community organisations on collaborative projects and carrying out evaluation into collaborative projects, and managing the content of the Centre’s website. She has also been a founding member of two community organisations, the People’s Heritage Co-operative and Women’s History Birmingham, and managed two community-­focused projects for those organisations, Untold Stories: Birmingham’s Wounded Soldiers from WW1 and Birmingham Women: Past and Present Revisited. Gauld is also the author of Words and Deeds: Birmingham Suffragists and Suffragettes 1832–1918, published in 2018. Ian  Grosvenor is Professor of Urban Educational History at the University of Birmingham, England. Books include Assimilating Identities: Racism and Education in Post 1945 Britain (1997), Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (1999) with Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere, The School I’d Like (2003), School (2008) and The School I’d Like Revisited (2015) all with Catherine Burke, Materialities of Schooling (2005) with Martin Lawn, Children and Youth at Risk (2009) with

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Christine Mayer and Ingrid Lohmann, the Black Box of Schooling (2011) with Sjaak Braster and Maria del Mar del Pozo Andres and Making Education: Governance by Design (2018) with Lisa Rasmussen. He is the Managing Editor of the journal Paedagogica Historica and Director of the Voices of War and Peace First World War Engagement Centre. Previous roles include Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor for Cultural Engagement and Head of the School of Education, University of Birmingham, Secretary General of the European Educational Research Association [EERA] and convenor of EERA’s Network 17. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Matilda Keynes  is a doctoral researcher at the Australian Centre for Public History, University of Technology, Sydney and Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. In 2018–19, Keynes was Endeavour Postgraduate Research Scholar at Umeå University, Sweden, in the History and Education Research Group. Matilda’s research focuses on the role of history education in processes of transitional justice and state redress and has been published in the International Journal of Transitional Justice and the International Handbook for Historical Studies in Education. Keynes is the coeditor of a 2021 special issue of History of Education Review on the theme of historical justice and is Assistant Editor for History Australia, the scholarly journal of the Australian Historical Association. Daniel  Lindmark is a professor at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Umeå University. His professorship includes History and Education (50%) and Church History (50%). He serves as a research leader in the Umeå History and Education Research Group as well as Várdduo—Centre for Sami Research. His research interests include educational history, print culture, popular religion, historical culture, and Sami studies. He coordinates the Nordic research network Religious History of the North. In the period 2012–2017 he was in charge of “The Church of Sweden and the Sami: A White Paper Project” (funded by the Church of Sweden). Parallel to this project he ran the research project “Sami Voices and Sorry Churches: Use of History in Church-Sami Reconciliation Processes” (funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas). Recent publications include “National Traditions of Educational Research in Sweden”, Religion and Educational Research:

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National Traditions and Transnational Perspectives (2019); “Sámi Schools, Female Enrolment, and the Teaching Trade: Sámi Women’s Involvement in Education in Early Modern Sweden”, Sámi Educational History in a Comparative International Perspective (2019). Jan  Löfström is Associate Professor of History and Social Studies Education at the University of Turku, Finland. His research interests include historical and moral consciousness, uses of history, historical reparations, and history education. He is author of a number of articles on these topics, including ‘Historical apologies as acts of symbolic inclusion – and exclusion? Reflections on institutional apologies as politics of cultural citizenship,’ in Citizenship Studies, 15(2011):1, 93–108, and ‘How Finnish upper secondary students conceive transgenerational responsibility and historical reparations: implications for the history curriculum,’ in Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46(2014):4, 515–539. He is editor of the volumes Can history be repaired: On repairing and forgiving historical wrong (in Finnish, Gaudeamus University Press, 2012) and Encountering painful pasts  – Rencontrer les passés douloureux (Research Centre for Social Studies Education, University of Helsinki, 2014). With Niklas Ammert (PI), Silvia Edling and Heather Sharp, he is engaged in a research project on the intersections of historical and moral consciousness. Heather Mann  is completing her doctorate in History at the University of Oxford. Her thesis, ‘Holocaust memory and its mediation by teachers: a study of England and France’, uses oral history to study teachers’ memory of the Holocaust, other genocides and colonialism, to analyse the evolution of collective memory and national mythology inside the classroom. She is a senior scholar at Lincoln College (2018/19) and is a lecturer in the history of the Holocaust at the University of Southampton. James  Miles  is a PhD candidate in curriculum and pedagogy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. His dissertation research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, explores history education’s role in the pursuit of historical justice, reconciliation and historical redress in Canada. His research has been published in the McGill Journal of

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Education, Historical Studies in Education, and Theory and Research in Social Education. Miles was previously a secondary school history teacher for ten years. Miles is also an assistant editor at the journal Curriculum Inquiry. Björn Norlin  is Associate Professor (Docent) of History and Education at the Department of Education, Umeå University. He is also Deputy Director of “The Postgraduate School of Educational Sciences”, Umeå School of Education, and one of the editors of Nordic Journal of Educational History. His research interests include educational history, history education and the new media, conceptual and spatial history, and Saami studies. He is involved in several publications and activities concerning the history of education and violence, as well as the role of history and educational history in contemporary reconciliation processes. Recent publications include (with D.  Sjögren) “Educational history in the age of apology: The Church of Sweden’s ‘White book’ on historical relations to the Sami, the significance of education and scientific complexities in reconciling the past”, EDUCARE (2019); (with D. Lindmark) “Sweden”, The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education in the Post-Cold War Era (2019); and Norlin, B. (ed.), Education and Violence: Special Issue of Nordic Journal of Educational History (2018). Julia  Paulson  is a reader/associate professor in Education, Peace and Conflict at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on the intersections between education, transitional justice, social memory processes, conflict and peace. She is leading collaborative research projects exploring these themes with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Newton Fund and the Spencer Foundation, including the large AHRC funded Education, Justice and Memory Network project. Paulson is editor of the book Education and Reconciliation (Bloomsbury). Andy Pearce  is Associate Professor of Holocaust and History Education at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, University College London. He writes on issues related to Holocaust memory, Holocaust and history education, memory studies, teaching and learning, and contemporary history.

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Natasha  Robinson is an ESRC scholar and PhD candidate at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, UK.  Her research focusses on history education in conflict and post-conflict contexts, with a particular interest in South Africa. Alongside her PhD Robinson has worked as a consultant for the OECD, where she helped to design the 2018 PISA framework for Global Competence. She is engaged in a study with the Harvard School of Education, looking at the changing relationship between history education and citizenship in post-­ apartheid South Africa. Daniela  Romero-Amaya is a doctoral candidate in Social Studies Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, United States. Her work examines the interplay of history education, citizenship education, and memory-making in conflict-affected contexts, particularly in relation to young generations. Her ethnographic work explores the civic education, participation, and engagement of Colombian youth against the backdrop of the social and political transformation underway in the country after the endorsement of the peace accords in 2016. Romero-­ Amaya received the 2018 the Morton Deutsch Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper for her piece “Empty Schools and Silencios: Pedagogical Openings for Memory-Making in Colombia.” She is part of the 2019 Graduate Fellows of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) from the Earth Institute, Columbia University. Erik  Ropers  is Associate Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies at Towson University and is the author of Voices of the Korean Minority in Japan (Routledge, 2019). His works have been published in a range of academic journals including Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, Japanese Studies, and Humanity on topics including wartime forced labor, survivors of the atomic bombings, and gendered violence.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

The cover of the White Paper (on the left) and the cover of the textbook (on the right). The difference in cover art underline the difference in approach between the White Paper and the textbook with the relationship between the Roma and the state represented by an archival index on the cover of the White Paper and a Roma family being evicted representing the same relationship on the cover of the textbook 38 Cover of Ano yama o koete (Climbing That Mountain). The Japan-China Friendship Association memorial stela can be seen to the left 99 A Japanese man removes an insect from a Chinese laborer’s face. TKS 1984, p. 23 100 The popular science publication Samerna och Svenska kyrkan: Underlag för kyrkligt försoningsarbete (The Sami and the Church of Sweden: A basis for church reconciliation work) published in February 2017. (Photo: SVT - Swedish Television)133 The scholarly anthology De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: En vetenskaplig antologi (The historical relations between the Church of Sweden and the Sami: A scholarly anthology) published in two volumes in 2016. (Cover photo: Johan Fjellström, LiLAB, Arjeplog) 142 xxi

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Fig. 7.3

List of Figures

Archbishop Antje Jackelén (right) with Johannes Marainen, Ingrid Inga, and Sylvia Sparrock from the Sami Council at the release of the popular science publication in February 2017. (Photo: Jörgen Heikki, SR Sameradion (www.sverigesradio.se/sameradion))144 Fig. 8.1 Unknown soldier from The Lost Tommies, Courtesy of the Kerry Stokes Collection: The Louis and Antoinette Thuillier Collection. Donated to the Australian War Memorial by Mr Kerry Stokes on behalf of Australian Capital Equity Pty Ltd 164 Fig. 8.2 A blind man assisted by another man (Fritz Wrampe). Drawing by Fritz Wrampe, 193-. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 168 Fig. 11.1 © FDFA/swisspeace 2006, inspired by the Joinet/Orentlicher Principles, cited in swisspeace 2016, p.6  221

1 Introduction: Connecting Historical Justice and History Education Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin

Introduction In recent years, movements for historical justice have gained global momentum and prominence as the focus on righting wrongs from the past has become a feature of contemporary politics. This imperative has manifested in globally diverse contexts including societies emerging from a period of recent, violent conflict, but also, established democracies which are M. Keynes (*) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] H. Åström Elmersjö • B. Norlin Department of Education, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] D. Lindmark Department of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_1

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increasingly compelled to address the legacies of colonialism, slavery, genocide, institutional abuse, and war crimes, as well as other forms of protracted discord. A diverse suite of redress instruments including—but not limited to—criminal tribunals, truth commissions, reparations, and official apologies, are now regularly deployed in efforts to remedy and overcome historical injustices. Conceptions of historical justice have been embedded in existing legal systems and humanitarian frameworks, including human rights (Teitel 2014), and history increasingly occupies a central position in the mediation and management of the collective past (Olick 2007). Educational initiatives of various kinds are located at the centre of these actions for historical justice. Educating the public, politicians, or different categories of professionals by spreading knowledge generated in truth commissions, white paper projects, or criminal tribunals are, alongside different political and compensatory actions, important aspects of such initiatives. Schools, and other institutionalised educational contexts, have become important arenas of dissemination, as have museums and commemorative sites as well as broader governmental campaigns for spreading knowledge of historical injustices to the public. In this context, history education, broadly conceived, has become a focus for researchers and practitioners interested in how contested understandings of, and approaches to studying, the past can incite, exacerbate, and potentially, transform conflict. While there are many books published on the topics of teaching difficult, sensitive, and contested histories (Bentrovato et  al. 2016; Elmersjö et  al. 2017; Psaltis et al. 2017; Peck and Epstein 2018), scholars have paid relatively less attention to the evolving relationship between historical justice and history education, including the challenges and possibilities this relationship generates for both fields. This volume is thematically located at the intersection of these two fields and is concerned with how the expectations of historical justice movements and processes are directed towards, and taken up, in educational contexts, particularly in history education. By presenting cases from a wide range of national contexts, this collection sets out to explore important empirically grounded and conceptual features of the evolving relations between history education and historical justice, as well as to discuss various problems and possibilities located at those junctures. This book explores distinct but connected domains where agendas of historical justice and history education intersect. It considers the spread and use of knowledge generated from state-sponsored historical justice

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processes; current and potential functions of history education in processes of historical justice; and the implications of historical justice movements and mechanisms for history education and vice versa. The general aim of the volume is to provide an important touchstone for scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and teachers that can guide future research, policy, and practice in the fields of historical justice, human rights, and history education.

Context When Francis Fukuyama (1992) declared ‘the end of history’ in the early 1990s, he saw, in the victory of liberal democracy and free market capitalism over communism, the realisation of history attaining its highest and final goal. However, the early 1990s will likely prove the high-water mark for the post-cold war order based on liberal principles of democracy, markets, and the rule of law. Since then, near-constant war in the Middle East, global financial crises, imminent environmental collapse, growing inequality, increasing human displacement, rising xenophobic populism, and the global covid-19 pandemic have, together, considerably undermined Fukuyama’s prophecy. History, rather than fading quietly into insignificance, has become a prominent domain of dispute as various groups and leaders contest narratives of the past in order to proffer visions of the future and shape contemporary agendas. In the face of unprecedented change (Simon 2019), alternate visions of past and future have rushed to fill the void. One response has been the global movement and proliferation of claims to redress the injustices of the past. According to Hartog (2016), as visions of a hopeful future recede from view, the thirst for knowledge of the past increases, while Torpey (2006) has suggested that the road to the future now leads through the disasters of the past. In the aftermath of mass violence, facing the memory of traumatic historical events has become imperative and widely seen to be a key aspect of advancing peace and reconciliation (Neumann and Thompson 2015). Further, as the traditional sovereignty of liberal nation-states is challenged by the contemporary forces of globalisation, displacement, and environmental degradation, managing the polity’s relationship with the national past has become a vital political agenda for

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modern governments (Keynes 2020). On the global stage, conveying truthful knowledge of the past is now an expectation of belonging to the liberal international community and is part of the ‘backbone of liberal democratic discourse’ based on the architecture of universal human rights (Karn 2015, p. 61). This has elevated the status and authority of historical knowledge seen to be able to right moral wrongs (Bevernage 2012). At the time of writing, Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, sparked by the killing of Black man, George Floyd by police, constitute the largest movement in the country’s history (Buchanan et  al. 2020). In response, philosopher Colleen Murphy, has argued that the United States ought to pursue transitional justice, particularly a truth and justice commission, to address the history and continuing racial inequality and injustice in the United States (Murphy 2020). At the same time, in Bristol, UK, anti-racism demonstrators tore down a statue of seventeenth-­century slave trader, Edward Colston, which had stood since 1895 (Picheta 2020). There, debates rage about the legacies of the British Empire including its role in the transatlantic slave trade, as well as other colonial oppressions and violences (Bentley 2015), debates echoed in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, for example (Henley et al. 2020). In Victoria, Australia, a truth and justice commission was announced in July 2020 to ‘formally recognise historical wrongs and ongoing injustices’ against First Nations people, the first of its kind in the country’s history (Allam 2020). Today, movements, debates, and processes of historical justice dominate the headlines. While some scholars have traced the origins of the trend towards historical redress to the Nuremberg Trials of the late 1940s (i.e. Teitel 1997), it is widely accepted that contemporary historical justice processes are largely a post-cold war phenomenon. The collapse of communism, wars in former-Yugoslavia and Africa, and political transitions in South Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America of the 1980s and 1990s mark what has been labelled the ‘restorative turn’; a period whereby restorative approaches to past injustices—centred upon establishing historical truth and fostering peacebuilding—were elevated, alongside established legalist, retributive measures. It is with the restorative turn that we can locate the emergent relationship between historical justice and history education. From the 2000s,

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education has been increasingly connected with agendas of historical justice. In an important article from 2007, Elizabeth Cole initiated scholarly conversation about the relationship of history education to processes of transitional justice arguing that ‘the two sectors have rarely intersected, and their work has generally proceeded along separate tracks’ (2007, p. 115). In the decades since, that reality has altered significantly, a fact reflected in Paulson and Bellino’s (2017) survey of truth commission’s engagement with education. In that study, of the 20 truth commissions analysed, all ‘included some form of engagement with education’ (p. 362). Those findings suggest that as truth commissions have ‘become established as a post-conflict norm’ their engagement with education has grown in scope and substance (Paulson and Bellino in this volume). These observations about truth commissions reflect the burgeoning  relationship of historical justice to education more broadly. Today, education is regularly framed as a significant site of historical injustice, for example; in official inquiries investigating institutional abuse (Arvidsson 2019), or where education has been complicit in policies of genocide, assimilation, or indoctrination (Wilkie 1997; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015). It is also positioned as a site in need of considerable reform in order to address past injustices, and, as a vital mechanism for redressing the past in its own right, as a domain where injustices can be remedied. These diverse and expansive imaginings of education in relation to claims and processes of historical justice produce contradictory and confusing agendas. For history education in particular, relations to historical justice are neither clear nor always complimentary. In many ways, this is reflected in, and owing to, the abounding conceptions of both domains, to which we now turn.

Concepts, Tensions, and Opportunities This volume treats historical justice as an expansive concept that signals the global impetus that has emerged in the post-cold war era to acknowledge and redress past wrongs, and, often, prevent their recurrence (Neumann and Thompson 2015). Historical justice is to be distinguished from transitional justice, although there exists no uniform understanding

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of either, normative or historical. For clarity, in this book, we use historical justice as the broader term, and transitional justice specifically to describe official processes and mechanisms aimed at state redress and rebuilding (Winter 2014). History education too, we treat broadly. While the majority of chapters are focused on formal, school education and related materials such as curricula, textbooks, and pedagogy, many others frame history education more widely, as a domain of public history, that occurs in spaces such as museums, community history projects, memorials, and universities. Further, historical justice processes themselves, such as truth commissions and official apologies, can be read as inherently educational domains because they aim to inform publics about past injustices, and in many cases, seek to transform or restore state–citizen relations (Bellino et  al. 2017; Ramirez-Barat and Duthie 2017). By maintaining a broad understanding of both historical justice and history education, in this volume we aim to survey the evolving relationship between these fields, and to initiate conversation about the possibilities and difficulties being generated by their association in diverse contexts. In this process, several core themes and crucial tensions emerged that signal challenges and opportunities for future research in this field, and these are outlined below. (a) Historical Justice in Different Contexts The first reflects a long-standing quandary in the field of historical justice regarding different ‘kinds’ of societies undertaking retrospective justice processes. Much existing research has focused on the role of history education in ‘archetypal’ post-conflict societies—those undertaking regime transition after societal breakdown—and not established democracies (e.g. Bellino 2015; Bentrovato 2017).1 Until recently, this has reflected a narrow interpretation of transitional justice, understood as the transition to liberal democracy following civil unrest, violence, and authoritarianism (Nagy 2008). This understanding of transitional justice, as the transition to democracy and liberal norms, has arguably inhibited recognition of different conceptions of political transition (see, e.g.

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Hobbs 2016) and has privileged establishing legal accountability and civil and political rights over addressing longer-term, structural causes of conflict (Lykes and van der Merwe 2017). This limited interpretation has also elided the role of liberal democracies themselves in causing harm (Maddison and Shepherd 2014), or has created a binary where democratic states are not imagined as sites in need of political transition and historical justice (Matsunaga 2016). Our collection draws out these tensions by bringing insights from more typical post-conflict settings such as South Africa, (Ahonen and Robinson in this volume) and Rwanda (Bentrovato in this volume), together with broadening interpretations of historical justice, including in established democracies. An important feature of this volume is that it contributes new perspectives on the relation of historical justice measures to education in long-standing democracies. Chapters on Sweden, Canada, Finland, and the United Kingdom reveal diverse political and historical traditions, challenge assumptions, and generate new possibilities for analysis. For example, two chapters about Sweden introduce the category of ‘welfare state’ democracies to this field of research. Chapters by Arvidsson and Elmersjö, and Lindmark and Norlin show that redress processes in Sweden have focused on the measures undertaken by the welfare state to establish social cohesion and societal norms at the expense of the rights of minorities, and elsewhere Arvidsson has extended this analysis to cases of abuse in Danish state institutions (Arvidsson 2019). These can partly be distinguished from approaches to historical justice in settler colonial states contending with the continuing, structural injustices of settler colonialism (explored by Miles and Anuik in this volume), societies divided by the legacies of colonialism such as Cyprus (Christodoulou in this volume), and also formerly imperial states of the United Kingdom (see Gauld and Grosvenor, Mann in this volume) and Japan (see Ropers, Eriksson in this volume), reckoning with the legacies of their respective wartime and imperial pasts in classrooms, memorials, and museums. In these diverse contexts, the relationship of history education to historical justice movements and processes can radically differ, and this leads to a second core theme explored in this volume.

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(b) History Education Paradigms and Traditions This volume draws attention to the many, complex ways that conceptions of historical justice and history education are taken up by researchers from different disciplines and national contexts. On the one hand, that diversity is a natural outcome of researching areas that are multidisciplinary and connected to different local developments, histories, and educational and political contexts. On the other hand, it can create certain impediments for establishing a common conceptual understanding for future research dialogue. For example, historical justice might be approached differently depending on the motivation of teaching history in different national contexts. If history is taught in schools primarily in order to construct and celebrate the national story, then knowledge of historical injustice may be subsumed with nation-building narratives. Alternatively, if it is taught to develop historical thinking skills, teaching might focus, not on truth itself, but on how to critically evaluate truth claims. If history is primarily taught to develop historical consciousness in students, teaching might focus on developing an orientation in time in relation to a particular group identity. This volume seeks to acknowledge and make room for these approaches, rather than homogenise them; however, it does suggest that these contextual and conceptual differences make different kinds of research into history education and historical justice—including sustained, comparative approaches—desirable. Broadly speaking, historical justice challenges history education by; blurring its civic and scientific agendas through linking history teaching to normative goals; reanimating epistemological questions of truth and narrative; drawing attention to the limits of the history discipline as the arbiter of justice, and; by extending understandings of history education and its obligations beyond the space of the classroom and linear temporal frames. In return, approaches and concepts from history education challenge conceptions of historical justice. They contest assumptions that a unified narrative about the past can resolve conflict, and complicate simplistic uses of history, using disciplinary tools to resist the idea that history education should be aligned with normative goals. Ideas and methods from history education deepen understandings of historical justice itself,

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with theoretical frameworks such as historical consciousness (Rüsen 2005; Thorp 2014) and historical culture (Grever and Adriaansen 2017), and through the surprising perspectives of history teachers (Mann, Robinson in this volume) and students (Löfström in this volume). This volume reflects these tensions and possibilities. This is evident in the different epistemological positions and ideas presented in the book, about how to relate to knowledge in the researched areas. While some chapters are merely explanatory and aim at attaining knowledge or achieving an understanding of processes connected to, for instance, reconciliation or classroom activities (see Lindmark and Norlin in this volume), others take a more normative approach directed towards the improvement of teaching (see Collste in this volume), or the ways in which historical justice is practised (see Paulson and Bellino in this volume). What’s clear is that there is no ‘one-size fits all’ approach in this field. (c) Educationalisation There exist few conceptual frameworks for the analysis of processes by which knowledge from historical justice agendas gets translated into educational domains, such as curricula, pedagogy, materials, museums, and memorial sites. Scholars seeking to survey this field have tended to focus on specific redress mechanisms in relation to education, like truth commissions (Paulson and Bellino 2017) or discrete educational materials such as textbooks (see, e.g. Bellino and Williams 2017; Bentrovato and Wassermann 2018; Christodoulou 2018), and curricula (see, e.g. Miles 2018; Keynes 2019). The process of rendering certain forms of knowledge (e.g. knowledge of state crimes produced through inquiry commissions) into a new educational discourse might be labelled educationalisation. This concept was popularised in English-language historical research on education by Belgian historian, Marc Depaepe and colleagues and is generally used in historical analyses to explore ‘the qualitative expansion of “educational” (“pedagogical”) interventions in society’ (Smeyers and Depaepe 2008, p.  3). This volume indicates that educationalisation may be a helpful, organising concept for framing analysis in this field.

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In Citizenship and the Learning Society, Naomi Hodgson (2016, p. 1) claimed that ‘educational responses to social problems are often triggered by a sense of crisis’. From a longer, historical vantage-point, historian Daniel Tröhler has argued that educationalisation can be understood as a form of modernisation, whereby, since the eighteenth century, perceived societal challenges started to be interpreted as problems to be solved by educational means (Tröhler 2016, p. 698). In contexts characterised by recent mass violence or authoritarianism, historical justice measures may respond to the breakdown of civil and political institutions, seeking to reckon with and remedy the harms of the past and restore or establish legitimate state-citizen relations. In established democracies confronting the enduring legacies and structures of unjust pasts, historical justice measures might seek to repair state legitimacy, encourage social cohesion, adhere to international norms, and deliver forms of justice to victims through truth-telling, reparation, and memorialisation. A sense of crisis, whether of legitimacy, morality, trust, or accountability, animates these efforts. In these situations, education is clearly positioned as a key part of an urgent agenda; to reconstruct society, and to contribute to the restoration of victims and the prevention of future violence. In this turn to educationalise the urgent problems associated with historical justice movements and measures, a particular developmental and decontextualised vision of education can arise. While education has more frequently been positioned as a partner or arm of historical justice processes, this has not always been coupled with reflection about the role of education in inciting or exacerbating conflict, as Paulson and Bellino note (in this volume). Taking stock of harms committed in schooling and educational institutions has not easily aligned with the developmental orientation of education, which McLeod (2017, p. 14) notes, remains a ‘modernist project dedicated to social and individual improvement and progress’. This is related to the ‘two-way gaze’ of historical justice measures, which, as Davies has observed (2017), places both forward and backward-­ looking demands on the education sector. Conceiving of these processes broadly in terms of educationalisation signals an awareness of the complexities, historical and contemporary, of seeking educational solutions to pressing societal problems, such as historical justice. It encourages

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scholars and practitioners to consider how the forward-looking project of education interacts with the backward-looking orientation of historical justice. For example, by emphasising not remorse but rather moral recommitment to a particular set of values and norms, do particular historical justice processes precipitate an educational dimension that is by its nature forward-looking and normative? Or rather, does the recognition of persisting injustices facilitated by educational measures in the past necessitate a confrontation with the developmental character of education, including its role in embodying and carrying out historical justice work? These are vital questions for researchers in this field. There are other promising and complimentary conceptual tools developed in this volume. For instance, in their chapter, Arvidsson and Elmersjö develop a framework for analysing processes of educationalisation, by marrying Apple’s (2003) concept of ‘official knowledge’ with Bernstein’s (1986) theory of recontextualisation. Bermudez (in this volume) develops a set of analytic tools for interrogating narratives that normalize violence in history education, which she shows can extend and complement existing paradigms for history education research. Bentrovato (in this volume) argues that a ‘dialogic multivocal’ approach, as in South African textbook reform, is more facilitative of reconciliation after violent pasts than the univocal approach pursued in Rwanda. These insights, and many others, represent promising opportunities for future research and practice.

The Parts of the Book The book is structured in four thematic sections: State-Sponsored Processes and Education (Part I), Historical Justice in Public History Spaces (Part II), Educational Materials: Textbooks, Curricula, Policy (Part III) and Pedagogy, Teachers, and Students (Part IV). Part I focuses on the area of state-sponsored processes and their relation to education. Its opening chapter is authored by Malin Arvidsson and Henrik Åström Elmersjö and deals with what happens when knowledge from a state-­ sponsored white paper project is transformed into educational texts for use in schools. By marrying the concepts of ‘official knowledge’ and

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‘recontextualisation’, the process by which knowledge is educationalised is highlighted. Arvidsson and Elmersjö show that the knowledge about historical abuse of the Roma minority in Sweden was mainly framed as part of general human rights education. In her chapter, Sirkka Ahonen writes about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the ethical implications of the commission’s work for history education in South Africa. Ahonen discusses the liberal ‘rainbowism’ of the early post-apartheid South African society and education and the challenge posed by a contrary, social memory based on post-colonial Africanism. In the last chapter of this section, Julia Paulson and Michelle J. Bellino discuss general patterns, possibilities, and implications of truth commissions for history education. Analysing 20 different truth commissions, they find that truth commissions seem to become more engaged in education over time. However, truth commissions do not seem to make their contributions educational from the start, and often leave the educationalisation of the historical knowledge they produce to educational policymakers and individual teachers. Part II provides perspectives on historical justice in public history contexts, broadly. The section contains six chapters dealing with a wide variety of public contexts where historical justice is being pursued. The first chapter of this section is written by Erik Ropers and deals with the ‘Hanaoka incident’ in Japan during World War II, where authorities brutally suppressed an uprising of Chinese forced labourers. Roper investigates how local educators have framed this history in different contexts. Discussing both schools and local organisations, Ropers demonstrates how this history is understood differently in the local community compared to the official history produced following the war crimes trials and verdicts. He shows how local educators can push back against national curricula in making historical narratives part of local memory. In the following chapter, Daniela Romero-Amaya discusses historical narratives and the socio-political implications of ascribing meaning to the past in post-conflict societies. She first theorises about how the post-­ conflict citizen is normatively constructed for a specific type of democracy. Then, she discusses how historical injustices are embedded in different overarching narratives, both official and subversive.

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Björn Norlin and Daniel Lindmark discuss what happens to historical knowledge when historical problems are formulated, researched, and published within truth commissions and white paper projects, in this case, the ongoing reconciliation process between the Church of Sweden and the Indigenous Sami people. Norlin and Lindmark note that the undertaking of a truth commission is always imbued with academic, ideological, and ethical considerations making the knowledge they produce complex to analyse. They conclude that different shapes of historical knowledge exist parallel to each other, and also converge, in these processes. In their chapter, Nicola Gauld and Ian Grosvenor consider collaborative projects about the memories of World War I involving community organisations and academics. They specifically discuss how these collaborations addressed historical injustices connected to the legacy of colonialism and empire in conflict, as well as the impact of the War on the rights of disabled persons. They conclude that in addressing issues that are well known, but emotionally and politically inconvenient, there is a lot to gain from establishing a relationship between academia and communities engaged in and affected by issues of historical injustice. Anna-Karin Eriksson’s chapter addresses the intersections of historical justice and history education in the history of ‘comfort women’ in Japan. Eriksson studies the organisation of ‘comfort women discourse’ as a false dichotomy which has created an unnecessary forced choice between gender justice and the victor’s narrative and the victor’s justice. In the final chapter of Part II, Göran Collste discusses relations between ethics and historical justice and relates this to history education and the concept of historical consciousness. In doing so, Collste calls for interdisciplinary cooperation, both in academia and in schools, when matters of historical justice are being addressed. Part III is concentrated on the area of educational materials, curricula and policy. Its first chapter is authored by Eleni Christodoulou who writes about the revision of history textbooks in Cyprus, which she describes as a divided society that is neither ‘transitioning’ nor ‘post-­ conflict’. Christodoulou argues that although no form of history education can completely rectify or compensate for past crimes, history textbooks can contribute to minimal forms of historical justice through their performative effects. She discusses the educational and historical

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context in Cyprus before offering four challenges/principles for history textbook revisions to materialise as forms of historical justice. In the next chapter, James Miles scrutinises the reform of social studies curricula in the Canadian state of British Columbia. Miles argues that the new social studies curriculum treats injustices attributed to colonialism as events and thereby isolates colonial injustice from the structures of settler colonialism. Even though historical injustices are now visible, and even important parts of the curriculum, the framing of injustices as events does not necessarily challenge the nature of the settler colonial state. Angela Bermudez writes about ten tools to deconstruct narratives about violent pasts and how teachers can help students develop a more critical understanding of violence in the past and reject the normalisation of violence. Exploring the relationship between historical inquiry and ethical reflection she also discusses the legitimacy of different goals in history education stemming from ideas of historical thinking as well as from ideas of historical consciousness. With the ten tools provided, students and teachers are invited to examine representations of violence in the past more critically. In the last chapter of the section on educational materials, curricula, and policy, Denise Bentrovato examines the differences in approaches to a violent past in South African and Rwandan textbooks. She argues that the Rwandan textbooks more closely follow a univocal narrative based in the transitional justice process that Rwanda went through following the 1994 genocide that was in turn based in justice and accountability. The South African textbooks, on the other hand, are found to have more multivocal narratives based in the South African approach to transitional justice centred around forgiveness and negotiation. Part IV treats closely with pedagogy, focusing on teachers’ and students’ ambitions and perspectives on historical justice. Jonathan Anuik’s chapter revolves around a book club for student teachers in Canada. By encouraging student teachers to read a novel about Indigenous struggles in the face of settler colonial society, they were able to engage on a deep level with historical empathy. The book chosen, a historical fiction novel, also tended to embed Indigenous knowledge as part of the Canadian story. Anuik concludes that a book club enables its participants to understand how a fictional story can contribute to grassroots practices of reconciliation.

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In her chapter on formal history education in South Africa, Natasha Robinson argues that a focus on how young people understand the past, including its legacy and meaning in contemporary society, is urgently required. In her study, Robinson finds that history teachers in South Africa approach recent South African history quite differently, either framing apartheid as having a profound impact on the present or as a past parenthesis in South African history. In their chapter, Andy Pearce and Stuart Foster question the idea that teaching about the Holocaust inevitably inculcates tolerance in young people. The authors argue that learning about the Holocaust presents opportunities for young people to explore the complexities of both justice and injustice in history. However, these complexities can only be utilised to reinforce students’ understanding of justice and tolerance by a deeper recalibration of how we think about, and practice Holocaust education. Heather Mann also engages with teaching about genocide in her chapter. Drawing on interviews with secondary school history teachers in England, she analyses teachers’ motivations when teaching about the Holocaust and whether attaining justice for more recent genocides motivates them and informs their lesson planning. Mann also asks why the Holocaust enables teachers in England to articulate genocidal violence, but not colonial violence to the same degree. In the final chapter of this section, and of this volume as a whole, Jan Löfström explores how Finnish upper secondary school students interpret the motives and effects of historical apologies. Löfström finds three different interpretations: promotion of the strategic interests of the state, the communication of moral lessons and immaterial redress to victims of transgenerational harm. Because the last category was harder for the students to accept, Löfström suggests that ethics of care, rather than ethics of justice, could be a way to deal with transgenerational guilt and harm in history classrooms.

Conclusion This volume demonstrates that history education, in schools and beyond, has an important contribution to make to agendas and understandings of historical justice. While generalised human rights and peace education

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may have been the favoured educational outlets for historical justice processes, history education occupies an increasingly vital position. With the growing legal recognition of the ‘right to truth’ in international humanitarian discourse, and the global rise of truth-seeking processes elevating the status of historical knowledge as a moral force, the ‘turn to history’ centres history education as a mediator of historical justice agendas. Methods and concepts from history education, whether understood in terms of orientation, or disciplinary thinking, provide vital means and opportunities for contextualising the longer-term causes and structures that lead to mass harm and injustice. In this way, this volume contributes something distinctive to the field of historical justice. While education has typically been framed as a partner of primary redress mechanisms, such as trials and truth commissions, the chapters in this book underscore the thoroughly educational character of historical justice in its own right and contribute vital educational approaches and insights that should challenge the field of historical justice. As history education comes into view as an important domain of historical justice, this volume highlights important new directions and approaches, and incites crucial agendas for further research.

Note 1. Although there are long-standing literatures addressing history education in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine which are established democracies. See, for example, McCully 2012; Goldberg 2017. 

References Allam, Loreta. 2020. Victoria to Set Up Australia’s First Truth and Justice Commission to Recognise Wrongs against Aboriginal People. The Guardian, July 10, sec. Australia News. Apple, Michael W. 2003. Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.

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Arvidsson, Malin. 2019. Retroactive Responsibility: A Comparison of Argumentation on State Redress for Historical Institutional Child Abuse in Sweden and Denmark. Scandinavian Journal of History 45 (2): 159–177. Bellino, Michelle J. 2015. So That We Do Not Fall Again: History Education and Citizenship in ‘Postwar’ Guatemala. Comparative Education Review 60: 58–79. Bellino, Michelle J., and James H.  Williams. 2017. (Re)constructing Memory Education, Identity, and Conflict. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Bellino, Michelle J., Julia Paulson, and Elizabeth Anderson Worden. 2017. Working through Difficult Pasts: Toward Thick Democracy and Transitional Justice in Education. Comparative Education 53: 313–332. Bentley, Tom. 2015. Empires of Remorse: Narrative, Postcolonialism and Apologies for Colonial Atrocity. Routledge Studies on Challenges, Crises and Dissent in World Politics. London: Taylor and Francis. Bentrovato, Denise. 2017. Accounting for Genocide: Transitional Justice, Mass (Re)education and the Pedagogy of Truth in Present-Day Rwanda. Comparative Education 53: 396–417. Bentrovato, Denise, and Johan Wassermann. 2018. Mediating Transitional Justice: South Africa’s TRC in History Textbooks and the Implications for Peace. Global Change, Peace & Security 30: 335–351. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14781158.2018.1438386. Bentrovato, Denise, Karina V.  Korostelina, and Martina Schulze, eds. 2016. History Can Bite: History Education in Divided and Postwar Societies. Gottingen: V&R Unipress GmbH. Bernstein, Basil. 1986. On Pedagogic Discourse. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G.  Richardson, 205–240. New York: Greenwood Press. Bevernage, Berber. 2012. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice. New York: Routledge. Buchanan, Larry, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel. 2020. Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History. The New York Times, July 3, sec. U.S. Christodoulou, Eleni. 2018. Deconstructing Resistance Towards Textbook Revisions: The Securitisation of History Textbooks and the Cyprus Conflict. Global Change, Peace & Security 30 (3): 373–393. Cole, Elizabeth. 2007. Transitional Justice and History Education. International Journal of Transitional Justice 1: 115–137.

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Davies, Lynn. 2017. Justice-Sensitive Education: the Implications of Transitional Justice Mechanisms for Teaching and Learning. Comparative Education 53: 333–350. Elmersjö, Henrik Åström, Anna Clark, and Monika Vinterek, eds. 2017. International Perspectives on Teaching Rival Histories. Pedagogical Responses to Contested Narratives and the History Wars. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New  York: Free Press. Goldberg, Tsafir. 2017. The Official, The Empathetic and The Critical: Three Approaches to History Teaching and Reconciliation in Israel. In History Education and Conflict Transformation Social Psychological Theories, History Teaching and Reconciliation, ed. Charis Psaltis, Mario Carretero, and Sabina Čehajić-Clancy. 277–300. Springer International Publishing. Grever, Maria, and Robert-Jan Adriaansen. 2017. Historical Culture: A Concept Revisited. In Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education, ed. Mario Carretero, Stefan Berger, and Maria Grever, 73–89. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hartog, François. 2016. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. Translated by Saskia Brown. New York: Columbia University Press. Henley, Jon, Philip Oltermann, and Daniel Boffey. 2020. European Colonial Powers Still Loth to Admit Historical Evils. The Guardian, March 11, sec. World News. Hobbs, Harry. 2016. Locating the Logic of Transitional Justice in Liberal Democracies: Native Title in Australia. UNSW Law Journal 39 (2): 512–552. Hodgson, Naomi. 2016. Citizenship for the Learning Society: Europe, Subjectivity, and Educational Research. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. Karn, Alexander. 2015. Amending the Past: Europe’s Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Keynes, Matilda. 2019. History Education for Transitional Justice? Challenges, Limitations and Possibilities for Settler Colonial Australia. International Journal of Transitional Justice 13: 113–133. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ijtj/ijy026. ———. 2020. History Education, Citizenship and State Formation. In Handbook of Historical Studies in Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald. Singapore: Springer. Lykes, M. Brinton, and Hugo van der Merwe. 2017. Exploring/Expanding the Reach of Transitional Justice. International Journal of Transitional Justice 11: 371–377.

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Maddison, Sarah, and Laura J.  Shepherd. 2014. Peacebuilding and the Postcolonial Politics of Transitional Justice. Peacebuilding 2: 253–269. Matsunaga, Jennifer. 2016. Two Faces of Transitional Justice: Theorizing the Incommensurability of Transitional Justice and Decolonization in Canada. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 5: 24–44. McCully, Alan. 2012. History teaching, conflict and the legacy of the past. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 7: 145–159. McLeod, Julie. 2017. Marking Time, Making Methods: Temporality and Untimely Dilemmas in the Sociology of Youth and Educational Change. British Journal of Sociology of Education 38: 13–25. Miles, James. 2018. Teaching History for Truth and Reconciliation: The Challenges and Opportunities of Narrativity, Temporality, and Identity. McGill Journal of Education/Revue des sciences de l’éducation de McGill 53 (2). https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/9495. Murphy, Colleen. 2020. Transitional Justice in the United States. Just Security, July 16, sec. Civil Liberties. Nagy, Rosemary. 2008. Transitional Justice as Global Project: Critical Reflections. Third World Quarterly 29: 275–289. Neumann, Klaus, and Janna Thompson, eds. 2015. Historical Justice and Memory. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Olick, Jeffrey. 2007. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York: Routledge. Paulson, Julia, and Michelle J. Bellino. 2017. Truth Commissions, Education, and Positive Peace: An Analysis of Truth Commission Final Reports (1980–2015). Comparative Education 53: 351–378. Peck, Carla, and Terrie Epstein, eds. 2018. Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts: A Critical Sociocultural Approach (Hardback)—Routledge. New York: Routledge. Picheta, Rob. 2020. Protesters Tear Down Statue of Slave Trader as Anti-racism Demonstrations Take Place Worldwide. CNN. Psaltis, Charis, Mario Carretero, and Sabina Čehajić-Clancy. 2017. History Education and Conflict Transformation Social Psychological Theories, History Teaching and Reconciliation. Springer International Publishing. Ramirez-Barat, C., and R. Duthie, eds. 2017. Transitional Justice and Education: Learning Peace. New York: Social Science Research Council. Rüsen, Jörn. 2005. History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation: Making Sense of History. New York: Berghahn Books.

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Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár. 2019. History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Smeyers, Paul, and Marc Depaepe, eds. 2008. Educational Research: the Educationalization of Social Problems. Dordrecht, Springer. Teitel, Ruti G. 1997. Transitional Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Globalizing Transitional Justice: Contemporary Essays. Oxford University Press. Thorp, Robert. 2014. Towards an Epistemological Theory of Historical Consciousness. Historical Encounters 1: 20–31. Torpey, John. 2006. Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tröhler, Daniel. 2016. Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationalization of the Modern World. In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, ed. Michael A. Peters. Singapore: Springer. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Ottawa: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Wilkie, Meredith, ed. 1997. Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Parliamentary Paper no. 128 of 1997. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Winter, Stephen. 2014. Transitional Justice in Established Democracies: A Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan.

Part I State-Sponsored Processes and Education

2 Recontextualizing Historical Injustice into Education: The Relationship Between a White Paper and a Textbook on the Abuse of the Roma in Swedish History Malin Arvidsson and Henrik Åström Elmersjö

Introduction Calls for historical justice have been voiced in many countries in recent decades (Neumann and Thompson 2015). While transitional justice as a scholarly and policy field originally focused on post-conflict societies and “paradigmatic cases” of transitions from dictatorship and autocratic rule to democracy, the field has expanded. The re-evaluation of a colonial past and assimilationist policies in established democracies can be seen as a kind of long-term transition (Winter 2014) and, as Nicola Henry has

M. Arvidsson (*) Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] H. Åström Elmersjö Department of Education, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_2

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pointed out, “one of the limitations of a violent conflict or authoritarianism-­ centric definition is the risk that democratic states escape scrutiny for their misdeeds” (Henry 2015, p. 215). Drawing on her broad definition of transitional justice, this chapter contributes to the field by analyzing the politics of state redress in Sweden. Previous studies on transitional justice in established democracies have largely focused on settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada (see, e.g. Nagy 2008, Winter 2014, Keynes 2019). Even though Sweden’s colonial past is now becoming the subject of demands for historical justice, for example, the demand to make 9 October a day of commemoration for Sweden’s part in the North-Atlantic slave trade, and in proposals for a truth commission regarding the Swedish state’s treatment of the Sami, efforts to right colonial wrongs have not played such a key role in Swedish redress politics as in typical settler colonies. In Sweden, demands for recognition and redress have instead been framed by a re-evaluation of the welfare state. The extensive social reforms from the 1930s onwards, motivated by an ambition to create economic equality and provide a universal social welfare system, have been praised internationally by progressive intellectuals, who cite the “Swedish Model” as an example of a golden middle way between capitalism and communism, while conservative commentators have used it as a cautionary example of collectivism. Lundberg and Tydén suggest that Swedish historiography has been dominated by a narrative that portrays the country’s transformation from a poor, agrarian society to an industrialized welfare state as a success story. In this “traditional” approach, the realization of social rights through democratic majority decisions is emphasized. A more critical approach, they argue, has been articulated by “constitutionalists” who are concerned with the comparatively weak protection of individual rights and social interventions that are being enforced through administrative decisions, rather than judicial procedures. This kind of critique had been voiced throughout the post-war era but gained currency during the 1980s and 1990s, underpinned by studies portraying the Swedish “People’s Home” as paternalistic, staffed by experts lacking respect for individual autonomy and integrity. These conflicting perspectives crystalized in 1997, when revelations about eugenic sterilization made international headlines and resulted in a heated debate about the

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nature of the welfare state: liberating or oppressing? (Lundberg and Tydén 2010). This public and scholarly debate about the exclusionary logic of the welfare state was followed by several temporary, independent commissions, mandated by the government to provide knowledge about past injustices—first regarding involuntary sterilizations and later as a response to testimony about abuse in out-of-home care for children. Although these commissions attempted to investigate the extent to which ethnic minorities were over-represented among the victims, this was not the main question (Arvidsson 2016). The first example of state-sponsored knowledge production with a specific focus on the historical treatment of an ethnic minority is the report The Dark Unknown History: White Paper on Abuses and Rights Violations Against Roma in the 20th Century (Ds 2014: 8), which was the result of a project initiated in the spring of 2011 at the Swedish Government Offices. (Although the project also resulted in independent reports by researchers, we have chosen to focus on the final report which will henceforth be referred to as the White Paper.) In this chapter, we will analyze text material produced by the Commission on Antiziganism—a temporary government commission, set up in 2014  in order to follow up the White Paper—which was tasked with promoting human rights and fostering democratic values by disseminating historical knowledge regarding Antiziganism. In a general sense, there is an educational component to all measures designed to officially recognize past injustices, whether it is a truth commission (TRC), an apology or a financial redress scheme. As Norlin and Lindmark (2021) point out, to disseminate historical knowledge in public education activities is sometimes also part of the formal mandate of a TRC. However, we are primarily interested in the transformation of such efforts to educate the general public in the different institutional framework of formal education. The purpose of this chapter is to develop a conceptual framework for a larger study of how a welfare state’s efforts to make amends for past injustices have influenced school activities. The way in which the process of obtaining new knowledge of past injustices has been incorporated into official knowledge—exemplified here as subject matter presented in a way that is (allegedly) possible to teach in schools—is at the core of our inquiry. We consider the efforts of the

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Commission on Antiziganism to “translate” new knowledge into education to be a possible first step on a path to incorporating this new knowledge into knowledge that is viewed as important, legitimate and common-sense to teach and learn. The question we intend to address regarding this empirical example is: How does the knowledge gained and the concepts used to describe past rights violations in the Swedish welfare state, in official inquiries and government commissions, translate into teaching?

Historical Justice and Education in Sweden The transition to democracy in post-communist states after the fall of the Berlin Wall generated debates about how to redress injustices committed during the previous regime. The end of the Cold War also entailed a new ideological climate that was the background to renewed campaigns for reparations in many other countries (Torpey 2006, p. 24). In Sweden, criticism of surveillance and registration of the opinions of left-wing radicals gained momentum and calls were made for a truth commission to document such infringements of civil and political rights, with references to the South African TRC. Even though the Commission of Inquiry into the Security Service was not called a truth commission, one of the arguments for setting it up was to strengthen citizens’ trust in the state (SOU 2002: 87, Arvidsson 2018). During the 1990s, there was also a renewed debate about collective guilt regarding the complacency of neutral countries in light of their knowledge about atrocities committed during World War II (Barkan 2000, pp.  88–111). Sweden’s acquiescence toward Nazi Germany, for example, in allowing the transportation of troops to Norway, was heavily criticized and discussed in new historiography evaluating the “small-state realism” narrative, based on the notion that Sweden—as a small state in the midst of a war between major powers—had no realistic alternative to the concessions it made to Nazi Germany, from a moral perspective (Andersson and Tydén 2007; Östling 2008). At the same time, Prime Minister Göran Persson initiated an information project about the Holocaust, labeled “Living History” [Levande historia], with “the double

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objective of bringing about a knowledge of the Nazi genocide and to counteract destructive tendencies of racism, intolerance and contempt for democracy in late 20th century society” (Karlsson 2003, p.  15). A book was produced and issued free to school pupils (Bruchfeld and Levine 1998). This initiative was institutionalized in 2003 as the Living History Forum, which has since played a key role regarding education about historical injustices, for both the general public and for school pupils. As previously mentioned, another kind of historical injustice that was brought to the fore during the late 1990s and early 2000s was associated with repressive aspects of the Swedish welfare state. A commission set up in 1997 investigated the eugenically motivated sterilization laws enacted in the 1930s and 1940s and how they had been applied up until the 1970s. A temporary law was enacted, entitling direct victims of involuntary sterilization to financial redress (Arvidsson 2016, pp.  157–165). Some years later, the “Living History Forum” [Forum för Levande Historia], in collaboration with the Museum of Ethnography and the Swedish Exhibition Agency, produced the exhibition (O)mänskligt [(In) human] with the aim of problematizing the norms and practices of categorization in order to foster respect for human rights and dignity. The exhibition was displayed in several Swedish museums between 2010 and 2016. It was accompanied by a teacher’s guide (Living History Forum, (O)mänskligt:  Lärarhandledning) and, in connection with the touring exhibition, a set of workshops was offered to school classes (Living History Forum, Workshop i (O)mänskligt). In contrast to campaigns for historical justice for atrocities committed during armed conflicts, amends for forced sterilization draw our attention to “a different logic of human rights deprivation, partly intersecting but not identical with the logic of ethnoracial distinctions: the logic of normality, deviance and fitness” (Braun et al. 2014, p. 204). A similar kind of redress process took place during the 2000s. As a reaction to care leavers’ demands for official recognition of maltreatment in institutions for children, and with reference to an ongoing commission in Norway, another government commission was set up to document neglect and abuse in out-of-home care for children throughout the twentieth century. A second government commission was tasked with preparing an official apology, which was delivered at a ceremony in November 2011. It also

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suggested that direct victims of severe forms of abuse should be entitled to temporary financial compensation. Finally, it suggested that the commission’s results should be made available to the general public via a touring exhibition. However, no specific project aimed at school children was launched (Arvidsson 2016). Over the last decade, demands for historical justice have primarily been made by or on behalf of officially recognized national minorities (Arvidsson 2018). In 2010, the Delegation for Roma Issues recommended that an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission be mandated (SOU 2010: 55, p. 220). This recommendation was rejected because it was deemed as being too oriented toward the past, and the government later initiated the abovementioned White Paper project instead. The working group was reporting to the Government Offices of Sweden and was thus subject to more direct political influence than an independent committee appointed by the government. It was tasked with producing a White Paper on the abuse and discriminatory treatment of the Roma during the twentieth century. This was carried out by commissioning researchers who undertook specialized studies and by collecting testimonies through interviews. The original aim was also to discuss questions concerning responsibility for the documented abuses in relation to different institutions. However, as David Sjögren has described, the instructions changed over time and the responsibility issue gradually disappeared. In the published version of the White Paper on Roma and Travellers, the stated aim was to recognize the victims and their next of kin, and to promote understanding of the situation for the Roma minority in Swedish contemporary society in the light of historical knowledge about how stereotypes and prejudice have been passed on from one generation to the next and influenced state policy (Sjögren 2016, pp. 142–143). Shortly after the White Paper on Roma and Travellers was published in March 2014, the Commission on Antiziganism was set up, headed by Thomas Hammarberg, a human rights expert. The remit included both taking direct action against antiziganism and suggesting further initiatives to confront antiziganism. Another task was to produce and distribute material based on the White Paper, in cooperation with the Swedish

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National Agency for Education, the Equality Ombudsman and the Living History Forum (Dir. 2014: 47, pp. 6–7).

Educational Texts About a National Minority In this chapter, we will analyze two texts published by the Commission on Antiziganism: a textbook and an accompanying teacher’s guide. The Commission’s initial analysis of existing textbooks in social studies and history showed that they lacked information about the discrimination against the Roma and the group’s status as a national minority. Thus, the textbook Antiziganismen i Sverige: Om övergrepp och kränkningar av romer under 1900-talet och idag [Antiziganism in Sweden: About the abuses and violations of Roma during the 1900s and today] was produced as a resource for teachers to engage with these issues. It follows the same thematic structure as the White Paper, but the content has been adapted for lower as well as upper secondary schools. A special effort was made to include photos in order to facilitate classroom work with image analysis. Some interviews from the White Paper project were reused, but the Commission also conducted new interviews in order to strengthen the focus on contemporary work for Roma rights. The textbook and teacher’s guide were disseminated through the Commission’s website and sent to social studies teachers at all lower and upper secondary schools. It was also disseminated through a conference series about how schools can work on confronting xenophobia and racism, aimed at teachers, headmasters and municipalities (SOU 2016: 44, pp. 66–68). In his analysis of how minority history is treated in the Norwegian and Swedish school subjects of history, Vidar Fagerheim Kalsås (2018) argues that these and other educational texts about the Romani people and the Roma communicate two master narratives: a “narrative of uniqueness” and a “narrative of oppression”. While the first narrative is associated with the national minority status, the latter is associated with contemporary debates about historical justice. Evaluating the historical-didactical design of the educational texts in relation to Jörn Rüsen’s categorization of how historical consciousness is developed, Fagerheim Kalsås found that: “the texts are designed in ways that can develop a traditional and exemplary

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historical consciousness, but that they are lacking elements that can challenge the pupils in the direction of a critical or genetical historical consciousness” (Fagerheim Kalsås 2018, p. 11). Our reading of the textbook and teacher’s guide is neither a close textual analysis nor an evaluation. We would rather focus on the context in which they were produced, thereby using them as examples in a theoretical discussion about what happens to knowledge of historical injustices when it is recontextualized.

Theoretical Considerations The transformation of historical justice into a formal educational issue could be understood in terms of educationalization (Keynes et al. 2021), or the creation of an educational discourse in new fields in which the solution to different identified and represented societal problems, such as historical justice, are articulated as (formal) educational issues (Depaepe 1998; Smeyers and Depaepe 2008). On the analytical level, we are inspired by Michael W. Apple’s conceptualization of official knowledge and its connection with Basil Bernstein’s view of the recontextualization of knowledge into pedagogical discourse. Official knowledge constitutes the knowledge that is seen as legitimate and common-sense in a given society at a given time (Apple 2000). Thus, official knowledge can be seen as a political instrument and as both a creator of cultural hegemony and a consequence of it. Official knowledge is also considered to be inherently pliable: what is considered legitimate, common-sense knowledge within a specific society is constantly negotiated. Even if it may be regarded as a tool for dominating groups, these groups must take the concerns of the less powerful into account in order to maintain their dominance (Apple and Christian-Smith 1991). Compromises would need to be made and would at times suggest minor victories for the less powerful groups in society and what is “declared to be official knowledge, then, is compromised knowledge, knowledge that is filtered through a complicated set of political screens and decisions before it gets to be declared legitimate” (Apple 2000, p. 64).

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The compromises could occur at different sites, for example, in political and ideological discourse; in state policies; in knowledge taught in schools; in the daily activities of teachers and students in classrooms (Apple 2000, p. 10). At these different sites, knowledge could be negotiated in different ways and new positions could be upheld by different powers. In accordance with Bernstein’s view of the recontextualization of knowledge, in which it is de-located from one arena (e.g. research or a governmental inquiry) and relocated to another (e.g. education or museums), official knowledge tends to undergo these transformations: “Political accords and educational needs can radically alter the shape and organization of the knowledge” (Apple 2000, p.  65, see also Bernstein 1986). According to Apple’s interpretation of Bernstein, this recontextualization into a pedagogical discourse occurs in three ways: (1) the knowledge no longer forms part of the professional discourse of researchers or the cultural discourse of oppressed groups (or whoever produced the knowledge). That is, the knowledge is integrated into a different set of political and cultural needs, in which power relations might be different; (2) the knowledge is tailored to fit a pedagogical need: simplified, condensed and elaborated into appropriately sized slices that are easy to learn and that are perhaps “politically safe”; (3) the use of the knowledge changes, perhaps from expanding our intellectual horizon to socializing pupils. In this chapter, we primarily focus on the second mode of recontextualization but will also briefly discuss the third mode. Demands for changes in official knowledge are often directed at education, more specifically at curricula. New knowledge, resulting from social movements and/or academic research, is then educationalized. However, in the negotiations regarding if and how new knowledge is to become part of official knowledge, there are apparently a variety of spaces in which this knowledge could end up. At one end of this scale is a space in which this knowledge is a clear, concise and incorporated part of curricula, in which this new knowledge is transformed into pedagogical discourse as an important part of learning specific subjects. At the other end of the scale is complete oblivion; no mention or action at all as a consequence of this new knowledge. In between are different forms of temporary and non-incorporated educational initiatives: themes for one day,

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week or month, temporary museum exhibitions and other types of separation of this new knowledge from “normal” knowledge (see, e.g. Apple 2000, pp. 31–39). These “in-between” schemes could be clearing a path toward both ends of the scale as they might be a first step toward inclusion in curricula, as well as a first step toward oblivion. By looking at what is essentially a material form of knowledge transfer (i.e. different material imprints that people interact with in different ways)—quite literally, the transformation of knowledge into specific texts—we also subscribe to James A. Secord’s ideas of knowledge as communication. This entails us also exploring the fluctuating and perhaps evasive boundary between expert esoteric knowledge and the exoteric knowledge of the pedagogical discourse (Secord 2004, p. 671).

 econtextualizing Historical Justice R for the Roma in Sweden Given that the White Paper project was already an outspoken educational initiative with the stated aim of promoting understanding of the contemporary situation of the Roma minority, some recontextualization had already taken place. Two different forms of recontextualization can be identified during this process. To begin with, the historical knowledge produced by the commissioned research, originally published in independent reports, was summarized in the White Paper and thus communicated in a more policy-orientated language. Second, the report drew on 27 interviews, and these individual testimonies of discrimination were cited in order to officially recognize these experiences and to illustrate different forms of exclusion. Thus, the commonalities in these narratives were stressed, thereby generalizing the personal experience of the interviewees (Ds 2014: 8, p. 17). We will not look any further into this negotiation of knowledge but will exclusively investigate the changes to structure and foci between the White Paper and how this research-­ produced knowledge was transformed into a textbook for use in schools.

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Framing the Textbook The very strong association between the White Paper on Roma and Travellers and the educational material on antiziganism is already apparent in the preface of the textbook, where the 2014 Swedish Minister for Integration, Erik Ullenhag, is quoted from the preface of the White Paper, stating that he hopes this part of Swedish history will be made known and that a shorter version of the White Paper should be produced for distribution in schools (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 1). Because the textbook is so closely related to the White Paper, it is also very clear what measures have been taken regarding the recontextualization of the knowledge presented in the White Paper, for example, in the introductory part in which the nature of the texts is established. The White Paper begins with the definition of important concepts and a description of the methods used in collecting data, including the very problematic material collected regarding the Roma at a time when racial biology was regarded as a distinguished scientific discipline (Ds 2014: 8, pp. 10–22.) The 62-page textbook, on the other hand, begins with some background information about human rights and a short account of the Roma minority group and the fact that this group is one of five national minorities in Sweden. It ends with a reproduction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its entirety (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 2 and pp. 56–61). Given the importance of already established official knowledge, one important issue in recontextualizing academic research into formal education is to establish where within the context of curricular knowledge this new piece of information has been placed. By its own framing, the textbook places itself within human rights education; the textbook starts and ends in this context; the discrimination against the Roma is presented as subject matter in education on human rights. In the teacher’s guide that accompanies the textbook, there is also a section on important contextual knowledge, framing the textbook further in the context of World War II, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the Swedish welfare state, effectively scrutinizing the welfare state from a human rights perspective (Antiziganismen i Sverige: Lärarhandledning 2015, p. 4). This

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framing is of course primarily a result of the remit, that explicitly mentions the school’s work to communicate and foster respect for human rights and fundamental democratic values as a specific focus for the commission (Dir. 2014: 47). It is however also part of a global trend toward describing historical events in terms of human rights violations in textbooks (Bromley and Lerch 2018). This way of presenting where the knowledge communicated in the textbook belongs frames it into already established official knowledge and the teacher’s guide also makes several references to the curricula for lower secondary schools and the syllabi for history and social studies, firmly establishing this content in already familiar parts of schooling (Antiziganismen i Sverige: Lärarhandledning 2015, pp. 12, 15–16). The way in which the new addition of knowledge is presented in context further highlights the perceived need for it to fit into an already established narrative and add the experiences of the Roma to already familiar narratives of persecution. This way of recontextualizing this knowledge also makes room for connecting the contemporary discrimination against the Roma with historical expressions of discrimination, including discrimination toward other groups (see also Fagerheim Kalsås 2018).

Categorization The issue of how to discuss historical categorization without reproducing prejudice has been key to recent works by several scholars who contributed to the White Paper project (Ericsson 2015; Ohlsson Al Fakir 2015). The definition of concepts in the White Paper includes a discussion on the relationship between the contemporary terms “Roma” and “Travellers” and the pejorative labels (in Swedish “zigenare” and “tattare”) that appeared in documents that were used to survey the treatment of the groups historically. This part of the White Paper is not elaborated upon in the textbook in what could be regarded as an effort to make the textbook easier to understand and politically safe for adolescents. The word “tattare” is extensively used outside direct quotations in the White Paper (however, always within scare quotes), presumably to ensure the reference is the same between the source material and the discussion about

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antiziganism. Thus, the distinction between the term “Roma” and words used in the past is elaborated upon; the people labeled “tattare” in the source material do not always refer to the same group or category as Roma or Traveller in the contemporary application of the words (Ds 2014, pp. 8 and 19). In the textbook, the word “tattare” is only used twice outside of direct quotes, and no distinction is made between Roma and “tattare”. The students are told the following in an info box on antiziganism: “The words ‘zigenare [gypsies]’ and ‘tattare’ are patronizing and offensive words for Roma and Travellers” (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 4). Travellers are said to be a specific group of Roma and are described as having the exact same reference as the pejorative term “tattare” (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 31). In this recontextualization of knowledge into pedagogical discourse, a condensation of the knowledge has taken place. Ensuring that pejorative slurs are not used in an educational text that is about discrimination and racism takes precedence over complicated discussions regarding the reference to different racially motivated terms historically used for categorization. This could be said to further contextualize the educational effort into the realm of human rights education and it also implies that it is important to take a stand in the moral issue of how people are labeled. In a research context, this does not take precedence over the issue of ensuring that the historical categorization is understood in terms of which people the sources are discussing, but in an educational effort, framed within human rights, the issue of labeling people in a way that is perceived as pejorative is, of course, of major importance. In this sense, the textbook could be understood as being future orientated and more about learning to be a better citizen than about understanding the past. A large part of the textbook is still about categorization, but in a more general form that discusses the problematic past of the welfare state, categorizing people who were seen as undesirable in society. This is framed in a discussion about state mapping of people on the basis of race and the violation of individual integrity that such mapping constitutes (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 13). This further highlights the contextualization of the textbook within human rights education.

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Personalization Another way that the recontextualization of knowledge is noticeable in the textbook is the personalization of history in which, for example, groups are attributed feelings (as a group and not as individuals) (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 10). The complex nature of structural discrimination and racism is not told through descriptions of legal texts and the processes behind structural discrimination (as in the White Paper), but through quotes from people who were, and are, suffering from the consequences of discrimination. Almost half the text in the textbook comprises different first-person accounts. For example, regarding education, the following quote represents an example of how Roma children were denied access to schools: I started in the first year. I remember very well when I arrived at school and stood in the doorway to the classroom. The other students were 7–8 years old. I was 14 years old and tall for my age. I was definitely much taller than my classmates. They thought I was one of the teachers (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 44).

While there is a brief description of the state of Roma education in Sweden in the 1940s, much of the chapter on education comprises direct quotes from persons recounting their time at school. The quotes play a different role in the textbook compared to the White Paper. In the textbook, they form part of the explanatory text. Instead of describing the situation in general terms, the Roma themselves speak directly to the students, telling them how it was. In the White Paper, the interviews serve as source material and are more frequently left out of the explanatory text and presented as corroborating sources, for example, under the heading “Roma experiences of education” (Ds 2014: 8, pp. 204–207). This is then explained through a detailed description of the laws and regulations that were in place at different times. Overall, there seems to be a strong belief in the educational power of the fate of real people and a belief that it can reach adolescents in a deeper way. This is also elaborated on in the teacher’s guide: “The interviews [in the textbook] provide insight into how it has been, and how it is, when

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life is affected by antiziganism” (Antiziganismen i Sverige: Lärarhandledning 2015, p. 3). For each chapter, there are also additional personal stories described in the teacher’s guide. This way of personalizing history for the benefit of understanding is, of course, very common in history education (see, e.g. Halldén 1994; Barton 2008; Olofsson 2010), as well as the personalization of collective actors, such as ethnic groups (Foster 2006; Barton 2012), and underlines the recontextualization of academic knowledge into pedagogical discourse. Another kind of personalization is how the Roma’s contemporary struggle for human rights is presented through interviews with politicians and activists. Fagerheim Kalsås (2018) suggests that portraying Roma activists in this way could lead to identification with their struggle (p. 91). This section includes the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The teacher’s guide also points toward human rights education giving examples of questions that could guide the students in reading each chapter: “What is the chapter about? Which articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could be referred to in the chapter? In what ways are the depictions in the chapter a violation of these articles?” (Antiziganismen i Sverige: Lärarhandledning 2015, p. 5) (Fig. 2.1).

Continuity Any effort to redress past injustices, like a truth commission or a White Paper project, will have to deal with the question of the extent to which the injustices should be seen as historical, or enduring into the present (Bevernage 2012). The explicit aim of the White Paper project was to facilitate an understanding of the present-day Roma minority through an understanding of the past (Ds 2014: 8, p.  285), although the White Paper was not tasked with investigating contemporary discrimination. The textbook, however, is about both historical and contemporary discrimination, which is already apparent in the title (“Antiziganism in Sweden: About the abuses and violations of the Roma during the 1900s and today”). Furthermore, the use of the term “antiziganism” serves to underscore continuity (Fagerheim Kalsås 2018, p.  91). This could be

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Fig. 2.1  The cover of the White Paper (on the left) and the cover of the textbook (on the right). The difference in cover art underline the difference in approach between the White Paper and the textbook with the relationship between the Roma and the state represented by an archival index on the cover of the White Paper and a Roma family being evicted representing the same relationship on the cover of the textbook

understood as being part of the recontextualization process and an attempt to make historical inquiry more meaningful in the future-­ orientated venture of discussing human rights, as well as in the making of a “practical past” (Nygren and Johnsrud 2018; Nolgård and Nygren 2019). For example, in two instances, the historical descriptions of the textbook are juxtaposed with news articles on the treatment of the Roma in contemporary Sweden, effectively showing a continuation into the present (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, pp. 15, 40). In relation to the White Paper, the textbook is sometimes less specific regarding when something happened, further establishing the narrative of continuation. As Fagerheim Kalsås has shown, the degree of specificity varies depending on which of the five themes are being discussed (Fagerheim Kalsås 2018, pp. 92–94). One example that is clearly situated in the past is the chapter on the travel ban prohibiting the Roma from

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entering Sweden, which was in force between 1914 and 1954 (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, pp. 20–24). A contrasting example is the discussion about access to education: “The possibilities for Roma children to attend school has been affected by the municipalities’ expulsion of the Roma” (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 44). In other instances, the continuity of oppression is highlighted through examples from different decades, such as in the chapter on housing in which examples are taken from the middle of the twentieth century, the 1970s, the 1990s and “today” (Antiziganismen i Sverige 2015, p. 39). Establishing this continuity could be considered as being vital in making the history of the Roma part of official knowledge in connection with human rights education, and in connecting the students to the history that is recounted in the textbook. This effectively makes the issue of historical justice an issue of contemporary justice. The teacher’s guide also highlights this: The textbook […] can hopefully contribute to making students better equipped to be able to discover, acknowledge and counteract violations of human rights in our society today […] it is also important in this learning process to be aware of the fact that discrimination and abuse still form part of the everyday lives of many Roma (Antiziganismen i Sverige: Lärarhandledning 2015, p. 3).

The perceived requirement to highlight the continuous discrimination against the Roma could be seen as a consequence of two different kinds of recontextualization. First, this could be a recontextualizing consequence of the curricular requirement of connecting history with the present and the future (see syllabi on history in Lgr11 and Lgy11) and, in accordance with Swedish history teaching in general, the teacher’s guide also aims to “make students reflect on historical events and how they are connected with current events” (Antiziganismen i Sverige: Lärarhandledning 2015, p. 4). Second, highlighting continuity could also be regarded as a requirement for making this particular history part of the curricular content of human rights, and the focus on creating better citizens for the future.

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Conclusions When knowledge created in academia or in government investigations aimed at historical justice is enacted in education for children and young persons, a different set of requirements has to be met. In this chapter, we have studied just one stage of this process of recontextualization: what happens when the findings of a White Paper are transformed into a textbook? The introduction of new subject matter into official knowledge is a lengthy process, and a larger study of how this and similar teaching materials are being used in school settings would be needed to draw any conclusions regarding how and to what extent the new knowledge has influenced teaching about Roma history. Nevertheless, there are some striking differences between the White Paper and the textbook. In the textbook and teacher’s guide, the Roma experience was incorporated into existing official knowledge through linkage to historical subject matter that had already been closely associated with human rights: the Holocaust and World War II. However, the establishment of the Swedish welfare state, which is also already established official knowledge, was associated with this contextualization, bringing the Roma experience under the umbrella of the human rights discourse—which has had a profound impact on Swedish educational policy in recent years (Nilsson 2018)—while at the same time also placing the welfare state under scrutiny from a human rights perspective. In this context, the requirement for this knowledge in a school setting—contextualized within human rights education—was an orientation toward a future of better citizens. This also led to a requirement for a condensed narrative, told in the first person, with less attention being paid to the explanatory value of the structures behind discrimination. Instead, more attention was paid to personal experiences of discrimination. Pedagogically, personalization has also been regarded as a superior way of communicating history to students, particularly aimed at historical empathy. In this specific case, knowledge of the historical experience of the Roma was framed in order to be utilized in dealing with an already established and already educationalized social problem: a requirement for citizens who understand the profound need to respect human rights. This

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type of educationalization is probably fueled by the belief that discrimination can be eradicated through the dissemination of knowledge about it, particularly knowledge about personal tragedy, with a view to evoking empathy. Understanding the past as such, and the structural workings of how that past came to be, appears to be a secondary aim of the textbook and teacher’s guide. Thus, the educationalization of the Roma experience was not really the educationalization of a new social problem tied to a minority’s history told from its own perspective. Instead, the Roma experience was incorporated into already educationalized social problems. On a theoretical level, the recontextualization of knowledge is necessary to the process of making subject matter teachable. However, gaining more knowledge about how the recontextualization is enacted in a specific case is an empirical issue. We have shown that in the case of the textbook on antiziganism, the recontextualization entailed the framing of the subject matter within established official knowledge. This way of introducing new knowledge into a specific domain of the curriculum (in this case, human rights) carries the risk of making the knowledge less about the people who were seeking historical justice in the first place, and instead making it the vehicle through which something else is taught. However, when new knowledge is recontextualized into a specific domain, it probably has a better chance of being acknowledged as important, albeit as part of other knowledge, and aligned to fit that requirement. There could be a trade-off here: on the one hand, the knowledge is recognized and incorporated; on the other hand, it is used for something other than learning about a specific group’s struggles, which, instead, become more of a side effect, or an example of something else. Failure to make the adjustment in order to align the knowledge to fit existing curricular requirements could potentially relegate new knowledge to the domain of non-incorporated knowledge consigned to—for example—temporary educational theme days. We have described one particular process at one particular time. However, further research is needed in order to gain knowledge about what happens over time; whether this knowledge is truly adopted in teaching, or whether it tends to fade away as time passes.

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References Andersson, Lars M., and Mattias Tydén. 2007. Sverige och Nazityskland: Skuldfrågor och moraldebatt. Stockholm: Dialogos. Antiziganismen i Sverige: Om övergrepp och kränkningar av romer under 1900-­ talet och i dag. 2015. Stockholm: Kommissionen mot antiziganism. Antiziganismen i Sverige: Om övergrepp och kränkningar av romer under 1900-­ talet och idag. Lärarhandledning. 2015. Stockholm: Kommissionen mot antiziganism. Apple, Michael. 2000. Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Apple, Michael, and Linda K.  Christian-Smith. 1991. The Politics of the Textbook. In The Politics of the Textbook, ed. Michael Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith, 1–17. New York: Routledge. Arvidsson, Malin. 2016. Att ersätta det oersättliga: Statlig gottgörelse för ofrivillig sterilisering och vanvård av omhändertagna barn. Örebro: Örebro University. ———. 2018. Sanningskommission på svenska: Riksdagsdebatt om upprättelse och ansvarsutkrävande för historiska orättvisor. In Mänskliga rättigheter i samhället, ed. Malin Arvidsson, Lena Halldenius, and Lina Sturfelt, 165–188. Malmö: Bokbox. Barkan, Elazar. 2000. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: Norton. Barton, Keith. 2008. A Sociocultural Perspective on Children’s Understanding of Historical Change: Comparative Findings from Northern Ireland and the United States. In Researching History Education: Theory, Method, and Context, ed. Linda Levstik and Keith Barton, 300–332. New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. Agency, Choice, and Historical Action: How History Teaching Can Help Students Think About Democratic Decision Making. Citizenship Teaching & Learning 7 (2): 131–142. Bernstein, Basil. 1986. On Pedagogic Discourse. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G.  Richardson, 205–240. New York: Greenwood Press. Bevernage, Berber. 2012. History, Memory, and State-sponsored Violence: Time and Justice. London: Routledge. Braun, Kathrin, Svea L.  Herrmann, and Ole A.  Brekke. 2014. Sterilization Policies, Moral Rehabilitation and the Politics of Amends. Critical Policy Studies 8 (2): 203–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2013.869179.

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Bromley, Patricia, and Julia Lerch. 2018. Human Rights as Cultural Globalisation: The Rise of Human Rights in Textbooks, 1890–2013. In The Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Annekatrin Bock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bruchfeld, Stéphane, and Paul Levine. 1998. …om detta må ni berätta: En bok om Förintelsen i Europa 1933–1945 [Tell ye your children… A book about the Holocaust in Europe 1933–1945]. Stockholm: Forum för levande historia. Depaepe, Marc. 1998. Educationalisation: A Key Concept in Understanding the Basic Processes in the History of Western Education. History Education Review 27 (1): 16–28. Dir. 2014: 47. Kraftsamling i arbetet mot antiziganism. https://www.regeringen. se/49bafa/contentassets/0a31f6f3fc2848db852f9d8fdc2fd9ec/kraftsamling-­ i-­arbetet-mot-antiziganism-dir.-201447. Accessed 15 May 2019. Ds 2014: 8. The Dark Unknown History: White Paper on Abuses and Rights Violations Against Roma in the 20th Century. Stockholm: Fritzes. Ericsson, Martin. 2015. Exkludering, assimilering eller utrotning? “Tattarfrågan” i svensk politik 1880–1955. Lund: Lund University. Fagerheim Kalsås, Vidar. 2018. Forteljingar om eigenart og undertrykkning: Ein studie av undervisningstekstar om minoritetane romanifolket og romar. Agder: Universitetet i Agder. Foster, Stuart. 2006. Whose History? Portrayal of Immigrant Groups in U.S. History Textbooks, 1800–Present. In What Shall We Tell the Children: International Perspectives on School History Textbooks, ed. Stuart Foster and Keith Crawford, 155–178. Greenwich: IAP. Halldén, Ola. 1994. Personalization in Historical Descriptions and Explanations. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Henry, Nicola. 2015. From Reconciliation to Transitional Justice: The Contours of Redress Politics in Established Democracies. International Journal of Transitional Justice 9 (2): 199–218. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijv001. Karlsson, Klas-Göran. 2003. The Holocaust as a Problem of Historical Culture: Theoretical and Analytical Challenges. In Echoes of the Holocaust: Historical Cultures in Contemporary Europe, ed. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, 9–57. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Keynes, Matilda. 2019. History Education for Transitional Justice? Challenges, Limitations and Possibilities for Settler Colonial Australia. International Journal of Transitional Justice 13: 113–133. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ijtj/ijy026.

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Keynes, Matilda, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. 2021. Introduction: Connecting Historical Justice and History Education. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Norlin, Björn, and Daniel Lindmark. 2021. Generating and Popularising Historical Knowledge in a Reconciliation Process: The Case of the Church of Sweden and the Sami. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Living History Forum, “(O)mänskligt: Lärarhandledning”, https://www.levandehistoria.se, n.d.-a. Accessed 15 May 2019. ———, “Workshop i (o)mänskligt”, https://www.levandehistoria.se, n.d.-b Accessed 15 May 2019. Lundberg, Urban, and Mattias Tydén. 2010. In Search of the Swedish Model: Contested Historiography. In Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State, ed. Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, 36–49. London: Black Dog Publishing. Nagy, Rosemary. 2008. Transitional Justice as Global Project: Critical Reflections. Third World Quarterly 29 (2): 275–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/014365 90701806848. Neumann, Klaus, and Janna Thompson. 2015. Introduction: Beyond the Legalist Paradigm. In Historical Justice and Memory, ed. Klaus Neumann and Janna Thompson. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Nilsson, Frida L. 2018. Självklart men oklart: Rättighetsspråk i gymnasieskolans läroplaner 1970–2011. In Mänskliga rättigheter i samhället, ed. Malin Arvidsson, Lena Halldenius, and Lina Sturfelt, 77–99. Malmö: Bokbox. Nolgård, Olle, and Thomas Nygren. 2019. Considering the Past and Present of Romani in Sweden: Secondary School Pupils’ Thinking and Caring About the History of the Romani in National Tests. Education Inquiry 10 (4): 344–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/20004508.2019.1607708. Nygren, Thomas, and Brian Johnsrud. 2018. What would Martin Luther King Jr. say? Teaching the Historical and Practical Past to Promote Human Rights in Education. Journal of Human Rights Practice 10 (2): 287–306. https://doi. org/10.1093/jhuman/huy013. Ohlsson Al Fakir, Ida. 2015. Nya rum för socialt medborgarskap: Om vetenskap och politik i ’Zigenarundersökningen’  – en socialmedicinsk studie av svenska romer 1962–1965. Växjö: Linnéuniversitetet.

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Olofsson, Hans. 2010. Fatta historia: En explorativ fallstudie om historieundervisning och historiebruk i en högstadieklass. Karlstad: Karlstad University. Östling, Johan. 2008. Swedish Narratives of the Second World War: A European Perspective. Contemporary European History 17 (2): 197–211. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0960777308004372. Secord, James A. 2004. Knowledge in Transit. Isis 95 (4): 654–672. Sjögren, David. 2016. Att göra upp med det förflutna: Sanningskommissioner, officiella ursäkter och vitböcker i ett svenskt och internationellt perspektiv. In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: En vetenskaplig antologi, band 1, ed. Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, 123–152. Skellefteå: Artos & Norma. Smeyers, Paul, and Marc Depaepe, eds. 2008. Educational Research: The Educationalization of Social Problems. Dordrecht: Springer. SOU 2002: 87. Rikets säkerhet och den personliga integriteten: De svenska säkerhetstjänsternas författningsskyddande verksamhet sedan år 1945. Stockholm: Fritzes. SOU 2010: 55. Delegationen för romska frågor. Romers rätt: En strategi för romer i Sverige: Ett lands behandling av dess romska befolkning är ett lackmustest för det civila samhället och dess demokrati: Betänkande. Stockholm: Fritzes. SOU 2016: 44. Kommissionen mot antiziganism. Kraftsamling mot antiziganism: Slutbetänkande. Stockholm: Wolters Kluwe. Torpey, John C. 2006. Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Winter, Stephen. 2014. Transitional Justice in Established Democracies: A Political Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

3 Taking Responsibility for the Past: Theoretical and Educational Considerations, Illustrated by South African Experience Sirkka Ahonen

Introduction Acknowledging the close relationship between social memory and history education, I will study the role of ethical judgment of the past in the two domains. I will first analyze the nature of historical ethics, and then delve in the South African example of a community tackling with a divided social memory and conflicting judgments of the past. I will analyze the addresses made at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in order to uncover the vernacular conceptual categories of the ethics of history in social memory. On the theoretical level, my aim is to develop a conceptual frame for ethical judgment as a domain in historical thinking. For that purpose, I distinguish between spontaneous emotional responses and a reasoned ethical judgment. That done, I will relate social memory

S. Ahonen (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_3

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and history education to each other and ask how far the ethical concepts of social memory were applicable to history education in post-apartheid schools. In a community, representations of the past are created and mediated in both social memory and the culture of history. Social memory is built in vernacular live communication, while historical culture consists of civic and commercial activities. Historical culture extends social memory by means of cultural artifacts like monuments, memorialization rituals and works of art and literature. While, as a rule, living social memory reaches back only two or three generations, the culture of history may extend the collective memory several centuries back in time (Assmann 1999). Social memory and the culture of history have moral underpinnings. Past individuals and groups are recognized as responsible agents of history who either did a good service to the community or damaged it. In both social memory and the culture of history, justice is an essential category of making sense of the past. Since the constructivist turn in historiography, a historian is acknowledged as a member of their community. A historian shares the responsibilities of the community and uses them to attribute meaning to the past events (Kalela 2012). Detachment from the community is not feasible for a historian in his or her work. History as a whole is a morally tuned activity and revolves around the concept of historical justice (Thompson 2004; Neumann 2014). The responsibility for past wrongs implies duties of apology and reparation. According to historian of law and justice, Janna Thompson, past injustices are judicially reparable regardless of how far back in time they occurred (Thompson 2004). The flourishing culture of public apologies since the 1990s shows that a moral turn has taken place in historical consciousness and historiography (Löfström 2012). Thompson offers a judicial argument for trans-generational responsibility: if an institution, for example a state, has existed as a continuous judicial entity, it is responsible for its actions independently of the time-span between those actions and the presented charge (Thompson 2004, vii, pp. 25–8, 150–3). In a divided community, historical justice is problematized by the reciprocity of the claims of guilt and credit between antagonistic groups. As a result, moral narratives cause discord between the groups. Groups may

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get locked in echo chambers, where they only hear their own voice. An escape from the echo chamber and an opportunity of reconciliation requires the acknowledgment of the narrative structure of historical knowledge. According to the Dutch philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit, the narrative form is the standard of historical presentations. Facts as such are inert knowledge and do not make sense in their own right. A historian, lay or professional, attributes meaning to the facts and twines them into narratives (Ankersmit 2001). Customarily, a narrative is about human agency and intentions, and includes a moral plot. In the narrative, the past actor, either an individual or a collective, bears the moral responsibility for historical acts. Attributing meaning to facts happens in a socio-cultural context. Therefore, narratives are not objective accounts but socially and culturally affected constructions, which means that the receiving public has to come to terms with several diverging narratives. Therefore, a historical event needs to be approached by prompting a dialogue between the diverging narratives. Dialogue is an escape from an echo chamber and encourages reconciliation between antagonistic groups in a historical community. Dialogical meaning-attribution makes history into a moral craft. After an era of positivistic historiography following the Second World War, an ethical turn took place among historians and inspired them to reflect upon the past from an ethical viewpoint. When ethically dealing with the past and initiating a dialogue between groups of a divided historical community and their reciprocal claims of guilt and victimhood, a scrutiny of the categories and concepts of historical justice in different historical contexts is necessary. South Africa is an illustrative example of a divided historical community where a change of regime and institutions like education was required to unblock the discussion about a difficult past. In this chapter I will, first, refer to historiographical changes in post-apartheid South Africa, and then, as my main contribution, analyze the concepts of vernacular historical justice, using the protocols of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995–1997) as material. Finally, I will discuss the radicalization of perspectives on the responsibility for the past in South Africa and the historical-educational responses to them.

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 ealing with Competing Moral Narratives D in South African Post-Apartheid Historiography As a historical community, South Africans have fostered two widely diverse history narratives, both with highly moral underpinnings. The Black narrative is largely followed by the Black majority, and the opposite Boer narrative by the Afrikaner minority. In South Africa, also the British, the Malay, the Indians and the Indigenous First Nation people have their particular historical narratives, but, politically, the Black and the Boer stories constitute the two most dominant elements of the South African history wars. The structure of apartheid society long forced the parties to remain in their echo chambers, but after the transition to democracy in 1994, it was urged that the two narratives be equally recognized. Recognition was necessary for aspired civic coexistence. When constructed, both narratives were bolstered by mythical tenets, above all by the myths of primordial origins of a people and the inevitable redemption of the people from oppression. ‘Primordial origins’ and ‘redemption’ are prevalent in historical communities’ internationally traveling arch myths, used by communities to frame their idiosyncratic narratives (Schöpflin 1997, pp. 19–54). The Black narrative was articulated in the 1980s by Black historians into a manifest history of the African ascendance and the historical agency of Black people. Previously, in the history mediated by the apartheid regime, the African tribes appeared as timeless primitive cultures of mere anthropological interest. In the new Black historical consciousness, Africans were recognized as founders of states and creators of magnificent rock art. Their suffering under colonial oppression was acknowledged, but apart from victimhood also active agency, resistance and achieved redemption were also accentuated (Dube 1983). The adverse Boer story was equally framed by the arch myths of primordial origins and inevitable redemption. According to the story, the building of the Boer nation was started in 1652 by the Dutch who landed on the Cape peninsula, settled as farmers on an empty land and assumed the mission to civilize the native Khoi and San peoples and the arriving

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Bantu tribes. When the British took over the Cape peninsula during the Napoleonic wars, the Boers retired toward the North and proved their extraordinary resilience by building new pioneer settlements. The endeavor became known as the heroic Great Trek, during which the Boers were harassed by both Zulu warriors and British imperial army. The victimization of the Boers culminated in the Boer war (1899–1902), when the British army locked tens of thousands of Boer women and children into lethal concentration camps. According to the Boer narrative, this episode equaled a genocide. Redemption came in 1948, when the Afrikaner National Party emerged as the victor of the parliamentary election and established the apartheid regime (Grundlingh 1990/1991, pp. 6–11). A full-scale civil war was fought in South Africa since the Black resistance took up armed struggle in 1961, and the apartheid state responded militarily. Argumentation by both the Blacks and the apartheid regime implied a notion of ‘just war’ as the redeemer of the people. ‘Just war’ is an example of the historical ethical concepts that were used in social and cultural memory to defend the ethical positions of the both parties of the conflict. The transition to majority rule in 1994 was accompanied by an urge from the new leaders to create an integrated identity narrative for the South-African people. The population was ethnically, linguistically and culturally deeply divided, but ‘imagining’ unity was seen to be necessary by the leaders. However, it soon became obvious that a shared identity narrative was not sustainable. The idea of historical justice came to be constituted through meaning-attribution using concepts like repression, victimhood and guilt. The emerging rival identity narratives consisted of a liberal view of ‘unity in diversity’ and, second, of a revolutionary view of the right of the oppressed majority to own their past. The political power-sharing in 1994 by the victorious African National Congress (the ANC) and the National Party, representing the Afrikaners, was supported by the liberal concept of ‘rainbow nation’. Nelson Mandela and the ANC advocated for a liberal, balanced recognition of two contradictory historical communities of South Africa, the Blacks and the Afrikaners, with the aim of the building of a civic nation with shared civic rights. The building of the

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nation was bolstered by an equal recognition of the two dominant opposite history narratives, that of Black suffering and resistance, and the other of Boer victimhood. Balanced recognition was the policy chosen by the ‘government of national unity’, comprising the ANC the National Party. Reconciliation was also aspired to in social memory and, particularly, in history education. History lessons had to be made evenhanded in treating past peoples and their legacies. ‘Human rights’, ‘equality’ and ‘human dignity’ were the key concepts to be applied to correct the difficult past (Kallaway 1991; Stolten 2007). The alternative policy of building ‘New South Africa’, as the regime was called in the transition rhetoric, was eventually constituted by a radical, revolutionary interpretation of history. The ANC was in charge of the identity politics, especially after the National Party soon left the ‘government of unity’ and moved into opposition. Identity politics bacame radicalized within the ranks of the ANC. The new policy of historical identity was launched by the second president of the state, Tabo Mbeki, who after taking office after Nelson Mandela in 1999 acknowledged the incompatibility of the ‘rainbow’ narrative and the Black people’s need of revolutionary redemption from oppression. The antagonism between the historical identity of the Black people and the idea of a ‘rainbow nation’ was acknowledged. According to the new narrative, the injustices suffered by the Black people and their active resistance became the aspirational main tenets of the national identity of New South Africa. The identity narrative consisted rather of Africanism than cultural pluralism. The key concepts to organize Black historical consciousness consisted of ‘ownership of history’, ‘recognition of past injustices’, ‘just war’, ‘liberation struggle’ and ‘redemption’ (Bam 2002; Stolten 2007). This radical historical narrative gained momentum in the course of the 2000s, when young Blacks became increasingly frustrated by delays in socioeconomic progress. A Neo-Marxist critical accusation of the ANC favoring neoliberalism took over the previous trust in the agenda of universal welfare. The accusations were taken up by the Economic Freedom Fighters, established by Julius Malema in 2013 and focused on both the past and prevailing social injustices (Economic Freedom Fighters Founding Manifesto 2019; Wassermann 2018).

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This radical Neo-Marxist conceptual framework influenced the culture of history. Emancipation of minds from the colonial experience of social and cultural inferiority was urged. For instance, museums adopted an Africanist approach to the heritage, stressing the role of Africa as the cradle of human ascendance and Africans as conscious and active actors of history. African culture was no more presented as a timeless anthropological phenomenon but as a dynamic historical process (Coombes 2003; Ahonen 2012, p. 110). In school history, it was feared that the Africanization of the South African identity would threaten the pursuit of national unity and was therefore slow to materialize. At the same time, in schooling, the post-­ rainbow-­nation identity politics sought new tenets derived from the authentic memories of the majority of people (Bam 2000, 2002).

 thical Concepts Framing the Social Memory E at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission The stories told by people to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission make an authentic record of grass root views of historical justice. My method of analyzing the universal ethical concepts framing the stories is based on the criterion of reasoned ethical judgment. According to the criterion, I distinguish between an emotional reaction to injustice and a historically contextualized judgment of unjust acts. According to Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, making the distinction legitimates ‘ethical judgment’ as one of the core concepts defining historical thinking (Seixas and Morton 2013; Gibson 2014). The contextualization makes the judgments of ‘good’/‘evil’, ‘right’/‘wrong’ and ‘just’/‘unjust’ into reasoned judgments. When reading an ethical judgment by a Commission addresser, I ask whether they, in their argumentation refer to universal human rights or, for instance, to the pragmatic pursuit of strategic cleansing in the civil war. This contextualization does not equate to a relativization of evil action, but rather guides the categorization of the judgment: the ethical concept used by the addresser could be either ‘human inviolability’ or ‘just war’. ‘Human inviolability’ refers to a universal value and

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‘just war’ to the Marxist or nationalist theories of war. Both reference points, the universal values and the ideological theories, were commonly acknowledged in South Africa during apartheid. A reasoned judgment by a reader must be based on historical contextualization. The reader must familiarize themself with the sociocultural positions of the past persons or groups, and take the moral beliefs of the respective past into account. On that condition, the reader can weigh the arguments presented by a person from the past. The resulting reasoned ethical judgment will not be anachronistic and, as such, unfair to past people, but rather intersubjectively and trans-temporally sustainable. Apart from being a governmental policy of reconciliation, the TRC was a major project of identity politics and education. The TRC worked intensively in the years 1995–1997 on an extensive scale. The sessions of the most crucial committee of the Commission, the Human Rights Committee, took place in local settings all over South Africa to enable the whole populace to tell about its experiences. The participation in the sessions was open to everybody, both the victims and perpetrators, the interviewees being selected and invited by the committee officials. A balance was sought between different social strata and institutions. Applications for court hearings were received from over 22,000 victims and perpetrators, and more than 2000 of them were dealt with at the local open sessions. The educational impact was reinforced by a regular media coverage. The sessions were mass events, and the TV mediation made them into collective experiences and a massive educational project. In the TRC sessions, people were encouraged to learn to conduct open dialogue about the injustices suffered in the past. In order to safeguard the authenticity of the record, interviews in the sessions were based on free storytelling instead of interrogation. Regarding historical methodology, the protocols of the TRC hearings can be characterized as oral history, consisting of vernacular memories. As memories, the recorded stories were subjected to an ongoing process affected by changes in persons’ individual lives and social experiences, even by the experience of the TRC sessions. The spontaneity of the stories was efficiently protected by the interviewers, who wanted to gather a vernacular record of history

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instead of an official record of crimes. The sessions often turned into emotional encounters and even toy dancing and tussle. The invitation by Nelson Mandela of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to be the chairman of the TRC determined the Commission’s ethical approach to the past. Instead of referring to strict judicial principles of retribution and compensation, the Commission urged Christian forgiveness to rebuff an evil spiral of revenge. According to the ethical premises of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an amnesty could be given only to individual persons, not to institutions, on the premise that only intentional individuals could be responsible actors and bearers of guilt. While forgiveness was the final aim of the process, the applicants were not explicitly asked to apologize. Neither were the victims urged to forgive. Full recognition and truthful account of offences were the only requirement (TRC Report 2003, Vol. 6, Section 1, Chapter 1). At the hearings, expressions of forgiveness were rare when compared to expressions of relief by an interviewee after having told or heard the truth (TRC Report 2003, passim; Ahonen 2012, pp. 103–4). The commissioners believed in the therapeutic impact of the non-retributive policy of the commission. The perpetrators were expected to feel unburdened by having told the truth to the relatives of the victims, who for their part would accept the recognition of a crime as an act of justice and a restitution of their dignity. The reconciliatory, socially therapeutic purpose of the TRC hearings determined the nature of the addresses. As the interviewers did not use any judicial scale of injustices, most addresses were concrete stories of evil acts by perpetrators or pain experienced by victims. In reading the interviews with the purpose of tracing collectively shared and valid concepts of justice, I paid special attention to statements that referred to universal ethical-judicial principles. From there, I determined five vernacular conceptual categories of injustice of the apartheid experience. They are: ‘colonial exploitation’, ‘human inviolability’, ‘recognition of suffering and offence’, ‘confession of guilt’ and ‘just war’. According to my analysis, these eclectic categories represent the vernacular ideas of post-apartheid historical justice. When presenting the conceptual categories, I suggest possible ideological underpinnings, asking whether the statements stem

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from assumptions of universal human rights or from Neo-Marxist ideas of social and economic emancipation.

‘Colonial Exploitation’ Whites were using churches to oppress blacks … [Whites] took our country using churches and bibles. We know and we have read from books that they are the ones who have taken lands from us. (TRC Report 2003, Vol. 6, Section 3, Chapter 4, p. 396)

The statement by a Black victim of apartheid-induced historical injustice is one of the few examples of a victim referring to the canon of Black history, which was based on the Marxist interpretation of the unjust landownership and dispossession as part of class-struggle. According to the canon, the owners’ class used its political power to exploit the masses and socially oppressed them. The Africans were denied their right to own the land they tilled, and the right to economic and social emancipation. Aspirations of fair distribution of land and social emancipation were tenets of Neo-Marxist conceptions of justice.

‘Human Inviolability’ What kind of man [is it] that uses a method like this one. The wet bag, on other human beings, and listens to the cries and moans and groans and taking each of the people near to their deaths. What kind of man does that. (TRC Report 2003, Part 3, case 5314/96)

The statement by a Black victim addressed to the amnesty committee of the TRC, refers to the assumption of a universal human right to bodily inviolability. The historically recognized and institutionalized British rule of habeas corpus was in principle valid in the South African judicial system. The Black victim in question regards the brutality of the South African Defence Force as a breach of the universal human rights and a crime against humanity.

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Recognition of Suffering and Offence’ I would like to hear from each of you, as you look me in the face, that you regret and you want to be personally reconciled. (TRC Report 2003, Vol. 6, Section 3, Chapter 4, p. 400)

The statement by a White victim refers to a Black terror attack to the victim’s home and asks the perpetrator to recognize and atone for the offence. In many cases alike, the claimants restricted their appeal to symbolic recognition and did not demand material compensation. Recognition as such satisfied their sense of justice and was trusted to restore the dignity of the victim. The human right to a safe home was considered and it was urged that the breach be recognized as a violation of the right.

‘Confession of Guilt’ to actually show that the family finally knows who actually was part of the activities of eliminating their brother, their parent, their father … I feel to have come out and expose myself, to say I was part of the type of activity. (TRC Report 2003, Vol. 6, Section 3, Chapter 2, p. 267)

The statement by a White perpetrator who had taken part in illegal deportations of Black resistance fighters is founded on the judicial principle of a confession of a crime as constituting justice. The perpetrators applied for amnesty from the TRC by means of making confessions. If the crime was not grave, according to the rules of the TRC, they had a good chance of amnesty. Amnesties were amply delivered in the name of the reconciliatory principle of socially restorative forgiveness. A confession was supposed to satisfy a victim’s sense of justice and, on the other hand, a perpetrator’s moral quest of redemption from guilt. Unlike forgiveness, confession as such, is a judicial concept usable as an intermediary between restorative and retributive justice.

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‘Just War’ The majority of the people of our country—has as equal a right—to engage in the struggle to gain [self-determination] as did any other colonized people. We could and did engage in a just war—actions carries out in the context of that just war of national liberation do not constitute gross violations of human rights. (TRC Report 2003, Vol. 6, Section 3, Chapter 2, p. 277)

In this statement, a representative of the ANC rebuffed the accusation against the ANC of having conducted condemnable atrocities against the Whites. He referred to the Neo-Marxist theory of post-colonial liberation wars as ‘just wars’. Advocates of the theory of just war supported Franz Fanon’s theory of the necessity of violence for redemption from colonial domination. According to Fanon’s theory, violence was the prerequisite for mental emancipation from the experience of colonial oppression, and Black people therefore were historically justified to incite terror and commit atrocities against their oppressors (Fanon 1961). These ethical concepts represent vernacular conceptions of historical justice. The concepts appeared in the interviews recursively, even though the ostensible ethical code of the TRC was based on empathic forgiveness and charitably reasoned amnesty, rather than judicial arguments. In the protocols, expressions of forgiveness were rare, compared to the statements that included vernacular but still judicially valid concepts of inalienable human rights of inviolability and possession. The rarity of the acts of forgiveness and apology saddened Archbishop Tutu, but among the Black activists rather provoked criticism against the ethical code of the TRC.  According to this criticism, the TRC traded justice for reconciliation. Individual human rights were sacrificed for the national good. Historical injustices were recognized at the TRC hearings, but their judicial treatment was absent, as recognition was considered sufficient. Black activists did not regard the policy of mere recognition tenable. The statements presented in the hearings included clear and straightforward aspirations of historical justice that were left unrequited. Some victims went home with unfulfilled expectations of historical justice.

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Despite the shortcomings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in accomplishing justice, the ethos of the Commission was positioned to guide history education. In order to apply the openness and evenhandedness of the processes of the Commission to school, vernacular memories were recognized as historical knowledge. Personal stories of the past were included in school textbooks for school students to identify with the past. By mediating the oral record of the Commission, schoolbooks were expected to rewrite the history of South Africa. Moreover, students were invited to interview local people and empathically deal with the ordeal of both Black and White people. Oral history would balance the ‘rainbowism’ of the textbooks (Bam 2000).

 istorical Justice as the Stumbling Block H in Education? History education is a special arena of producing and mediating history. In difference to the history culture produced by civil society and commercial entrepreneurship, history education serves a civic and political purpose. By means of curriculum politics, a society wants to influence collective historical identity. The segregation of South African schools into Afrikaner and Black schools ended with the transition to democracy. The first post-­transitional school curricula were written to provide shared values and contents to all children. Regarding history, the educators recognized the Boer grand narrative together with the post-colonial Black narrative in order to implement the idea of ‘rainbow nation’ in the history syllabus. Even though the sufferings of the Black people and their struggle for freedom were elevated to the fore in the syllabus, the ordeal and heroism of Boer settlers were equally recognized (Ahonen 2012, pp. 112–16). The educational intentions by the first leaders of New South Africa were liberal and constructive. Reconciliation by means of an equal recognition of the both Black and White identity narratives was trusted. However, from the point of view of the Black majority, changes in the socioeconomic structures of the country were slow. Because of grossly

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unequal income distribution, living areas remained racially segregated. History education could not integrate young people who lived racially apart. Only in rare urban settings did black and white students study together and engage in a constructive dialogue about the past. The structures of the communities maintained ambiguities about historical justice. Surveys of the attitudes of young people in the 2000s indicate that both Black and White young people found it hard to come to terms with the difficult past and be assured about historical justice being achieved. Some Black young people regarded that Black violence during the struggle for freedom had been ‘a just war’, and therefore the refusals of amnesty to Black fighters in the TRC were rather a miscarriage of justice than a fair deal (Mackey 2007, pp. 75–98). As fighting for a just cause could not be a crime, the evenhandedness practiced by the Commission was not considered appropriate historical justice. Some White young people rebuffed the transgenerational responsibility for past crimes. Why should they bear the guilt for acts they had not committed? Young Afrikaners demanded from school a fair treatment of the past in terms of an uncompromised recognition of the heroism and victimhood of their ancestors. They claimed that Black history in history textbooks fostered false historical consciousness in their minds (Wassermann 2007, pp. 14–53). In the 2010s, the social and economic frustration among the Black youth became so grave as to risk the prospect of reconciliation. Instead of accepting recognition and forgiveness as a sufficient restoration of justice, Black radicals wanted economic compensation, and resumed the struggle for social and economic revolution even reviving the anti-Boer hate talk. ´Rainbowism´ gave way gradually to radical postcolonial and Neo-­ Marxist interpretations of historical justice. In the school curriculum, Africanization overtook the liberal quest of multiculturalism (Wassermann 2018, pp. 69–70). When the political tensions were exacerbated during the 2000s, the idea of building a sustainable collective identity for New South Africa by means of a mere recognition of bitter individual memories became obsolete (Leebow 2009, pp. 278–281; Economic Freedom Fighters Founding Manifesto 2019). The social conflict between the frustrated Black youth

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and the ANC elite triggered a debate about a valid historical identity as the aim of school education.

 onclusion: Changing Historical Identity C in the Field of Social Memory and History Education The significance of history as an identity-building school subject is typically emphasized in transitional societies. In New South Africa, historical identity was the core issue for history curriculum. The monopoly of the Afrikaner narrative maintained during apartheid became obsolete, with the Black alternative narrative being cautiously introduced to school books (Pingel 1994, 100–105; Siebörger 1994). The pivotal changes of national institutions, among them school education, required a further reconsideration of historical identity. Could the story of the past ever be unified? From the perspective of the 2010s, the post-apartheid politics of historical identity evolved in two distinct stages. The first stage was constituted by ‘rainbowism’, the pursuit of integrating the Black and Afrikaner master narratives in the moral terms of recognizing the claims of historical justice by both groups. The vernacular statements presented in the sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided the concepts of historical justice to form the underpinnings of shared historical identity. The concepts, among them ‘colonial exploitation’ and ‘human inviolability’ were derived from liberal human rights and Neo-Marxist concepts of emancipation and redemption. Eventually, ‘rainbowism’ did not sustain the South African socioeconomic reality. Racial, ethnic and class-based segregation persisted in local settings. The second phase of the politics of historical identity was prompted by the recognition of historical justice as it was understood by the underprivileged majority of people. Communities of memory became stronger tenets of historical identity than school lessons. The youth surveys from the 2000s indicated that ‘rainbowism’ and the subsequent reconciliatory history education had resulted in ambivalent understandings

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of historical justice. For many Black youth, the post-transitional history curriculum was not sufficiently post-colonial, while some of the White youth it was too post-colonial. These reactions do not constitute a successful reconciliatory dialogue but, represent partisan, moral barriers to reconciliation. In the second phase, the pursuit of historical identity was based on the recognition of the right of the Black majority. Radical Black youth asked to have their historical suffering and resistance recognized and made into a central tenet of the national identity. The reconsidered identity was made explicit in the manifesto of the Economic Freedom Fighters, launched in 2013. The Manifesto no longer refers to the multicultural composition of South Africa but, instead, declares: At all levels of education system, pupils and students will be taught to love their country, their people and their continent and will be taught the principles of social solidarity, progressive internationalism and the pursuit of social justice. Knowledge of technical skills alone is not enough to build a country. The Economic Freedom Fighters will therefore couple technical education with progressive civic education. (Economic Freedom Fighters Founding Manifesto 2019)

The reference to social justice by the authors of the Manifesto implies a change in the understanding of historical justice. In its most fundamental sense, historical justice consists of injustices getting repaired and justice being evenly distributed. The authors of the Manifesto held that persistent socioeconomic inequality constituted historical injustice and wanted moral responsibility taken for it. For the authors, restorative justice in terms of merely reconciling the parties of the conflict did not suffice. A revolution of socioeconomic structures was needed to repair history, and, to enable that, a critical historical identity was required. The call for radicalizing historical identity was answered by educators in terms of bolstering history as an identity-building subject with moral underpinnings. The injustices experienced and sacrifices made by the Black majority were emphasized in the curriculum (Government Gazette 2015). The past was not regarded as past but still alive, appearing in the present as economic inequality and social stagnation. The

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trans-­generational nature of the responsibility for the past was recognized. Radical concepts of social economic justice and post-colonial Africanism were fostered by writers of the South African history curriculum (Wassermann 2018; Economic Freedom Fighters Founding Manifesto 2019). Taking responsibility for the past in such a way would necessarily bring school history in touch with social reality. In conclusion, I stress the close relationship between social memory and history education. After the transition to democratic New South Africa, this relationship first materialized in the quest for making the historical ethical judgments presented at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission the guiding concepts of history curriculum. Colonial exploitation, human inviolability and recognition of suffering were among the concepts that manifested in history education. However, during the 2000s, as the social memory of the Black majority evolved toward a more radical understanding of the past, school education became for the second time challenged by social memory, this time by highlighting the continuity between apartheid and the ongoing socioeconomic problems. For the sake of a progressive orientation to the future, ethical judgment of the past was expected to be radical. Instead of liberal lessons serving reconciliation, radical young Africans wanted a clear break with the past unjust practices, and reparations to make up for them. Therefore, in the 2020s, history education is once again at a crossroads: to maintain the liberal heritage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or to contribute to the revolutionary change of society?

References Ahonen, Sirkka. 2012. Coming to Terms with a Dark Past: How Post-Conflict Societies Deal with History. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Ankersmit, Frank. 2001. Historical Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Assmann, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck. Bam, June. 2000. Negotiating History, Truth and Reconciliation: An Analysis of Historical Consciousness in South African Schools. A Case Study. WW.arts.uwa. edu.au/Mots Pluriels/MP1300jb.html.

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———. 2002. The South African History Project. In History, Memory and Human Progress. Ministerial Conference in Cape Town, October 2002. Coombes, Annie E. 2003. History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durban and London: Duke University Press. Dube, David. 1983. The Rise of Azamia, the Fall of South Africa. Lusaka. Economic Freedom Fighters Founding Manifesto. 2019. Accessed 5 September 2019. https://effonline.org/wp_content/uploads2019/07/. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: Éditions Maspero. Gibson, Lindsay. 2014. Understanding Ethical Judgments in Secondary School History Classes. (Doctoral Dissertation). University of British Columbia. Accessed 2 January 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/48498. Government Gazette. 2015. Government Gazette No 39267, pp.  4–5. September 10, 2015. Grundlingh, Albert. 1990/1991. Politics, Principles and Problems of a Profession: Afrikaner Historians and Their Discipline, c. 1920–c. 1965. Perspectives in Education 12 (1): 6–11. Kalela, Jorma. 2012. Making History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kallaway, Peter. 1991. Education and Nation Building in South Africa in the 1990s: Reforming History Education for the Post-Apartheid Era. Pretoria: Human Science Research Council (HSRC). Leebow, Bromwyn. 2009. The Politics of Judging the Past: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Historical Justice in International Perspective. How Societies are Trying to Right the Wrongs of the Past, ed. Manfred Berg and Bernd Schaefer. New York: Cambridge University Press. Löfström, Jan, ed. 2012. Voiko historiaa hyvittää? Historiallisten vääryyksien korjaaminen ja anteeksiantaminen. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Mackey, Emma-Louise. 2007. ‘Histories That Creep in Sideways’: A Study of Learners’ Attitudes to History and Their Senses of the Past. Yesterday and Today, No. 1. May 2007, 75–98. Neumann, Klaus. 2014. Historians and the Yearning for Historical Justice. Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 18 (2): 145–164. Pingel, Falk. 1994. Colloqium on School History Textbooks for Democratic South Africa. Internationale Schulbuchforschung 16: 101–105. Schöpflin, George. 1997. The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myths. In Myths and Nationhood, ed. George Schöpflin and Geoffrey Hosking. London: Hurst.

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Seixas, Peter, and Tom Morton. 2013. The Big Six: Historical Thinking Concepts. Toronto: Nelson Education. Siebörger, Rob. 1994. New History Textbooks for South Africa. Pretoria: Macmillan Boleswa. Stolten, Hans Erik. 2007. History in the New South Africa: An Introduction. In History Making and Present Day Politics. The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik Stolten, 1–50. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Thompson, Janna. 2004. Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press. TRC Report. 2003. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report. South African Government Information. Accessed 12 February 2010. www. justice.gov.za/trc/. Wassermann, Johan. 2007. The Historical Consciousness of Afrikaner Adolescents: A Small Scale Survey. Internationale Gesellschaft für Geschichtsdidaktik, Jahrbuch 2006/7, 14–53. ———. 2018. The State and the Volving of Teaching About Apartheid in School History in South Africa, Circa 1994–2016. In Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts: A Critical Sociocultural Approach, ed. Terry Epstein and Carla L. Peck, 69–70. New York: Routledge.

4 Education and Truth Commissions: Patterns, Possibilities and Implications for Historical Justice Julia Paulson and Michelle J. Bellino

Introduction Truth commissions (TCs) have been described as the ‘archetyptical transitional justice tool’ (Bakiner 2015, p. 154). As such, an understanding of the ways that they engage with education in their work and how they intend that their work impact upon students, teachers, schools and education systems is essential to any exploration of the linkages between historical justice and education. In this chapter, we reflect upon the findings of a study that analysed 20 truth commission final reports, documenting the ways that they included education in their investigations and in the recommendations they made to enable the one of common

J. Paulson (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. J. Bellino University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_4

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truth commission objectives, non-recurrence or ‘never again’ (Hayner 2011). The results of this study are published in full in Paulson and Bellino (2017) and we summarise them here with a particular attention to the themes of this book, specifically to attending to the ‘educationalisation’ (Keynes et al. 2021) of the historical knowledge generated by truth commissions. The chapter argues that because truth commissions usually do not work closely with education actors to shape the versions of the past that they present in their final reports, nor think in advance about how those reports and their historical narratives might be used in education, they often to do not specify or participate actively in how the narratives of the past that they produce get ‘educationalised’. This means it is usually left to educational policymakers and educators themselves to decide how and if they use truth commissions’ narratives in classrooms. At least partly as a result of this limited engagement with education during the active periods of truth commission testimony collection and report writing, there remain questions about whether the knowledge they produce is ever educationalised, and if it is, whether it is done in ways that support the wider goals of transitional justice.

Truth Commissions (TCs) There have been more than 40 TCs organised around the world since the 1980s (Hayner 2011). With the increasing prominence of transitional justice within liberal peacebuilding processes, the establishment of a TC has come to be regarded as a ‘global norm’ (Kelsall 2005, p. 362). TCs are temporary bodies, usually established by government or as part of peace agreements, with mandates that call on them to uncover and document the causes and consequences of armed conflict or a period of human rights abuses (Hayner 2011). Unlike trials, TCs do not have prosecutorial power. However, ‘in a holistic approach to transitional justice, the recovery of truth serves as both a cornerstone of justice and a triggering device for legal justice, reparations, and institutional reforms’ (Ames Cobián and Reátegui 2009, p. 148). In recovering ‘truths’ about the past and laying the groundwork for further work towards justice, TCs therefore have a dual orientation to the past and future. Part of the TC’s role is to

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make recommendations based on their investigations into past violence and injustice that aim to prevent abuses from reoccurring. In this sense, reports authored by TCs can offer a vision of a just future and the particular transformations it requires. Importantly, this future imaginary is rooted in recognition, documentation, and clarification of historical injustice. TCs are unique as they are not only backward-looking but also clearly forward-looking, encouraging public recognition of past conflict to enable transformation and reconciliation in the present and future, linking their work with the future-oriented project of education. Substantive links between education, conflict, and opportunities for sustainable peacebuilding have been developed in recent years (see, e.g. Novelli et al. 2015). While education is no longer regarded as a necessarily protective or neutral undertaking (Bush and Saltarelli 2000), researchers, teachers and advocates continue to see potential for schools to foster reconciliation and prevent violence (Bellino and Williams 2017; Buckland 2005; Mundy and Dryden-Peterson 2011; Paulson 2011). Studies find the potential for schools to instil a shared sense of identity (Tawil and Harley 2004), deepen awareness of and respect for human rights (Bajaj 2017; Tibbitts and Fernekes 2010), and teach conflict-resolution and peacebuilding skills (Bickmore 2014). This research has also shown that educational reconstruction requires simultaneous attention to structural and curricular elements, arguing that peace education within unchanged, inequitable structures risks preserving and reproducing conflict legacies and therefore undermining transitional justice objectives (Bellino 2016; Cremin 2015; Hammett and Staeheli 2013). Even as the complexity of understandings of the relationships between education, peace and conflict grows, there continues to be a lack of ‘sensitivity of reforms and programs to the legacies of past injustices in both the education sector and the public culture of a country’ (Ramírez-Barat and Duthie 2017, p.  11) with educational reforms often prioritising performance based outcomes and efficiencies. The forward and backward-looking demands placed on the education sector in the aftermath of conflict illustrate what Lynn Davies (2017) terms a ‘two-way gaze’, which, as we will argue, opens possibilities for the educationalisation of the historical knowledge generated by TCs. We further argue that these possibilities generate more

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productive results when enacted in collaboration with educators and their students, recognising educational actors and young people as stakeholders in the process of historical justice.

Patterns Our study included all TC final reports that were publicly available in English, French and Spanish, published in the period of 1980–2015, totalling a sample of 20 reports. We conducted a content analysis of these documents and share the key patterns that emerged from the analysis below. Readers interested in a fuller discussion of the study’s methods and findings can consult the full study (Paulson and Bellino 2017). A first point is to note that there is considerable variation in the nature and degree to which individual TCs have engaged with education. Some commissions have had very little engagement with education (e.g. Uganda, Haiti, El Salvador, Chad and Uruguay), while others show high engagement, as in the case of the Canadian and Kenyan TCs. While it is important to note this variation, we do see a clear pattern of increasing TC engagement with education over time. In the 1980s, we found a relatively small number of TCs with limited engagement with education, whereas in the 1990s and 2000s, we see both the proliferation of TCs, as well as increasing TC engagements with education. The two 2010s TCs included in the sample (Canada and Kenya) engaged thoroughly with education. Indeed, the growth of engagements with education over the period as a whole is more pronounced than the proliferation of TCs themselves. This data suggests that as TCs have become established as a post-conflict norm, so too has education become established as a dimension of TCs’ work, and, indeed, a dimension of their work that is growing in its quantity and in the substance of that work. Discourses around TCs’ outreach efforts as a form of public education disseminated outside formal school spaces, have also proliferated (see, e.g. Dugal 2016), though in this chapter we focus on engagements with formal educational institutions. Three key patterns emerge in terms of the substance of this growing engagement. First, TCs tend to act on rather than with the educational

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sector. TCs tend to frame education as institutions to be acted upon (and changed) rather than as a key partner with whom to work. This is demonstrated by the small number of TCs that developed relationships with education actors, for example Ministries of Education, Universities or teachers’ unions and professional organisations. The TCs of Peru and Canada were the only ones to include members of staff specifically tasked with working on issues related to education. Only 4 of the 20 TCs analysed (Canada, Paraguay, Peru and Sierra Leone) described developing working relationships with educational authorities. A small number of TCs (Sierra Leone, Timor Leste, Liberia and Kenya) actively included the participation of children in their work. Only Canada’s TC, which centred on residential schooling as cultural genocide, regarded education as an integral part of their mandate. Canada’s TC held ‘Education Days’ involving more than 15,000 students with cultural performances, presentations, discussions and workshops. Additionally, they organised events with educators to ensure that students’ learning would build on these experiences. These deep and sustained collaborations with educational stakeholders, however, emerged as an exception to the norm. Second, examining trends over time, we find that TCs increasingly investigate crimes committed in and through educational systems. That is, reports detail how educational actors and spaces were affected by conflict (e.g. targeted attacks on schools, exploitation of schools for recruitment of child soldiers, armed movements being birthed on University campuses). Additionally, TCs have attended to the ways in which educational systems may have contributed towards or been complicit in conflict dynamics (e.g. mobilising tensions through biased, discriminatory and intolerant curriculum and/or exacerbating inequalities in education access and outcomes). However, our analysis shows that there are limits on turning this historical, truth-telling gaze towards the educational sector. Looking backwards in order to ‘tell the truth’ about education should profoundly shape and inform the ways in which TCs make forward-looking recommendations for educational change, employing the ‘two-way gaze’ (Davies 2017) characteristic of transitional justice processes. However, in most cases documentation of wrongs committed in and through schools does not explicitly align with projected visions of an educational sector that embodies and advances historical justice.

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TCs are mandated to look backwards, in order to uncover the truth about human rights violations over a given period. Three quarters of the TCs in our study levelled a backwards gaze at education in some way, and several did so in more than one way. Eleven TCs held investigations into human rights violations committed against education actors (e.g. students, teachers, university students and staff, teaching union members) and/or violations that took place within educational spaces (e.g. attacks on schools and universities). Nine TCs explored the ‘negative face of education’, exploring how the education sector contributed to conflict through (mis)representation and experiences of inequity and exclusion across identity groups. The Canadian TC, with its focus on the residential school experience of Aboriginal Canadians, documented an education project that intentionally separated families, aimed to eradicate cultures, and fueled to the ongoing marginalisation of indigenous people in Canada (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015). Similarly, the South African education system was premised on conceptions of white supremacy and institutionalised racial hierarchy through an inferior school system that restricted the upward mobility of black South Africans. In contrast to the Canadian TC, however, the South African TC did not engage directly with legacies of apartheid rooted in school structures. In this case, the legacy of apartheid coupled with the legacy of the transitional justice process itself remain a barrier to educational equity (Tibbitts and Weldon 2017). In other TCs, education was one sector investigated alongside others in order to identify and understand causes and contributing factors of conflict. TCs also investigated education through public hearings on its linkage to conflict and violence. Public hearings were popularised by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (though it did not include a hearing on education) and have since been adopted by many TCs. In four cases (Canada, Liberia, Paraguay and Peru), TCs held public hearings on education, creating a public forum in which to explore how education was implicated in conflict, as well as the ways that conflict affected the educational sector. Interestingly, while most TCs in the sample included some form of backwards gaze at education, the findings of this truth telling about education did not consistently inform the forward-looking

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recommendations that TC offered for educational reform. In total, eight TCs in our sample made recommendations for education sector reform. For example, in Sierra Leone, the TC recommended expansive educational reform, including for education to be made free and accessible, for the abolition of corporal punishment, for the reduction of corruption, and for the end of discriminatory practices (such as expelling girls who become pregnant) (Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2004). In six cases (Canada, Kenya, Liberia, Peru, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste), TCs that investigated education’s role in conflict went on to make recommendations for educational sector reform. This seems a sensible pattern of work—to first investigate how education has contributed towards conflict and its causes, and then to make recommendations for changes to education based on those findings. Indeed, some may say this is the quintessential task of TCs. However, not all TCs that investigated education’s negative face followed this pattern. Three TCs (Ghana, Panama and South Africa) investigated the role of education in conflict, but did not make recommendations for sectoral reform; and the TCs of Guatemala and Morocco made recommendations for education reform without a backward-facing look into the role of education in conflict. There seems to be a willingness by a number of TCs to investigate crimes that take place in educational spaces, as well as cases where rights violations systematically target educational actors. This enables an exploration how schools, educators and students were affected by conflict. Likewise, many TCs investigate the ways that education has contributed towards or been complicit in conflict. However, we find a weaker commitment to doing this work publicly by encouraging a wide-ranging societal reflection, participation and dialogue about education’s role in conflict via a public hearing, or by including educational stakeholders in the performative work of TCs. Meanwhile, a quarter of the TCs in our sample did not turn their backwards gaze to education at all (Uganda, Haiti, Chad, Morocco and Uruguay), a missed opportunity to ‘tell the truth’ about education within the wider truth-telling project, and a challenge for the ‘educationalisation’ of historical justice. A third key pattern to emerge from our analysis centres on how education features in TC recommendations. Overall, the most frequent educational engagements of TCs are recommendations for new educational

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content. Given TCs’ increased commitments to ‘telling the truth’ about education, as outlined above, we might expect to see calls for educational curricula that integrate historical inquiry and understanding into formal curriculum. Instead, TCs more often recommend forward-­looking (peace and human rights education) than backward-looking content focused on learning about and understanding the particulars of conflict or human rights abuses, or their (often) deep-rooted and complex origins. TC recommendations regularly included calls for human rights education, as well as for peace education, civics education or values education. The TC in Timor Leste also recommended educational content around food security, disaster preparedness, environment, health, cultural selfdetermination and gender, suggesting that for this commission any number of social problems might be remedied through formal instruction in schools (Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation 2005). TC recommendations for new curricular content were generally brief, listing only the areas around which new content or subjects should be developed. Detail was usually not given about how and by whom such content or guidelines should be developed—nor was their inclusion any guarantee that these recommendations would be taken up. Our impression is that recommendations are directed towards a centralised education authority assumed to be responsible for developing and then disseminating content or curricular guidelines, when in fact educational decision making is often decentralised and educational resources developed by a range of actors within and beyond the formal educational sector. TCs are designed as temporary entities with limited power to implement—or induce others to implement—their recommendations (Hayner 2011). In this sense, we should not expect that TC recommendations aimed at the educational sector are any more likely to be implemented than those aimed at other sectors. However given the limited involvement of educational stakeholders with TC activities described above, it seems especially unlikely. Researchers have critiqued peace and human rights curricula for being universalised and decontextualised (Cremin 2015; Horner 2013). Often peace education espouses a forward-looking approach promising future

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peace that is not grounded in an understanding of the past and its legacies in the present. For us, therefore, there is some worry around the fact that recommendations for formal and non-formal education in human rights and peace education is the most frequent educational engagement of TCs—bodies that are, after all, mandated to investigate the past and to uncover particular, contextual truths. This worry is confounded by the fact that not all TCs—indeed, not even a majority of TCs examined— made recommendations to teach about the conflict or period of rights violations that they investigated. Seven TCs made recommendations to teach about past conflict and seven produced educational resources based on their work (of these, five—Timor Leste, Liberia, Paraguay, Kenya, Canada—did both), while just over half of the TCs in our sample (11) did not concern themselves with recommendations for education explicitly about the conflict or period of human rights violations they explored. This finding, we argue, has significant implications for the ways in which the historical knowledge generated by TCs is (or is not) educationalised, and the parameters around open discussion of conflict and human rights violations both in and outside of schools. We conclude the chapter by considering in greater depth the ways in which TC reports and artefacts have been used in education systems and classrooms, drawing principally on qualitative research that has explored this question in various contexts. This enables us to present some of the current limitations around the educationalisation of historical knowledge generated by TCs, as well as to suggest possibilities for more productive future approaches, including those that include partnerships with educators and young people over the course of a TC’s work. In exploring possibilities, we draw on our ongoing collaboration with the Colombian TC, La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición (hereafter, the CEV), which began its three year mandate in 2018, to point to the innovative ways that this commission is working to build a more active, creative and collaborative relationship with students and teachers as part of its ongoing work.

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Possibilities and Implications for Historical Justice In presenting the patterns from our 2017 analysis above, we have shown how TCs largely do not engage with educators and students as part of the work they do during their short (and busy) mandated periods. One implication of this is that the work of bringing TCs’ findings and the historical narratives that they produce on the causes and consequences of conflict into educational policy, curricula and classroom discussions largely fall to educational policymakers and to individual educators themselves. By exploring qualitative research on the ways in which TCs have been taught in various country contexts in this section, we show first that educational policymakers often fail to take up the task of educationalising TCs or do so in ways that are politically convenient but not conducive to the wider goals of transitional justice. We also point to the risks of individual teachers opting in—and more likely—out of these discussions, which are pedagogically challenging and often politically fraught. A first strand of research explores the impact of TC recommendations on the education sector. Paulson (2011, 2017) shows how the Peruvian Ministry of Education used some of the recommendations for educational reform made by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to add legitimacy to initiatives they were already pursuing, while ignoring others that did not align with their priorities. When they developed a set of teaching resources that drew on the commission’s findings, these were sent only to the most marginalised schools, which were predominantly located in the regions of the country most affected by conflict. This decision directly contradicted a key TC message that all Peruvians should learn about the conflict and consider the roles of their communities within it. Likewise, the TCs in Liberia and Sierra Leone made recommendations for educational reform, having explored the ways in which educational injustices contributed to conflict in both countries, but these recommendations largely went unimplemented and were widely unknown to educational policymakers and teachers (Shepler and Williams 2017). Additionally, structural challenges embedded in the

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school system impeded their uptake, leaving teachers uncertain whether these conversations would be more productive if considered outside of schools. This gap between stated recommendations and policy reforms often leaves teachers unsupported in decisions about whether and how to bring these difficult conversations into classrooms, fragmenting and stifling critique, which are often linked to fears of (re)inciting conflict and division (e.g. Bellino 2017). TCs’ recommendations presume that educational spaces are apolitical and not themselves in need of transformation, but the research reviewed highlights the highly political nature of education and educational decision making, providing support for the idea that education should be seen as both a site for advancing conversations about historical justice, as well as a site in need of transitional justice (see Bellino et  al. 2017; Davies 2017; Ramírez-Barat and Duthie 2017). A second strand of research traces TC entry into textbooks, including ‘official’ state-sanctioned textbooks and supplemental resources produced by NGOs and other educational actors (e.g. Oglesby 2007; Shepler and Williams 2017; Paulson 2017). In both cases, research highlights the difficulty in translating TC reports, which usually span thousands of pages, into educational materials that provide an appropriate level of historical information, context and detail, with key transitional justice messages around responsibility, non-repetition and reconciliation. For example, in South Africa, Hammett and Staeheli (2013), show how the TC inspired exploration of the apartheid past in social studies textbooks is presented in ‘matter-of-fact and decidedly apolitical tones without dwelling on the pain and injustice of the system’ (p. 39). TC inclusion in textbooks has also been a politicised issue—the sanitised and watered down version of Peru’s final report that made it into social sciences textbooks provoked a national media storm that was used by political actors to try to delegitimise the wider TC project and its findings (Paulson 2017) and the Ministry of Education’s efforts to develop and adopt a textbook based on the Guatemalan TC’s final report were blocked by Congress (Oglesby 2007). These studies also illustrate how critical studies of historical injustice are at odds with the collective identity and nation-­ building work often privileged in schools (Carretero 2011).

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A third strand of research focuses on teacher and student interactions in schools, and the motivations, risks and varied outcomes of individual teachers’ decisions to centre issues of historical (in)justice in their classrooms, and the extent to which TC materials are consulted as historical resources. Bellino’s (2014, 2017) ethnographic work in Guatemala highlights the degree to which these decisions vary between schools and remain tightly linked to the socioeconomic and cultural communities of the school and the conflict allegiances and experiences of those communities. Studies carried out in South Africa (Weldon 2010; Tibbitts and Weldon 2017) and Northern Ireland (Worden and Smith 2017) show how teachers’ own identities, biographies and experiences of conflict shape their willingness or otherwise to teach about the recent past and to engage, or not, with the TC. Here, qualitative research reveals that in some cases educators teach about the findings of the TCs in their contexts despite the absence of policy or high-quality educational curricula or resources to support this. Teachers, therefore, are key actors for the educationalisation of TCs and their contributions deserve to be recognised and supported. Likewise, the obstacles that teachers face in adapting these resources for their classrooms—including the processing of their own experiences as actors in/affected by conflict and violence, must be acknowledged. One way to account for teachers’ needs as both individuals and professionals is by actively involving them in the development of educational materials as co-authors with a stake in the process and expertise to share. We close this chapter by highlighting that TCs’ practices are changing and that efforts do exist to engage teachers, young people and other education sector actors during the periods in which TCs operate and to support their work after they end. The Colombian CEV, in the second year of its three-year mandate as we write this chapter, includes pedagogy as one of its four operational pillars and, thanks to this, has a pedagogy team on staff who work on educating the public about TC activities, as well supporting educational initiatives for teachers, students and schools. The CEV team generally, and the pedagogy team specifically, collaborate constructively with civil society organisations, including with partners like Educapaz and Rodemos el Dialogo, who support schools, teachers and

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students to engage directly in learning about the TC and in exploring the causes and legacies of conflict within school communities and their local areas. These initiatives support the positioning of education as a space for transitional justice and truth telling and share responsibilities between the CEV, civil society and educational actors themselves, including, importantly students and teachers who can join volunteer schemes led by the CEV to further its pedagogical work. The pedagogy team participate in ongoing Ministry of Education discussions about the reintroduction of history as a taught subject in Colombia (where is it is currently encompassed within the broader topic of social sciences) and work with education bodies to produce materials about the transitional justice process, creating relationships and starting conversations that have the potential to guide the production of resources based on the CEV’s final report when it is issued. As the CEV work moves from its backward-­looking phase of testimony collection towards its forward-looking work of drafting recommendations, the pedagogy team is exploring ways to involve teachers and the education sector more broadly in making this link between the ‘truth told’ about education and the proposals for change towards a more just educational future. We do not detail here the challenges that the political context in Colombia poses to the transitional justice project generally and the CEV particularly, nor do we present a critical account of the CEV’s engagement with education as whole—an exercise that would be unfair at this stage of their work. Instead, we highlight the promising practices that the CEV is adopting, with the support of its allies and thanks to its openness to learning from TC experiences elsewhere, and from TC research, and to the commitment within its mandate, sustained over the course of its operations, to pedagogy and education. We acknowledge that TCs have limited time in which to undertake an enormous task, and often are understaffed and under-resourced. Their mandates by necessity must be limited and they cannot be expected to do everything. However, we hope this chapter has offered convincing arguments for including a focus on education within the mandates for TCs and for working with educators as key partners. The CEV has already demonstrated that both of these practices are possible, even during early stages of work and amidst a

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politically charged climate. We will continue to follow and support its endeavours and hope to see its work educationalised in ways that enable transitional justice within the educational sector, as well as a contribution to the aims of transitional justice from education. Acknowledgements  This work was supported by the British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE). Portions of this text first appeared in Paulson, Julia, and Michelle J. Bellino. 2017. Truth Commissions, education, and positive peace: An analysis of truth commission final reports (1980–2015). Comparative Education 53 (3): 351–378. doi: 10.1080/03050068.2017.1334428, and have been reprinted with permission. No more than 200 words are reprinted directly from the Comparative Education article.

References Ames Cobián, Rolando, and Félix Reátegui. 2009. Toward Systemic Social Transformation: Truth Commissions and Development. In Transitional Justice and Development: Making Connections, ed. Pablo de Greiff and Roger Duthie, 142–169. New York: Social Science Research Council. Bajaj, Monisha, ed. 2017. Human Rights Education: Theory, Research, Praxis. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bakiner, Onur. 2015. Truth Commission Impact: An Assessment of How Commissions Influence Politics and Society. International Journal of Transitional Justice 8 (1): 6–30. Bellino, Michelle J. 2014. Whose Past, Whose Present?: Historical Memory Among the ‘Postwar’ Generation in Guatemala. In (Re)constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation, ed. James H. Williams, 131–152. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. ———. 2016. ‘So that We Do Not Fall Again:’ History Education and Citizenship in ‘Postwar’ Guatemala. Comparative Education Review 60 (1): 58–79. ———. 2017. Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Bellino, Michelle J., and James H. Williams. 2017. Introduction. In (Re)constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict, ed. Michelle J.  Bellino and James H. Williams, 1–20. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Bellino, Michelle J., Julia Paulson, and Elizabeth A. Worden. 2017. Editorial: Working Through Difficult Pasts: Toward Thick Democracy and Transitional Justice in Education. Comparative Education 53 (3): 313–332. Bickmore, Kathy. 2014. Peacebuilding Dialogue Pedagogies in Canadian Classrooms. Curriculum Inquiry 44 (4): 553–582. Buckland, Peter. 2005. Reshaping the Future: Education and Post-Conflict Reconstruction. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Bush, Kenneth D., and Diana Saltarelli. 2000. The Two Faces of Education in Ethnic Conflict: Towards a Peacebuilding Education for Children. Florence, Italy: United Nations Children’s Fund. Carretero, Mario. 2011. Constructing Patriotism: Teaching History and Memories in Global Worlds. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. 2005. Chega! The Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. Timor-Leste. Cremin, Hilary. 2015. Peace Education in the Twenty-First Century: The Concepts Facing Crisis or Opportunity? Journal of Peace Education 13 (1): 1–17. Davies, Lynn. 2017. Justice-Sensitive Education: The Implications of Transitional Justice Mechanisms for Teaching and Learning. Comparative Education 53 (3): 333–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2017.1317999. Dugal, Zoe. 2016. Outreach to Children in the Transitional Justice Process of Sierra Leone. In Transitional Justice and Education: Learning Peace, ed. Clara Ramirez-Barat and Roger Duthie, 285–300. New  York: Social Science Research Council. Hammett, Daniel, and Lynn Staeheli. 2013. Transition and the Education of the New South African Citizen. Comparative Education Review 57 (2): 309–331. https://doi.org/10.1086/669123. Hayner, Priscilla B. 2011. Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge. Horner, Lindsey. 2013. Networking Resources, Owning Productivity: A Post-­ development Alternative in Mindanao? Globalisation, Societies, Education 11 (4): 538–559. Kelsall, Tim. 2005. Truth, Lies, Ritual: Preliminary Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone. Human Rights Quarterly 27: 361–391.

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Keynes, Matilda, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. 2021. Introduction: Connecting Historical Justice and History Education. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mundy, Karen, and Sarah Dryden-Peterson, eds. 2011. Educating Children in Conflict Zones: Research, Policy, and Practice for Systemic Change: A Tribute to Jackie Kirk. New York: Teachers College Press. Novelli, M., M.T.A. Lopes Cardozo, and A. Smith. 2015. A Theoretical Framework for Analysing the Contribution of Education to Sustainable Peacebuilding: 4Rs in Conflict‐Affected Contexts. University of Amsterdam. Available online: https://doi.orglearningforpeace.unicef.org/partners/ research‐consortium/research‐outputs/. Oglesby, Elizabeth. 2007. Historical Memory and the Limits of Peace Education: Examining Guatemala’s Memory of Silence and the Politics of Curriculum Design. In Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation, ed. Elizabeth A. Cole, 175–202. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Paulson, Julia. 2011. Reconciliation Through Educational Reform? Recommendations and Realities in Peru. In Education and Reconciliation: Exploring Conflict and Post-Conflict Situations, ed. Julia Paulson, 126–150. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017. From Truth to Textbook: The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Educational Resources, and the Challenges of Teaching About Recent Conflict. In (Re)constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict, ed. Michelle J. Bellino and James H. Williams, 291–311. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Paulson, Julia, and Michelle J. Bellino. 2017. Truth Commissions, Education, and Positive Peace: An Analysis of Truth Commission Final Reports (1980–2015). Comparative Education 53 (3): 351–378. Ramírez-Barat, Clara, and Roger Duthie, eds. 2017. Transitional Justice and Education: Learning Peace. New York: Social Science Research Council. Shepler, Susan, and James H. Williams. 2017. Understanding Sierra Leonean and Liberian Teachers’ Views on Discussing Past Wars in Their Classrooms. Comparative Education 53 (3): 418–441. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305006 8.2017.1338641. Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 2004. Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

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Tawil, Sobhi, and Alexandra Harley. 2004. Education, Conflict and Social Cohesion. Paris: UNESCO. Tibbitts, Felisa, and William Fernekes. 2010. Human Rights Education. In Teaching and Studying Social Issues: Major Programs and Approaches, ed. Samuel Totten and Jon E. Pederson, 87–117. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Tibbitts, Felisa, and Gail Weldon. 2017. History Curriculum and Teacher Training: Shaping a Democratic Future in Post-apartheid South Africa? Comparative Education 53 (3): 442–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305006 8.2017.1337399. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Weldon, Gail. 2010. Post-conflict Teacher Development: Facing the Past in South Africa. Journal of Moral Education 39 (3): 353–364. Worden, Elizabeth Anderson, and Alan Smith. 2017. Teaching for Democracy in the Absence of Transitional Justice: The Case of Northern Ireland. Comparative Education 53 (3): 379–395. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305006 8.2017.1334426.

Part II Historical Justice in Public History Spaces

5 The Hanaoka Incident and Practices of Local History and Memory Making in Northern Japan Erik Ropers

Introduction From August 1944 to August 1945, over 900 Chinese laborers and upwards of 4500 Korean laborers lived and worked under grueling and inhumane conditions at the Kajima Corporation construction site at the Hanaoka mine in Akita Prefecture.1 Brought to Japan against their will, these men comprised a tiny fraction of the millions of men and women forcibly mobilized by Japan across Asia between 1939 and 1945 for labor service. On the evening of 30 June 1945, roughly 850 Chinese and Korean laborers rebelled against their Japanese overseers, resulting in the deaths of four Japanese workers and a Chinese spy as they fled into the surrounding countryside. Almost immediately local authorities mobilized thousands of local militia, military veterans, young men, and police to track the escapees down. The eventual recapture of these laborers and the brutal suppression of the revolt, combined with other deaths at the E. Ropers (*) Towson University, Towson, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_5

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site, resulted in 418 of 986 Chinese laborers (42 percent) perishing between August 1944 and October 1945—an extremely high number compared to the average rate of 17 percent for Chinese forced laborers nationwide (Nozoe 2008, p. 279; HNC 2011, p. 5).2 It was this rebellion and escape attempt that became known as the “Hanaoka Incident.”3 After Japan’s surrender, members of the Allied Occupation forces charged with investigating and prosecuting Japanese war crimes zeroed in on Hanaoka as one of, if not the most excessive and heinous instances of forced labor by the Japanese in all of mainland Japan. The arrival of US Army Captain John J. Graff in the village on 7 October 1945 set into motion a formal investigation of conditions in the camp by GHQ (General Headquarters) that would last well into 1947. Investigators thoroughly examined whether or not there was “evidence to determine whether the apprehension or continued detention of individual Japanese personnel of the camp would be warranted” as they weighed whether or not to bring charges against company workers and local police at the Yokohama War Crimes Tribunal (GHQ 1945, p. 4). Kajima employees, up to and including the company president and his son, were interviewed (GHQ n.d.) as were some local civilians and Chinese survivors. Investigators determined that charges were warranted and urged the court to consider two kinds of criminal guilt: first, whether or not company officials and supervisors were criminally negligent in their duties, and second, whether or not acts of “torture and brutality” had been committed against the Chinese laborers (GHQ 1945, p. 4). Eight men, a mix of local Kajima employees and local policemen, were ultimately indicted and in a trial lasting a little over three months, five were found guilty. In spite of this extensive investigation, trial, and legal affirmation of guilt, local memories rarely foreground or discuss in detail these efforts on the part of the Allied Occupation. The trial’s general absence in local narratives, memorials, and classrooms shows its relative insignificance as far as how locals in the community have framed and understood the event itself and broader responses to Japanese war criminality. My understanding of these responses, and of historical justice more broadly, follows that of Lisa Yoneyama (2016) who recognizes that conceptions of historical justice are not uniform throughout nation-states. Though historical justice seeks to right past wrongs, Yoneyama (2016, p.  18) reminds us that these

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enmeshed conversations are “insurgent memories, counterknowledges, and inauthentic identities that have been regimented by the discourse and institutions centering on nation-states.” Indeed, the effect of regional war crimes trials at Yokohama and elsewhere throughout the Asia-Pacific region has arguably flattened our understanding of serious war crimes perpetrated by civilians into a few choice examples.4 The effect of this flattening largely effaces the lives, experiences, and voices of the overwhelming number of victims and survivors of Japanese wartime aggression—as well as the voices of Japanese themselves who participated actively in, or resisted, the aims and orders of the wartime state as individuals, in groups, or communities. By turning to the local level in this case, it is possible to clearly see how citizens living in Akita remember the Incident and present an example of an insurgent narrative and meaning for audiences in their communities vis-à-vis the grand narratives of wartime Japan and Japanese war criminality, which have silenced their voices, memories, and experiences. This chapter examines how Japanese students and educators, primarily in northern Japan, have framed and engaged with the history of the Hanaoka Incident. I show in the following pages the importance of local memory cultures and pedagogical practices that, in not foregrounding and fixating on the Allies’ efforts at holding some perpetrators legally accountable, provide a counterbalance to national narratives which tend to privilege legal mechanisms like the Tokyo and Yokohama War Crimes Tribunals. In doing so, I explore alternate narratives and possibilities that hold resonance for the communities affected by events in question— events that rarely rise to the level of national consciousness. I will show how emphasis is placed by locals on the daily experiences of Chinese laborers at the work site and the brutality in which they were recaptured after their escape. This chapter also demonstrates the collaborative and community-driven processes of history, education, and memory making across several decades in northern Japan beyond the national and transnational movements concerning the Incident that have featured in prior scholarship about the subject (e.g. see Underwood 2005 and Seraphim 2006). After situating the Incident geographically and with reference to the existing historiography, I proceed to examine some of the pedagogical practices found in the local community, focusing mainly on a

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collaborative classroom art project in a primary school not far from where the Incident occurred. Examining this and other local sources provides an opportunity to recenter how the subject is viewed: in other words, focusing on how locals have thought of, written, and conceived of the Incident allows us to hear voices and see challenges to many of the grand narratives of wartime and postwar Japanese history that have been tacitly accepted. Contrary to a major strand of historiography about wartime Japan, Hanaoka reveals the limits of Allied investigations and jurisprudence to resolve war crimes, and how that project might be taken on by local activists and educators in order to ensure such experiences are not forgotten by subsequent generations.

Local Memories in Akita Prefecture Four hours north by bullet train from Tokyo to Akita City on the main island of Honshū, the city of Ōdate is another hour and a half by express train north and east through the mountains and valleys that characterize the middle of the prefecture. While the memory culture of the Hanaoka Incident is geographically focused on Ōdate, it shifts and spreads across the prefecture which had no less than 73 sites that engaged forced laborers during the wartime era, predominately in mining, forestry, and construction (Nozoe 2005, pp.  38–41). The Fujita Corporation, which owned and operated the Hanaoka mine, subcontracted civil engineering work to the Kajima Corporation in order to help increase productivity at the site. How locals remember, think about, and discuss the Hanaoka Incident is relevant in thinking through how historians and community members view, understand, and integrate these kinds of histories and memories into local and national frameworks. Broadly speaking, local memories of the war in Akita differ to the kinds of standard memories and narratives of wartime Japan commonly found and repeated elsewhere in the historiography and in public classrooms nationwide. Akita had largely escaped the destructive bombing campaign waged by the Allies until the day before surrender when an oil refinery on the outskirts of Akita City was targeted (known as the Tsuchizaki raid). Whereas Tokyo suffered approximately 100,000

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casualties from the Allied firebombing of the capital on 9–10 March 1945, fewer than 1000 civilians died in the Tsuchizaki raid on 14 August 1945, the day before Japan’s surrender. As a consequence of having not suffered the kinds of devastation seen in most other prefectural capitals and major cities, local histories centered on and around the prefectural capital of Akita City tend to focus on the privations of war and lack the devastated cityscape routinely found elsewhere throughout Japan. Traveling away from the urban center in the prefecture reveals a vast array of wartime industries and labor sites, which local historians often fixate on. In doing so they frequently incorporate memories and accounts of forced labor and colonial citizens who worked on mining, forestry, and construction projects (for example developing key infrastructure such as roads, bridges, irrigation, and dams) compared to national narratives where these contributions too often fade into the background, if they are present at all. The silences present in national discourse and educational curricula, for example, often underscore Japan and the Japanese people as victims of the war broadly writ, rather than the countless millions of people killed or victimized by Imperial Japan during the wartime period (1937–1945) or earlier (cf. Ienaga 1993; Orr 2001, p. 9; Saaler 2005, pp. 74, 94, 101). In the case of Hanaoka, a few locals were involved during the 1950s in attempts to draw national attention to what had happened in this rural village. Acclaimed author Matsuda Tokiko, who grew up in rural Akita, published a number of news articles and short stories about the Incident, most notably in the communist daily newspaper Akahata (1953a, 1953b); she went on to base one of her early novels Chitei no hitobito (The Underground People) on the lives and experiences of laborers at the Hanaoka mine.5 During the 1950s, it was largely local historians across Japan that worked to narrate and draw attention to the plight of Chinese laborers, until the middle of the following decade when historians, largely those in or connected to minority communities in Japan, began to produce extensive works based on government, military, and corporate documentation, as well as fieldwork (Ropers 2019, pp. 19–20). As many of these early works were focused on documenting and understanding the expansive and insidious bureaucracy that facilitated wartime forced labor, it was largely the work of local historians and activists that revealed the details and experiences of individuals working

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at thousands of sites across the country. Local histories, movements, and education, therefore, provide alternate perspectives to understand events too often overlooked by dominant and traditional discourses. Finally, the emphasis placed upon Chinese laborers in local narratives from Akita, mainly due to the severity with which Chinese workers were treated at Hanaoka, is notable given that Koreans compromised the overwhelming majority of forced laborers at the Hanaoka site (outnumbering the Chinese 4 to 1), in Akita as a whole, and throughout mainland Japan. A tendency by the media in recent years, driven in part by international politics since the election of South Korean President Moon Jae-in in 2017, has been to focus squarely on the stories and experiences of Koreans during the wartime period to serve as a fulcrum for postwar historical debates and memory about forced labor and other wartime criminal acts. And, while more recent scholarship is beginning to explicitly incorporate the experiences and memories of non-Korean so-called “comfort women” (for example Qiu et al. 2014; Kinoshita 2017), much of the media, both domestically in Japan and in a global context, continues to focus on the Korean situation as defining wartime Japanese aggression and a perceived lack of remorse. Consequently, the Hanaoka Incident provides an opportunity for scholars to re-evaluate our understanding, and perhaps ways of teaching postwar historiography. It is here, at the local level, that local historians and activists tell this story to transmit knowledge and memory to subsequent generations in the community. These local memories and groups operate largely independent of dominant national narratives of wartime Japan. Philip Seaton and others have recently underscored these points by directing our attention to the marginality of rural prefectures in Japanese war narratives and how prefectures such as Akita allow scholars to examine stories, events, and ideas which have not been incorporated into or been greatly affected by national memories and histories and are not widely incorporated into national public school curricula. Local studies, Seaton argues, have much to offer. He writes: It is all too easy to assume that those elements of the Second World War history which acquire the “local history” tag deal with “forgotten” aspects of war history, where “forgotten” is synonymous with “irrelevant” except to

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those with personal or emotional connections to that region. Partially due to this and academic preferences for grand narratives or the achievements of the great (wo)men of history, local history has traditionally been the preserve of the amateur rather than academic historian. (Seaton 2016a, p. 4)

Though on many occasions local memories often only contribute “shading and nuance” to national narratives, “local memories may be sufficiently distinctive and widely narrated within the locality to allow the conclusion that people possess distinctive local collective memories” (Seaton 2016b, p. 13). The distinctive local memories of the Hanaoka Incident are in contrast to what James Orr (2001, p. 173) has termed as the more collective form of Japanese “amnesia” of wartime history, particularly in its treatment and aggression toward other peoples. Indeed, it was a “surprise” to the authors of A People’s History of Modern Akita that “it [didn’t] appear to be the case in Akita that locals have forgotten the lives of Chinese [forced laborers],” something that was in stark contrast to the growing national amnesia of war crimes and history of wartime Asia in the late 1950s and 1960s when this and similar works were published (Akita kindaishi kenkyūkai 1969, p.  222). This observation is amply supported by the ways in which local students and educators integrated these stories and memories into school curricula, as I discuss in the following sections.

Local Challenges to Established Narratives Japanese collective memory has tended to eschew the wholescale integration of wartime memories from more rural parts of the country. Seaton (2007, p. 22) has also drawn our attention to the topic of memory composure: how individuals born in postwar Japan without direct experience of the war are conditioned along a “spectrum of judgemental memory.” In this argument, he draws our attention to the complexity of war memories (identifying five key variations) and importantly underscores that the politically powerful conservative movement (namely the Liberal Democratic Party and its political allies) have, since the 1970s, largely

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controlled the official narrative and government/educational policy whereas so-called progressives who often emphasize Japan’s “unjust” wartime actions have tended to work largely through cultural forms of expression—in art, film, or the written word, for instance (2007, pp. 22, 36). Schools, therefore, have been one of the key battlegrounds in Japan of how history has been narrated and remembered, both in a political framework and a regional framework alluded to by Seaton. Such flashpoints can be seen in how government ministries and officials have sought to shape the teaching of Japan’s wartime history. As a matter of process, the Ministry of Education screens textbook manuscripts, requiring changes in wording or deletions before granting approval and allowing publication. One of the leading figures to challenge this process was Japanese historian Ienaga Saburō, who became synonymous with resisting state scrutiny of textbooks. As an author of Japanese high school history textbooks, Ienaga launched three separate court challenges over 30 years to contest what he argued was state censorship of his work. Ienaga challenged the Ministry of Education’s suppression of passages such as those dealing with the Japanese invasion of mainland Asia and colonial rule (see Akimasa 2011, pp.  165–167 and Ienaga 1993, pp.  124–128).6 Teachers’ unions, such as the Japan Teachers’ Union (JTU) too, “engaged in fierce struggles with conservative offices” during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s as one of the strongest critics in the educational sphere of a bureaucracy that reminded many of wartime militarist thought and practice (Seraphim 2007, p. 21). As Nozaki (2008, p. 154) rightly notes, “Ienaga’s thirty-year challenge to the state raised, fairly directly, the question of whose knowledge ought to be taught in schools and thus represented in school textbooks.” The battle waged by Ienaga in the courts over curricula and remembering the past are also visible in specific local circumstances such as Hanaoka. In the early 1970s, an unnamed official in the Japanese Ministry of Education suggested that “there was no need to teach children about Japan’s dark and embarrassing [wartime] past,” instead arguing for the teaching of a more positive national history.7 Local students disagreed with this assessment, instead arguing that because of Japan’s “dark” past such histories

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needed to be included in textbooks (for example Hirano 2005, p. 209). For some, the classroom was the only place to learn about the “dark” past: often family members knew nothing about the Incident or were reticent to discuss it. One student stated that “I think my grandfather knew about it but said ‘I don’t know anything’” (Satō 1975, p. 3). Others whose families were able to relay basic facts of the Incident, including that Chinese laborers were recaptured after their escape and were killed, were surprised at the maltreatment of survivors and general callousness of Japanese guards and overseers (Satō 1975, p. 4). These observations by students are supported by local historian Nozoe Kenji who stated in an interview the following year that “most people [in Hanaoka] don’t want to talk about it. […] One gets the impression that few are aware of the crimes that took place there” (Shimizu 1976, p. 117). Curricular documents prepared by local educators reveal that the Hanaoka Incident began to be taught in local school classrooms in 1968 (HYK 1986, p. 71). Lesson plans and course packs provided teachers a broad outline for four to eight hours of instruction depending on grade level. Situating the Incident in the context of wartime Japan and Japanese imperialism, students approached the Incident by first reading oral histories of Chinese laborers who worked throughout Akita Prefecture during the war and discussing characteristics and commonalities between them in class before being directed to write short response papers (kansōbun) outlining their thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless, teachers did not just narrowly teach about Chinese as victims and Japanese as perpetrators. Among other key points, it was suggested for instructors to not simply focus on Chinese forced laborers but to also keep in mind and discuss other domestic victims of the war (in other words, Japanese victims) (HYK 1986, p. 72). The general feeling of reticence felt by many locals during the decade of the seventies, particularly those who were alive during the war, that prevented them from openly discussing the history of Hanaoka began to change by the 1980s and open the door for more innovative projects in local school classrooms that built on students’ discussion and analysis of oral testimonies and primary documents.

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Cultivating a Consciousness of Peace After helping develop curricular manuals for elementary, middle, and secondary school classrooms and teaching students for over a decade about the Incident, local public-school teacher Shōji Tokiji, along with his students, published an illustrated history of it with students based on their classwork and discussions in 1984. The final product, Ano yama o koete (Climbing That Mountain), is a short 32-page book of black and white prints paired with written text and interspersed with brightly colored magenta-on-black prints. A favorable review in the magazine Hanga (Anon. 1984, p. 18) noted the “dramatic effect of the magenta pages” upon opening the book and the “sensitive way in which the authors depicted [Japanese] villagers.” It is best located and understood in the context of local memory and pedagogy rather than in an international framework like the better-known visual work of Hanaoka monogatari (Tale of Hanaoka) (Nii et al. 1951 [1981]; in translation cf. Minear and Seraphim 2015, n.p.). The work is a physical representation of local story telling and remembrance of the Incident rooted in the local classroom. Though both works narrate the events of the Incident, That Mountain does so at a level suitable for young children between 10 and 12. In contrast to Tale of Hanaoka, which was authored by respected local artists whose leftist politics had drawn the ire of Allied Occupation officials, the students’ drawings are somewhat cruder but no less powerful in their imagery. Both works pay tribute to the suffering and lost lives of laborers under wartime militarism. Focusing on this single work by local schoolchildren is productive for several reasons. As Seraphim (2013, p.  89) notes, collected works provide an immediate context in terms of production, reception, and cultural space. They are often commemorative in nature and highlight the selective processes of memory in their creation and consumption. Moreover, there is a rich tradition of collaborative art projects documenting aspects of Japan’s wartime history beyond Tale of Hanaoka and Climbing That Mountain: for instance, the Hiroshima Panels by husband and wife artists Maruki Iki and Maruki Toshi powerfully document the consequences of the atomic bombings and nuclear testing. Similarly the Chinese Returnee Comic Artists’ Group (Chūgoku

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hikiage mangaka no kai), composed of men and women who repatriated from northeast China as children as the end of the war have offered audiences a variety of works from drawings and lithographs exhibited in local museums throughout Japan as well as longer comic serials loosely fictionalizing their experiences (Ropers 2016). As Andreas Huyssen and others have suggested, the past must be articulated in some form to become memory (Huyssen 1995, pp. 2–3). What separates That Mountain from these and other collaborative works documenting the war is the way in which it stands as a product of nearly two decades of pedagogy in local school classrooms. In the development of That Mountain, students drew on their knowledge of the Incident from classroom readings and discussion to collaboratively narrate individual and collective experiences of Japanese and Chinese locals, using visual art and written narrative to form and shape their memories and broader local memories of the Incident. Its distribution appears to have largely been for the local Akita community: students, parents, and educators, though it was advertised for direct sale in some nationally circulating magazines (Anon. 1984, p. 18). Indeed, Shōji wrote that his aim in teaching the Incident to students was to cultivate a sense of historical consciousness and understanding, and to instill a sense of apprehension about narratives concerning Japanese victimization in his students. These aims, while certainly applicable for Japanese citizens across the nation, had particular resonance for the local community. The stated aims and desires are not unique and are often repeated in other contexts by artists who have explicitly used their work to generate conversation, discussion, and debate; in effect, arguing for the use of art to generate a wider and more inclusive historical consciousness in reading publics and communities (Ropers 2016, p. 146). At this point it is worth briefly elaborating on the idea of historical consciousness. In the context used by Shōji and many in Japan writing about the war, the concept generally underscores the importance of war responsibility for the Japanese people as a critical part of war memory. Moreover, its use emphasizes the political and ethical dimensions of wartime history and memory at the heart of these conversations and debates. This is somewhat distinctive compared to the pioneering work of Jörn Rüsen and his typology of different levels of historical consciousness that

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provides a way to think through how peoples understand and use narratives about the past. Students learning history in schools, for example, begin to think about the past in ways that help orient them in the world today, informing “moral deliberation by connecting the past, present, and future" (Rüsen 2005, p. 86; den Heyer 2004, p. 203). It is also related to the processes of historical learning. Rüsen (1993, p. 87) suggests that historical learning is not merely studying “objective” facts; historical knowledge, too, must begin to “play a role in the mental household of a subject.” In other words, students will better understand an experience of the past, be able to give meaning to this experience, and be able to apply these meanings to everyday life (Rüsen 1993, p. 88). Drawing on these observations, Peter Lee (2004, p. 10) applies Rüsen’s ideas and emphasizes the ways in which the past is ordered and becomes significant in our understanding. Pointing  to the role of educators facilitating student learning, he writes that “The point is to enable students to achieve their own meaningful framework. [We should also] recognize Rüsen’s point that students must make whatever versions of the past they encounter part of their mental furniture, so it is important to give them so means of doing this.” A concrete example that underscores Shōji’s understanding of why historical consciousness is important, along with the ideas by Rüsen, Lee, and others working in the field of history education, is seen in the classroom project he developed. Two generations separated students from the Incident by the time work for That Mountain began in local classrooms in 1982. The project, which took two years to complete, saw Shōji’s sixth-­ grade students become researchers, authors, and artists. The active learning that students embarked upon was in and of itself a “monument” to the Incident (HYK 1986, p. 78). Drawing primarily on an interview and diary of a Japanese woman the class had read and discussed, students then collaboratively wrote a story conveying the history of the Incident before pairing it to a series of 15 evocative woodblock prints. With the artwork, the students were directed to be mindful of the balance between black and white, the physical movements and feelings of individuals depicted, and the local community’s long-standing desires to commemorate the dead (HYK 1986, p.  74). Referencing this last point, the most visible local monument dedicated to the memory of the deceased Chinese

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Fig. 5.1  Cover of Ano yama o koete (Climbing That Mountain). The Japan-China Friendship Association memorial stela can be seen to the left

laborers features front and center on the cover of the book (Fig.  5.1) which depicts six Japanese of various ages praying for the dead at the memorial site erected in 1966 by the Japan-China Friendship Association (inscribed on the stela) with the book’s title placed in the top-center. Local commemorations continue to be important as well, with a yearly gathering and memorial service on the anniversary of the Incident. Just as Shōji and his students considered their work as a monument to the victims and survivors, a reviewer similarly noted the book was similarly impactful like the memorial stela—perhaps even more so in terms of spreading awareness and memory of the Incident if the book was purchased and circulated outside the local community (Anon. 1984, p. 18). Students also focused on interactions between local community members and the laborers themselves, revealing moments of empathy between Japanese locals and the recaptured Chinese. With word that the laborers had been successfully recaptured, locals came out at midday to observe the growing spectacle. In one print, two local women recoil at the sight

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of four Japanese men beating two bound laborers kneeling in the village square. One woman, holding tightly onto the other states how awful the sight is as the other, covering her face and crying laments that “the Chinese are going to be killed” (TKS 1984, p. 21). Focusing on another laborer in the town square, “an older Japanese man furtively glanced at a Chinese labourer. Peering carefully he saw an insect crawling on the man’s face. ‘Humans all itch alike’ said the old man as he squished the bug” (TKS 1984, p. 23) (Fig. 5.2). Turning the page, a group of four housewives looked on sadly, before turning away. One remarked how her husband had been sent to the warfront and wondered if he was being treated as poorly as the Chinese in front of her were. Her heart ached as she wondered “why is that humans need to fight one another?” (TKS 1984, p. 24).

Fig. 5.2  A Japanese man removes an insect from a Chinese laborer’s face. TKS 1984, p. 23

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Conclusion Despite common (but often passing) recognition about the importance of art as a vehicle of memory, it is something that is usually not consulted or deconstructed at length by historians, as Ernestine Schlant has observed (Stahl and Williams 2010, p. 1). In considering the reluctance of scholars to more closely examine artistic forms of memory, we might consider Kenneth Waltzer’s provocative question: “How widely should we think about testimony and what to call it? Where does testimony begin and where does it end? [Is] survivor memory accessed and shared as truth in wider and more informal ways?” (Greenspan et al. 2014, p. 200). In the context of the Hanaoka Incident and local pedagogy, this question becomes more pressing and complicated when faced with the kinds of innovative pedagogical practices seen in  local classrooms: for example, does one make sense of these students’ accomplishments in foregrounding local memories against the work of professional artists, local and national historians, museums, and activists? Seen from a national and international perspective, the history of the Hanaoka Incident appears straightforward. Situated in the context of Japanese wartime forced labor it has consistently stood out for the brutality in which the Chinese were treated. Despite the attempts of the Allies to seek justice for the laborers involved at the Yokohama War Crimes Tribunal, neither survivors nor local activists considered justice served. The verdict delivered at the Tribunal provided no apology, no compensation, and no lasting sense of justice. Senior executives who formulated key policies were never brought to trial and all incarcerated defendants were paroled by 1956. One group of local citizens, working through the Japan-China Friendship Association, worked to keep the memory of the Incident alive by constructing memorials and holding yearly commemoration ceremonies. Ultimately it would take nearly half a century of transnational activism by the Association until the Kajima Corporation settled a lawsuit brought by survivors in 2000 that provided compensation to survivors and their families, as well as the establishment of a local non-profit museum dedicated to the Incident.

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However, shifting our perspective to the local level helps to reveal how the Incident has been contested, framed, and passed down to younger generations in Akita and beyond. I have shown how locals, like Shōji Tokiji and his students, worked to develop methods to educate younger generations in local public-school classrooms. Just as local teachers incorporated the Incident as a unit in their social studies classrooms, other possibilities for engagement existed such as using art and narrative to creatively keep the history and memory of the Incident alive and in the present. Focusing on the lived experience of laborers and local villagers during the war, these pedagogical approaches, and a number of other local histories, avoided the complex and (for both survivors and their supporters) inconclusive war crimes tribunals organized by Occupation forces. They also provide evidence of how, in local contexts, teachers, and students pushed back against national educational bureaucracies, particularly the Ministry of Education which sought to diminish or erase memories of Japan’s unjust war in history textbooks and schools. Based on a reading of curricular manuals and the collaborative class project Climbing That Mountain, I have shown how local educators taught and instilled a sense of local memory and responsibility in students. I have also illustrated the ways in which local students empathized with Chinese victims, survivors, and community members. The project of making and giving voice to such memories did not end with these students and continued in the following decades with another generation of local teachers frequently writing of their involvement in fieldwork and literary projects with students to cultivate and shape historical consciousness and recognition of what Chinese laborers experienced (Watanabe 2005, pp. 176–192).

Notes 1. There are some slight numerical discrepancies between sources with the number of workers ranging from 981 cited by Allied investigators to 986 noted by Nozoe. Estimates for the number of Korean workers employed are more difficult with recruitment having begun in 1942—see Nozoe (2005, p. 39). Subsequent mentions of Akita should be taken to refer to the prefecture unless otherwise stated.

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2. While approximately 38,000 Chinese were forcibly recruited and brought to Japan between November 1942 and May 1945, over three million were forcibly recruited on the continent from 1941 to 1945 (HNC 2011, p. 5; Zhifen 2005, p. 73). 3. I follow the established Japanese phraseology of the “Hanaoka Incident” (Hanaoka jiken) rather than alternative English-language possibilities such as “Hanaoka Massacre” in this chapter. East Asian names follow the traditional order of last name first. 4. For instance, Korean civilian guards have often been singled out as one of the larger collective groups tried. See Cribb (2018, pp. 335–336). 5. For a chronological list of sources by year concerning Chinese forced labor and the Hanaoka Incident, including other early articles by Matsuda, see Nozoe (2008, vol. 4, pp. 219–307). 6. While Ienaga drew domestic and international attention to the issue with his lawsuits he was only partly successful from a legal perspective. In the first lawsuit the district judge rejected his claim that the textbook authorization system constituted censorship which was upheld on appeals; the second lawsuit demanding the Ministry of Education reverse its rejection of a textbook was successful at the District and High Court levels, but reversed and remanded by the Supreme Court and ultimately dismissed as curriculum guidelines had been changed while the case was being adjudicated; verdicts in the third lawsuit demanding compensation for another rejected textbook upheld the textbook authorization system as legal but found the Ministry had abused its discretion and ordered Ienaga be paid compensation. For details on each of the lawsuits and various stages of appeal in context, see Nozaki (2008). 7. This bears striking resemblance to calls by conservative historians in the 1990s embroiled in Japan’s “history wars.” See Saaler (2005, pp. 39–40).

References Akimasa, Miyake. 2011. Rewriting History in a Textbook in Contemporary Japan. In Designing History in East Asian Textbooks, ed. Gotelind Müller, 163–180. London: Routledge. Akita kindaishi kenkyūkai, ed. 1969. Kindai Akita no rekishi to minshū. Akita: Akita kindaishi kenkyūkai.

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Akita-ken Tashiro-choritsu Koshiyama shogakkō (TKS). 1984. Ano yama o koete. Tashiro: Tashiro-choritsu Koshiyama shogakkō. Anon. 1984. Gashū shōkai. Hanga 367: 18. Cribb, Robert. 2018. The Life and Trial of Cho Un-kuk, Korean War Criminal. Critical Asian Studies 50 (3): 329–352. den Heyer, Kent, ed. 2004. A Dialogue on Narrative and Historical Consciousness. In Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas, 202–211. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. GHQ (General Headquarters). n.d. Gist of Answers of President Kajima in Reply to Prosecutor Faison’s Questions Regarding the Chinese Laborers at Hanaoka. Records of the Allied Operational and Occupation Headquarters, World War II, Record Group 331, Box 9811, Folder 2; National Archives at College Park, College Park MD. ———. 1945. Chusan Camp Atrocities Case Report. Records Pertaining to Rules and Procedures Governing the Conduct of Japanese War Crimes Trials, Atrocities Committed against Chinese Laborers, and Background Investigations of Major Japanese War Criminals (National Archives Microfilm Publication M1772, Roll 12); Records of Allied Operational and Occupation Headquarters, World War II, Record Group 331; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Greenspan, Henry, Sara R.  Horowitz, Éva Kovács, et  al. 2014. Engaging Survivors: Assessing ‘Testimony’ and ‘Trauma’ as Foundational Concepts. Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 28: 190–226. Hanaoka jiken yonjusshūnen kinen shūkai no kiroku henshū iinkai (HYK), ed. 1986. Hanaoka Jiken yonjusshūnen kinen shūkai no kiroku: 1985.6.30. Hanaoka no chi Nitchū fusaisen yūkōhi o mamoru kai. Hanaoka no chi nitchū fusaisen yūkōhi o mamoru kai (HNC). 2011. Fīrudowāku Hanaoka jiken: Manabi shirabe kangaeyō. Tokyo: Heiwa bunka. Hirano, Emiko. 2005. Gakushū ryokyō de mananda koto…Hanaoka jiken. In Hanaoka jiken rokujusshūnen kinenshi, ed. Hanaoka jiken rokujusshūnen kinenshi henshū iinkai. 209–210. Akita: Hanaoka no chi nitchū fusaisen yūkōhi o mamoru kai. Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge. Ienaga, Saburō. 1993. The Glorification of War in Japanese Education. International Security 18 (3): 113–133. Kinoshita, Naoko. 2017. ‘Ianfu’ mondai no gensetsu kūkan: Nihonjin ‘ianfu’ no fukashika to genzen. Tokyo: Bensei shuppan.

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Lee, Peter. 2004. ‘Walking Backwards into Tomorrow’: Historical Consciousness and Understanding History. History Education Research Journal 4: 1–46. Matsuda, Tokiko. 1953a. Hanaoka jiken no koto. Reprinted in Matsuda Tokiko. 2004. Matsuda Tokiko jisenshū. Vol. 6, 322. Tokyo: Sawada shuppan. ———. 1953b. Ikotsu o okutte. Reprinted in Matsuda Tokiko. 2004. Matsuda Tokiko jisenshū. Vol. 6, 217–287. Tokyo: Sawada shuppan. Minear, Richard, and Franziska Seraphim. 2015. Hanaoka Monogatari: The Massacre of Chinese Forced Laborers, Summer 1945. The Asia-Pacific Journal 13 (26). Accessed 18 August 2019. https://apjjf.org/2015/13/26/Richard-­ Minear/4337.html. Nii, Hiroharu, Jirō Takidaira, and Daisuke Maki. 1951 [1981]. Hanaoka monogatari. Akita: Mumeisha shuppan. Nozaki, Yoshiko. 2008. War Memory, Nationalism, and Education in Postwar Japan. London: Routledge. Nozoe, Kenji. 2005. Akita-ken ni okeru Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō: Shōgen to chōsa no kiroku. Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha. ———. 2008. Shiriizu: Hanaoka jiken no hitotachi. Vols. 1–4. Tokyo: Shakai hyōronsha. Orr, James J. 2001. The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Qiu, Peipei, with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei. 2014. Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ropers, Erik. 2016. Shōgen, torauma, geijutsu: Sensō to sengo no katari no shūgō-tekina bunseki. Trans. Akane Meguro. In Sensō shakaigaku, ed. Hiroaki Yoshii, 145–170. Tokyo: Akashi shoten. ———. 2019. Voices of the Korean Minority in Postwar Japan. London: Routledge. Rüsen, Jörn. 1993. Experience, Interpretation, Orientation: Three Dimensions of Historical Learning. In Studies in Metahistory, ed. Pieter Duvenage, 85–93. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. ———. 2005. History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation. New  York: Berghahn Books. Saaler, Sven. 2005. Politics, Memory, and Public Opinion: The History Textbook Controversy and Japanese Society. München: Iudicium. Satō, Mamoru. 1975. Chiiki ni nezashita shakaika no jissen o mezashite—bessatsu shiryō. Akita: Akita-ken rekishi kyōikusha kyōgikai Ōdatekitaaki sākuru. Seaton, Philip A. 2007. Japan’s Contested War Memories. London: Routledge. ———. 2016a. Introduction. In Local History and War Memories in Hokkaido, ed. Philip A. Seaton, 1–6. London: Routledge.

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———. 2016b. A Theory of Local War Memories. In Local History and War Memories in Hokkaido, ed. Philip A. Seaton, 9–25. London: Routledge. Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. ———. 2007. Relocating War Memory at Century’s End. In Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, ed. Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter, 15–46. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013. Visual Cultures of Memory in Modern Japan. In Understanding Memory as Source and Subject, ed. Joan Tumblety, 88–106. London: Routledge. Shimizu, Tei. 1976. Hanaoka jiken nōto. Akita: Akita shobō. Stahl, David C., and Mark B. Williams. 2010. Introduction. In Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film, ed. David Stahl and Mark Williams, 1–25. Leiden: Brill. Underwood, William. 2005. Chinese Forced Labor, the Japanese Government and the Prospects for Redress. The Asia Pacific Journal 3 (7). Accessed 22 August 2019. https://apjjf.org/-­William-­Underwood/1693/article.html. Watanabe, Toyohiko. 2005. Hanaoka jiken no fīrudowāku wa, kodomotachi no ninshiki o dō kangaeta ka. In Hanaoka jiken rokujusshūnen kinenshi, ed. Hanaoka jiken rokujusshūnen kinenshi henshū iinkai, 176–192. Akita: Hanaoka no chi nitchū fusaisen yūkōhi o mamoru kai. Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes. Durham: Duke University Press. Zhifen, Ju. 2005. Northern Chinese Laborers and Manchukuo. In Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories, ed. Paul H.  Kratoska, 61–78. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe.

6 Historical Narratives and Civic Subjectification in the Aftermath of Conflict Daniela Romero-Amaya

Introduction Societies are built on the accounts of the past, including those that entail atrocities and horror. For societies emerging from an armed conflict, confronting the past is one of the most challenging, disputed, yet required tasks, particularly when it comes to addressing mass violence and grave human rights violations with young generations (Cole and Barsalou 2006; Cole 2007; Bentrovato et al. 2016). Transitioning from warfare or authoritarianism demands social and political reforms, institutional adjustments, new actors, roles and relations, and educational changes that provide meanings to turbulent events (Friedrich 2014; Davies 2017a, b). The past may take the form of a ‘usable past’ (Wertsch 2002) as interpretations of what occurred become strategic and functional for mobilizing specific nation-building projects (Carretero et al. 2012; Williams and Bellino 2017).

D. Romero-Amaya (*) Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_6

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Since the act of remembering does not unequivocally promote mutual understanding or the achievement of historical justice (Bird and Ottanelli 2015), governments and civil society partake in contested processes of collective memory-making, narration of the past, accountability, and the imagining of a different social order. As the social world does not come to humans “already narrativized, already speaking itself ” (White in Ewick and Silbey 1995), narratives set accounts of the world that help subjects position themselves within that world. In conflict-ridden societies, historical narratives are crucial to communicate understandings of past atrocities, to install a moral compass to judge wrongdoings, and to orient the self within the material and intangible legacies of conflict (Neumann and Thompson 2015). Considering that narratives combine experience and expectation (Rüsen 2004), accounts of the violent past are fundamentally ‘transactional’ because these create experiences of the conflict for the postwar citizenry, while demanding responses and conducts through the appeal to people’s emotional, imaginative, and moral involvement (Davies 2002). Hence, narratives are not only told within contexts, but constitutive of their own contexts (Ewick and Silbey 1995). In this sense, the past and its narration becomes a harbor for competing interpretations over the roles and responsibilities of citizens after widespread abuses (Bellino 2014a; Friedrich 2014). Historical narratives, then, are not neutral discursive forms, but political artifacts charged with meanings and effects in the present (Barton and Levstik 2004; Neumann and Thompson 2015). It is important to understand contexts of narrative-elicitation (social and political norms, arrangements, and relations) when an account of the conflict is demanded, expected, altered, or prohibited. The ways in which these struggles unfold shed light on the risks, challenges, and opportunities for sustainable transitions. In this chapter, I address the questions: What roles do historical narratives play in the civic subjectivity1 of young people after conflict? And to what extent do postwar subjectivities contribute to conflict transformation and the striving for more just societies? Historical narratives have a strong presence in history education (Psaltis et al. 2017), but also circulate beyond curriculum, textbooks, and classroom walls. Children and

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youth are exposed to competing views on the conflict, thus learning about past injustices in various settings and from different sources (Barton and McCully 2010; Bekerman and Zembylas 2012). Further, historical justice transcends matters of criminal justice, to also encompass civic struggles for memory, recognition, justice, and reparation, with profound implications on the civic contract and succeeding generations (Neumann and Thompson 2015). In the following, I review compelling findings, concerns, challenges from the literature on history and citizenship education,2 and argue that historical narratives are central in the process of consolidating a civic subjectivity in the post-conflict times,3 since narratives inform understandings of the self and the society, and provide young generations with interpretative horizons of the conflict and current modes of relating with the State, institutions, and with others. By focusing on postwar youth, as young citizens capable of developing as agents of change and for whom most educational and security reforms are targeted (McEvoy-Levy 2006), I seek to offer a nuanced reading on the dynamic relation between historical narratives and subjectivity, including their significance in attempts to cope with the past wrongs and the making of the present an inhabitable place. Ultimately, this contributes to expanding our frameworks and understandings on peacebuilding—as complex processes with unfolding political and moral negotiations and decisions—and the study of youth’s role on it (Berents and McEvoy-Levy 2015). Civic subjectivity, as I address it here, is concerned with young citizens’ positioning and agency in relation to the government, fellow citizens, and the violent conflict. It is shaped by the underlying motives and aspirations of telling a particular account of the past, that may (not) illicit a response to historical abuses. The interplay of narratives and the citizenry-making sheds light on youth agency on conflict transformation, particularly as they adopt civic stances and performances of support, resistance, or contest, in face of past and ongoing injustice, bigotry, and the risks of renewed conflicts. This chapter is structured in three main sections. The first part draws on the archetype of the citizen in the aftermath of conflict, focusing on the rise of liberal democracy and neoliberal logics. The second one details

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three different types of historical narratives and the disputes to produce, distribute, support, or contest a narrative, thus revealing how deeply related citizenship projects and historical narratives are and the numerous ways that they enforce each other. The last part problematizes the assumption of memory—and its transmission through narratives—as the antidote to prevent future conflicts. I claim that engaging with historical narratives is a political action with deep implications on conflict relapsing or transformation. I conclude calling for more empirical studies that examine the manifold ways in which youth interact with historical narratives in their everyday life as citizens immersed in changing contexts. This can provide better insight into youth encounters with narratives, the promises, expectations, and the contrasting lived experiences in the aftermath of conflict.

Normative Post-Conflict Citizenship After periods of widespread abuses, a ‘new nature’ of civil society is pressing to consolidate a nonviolent democratic social life (Davies 2004a). The nation-state is rebuilt as the citizenry is educated and shaped for it. Post-conflict citizenship, therefore, becomes a process of subjectification,4 in which individuals are constructed and construct themselves as citizens, through attitudes, behaviors, skills, and identities that help them fulfill the demands afterwards crisis. Hence, the young emerging polity is expected to align with matters that transcend electoral choices or citizenship status, to more complex processes of accountability, trust, transparency, justice, human rights (HR), multiculturalism, inequality, and open rejection to armed aggressions. A review of literature demonstrates that the framing of post-conflict citizenship is mainly rooted in two logics: liberal democracy and neoliberalism. Unearthing them is central to the argument of this chapter because the sanctioning of an ‘ideal’ citizen draws the lines of civic categorization and proofs of civic virtue (the ‘good’ citizen), thus, sanctioning codes of participation and interaction among citizens and with the State.

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Liberal Democracy The rise of liberal democracies over the last two centuries has contributed to an understanding of citizenship that implicitly invokes liberal democracy, and the construction and maintenance of democratic publics and identities as the main goal of citizenship education (Levinson 2011). Schools have been crucial in underpinning a predominant liberal/national model of Western citizenship, which is typically defined in individual liberal liberties (freedom of speech, association, conscience, and to choose and lead one’s life) and liberal duties (the duty to be tolerant, to accept secularism, and to exercise critical autonomous judgment in elections and public reasoning) (Kymlicka 2003). This liberal model is challenging, but particularly fragile in conflict-ridden societies, as the rule of law, governance, accountability, and justice tend to be unstable. Under these conditions, strategies for democratization through education come at the forefront, including curricular and pedagogical transformations with a strong emphasis on HR and democratic education. Education in the aftermath of conflict turns into a tool for social production rather than reproduction; it becomes education for citizenship (Staeheli and Hammett 2013), as it aims to create political subjects capable of and prone to participate as democratic agents. This is reinforced through concepts (democratic principles), skills, and experiences (the performance of democracy), and by modeling participatory and inclusive methods (democratic pedagogies). The potential of such citizenry-­making project relies on the possibility of strengthening ‘thick’ democracies that transcend electoral behaviors to meaningful participation and engagement in civic life (Bellino et al. 2017). Some of the skills and conducts grounding the ‘thickening’ of democracy are developing empathy; respect of HR and difference; the understanding and exercise of civic rights; endorsement of dialogue; and developing positive forms of conflict. Moreover, literature has expanded the framing of ‘good’ citizenship to an active citizenship, entailing civic behaviors such as challenging social injustice, corruption, and aggressions; drawing connections between the difficult past and the present and making value-laden decisions; and standing up for issues relevant to HR and democracy.

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Neoliberalism ‘Western versions’ of democracy are largely tied to neoliberal structures and agendas, calling for educating citizens to become competitive and hard workers, while reproducing inequality, increasing exclusion and poverty, evading respect for HR, and cutting public accountability (Davies 2008). Under neoliberal frames, the ‘shrinking of the State’ transfers the government’s duty of the national reconstruction to the citizenry (Jelin 2004). Such shifting of responsibility is imbedded in market-­ driven approaches that are also linked to strengthening young generations’ identity and membership to a ‘deterritorializing state’ not only by effects of globalization (Mitchell 2003), but also as a result of increased forced migration (Dryden-Peterson 2011; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al. 2014). This kind of post-conflict subjectification is about ‘neo-liberalising subjects’; making individuals enterprising, responsible, and guilty if they do not succeed in taking advantage of the opportunities out there (Ball 2012). Hence, citizenry is oriented towards individual survival and competition in the local and global market. The subject shifts from the multicultural self that recognizes, tolerates, and celebrates difference, to a strategic cosmopolitan who uses diversity for competitive efforts (Mitchell 2003). Post-war youth are civically shaped to assume the responsibility of contributing to peace and stability through hard work and economic prosperity, socialized to belief that they are accountable of constructing a better future and livelihood, and to become self-reliant. In this vein, ‘good’ post-conflict citizenship encompasses the subject-­ making of more productive and effective beings who work on improving the self. This is evidenced, for instance, with socioeconomic assumptions such as the ‘fixing’ of former combatants through the acquisition of job skills that transform former militias into productive individuals that are hirable and apt to economically supply to the community (Savard 2016). Similarly, tropes of self-sufficiency, responsibility, and cosmopolitanism are present in the process of developing post-apartheid citizens. The ‘two universals’ of democratization—HR and responsible citizens—are mirrored in curricula and school practices that encourage students to take responsibility of their own lives, well-being, and of the prosperity of the

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nation (Staeheli and Hammett 2010, 2013). Therefore, the responsible postwar citizen is conceived as one that makes moderate or few demands to the state, and who takes ownership of the future. Neoliberal modes of governance across contexts have also been charged with discourses of HR and post-conflict citizens that indorse them. Further, HR education for global citizenship aims to provide young people with the membership to a global community—transnational citizenship narratives within a global capitalism framework (Mitchell 2003)—that promotes knowledge and skills relevant to universal values, standards, and rights. In this vein, cosmopolitanism, as one manifestation of post-conflict citizenship, inscribes young people’s civic actions and identities into a global commitment to HR, yet downplaying local specificities of injustice and memorialization because it takes particular cases, as the Holocaust, as universal models for understanding and acting upon all sorts of conflicts and cruelties (Huyssen 2015). Such liberal cosmopolitanism affiliated to HR, can operate as an ‘objects’ brand’ for which one can identify the product “but not the means by which it is produced” (Staeheli and Hammett 2013, p.  34). This means that postwar generations can align themselves with the endorsement of HR, but disregard the understanding of underpinnings of history that guide them to do so. Consequently, the emerging polity is shaped toward respect, tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism, while overlooking the politics of the past that help to explain relations and arrangements in the present.

Historical Narratives and Civic Subjectification Historical narratives are not mere recalls, but memory frameworks connecting the past, present, and future to sustain political agendas (Olick et al. 2011; Carretero et al. 2012). To forge the nation-state, master narratives become central to elaborate meaningful versions of the past that resonate with and give shape to people (Alphen and Carretero 2015). Once severe hostilities have ceased and amidst transitions, school are strategic sites to promote new relations, strengthen social cohesion, and build the polity needed to develop the new order (Psaltis et al. 2017; Williams

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and Bellino 2017). History education, particularly, holds the power to reinforce an official narrative that legitimizes current power structures and relations, but it can also serve to redefine social boundaries and identities, and influence students’ attitudes and responses regarding disputed issues (Korostelina 2017). Despite the hegemonic character of official narratives, these are not exempt from interrogation, rejection, or modification. Instead, these collide with alternative accounts that publicly and privately circulate, and with different approaches and meanings granted to the conflict. With the question “whose past, whose present?” Bellino (2014b) illustrates the unceasing disputes over historical accounts, ownership, and collective identity. Contentions over the past—to make it a usable past—disclose the ways in which the conflict is (not) narrated as to arrange the self, the community, the ones who do not belong to the community, and the roles and responsibilities of individuals within the nation. Historical narratives become instrumental to construct the citizenry as a technology to govern the transitioning nation. This entails the regulation of narratives, both in content and form, for the production of a kind of subject-citizen assembled through real effects of discourse and classification (Friedrich 2014). Such regulation sets the template for the new order of people and decisions—‘we’/‘they’, ‘good’/‘bad’, ‘expected’/‘rejected’. Past events diverge from isolated facts to rather become meaning-filled accounts, threaded in historical narratives that gain rhetorical power to justify (or challenge) social practices, values, and the dominant system (Haste and Bermudez 2017). Historical injustices do not stand alone, nor are they self-­explanatory; narratives set the moral compass and the explanatory framework of the conflict by attributing or eclipsing responsibilities. As narratives are transactional, students’ engagement with narratives prompts a stance toward what was done and the display of attitudes and behaviors reflecting such stance. Here I present three different ways in which narratives of the conflict operate distinctively in the shaping of citizenry.

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Narratives of Nationhood Literature on identity-based conflicts evidences that an official narrative of nationhood and ‘unity among diversity’ often arises in times of recovery and reconstruction. ‘Pedagogies of truth’ (Bentrovato 2017) have been used to recast students’ identities and ethnic-group relations to build a cohesive post-genocide generation. The deliberate removal of ethnic distinctions to install a unified national identity is based on the governmental patriotic version of history, for which any alternative account or perspective is rejected or even penalized. Similarly, to re-imagine an ostensibly non-racial post-apartheid nation, South African administrations have sought to erase racial distinctions among citizens, while emphasizing respect for democracy, equality, human dignity, and social justice. Another post-conflict strategy has been the promotion of ethno-­ nationalistic narratives, in which ‘nation-ness’ appears as a natural and inherent quality of people that conform an ethnic ‘all’ that is oppressed by others. Scholarship stresses the role that education has played in sustaining these beliefs throughout generations. According to literature, such narrative is prevalent in Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Cyprus, where the politics of the storytelling are inscribed into the storyline of victimhood and self-suffering, thus, distorting ethnic distinctions, blurring lines between victimhood and responsibility, and nationalizing suffering. Official narratives rooted in the nationhood trope tend to be oversimplifying versions of events, that narrow youth understandings of the past and their positioning within current conditions. The use of this kind of historical narrative precludes open discussions about race, ethnicity, inequality, or inter-group relations, consequently, perpetuating group tensions in the present. Through the institutionalization of master narratives, stories “come to constitute the hegemony that in turn shapes social lives and conducts” (Ewick and Silbey 1995, p.  212) among citizens themselves (self-censorship), and between the State, institutions, and the population (censorship and repression). Master narratives have been purposefully promoted and sustained to control, not only the resources involved in remembering the past (textbooks, curricula, school calendars,

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and commemorations), but also the fashioning of renewed citizens. Narratives of nationhood play a major role as ‘moral vectors’ establishing civic distinctions and offering examples of civic virtue, such as loyalty (Carretero 2017).

Narratives of Silence In conflict-affected communities, silence circulates in different spheres and with distinctive purposes. It might come as a top-down measure, a group strategy, or a personal choice. For this chapter, I am not focusing on silence that derives from trauma, but on silence that surfaces as a deliberate action. In both speech and silence, memories are articulated. Therefore, silence here is not equated with amnesia, but taken as an alternative narrative memory. Following Susana Kaiser’s (2005) idea that the past is present in the silences, and those silences speak quite loud, I briefly present cases in which authors identify the vociferous narratives of silence. Through these examples I seek to reveal the articulation of silence, memory, and moral questions that elicit civic (dis)engagement, assessment of risk, and accountability on social and political situations. Scholars claim that at the micro-level, motives for silencing the past might variate from fear of speaking up after years of imposed silence; trepidation of re-igniting violence and transmitting traumas and wounds; controversial ownership and authority to narrate the war story; and the absence of safe conditions to voice out memories and accounts. At the macro level, it has functioned as a nation-building strategy like a moratorium, pact of silence, legal ban, ‘missing history’ in schools, and unavailable resources or no compulsory curricula. As gatekeepers of educational practice, and as students’ most immediate referent of the State, teachers play a key role in mediating silence through pedagogical decisions. These include complete reliance on the passive voice of textbooks, the use of old materials that omit the conflict, and the reasoning of not teaching it due to curricular exclusion. With these resolutions, teachers ‘safely’ put the past into frames of silence or non-agency (passive voice), as mechanisms of self-protection, particularly if violence endures. Trinidad (2004) defines teachers’ strategies to

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communicate with students as ‘mute transmissions’ of memories and narratives of the conflict, while Sánchez Meertens (2017) calls the attention to look closer to teachers’ apparent inaction and forced muteness, and describes these ‘communicative silences’ as teachers’ repertoires admits war that can even be prolonged after conflict. Young generations actively engage with silence as they learn to interpret it, to encode its explanation, and to negotiate its use and meaning and the stance they take when complying or challenging it. Ciphering these intricacies is a formative experience of citizens’ political subjectivity, that at times hinders and at times prompts the addressment of historical injustice and suffering (further discussed in the last section). Bellino (2016) argues that historical silence does not necessarily refer to the eradication of a school subject or content, but also “to the selective erasure of agency, power, and accountability” (p. 186). Forward-looking civic projects—prevailing in the liberal democracy and neoliberal civic models—rest upon de-historicized understandings of society that while stressing ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘advancement’, ignore the history of the violent past. The underlying risk is that de-historicized understandings prevent youth from making informed decisions as citizens that encounter complex scenarios, such as victims’ reparation and restorative justice, or the individual and collective striving for truth and memory (Bakiner 2015; Corredor et al. 2018). Similarly, an increasing civic education along the lines of ‘culture of peace’, HR and democratic citizenship, seek to mobilize postwar citizens toward a promising future rather than dealing with the past. Textbook analyzes demonstrate the intention to relegate the past to apolitical tones, facts, and records, leaving unaddressed the structural dimension of violence and bigotry, as well as the contemporary legacies of the difficult past. The decontextualization of historical memory through obstinate peace and rights frameworks narrows the account of the past to factual data or terms of polarity (victims vs perpetrators), thus overlooking the complexity of the conflict, its causes, magnitude, and impact. Then, it is critical to examine and debate the pedagogical significance of remembering, narrating, and giving meaning to memories and narratives: Is there any civic purpose in this task? What is it? And how does it nurture or

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frustrate the complex exercise of justice and responsibility after mass violence and abuse? In analyzing the ‘two-devils’ trope, where conflict is portrayed between two power-homogenized parties and civilians trapped powerless between the fires, silence swings between lines as the past is distorted and civic agency removed. Jelin (2003), Oglesby (2007) and (Bellino 2016) offer critical views on the ‘two-devils’ and stress some points that resonate with concerns on sustainable peacebuilding and historical justice. First, it neglects asymmetric power relations within conflict; second, it diffuses accountability across parties because “the message that everyone is accountable becomes mistaken for the notion that no one can be held accountable” (Bellino 2016, p. 183); three, it strips civilians’ agency as political and historical actors while excusing their inaction amidst war; and four, it casts actors’ roles and identities as either victims or perpetrators, impeding their recognition as historical protagonists beyond static and limiting identities. Through these various forms of historical silence, distortions on people’s agency is detrimental for social and political reconstruction because a basic sense of agency is necessary for political participation (Corredor et al. 2018). Historical accounts—in their presence, absence, or transformed version—forge young people’s memories, identities, and civic decisions that give shape to the emerging polity and the new social contract. And since memories are not things people think about, but think with (Gillis in Jelin 2003), they influence post-conflict citizens’ beliefs, dispositions, and choices to nurture, prevent, or impede social and political stability.

Narratives of Resistance This type of narrative corresponds to accounts of the conflict that resist to totalizing versions of the past. Although postwar governments might seek to establish an official ‘truth’ by means of institutionalized silence or unique versions of the past, young citizens unsettle it by evoking alternative memories to the official one. Any memory can turn into a ‘dangerous memory’ (Bekerman and Zembylas 2012) when it holds a disruptive character in its elaboration and narration; in the use of antihegemonic

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sources to build the narrative and in the means to communicate it. Even the act of narrating can be taken as a counteraction under disempowering circumstances. The storytelling prompts resistance because it is “a vital human strategy of sustaining a sense of agency […] To reconstitute events in a story is no longer to live those events in passivity, but to actively rework them, both in dialogue with others and with one’s own imagination” (Jackson 2002, p. 31). Non-traditional narrative approaches hold such antihegemonic tone and spirit, and can take the form of mnemonic spaces or practices. On the one hand, memorial landscapes reflect the social determination to evoke the past under renewed narrative templates. Memorials, as arenas of contestation, may serve “as sites for social groups to actively debate the meaning of history and compete for control over the commemorative process as part of larger struggles over identity” (Dwyer and Alderman 2008, p. 166). Different conflict-affected communities have turned public spaces into ‘palimpsests’, where interpretations of the past are re-­ inscribed to sites. The city, therefore, becomes a “participatory agent in the construction of collective memories and counter-memories” (Friedrich 2011, p.  171). In those mnemonic locations, social actors and groups seek to legitimize their identities and narratives. When civil society introduces alternative accounts, they reclaim the silenced history and advocate against impunity, thus transmitting to young generations not only the call for justice, but the application of the moral questions to endorse or challenge the use of violence as means to resolve differences, and the disputing forces on the monopoly on the historical narrative. On the other hand, the performance of citizenship also constitutes narratives of resistance. Memory activism, for instance, use counter-­ memories as oppositional knowledge, so young activists propose new understandings of the past and suggest alternatives to address the protracted conflict. Further, the consideration of marginalized groups’ memories and first-hand experiences as legitimate sources, opens up venues to subvert hegemonic narratives and promote historical dialogue. First, it humanizes the conflict, so the past is no longer a succession of events and factual data, but historical actors with agency over time. Second, it assists to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. Third, it supports the legitimization of voices of people who were directly involved and

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traditionally unheard. Fourth, it contributes to challenge the assumption of an essential ‘truth’. And fifth, it makes the history of the conflict relevant and meaningful for young citizens’ daily life. Memory as ‘duty’ does not automatically produce understandings of the past, nor it prompts citizens’ will and commitment to partake in conflict transformation and the strive for justice. Memories and narratives as citizenry-making devices are also political actions that become the organizing framework of the past-present relation, the making and the authoring of the citizen, and the retrieving of the self in the narratives of the nation (Ismail 2018). Historical narratives are “the grid through which the telling of a sequence of events becomes intelligible” (Friedrich 2014, p. 13) for the sociopolitical assemblage of the emerging society and the attempts to address the past wrongs. Attempts that are still ‘under fire’ in most conflict-ridden societies.

Future Steps Instead of conclusions, I would rather take this last section to suggest some research directions regarding historical narratives and civic subjectivity in the aftermath of conflict. In this chapter, I stressed a normative civic framing of the post-conflict citizen that is envisioned and shaped as a subject that integrates attitudes, skills, and behaviors aligned with neoliberalism and liberal democracy. Along these lines, post-war generations are taken as citizens-architects of the national reconstruction and the presumed better future. Yet, their shaping as subject-citizens is linked to historical narratives—in the various and not mutually exclusive forms of nationhood, silence, or resistance—that circulate in public and private spheres and provide them an understanding of the conflict, while granting meaning to their civic positioning and roles in the present and future. This chapter also puts forth two intertwined ideas that are worth discussing in greater depth in forthcoming studies. First, in conflict-affected scenarios, the past is an active past considering that its legacies are still alive and circulate among society, particularly, through historical narratives that set the grid to judge past wrongs and endorse the ‘good’ citizen that builds and sustains democracy and peace; this is, a narrative

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framework for civic performativity that serves to regulate subjects’ lives, decisions, and relations. The troubling past insists on its presence, insofar it takes the form of a usable past, for which the renewed struggle centers on its narrativization, and therefore, on the calls for accountability linked to such narrative. Second, it is important to continue with critical studies on the ways in which young generations respond to and engage with the civic and historical narratives they encounter. As Bellino (2014a) states, “youth do not simply inherit memories of violence; they activly interpret reconstruct, and place themselves within these narratives” (p.  8). Moreover, children and youth are not simply ‘consumers’ of citizenship education, but civic agents whose identities and decisions are drawn from their perspectives and experiences, and not exclusively from adult pre-­ conceived ideas and expectations. Shifting this understanding on youth, contends a deficit model of young people as citizens in-the-making, to consider them as present-day political actors with ever-evolving interpretations and negotiations around violence, justice, citizenship, and peacebuilding (Berents and McEvoy-Levy 2015; Vandegrift 2015; Raggio 2017). Further research directions could move toward understanding and analyzing youth civic repertoires when addressing the post-conflict times; to examine how the civic framing operates as an organization of everyday experience to which they respond. Investigating the multifold challenges in transitioning to more stable conditions, demands more deliberations about how young citizens undertake their post-conflict subjectification in face of pressing and challenging circumstances. The politics of the everyday and the endless meaning-making of social life are substantial dimensions for analyzing how youth address and pursue politics (Coe and Vandegrift 2015, p.  154), remarkably, when they are immersed in conflict-­ridden worlds where violence and injustice endure. Paying closer attention to the ways in which historical narratives shape youth lives, as well as the ways in which they fashion the self in dialogue or contestation to these narratives, can help us scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers, to better understand and theorize about citizenship and youth political practice in the aftermath of mass violence. Literature reveals that young citizens pilot their lives within the possibilities and inconsistencies of a difficult past, a forward-looking postwar discourse, and the fragile and increasingly violent realities. Youth civic

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decisions stem from different sources, including their own sense of civic efficacy, interpretations of the past and historical injustice, morality, and the civic messages they receive from institutions, teachers, friends, relatives, media, and the community. They adopt, adapt, or contend the competing narratives they face as to make meaning of what the post-era demands from them or denies them. Youth engage with the performativity of the ‘good’ citizen, particularly, when it is imposed through coercive means that condemn any alternative account to the master narrative. When violence and intimidation is the modality of post-conflict governance, subjects’ practices of compliance (reproduction of master narrative or the public mastering of it) should be understood as a civic practice of self-understanding and self-­ positioning within political repression. This urges to pay attention to narratives circulating in private spaces, and to marginal practices or civic strategies to overcome coercion; those not self-evident ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008) that are not of neutral repetition, but intended deeds to break socio-historical patterns of bigotry and injustice. New generations may reproduce master historical narratives that endure hostilities as they are socialized to cultivate and reproduce the immovable bonds of history and identity. The interpellated subject of nationalist narratives is summoned to echo and enact these narratives as not to be categorized/penalized as a traitor (Fridman 2006). Even when youth are exposed to a multi-perspective account of the conflict, they can also be unwilling to abandon the political commitments of their families and communities. Yet young generations also fight to dismantle the silence or the master narrative; they actively seek for ways to unearth the past and to construct their own meanings and interpretations. Even if this entails to challenge hegemony by erecting alternative mnemonic spaces and practices, advocating for raising counternarratives that bring about institutional justice, or constituting a ‘peripheral citizenship’ (Sørensen 2008). Youth desires to put the past behind and not to be ‘stuck’ in it, but to become productive citizens and hard workers, call for critical reviews about the implications of such historical ‘fractures’. Post-conflict youth may not be stuck in the past but in the present; stuck within hampering socioeconomic conditions that condemn them to poverty, crime,

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unemployment, and feelings of being trapped in a life of looming failure (Sommers 2002). Such ‘ideological effects’ of historical narratives—that disconnect the past from the present and encourage youth to think that the worst is behind and the present is separate from such awful past— legitimize the current social order and conditions of inequality and injustice (Raggio 2017) that in many cases lead to conflict in the first place. Then the question points to how to productively and sustainably move away from conflict if the ideological effects still glitter, while stigmatization, alienation, and criminalization of youth increase and justice is taken by one’s own hands? The intersection between the ways in which young people interact and engage with the historical narratives of the conflict as to navigate their present lives is a fertile research area. The dissonance between the normatively driven policies and the lived realities can lead to nuanced understandings of the complex picture after conflict and the outlooks for peacebuilding and democratic consolidation. The pedagogical value of historical narratives goes beyond moral lessons that the (non-) telling of the war might offer to post-conflict citizens. Rather, the potential lies on the emerging tensions and deliberations as novel institutions, policies, and relations are set in play for the development of a new social contract and order. Living under (and surviving to) conditions of increasing violence and segregation—as most post-conflict settings are—is already in itself a puzzling educational experience for young people about the conflict, its history, citizenship, and the post-conflict times.

Notes 1. Subjectivity in this chapter follows the Foucauldian understanding of the twofold dimensions ‘being-made’ and ‘self-making’. Consequently, the subject is not exclusively made by power relations stressing restrictions and regulations through institutions and apparatuses of rule, but also the subject produces the self through her/his own capacity of actively engaging with the power practices and techniques; agents with the capacities of acting and being (Foucault 1982, 2001). 2. The review of literature encompasses books, book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, and reports, concerning History and Citizenship

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Education in conflict-affected societies. For each corresponding section of this chapter I reviewed 38, 65, and 26 sources, respectively. But it is worth noting that some sources were used in more than one section or more than one type of historical narrative (section II). This feature speaks for the intricacies, entanglements, and disputes over the narration of the past and the aspirations and difficulties of consolidating political transitions. 3. The term ‘post-conflict’ is commonly used in different fields to indicate the subsequent stage of a society that has recently experienced a violent conflict, including an armed conflict or authoritarian regime. Although the use of the term might be practical for categorization purposes, a loose use of it as an umbrella term can be of profound simplification (Davies 2004b), since it may overshadow the complexity entailed in the social and political transition. The term can fall short to describe the nature of conflict, which happens on a continuum rather than compartmentalized and well-defined phases (Quaynor 2012). At the core of the debate is not the end of the conflict itself, but the long-term and challenging process of moving from a conflict-habituated system to a non-violent one; this is, the transformation of conflict and not is mere resolution (Botes 2003). While bearing this complexity in mind and acknowledging it to the reader, I opt to use the term ‘post-conflict’ for practical reasons in this chapter. 4. Building on the first footnote, I elaborate on ‘subjectification’ as the dual process of ‘self-shaping’ and ‘being-shaped’ of a particular kind of subject (the postwar subject-citizen) within the networks of power and agency related to the nation-state and the civil society. See Ong (1996) for an ethnographic approach of citizenship as a cultural process of subjectification.

References van Alphen, Floor, and Mario Carretero. 2015. The construction of the relation between national past and present in the appropriation of historical master narratives. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 49: 512–530. Bakiner, Onur. 2015. Truth commissions, memory, power, and legitimacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ball, Stephen. 2012. Global education inc: New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. New York: Routledge.

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Barton, Keith, and Linda Levstik. 2004. Teaching history for the common good. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Barton, Keith, and Alan McCully. 2010. “You can form your own point of view”: Internally persuasive discourse in Northern Ireland students’ encounters with history. Teachers College Record 112: 142–181. Bekerman, Zvi, and Michalinos Zembylas. 2012. Teaching contested narratives: Identity, memory and reconciliation in peace education and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellino, Michelle. 2014a. Memory in transition: Historical consciousness and civic attitudes among youth in “postwar” Guatemala. Ed.D.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. ———. 2014b. Whose past, whose present? Historical memory among the “postwar” generation in Guatemala. In (Re)constructing memory: School textbooks and the imagination of the nation, ed. James H.  Williams, 131–151. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. ———. 2016. Learning through Silence in “Postwar” Guatemala. In History can bite: History education in divided and postwar societies, ed. Denise Bentrovato, Karina Korostelina, and Martina Schulze, 177–190. Göttingen: V&R unipress. Bellino, Michelle, Julia Paulson, and Elizabeth Anderson Worden. 2017. Working through difficult pasts: Toward thick democracy and transitional justice in education. Comparative Education 53: 313–332. Bentrovato, Denise. 2017. Accounting for genocide: Transitional justice, mass (re)education and the pedagogy of truth in present-day Rwanda. Comparative Education 53: 396–417. Bentrovato, Denise, Karina Korostelina, and Martina Schulze, eds. 2016. History can bite: History education in divided and postwar societies. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. Berents, Helen, and Siobhan McEvoy-Levy. 2015. Theorising youth and everyday peace(building). Peacebuilding 3: 115–125. https://doi.org/10.108 0/21647259.2015.1052627. Bird, S. Elizabeth, and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds. 2015. The performance of memory as transitional justice. Series on Transitional Justice vol. 19. Cambridge: Intersentia. Botes, Johannes. 2003. Conflict transformation: A debate over semantics or a crucial shift in the theory and practice of peace and conflict studies? International Journal of Peace Studies 8: 1–27. JSTOR.

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7 Generating and Popularising Historical Knowledge in a Reconciliation Process: The Case of the Church of Sweden and the Sami Björn Norlin and Daniel Lindmark

Introduction Truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) often serve as important instruments for disseminating historical knowledge to the general public. This function is not necessarily restricted to the written reports that the TRCs produce and can also be linked to various other activities carried out during a TRC’s period of operation. The post-apartheid TRC of South Africa (1995–1998) was one of the first to stage public hearings, many of which were broadcast live on radio and television, thus continually informing the public about the issues under investigation (see also Ahonen 2021). In some cases, public education activities are included in B. Norlin (*) Department of Education, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] D. Lindmark Department of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_7

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the formal mandate of the TRC.  This was the case with the TRC of Canada (2008–2015), which was mandated to host a number of national reconciliation events. In partnership with other organisations, the TRC arranged numerous public hearings with residential school survivors and held Education Days for elementary and high school students (TRC of Canada 2015; see also Paulson and Bellino 2021). “The Church of Sweden and the Sami—A White Paper Project (2012–2017)” had quite a restricted mandate from the perspective of public outreach. The mandate focused on the production of knowledge and the outcome in terms of written documentation, and no specific public education activities were mentioned. However, as will be demonstrated below, the project leadership engaged in quite a few public outreach activities from the very beginning, and these continued long after the formal conclusion of the project. Furthermore, the entire process of production, transmission, and transformation of knowledge can be viewed from an educational perspective. The White Paper Project was part of a reconciliation process between the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Sweden and the indigenous Sami people that intensified in 2011 when Sami representatives asked for documentation of injustices inflicted on the Sami in the past. Its overall aim was to provide a solid knowledge base for the continuation of this process. This chapter examines the reconciliation process and uses it as an empirical case for producing knowledge of general relevance for the understanding of official white paper projects and TRCs from the perspective of generating and disseminating historical knowledge. Both authors have been highly engaged in working with the Church of Sweden’s White Paper—Daniel Lindmark as the scientific leader of the project and Björn Norlin as one of the researchers involved in the academic report and particularly in synthesising and popularising its results. This chapter thus builds on individual experiences of the practical work with the project, but also includes more general analytical perspectives on white papers and TRCs as producers and mediators of historical knowledge. The leading research questions are as follows: what happens with historical knowledge when historical problems are formulated, researched, and published within a reconciliation process driven by an ideological agenda? Are there distinguishable processual patterns intrinsic to the work with this white paper project, and, if so, how can they be defined and related to different

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Fig. 7.1  The popular science publication Samerna och Svenska kyrkan: Underlag för kyrkligt försoningsarbete (The Sami and the Church of Sweden: A basis for church reconciliation work) published in February 2017. (Photo: SVT  - Swedish Television)

educational conditions and objectives? How can such a process be analysed from a theoretical point of view? The overall ambition with this chapter is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the roles and shapes of historical knowledge in contemporary reconciliation processes, the theorising of white papers as educational projects, and future scholarly dialogues in the field.

 heories and Concepts: Generating, T Mediating, and Remediating Historical Knowledge How to theorise about the production, transmission, and transformation of knowledge in a contemporary reconciliation project? To begin with, there are close links between the analytical ambitions of this chapter and other contributions in this anthology. As elaborated upon by Keynes et  al. (2021), the concept of educationalisation, that is, contemporary societal and political issues recurrently being transformed into educational and pedagogical discourse (see also Depaepe 1998, 2012; Smeyers

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and Depaepe 2008), can be placed at the heart of today’s historical justice processes and thus marks a valid analytical point of departure for research in the field. Furthermore, in their chapter about how knowledge from a specific official white paper report on the treatment of Roma in Sweden was adjusted to fit institutionalised education and the pedagogical aims of teaching children and adolescents, Arvidsson and Åström Elmersjö (2021) add the concept of recontextualisation and by this highlight important aspects of these processes (drawing on theories of Bernstein 1986 and Apple 2000). The two concepts of educationalisation and recontextualisation can also be seen as supporting an analytical understanding of the case examined in this chapter. What is explored is certainly how a contemporary— and politically and ideologically charged—societal issue is being repackaged in scientific and educational forms and how the knowledge generated in this process changes shape in accordance with the different contexts in which it is actuated. There are, however, also divergences regarding how we examine the case in this chapter and the analysis in the chapters mentioned above. First, we engage with the reconciliation process between the Church of Sweden and the Sami as a highly multi-­ faceted educational procedure involving many agents, media, and contexts. In fact, this breadth in the production and transmission of knowledge is given the most analytical attention. Second, we make order of this richness by defining overall processual phases connected to the project rather than selecting specific aspects of it for deeper examination. Third, it is not educationalisation leading towards the context of institutionalised schooling and children’s learning that is focused on, but rather it is the process directed to adult ‘learners’ that is activated in the broad (educational) landscape of today’s professional and public media. Fourth, we are not focusing on the actual learning outcomes in different phases of the reconciliation process, but solely on what we see as important educational conditions intrinsic to different stages in the process per se. The production and communication of knowledge is, in essence, a social undertaking and as such both forms and is formed by the principle communicative instruments it depends on. Here we see the concepts of

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media affordances, remediation, and media convergence as additional analytical tools that can be used for understanding the educational dimensions of a contemporary reconciliation process. Scholars interested in the societal mediation of historical knowledge have emphasised the need for better recognising the abundance of forms that historical knowledge are communicated by today and that different forms for communication, or different media, can hold very different characteristics that affect their ways of transmitting knowledge (Lässig 2009; Zander 2014; Norlander 2016). A text-bound academic report aimed at educating scholars about a certain historical event is something quite different from, for instance, an interview in a magazine, a popularised article, a feature film, or a blog post referring to the same event, but aimed at the broader public. These types of media are encapsulated in different genres and modalities and thus have different affordances (Hutchby 2001, 2003; Hopkins 2016) or media-specific qualities (Norlander 2016). However, there can still be a relational element involved in the sense that knowledge mediated in one type of media can be interpreted, transformed, and transmitted by another. We can understand this in terms of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999), for instance, if selected content of an academic report is reconfigured to fit the mode of a blog. However, something that makes this more complex is that the media landscape of today is characterised by a high degree of convergence, that is, the blending of media forms and content that blurs traditional and more easily defined boundaries between old and new channels for communication (Jenkins 2012; Karlsson 2018). To sum up, what we are arguing for in this chapter is that reconciliation processes are subjected to a broad mode of knowledge production and must be understood accordingly. They transgress and activate different parts of the historical-cultural landscape, where different and distinguishable phases are linked to different actors, educational contexts, and media genres for communicating knowledge as well as to different audiences. They are also subjected to a certain blending of media forms. This, in turn, affects reconciliation processes as overall educational enterprises regarding historical knowledge.

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F ormulating the Historical Problem in Relation to Contemporary Conflicts As noted, TRCs and white paper projects are seldom purely academic enterprises. Instead, they reflect political, ideological, and moral considerations, and their aim is usually to contribute to solving present-day issues. When governments and organisations decide to initiate investigations in the pursuit of historical justice, there is always an agenda that goes beyond the academic interest in researching the past. Furthermore, a wide spectrum of expectations reflecting the interests of various stakeholders are also associated with such investigations. These expectations can be expressed in the form of different truth-claims based on various types of evidence, ranging from survivors’ experiential evidence to legal evidence viable in court cases. Taken together, these circumstances make TRCs and white paper projects quite complex phenomena (Lindmark 2018; Norlin and Sjögren 2019). When it comes to the historical relations between the Church of Sweden and the Sami people, the White Paper Project was formed out of critical reflections among Church representatives regarding their past and present relations. Sami individuals and organisations also asked for changes. From both sides, the desired changes were framed in terms of reconciliation. This reconciliation agenda appears to have been quite consensus-oriented, and no restitution claims were raised and no major changes were offered (Nordbäck 2016; Tyrberg 2016). The White Paper Project was part of a reconciliation process that began in the early 1990s, inspired by international ecumenical meetings such as the Lutheran World Federation General Assembly in Curitiba in 1990 and the World Council of Churches General Assembly in Canberra in 1991. These meetings opened critical perspectives to the role of Western churches in colonial policies towards indigenous peoples worldwide. Swedish delegates applied these perspectives to historical and contemporary relations between the Church of Sweden and the Sami. In the 1990s, conferences were arranged, reconciliation services were held, a national Sami Council in the Church of Sweden was established, and a South-Sami journal was published (Daerpies Dierie). Consequently, the critical reflections on the

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relationship between the Sami and the Church of Sweden were formulated in a Christian theological context of reconciliation, which was more conciliatory than confrontational and was communicated to a wider audience primarily through Sami and Church media. In 2006, a Church commission released its report on Sami issues in the Church of Sweden, calling for further steps to be taken, including a hearing on Sami spirituality. In 2011 such a hearing was organised under the name of Ságastallamat, at which Sami representatives urged the Church of Sweden to assume responsibility for the wrongs that the Church had inflicted on the Sami at various times in the past. A deeper knowledge of the Church’s injustices against the Sami was seen as a prerequisite for a continued reconciliation process. After the hearing, the Church of Sweden Theological Committee and the Sami Council jointly presented an action plan that included a white paper project. Funded by the Church of Sweden’s Research Department, the White Paper Project was initiated in 2012. It was placed at Umeå University, where additional resources were raised, and a steering committee was set up with representatives of Umeå University, Sami communities, and the Church of Sweden Central Offices and Committees, including the Research Department, the Theological Committee, and the Sami Council. The project came to involve close to 40 scholars who produced a comprehensive academic report (2016) and a popular science summary (2017), an extended and updated English version of which appeared after the formal conclusion of the project (2018). After the release of the publications, the reconciliation process continued with various activities, including the 2019 repatriation and reburial ceremony of Sami human remains that had been excavated from Lycksele’s old cemetery and taken for racial biological investigations in the 1950s (Aurelius 2019). The terms of reference mandated the White Paper Project to produce an overview of what was known about two short periods when the repression of the Sami people and their culture was deemed to be exceptionally harsh and to propose further research within these or other periods. The periods referred to were 1680–1730, when religious trials took place in Sápmi, and the first decades of the twentieth century, when children of the reindeer-herding mountain Sami were offered restricted education in a residential school system, the Nomad School of 1913, while the rest of

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the Sami children were supposed to be assimilated into the majority population through the regular elementary school system. The terms of reference also mandated the project not only to identify historical abuse, but also to take notice of the positive contributions that the Church of Sweden had made to the Sami and their culture, including the development of written languages. Consequently, the mandate did not use the value-neutral language of academic research, but anticipated the past to be valued along a presentist scale ranging from positive to negative. Such value-based terminology lingered in the White Paper Project for quite a long time because the wordings of the non-academic preparatory phase made its way into the formulation of the mandate in the project plan, including such terms as offensive treatment, coercion, oppression, discrimination, and racism. Another explanation for the continued use of presentist value-based terminology refers to the fact that the steering group was dominated by representatives of Sami communities and the Church, among whom the reconciliation agenda was a natural point of departure. As will be seen below, the way the mandate was framed within the ideological agenda of the reconciliation process made it necessary for the project leadership to develop strategies to strengthen and protect the academic character of the project. Still, the project would retain its church history character with a clear focus on the Church of Sweden and its structures, actors, and areas of responsibility.

 enerating Scientific Knowledge: G The Academic Anthology While the first phase of the White Paper Project primarily was driven by actors with a reconciliation agenda outside of academia, and communicated through Church and Sami media, the next phase can be characterised by recontextualisation and academisation. Placed at an academic research institution and led by a university professor, the White Paper Project in significant ways became an academic research project. This process was supported by the steering group, which was dominated by researchers active in academic institutions. Among the seven full

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members of the group, there were three university professors and one senior lecturer. Two out of three co-opted members were also university professors. The terms of reference formulated by the Church of Sweden were not very specific, so they had to be interpreted and elaborated. The first task of the steering group, which convened its first meeting in November 2012, was to develop a project plan. In this process, it was decided to broaden the scope of the project. Instead of making an overview of what was known about the two indicated periods and suggesting further research, the steering group redefined the goal of the project to include the production of new knowledge, from the first Sami encounters with Christianity in the Middle Ages up to the present reconciliation process. Furthermore, the project leadership also decided to place the historical relations between the Church of Sweden and the Sami in a wider geographical context, which meant that the project included overviews of the Church-Sami relations in Norway and Finland. A study of Sami mission activities conducted by various religious denominations and independent churches in Sweden represents another example of contextualisation. The recontextualisation and widening of the project’s knowledge base represent attempts at turning the project into a full-fledged academic research project. This ambition can also be identified in the framing of the Church–Sami reconciliation process within an international context of historical justice. Studies on historical justice as an international phenomenon (Sjögren 2016) and reconciliation as a social practice in Swedish history (Nordbäck 2016) opened perspectives on the process that the White Paper Project was supposed to support, thereby contributing to problematising the project and its role in the process. A parallel research project offered continuous opportunities for self-reflection. The project “Sami Voices and Sorry Churches: Use of History in Church-Sami Reconciliation Processes” was funded by the Research Council Formas (2012–2015) and directed by Daniel Lindmark. The recontextualisation of the project into the academic domain became visible in the organisation of the academic report. This two-­ volume “scientific anthology” of 1135 pages consisted of 33 academic articles plus introductory and concluding chapters (Lindmark and

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Sundström 2016) (Fig. 7.2). The articles were written by well-renowned specialists in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Among the 33 authors, 26 held a doctorate, 3 were doctoral candidates, and 4 were private researchers, 2 of whom held an honorary doctorate. All of the articles underwent academic peer review before publication. In order to enable the recruitment of as many qualified researchers as possible, the authors were granted the academic freedom to independently choose their research questions, theories, methods, and sources and to reach any conclusions they found academically justified. The only guiding direction given by the project leadership was a thematically defined area to which the authors were supposed to contribute. The aim was to uphold high academic standards, and academic review articles indicate that this goal was reached (Kortekangas 2017; DuBois 2019). Speaking with individual voices, the authors of the articles presented a diverse, detailed, and nuanced picture of the historical relations between the Church of Sweden and the Sami. Only in exceptional cases did the authors refer to the on-going reconciliation process or pass moral judgements or discuss issues of contemporary responsibility for misdeeds in the past. This was especially the case in articles dealing with racial biological investigations and the removal of human remains from graves, and the authors for the most part contributed with their regular academic research competence and left it to others to draw possible conclusions related to historical justice. Such discussions were introduced in the concluding chapter and were expanded upon in the popular science publication, especially in its final section where more constructive or normative perspectives were displayed. The White Paper Project was intended to serve the needs of a reconciliation process driven by an ideological agenda. As was demonstrated above, for the project leadership it was a task of vital importance to protect the autonomy of the project and its scholars. The strategies applied can be analysed from the perspective of academic boundary-work (Lindmark 2016), which is a term in the sociology of science that refers to strategies used by scientists to draw a rhetorical line against activities that are not characterised by the qualities that should distinguish scientists, their methods, and claims. The most well-known representative of this theory, Thomas F.  Gieryn (1983, 1999), states that such

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boundary-work is most conspicuous when researchers explain their science to the public, and he argues that “protection of autonomy” is one of the main strategies. The autonomy of the White Paper Project was clearly demonstrated through the steering group’s independent widening of the restricted mandate and the safeguarding of the professional integrity of the scholars involved. However, the protection of the project’s autonomy can be detected in other areas, too. A clear distinction was made between historical research and the more ideological texts intended to inspire action. This distinction was most visible in the division between the two separate publications, that is, the academic report and the popular science publication. Even the latter publication was divided into two parts, the first summarising the results of the academic report and the second presenting “perspectives of reconciliation”. The project also refrained from presenting any roadmap or calls to action, thereby making a distinction between academic research and policymaking. Consequently, the project drew a sharp line between the academic and ideological uses of history (Lindmark 2016).

 aking the Knowledge Public: Synthesising M and Popularising the Results As we have emphasised, reconciliation processes of the present kind are, in the end, public by their very nature. They encompass academic interests, interests attached to external organisations and agencies, and interests connected to a broader public. This condition also affects the forms that the knowledge can be disseminated in. A crucial phase in these kinds of processes is thus not only to produce scientifically ‘approved’ knowledge within a specific academic domain, while admitting to academic genres like articles and reports, but equally important is to make such knowledge available and accessible to various stakeholders outside of academia. But how does this come to pass in terms of distributing knowledge, and what happens to historical knowledge when it is transmitted to a new public arena and to a broader popular context?

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The Popular Science Publication… In the present case with the Church of Sweden’s White Paper Project, in the course of the process it was decided that the knowledge gained from the academic anthology was to be made accessible to a broader public outside the academic context, in particular Church employees, politicians, and other civic representatives from the majority and Sami populations. The publication of the scholarly anthology in April 2016 (Lindmark and Sundström 2017) (see Figs. 7.1 and 7.2) was not seen as being sufficient to satisfy the overall educational goal of the project. An important step in making the knowledge accessible was the popular science publication Samerna och Svenska kyrkan: Underlag för kyrkligt försoningsarbete (The Sami and the Church of Sweden: A basis for church reconciliation work) published in February 2017 (see Fig. 7.1). Its aim was, in a very comprehensive way, to give an account of the background of the project, to synthesise the main results of the 35 chapters of the academic anthology, and to supply contemporary perspectives on

Fig. 7.2  The scholarly anthology De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: En vetenskaplig antologi (The historical relations between the Church of Sweden and the Sami: A scholarly anthology) published in two volumes in 2016. (Cover photo: Johan Fjellström, LiLAB, Arjeplog)

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reconciliation from both Church and Sami representatives. The mandate from the project steering group to the authors of the synthesising section of the popular science publication did not include additional analyses or contents in relation to what already had been published in the academic anthology, but rather that they stay as close as possible to the content of the individual chapters. However, this process of synthesising and popularising knowledge nevertheless implied a remediation, a transmission of knowledge from a genre of academic writing and communicating research to a quite different type of text-bound media, with a different kind of affordance and a different intended readership. Some central features of this remediation can be emphasised here. The practical work with synthesising the academic knowledge of course meant using a more accessible language, but also entering a consolidation mode, that is, mediating between scholars from various academic disciplines, tuning and linking occasionally disparate narratives and creating a coherent representation of the overall ‘puzzle’. This included creating a common narrative structure and a fixed linear chronology, presenting the reader with coherent historical agents, and underscoring conflict in the sense that potential problem areas in the relation between the Swedish Church and the Sami occasionally needed to be thoroughly explained to an unfamiliar reader (who was unable to contextualise in the same way as professional historians). This also meant finding a common ground between different analytical approaches to central concepts, for instance, the concepts of colonialism, ethnicity, the church and the Sami as historical entities and agents, and different views about the nature of history itself among the engaged scholars. Popularising the results from the academic anthology also meant moving from what can be seen as a type of critical scientific distance in relation to the object of study towards a mode of empathy and individual attachment, for instance, by providing the reader with examples of individual ‘victims’ of past oppressive actions (Norlin and Sjögren 2019). This striving for individual engagement can be linked to what Arvidsson and Åström Elmersjö (2021) define as personalisation. The popular science publication was thus on the one hand highly dependent on the knowledge generated in the academic anthology, without which it would not have been able to exist, but on the other hand it

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transformed this knowledge into something new (even if still well situated within the academic domain and with scholars as the prime ‘educators’).

 and Other Media for the Dissemination … of Knowledge Although highly important, the popular science publication was only one of many facets in this third processual phase of knowledge transmission and of making the academically generated knowledge accessible for the public. In fact, this phase was by no means uniform and coherent, but rather consisted of many different forms, media, and modalities. Directly after the publicly broadcast release of the popular science publication in 2017 (which included presentations by the project leaders, Sami representatives, and Archbishop Antje Jackelén of the Church of Sweden, see Fig. 7.3), other TV broadcasts and interviews on national and local radio and in various national and provincial newspapers followed. In addition,

Fig. 7.3  Archbishop Antje Jackelén (right) with Johannes Marainen, Ingrid Inga, and Sylvia Sparrock from the Sami Council at the release of the popular science publication in February 2017. (Photo: Jörgen Heikki, SR Sameradion (www. sverigesradio.se/sameradion))

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several magazines associated with the Church and its professions as well as Sami organisations reported on the release of both the academic anthology and the popular science publication and referred to a selection of its contents and results. Furthermore, the project leaders and many of the scholars who had contributed to the academic anthology held public lectures and took part in in-service training of clergy and other church employees, in indigenous Sami reading circles, and in information meetings of various kinds as well as in regular academic conferences (cf. Lindmark and Sundström 2018b). Parallel to this was a response to the White Paper Project triggered in social media, for instance, on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Ordinary people, along with journalists, active in social media now became involved in mediating knowledge from selected parts of the white paper publications to whomever might be interested, giving comments to and accounts for parts of it, and criticising other parts or perspectives. By doing this, they thus engaged in recontextualising and remediating the knowledge generated in the academic anthology, or filtered through the popular science publication, to a new audience, at the same time connecting it to new historical and contemporary contexts and to new stories about the past and the present.1 This also added a new visual dimension to the hitherto text-bound body of knowledge. An obvious example of this is the connection of certain content matter of the academic anthology—the Church’s role in colonialism and its support of racial biology science—to the contemporary and internationally acknowledged feature film Sami Blood, which dealt with related topics (see https://www.smp.se/tt-­feature/ filmrecension-­sameblod/). The academic report soon also found its way into several Wikipedia entries. In the autumn of 2018, the popular science publication was published in an extended and updated English version with the title The Sami and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project (Lindmark and Sundström 2018a). The aim was to present the project and its results to an international audience. This third phase of transmitting the historical knowledge from the academic anthology to the public thus meant the making of something new. What previously had been a quite coherent and restrained academic body of knowledge was now exploding into a myriad of forms, spreading over and converging into a much broader and very different historical, cultural, and media landscape. Historical knowledge was now being

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channelled through new media, new types of text genres, and new modalities, including visual, audio-visual, and spoken media (many of which seem to overlap). The main actors in this phase of transmitting and remediating the historical knowledge were now not restricted to academics, but included Church and Sami representatives, journalists, and ordinary people active in social media, that is, different kinds of educators. Analogous with this, the consignees of the historical knowledge also shifted from primarily academics to mainly individuals outside of academia. What is evident in this third phase of transmission and remediation of the knowledge is that this also meant a contemporary turn of history in the sense that historical knowledge in a much clearer way, once again, was linked to contemporary societal issues, for instance, regarding the present relation between the Sami and various institutions of the majority society at large, to conditions in other areas of Swedish society (integration and multi-culturalism), or far beyond the Swedish context, as well as concerning intra-ideological tensions and developments within the Church organisation. Here it is apparent that newspaper articles, blogs, interviews, and so on, managed to do something that the academic white paper publications did not, namely to create a link between history and individuals living today, making room for personal experiences, memories, and attitudes, to thoughts about the contemporary societal situation and to the alleged state of things, and partly also to the future. By this, the temporal, social, and contextual horizons of history were expanded.

 oncluding Remarks: The Different Shapes C of Historical Knowledge in a Contemporary Reconciliation Process This chapter set out to explore what happens to historical knowledge when historical problems are formulated, researched, and published within a reconciliation process, if there are distinguishable processual patterns intrinsic to the work with a white paper project, and, if so, how they

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can be defined and related to different educational conditions and objectives. A related issue was how to theorise about this. The chapter has highlighted a few things. First, when researching contemporary reconciliation processes, we are most likely to deal with multi-­ facetted and multi-dimensional projects generating and disseminating knowledge about the past. These are, in essence, educational enterprises and might on a general level be analytically approached using processual concepts like educationalisation. Even though they, consequently, should not be regarded as homogenous phenomena or fixed processes, the case studied in this chapter nevertheless suggests some generic patterns. An initial public phase of defining an overall historical problem that connects to a more or less shared present-day notion about what is actually to be reconciled is followed by a second, intra-academic, phase of research and of building up scientific knowledge in the area in question. In addition, when this academic phase is completed, the generated body of knowledge needs to be reconstructed in forms that makes it accessible and transmittable to the public. This can be regarded as a disseminating and remediating phase in a reconciliation procedure. All three phases can be seen as interconnected and somewhat overlapping, but they are at the same time occupied by different main actors (educators and prospective learners), different genres of mediating history and historical knowledge (bound to different media affordances), and by different overall conditions for knowledge transmission and exchange. This transition over the contemporary historical cultural and media landscape connected to the reconciliation process can be analytically understood in terms of recontextualisation and of remediation. All in all, this creates a condition where many different shapes of historical knowledge exist in parallel and converge in these processes. Together they constitute a white paper project as an organism and an educational project. An important aspect of this, which has not been addressed in this chapter, is the elements of the hierarchisation of knowledge imbued in the process. It is evident that ‘scientific’ knowledge has been key in the investigated reconciliation project. This also poses vital questions for future research with regards to what effect privileging this type of knowledge has and what other kinds of knowledge, and sources for knowledge, are marginalised in this process.

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Note 1. See, for example, https://twitter.com/hashtag/sanningsapmi?src=hash; http://persundin.blogspot.com/2018/06/; http://annochjohan.blogspot. com/2016/07/http://gun-­m-­ek.blogspot.com/2017/02/aina-­kommer-­ om-­donald-­trump-­och-­om-­den.html; https://denkristnahumanisten. wordpress.com/tag/svenska-­kyrkan/; https://feministisktperspektiv. se/2016/10/25/tyst-­om-­markfragan-­i-­svenska-­kyrkans-­vitbok/; https:// samefolket.se/kyrkans-­vitbok-­duckar-­for-­viktiga-­fragor/; http://bloggardag.blogspot.com/2016/04/det-­varas-­for-­kvinnoprastmotstandarna. html; https://tobiashubinette.wordpress.com/category/samer/.

References Ahonen, Sirka. 2021. Taking Responsibility for the Past: Theoretical and Educational Considerations, Illustrated by South African Experience. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Apple, Michael. 2000. Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Arvidsson, Malin, and Henrik Åström Elmersjö. 2021. Recontextualizing Historical Injustice into Education: The Relationship Between a White Paper and a Textbook on the Abuse of the Roma in Swedish History. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Aurelius, Adriana. 2019. Máhtsatiebmie likttemijne—Återbördande i försoning: En processbeskrivning över repatrieringen i Lycksele 2019. http://www.lycksele. se/globalassets/dokument/6-­kommun-­och-­politik/projekt-­och-­samarbete/ repatriering-­processbeskrivning-­191213.pdf. Bernstein, Basil. 1986. On Pedagogic Discourse. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G.  Richardson, 205–240. New York: Greenwood Press. Bolter, J.D., and R.  Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Depaepe, Marc. 1998. Educationalisation: A Key Concept in Understanding the Basic Processes in the History of Western Education. History Education Review 27 (1): 16–28. ———. 2012. Between Educationalization and Appropriation: Selected Writings on the History of Modern Educational Systems. Leuven: Leuven University Press. DuBois, Thomas A. 2019. [Review Article:] Daniel Lindmark & Olle Sundström (eds.) 2016, De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi 1–2, Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag 2016 (Forskning för kyrkan 33), ISBN 978-91-7580-795-9, 1,135 pp. Journal of Northern Studies 13 (1): 100–105. Gieryn, Thomas F. 1983. Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists. American Sociological Review 48: 781–795. ———. 1999. Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hopkins, Julian. 2016. The Concept of Affordances in Digital Media. In Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten, ed. H.  Friese, G. Rebane, M. Nolden, and M. Schreiter. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Hutchby, Ian. 2001. Technologies, Texts and Affordances. Sociology 35 (2): 441–456. ———. 2003. Affordances and the Analysis of Technologically Mediated Interaction. Sociology 37 (3): 581–589. Jenkins, Henry. 2012. Konvergenskulturen: Där gamla och nya medier kolliderar. Göteborg: Daidalos. Karlsson, Tomas. 2018. Låtsaskrigen: Föreställningar om krig, maskulinitet och historia i krigsspel under 200 år. Umeå: Umeå universitet. Keynes, Matilda, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. 2021. Introduction: Connecting Historical Justice and History Education. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kortekangas, Otso. 2017. [Review Article:] De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. En vetenskaplig antologi [The Historical Relations Between the Church of Sweden and the Sámi. A Scholarly Anthology] Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, eds. Skellefteå, Sweden, Artos, 2016 1,135 pp., SEK 315, ISBN 9789175807959. Scandinavian Journal of History 42: 355–359.

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Lässig, Simone. 2009. Textbooks and Beyond: Educational Media in Context(s). Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 1 (1): 14–15. Lindmark, Daniel. 2016. Historiebruk i retrospektiva praktiker: Historikers bidrag till försoning. In Gränsöverskridande kyrkohistoria: De språkliga minoriteterna på Nordkalotten, ed. Daniel Lindmark, 115–142. Umeå: Religious History of the North. ———. 2018. Writing Educational History in a Reconciliation Process: The White Paper Project on the Church of Sweden and the Sami. Unpublished Keynote Lecture, ANZHES Annual Conference, University of Sydney, 8–10 December 2018. Lindmark, Daniel, and Olle Sundström, eds. 2016. De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: En vetenskaplig antologi. Skellefteå: Artos. ———, eds. 2017. Svenska kyrkan och samerna: Underlag för kyrkligt försoningsarbete. Möklinta: Gidlunds. ———, eds. 2018a. The Sami and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds. ———. 2018b. The Reception of the White Paper Project and its Publications. In The Sami and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project, ed. Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, 181–203. Möklinta: Gidlunds. Nordbäck, Carola. 2016. ‘En försoningens väg i Jesu namn’: Perspektiv på Svenska kyrkans försoningsarbete. In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: En vetenskaplig antologi, ed. Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, 79–122. Skellefteå: Artos. Norlin, Björn, and David Sjögren. 2019. Educational History in the Age of Apology: The Church of Sweden’s ‘White Book’ on Historical Relations to the Sami, the Significance of Education and Scientific Complexities in Reconciling the Past. Educare—Vetenskapliga skrifter: 69–95. https://doi. org/10.24834/educare.2019.1.4. Norlander, Peter. 2016. Historieundervisning i det multimediala klassrummet: Lärares förhållningssätt till olika mediers kvaliteter och användbarhet. Umeå: Umeå universitet. Paulson, Julia, and Michelle J. Bellino. 2021. Education and Truth Commissions: Patterns, Possibilities and Implications for Historical Justice. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Sjögren, David. 2016. Att göra upp med det förflutna: Sanningskommissioner, officiella ursäkter och vitböcker i ett svenskt och internationellt perspektiv. In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: En vetenskaplig antologi, ed. Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, 123–152. Skellefteå: Artos. Smeyers, Paul, and Marc Depaepe, eds. 2008. Educational Research: The Educationalization of Social Problems. Dordrecht: Springer. TRC of Canada. 2015. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final%20Reports/Executive_Summary_ English_Web.pdf. Tyrberg, Karl-Johan. 2016. Försoningsprocessen mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: Initiativ och insatser 1990–2012. In De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: En vetenskaplig antologi, ed. Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, 43–78. Skellefteå: Artos. Zander, Ulf. 2014. Historiekulturella manifestationer: Historia i ord, bilder och musik. In Historien är närvarande: Historiedidaktik som teori och tillämpning, ed. Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

8 The Role of Commemoration in History and Heritage: The Legacy of the World War One Engagement Centres Nicola Gauld and Ian Grosvenor

Introduction In 2014, five First World War Engagement Centres were established by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to support a wide range of community engagement activities. These connected academic and public histories of the First World War during its centenary period, and encouraged communities to think differently about the legacies of the conflict. Each Centre involved a consortium of universities based on particular areas of expertise. For example, the Voices of War and Peace Centre consisted of academics from the Universities of Birmingham, Birmingham City, Worcester, Wolverhampton, Manchester Metropolitan, Cardiff, Newcastle, Durham and Glasgow. Those academics specialised N. Gauld (*) Voices of War & Peace WW1 Centre, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] I. Grosvenor University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_8

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in the themes of Belief, Children, Cities at War, Commemoration, Gender and the Home Front and Peace and Conflict. A key focus of the Centres was to provide UK-wide support for community groups funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund through its grant programme “First World War: Then and Now.” In doing so, the Centres and their community partners pursued several collaboration strategies, from traditional knowledge transfer to full co-production. Now, at the end of the commemorative period, this chapter considers the impact of collaborative working on both community organisations and the academy, drawn from case studies and evaluative work carried out by the Voices of War and Peace Centre on 17 co-designed and co-­ produced projects that the Centre funded in 2015–2017. It focuses specifically on those projects that addressed omissions within the histories of the First World War in terms of race and disability as well exploring the legacies of colonialism. Through interrogating the data gathered from the 17 collaborative projects, as well as data collected from a supplementary project that addressed issues of diversity within the commemorations, this paper considers how the projects addressed historical injustices connected to the legacy of colonialism and empire in conflict and the impact of the War on the rights of disabled persons and how commemoration and memory has been challenged to offer different perspectives.

Out of Memory into History With the launch of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition’s £50 million plan to mark the centenary of the First World War, the then Communities Secretary Eric Pickles observed: “As the First World War moves out of common memory into history, we’re determined to make sure these memories are retained” (Clark 2013) but which common memories did he have in mind? How did the ways in which communities remembered the past compare to official government schemes of commemoration? Remembering, just like forgetting, is always a political act (Rieff 2016). The War was a global conflict which left its mark on the local. Is it a truism that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”? (Hartley 1953, p.  1) Certainly, Britain today is a very

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different country to that of 1914. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Britain was described by Lord Parekh as “a community of communities” (The  Runnymede  Trust 2000) and, in the aftermath of the 2012 Olympic Games, by the anti-racist and leading intellectual of the left Ambalavaner Sivanandan, as “a truly multicultural society, the foremost in Europe, and its exemplar” (Sivanandan 2016). Yet, the afterglow of 2012 faded very quickly with the divisive and inflammatory referendum on Europe in 2016 and today there is, as one political commentator concluded, “a real darkness in this country, a xenophobic, racist sickness of heart that is closer to the surface today than it has been for decades” (Lanchester 2016). The rise of traditionalism, xenophobia and popular nationalism has also been paralleled by a sustained assault on the concept of multiculturalism, to the extent that it is now “widely scorned and trivialized” and “excluded from serious analysis and critical conversation” (Gilroy 2017, p. 61). In this context what sense will Britain’s diverse communities make of the events associated with six years of commemorative activity? As the conflict moves out of memory into history how will their experience of commemoration connect the past with their present and how will it shape their future[s] given that commemoration of the First World War is still largely about the sacrifice of a generation of young white males in the mud and trenches of Europe? (Reynolds 2013, p. xv).

Historic Wrongs and Historical Justice In On the uses and disadvantages of history for life (1873) Nietzsche argued that the fact that “living requires the services of history” must be just as clearly understood as “the principle … that an excess of history harms the living person.” History belonged to the living in three respects: as “an active and striving person,” “as a person who preserves and admires it,” and “as a suffering person in need of emancipation.” “This trinity of relationships,” he continued, “corresponds to a trinity of methods for history, to the extent that one may make the distinctions, a monumental method, an antiquarian method, and a critical method.” For the living, monumental history was “derived” from the conviction that “the greatness which was once there … will really be possible once again.” It was a

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history that was “celebrated in folk festivals and in religious or military remembrance days,” tended toward “mythic fiction” and as a consequence the “past itself suffer[ed] harm” as parts of it were “forgotten” and “despised.” Those who practised monumental history “let the dead bury the living.” The antiquarian historian tended “with care that which has existed from of old” and desired “to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him [sic] the conditions under which he himself came into existence.” The antiquarian admired and revered the minute details of the past and emphasised “the customary and traditionally valued.” The monumental and the antiquarian method of history resulted in an “oversaturation” of the past in the present and, for Nietzsche, history for the living was “in need of emancipation.” What was required was “critical history,” that is “history which sits in judgement and passes judgement.” At the same time, he recognised that we are the “products of earlier generations … their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes” and “it is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely” (Nietzsche 1873, pp. 7–12). One can see parallels between Nietzsche’s view of history and that of the still dominant narrative in Britain about the First World War, which is one of personal tragedies, of a generation lost as a result of “a meaningless, futile bloodbath in the mud of Flanders and Picardy,” a narrative illuminated by poetry, a memorialised story of sacrifice, mourning and grief, and a story of the dead not the living (Reynolds 2013, p. xv). It is a narrative which manifests a cluster of shared public points of reference centred around “military remembrance” and “looks back from the trenches to a lost Edwardian Eden.” But, as Reynolds writes, it is a narrative where “we have lost touch with the Great War” and historians need to “clamber out of the trenches” and seek “new vistas” (Reynolds 2013, pp. xv, 430). Such new vistas would go beyond the “mythic” and look for the “forgotten” and the “despised” in the landscape of the conflict. Similarly, one can connect Nietzsche’s critical history that “sits in judgement and passes judgement” with activism around redressing historical wrongs and injustices. It has become widely accepted that past wrongs and injustices “must be investigated, documented and redressed” (Neumann 2014, p. 147). International law recognises that victims have a right to:

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(a) Equal and effective access to justice; (b) Adequate, effective and prompt reparation for harm suffered; (c) Access to relevant information concerning violations and reparation mechanisms. (United Nations 2006, principle 11). But what is the definition of a historic wrong and injustice? The literature on historical justice would include genocide, slavery, war crimes, forced displacement, disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture and other serious human rights violations within such a definition, with each being a focus for redress and telling the truth. But what of the “forgotten” in history? Should they not have redress? What of the absences and silences in historical narratives? Historical justice should accord agency to those whose voices have been silenced. Historical justice should give voice to the forgotten, to the dead, by bringing the past to life. “Of course,” as Morris-Suzuki observed, “it is irrational to speak to the dead. The dead cannot hear us” (Morris-Suzuki 2013, p. 100). But their descendants can. As James Green has argued, “Historical narratives can do more than redeem the memory of past struggles; they can help people think of themselves as historical figures with crucial moral and political choices to make, like those who came before them” (Green 2000, p. 11). There is a further dimension to this argument, as our approach to the concept of historical justice is in part intertwined with the politics of empire and decolonisation. In recent years research into the history of the Black and Asian presence in Britain and the impact of Britain’s imperial and Empire histories have questioned the dominant, unified, homogenised and linear narrative of Britain’s island story and its unaltered identity. Much of this work has been driven by local activism where research has been going on in local community centres, adult education classrooms, and libraries and has been circulated through temporary exhibitions, small publishing enterprises and word of mouth. It is work which captures the local experiences of migration and settlement (Grosvenor 2007, pp. 607–622; Waters 2016, pp. 104–120). It is the work “of politicised groups striving to understand their own histories through their own

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research and interpretation” (Bressey 2013, p. 554) and it involved a process, as Stuart Hall wrote some 20 years ago, which “transformed” lives: The subjects of the local, of the margin, can only come into representation by … recovering their own hidden histories. They have to … retell the story from the bottom up … These are the hidden histories of the majority, which had never been told … the speaking of a past that previously had no language. (Hall 1997, pp. 183–184)

Challenging this exclusive narrative of belonging has helped to address “the resulting condition of ‘historylessness’ that has been a measure of black marginality” (Gilroy 2007, p. 3), but the dominant discourse still largely remains undisturbed. Society is dominated by a particular notion of knowledge and will be until “Knowledge-as-an-intervention-in-reality” triumphs over “Knowledge-as-a-representation of reality” (Dennis 2018, pp. 201–202). Representation is not simply a manifestation of power, but “an integral part of social processes of differentiation, exclusion, incorporation, and rule” (Owens 1992, p. 91) and once recognised history can be reframed, re-imagined and redefined by the struggle of the margins to come into representation. What follows next is an account of collaborative community projects which have sought to give “voice” to the marginalised and the forgotten and to redress injustice.

The First World War Engagement Centres The Voices of War and Peace Engagement Centre was led by the University of Birmingham but was mainly based off-campus in the city’s public library, the Library of Birmingham, and operated in other parts of the UK through its network of researchers. Collectively, with other partner higher education institutions, the Centre claimed research expertise relating to the themes of Childhood, Gender, Belief, Commemoration, Peace and Conflict, and Cities. A key focus of the Centres was to provide UK-wide support for community groups funded by the National Lottery

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Heritage Fund through its grant programme “First World War: Then and Now” (which offered groups funding from £3,000–£10,000). In addition, between 2014 and 2016 each Centre had a community research fund included in the original grant, to support co-designed and co-­ produced projects by members of the Centres’ research networks in collaboration with community partners. In a second round of funding, and in direct response to the lack of diverse stories that had emerged during the first two or three years of official commemorative activity, priority was given to projects that diversified engagement in centenary activities including, for example, engagement with minority or marginalised groups in society, including Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups, and projects that sought to uncover hidden narratives or unheard/disregarded voices relating to the centenary.1 This lack of projects and research around lesser-known or ignored histories neatly encapsulates the pressing need for historical justice themed work to continue and expand. Three projects supported by the Voices of War and Peace Centre concentrated on colonialism and empire: Stories of Omission: Conflict and the Experience of Black Soldiers; Minding Black Histories: Remembering, Acknowledging and Documenting Contributions of Black Poppies in WW1; and The Indian Army in the First World War: An Oxfordshire Perspective. Another project supported during this second phase focused on the protest march across the UK that was undertaken by blind persons in 1920, titled “Justice Not Charity” Was Their Cry. Other projects, although not specifically focused on colonialism, did explore hidden, ignored and often disregarded histories, for example, the experience of refugees then and now, the impact on young people living in rural and city environments, and women peace campaigners. Evaluation interviews and surveys that were carried out with participants after each project was complete indicated that the successes of collaborative co-production did outnumber the challenges. For example, new ways of working and new relationships were established, groups successfully made connections between what happened during the First World War and subsequent conflicts including up to the present day (for example in the former British colony of Aden, now Yemen), opportunities for skills development and training were offered, and the provision of

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space for reflection on practice and process by both partners was made available. However, all the challenges identified were significant and had serious impacts on the organisations. These included issues around financial systems used by the academy, differences in timescales, and challenges around engaging young people, both in formal education and outside. As well as raising wider and often complex issues, the projects also reflected challenges that had been identified by two recent reports commissioned by the AHRC, Creating Living Knowledge and Common Cause Research, particularly issues specifically affecting BME communities (Facer and Enright 2016; Facer et  al. 2018). The Common Cause report included an important set of principles to guide future community–university partnerships and stressed a number of things to take place if these partnerships were to continue, including: a clear commitment from universities to help strengthen the community organisation they are collaborating with; a focus on mutual benefits, transparency and accountability; fair knowledge exchange and, most importantly here, a commitment to equality and diversity where collaborative projects should avoid intensifying pre-existing prejudices and stereotypes within and between communities. As well as working through issues rising from collaborative work one of the tasks of the Engagement Centres from the outset was to challenge received knowledge about the First World War: this proved the most difficult objective, likely because the War is typically imagined in specific ways which are then attached to present-day values and aspirations. Despite efforts to change the narrative, the understanding of the War in the UK is still most commonly associated with trenches, the Western Front and war poetry. One significant element of new knowledge to be added to the centenary agenda was that relating to the experience of those Black and Asian men who were recruited as soldiers or military labour. This knowledge surfaced through community groups, national organisations and specific initiatives, although this was not always straightforward and there were often difficulties in making history relevant to young people from those backgrounds who are today facing their own challenges. While this new knowledge added to the current national narrative, it did not generally extend to a greater understanding of the longer-term impact

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of the conflict on colonies of empire. Comments from the lead academic on the Minding Black Histories project were particularly revealing about how young people felt about the centenary: On the one hand, we expected the young volunteers, some of whom have direct ties to Black servicemen who fought during the First World War, to be very interested in the topic, and to be engaged and excited about contributing to the project and its findings. In reality, most of these young people didn’t really care about those histories, they didn’t feel they were connected to that past, nor did they feel concerned or affected by it in the present. As the project progressed, we were able to get them more involved, but engagement remained a big challenge as they all had other priorities, including looking for jobs around Birmingham, so we had to cancel and reschedule workshops to fit their changing schedules. On the other hand, we expected their interest in the project to grow once we were able to connect those histories to their present, for example through showing them how some streets that they know in Kinshasa today are in fact named after generals and battles of the First World War, and we were right in those assumptions: engagement with these past histories can be strengthened and deepened if connected to more contemporary experiences.

Stories of Omission Stories of Omission: Conflict and the Experience of Black Soldiers, a collaboration formed by the chapter authors and community partner Recognize Black Heritage and Culture, went beyond simply the story of Black men as soldiers and began to explore the impact of the conflict in the Caribbean during and in the immediate aftermath of the War alongside issues around inequality and racism (Stories of Omission: Conflict and the Experience of Black Soldiers 2019). One of the main motivations for the ongoing work of Garry Stewart, the Director of Recognize Black Heritage and Culture, was that during his time as a former member of the armed forces Stewart had not been aware that there were Black servicemen

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during the First World War. Another volunteer on the project pointed to her desire to be involved in something meaningful that would give something back to the community (Karen Lloyd, interviewed in Stories of Omission film). Stories of Omission focused on the information about the conflict that was available to the public at that time and what was missed out, hidden, ignored or disregarded and how this has continued to affect First World War narratives in the UK today. Produced during his commission by the Imperial War Museum’s Art Commissions Committee as an official UK war artist, Steve McQueen’s striking artwork Queen and Country (2007) was a visual stimulus at the start of the Stories of Omission project. In the work, sheets of postage stamps commemorate each British soldier who was killed during the Iraq War from 2003 to 2008: the everyday object was used to remember an unspeakable tragedy and the ultimate sacrifice a serviceman or woman can make. Not without controversy, the stamps were refused for general use by the Post Office, who felt they would be distressing to family members. A petition to gather support for the circulation of the stamps was created by the Art Fund which received over 26,000 signatures between November 2007 and July 2010; however, the stamps have yet to be released to the public. Many of the faces represented on those stamps belong to Black soldiers, something that today we would not question, but the treatment of Black soldiers during the First World War cannot be said to be the same—frequently ignored, omitted from news reports, their role denied or dismissed, a lack of acknowledgement and recognition of the Black soldier was present throughout the conflict and in the years after the War ended. Stories of Omission featured some individual soldiers’ stories, including that of George Blackman, a soldier originally from Barbados who served in the British West Indies Regiment for the duration of the War and was present during the Taranto Mutiny of December 1918. Like many men from the Caribbean, Blackman was desperate to serve and lied about his age to the enlisting officer (he was only 17 when he joined up); however, he later recalled the commonplace racism that he experienced, “They called us darkies…But when the battle starts, it didn’t make a difference. We were all the same. When you’re there, you don’t care about anything. Every man is under the rifle.” Blackman felt that the “mother country” had abandoned soldiers like him, recalling “there were no parades for us.”

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On returning to Barbados he described how he only had the clothes he was wearing at the time and was faced with unemployment, a common outcome for the majority of soldiers from the Caribbean. Stories of Omission also brought to attention visual material such as Percy Wyndham Lewis’ painting A Canadian Gun-pit (1918, The National Gallery of Canada). This is one of the few paintings from the period that shows Black soldiers, depicted loading shells under the watchful eyes of the officers. The project also explored images of unnamed soldiers from the Caribbean that featured in The Lost Tommies. This was a book and television programme produced around a collection of photographs that had been taken by a pair of amateur photographers in Vignacourt, France during the War and rediscovered in 2011 by an Australian journalist (Fig. 8.1) (Coulthart 2016). Stories of Omission also encouraged volunteers to carry on with their own research after the project came to an end. However, it was clear that in many ways it had only scratched the surface and that there was much work still left to do in order to fully understand the experiences of Black soldiers during and after the War. This was particularly felt in relation to the 1919 race riots that occurred in port towns and cities in England and Wales and also to attempts made in the Caribbean to secure independence from the British Empire after the soldiers returned from the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. After Stories of Omission was completed in 2018, subsequent interventions included the Legacies of the First World War Diversity Festival held in Birmingham  (Legacies of the First World War Festival: Diversity 2019), which explored the theme of diversity. A number of participants were interviewed for a short film about the event. When asked for their thoughts on the wider commemorations and the successes and challenges around community engagement, responses included: The question is, have we moved on beyond the idea of the First World War being fundamentally a European conflict fought by Europeans, a war dominated by the poets and the poppies and that sort of imagery? (Academic) There’s a lot of new knowledge that has emerged and I think a lot of people are thinking, what do we do with it, where does it go so it becomes part of the wider narrative, how does it get disseminated? (Heritage consultant)

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Fig. 8.1  Unknown soldier from The Lost Tommies, Courtesy of the Kerry Stokes Collection: The Louis and Antoinette Thuillier Collection. Donated to the Australian War Memorial by Mr Kerry Stokes on behalf of Australian Capital Equity Pty Ltd

The community groups who have gone through the process are doing academic work … these are citizen historians. What do they do next and what is the role of the university in supporting them achieve what they want to do? (Academic)

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The pace of political events just appears to be overtaking all of it … the projects that have brought in the voices of people who are underrepresented are really the ones that should be listened to. (Community Activist) There is a slight feeling of disappointment for me… thought we’d be able to expand the sense of the First World War… stretch some of the myths, challenge some of the myths … at the end of it, it still feels like an awful lot about the Battle of the Somme, an awful lot of poppies… invariably red. Physical disability, mental disability at a time when you haven’t got a national health service, you haven’t got a welfare state in the way that we know it… I think that’s not come through the system. (Academic) Looking forward we need to identify the methods used in our projects and use them to be the baseline for further public engagement funding calls. (Academic)

While the World War One Centres had been actively engaging with communities since 2014, the comments suggest that many more questions than answers had surfaced during that period. The festival also included a panel discussion about a supplementary project also supported by the Voices of War and Peace Centre, “Diverse stories: Towards BAME narratives of the First World War and its Legacies,” led by Kevin Myers and Islam Mohammed from the University of Birmingham. Interrogation of data provided by the National Lottery Heritage Fund into projects funded under their “First World War: Then and Now” programme showed that from over 2000 projects funded since 2014 only a tiny percentage focused on BME stories (approximately 3%). Another finding of the project report was that the stories which had surfaced during the commemorative period about the contribution of Britain’s colonies of empire tended to reinforce the dominant narrative of conflict and sacrifice by men, even in the context of extreme racial prejudice in the past and increased Islamophobia and discriminatory immigration policy in the present, notably the Windrush scandal that emerged in 2018. This political scandal, ongoing at the time of writing, concerned people who were wrongly detained and, in some cases, deported, from the UK by the Home Office. Many affected were British subjects who

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had arrived in the UK before 1973, particularly from Caribbean countries (and had travelled on the Empire Windrush ship). This factor was also discussed in a keynote lecture at the festival by Richard Smith (Goldsmith’s, University of London) who acknowledged the privileging of frontline service during the commemorations, along with a lack of exploration around opposing stories such as anti-colonialism, conscientious objection and the role of women  (Smith 2019). Other findings from “Diverse stories” related to process and included issues around the need for increased consultation with communities and inclusion in projects from the beginning, difficulties around sustaining relationships with community partners, and a pressing need for university systems to change to accommodate practical factors that arise from working with communities. Similar issues were discussed during a policy breakfast event held at the beginning of the festival which also explored ideas around distrust of academia by some communities and the acceptance of having difficult conversations between universities and communities. These discussions are all set against the wider context of today’s debate around decolonisation in the heritage sector and in the academy, a movement that is rapidly gaining ground and featured prominently in a recent exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, “The Past is Now: Birmingham and the British Empire” (2017–2018), a display co-curated by artists and activists that challenged the ways in which the story of the British Empire had been traditionally told by an institution that came directly out of that period. The increased awareness and efforts made during the commemorative period to redress the balance, to tell uncomfortable truths, and to acknowledge racism, both past and present, is an integral part of the decolonising process.

“Justice Not Charity” Was Their Cry Disability History Scotland (DHS) were established in Edinburgh in 2012 with the aim of advocating the advancement of equality and diversity through the promotion of disability history, education and campaigning. The organisation’s first project, All Together Now?, funded by

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the National Lottery Heritage Fund under the Then and Now scheme, sought to investigate the impact of the First World War on the lives of disabled people. This project led to three members of the organisation being invited to Birmingham in 2016 to participate in a discussion event held with the specific aim of encouraging collaborative projects. The result was “Justice Not Charity” Was Their Cry, a collaborative partnership project between DHS, the University of Birmingham, and Jennifer Novotny, an Early Career Researcher (ECR) based in Glasgow. The aim of this project was to raise awareness of the events of 1920, when over 200 protest marchers organised by the National League of the Blind converged on London’s Trafalgar Square as politicians met in the House of Commons to discuss legislations to help secure the economic and social rights of blind persons. The project also aimed to disseminate as widely as possible the results of the project findings and bring to attention a neglected part of disability history. The protest march was a highly significant moment in the history of disability and disabled persons’ self-­ organising as they sought social justice for economically disenfranchised citizens by demanding that the State take direct responsibility for the welfare of the blind. The campaigners sought to free blind persons from a reliance on voluntary charity, which typically came with a variety of stipulations, for example, a range of individuals, from local government administrators to members of admissions and review panels typically comprising of medical personnel and socially elite philanthropists, would decide on how much aid a blind person would receive. Moreover, if a person was resident in an institution, such as poorhouse or asylum, they would be subjected to institutional rules. For those living outside institutions, if they had been accepted into industrial training then the roles they received were limited while others were dependent on charity from family members and personal independence was restricted (Novotny 2018). The focus, as in DHS’s earlier project, was on the rejection of charity and an assertion of peoples’ rights to equality and justice, emphasising in the accompanying booklet that was produced as one of the project outcomes, “the rights of disabled persons were part of a wider battle to define the State’s responsibilities towards its citizens” (Novotny 2018) (Fig.  8.2). As in the Stories of Omission project, a group of citizen

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Fig. 8.2  A blind man assisted by another man (Fritz Wrampe). Drawing by Fritz Wrampe, 193-. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

researchers worked with support from DHS and from academics to explore the wider political and historical context and individual stories of the Scottish marchers. While the subject of the many thousands of returning soldiers who had suffered life-changing injuries, both physical and emotional, was featured in a small minority of projects delivered by community groups during the centenary, “Justice Not Charity” differed from these in its focus on civilian blind persons, a group of people almost doubly overlooked as

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they campaigned for equality and justice against a background of public appeals for charitable contributions for disabled servicemen. The aid being offered to wounded soldiers and sailors, immediate and with no strings attached, was exactly the type of support the National League of the Blind had been advocating for decades, arguing that the acceptance of charity infringed on an individual’s independence and dignity. As Novotny remarks, “throughout the research process it became clear that little is now popularly known of the march, despite its historical significance to radical politics, civil rights, and the self-organisation of disabled persons” (Novotny 2018). While the names of most of the marchers have been forgotten some stories emerged during the research phase of the project, including that of Charles Lothian, an employee of the Royal Glasgow Asylum for the Blind and organiser for the National League of the Blind, who coordinated the march from Glasgow and wrote several poems on social justice, one of which, “The Blind Advocate” of 1918, inspired the project title. Lothian regularly wrote in support of blind welfare and argued that “charity stripped recipients of their dignity and independence, whereas a redistribution of wealth by the government was socially just” (Novotny 2018). In an interview with Sasha Callaghan, former Chair of DHS, carried out in the summer of 2018, the motivations for doing the project were discussed. These included financial factors, the subject area, which had been briefly explored in first project but the group expressed an interest in wanting to find out more; and a more specific interest in the local aspect, about which very little research had been done: “I wanted to learn more about researching, I wanted to know more … I’ve learnt an awful lot from it.” Callaghan described how the project had benefitted from academic support offered by the Voices Centre and Jennifer Novotny and that the group would have struggled to deliver the project on their own as they lacked the knowledge and skills that Novotny could bring to the group, something they cited as a major factor in the success of the project. Stuart Pyper, DHS project administrator, was also interviewed. For Pyper, one of the most striking things was learning about people like Charles Lothian, although he described a more troubling part of the process: “when you’re looking at this kind of history … you realise that these people sacrificed a lot, and they did do a lot for us, but in a way it still

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feels like we’re still having to fight the same fights today. It really shows how history can repeat itself.” Pyper also spoke about how he had found the commemorations to be selective in nature and suggested that we needed to look at the fragmented picture instead of the bigger picture, commenting that while Charles Lothian had been noted in official records his story and experience had been brought to life during the course of their project. One of the most notable parts of the “Justice Not Charity” project was the challenge that the group faced right at the beginning around getting the project started: DHS had felt that they were offering an academic partner a ready-made project but unfortunately the institution they originally approached let them down, which led to missed deadlines for the funding application and a delayed start date. Another challenge, one that was also faced by Stories of Omission, was the paucity of information and evidence about individuals, an ever-present problem that historical justice projects strive to remedy. In terms of the wider impact and legacy of the project, it affected the organisation only in that it re-emphasised the way that they had always tried to work, collaboratively, and that it helped the organisation to do that even more. Like many disability history groups, DHS have faced perennial funding crises and have existed without any core funding; however, they strongly advocated collaborative working as their preferred method.

Conclusions In July 2019, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report “Lessons from the First World War Centenary” was published (Select Committee Report 2019). The report included a section on “reaching new audiences.” The first two sections describe the general public’s increased knowledge of “the multi-ethnic and multi-faith contribution to the world wars”. However, given our experiences of the centenary we might take issue with the usage of the word “new” and its implication that BME community groups are somehow new to the subject of the First World War, despite their contribution to the War and the impact it had upon Commonwealth/Empire countries. Similarly, there

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are references to “hidden or less-well known stories” but no consideration as to why they have been hidden. Statistics in the report show that while there was a notable increase in awareness about the contribution of Indian soldiers, there is no mention in the report of Black British soldiers or soldiers from the Caribbean or Africa. The report concludes the section by recommending that “Diversity should be included as an explicit criterion in any future commemorations.” All of the projects discussed in this chapter have arguably “given voice” to those who haven’t been heard or listened to adequately—but who is listening? What can we learn from this process? And what does meaningful engagement with community organisations mean for universities? Collaborative work around history and heritage is clearly marked by both challenges and opportunities. There are complex issues around personal ownership of the past and “whose history” is heard. Over the last six years there is extensive evidence that the work of the World War One Engagement Centres has enriched public understanding of the First World War and its legacies and has enhanced the research capacity of diverse communities across the UK, generating confidence in engaging with the complexities associated with critical study of the past and, in particular, building understanding of the contemporary resonances and issues relating to the conflict in personal, local and global contexts. The Centres have supported the establishment of new research relationships across Higher Education Institutions and new models of working with civic society mediators. They have delivered and enhanced opportunities for ECRs to experience participatory research and public/community engagement and effected institutional change through the promotion of public engagement and the sharing of good practice. However, it was not obvious in 2014 how difficult the AHRC (and National Lottery Heritage Fund) aim to challenge narratives of the War would be, as can be seen from the evidence collected from communities, academics and cultural practitioners. What is needed is a staging post for future research that will demonstrate the value of fine-grained knowledge and the importance of giving close attention to the social relationships that produce it. Over the past four years the Voices Centre has worked collaboratively with colleagues at the Everyday Lives in War Centre (based at the University of Hertfordshire), including on the exhibition Beyond the

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Battlefields: Käthe Buchler’s Photographs of Germany in the Great War (2017–2018), leading to a new collaborative project which emerged through reflective discussions between the two Centres. Much of the work around recognising BME participation in the War has been driven by a desire to reflect ethnic diversity in the UK in the twenty-first century, yet the centenary has itself often been framed by a concept of the nation state, which is taken for granted as natural or normative. A proposal has recently been written by the chapter authors with Sarah Lloyd, the Director of Everyday Lives, for a new project that includes a strand titled Rewriting Histories of the Nation, which will address those developments, building on the community project work already completed with the Engagement Centres as discussed above. How does attention to Empire and colonial relationships change understandings of the UK during the First World War period? What implications does a re-framing of narratives have for definitions of the nation and its current four constituent parts as a focus for historical memory today? (Bhambra et al. 2018). In conclusion, the challenge of developing an inclusive and diverse historical legacy which addresses issues of justice and education through participatory research in contexts where received ideas about the past are particularly strong, requires from the academy, the involvement of academics and public engagement professionals who have the skills and abilities to build relationships with communities and requires an investment in time and resources. As David Andress has written, in relation to cultural dementia and the discipline of history, there is “an actively constructed, jealously guarded toxic refusal to engage with facts that are well-­ known but emotionally and politically inconvenient, and with other experiences that are devastating to the collective self-regard of huge segments of societies that have no visible desire to come to terms with reality” (Andress 2018, p. 47). It also requires universities to recognise how Eurocentric norms legitimise particular forms of knowledge and pedagogy and to actively engage in decolonising the academy, in confronting the legacy and violence of Empire.

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Note 1. For a full list of the projects please visit: https://www.voicesofwarandpeace.org/voices-­projects/

References Andress, David. 2018. Cultural Dementia: How the West Has Lost Its History, and Risks Losing Everything Else. London: Head of Zeus. Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancioğlu, eds. 2018. Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press. Bressey, Carol. 2013. Geographies of Belonging: White Women and Black History. Women’s History Review 22 (4): 541–558. Clark, Nick. 2013. Communities Secretary Eric Pickles says 2014’s £50m World War I commemorations must not turn into “anti-German festival.” The Independent, June 10. Coulthart, Ross. 2016. The Lost Tommies. London: Harper Collins. Dennis, Carol Azumah. 2018. Decolonising Education: A Pedagogic Intervention. In Decolonising the University, ed. Gurminder K.  Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancioğlu, 190–207. London: Pluto Press. Facer, Keri, and Bryony Enright. 2016. Creating Living Knowledge: The Connected Communities Programme, Community University Relationships and the Participatory Turn in the Production of Knowledge. Bristol: University of Bristol/AHRC Connected Communities. Facer, Keri, et al. 2018. Common Cause Research: Building Research Collaborations Between Universities and Black and Minority Ethnic Communities. Bristol: University of Bristol/AHRC Connected Communities. Gilroy, Paul. 2007. Black Britain: A Photographic History. London: Saqi. ———. 2017. Parallel Perspectives: Transnational Curation in London 2015–16. London: Kings College. Green, James. 2000. Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Grosvenor, Ian. 2007. From the “eye of history” to “a second gaze”: The Visual Archive and the Marginalised in History of Education. History of Education 36 (4–5): 607–622.

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Hall, Stuart. 1997. The Local and the Global: Globalisation and Ethnicity. In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, National and Postcolonial Perspectives ed. McCintock, A., Mufti, A., and Shobar, E., 173–187. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartley, L.P. 1953. The Go-between. London: Hamish Hamilton. Lanchester, John. 2016. Brexit Blues. London Review of Books. 28 July. Legacies of the First World War Festival: Diversity. 2019. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=jt3wxssX6sE. Accessed 3 Oct 2019. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2013. Letters to the Dead: Grassroots Historical Dialogue in East Asia’s Borderlands. In East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence, ed. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, M.  Low, L.  Petrov, and T.Y. Tsu, 87–104. London: Routledge. Neumann, Klaus. 2014. Historians and the Yearning for Historical Justice. Rethinking History 18 (2): 145–164. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1873. On the uses and disadvantages of history for life: From untimely meditations (translated by Ian Johnstone). https://www. leudar.com/library/On%20the%20Use%20and%20Abuse%20of%20 History.pdf. Accessed 24 Mar 2020. Novotny, Jennifer. 2018. Justice Not Charity Was Their Cry. Pamphlet. Owens, Craig. 1992. Representation, Appropriation, and Power. In Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, ed. Scott Stewart Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock, 88–113. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reynolds, David. 2013. The Long Shadow. The Great War and the Twentieth Century. London: Simon & Schuster. Rieff, David. 2016. In Praise of Forgetting: History, Memory and Ironies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Select Committee Report. 2019. Lessons from the First World War Centenary. 16 July 2019. https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-­ a-­z/commons-­select/digital-­culture-­media-­and-­sport-­committee/inquiries/ parliament-­2017/ww1-­centenary/. Accessed 3 Oct 2019. Sivanandan, A. 2016. Foreword. In Racial Violence and the Brexit State, ed. Jon Burnett. London: Institute of Race Relations. Smith, Richard. From Empire to Multicultural Nation: Memory and Forgetting During the First World War Commemorations. Lecture delivered at the Legacies of the First World War Diversity Festival, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, 23 March 2019.

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Stories of Omission: Conflict and the experience of Black soldiers. 2019. https:// www.voicesofwarandpeace.org/wp-­content/uploads/2018/10/storiesofomission­guide_rd.pdf. Accessed 3 Oct 2019. The Runnymede Trust. 2000. The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report. London: Profile Books. United Nations. 2006. Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly on 16 December 2005: Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to Remedy and Reparations for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law. United Nations Document A/RES/60/147, 21 March. https://www.un.org/ ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/60/147. Accessed 1 Mar 2020. Waters, Rob. 2016. Thinking Black: Peter Fryer’s Staying Power and the Politics of Writing Black British History in the 1980s. History Workshop Journal 82: 104–120.

9 Challenging ‘Comfort Women’ Discourse: Rethinking Intersections of Historical Justice and History Education Anna-Karin Eriksson

Introduction East Asia’s ‘history wars’are allegedly fought over successive politicalestab lishments’prolonged avoidance to face Japan’s history of military expansion. In this, one of the fiercest battles over how to remember and forget the war concerns the so-called ‘comfort women’ (Tai 2016, pp. 35–36). ‘Comfort women’ euphemistically refers to the estimated 200,000 women and girls who were subjected to so-called ‘comfort stations’ under the Empire of Japan 1931–1945. The ‘comfort system’1 was set-up as a solution to the faltering ‘military hygiene’ that was caused by supposedly ‘unavoidable’ male desire (Ueno 1999, p. 130) and has been confirmed to having been established in Shanghai in 1932 (Yoshimi 2000, p. 43), but traced back at least  as far as to the military’s regulated prostitution in Siberia 1918–22  (Tanaka 2002, p.  11). ‘Comfort system’ history had

A.-K. Eriksson (*) Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_9

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been neglected for nearly 50 years when, in 1991, courageous survivors filed a lawsuit in a Tokyo court. Even though testimonies have been given, documents have been retrieved and forensic sites still remain, this history continues to being neglected. Museums have long served as important instruments for education in Japan and the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in Tokyo is leading the efforts to grant this history  recognition (Tai 2016, pp.  35–36). Meanwhile, the controversial Yasukuni Shrine with its adjacent Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum,2 also in Tokyo, goes as far in its militarism advocacy so as to host costume play parades where people dress up as imperial army soldiers to march at Yasukuni Shrine on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender (Shin and Sneider 2014). ‘Comfort women’ discourse organises these two museums as competitors over history. While their narratives undeniably invoke different accounts of history and diverging calls for justice and their strategies for educating and mobilising visitors vary accordingly, the question that I pose in this chapter is whether the official mourning of the war-dead necessarily has to be interpreted as a denial of ‘comfort system’ history. While the WAM insists that ‘comfort system’ history makes up an integral part of the war effort, the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan promote militarism as the only way to counter the victor’s justice that was imposed on Japan at the war’s official  ending. In this way,  ‘comfort women’ discourse plays out as a juxtaposition of left-wing anti-militarism against right-wing militarism advocacy. This organises ‘comfort women’ discourse as a choice of either invoking gender justice or countering victor’s justice; to enable either the recognition of ‘comfort system’ history or the official mourning of the war-dead. What such a counter-posing does is to frame recognition of ‘comfort system’ history to occur at the expense of official mourning and thereby leave bereavement open to exploitation for militarism advocacy. In this chapter, I scrutinise what is required for ‘comfort system’ history to become a part of national history. The chapter contrasts the bringing of ‘comfort system’ history to life by presenting survivors’ lifetime stories at the WAM with the forging of mourning with militarism at the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan. By exploring intersections of historical justice and history education in these museums, the chapter accounts for the structures and practices that challenge

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and sustain ‘comfort women’ discourse. It brings together hitherto isolated analyses that have been studied on their own terms, and reads them together in a way that not only points to their commonalities and divergences, but also explores how they may be productively understood to regenerate each other. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the WAM’s challenge to the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan opens up ‘comfort women’ discourse by disconnecting militarism advocacy from official  mourning and thereby enable ‘comfort stations’ and official mourning to co-exist in one history. By way of an outline, the chapter offers a brief background to the two museums. It then establishes ‘comfort women’ discourse as competing instrumentalisations of history that not only sustain the museums’ respective agendas, but also intensify the polarisation of ‘comfort women’ discourse by feeding them into ‘comfort women’ discourse as each other’s alleged extremes. Finally, the chapter sets out to rethink intersections of historical justice and history education to explore possible ways to unsettle that polarisation.

A History of Controversy The WAM opened in 2005, 60 years after the war’s official ending, in order to preserve the history and memory of gender-based violence (Nishino 2007, p.  1). It is volunteer run by women, for women, and displays survivors’ testimonies framed not as isolated events, but as parts of their lifetime stories (Watanabe 2015, p. 236). The WAM emerged in the course of the world-wide ‘comfort women’ movement to seek recognition and demand justice. This began in 1991 as courageous survivors filed a lawsuit after almost 50 years of neglect. This activism was enabled by emerging international law standards that established possibilities for individual redress as opposed to settlements negotiated by state leaders in the 1990s (Hein 2003, p. 134). Since its opening, the WAM has been leading political activism against conservative politicians and right-wing nationalists in collaboration with activists in several countries. The WAM archives documents from former ‘comfort women’s’ lawsuits and

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“encourages visitors to get to know victimized women and confront their truth telling” (Tai 2016, p. 36). Eika Tai describes how the aim of seeking recognition for this history emerged against fierce right-wing backlash from the beginning of these movements. The WAM was opened for three reasons: to preserve the records that were collected in preparation for the Women’s International Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery that was held in Tokyo in 2000; to honour the women in the Koreas, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Papua New Guinea, Guam and Japan who were subjected to the system; and to establish a ground for activism on violence against women and through that, foster amicable relations with neighbouring countries in Asia (Nishino 2007, p.  2). Since ‘comfort system’ history is excluded from history textbooks in Japan, the WAM represents the only permanent  venue for education about the ‘comfort system’ in Japan. This museum is divided into three parts: a permanent exhibition, an ongoing exhibition and a study area. A dedication to the late Yayori Matsui, the journalist and feminist activist who enabled the WAM’s opening by way of a personal donation, forms a part of the permanent exhibition (Watanabe 2015, 237). By contrast, Yasukuni Shinto Shrine was established as a part of Japan’s modernisation process in 1869 as a site dedicated to the worship of those who have fought for Japan in battle. It marked its 150th anniversary in 2019 (Yasukuni Yūshūkan). The Yasukuni is an individual religious corporation and does not belong to the Association of Shinto Shrines (Okuyama 2009, p. 240). John Nelson refers to it as “one of Japanese society’s most formidable and intimidating institutions” (2003, p. 446). The Yasukuni follows the conventional outline of a Shinto shrine (Breen 2004, p. 78). What differentiates it from other shrines is its claim on the souls of the 2.46 million war-dead that it enshrines. “Here, the souls of the dead are not only enshrined and propriated but also valorized and fetishized” (Nelson 2003, p. 446). The Yūshūkan counts among the most influential in Japan’s process of nation-building and imperial expansion as a means to inculcate the idea of Japanese supremacy (Tai 2016, p. 35; Nelson 2003, p. 446). Yasukuni regularly spurs controversy on August 15, the day of Japan’s surrender. While officials state that they make their visits to the Yasukuni with the intention of remembering the horrors of war in order to make it to never reoccur, critics suggest that the act of

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commemorating war criminals makes up a constitutional offense as official state visits breach the constitutional separation of religion from the state (Breen 2004, pp. 76–77). While the enshrinement of 14 convicted A-class war criminals in 1978 has become the focal point of this controversy (Tai 2016, p.  35), key to my argument in this chapter is the Yasukuni’s overall aspiration to sustain imperialist continuity through the Yūshūkan’s glorification of the military prowess of the Japanese empire3 (cf. ibid.; Nelson 2003, p. 446). The Yūshūkan comprises four permanent exhibition zones: a prologue zone; a modern history zone; a noble spirits’ sentiments zone; and a great exhibition and entrance hall. According to the front cover of the museum pamphlet, the prologue zone expresses “the ‘spirit of the samurai’ from ancient times to modern ages”; the modern history zone explains “Japanese modern history from the Meiji Restoration to the Greater East Asia War, exhibiting mementos of the noble spirits of fallen heroes from various wars”; the noble spirits’ sentiments zone invites the visitor to “learn the ‘sentiments’ of the noble spirits and their achievements through numerous photos and notes”; and the great exhibition and entrance hall displays “[l]arge weapons and items collected from old battlefields, including the human torpedo Kaiten and the rocket powered glider Chika […], and a zero fighter and a Model C56 locomotive No. 31” (Yasukuni Yūshūkan). While ‘comfort system’ history has been neglected by successive political establishments, there was a brief alteration after Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono admitted military involvement and coercive practices and issued an apology, the so-called Kono statement, in 1993. After this, all seven junior high school history textbook publishers were made to include (brief ) references to the ‘comfort system’ in 1997. These references had, however, disappeared entirely in 2013 in reaction to the right-­ wing backlash that they had invoked (Watanabe 2015, pp. 237–238).

Analytical Framework My argument in this chapter targets the organisation of ‘comfort women’ discourse. What I do first is to establish ‘comfort women’ discourse as competing instrumentalisations of history, and then rethink intersections

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of historical justice and history education to explore possible openings in the ways in which ‘comfort women’ discourse is organised. I do this by shifting from a logic of competition, in which the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan’s narrative is affirmed by negating the WAM’s narrative, to a logic of complementarity that makes the two inseparable. In this, I combine three analytical perspectives: David Cameron’s differentiation of museum functions (1971); Gustavo Buntix and Ivan Karp’s tactical museologies (2006); and Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe’s approach to educationalisation (2008, see also Keynes et al. 2021). By illustrating how the WAM and the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan alike are aimed to establish4 and challenge history, David Cameron’s differentiation of the museum’s forum function from its temple function (1971) establishes ‘comfort women’ discourse as competing instrumentalisations of history. Cameron’s differentiation of museum functions here organises the relation of the museum narratives according to a logic of competition. By using Gustavo Buntix and Ivan Karp’s tactical museologies (2006). I then  illuminate  how ‘comfort women’ discourse feeds the museum narratives into each other as alleged extremes. Finally, I use Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe’s educationalisation to point to how the museum narratives’ competing instrumentalisations of history might be re-contextualised  by shifting from a logic of competition to a logic of complementarity. Together, Cameron’s differentiation of museum functions, Buntix and Karp’s tactical museologies and Smeyers and Depaepe’s educationalisation establish ‘comfort women’ discourse as competing instrumentalisations of history, illuminate  how ‘comfort women’ discourse feeds the museum narratives into each other and open up possibilities to unsettle the polarising dynamics of ‘comfort women’ discourse.

Entangled Histories David Cameron differentiates the function of the museum as a forum and a temple respectively. The WAM, aligned with the function that Cameron stipulates for the forum, is set up “to confront established values and institutions” (1971, p.  19). Meanwhile, the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan fulfil Cameron’s expectation of the temple to make up a

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“structured sample of reality” that “fulfils a timeless and universal function” (1971, p. 23). Turning the tables, the WAM might also be understood to fulfil the temple function and the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan to fulfil the forum function. While both museums aim to challenge established values and institutions, they both also exhibit samples of reality that are intended to fulfil timeless and universal functions, even though these aims are articulated differently in each venue. The WAM in order “to confront established values and institutions” (Cameron 1971, p. 19) has to establish a “structured sample of reality” that “fulfils a timeless and universal function” (ibid., p. 23). Only by first establishing ‘comfort system’ history (the temple function) can there be a ground from where to advocate for the need to grant it recognition (the forum function). Likewise, the purpose of establishing the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan’s temple function is to use it to advance its forum function. The Yasukuni/ Yūshūkan case demonstrates how the two functions cannot be separated, since the very establishment of a (different) national origin story (the temple function) is what conditions its militarism advocacy (the forum function). The WAM and the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan establish one history each: the WAM of gender-based violence (Nishino 2007, p. 1); and the Yasukuni of militarised masculinity (Repo 2008, p.  219). While history at the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan invokes a continuity of militarism, the WAM presents the continuities of gender-based violence that follow in its wake. To recapitulate, ‘comfort women’ discourse is organised as a tension of, on the one hand, the WAM’s leftist anti-militarism and, on the other hand, the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan’s right-wing advocacy for Japan’s re-­ militarisation as the poles on a continuum that produce competitive, either/or versions of monolithic history. This competitive logic enforces a separation of militarism from gender-based violence. This framing, which makes gender-based violence a product of militarism, disallows a separation of militarism from gender-based violence as isolated systems. Thus, while a competitive reading of gender-based violence and militarism frames the acknowledgement of gender-based violence to disrupt militarism, a complementary reading sees how the one is contingent on the other.

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To establish the competitive logic of ‘comfort women’ discourse before I proceed to the museums, in this section I scrutinise two recent books that, although they are not formally connected to the museums, align closely with their respective narratives. The first one, Denying the comfort women: The Japanese state’s assault on historical truth, is edited by the WAM’s first secretary general Nishino Rumiko (2018), together with Kim Puja and Onozawa Akane,5 two gender studies and history scholars. The second one, Comfort women not “sex slaves”: Rectifying the myriad of perspectives,6 is written by Koichi Mera (2015), a California-based conservative intellectual and President of the Global Alliance for Historical Truth. Invocations of justice in both narratives come down to the authors’ respective grounds for historiography. This points to how history and justice are closely intertwined. While Mera conditions history by the (non-)availability of facts about the ‘comfort system’—and refrains from mentioning the paradox that it was the state that destroyed this evidence to begin with (Ueno 1999, pp. 131, 135)—Nishino et al., forego that the system remained known, but neglected, ever since the war’s official ending (2018; Ueno 1999, pp. 133, 136). Both narratives share the view that history is conditioned by truth (that is by testimonies and facts respectively). This plays out as the political left invokes testimonies as the primary ground that is available for this history to be written in the first place, as a consequence of said destruction of evidence, while the political right invokes ‘facts’ as the only ground for establishing any history at all as a measure to out rule the very possibility of a ‘comfort system’ history. Nishino et al. frame the ‘comfort women’ issue as a question about a justice that emanates out of the establishment of historical truth. By denying former ‘comfort women’ their dignity, they argue, the Japanese state is making itself guilty of an assault on historical truth (Nishino et al. 2018). Historical truth is here established on the basis of former ‘comfort women’s’ testimonies. In this, justice amounts to being heard and having one’s being, and story, recognised. Making the ‘comfort women’ issue a question about state responsibility amounts to a juridification of history. Mera also juridifies history, albeit with different implications. To divert responsibility away from the state, Mera blames former ‘comfort

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women’s’ families for their subjection to the system. By suggesting that former ‘comfort women’s’ enrolment was voluntary (again, blaming families rather than the state for being responsible for any coercive elements), he advocates for a freeing of the state from responsibility (2015, 2018). These books add to the museum narratives, in Nishino et al.’s case, by invoking a firm re-inscription of state responsibility and, in Mera’s case, by reconfirming an outspoken reallocation of responsibility away from the state. Nishino et al. and Mera’s accounts are, thus, both concerned with state responsibility. This organises ‘comfort women’ discourse on the basis of the assumption that there is a clearly defined line to invoke between justice and injustice. While such a clear distinction establishes ‘comfort system’ history, it also  sustains the polarised organisation of ‘comfort women’ discourse. While the two books revolve around grounds for historiography and justice claims, the remainder of the chapter connects the museums to this discourse and discusses museums’ educational dimensions. It outlines how the museums are organised to juridify and educationalise history, and scrutinises the intersections of historical justice and history education that they each rely on.

Juridified Histories Gustavo Buntix and Ivan Karp’s “’Tactical Museologies’ refers to processes whereby the museum idea is utilised, invoked, and even contested in the process of community formation” (Buntix and Karp 2006, p. 208). This concerns the symbolic capital that is associated with the idea of the museum according to a logic of competition over who gets “to present a universal point of view” (2006, p. 207) in a society. Applied to the WAM, tactical museologies might be understood in relation to Mina Watanabe’s work. Watanabe, activist and current secretary general, in Passing on the history of ‘comfort women’: the experiences of a women’s museum in Japan, accounts for her activism as a way of “pass[ing] on the history of Japan’s military sexual slavery” (2015, p. 236). Watanabe’s title is curious in that it carries the dual connotation of passing on (meaning forwarding on to

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future generations, as I understand Watanabe’s intention) and passing on (meaning neglecting this history, as a reference to successive postwar political establishments’ neglect). As such, Watanabe’s title, in itself, positions the WAM’s  historiography against the Yasukuni’s denial. Watanabe here proceeds beyond Nishino’s statement that the WAM’s purpose is about “the history and memory of the wartime violence committed by the Japanese military against women” (Nishino 2007, p. 1) by suggesting that the WAM was established to counter the denial of “the historical facts of Japan’s military sexual slavery system and its criminal nature” (Watanabe 2015, p. 245). This shifts foci from Nishino’s target of historical deeds to address the current responses to those deeds and aligns with what might be argued to make up a generalised intensification in searches for recognition of historical (in)justices. This reframes the stakes involved from being a question about history and memory to becoming a question of history and justice that puts the system’s “facts and its criminal nature” (Watanabe 2015, p. 245) rather than its “history and memory” (Nishino 2007, p. 1) at stake. This also points to a juridification of discourse. Tactical museologies could also be used to describe the Yasukuni as an important instrument  of education as a means of nation-building and imperial expansion to inculcate the idea of Japanese supremacy (Buntix and Karp 2006, p. 207). It could alternatively be understood to target Japan’s position in the world. Yasukuni became a private institution with the separation of religion from the state that was stipulated in the 1947 constitution7 (Hook and McCormack 2001, p. 11). The Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan today serve the dual purpose of advocating for Japan’s re-­ militarisation and of re-contextualising Japan’s recent history as less a product of the wartime (1931–1945) and more a product of Japan’s modernisation (from 1968 to the present). John Nelson suggests that war commemoration in Japan, apart from widespread destruction and the death that resulted from both conventional and nuclear weapons, is heavily burdened by defeat and unconditional surrender, by international condemnation of Japan’s military actions and by the reparations that were paid (2003, p.  444, note 1). Current Prime Minister Abe’s effort “to restore Japan’s honor” (Tai 2016, p.  44) might, accordingly, be

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understood in light of the ‘emasculation’ that Japan is perceived to having been subjected to at the war’s official ending (cf. Orr 2001). Thus, while the WAM writes ‘comfort system’ history against a history of neglect, the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan re-contextualise history to begin from Japan’s modernisation process rather from its prewar and wartime history. History, in this way, fulfils the role of an important instrument for an education that serves to inscribe a different national origin story. Buntix and Karp’s tactical museologies highlight the ways in which both venues are articulated as aspirations to justice against established conventions (even though their targets differ) (2006, p. 213). While the possibility to invoke justice was what initiated ‘comfort women’ activism to begin with, invocations of justice also sustain the polarised organisation of ‘comfort women’ discourse. Efforts undertaken to secure ‘comfort system’ history from once again falling into neglect are therefore, necessarily, two-sided. The WAM and the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan both juridify history: the WAM with the aim of holding perpetrators accountable for gender-based violence (cf. Nishino 2007, p. 1); and the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan with the aim of countering the victor’s justice that was imposed on Japan at the war’s official ending. This generates claims that are tied to gender-­ based  violence (gender justice) and militarism (victor’s justice), respectively. Until ‘comfort system’ survivors  filed their lawsuit, the US-imposed victim narrative had been so strongly connected to the nationalist narrative that victimhood under the Allied forces and the Japanese military regime had been almost all-pervasive in official discourse in Japan (Tai 2016, pp. 36–38). War was perceived as an act of the state and peace as an act of society (Kersten 2004, p.  502). Post-war society was, thus, understood to be victimised not only by the US-led allied occupation, but also by their prewar and wartime state. This generalised notion of victimhood has been invoked as a means to discourage differentiation within the category of the victim and thus to disenable ‘comfort women’s’ extraordinary suffering to be set apart from the war’s universal victimisation. While this highlights that everyone is a victim of war, it at the same time points to how invocations of victimhood might be used to silence rather than grant recognition.

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Educationalised Histories The WAM and the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan also educationalise history, suggesting that societal problems are to be solved by way of education (cf. Smeyers and Depaepe 2008, p. 2), and both are guided by the purpose to never again allow reoccurrence (although reoccurrence means different things in each venue). Educationalisation, as it is understood here, essentially concerns the transfer of social responsibility to an education system that marries emancipation with socialisation into a pre-defined set of progressive educational goals. For the WAM, this demonstrates that gender-­based violence and militarism are entangled. For the Yasukuni/ Yūshūkan, it implies fostering state expansion to never again having to be subjected to victor’s justice. Hence, the issues that each museum aims to solve is either to suspend  warfare on the basis of the inevitability of gender-­based violence that follows in its wake or to fostering state expansion (cf. Smeyers and Depaepe 2008, pp. 1–2). The WAM’s version of educationalisation offers a foundational challenge to the denial of the ‘comfort system’ that is produced at the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan. By writing ‘comfort system’ history, the WAM effectively demonstrates that militarism cannot be separated from gender-­ based violence. Along these lines, it is not difficult to envision a social responsibility that counters imperatives to an educationalisation that fosters state expansion, since state expansion (now and at the time) must necessarily produce some version of a prolonging of the history of the ‘comfort system’ system. One of the WAM’s aims, apart from writing ‘comfort system’ history, is to aid visitors in learning, thinking, and taking action (Tai 2016, p. 39) and the WAM exhibition hall is envisioned as a place to meet these women individually in order for visitors to understand the reality of sexual violence through listening to survivors’ personal voices. This is how survivors’ testimonies, accompanied by their portraits, came to take centre stage in the WAM’s exhibitions. Also here, like at the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan, conveyed emotions are employed as effective vehicles for education. At the WAM, the planners expected survivors’ portraits and gazes to be effective in conveying emotions in “a strategy of ‘truth telling’ for educating Japanese visitors” (ibid.).

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Yasukuni Shinto Shrine, designed to meet the political needs of the modern state to cultivate patriotism, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, became the focus of a vibrant state cult that sustained Japanese overseas aggression during the war. Spared by the US-led Allied Occupation power, the Yasukuni still today represents a substantive physical link to Japan’s imperial, militarist past. This imperial connection is what ensures a sense of continuity. The Yasukuni today performs the same ideological function as it did prior to 1945. The emperor, through an emissary, celebrates and commemorates the virtues of loyalty that underpinned the ultimate sacrifice that was made for him. This makes the Yasukuni a celebration of sacrifice for the imperial institution. Thus, Yasukuni priests are as much the guardians of the war-dead as they are guardians of a particular model of Japan’s imperial past. What is distinctive about the Yasukuni is its invocation of bereavement that connects mourning to militarism by way of appropriating the war-dead for ideological purposes. This was the case during the war and still remains the case today. The Yasukuni targets the resurrection of imperial glory and wishes to morally transform “Japan’s otherwise irredeemable youth” (Breen 2004, p. 85). By calling attention to the millions who died ‘heroic deaths’ in a ‘glorious war’, Japan is believed to come out as a ‘glorious nation’ that is worthy of their sacrifice too. In this way, the war-dead are used as a means to transform society today (ibid., p. 82-5). To make the youth realise this, the Yūshūkan displays video messages that convey a ‘plight to loyalty’ that is tailored to target the many visiting school children in particular. Thus, while the WAM relies on visitors’ understanding of the realities that imperial subjects were and are faced with, the Yasukuni relies on (school children’s) obedience toward authority. The difference between these two versions of education is that the latter invokes an uncritical transmission of an established legacy, while the former is conditioned by the visitor’s critical eye. The WAM, thus, poses a foundational challenge to the patriotism that laid the groundwork for the state cult of overseas aggression not only by demonstrating its consequences, but also by invoking a radically different way of educating about it. This goes to the core of the imperial connection to Japan’s militaristic past that conditions the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan’s very raison d’être.

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The continuities that are invoked at the WAM and the Yasukuni/ Yūshūkan stand in stark contrast to each other. While they both serve ideological purposes, the WAM connects militarism to gender-based violence, while the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan connects its ideology to the war-­ dead. The WAM’s version of history, which is primarily established on the basis of survivors’ testimonies, forges a connection of militarism to gender-based violence. Meanwhile, the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan’s version relies on the appropriation of the war-dead and works as a guardian of a model of Japan’s imperial past that effectively is conditioned by the denial of the ‘comfort system’. For as long as the war-dead remain connected to Japan’s past in a manner that promotes imperial continuity, mourning will maintain its connection to militarism advocacy. Mourning, thus, needs to be disconnected from the Yasukuni’s ideological project of appropriation of the war-dead for the imperial connection to be severed. Such a disconnection might be accomplished by a shifting understanding of ethics from a view of the Yasukuni as “an immense plus for the ethical life of the nation” (Breen 2004, p.  84) to a questioning of its appropriation of the war-dead for ideological ends; thus, by disconnecting mourning from militarism advocacy. Focusing on intersections of historical justice and history education, such a disconnection of the very possibility of appropriating the war-dead for ideological purposes opens up for a mourning that stands apart from militarism advocacy. This suits the Yasukuni’s outspoken goal of promoting a mourning of the war-dead without passing judgment on their lifetime deeds. It, however, disables the implicit possibility of appropriation that the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan’s militarism advocacy relies on. An understanding of historical justice and history education that connects mourning with militarism advocacy relies on bereavement to forge that connection. What emerges in the WAM’s challenge to the Yasukuni/ Yūshūkan’s forging of mourning with militarism is, thus, the impossibility of maintaining a continuity that invokes bereavement as the ground for militarism advocacy and thus frees mourning to being enabled without such appropriation.

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 penings: Rethinking Intersections O of Historical Justice and History Education in ‘Comfort Women’ Discourse In this chapter, I have established and rethought the competitive logic that organises ‘comfort women’ discourse. To do this, I began by juxtaposing ‘comfort system’ history with militarism advocacy  as either/or alternatives and then shifted to a logic of complementarity in which the two were, rather, seen as inseparable from each other. In this rethinking of the intersections of historical justice and history education in ‘comfort women’ discourse, I illuminated what a rethinking of the logics that connect the two museums; from a framing as competitors over historiography, to an understanding that instead focuses on their different ways of approaching the relations of militarism to gender-based violence might accomplish. While the WAM establishes a history that makes genderbased violence the inevitable side-effect of militarism, the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan seek to establish a beginning for Japanese history that does not depart from the war’s official ending, but instead takes a combination of ancient history and Japan’s modernisation as its point of departure. To shift from a national origin story that portrays Japan as humiliated to instead portray a strong Japan with long-­established values alters not only its image, but also the temporalities that are invoked to convey it. The major difference between the histories that are presented at the WAM and the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan is that the one presented at the WAM points to the continuities of gender-based violence, while that of the Yasukuni/ Yūshūkan is conditioned by the denial of such a connection. By calling out the militarism advocacy that takes place in the Yasukuni’s rituals (Nelson 2003, p. 446) and by accounting for how mourning is connected to military paraphernalia and revisionist history at the Yūshūkan by way of invoking bereavement (Yasukuni Yūshūkan), the chapter suggests that the stakes involved in the denial of ‘comfort system’ history goes to the heart of the claims that are related to the victor’s justice that was imposed on ‘Japan’ at the war’s official ending. By understanding the history that is displayed at the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan from this vantage rather than as

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enacted for the outright purpose of denying ‘comfort system’ history, ‘comfort women’ discourse can be re-­contextualised to open up for the co-existence of ‘comfort system’ history and the mourning of the wardead in one history. By re-contextualising the museum narratives, the WAM’s challenge to the Yasukuni/Yūshūkan is able to shift this very structure (with its ensuing practices) to open up possibilities for reconciling currently competing victimhoods, which in light of this re-contextualisation, too, are able to co-exist in one history.

Notes 1. In this chapter, I write ‘comfort women’ discourse when I refer to the polarised organisation of this discourse and ‘comfort system’ history to denote the history of neglection of the set-up, recruitment and maintenance of so-called ‘comfort stations’. I refer to it as a system to highlight its systematic character and continuities after the war’s official ending (for these latter aspects, see Ueno 1999 and Sakamoto 2010). 2. In general, I refer to the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan as parts of one narrative and only sometimes highlight specificities of each throughout the chapter. 3. The Yūshūkan was built on the Yasukuni grounds in 1882 for the purpose of glorifying the Japanese empire (Tai 2016, p. 35; Nelson 2003, p. 446). 4. I use the terms ‘establish’ and ‘write’ history interchangeably throughout the text. 5. I have kept these authors’ names in the order of surname, first name as they are organised in the book (Nishino et al. 2018). 6. Mera’s book has been published in two editions (2015, 2018). The NOT is capitalised in the second edition (2018). This is in itself symptomatic of an intensification of the polarised organisation of ‘comfort women’ discourse. 7. The 1947 constitution, over half a century later, remains without amendments (Hook and McCormack 2001, p. 158; Martin 2019).

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10 Ethics and Historical Justice Göran Collste

Introduction The last decades we have witnessed a large number of claims for historical justice, rectification and redress.1 Among these are claims for rectification for injustices committed under colonial rule, for example Mau Mau victims of the British colonial war in Kenya, Herero victims of the German genocide in former Southwest Africa, the Caribbean nations for the slave trade; for wrongs committed during the Second World war, for example Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Japanese imprisoned in the USA, Japanese soldiers’ “comfort women” in Korea and China; and for rectification after dictatorships, civil wars and tyrannies, for example  South Africa after apartheid, war crimes during the war in former Yugoslavia, Argentina after military dictatorship. These claims for rectification have in common that they refer to injustices in the past. But they also have in common that these past injustices G. Collste (*) Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_10

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have reverberations in the present. As novelist William Faulkner writes: “The past is never dead, it is not even past”. That is why the victims raise their voices to claim historical justice. Claims for rectification pose challenges for historians. The claims are in some cases based on controversial historical accounts. For example, Bosnians, Serbs and Croatians present different narratives of what really happened during the civil war in former Yugoslavia. Whose narrative is most accurate? To find out the truth there is a need for historical inquiries. But that is not enough. The parties of a conflict interpret historical incidents differently and history fits better or worse in the parties’ overall horizons of understanding. Thus, there is also a need for methods to “fuse horizons of understanding” to use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s expression (Gadamer 2011). Hence, historical injustices raise both questions of historical evidence and facts, and of how to balance guilt and responsibility. Both aspects—truth and interpretation—are important for truth commissions with a mandate to investigate what really happened and who bears responsibility. Historical justice raises challenging questions for history, for example how to understand and reconcile conflicting views on history, how to find the truth in a situation with differing interpretations of a historical incident. But historical inquiries are not enough for analysing historical justice. Historical justice also raises important ethical questions, for example, what are the reasons for historical and rectificatory justice, how to understand agency, freedom and responsibility and what are the relation between justice and forgiveness. Thus, historical justice needs knowledge, insights and methods from both history and ethics. Historical justice is a multi-disciplinary topic. This fact has implications for both research and education on historical justice. In this chapter, I present three recent cases of historical justice: the Caribbean nations’ declaration of Reparations for Native Genocide and Slavery from 2013, the claims of former Mau Mau adherents for rectification from Great Britain for atrocities during the colonial war in the 1950s and the restitution of African art in French museums. These cases illustrate the need for both historical and ethical inquires. Next, I discuss some ethical issues raised by historical justice. I try to define the concept historical justice and I discuss criteria for historical justice and why and

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when it is justified to aim for historical justice. In the final part I discuss how historical justice can be addressed in school.

 laims for Rectification After Colonialism: C Three Cases The Case of the Caribbean The Caribbean nations have joined to seek rectification for slavery and the slave trade. The initiative gained force at the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade in 2007. Representatives of Caribbean governments claimed rectification from Britain and other European nations that benefitted from the slave trade (Beckles 2013, pp. 223–229). In July 2013, the heads of governments of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) issued a declaration demanding reparation for genocide of the Indigenous population and for slavery and slave trade during colonialism. They set up the CARICOM Reparation Commission with representatives of the governments to prepare reparatory demands. The chair, Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer of Antigua, declared: We know that our constant search and struggle for development resources is linked directly to the historical inability of our nations to accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and colonialism. These nations that have been the major producers of wealth for the European slave-owning economies during the enslavement and colonial periods entered Independence with dependency straddling their economic, cultural, social and even political lives. (CARICOM 2013)

The Commission addressed not only Britain, but also France for its colonial legacy in Haiti and the Netherlands in Surinam, as well as other European nations that were involved in the slave trade like Spain, Portugal, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The heads of state of 15 Caribbean nations also approved of a ten-point plan for rectification, including demands on European countries to apologise for their involvement in the slave trade and to pay compensation to the descendants of

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slaves who are still suffering from the consequences of slavery and the slave trade. Furthermore, they claimed that the European nations should “devise a development strategy to help improve the lives of poor communities in the Caribbean still devastated by the after-effects of slavery” (Pilkington 2014). Historian Hilary Beckles played an important role in the Commission that prepared the Declaration. In his book Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide in the Caribbean (2013) he describes how the Indigenous population was slaughtered by the colonisers and how the cotton economy based on slavery and the slave trade enriched Britain and impoverished the Caribbean islands.

The Case of the Mau Mau in Kenya In April 2011, four elderly Kenyans travelled to London. They were some of the thousands of Kenyan prisoners detained by the British during the war against the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. The task of the four Kenyans was to put the British government to court for atrocities during the colonial war against the Mau Mau movement almost 60 years earlier. Their claims for rectification had the following background. Around the year 1950, Mau Mau militants, mainly from the Kikuyu tribe, started attacking Africans in Kenya who were appointed by the colonial authority as chiefs, civil servants or informers. Many of them became extremely wealthy and seen as Quislings by most Kikuyus (Elkins 2005). The most severe ambush took place in the northern settlement of Lari in March 1953. Families of collaborators were violently assaulted and the insurgents killed 120 people. The Mau Mau attack was followed by a counter attack by the colonial Home Guard against anyone who was a suspected Mau Mau sympathiser, leading to the deaths of approximately 200 persons (Anderson 2005, pp. 126–130). In order to repress the uprising, the colonial government proclaimed a state of emergency in 1954. The city of Nairobi was under siege and no Africans were allowed to leave the city. Police went through the African communities looking for Mau Mau adherents and sympathisers. The search continued and by the end of the year as many as 71,000 Kikuyu,

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or one in eight Kikuyu adult males, were detained in British prisons or camps (Anderson 2005, pp.  313–314). The detained were harassed, beaten and tortured and the camps were by British opposition politician named after the German concentration camps as “Kenya’s Belsen” and “Kenya’s Mauthausen”. Historian David Anderson makes the following estimations of the death toll as result of the conflict: all in all, Mau Mau soldiers killed 32 European settlers, 200 British soldiers and 1800 Kenyan collaborators. Officially the colonial government killed 12,000 Mau Mau soldiers and sympathisers, but in reality more than 20,000 according to Anderson (2005) and many more according to Elkins (Elkins 2005, p. 366). The four Kenyans who arrived in London in 2011 were victims of castration, torture and rape committed in British detention camps. Near the end of the colonial rule of Kenya, the British colonial administration systematically destroyed documents that could show any kind of brutality or unethical behaviour by British soldiers or civil servants not only in Kenya but in other colonies as well (Anderson 2011). However, in 2013 thousands of documents from colonial Kenya and many other colonies, as well as documents about the slave trade, hidden by the British foreign office were revealed to the public. The Mau Mau was at the time of the uprising seen by the British as “…a sinister tribal cult affecting a largely primitive and superstitious people…” (Meredith 2006, p. 79). Due to the lack of documentation, and efforts to cover the history there was a lack of knowledge of what really happened. However, two historians played an important role for revealing the hidden history of what happened in Kenya in the 1950s. Caroline Elkins, while writing her PhD thesis, went to Kenya and interviewed Kenyans who had witnessed the imperial war. In her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya published in 2005, she told the lost history of the British colonial war. Historian David Anderson of Warwick University uncovered a cache of documents, hidden for more than half a century by British governments, which detailed systematic torture and abuse of Mau Mau freedom fighters during the 1950s Kenya Emergency. Colonialism has not only left political and economic legacies, but also cultural. During this period of history, Africa lost most of its art.

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 he Case of Restitution of African Art T in French Museums African art in French museums is an example of how past injustices have left traces in the present. In a speech in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, on November 28, 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron proclaimed: “Starting today, and in the next five years, I want to see the conditions put in place so as to allow for the temporary or definitive restitution of African cultural heritage to Africa” (Noce 2018). To follow up his speech, Macron initiated a study of African art in French museums. The aims were both to find out the amount of African art in French museums and how the art was acquired. The study was presented in 2018. It reported the astonishing result that there are approximately 90,000 pieces of arts from Africa in French museums, and of these 70,000 pieces in the Quai Branly museum in Paris. The art originates from both former French colonies and from other African countries, most from Chad, Cameroon, Madagascar and Mali, with around 6000–9000 pieces of arts from each of these countries. The commission also tried to trace how the art was taken from Africa and placed in French museums. About two-thirds of African art in French museums were acquired before 1960, that is during colonial times. The report also shows that there are approximately 180,000 pieces of African art in the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels, and 69,000  in the British Museum. It is estimated that between 90 and 95 per cent of all African classical art is to be found outside of Africa (Sarr and Savoy 2018). The commission investigating African art in French museums is an example of the importance of historical investigations in order to understand enduring injustice. Bénédicte Savoy, one of the commissioners, is an art historian. One of the commission’s task was to inquire how and when the pieces of African art had been transferred from Africa. A crucial question was if the transfer was legal or the result of theft. As expected, the answer is that most of the art was transferred to Europe “without consent”, as Sarr and Savoy writes. The investigation of African art in French museums also raised important moral questions. As Bénédicte

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Savoy states: “…we are dealing with the case of a continent which has almost nothing left of its history when we have it all. The aim is not to empty Western museums to fill up the African ones, but to invent a new relationship based on ethics and equity” (Noce 2018). What, then, is the meaning of equity? Under what conditions is rectification after historical injustices or restitution of stolen art morally justified and how can equity and justice be achieved? These are some ethical questions raised by the French investigation.

The Interdisciplinarity of Historical Justice The study of historical justice will benefit from interdisciplinary cooperation. Obviously, there is a need for historical investigations of what happened in the past. But historical inquiries are not enough. There is also a need for ethical reflection of what ought to be done today as a consequence of historical injustices. In this part, I will discuss how both historical and ethical inquiries are needed for understanding historical justice.

History My three examples of rectificatory justice, the CARICOM proposal for rectification for the slave trade, the claims of the former Mau Mau adherents and the investigation of African art in French museums, illustrate the important role of historians and the need for historical inquiries for claims of historical justice and restitution. The claims must be grounded in solid historical knowledge and evidence, and as we have noticed, historians have played important roles for all the three cases of historical justice. Claims for historical justice also pose challenges for historians. The claims are grounded on a presumption that there is a link between the original injustice and the present. However, all historical wrongs do not ground claims for rectification today. Some incidents may be commemorated but do not raise cases of rectification. Only those past wrongs that

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still affect the lives of now living individuals or have implications for the descendants of victims of historical injustices raise a case for possible rectification today (Collste 2015, pp. 140–141). But how can a causal link between the historical incidence and the present situation be demonstrated. For example, how can it be demonstrated that the slave trade in the eighteenth century is a factor behind present-day poverty in the Caribbean, as is claimed by the CARICOM initiative? Perhaps there are other more important explanations of present poverty? What degree of certainty is needed for backing up justified demands for rectification (Winter 2006)? These questions pose challenges for historians engaged in inquiries of historical injustices. Investigations of the historical background of claims for historical justice also challenge the professional ethics of the historian. History is a critical discipline. The historian’s task is to investigate a historical event and, based on the inquiry, be able to describe, contextualise and explain it. The historian must consider all relevant aspects and live up to scholarly norms of objectivity and comprehensiveness. On the other hand, historical investigations are not done in a social vacuum. The historian is working in a world with oppression, poverty and exploitation. This becomes obvious when dealing with issues of historical wrongs. Here, historical inquiries might make a difference in the present and the results can be used in support of the victims of oppression and injustices. Furthermore, as both Anderson’s and Elkins’ research of the Mau Mau uprising illustrate, historians have the skill, and perhaps even obligation, to disclose episodes and incidents that are hidden by the perpetrators, and reveal the history of suffering and harms. Elkins writes, “Even the most assiduous purges, however, often fail to clean up all the incriminating evidence. I spent years going through file upon file of official documents looking for anything that pertained to the detention camps” (Elkins 2005, p. xiii). However, for Elkins, interviewing survivors living in the Kenyan countryside was an even more fruitful method to get behind the official smokescreens and reveal what really happened when the British colonial regime purged the Mau Mau uprising. And historian David Anderson managed to assist the four Mau Mau victims in London in their efforts to document abuses during the uprising. He could then also disclose the huge number of “disappeared” official documents telling the stories of

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British abuses in the colonies when the British left Kenya, but also when they left other colonies, for example Palestine and Cyprus (Anderson 2011). How, then, should a historian reasonably balance the professional norms? Ideally, the historian uses their skills and knowledge as best as they can in doing an objective and comprehensive inquiry of issues of historical justice. As Klaus Neumann writes, historians “… are involved in the production of truth (albeit not ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ truth), and if such production takes place in the context of attempts to redress historic wrongs, then there is no clear-cut distinction between history’s truth and history’s justice” (Neumann 2014, p. 157). When exploring “history’s justice” the historian could be accompanied by an ethicist. What then are the ethical issues raised by historical justice and how can an ethicist contribute to the discussion?

Ethics Claims for historical justice must be based on historical knowledge. But why should we bother about injustices in the past? What is the point and purpose of inquires of historical justice? What does a right to rectification and a duty to rectify entail? When we try to answer these questions, we enter the domain of ethics. We bother about historical justice because victims raise claims of rectification and perpetrators have duties to rectify. The purpose of these investigation is to find out if their claims are justified. But what are the conditions for a right to rectification? Ethics is a philosophical discipline studying morality, and justice is a much-analysed moral concept. Claims for historical justice do not only pose challenges for history but also for ethics. In this section, I will first clarify the meaning of historical justice by a model. I will then discuss some conditions for rectificatory justice and some reasons for rectification. I will also discuss my three cases in the light of the ethical aspects of historical justice. Common for claims of historical justice is that past injustices have implications for the present discussions of justice, that is, if A has harmed B, A has to somehow rectify this act later. A has a duty to rectify and B a

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right to rectification. Let me formalise the components of rectificatory justice in the following model: A Model for Rectificatory justice Case P: X (an agent: person, group, state, etc.), did A (harm: exploit, steal, oppress, kill, etc.), to Y (the victim: a person, group, state, etc.), at t1 (time). Given Case P, rectificatory justice requires at t2 i. X acknowledges the harm (A) done to Y at t1, ii. X compensates Y (or Y’s descendants) with B (something valuable: money, etc.) or returns what was taken at t1. We can now contextualise this model by applying it to the cases above: The Caribbean case. The colonial powers exploited slaves and colonies during the time of the slave trade. Rectificatory justice requires that they acknowledge the exploitation and compensate the descendants of the slaves who are still suffering from the consequences of the slave period. The Mau Mau case. Britain suppressed the uprising in Kenya in the 1950s and imprisoned many Mau Mau adherents in concentration camps. Rectificatory justice requires that Britain acknowledges the suppression and compensates the Mau Mau adherents who were imprisoned and their descendants. The stolen art case. France, and other colonial powers, transferred art from the colonies and placed it in their own museums. Rectificatory justice requires that the stolen art is returned to the places of origin.

When Is Rectification Needed? What, then are the criteria for rectificatory justice? When is rectificatory justice required and when is it better to forget past injustices? A first criterion, I will suggest, is that the historical harm must have some morally relevant reverberations in the present. This means that rectification is required only if there are some contemporary individuals who are harmed as a result of what happened in the past. History is filled with exploitation, robbery, oppressive regimes and killing, but not all these incidents requires rectification. We can, for example, recollect the Vikings’ terror and robberies in France and England in the ninth to tenth centuries, but

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there are no reasons for the Scandinavian nations to rectify today while there are no one who is harmed today by what happened then. The requirement that the past injustices must have some morally relevant reverberations in the present also implies that some historical harm is fading over time and, as a consequence, reasons for rectification becomes weaker and weaker until they at least disappear. However, that does not mean that no injustices committed a long time ago cannot be the object of rectificatory justice today. As the case of colonialism and slave trade in the Caribbean illustrates, even if the original exploitation took place a long time ago, the harmful consequences are enduring, and what happened then have reverberations in the present in the form of poverty and on-going rights violations. A second question is if rectificatory justice requires that the past injustices were intentional. It seems reasonable that a perpetrator only has reasons to rectify for intentional harm and not for harms that he or she was not aware of, nor for harmful consequences of well-intended acts. For example, some art museums and their consultants may have transferred African art to European museums with the good intentions to let Europeans appreciate African art, or just because they wanted to earn money. But, as a consequence the art was taken from Africa without consent and is no longer accessible for the Africans. The question if a perpetrator has a duty to rectify for harm that was not intended is indeed complicated (Couto 2018). On the one hand it seems odd that one has to rectify for harmful consequences of well-intended acts. On the other hand, the distinction between intentional and unintentional harm is not meaningful for the victims. They suffer anyway from the consequences. Perhaps one could argue that there is a normative connection between the beneficiary of an injustice and the victims. If we become aware of harmful consequences of our past acts, as morally conscious persons we feel obliged to rectify in some way. For example, the European owners (private or state) of African art wish to return the art to Africa when they become aware of the original injustice and the enduring injustice that Africans lack access to their own art. A distinction between reasons for moral blame and reasons for rectification may clarify the argument. There is no reason to morally blame a person or a state for harmful consequences of un-intended or well-­ intended actions that the agent for good reasons was not aware of. But, if

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you become aware of the fact that you have caused harm, you would most likely compensate or mitigate the harm you caused. You then have remedial responsibilities due to the fact that you caused the harm, even if it was not intentional. Thus, even unintended harmful acts call for rectification, even though the agent is not morally blameworthy.

Why Is Rectification Needed? Why, then, should we aim for rectification? A first and foremost reason is that rectification is a way to realise justice. “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought”, as philosopher John Rawls writes (Rawls 1971, p.  3). Justice has intrinsic value. Historical justice means that a state that has treated its citizens unjust and harmful is obliged to compensate them and similarly, a nation that has not recompensed another nation for earlier injustices owes a debt to it. But rectificatory justice is not only backward-looking but also forward-­ looking. Many past injustices have reverberations in the present. Philosopher Spinner-Halev speaks of “enduring injustice” (Spinner-­ Halev 2012). For example, as was emphasised by representatives of the Caribbean nations, slavery and the slave trade still impoverish descendant of the slaves, and obviously, the transfer of African art to European and American museums have had enduring implications for generations of Africans. But if rectification is taken seriously by the former perpetrators, it has the power to end enduring injustices. Ideally, rectification leads to reconciliation. As Margaret Walker writes, “The direct concern of restorative justice is the moral quality of future relations between those who have done, allowed, or benefited from wrong and those harmed, deprived, or insulted by it” (Walker 2006, p. 385). According to Janna Thompson, reconciliation is achieved when …the harm done by injustice to relations of respect and trust that ought to exist between individuals or nations has been repaired or compensated for by the perpetrator in such a way that this harm is no longer regarded as standing in the way of establishing or re-establishing these relations. (Thompson 2002, p. 50)

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Thus, rectificatory justice has both intrinsic value while justice is achieved, and instrumental value as a means for reconciliation, trust and peaceful relations between perpetrators and victims of previous injustices.

Cases of Rectification What then were the responses to the three cases of claims for rectificatory justice described above? Many of the European former slave-trading nations refused to respond to the CARICOM declaration and the Caribbean claims for rectification. As Daniel Butt argues, to refuse to acknowledge and rectify for past injustices is in itself a wrong which adds to the original wrongs (Butt 2009, pp. 185–187). However, even if representatives of former slave-trading nations have remained silent, the CARICOM initiative has been taken seriously by other institutions. For example, based on a report on the early funding of the University of Glasgow, showing that many grants came from earnings from slavery and the slave trade in the Caribbean, the university initiated in 2019 a £20 million programme for rectification. The aim was to atone for the university’s historical links to the transatlantic slave trade, through paying for grants for students from the Caribbean and initiating a research programme on slavery and the slave trade in cooperation with the University of the West Indies (Mullen and Newman 2018). The initiative by the University of Glasgow actualises the question of which institution has a duty to rectify for past wrongs. Normally, like in the case of Mau Mau vs Great Britain, it is a state that bears the duty to rectify. However, as the initiative by the University of Glasgow shows, also other institutions that were involved in past injustices could have duties of rectification. These duties are justified by the historical connection between on the one hand the original injustice and exploitation, and on the other hand the present gaps between the wealth of the Scottish university and the poverty of the Caribbean. In a court decision from October 2012, the Mau Mau adherents were given the right to sue the British government. However, the court case was never completed due to a lack of evidence and witnesses over 50 years after the war. The case could then have been another failed and soon

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forgotten effort to achieve justice, but surprisingly it was not. On behalf of the British government, in a speech to the House of Commons the Minister of foreign affairs William Hague, denied juridical liability for the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising. But as an alternative, moral, rectification he publicly recognised the ill treatments of the colonial government, regretted the abuses and promised compensation to the surviving victims who were still alive (Collste 2015, pp. 181–182). On June 6, 2013, Hague said in the House of Commons: I would like to make it clear now and for the first time on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the emergency in Kenya. The British Government recognise that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. The British Government sincerely regret that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence. Torture and ill treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity, which we unreservedly condemn. (House of Commons 2013)

My third case is the restitution of stolen African art in European and American museums. It seems reasonable to argue that the French—and other European—museums are obliged to return stolen African art to the countries of origin. Although, president Macron’s initiative in 2018 to investigate African art in French museums with the aim of restitution was courageous and innovative, in practice not much has happened since. There are many obstacles against restitution: the French law states that public museum collections in France are deemed “inalienable” and the museums want to keep the treasures.

Historical Justice and Historical Consciousness How, then, can historical justice be taught in school? We need historical knowledge in order to understand our present society. This is especially true for issues of historical injustices. Past atrocities are not only present in the memories of the victims. They have also in various ways implied

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enduring injustices visible today; in the global unjust structure, in permanent refugee camps due to unresolved border disputes in the past, and in stolen art in imperial museums. This means that we cannot grasp and understand today’s society without historical knowledge. Claims for historical justice offer a fruitful gateway for studying history. For example, the claims of the Mau Mau adherents expose colonialism in Africa, the CARICOM declaration, claiming for rectification for the consequences of slavery and the slave trade exposes the Triangular trade and global economic history. The awareness of how the past is connected to the present and future is theorised in the discussion on historical consciousness, a central concept in recent discussions on history education. According to Thorp, historical consciousness means “…an ability to create connections between the three tenses past, present, and future” (Thorp 2013, p. 201). These connections become visible in the enduring injustices. Take the African art in European museums as a case in point. A student who visits the Quai Branly museum will admire the beauty, craft and skill of the African art. He or she then asks how it ended there. The answer connects the past injustices to the present exhibition, and perhaps inspires the student to do something about it by, for example, campaigning for a restoration of the art to its rightful owners. In this way, the present becomes connected to the past and to the future. But issues of historical justice also raise important ethical controversies. What is the meaning of justice and why is it important? How can conflicts and war be resolved? What are the requirements for reconciliation and peace in post-conflict societies? The South African Commission on justice and reconciliation after apartheid with its achievements and failures is an illustrative case in point to be studied in ethics (Tutu 2000). The South African example can be used for ethics teaching of the meaning of peace and reconciliation in both philosophy and religious study courses. In sum, issues of historical justice and claims for rectification have relevance for various subjects in school. The real world is not divided into different subjects, and hence, the best way to teach historical justice is by way of teamwork involving teachers of, for example, history, ethics, philosophy and religion. The subjects can complement each other and

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provide different aspects on historical justice in particular, and on the impact of history for the present in general. Historical justice could also raise issues for art studies in school. As was noticed earlier, an enduring impact of colonialism is the stolen art from former colonies in Africa, Latin America and Asia in European museums. This art mirrors cultures and religious rituals from different ages in the past. Student visits to museums exhibiting the art (for example the West African Museum in Brussels, the Museum of Quai Branly in Paris or the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm), can provide valuable experiences of the meaning of art, how art can be interpreted and also raise discussion of restitutions of stolen art and so on. Finally, historical events and injustices in the past are often mirrored in literature. For example, experiences of colonialism are narrated by authors from former colonies. Maryse Condé from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean writing about colonialism and its aftermath and Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o from Kenya, who in some novels describes the Mau Mau rebellion, are just two examples (Condé 1984; wa Thiong’o 1964).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that the study of historical justice needs interdisciplinary cooperation. Claims for rectification for historical wrongs could give rise to controversies and illustrate divergent interpretations of history. Hence, historical inquiries are needed in order to get a better understanding of what happened in the past. However, to assess claims for rectificatory justice and redress, historical knowledge is not enough. There is also a need for ethical reflection and ethical analyses and, hence, for insights and skills of ethicists. While past injustices have various reverberations in the present, teaching historical justice will demonstrate the importance of history teaching in school. History is no more a boring rendition of what happened ages ago, but a necessary subject enlightening our understanding of present-­ day global conflicts. The teaching of historical justice will raise the students’ historical consciousness and demonstrate the need for moral reflection and ethical analysis of important political values like justice, equity and reconciliation.

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Note 1. In the discussion on historical justice the terminology varies and the terms “rectificatory justice”, “corrective justice”, “compensatory justice”, “reparative justice” and “restorative justice” are used. In this chapter, I use the term “rectificatory justice”.

References Anderson, David. 2005. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. New York, London: Norton and Company. ———. 2011. Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle? The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39 (5): 699–716. Beckles, Hilary. 2013. Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide in the Caribbean. Kingston: University of West Indies Press. Butt, Daniel. 2009. Rectifying International Injustice: Principles of Compensation an Restitution Between Nations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CARICOM. 2013. http://www.caricom.org/jsp/pressreleases/press_releases_ 2013/pres147_13.jsp. Collste, Göran. 2015. Global Rectificatory Justice. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Condé, Maryse. 1984. Segu. Penguin Random House. Couto, Alexandra. 2018. The Beneficiary Pays Principle and Strict Liability: Exploring the Normative Significance of Causal Relations. Philosophical Studies 175 (9): 2169–2189. Elkins, Caroline. 2005. Imperial Reckoning. The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Gadamer, Hans-George. 2011. Wahrheit und Methode. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. House of Commons. 2013. Official Report, Parliamentary Debate. parliament. uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/chan13.pdf. Meredith, Martin. 2006. The State of Africa. A History of Fifty Years of Independence. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publisher. Mullen, Stephen, and Simon Newman. 2018. Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow Report and Recommendations of the University of Glasgow History of Slavery Steering Committee. https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/ Media_607547_smxx.pdf.

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Neumann, Klaus. 2014. Historians and the Yearning for Historical Justice. Rethinking History 18 (2): 145–164. Noce, Vincent. 2018. Senegal and Ivory Coast Will Ask for Return of Objects in French Museums. The Art Newspaper, November 29. Pilkington, Ed. 2014. The Guardian. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com. [Accessed 11.03.2014]. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harward University Press. Sarr, Felwine, and Benedicte Savoy. 2018. The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. http://restitutionreport2018.com/ sarr_savoy_en.pdf. Spinner-Halev, Jeff. 2012. Enduring Injustice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Janna. 2002. Taking Responsibility for the Past, Reparation and Historical Justice. Cambridge: Polity. Thorp, Robert. 2013. The Concept of Historical Consciousness in Swedish History Didactical Research. In Cultural and Religious Diversity and Its Implications for History Education, ed. Joanna Wojdon, 207–224. Schwalbach: Wochenshau Verlag. Tutu, Desmond. 2000. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Image Books. wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. 1964. Weep Not, Child. Heinemann. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2006. Moral Repair. Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge. Winter, Stephen. 2006. Uncertain Justice: History and Reparations. Journal of Social Philosophy 37 (3): 342–359.

Part III Educational Materials: Textbooks, Curricula, Policy

11 Textbook Revisions as Educational Atonement? Possibilities and Challenges of History Education as a Means to Historical Justice Eleni Christodoulou

Introduction In her fascinating study on the emergence of accountability for human rights abuses through the global diffusion of human rights norms, Sikkink (2011) puts forward the idea of a ‘justice cascade’; an international normative framework that changed world politics by holding individuals, including state officials, accountable for human rights violations. As the rationale behind transitional justice is to deal with past legacies of human I dedicate this chapter to my late father, Gregorios Christodoulou, who passed away at the end of 2020, shortly before the book was published. As I worked on this chapter by his bedside during his very difficult final stages and he encouraged me to finish it, I know he would have loved to read the book in print.

E. Christodoulou (*) European University Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research , Braunschweig, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_11

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rights violations in a way that adequately addresses victims’ needs, a lot of the mechanisms adopted in this pursuit of justice, such as truth commissions, exhumations or trials are related to the recovery of truth, be it part of ‘forensic truth’ or a ‘broader truth’ (Kovras 2017). This includes recovering the fate (and bodies) of missing persons, persecutions of perpetrators, reparations such as financial compensation and apologies, and setting the historical record ‘straight’. The latter usually involves mechanisms of establishing the truth about the past—‘historical truth’—and ways to institutionalise this act of remembering through various educational means. These could be formal and informal, and include revision of history curricula and textbooks, creation of new peace education material and documentation of human rights violations in public archives, memorial sites and museums (Cole 2007a; Ramírez-Barat and Schulze 2018). The focus of this chapter is on arguably the most contested, anxiety-­inducing and controversial pedagogical policy for addressing the uncomfortable legacies of a violent past: the revision of history textbooks. There are several reasons that can explain why textbooks seem to be more difficult to change but also cause more controversies than, for example, curricula,1 but the one characteristic of history textbooks often noted by scholars is their perceived status in society as core state ‘instruments’ for developing content-specific notions of national identity and for reproducing state-approved narratives of the past (Shin and Sneider 2011; Korostelina and Lässig 2013; Cajani et  al. 2019). As will be discussed later in the chapter, anxiety and resistance to history textbook revisions is related to the presentation of changes to history textbooks as threats to a community’s physical and ontological security. History textbook debates are ‘about power and control’ and often the (problematic) assumption is that whoever controls the current teaching of the past will also control the future, given that textbooks contain knowledge conveyed to future voters (Christodoulou 2018, p. 391). The overarching theme of this chapter is the role of history textbooks as avenues of and for historical justice. Can and should history textbook revisions be seen and adopted as a form of atonement—an action that makes amends for past wrongdoings—in divided societies? In other words, can and should they be used for righting wrongs of the past, and so as a form of historical justice? The choice of historical justice over

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transitional justice here is intentional. Several studies have investigated the relationship between education and transitional justice, offering conceptual frameworks, specific pedagogies and analyses of the ways in which knowledge emerging from truth commissions are being translated into educational material and contexts. Often these relate to post-conflict contexts (where there has been a political settlement) and/or countries transitioning to a democracy such as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, South Africa and Rwanda (Cole and Murphy 2009; Davies 2017; Ramírez-­ Barat and Duthie 2016; Bellino et al. 2017; Ramírez-Barat and Schulze 2018; Bentrovato and Wassermann 2018). However, academic scholarship has largely neglected conflict-affected yet already established democracies, where ‘official knowledge’ of the past has failed to acknowledge wrongdoings in the absence of the legitimacy, opportunity and momentum usually offered by transitional processes. This chapter seeks to fill in this gap by bringing in empirical insights from the case of Cyprus, a context where history textbook revisions as part of historical justice have failed to materialise.2 The case of Cyprus is an excellent illustration of how attempts at history textbook revisions may unintendedly destabilise and polarise communities. Moreover, and related to the gap identified above, Cyprus is a conflict-affected yet already established democracy where the dynamics are related to reclaiming justice vis-à-vis the past, rather than transitional democratic processes as such. It is a neither a transitioning, nor a post-conflict country; Cyprus gained its independence from Britain 60 years ago, in 1960, and despite several high-level diplomatic initiatives, including a failed referendum for a bi-zonal federation in 2004 (the plan proposed a federal government with two equal constituent states, the Greek-Cypriot State and the Turkish-Cypriot State; see Trimikliniotis 2009) many people in the island and outside of it have all but lost hope for a political solution. Arguably, existing literature that fails to make these distinctions—between transitioning and established democracies, and conflict and post-conflict (post-­ agreement) countries—does so at the expense of a clear presentation of the significant effects that such political changes (or lack thereof ) have on the kinds of justice claims that can be considered legitimate. Transition periods bring with them institutional reforms and restructuring that act as stepping stones for other societal changes. As Arthur has convincingly

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argued, the transitional agenda of replacing an authoritarian and abusive state apparatus with democratic citizenship strongly influenced ‘what justice entailed, or could become, during a time of transition’ (2009, p. 348). Although still under the influence of global norms over education, an established democracy is less likely to accept external interference on matters of education compared to a transitioning one. The latter is also more able to present history reforms as a desired departure from past official histories/propaganda of the authoritarian regime. Similarly, a post-conflict society that has achieved conflict-resolution via a formal political agreement (e.g. the Belfast Agreement of 1998) offers rather different opportunities and dynamics for the development of institutions, policies and reforms related to (history) education than a conflict-society that has failed to reach a political solution (e.g. Cyprus). In this chapter, I argue that although no form of history education can ever adequately rectify or compensate for past crimes, there is space and a place for history textbooks to be part of a wider mechanism of offering a minimal form of historical justice: history textbook revisions can have a performative effect as both a material and symbolic form of justice. I begin by offering a conceptual understanding of the role of history textbooks revisions as avenues of and for historical justice. I then present a short background of the educational and historical context in Cyprus before moving to the four challenges/principles I argue should be carefully considered for history textbook revisions to materialise as forms of historical justice. These four principles or core features should not be seen as a formula for success (or failure), or as essentialised conceptions of what peace or justice could look like; rather they seek to inform future practices through lessons learned from a divided society that has largely failed in conflict-resolution3 and redressing past injustices.

 arving Out a Place for History Textbook C Revisions in Historical/Transitional Justice International and regional organisations such as UNESCO, the Council of Europe and EUROCLIO have produced numerous recommendations and thousands of documents related to the importance of history

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textbooks in promoting peace, democracy and human rights (a search in UNESCO’s digital library brings up more than 7000 related outputs). The importance of multi-perspectivity and critical thinking skills is usually emphasised through projects such as ‘learning to live together’, ‘learning to disagree’ and so on. Loading history textbooks with such salience and professional historians with such onerous tasks is not something new; textbook commissions, often involving history textbooks, were historically created as institutions promoting peace education and international understanding both before and after the Second World War (Luntinen 1988; Fuchs 2010; Faure 2011; Elmersjö 2014; Kulnazarova and Ydesen 2016). The politicisation of history education in conflict and post-conflict societies has been covered in considerable length by academic literature spanning across disciplines from education, to social psychology, history and political science (see for example Cole 2007b; Papadakis 2008; Pingel 2008; Korostelina 2012; McCully 2012; Korostelina and Lässig 2013; Paulson 2015;  Bentrovato et  al. 2016; Fontana 2016; Christodoulou 2018; Cajani et al. 2019). Much less has been written in terms of explicitly positioning history textbooks within historical or transitional justice processes (depending on the context). Cole (2007a) has argued that history education, whilst not related to retributive justice, contributes to: other major aspects of confronting the past: to truth telling; official acknowledgement of harm; recognition of victims and the preservation of their memory (restorative justice); reconciliation; and to public deliberation, understood as the creation of a more democratic culture. (p. 123)

In addition to the official acknowledgement of harm, pain and injustices in history textbook discourses, it is also important to add an acknowledgement of the causes, the non-inevitable errors made (counterfactual thinking skills), and the consequences of these choices. Although these revisions can never rectify past wrongdoings, they can be seen as a material and symbolic attempt at restoring the human dignity of the victims and their loved ones. Placing emphasis also on non-inevitable errors elucidates the fact that for example, at any point in time, there are different options for political decisions, and particular choices come with certain collective or individual responsibility.

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Emphasising the role of acknowledgement as a means to restoring human dignity enables a more nuanced conceptual understanding of history textbook revisions: it opens up the space for viewing textbook revisions as constituting a more powerful performative contribution to historical justice in both a material and symbolic form. Going beyond discursive changes to historical narratives, the significance of both material and symbolic aspects of textbooks becomes more prominent. The argument usually made is that history education tends to be seen as producing knowledge and narratives in and of itself, and that it is these knowledge and narratives that are bringing us closer to the ‘truth’ in either historical or transitional justice processes. There is, however, arguably a larger role for history education to play and we can explore this when we go beyond the use of history textbooks for their epistemological value and view them as ontological entities, that is, as objects with material substance and symbolic power. These ontological formations reflect certain realities based on the dispositions that choose to resist or accept revisions. Emphasis on choice allows us to conceptualise history textbook revisions as a performative attempt to make amends for a past harm or crime that has material effects in terms of firstly, a changed ontological nature and status of an object as a tool for justice. On a meta-level, it can be seen as a symbolic action that could not have happened without the prior choice to recognise the wrongdoing and its non-inevitable nature, acceptance of responsibility and a clear intention to address victims’ needs to the extent that is possible within this form of historical justice. Taken together, material and symbolic changes can be seen as moving closer to the pursuit of not just knowledge, but reparations and justice, when dealing with the violent past. Current dominant paradigms of historical or transitional justice lack such a comprehensive framing of history textbook revisions. Within a well-known four-tiered approach to dealing with the past, there are four fundamental rights that have evolved into international legal norms (Yakinthou 2017, p. 5): 1. The right to know; 2. The right to reparations; 3. The right to justice; 4. The guarantee of non-recurrence.

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Swisspeace and the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) have developed a conceptual framework based on these four rights in the form of a circle divided into four quartiles (2016, p.  6). Within each quartile they have examples of justice mechanisms (see Fig. 11.1). For example, in ‘the right to reparations’ quartile, ‘educational material’ is listed whereas for ‘the right to know’, ‘history books’ are listed.

Fig. 11.1  © FDFA/swisspeace 2006, inspired by the Joinet/Orentlicher Principles, cited in swisspeace 2016, p.6

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Apart from these two references, no further explanation is offered either as to what exactly this educational material should entail (does it include history textbooks?), or whether history books are referring to history school textbooks. In addition, in the rest of the paper where each mechanism is explored in detail, there is a complete absence of a discussion on education apart from as an example of individual reparations. Even here, reparations are likely to refer to provisions securing access to education and education opportunities such as scholarships, similar to what was offered to victims in Chile (González 2018). Moreover, in the FDFA/ swisspeace model, there is a very ‘legalistic’ understanding of ‘justice’, currently only including formal judicial measures. To achieve the comprehensive approach I outlined above, history textbooks should be explicitly framed as part of not just a right to know ‘the truth’, but also a right to reparations, and as a right to justice more broadly understood. In the context of Cyprus, although there has been a nascent field of historical (or what some scholars refer to as transitional) justice, it tends to be related to the issue of the people gone missing during the conflict, referred to as ‘Missing Persons’ (Sant Cassia 2005; Yakinthou 2008; Kovras 2017) or attitudes towards cohabitation in a future settlement (Psaltis et al. 2019). No study has so far looked at the interplay between education and historical justice in Cyprus, and it is important when doing so to keep in mind the comprehensive framing of history textbooks outlined above.

 istorical Context in Cyprus: The Birth H of Injustices Before offering a window into the educational context in Cyprus, it is important to give a brief synopsis of the so-called Cyprus Problem so as to understand the post-colonial legacies that arguably affect Cypriot dispositions to this day. Conflicting positions on the future of the island started in the mid-1950s when the Greek-Cypriots (80% of the population) began their liberation guerrilla movement against the British with their end goal being union with Greece. The Greek Orthodox Church of

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Cyprus played an important part not only in the political struggle but also in the educational struggle, vehemently ‘guarding’ schools and educational policy from external colonial influence (Persianis 1978). On the other hand, the Turkish-Cypriots (18% of the population) viewed such a possibility of unifying with Greece as a threat to their power and responded by forming their own paramilitary organisation, whose goal was to permanently divide the island with the help of Turkey. The British, as part of a ‘divide and rule’ strategy, began to use the Turkish-Cypriots through a selected police force to suppress the Greek-­ Cypriot liberation struggle, thereby placing the two communities in direct conflict and exacerbating grievances, anger and mistrust. When the independence of the island came in 1960, neither community reached its goal, and power-sharing which depended on levels of trust and social cohesion that did not exist, shortly proved a failure. Intra- and inter-­ communal violence in 1963, and a failed coup by Greek Junta colonels in July 1974 aimed at overthrowing the current Greek-Cypriot president, led to the Turkish military invasion, first by occupying the northern coast, and shortly afterwards by launching a second offensive that extended to over a third of the island’s territory (36%). This led to the de facto partition of the island with thousands of casualties, 162,000 internally displaced Greek-Cypriots and 48,000 internally displaced Turkish-­ Cypriots (Gürel et al. 2012). To this day, the majority of Turkish-Cypriots live in the northern part whilst Greek-Cypriots live in the southern part, each side contesting the legitimacy of the other. Since 1983, the self-­ declaration of the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ effectively means the presence of a de facto state that has been rendered legally invalid by the UN, and an isolated Turkish-Cypriot community financially and politically dependent on Turkey. Although both communities have had slogans of ‘not forgetting’ the past, these refer to different events and different politics of remembering and forgetting (Papadakis 1993). Turkish-Cypriots refer to 1963 as the traumatic event, followed by the ‘happy peace operation’ of 1974 and the desire to ensure the permanency of these changes. On the other hand, Greek-Cypriots refer to 1974 as the traumatic event, and have since then invested in an educational culture of ‘I do not forget and I struggle’, imbuing a duty to the new generation to claim this lost and glorified land

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back and address the injustices of the 1974 de facto partition (Papadakis 2008). The segregated education systems continue to this day, with official historical narratives being taught through an exclusionary ethno-­ nationalist lens of selected victimhood.4 Several events after 1974 have arguably added to the intractability of the conflict and exacerbated the feelings of loss and injustice by the Greek-Cypriots, thereby affecting their willingness to acknowledge their own wrongdoings. One such example is that whereas Turkish-Cypriots had found enough Greek-Cypriot houses to inhabit in the north, thousands of Greek-Cypriots had to remain in refugee camps or seek temporary shelter with friends or relatives as the Turkish-Cypriot houses in the south were not enough. They felt they had to start from scratch, leaving their past lives behind. Feelings of injustice were aggravated by the arrival of tens of thousands5 of mainland Turkish citizens (usually from poor rural areas), referred to as ‘settlers’ who after 1975 were encouraged by Turkey to move to the northern part and given Greek-Cypriot properties in the north. This was strongly criticised by the Greek-Cypriot community, viewed as a violation of international law and as part of politically motivated demographic changes to ensure the permanence of division. Another turning point was the 1996 murders of two Greek-Cypriot unarmed men by Turkish extremists and soldiers. Arguably, since then, the insecurity of the Greek-Cypriots in the face of the continued presence of 35,000 soldiers from Turkey has solidified, affecting both the securitisation of history education and the presentation of history textbook revisions as a betrayal to the struggle for redress of injustices (Christodoulou 2018). Paradoxically, the absence of large-scale violence since 1974 has acted as a disincentivising factor to the peace process, given that there is an absence of ‘urgency’—what Adamides and Constantinou (2012) call a ‘comfortable peace’. A prevailing sense of comfort with the status quo can be partly attributed to fear of changes leading to further losses, political gains from populist leaders and political parties who have built their careers or success on the Cyprus Conflict. This sense of comfort (or resistance to discomfort) also extends to the education sector given that this too has become a ‘microcosm’ of the wider conflict debate.

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 ducational Context in Cyprus: Resistance E to History Textbook Revisions Cyprus has had no trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions, nor any reparations. Beyond the lack of a political willingness to acknowledge and address past harms, the divided nature of the island makes it all the more difficult to talk about any kind of justice mechanisms as there are two governments (one internationally recognised and one not) and no central mechanism with which to deploy the institutional structures. This also translates to the history education sector: usually truth and reconciliation commissions call for education to acknowledge historical injustice and for curricular and textbook revision to follow their findings. The absence of such a mechanism in Cyprus means that Greek-Cypriots feel that justice has not been achieved for them, making it difficult for them to actually follow the model outlined above, whereby acknowledgement and inclusion of the other sides’ pain and victimhood can be posited as a claim for justice. One important exception to this absence of truth recovery mechanisms relates to what has been paradoxically dubbed as a ‘the bright side of a frozen conflict’,6 a relatively successful bi-communal project related to the search for ‘forensic truth’—the exhumation and identification of the bodies of the missing persons from both sides (Kovras 2017). This work was done within the framework of the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) which, between 2006 and early 2020, identified 700 Greek-Cypriots (out of a total of 1510 missing) and 274 Turkish-Cypriots (out of a total of 492) and returned their remains to their loved ones (CMP 2020). It is important to note here however, that the CMP is not actually a historical justice mechanism that offers accountability to the victims; it clearly states that it ‘does not attempt to establish the cause of death or attribute responsibility for the death of missing persons’ (CMP 2020). It offers knowledge to families about the fate of their loved ones (though there is little doubt that all the missing are dead), and the ability to bury them. One overarching question of this book is how historical knowledge generated from official historical justice processes enters the education

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sector. In the case of Cyprus, the work of CMP has not featured at all in history textbooks. This does not preclude the possibility of the work of CMP having been discussed in classrooms or at home, especially as the evening news tend to show when remains have been identified and there is a religious burial ceremony. However, this gap does provide an untapped opportunity to present difficult and uncomfortable historical truths in history textbooks through the lens of a bicommunal project that was able to break institutionalised silence and disrupt the politicisation of a humanitarian issue. In terms of history textbook research in Cyprus, scholars have already exposed the problematic contents of history education and textbooks (Papadakis 2008; Latif 2019; Karahasan and Beyidoglu Onen 2019). One potential structural change is the reform of history education and in particular history textbook revisions as part of the peacebuilding process. Any attempt to revise them, however, is often seen with suspicion, anxiety and strongly resisted. As I have argued elsewhere, this resistance is an inevitable and ‘endogenous characteristic of any peace education initiative’ emerging precisely because of the attitudes it seeks to transform in the first place (Christodoulou 2018, p. 5). In the context of the Greek-­ Cypriot community, history education became a core subject for pursuing the policy of ‘I do not forget’ (Δεν Ξεχνώ/Den Xehno), which focused on keeping alive the collective historical memory of the invasion, the refugees, the human rights abuses and the lost lands in order to be able to claim them back (Christou 2006), thereby historical memory became synonymous with the pursuit of historical justice. Although since the early 2000s, and after the accession of the Republic of Cyprus into the European Union, the policy seems to have undergone various fluctuating periods of lows and highs,7 both in terms of its content and the discursive space it occupies in educational discourse (e.g. in the current  history curricula the phrase is not explicitly mentioned at all), its survival in one form or another for 45 years indicates the backdrop within which history textbook debates occur in Cyprus. Before moving on to the next section  which offers four principles that should be considered in future attempts, it is important to refer to more specific educational developments that will help give the reader some further understanding of the issues that will be discussed.

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The first time that history textbook revisions occupied formal education discourse was in 2004 when an academic committee appointed by the Ministry of Education and Culture—the Education Reform Committee—proposed the ideological reorientation of what was found to be an ethnocentric and culturally monolithic framework towards a multicultural one, and in particular, the revision of history textbooks by a joint committee of both Greek and Turkish-Cypriot academics (ERC 2004). Strong criticisms against this radical suggestion emerged from various levels of society including teachers, academics, journalists and the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, the latter regretting that despite their historic contribution towards education, they were completely left out of any consultations (Makriyianni et al. 2011). Unsurprisingly, this proposal never materialised. Thus, since the early 1990s, history textbooks of the secondary school level (that refer to the Cyprus Conflict) remain largely unchanged in the Greek-Cypriot8 community, despite several changes in curricula (both minor annual revisions and more extensive ones such as the one in 2010).9 In other words, unlike other countries, such as Germany, where history textbooks closely mirror the curricula for sensitive issues of the past (Christodoulou and Szakács-Behling forthcoming) in Cyprus history textbook reforms lag behind history curricula reforms. Cyprus is an interesting case in that history textbook controversies over the past 15 years have never involved a revised history textbook published in Cyprus; rather resistance has been over first, a new primary school history textbook imported from Greece in 2006 (and shortly withdrawn) and at various points in time over discussions regarding potential revisions. Research with teachers, politicians and religious actors has shown that the so called ‘Repoussi’ scandal, named after the surname of the Greek academic who led the team of textbook authors of the aforementioned textbook was particularly prominent in discussions of why there was apprehension regarding history textbook revisions in Cyprus (Christodoulou 2018). In other words, this ‘bad’ example was referred to as a justification for the negative attitudes they held towards future revisions. The changes introduced to the primary school textbook, were presented as unethically distorting historical truths for the sake of peace, using inappropriate terminology that legitimised the de facto partition of

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the island in to two states, and belittling traumatic violent events of the past in a way that humiliated the victims’ suffering. Another fierce debate started in 2008 following an unprecedented school objective that was the first formal peace education attempt initiated at a governmental level. The left-wing party AKEL (Progressive Party of Working People) which was in power at the time, tried to use its power to promote an ideological position long associated with the party: one that supported reconciliation and rapprochement through the promotion of the shared ‘Cypriotness’ of the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots, often seen by those on the right of the political spectrum as an attempt to de-Hellenicise the island and as a threat to its Greek culture, heritage, history and identity. The Ministry of Education and Culture issued a circular where it announced that the main objective of the school year 2008–2009 was the ‘fostering [of ] a culture of peaceful coexistence, mutual respect and cooperation’ between the two communities (MOEC 2008, p. 1). The Education Minister also proposed the realisation of the recommendations of the 2004 Education Reform Committee, including revisions to history textbooks (Makriyianni et  al. 2011). After intense resistance and confusion related to this school year objective, it was at first poorly implemented and later dropped entirely when there was a change in government in 2013 (Perikleous 2015; Zembylas et al. 2016). It is important to emphasise two points here: first, there is a misconception in both public and academic circles that the vast majority of history textbooks are imported from Greece, perhaps due to the fact that this was the policy in the past but also due to the controversy regarding the specific new textbook published in Greece in 2006. In fact, most textbooks that include the Cyprus conflict in a detailed manner, and are currently in use, have been published in Cyprus; these textbook production dynamics matter because they can potentially affect how directly future revisions are enforced. Second, debates in 2008 were not over a preliminary draft of a textbook, or an outline, but rather on whether or not the textbooks should be revised. In other words, they were over ‘imagined’ textbook revisions (Christodoulou 2018, p. 381).

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 tillborn Fate of History Textbook Revisions S in Cyprus: When and Why Do They Fail?  hey Fail When There Is a Lack of Honest T and Meaningful Engagement with Local Resistance, to Understand Their Discourses and Fears Merely rejecting negative attitudes to textbook revision can be counter-­ productive and does not lessen either the fear or anxiety associated with these changes. The agency of local actors, even those of religious leaders who have historically been involved in matters of education (Persianis 1978), needs to be seriously considered and problematised. Scholarship that sometimes arrogantly rejects any calls by religious groups for involvement, often lacks historical context ignoring how strongly the public detested British attempts to ‘de-Hellenicise’ the island. Regardless of whether a scholar is an atheist or a believer, one cannot dispute the fact that religious leaders ‘used their political power to support the schools and protect them from the Colonial Government interference’ (Persianis 1978, Preface; see also Heraclidou 2017). Scholars, therefore, need to place the remnants of these policies in perspective and appreciate their legacies, adopting a critical lens on liberal peacebuilding norms and exhibit a more meaningful engagement with local resistance (Lekha Sriram  2007;  Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond 2012; Novelli and Higgins 2016). As we have seen, Cyprus is not a post-conflict society with dynamic transitional justice mechanisms. Instead, in Cyprus there is strong and persistent resistance to history education reform with the justification of a conditionality argument: that this can only take place after there is a political solution, that is, after ‘justice’ has been given (Zembylas et al. 2016; Christodoulou 2018). Anything else, that does not satisfy this ‘condition’, is perceived as doing damage to the cause of justice and the ‘fighting spirit’ of the Greek-Cypriots. This presents a difficult dilemma for academics which is sometimes too easily dismissed. On the one hand, as scholars we are often adamant to point out the politicisation and nationalisation of mourning and loss, and the exploitation of the pain of

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the displaced, enclaved and the missing persons as a symbol for the Greek-Cypriot struggle against injustice (Yakinthou 2008). Bekerman and Zembylas have discussed how school curricula in Israel and in Cyprus capitalise on mourning in order to ‘strengthen the discourse of victimhood and create dehumanized depictions of the other’ (2012, p. 148). Justice remains an elusive concept and means different things for different groups of society (see Psaltis et al. 2019). Certain claims for justice seem to be related to an (understandable) denial to accept that certain reversals, for example to pre-1974 times, may be unrealistic given current political and social realities and that ‘times have changed’. Moreover, if nothing can happen until there is a political settlement, how can the community ever be prepared to vote for it if bottom-up peacebuilding is dismissed? On the other hand, it is imperative ‘to examine why some individuals or groups may not necessarily be “against” peace, when they demand that first there should be justice and then peace’ (Zembylas et al. 2016, p. 25). Treating them as, ‘spoilers’ (Newman and Richmond 2006), as ‘backward’, or as groups with ‘problems’ (Psaltis et al.) arguably risks falling in the essentialist traps of positivist psychologised traditions that suggest the issue lies more in the individual mind that needs to be ‘educated properly’ after which peace will ensure, thereby underestimating the material and structural injustices (Bekerman and Zembylas 2012, p. 26). Studies prescribing the use of history education reform as atonement rarely question assumptions and approaches of peace agendas that may contribute to injustices. This is related to the presentation of essentialist understandings of peace education rather than critical peace education (Bekerman and Zembylas 2012; Zembylas et al. 2016) As Bevernage (2010) eloquently reminds us, the positionality of wrongdoings as belonging to the past, far from being neutral, is also part of a politicisation, albeit of a different nature: The turn to modern historical discourse, then, is part of a politics of time in which ‘new’ democratic societies try to expel the ghosts of the past by actively positing what belongs to their historical present and what does not. (p. 122, emphasis added)

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Bevernage’s work on truth commissions and historiography (2008, 2010, 2016), forms part of a convincing critique on the historicisation of the past whereby historians are essentially asked to delegitimise the present effects of a haunting past on victims. Several questions are raised here regarding the role of the historian and the ethical and political implications of both students and teachers of history education working within a frame of temporality and historicisation that cannot recognise persistent injustices (Bevernage 2010; Keynes 2019) and this should be taken into consideration when making grand claims about history textbook revisions. I argue these considerations are important, not because I share the positionality of some who put forward the conditionality argument, that is that nothing can change unless there is a solution, but as part of an attempt to reduce the gap between discursive positions, without imposing an academic frame that positions subjects with different beliefs as backward, right wing or as ‘problems’ to be solved by re-education or further education. Whether these are past victims/survivors, religious actors, women and so on, their inclusion by way of consultations regarding future changes is a fundamental aspect of any successful historical justice mechanism (Yakinthou 2017). If textbook revisions are to be accepted, they need to be co-constructed from below, and not be seen as sudden top-down governmental or foreign impositions, nor should they be associated with a particular political party. Rather, they should have clear pedagogical, historical and justice-oriented contributions.

 hey Fail When There Is a Failure to Disentangle T Education from Matters of Security Building on the well-known Securitisation theory of the Copenhagen School (Buzan et al. 1998), the framework of the ‘securitisation of history textbooks’ amounts to the presentation of history textbook revisions, as threats to both ontological and physical security (Christodoulou 2018). Both forms of security are strongly interlinked with survival; the former is about ‘security-as-being’, as a consistent biographical narrative of the Self and the latter is about security as physical survival of the individual

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and the state (Steele 2008; Odysseos 2002). Historical textbook narratives are part of the everyday discourses, traditions, routines and ways of being which lead to a cohesive and stable understanding of one’s self through a sense of certainty, comfort, continuity and order. Any proposed change of history textbooks is viewed, therefore, as a disruption to the historical understanding of the Self, to who one essentially is, their self-identity. In terms of physical security, research has shown both direct and indirect associations: the logic of the implicit argument was that by changing the dominant historical narrative: there would be a loss of patriotism, a loss of determination to fight for one’s country that the future soldiers needed in order to be adequately prepared, and hence a negative impact on the security forces of the island, endangering its protection…There is an underlying anxiety that the citizens should always be prepared for war, given that there has not been a peace settlement yet, but more importantly given the insecurity felt with the presence of the Turkish troops. (Christodoulou 2018, p. 388)

There was also the direct argument that by watering down the historical narratives in the textbooks for the purpose of peace, effectively means abandoning the cause for justice, and for the Greek-Cypriots to feel secure again. According to Securitisation theory, securitisation occurs successfully when authoritative entities, construct an ‘existential threat’ which then necessitates urgent action and this construction is accepted by a substantial audience (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 27). Although in Cyprus, this construction of history textbooks as threats to both physical and ontological security is not always top-down (as we saw earlier with suggestions by a minister being rejected) it is successfully achieved through specific sub-­ themes: revisions to history textbooks are seen as a threat to national identity; to ‘historical truth’; to the cause of justice for the Greek-Cypriots; and as serving foreign interests (Christodoulou 2018). My main argument here, therefore, is that if there are to be history textbook revisions that are accepted by the majority of the people, there needs to be a serious attempt to disentangle the matters of security related to education, engage with peoples’ fears (as mentioned above) and offer concrete and positive

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visualisations of revised textbooks that are not left at the mercy of imaginations and extreme scenarios. Rather, revisions should offer material and symbolic opportunities for historical justice and improved pedagogical tools for both sides concerned. In order to ease fears of textbook changes affecting, for example, the bargaining power of one country vis-à-vis the conflict, then both communities need to acknowledge their past wrongdoings in parallel, concurrent revisions, even if this does not mean teaching using the same textbook. In terms of the issue of ‘national identity’ or ‘serving foreign interests’ for example, revisions can be carefully developed in a way that neither the Greek, nor the Turkish elements of the island are erased, without resorting to either/or scenarios but allowing the construction of multiple and multi-faceted identities. Ensuring bottom­up participation, inclusion and transparency can also further ease fears related to ‘foreign interests’. Dismissing insecurities rather than trying to deconstruct and disentangle them from matters of education, will only further perpetuate the educational impasse.

 hey Fail When There Is No Dedicated, Politically T Independent and Trusted Organisation That Is Tasked with Truth Finding and Instead There Are Sporadic Actions Without Preparing the Ground Both the ‘Repoussi scandal’ in 2006–2007 and the debates after the sudden, unexpected announcement of the first formal peace education initiative of 2008–2009 highlighted what could go wrong when there are sporadic actions without preparing the ground adequately or without due care to historical accuracies and terminology. We need to be more realistic about the expectations and possibilities of history education as a discipline and appreciate that teaching controversial issues can also exacerbate conflict identities when not done with caution. This is especially difficult in intractable conflicts like the one in Cyprus where time has not been a healing factor but rather has deeply embedded the conflict in the educational and cultural milieu of the Cypriot people. As discussed earlier in the chapter, with transitioning processes comes momentum, opportunities for change and legitimate frameworks to do so. A vacuum

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is created that needs to be ‘filled’ and the post-conflict transitioning period is one of ‘action’ through deeper transformative peacebuilding processes. However, these are missing in Cyprus; instead, there is ‘inaction’ in terms of state mechanisms and such initiatives are relegated to the small and marginalised civil society groups which themselves have also been accused of being ‘closed’ and exclusionary or being associated with particular political parties (especially the Left-leaning ones). Therefore, any educational initiatives should first be extremely careful with language and terminology, ensuring it does not offend, and with representations of the past ensuring that they do not ignore the needs of victims for adequate acknowledgement of their suffering without ‘softening’ elements of historical truth for the sake of peace. Second, educational initiatives should go beyond political orientations (of the Right or the Left) but rather be focused on improving educational standards and meeting relevant targets, as these are set up by international organisations (for instance, Council of Europe or UNESCO) and locally adapted to the specific needs of the community context. Third, although one can hardly speak of overwhelming or excessive changes in Cyprus—given that history textbooks have remained largely the same and educational reform has been very slow—sporadic actions by new governments will probably lead to further polarisation, confusion and poor implementation. The point here is two-fold: on the one hand changes need to be well-planned and with scaffolding. For instance, steady incremental steps could involve producing complementary history textbook booklets or digital educational material rather than changing the whole book entirely (this also is a faster process than introducing new textbooks). On the other hand, the Cyprus case has shown that there is a need for a dedicated, politically independent and trusted institution that is tasked with historical truth finding. History textbook revisions require ‘a very strong institutional component…If the political conflict is not yet resolved…the educational system becomes yet another arena in which different actors and narratives struggle over memory and the meanings of the past’ (Jelin 2003, p.  98, emphasis added). As Kovras convincingly points out ‘[i]t was only when the problem of the missing was depoliticised10 and delinked from political negotiations’ that the CMP had a breakthrough (2017, p. 51). This is important in order to ensure that ‘we

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are not prematurely closing off the past’; one needs to bear in mind that the logic behind many calls for amnesia and amnesty is one ‘which posits that there will never be a more timely moment to draw a line under the past than the moment when it is still present’ (Bevernage 2016, p. 17). But as Bevernage rightly reminds us, who draws this line is important: ‘the ‘good historian’, ‘the perpetrator or the politician with less noble intentions’ (2016, p. 17)? A very positive step towards the direction of having a dedicated organisation for bicommunal education initiatives came in early 201611 with the operation of the Bi-communal Technical Committee for Education (BTCE). This was established by the two political leaders of the communities, under the auspices of the United Nations. The BTCE has done ground-breaking work in bringing students and teachers together in the buffer zone (over 5000 from 2017 to 2019) through workshops on Education for a Culture of Peace as part of a project called ‘Imagine’,12 and it has various mandates beyond promoting contact and cooperation, including identification of good practices in education that can contribute to peace and reconciliation and creation of ‘educational materials that promote peacebuilding, intercultural dialogue, human rights education, and anti-racist education’ (UNDP 2019).13 Rather than having a specific mandate for historical truth finding, or history education reforms as part of historical justice, the BTCE has a much more general objective of preparing the ground for a possible future bi-communal and bi-zonal political settlement. Doing so is undoubtedly a necessary step. At the same time however, there is still a gap that could potentially be filled in the future by a more institutionalised mechanism, that is not dependent on the current government or political leaders, and is politically neutral and independent. At the moment, the BTCE includes some members that not only belong to political parties but are also political actors themselves. For the reasons discussed above, this could potentially cause conflicting interests and further obstacles, so the suggestion here is for any future organisation dedicated to history education to have consultations with all actors (for instance, political or religious) but for the core members to be educators that are not active politicians. Even if one accepts that political involvement is to an extent inevitable in the partocratic nature of both communities in Cyprus, there is still an important

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consideration to be made: asymmetries in terms of political agency can occur when the chair of one side, for instance, is an active politician whereas the other one is not (and is politically neutral). So such seemingly minor issues could potentially be enough to shake up the sensitive waters or disrupt the equilibrium. Involving politicians also includes the risk that arises during election time, when the possibility of a new party replacing the one that had created the committee jeopardises the work done so far.

 hey Fail When Truth-Finding and Attempts T to Achieve Historical Justice Are Too Limited in Scope and Do Not Take into Account Post-Colonial Legacies If the process of historical justice is to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the public but also serve an ethical role, then this should not be limited only to the intra- and inter-communal conflict, but also to the horrendous crimes committed by the British imperialist forces in Cyprus (especially during the anti-colonial struggle of 1955–1959). Although the island is filled with remnants, memorials and legacies of this colonial period and the struggles against British imperialism, it is rather surprising that British colonial brutalities, including towards unarmed men and women, young people and children, are not discussed in terms of historical justice when it comes to education contexts. In fact, talking about the role of British political manipulation and physical torture against the Greek-Cypriots is sometimes perceived as being aligned with particular political ideologies that supposedly shift the blame away from local, inter-ethnic tensions. Ultimately, historical justice debates, where they exist focus on the two rival ethnic communities, yet largely ignoring colonial legacies and crimes that are largely absent from history textbooks (when they exist they are not discussed in terms of pursuing justice for the victims) of both the colonised and the coloniser and discourses about changing these textbooks as a mode of reparation. However, the process of historical justice in and through education, should not be limited to particular groups or time periods if it is to gain the trust, respectability and legitimacy of the public—it should be ethically holistic rather than selective.

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The British government was taken to court by 33 such victims of torture in Cyprus and in January 2019 there was an out of court settlement of 1 million in reparations, but the government insisted that this was not ‘any admission of liability’ (UK Parliament 2019). As we have seen, acknowledgement of suffering and assuming responsibility is crucial for achieving a comprehensive model of historical justice that includes not just a right to reparations but also a right to the truth and to educational justice. In other words, if officially sanctioned truth telling, apologies and acknowledgement about the past is to provide an alternative form of material and symbolic justice to traditional legal avenues, then focusing only on revising history textbooks in the context of achieving inter-­ethnic justice without a form of redress for colonial crimes is not just too limited in scope but also highly problematic. The fact that Britain has apologised and paid compensation to thousands of veterans of the Mau Mau nationalist uprising in Kenya, brutally suppressed by the British colonial forces in the 1950s (the same decade as the Cypriot one) begs the question of why it has consistently refused to do so for the case of Cyprus. Writing about the British apology to the Mau Mau in 2013, Caroline Elkins wrote: ‘British colonial violence was brutal, and systematic. If there is any justice, the Mau Mau’s stunning legal victory should be the first of many’ (Elkins 2013) and specifically referred to the Cyprus case still awaiting formal acknowledgement and compensation. Elkin’s calls for further apologies have not been realised until today and this failure has also meant a missed opportunity for historical justice dynamics. This is because public debates and dedicated commissions related to British colonial crimes, focusing on direct and structural injustices and the sheer racism involved, may provide additional momentum in the future to similar institutions that deal with historical justice on an inter-communal level (like the one proposed above). It is also important when providing meaningful engagement to local current resistance to history textbook revisions, to contextualise it, keeping in mind relevant post-colonial dynamics, for instance, the inter-generational collective trauma that the narrative of education always being under attack by an ‘other’ has produced.

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Conclusion By building on critical peace education and critical historiography debates, this chapter questions some prevailing normative and often romanticised assumptions of ‘history education as reparations’, showing how it may unintendedly destabilise and exacerbate sociopolitical tensions if not carefully thought through. It also exposes how selective historical justice debates can be, focusing for example on the two ethnic communities, yet largely ignoring colonial crimes that are largely absent from history textbooks and discourses about changing them as a mode of reparation. History textbooks can be seen as located at the intersection between peace, justice and history, with each one of these often pulling in opposite directions and having different salience at particular points in time depending on the political context. Academic and practitioners should self-reflect and ask victims about their needs (Yakinthou 2017) rather than present essentialist understandings of human rights, peace and justice. As many scholars have noted, the distinction between victim and perpetrator is not always so clear and one can occupy both identities at the same time. Nesiah (2016) reminds us of both the need to be sensitive to past grievances but also ‘ensure that the process of determining the guilt and innocence in the proximate conflict will not be experienced as another round of victimization that exacerbates the conflict and deepens marginalization’ (p. 26). This is in practice as complex as it is complicating, and I have made the case above for four principles to be considered if future history textbook revision failures are to be avoided: honest, respectful and meaningful engagement with local resistance; a disentanglement of security with matters of education; a politically independent and neutral institution dedicated to historical truth finding and an adequate conversation and consideration on justice matters related to past colonial abuses. The positioning of a crime in the past (distant or not) does not absolve one of responsibility and accountability for their actions, and for the victims to receive even some belated form of historical justice. In response to one of the overarching questions of this book, ‘What is the role of history education in processes of historical justice, and what should it be?’, I also critique the prevailing limited understanding of

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historical justice and argue for a comprehensive model that puts emphasis on the ‘right to justice’. I posit that although no form of history education can ever adequately rectify or compensate for past crimes, history textbooks can form part of a wider mechanism of offering some minimal form of material and symbolic historical justice. The conceptual framework for historical justice also is a step towards a more specific understanding of the word justice. The word ‘justice’ is a vague noun that can be used to project utopian or even unrealistic demands for an idealistic future. It also can mean different things depending who you ask. In Greek there are also variations of the word that turn it into a verb, enabling in this case a more abstract and ongoing process that makes it even more difficult to identify, locate, measure and therefore pronounce it as a goal that has been ‘achieved’.14 On the other hand, associating the word ‘justice’ with ‘patriots’, ‘conservatives’, ‘old-­fashioned’ and those who are against progress, risks a Western-infused arrogance— exhibited at times by scholars who regard themselves as guardians of ‘progress’—that denies victims and their loved ones the ability to claim what they are ethically or even legally entitled to. Ultimately, perhaps the word ‘justice’ itself is too weak to sufficiently capture the powerful expectations often attributed to it. Nevertheless, the ‘cascade’ of justice does not seem to be going away anytime soon, and as scholars we ought to be more cautious when and how we add adjectives, be it ‘transitional’, ‘historical’ or other, to it. Until a possible shift in discourse occurs, more nuanced and comprehensive understandings of what justice could possibly entail vis-à-vis history education are useful in ensuring not only clearer possible end-points but also a more honest and inclusive debate on what is achievable, and which are the most appropriate contexts and principles for reaching the best possible scenario.

Notes 1. There are several explanations as to why textbooks seem to be more difficult to change but also cause more controversies than curricula. For example, the process of textbook authorship, production and revision is a much slower process and usually takes at least a few years where as curricula revisions require less contributions by individual authors and

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develop faster. Often the creators of one are viewed as curriculum developers (often policymakers) whereas the others are seen as ‘textbook authors’ (often teachers or academics). One is related to educational policy and is usually more abstract and related to objectives whereas the other one includes the actual and specific content of this policy. Finally, school textbooks—referred to by Ingrao (2009, p. 180) as ‘weapons of mass instruction’ are teaching tools used in the classroom, and taken home by students (and usually more easily accessible), thus enhancing their perceived power and influence when compared to a curriculum document. 2. In this chapter, I focus on the educational aspects of the Greek-Cypriot community in the Republic of Cyprus. 3. Here I am referring to high-level political negotiations and not to bottom-­up peacebuilding processes for example from bi-communal NGOs that have made some progress in achieving their goals, especially after 2003 and the opening of checkpoints that meant partial lifting of restrictions on movement and more intergroup contact. 4. The vast majority of pupils are also not able to speak the language of the ‘other’ and participating in such language classes often gets politicised (Charalambous 2014). 5. The figures tend to be over-estimated from the Greek-Cypriot authorities, sometimes reaching 160,000. According to a report by Mete Hatay (2007) the number of these ‘settlers’ from Turkey who have received citizenship (and hence the right to vote) is around 42,000 or 24% of the population. This number does not include temporary residents from Turkey, for example, students or immigrant workers. Turkish-Cypriots are entitled to citizenship, voting rights and access to welfare of the Republic of Cyprus, but Turkish settlers are not. 6. Kovras’s point here is that this is a unique case that shows the agency of the families of the disappeared which due to their own mobilisation and determination, were able to break the institutionalised silence of almost 30 years. The wives of the missing persons as well as investigative journalists played an important role in truth recovery. The Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) was established in 1981 but only started work 25 years after. 7. A comparative overview of the evolution of the objective of ‘I do not forget’ and the possible causes for this watering down falls outside the scope of this chapter. For a brief overview see Zembylas et  al. 2016,

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pp.  60–64 and Christou 2006. For the school year 2019–2020, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Youth of the Republic of Cyprus (MOECSY henceforth) in a relevant circular (File No. 7.1.05.31) emphasised the importance of the ‘timeless objective’ of ‘I know, I do not forget, I claim’, clarifying that it ‘remains a highest priority’(MOECSY 2019a). In its more specific school guidelines for the year 2019–2020 (C.1.2.) it referred to the ‘fading away’ of historical memory and called for a resurgence and ‘substantial upgrade’ of this objective in all school subjects (MOECSY 2019b). 8. Turkish-Cypriot revisions under the left-wing Republican Turkish Party (CTP) in 2004, towards somewhat less ethnocentric and discriminatory content (Papadakis 2008), were withdrawn in 2009 after the election of a right-wing party (National Unity Party) to power (see Vural 2012). New history textbooks have been introduced in the primary school of the Greek-Cypriot community but these do not cover the conflict period. 9. The Cyprus conflict is mentioned in history curricula in the last grade of primary school (Grade 6), the last class of gymnasium (lower secondary, Grade 3) and the last class of lyceum (higher secondary, Grade 3). History education is first taught as a separate subject in Grade 3 of primary school. The major history curricula reforms made in (2010) include explicit references to critical thinking and multi-perspectivity, the edification of students for being active democratic citizens, history education devoid of stereotypes and prejudices and the cultivation of twenty-firstcentury skills. The most updated curricula can be found at the website of the MOECSY: http://www.moec.gov.cy/analytika_programmata/programmata_spoudon.html. 10. Although I do not agree that such an issue can ever be de-politicised, my suggestion here is to achieve political neutrality in terms of independence from political parties, especially of those educators in high-level positions. 11. The BTCE was created in December 2015 but had its first ever meeting in February 2016. 12. ‘Imagine’ takes place under the auspices of the BTCE and is implemented by the NGOs Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) and the Home for Cooperation (H4C) with the support of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus. For further details of the project see here: https://www.ahdr. info/peace-­education/58-­education-­for-­a-­culture-­of-­peace-­imagine.

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13. This quote is taken from a UNDP job vacancy post. The author applied for this post and has since early 2020 been the Greek-Cypriot education specialist for creating educational material. The first draft of this chapter was sent and presented at a symposium on History Education and Historical Justice at Umeå University, Sweden many months before on June 4th 2019  while the author was affiliated with the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Germany. The relevant material used for this part of the chapter is publicly available. 14. Interestingly, ‘rights’ as in, for example, ‘human rights’ are also a variation of the same word.

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12 Redressing Historical Wrongs or Replicating Settler Colonialism? Social Studies Curriculum Reform in Canada James Miles

Introduction In the past 30 years the Canadian government has enacted a series of policies and gestures aimed at redressing a long list of state-perpetrated historical injustice. This movement has included official apologies, compensation packages to affected communities, and promises to teach future generations about Canada’s “historical wrongs.” Many reports that have been published as part of the redress process have specifically called for reforms to school curriculum as one important way to reckon with the unjust past (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015b; National Association of Japanese Canadians 2019). Such demands for educational reform have not been ignored by curriculum policy makers and have directly led to a wide range of revisions to most Canadian

J. Miles (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_12

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provincial and territorial curricula (Gibson and Case 2019; Miles 2021). In many ways, the government’s desire to right historical wrongs has placed a great deal of responsibility on Canada’s schools, teachers, and students. In this process, changing how to teach the subject of history is an obvious place to start, which raises important questions on how, and if, reforms to history and social studies curriculum can contribute to redressing historical injustice and promoting reconciliation. This chapter seeks to understand how policy makers and curriculum developers in the Canadian province of British Columbia have responded to demands to address both historical injustice and reconciliation in the school subject of social studies. I argue that while historical injustices, such as the Indian Residential Schools, are becoming a central part of Canadian social studies and history curriculum they have also been framed by curricula in problematic ways that may in fact obscure the colonial foundations of the nation and deny ongoing settler colonial policies. These curriculum reforms also raise questions around the challenges and possibilities for teachers and students engaging in a historical redress process. To interrogate these problems in Canadian curriculum reform, I developed the following questions: 1. How does British Columbia’s new social studies curriculum represent and reflect social and political movements toward historical justice, redress, and reconciliation? 2. What challenges and possibilities do Canadian teachers and students face in responding to historical injustices and the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism? Using these questions, this chapter aims to understand what British Columbia’s new social studies curriculum is trying to do and how its development reflects Canada’s current social and political climate, which scholars have called “a culture of redress” (Henderson and Wakeham 2013). I utilize concepts from the fields of settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies, in particular scholarship that explores and critiques notions of transitional justice and reconciliation in settler colonial contexts. Using this theoretical work to approach British Columbia’s curriculum, I analyze interviews with curriculum writers as well as relevant

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curriculum and policy documents produced by British Columbia’s Ministry of Education. Through a discussion of these sources, I aim to demonstrate how redress, injustice, and reconciliation came to be represented in the new curriculum and the set of issues this creates for teachers and students.

Background In recent years the Canadian federal government has made headlines internationally in its seemingly endless ability to apologize for past wrongs (Murphy 2018). Canada’s attempts to redress historical injustice have also included formal inquiries, financial reparations to survivors and families of victims, and funding for educational, health, and commemorative initiatives. Henderson and Wakeham (2013) have argued that the Canadian government has envisioned itself as a global leader in reconciling the difficult past. Since Prime Minister Mulroney’s 1988 apology to Japanese Canadians for internment during World War II, federal, provincial, and municipal governments have acknowledged and apologized for a wide range of “historical wrongs.” Injustices acknowledged by the government have included discriminatory and racist immigration policies directed at the Chinese Canadian and South Asian Canadian communities and wartime internments of Japanese Canadians, Italian Canadians, and Ukrainian Canadians. The largest, and arguably the most significant, of these redress initiatives has been the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian Residential Schools which started its inquiry in 2008 and issued its final report in 2015. While all of these historical injustices and subsequent redress campaigns have important histories, in this chapter I focus on what in Canada is commonly known as “residential schools.” Residential schools were a key component of Canada’s formal policy of assimilation which aimed to incorporate Indigenous peoples into mainstream White, Euro-Canadian, Christian society. Between the 1870s and 1996, the Canadian government funded approximately 130 church-run schools across the country. It was estimated by the TRC (2015a) that over 150,000 Indigenous children attended the schools, and approximately

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6000 students died, although records are incomplete. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report (2015a) also reported that physical and sexual abuse, malnourishment, disease, and inadequate education were common experiences faced by children at the schools. Justice Murray Sinclair, who chaired the TRC, referred to the residential schools as a part of the Canadian government’s conscious policy to “commit cultural genocide” (Tasker 2017, para. 12). The TRC was the culmination of a decade-long fight by residential school survivors and Indigenous communities more generally to gain justice for a wide range of injustices perpetrated in the name of the Canadian settler state. The TRC and the political reconciliation process that has unfolded might also be considered the pinnacle of the state’s attempts to redress and reckon with Canada’s colonial past. In conjunction with the TRC’s Final Report (2015b) “94 Calls to Action” were issued that call on governments, state institutions, and Canadians in general to respond to the commission’s findings. Calls to Action numbers 62–65 specifically recommend the reform of K-12 and post-secondary education curriculum and learning resources to include content about Indigenous peoples and the history and legacy of residential schools. Provincial and territorial ministries of education across Canada have responded with a wide range of curricular reforms, with a particular focus on the school subjects of social studies and history (Gibson and Case 2019; Miles 2021). For example, the revised social studies curriculum in British Columbia (2019a, b) now includes learning objectives that students are expected to know such as “discriminatory policies, attitudes and historical wrongs” and “past discriminatory government policies and actions, such as the Head Tax, the Komagata Maru incident, residential schools, and internments.” In particular, the topic of residential schools is now a mandatory component of the British Columbia social studies curriculum in at least three different grade levels (5, 9, and 10). Additionally, the recommendations and findings of the TRC are also a specific content outcome in the revised Social Studies 10 curriculum. Through an examination of these curriculum reforms, it is clear that striving for historical justice is now a major objective of Canadian history and social studies curricula. The desire to redress historical wrongs might

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be considered one of the most significant reforms to the goals of history education in Canada in recent memory. As one of the organizing “Big Ideas” from British Columbia’s Social Studies 10 (2019b) curriculum announces: “Historical and contemporary injustices challenge the narrative and identity of Canada as an inclusive, multicultural society.” In this chapter I aim to interrogate what it is these reforms are challenging and perhaps what aspects of Canadian identity and citizenship they are re-inscribing.

 ettler Colonialism and the Politics S of Reconciliation in Canada My analysis of how the British Columbia curriculum functions in relation to historical injustice and reconciliation builds upon theoretical scholarship in settler colonial studies. In his foundational work in the field, Wolfe (2006) defines settler colonialism by discussing its genocidal foundations. He argues that settler colonialism functions on “a logic of elimination” with the central aim being control of Indigenous land, adding “territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (p. 388). In this view, settlers’ desire for land and resources leads them to “destroy to replace” Indigenous populations, livelihoods, and cultures. The settler in this process aims to become “native” as they work in multiple ways to secure settler permanence and futurity. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) take up settler colonial theory in relation to education arguing that “settler colonialism is the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making himself the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing” (p. 73). This definition has particular implications for the role of schools in the settler colonial project. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández argue that schooling in settler states has long been oriented toward “the curriculum project of replacement” in which settlers “ultimately come to replace the Native” (p.  76). To this end, schools are one of the most important institutions for continually reaffirming the power of settler states to grant citizenship, and its associated rights, and also to deal with

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potential grievances. More generally, contemporary settler colonial nations can be characterized by Wolfe’s oft cited phrase: “Settlers comes to stay: invasion is a structure not an event” (p. 388). Indigenous scholars such as Coulthard (2014), Simpson (2014), and Tuck (2009) have argued that settler colonial states such as Canada, the United States, and Australia are continually seeking to secure settler permanence and futurity at the expense of Indigenous land and livelihoods. As schools are deeply implicated in this project, this creates a unique set of problems for thinking about historical justice and history education. While Canada pursues symbolic forms of historical justice under the banner of reconciliation, I argue it also works to suppress pursuits of justice that push for decolonization and/or Indigenous sovereignty. As Youngblood Henderson (2013) argues the politics of reconciliation situates Indigenous peoples “within the bounds of an ostensibly repentant and yet ultimately controlling settler state” (p. 123). Similarly, Coulthard (2014) argues that the government of Canada has worked diligently for at least the last 30 years to conceive of ways to deal with the problem of building a multicultural society based on liberal democratic values, while at the same time preserving and maintaining settler dominance over Indigenous lands and peoples. One important way the state has maintained this apparent contradiction is through its construction of a discourse of state-led reconciliation that both establishes and limits what is for discussion. The Canadian state’s recent reconciliation efforts have adopted the language and logic of transitional justice. In this process Canada has imagined itself as undergoing, or even having already undergone, a transition from a colonial past to a reconciled present. The tools it has used to this end include official apologies, a truth and reconciliation commission, compensation packages for survivors and their families, and educational and health programs. Coulthard (2014) among others (Alfred 2009; Chrisjohn and Wacase 2009) have called critical attention to question this strategic move by the Canadian state. These Indigenous scholars have argued that by applying the language and tools of transitional justice to a non-transitional context the government has attempted “to fabricate a sharp divide between Canada’s unscrupulous “past” and the unfortunate “legacy” this past has produced for Indigenous people and communities in the present” (Coulthard 2014, p. 121). In other words, the state

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has imagined settler colonialism as a thing of the past by narrowing its attention to specific aspects of the settler colonial project while ignoring structures and unequal relationships that remain in place. For the most part, the focus of the government has been on reconciling the history and legacy of one aspect of Canadian settler colonialism: the Indian Residential Schools. While the residential schools were undoubtedly a violent, traumatic, and particularly egregious part of the Canadian settler colonial project, I argue that by focusing on them as the issue requiring historical justice, the government obscures larger discussions about the colonial present and makes Indigenous peoples, as Coulthard (2014) has argued, “the primary object of repair, not the colonial relationship” (p.  127). This emphasis on Indigenous peoples has rippled down into schools where students often learn that Indigenous experiences at residential schools are primarily responsible for the problems relating to Indigenous-settler relations and inequalities experienced by Indigenous communities. In other words, structural inequalities and ongoing colonial violence experienced by Indigenous peoples can be sidestepped and perhaps ignored by the state in its desire to right the historical wrong of residential schools.

“ A Sad Chapter”: The Uses of Time in Canadian Political Discourse The federal government’s 2008 apology to survivors of the residential school system remains an important indicator of the government’s vision for the reconciliation process. Made in Parliament by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the apology received a mixed response from Indigenous peoples and nations (Jacobs 2008). While not discounting the significance of this apology for many survivors and community members, its use of language strategically limits what is being apologized for. The apology’s opening lines announce that: “The treatment of children in these schools is a sad chapter in our history” (Government of Canada 2010, para. 1). The apology noticeably does not contain the terms “colonialism” or “imperialism.” The following year PM Harper was also quoted at a G8 meeting saying that Canada “has no history of colonialism” (“Really Harper” 2009, para. 1).

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Instead of a meaningful engagement with the structural nature of colonialism, the rhetorical move of the state and media has been to refer to residential schools as a “sad or dark chapter” in Canada’s history. More generally, the history of Canada’s colonial relationship to Indigenous nations has become shorthanded in public discourse as a sad chapter in a shared history. Where this chapter begins and ends is unclear, however discussing it this way most decidedly suggests the chapter has come to an end. Furthermore, these word choices create a temporal bounding of injustice and violence, locating the abuses of settler colonialism into a dusty book chapter on which we have turned the page. Furthermore, this rhetorical move is not a new strategy or unique to Canada. Scholars have noted that the general function of state apologies for historical injustice is to help create a temporal break. As Trouillot (2000) argued “apologies always involve time. They mark a temporal transition: wrong done in a time marked as past is recognized as such and this acknowledgement itself creates or verifies a new temporal plane, a present oriented towards the future” (p. 171). I argue that the temporal transition and framing of historical injustice as an event has also been picked up and replicated in Canada’s school curriculum. In this reproduction residential schools have become a key content component of social studies and history education, while simultaneously being segmented from the concerns of settler colonialism and the ongoing realities of the settler state.

 istory Education Research in Settler H Colonial Contexts Much recent research in history education and historical justice has focused on the role for learning history in post-conflict, transitional states or those still experiencing armed conflict (Bellino 2017; Paulson 2015). Recently, scholars such as Keynes (2019) have begun to explore the problems of using a transitional justice model for history education in settler colonial states. In her exploration of history education in Australia, Keynes (2019) rightly questions whether a disciplinary “historical thinking” model of history education that is ascendant in states like Canada

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and Australia in fact serves to strengthen the legitimacy of the settler state, and therefore is inadequate for pursuing transitional justice. As I have argued elsewhere, teaching history for truth and reconciliation in Canada creates similar challenges (Miles 2018). In particular, I have previously raised questions around narrativity, identity, and temporality and how they get dealt with (or not) by teachers and students addressing the unjust past. History education’s role in Canadian reconciliation efforts has also been raised by other Canadian scholars with much disagreement over the best approach to take (Cutrara 2018; Gibson and Case 2019; McGregor 2017). In these debates, it is clear that history education does have an important role to play in any reconciliation or transitional justice process yet at the same time the realities of ongoing settler colonialism must be questioned along with history education’s role in securing and entrenching the settler state.

Methods To better understand the development and implementation of British Columbia’s social studies curriculum in relation to the question of settler colonialism, I analyzed official curricular documents and interviewed members of the social studies curriculum writing team responsible for developing the new curriculum. This research was part of a larger vertical case study (Bartlett and Vavrus 2014) that examines the teaching and learning of historical injustices across multiple sites in Canada. The new social studies curriculum in British Columbia was developed and implemented between 2010 and 2019 and involved extensive consultation with a variety of different interest groups, academics, and stakeholders including the teacher’s union and the First Nations Schools Association. The curriculum writing team for social studies varied in size over the writing period, but overall included approximately 20 people in total. Six individuals involved in the writing process agreed to participate in this study. All of the participants were also practicing social studies teachers at the time with at least ten  years teaching experience. To maintain their anonymity, I have chosen not to reveal any additional information about their identities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of

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the writers lasted between 45 and 60 minutes and focused on their decisions and rationale for including historical injustices and reconciliation in the new curriculum, as well as the influence of external influences or factors. The curricular documents and relevant policy reports that were analyzed were publicly available and retrieved from various websites of the Government of British Columbia.

Representations of Reconciliation and Historical Injustice in the Curriculum What the curriculum documents and interviews with curriculum writers most clearly show is that the TRC’s Calls to Action regarding K-12 curriculum have been explicitly implemented in some form across K-12 social studies curriculum. The K-12 British Columbia curriculum integrates what it calls “First Peoples’ Principles of Learning” at all grades and in all subjects, with the social studies curriculum in particular focusing on specific aspects of Indigenous history or culture at every grade level. In British Columbia’s Social Studies 10 curriculum (2019b) the “findings and recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” now make up one of eight content outcomes for the course. Simply put, curriculum reforms in British Columbia have been successful in mandating that residential schools should be taught in every school and at multiple grades. However, how and why residential schools are taught remains less clear and more complicated. Comparing the former and revised social studies curriculum documents is beyond the scope of this chapter, but I want to highlight a few noticeable changes particularly on the framing and placement of historical injustices. First, while topics such as “residential schools,” and “Japanese Canadian internment during World War II” do appear in the previous curricula from 2005 and 2006, they were included in thematic sections such as “the impact of immigration policies” “challenges faced by Aboriginal people” and “the treatment of minorities.” (BC Ministry of Education 2005, 2006). The new social studies curriculum now includes a separate content point variously called “discriminatory policies, attitudes and historical wrongs” (Social Studies 9, BC Ministry of Education 2019a), “discriminatory policies

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and injustices in Canada and the world, including residential schools, the Head Tax, the Komagata Maru incident, and internments” (Social Studies 10, BC Ministry of Education 2019b) and “past discriminatory government policies and actions, such as the Head Tax, the Komagata Maru incident, residential schools, and internments” (Social Studies 5). Along with new categorization that specifically uses terms such as injustice and historical wrongs, these aspects of the curriculum play a much more central and visible role in the curriculum content than in previous social studies curriculum. No longer are these injustices examples for discussing immigration policies or challenges faced by Indigenous people, but instead they are one of six to eight mandatory content points in the grades which they appear. The new importance granted to historical injustices in the curriculum was confirmed by all of the curriculum writers I interviewed, who discussed how inclusion of these injustices in the curriculum was largely motivated by political commitments made by the provincial government and was one of the few content areas of the new curriculum that was “non-negotiable.” By looking more closely at the framing of historical injustices in relation to the other content in the curriculum we can also see how they are segmented as a separate historical event from key foundational aspects of the nation state. Take for example Social Studies 9. The content requirement is that students are expected to know “discriminatory policies, attitudes, and historical wrongs.” This content expectation is given the same importance as other core themes of Canada’s history during the years 1750–1919 such as “nationalism and the development of the Canadian nation-state” (BC Ministry of Education 2019a). The equal space given to injustice in some ways is an important sign and achievement of the desire to ensure historical injustices now exist in the curriculum in a way that cannot be avoided or obscured by traditional progress-oriented narratives. However, it also separates injustice from the nation building process itself. I argue this has the effect of encouraging a nation building narrative that focuses on nationalism and citizenship on the one hand while also ignoring the erasure, removal, and forcible assimilation of Indigenous peoples as part of this nation building process. It could be argued this is unavoidable given the nature and organization of curricular documents, but I argue that if settler colonialism is foundational to the

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birth and development of the Canadian nation then it must be deeply interwoven in that discussion. The separation of Indigenous and Canadian histories into separate themes, chronologies, or content expectations in the curriculum is more than an organizational tool, but a replication of a long-standing projection of the settler imagination. Cree scholar Dwayne Donald (2009) uses the idea of “the fort” to explain how curriculum has “taught and continues to teach that Aboriginal peoples and Canadians live in separate realities” (p.  1). In using the concept of the fort, Donald shows how both metaphorical and physical manifestations of the frontier fort demonstrate how Indigenous peoples have been positioned as outside the concern of non-Indigenous Canadians. This separation of realities allows non-­ Indigenous Canadians to teach and learn that Indigenous sovereignty, governance, and ways of knowing are also outside comprehension and acknowledgment. Removing Indigenous peoples from the foundations of the Canadian nation in the reformed curriculum maintains and replicates what Donald (2009) calls a “colonial frontier logic” (p. 18). This separation of realities also appears to be replicated in how the curriculum is taught in British Columbia’s schools. The curriculum writers I interviewed, who were all social studies teachers, and the curriculum documents, suggest that the most common way historical injustices are now being taught is as a separate unit or series of lessons after the nation building or Confederation narrative is explored. In other words, teachers follow what seems on the surface to be the most logical approach of introducing the context of the Canadian nation state’s creation and then examining its successes and shortcomings such as policies or actions of injustice. While on one hand this approach has the possibility of challenging a progress-oriented grand narrative of the nation, it also positions injustices as aberrations or events that were not part of the nation building project itself. In other words, the context of the Canadian nation is taught as a neutral precursor for understanding later injustices. In this imagined benign or benevolent nation-state context, injustices such as residential schools or discriminatory immigration policies can be seen as actions and policies crafted and perpetrated by bad actors that were not being faithful to the nation’s imagined principles of peace, order, and good governance.

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I argue that learning about historical injustices in this manner never challenges potentially unjust foundations of the state itself. It would be highly unlikely in the curriculum’s current form for teachers to begin from the possibility that the foundation of the Canadian nation on Indigenous land can be understood as a historical injustice for Indigenous peoples in and of itself. As a result, the concept of historical injustice remains both tied and separated from the nation in problematic ways by failing to account for the unjust structural origins and foundations of the nation. Or said otherwise, the structure and logic of settler nations is left out of the discussion when considering how and why injustices are perpetrated. Another related issue is that the curriculum places injustices of settler colonialism experienced by Indigenous nations alongside and in some ways in equivalency with injustices faced by non-White immigrant or diasporic communities. This decision unavoidably exalts the role of the colonial state as the only sovereign actor in Canada allowing it the ability to both commit and redress injustice and bestow rights and citizenship. Colonialism is thus represented as just another example of historical injustice faced by a minority group on the path to multiculturalism. As Youngblood Henderson (2013) argues, any true form of reconciliation would entail the nation state recognizing that “Canadian citizenship is not a gift or even a reparative gesture to be bestowed upon Aboriginal peoples by the state; instead Canadian citizenship is the product of Aboriginal peoples’ conditional permission through the historical treaty processes to the British sovereign to provide for settlements” (pp. 115–116). A move to portray the Canadian state as the sole arbiter of rights, citizenship, and reconciliation devalues and erases the ability of Indigenous nations to assert their sovereignty and work toward decolonization. This portrayal also suggests that Indigenous nations must work through and under the settler nation state to have their demands for justice met. Thinking beyond or outside the settler nation is rendered impossible or unimaginable. To be clear, my interviews with the social studies curriculum writers do not reveal this framing of historical injustice as their intention for the curriculum. Further, I do not intend to criticize or attack their efforts as entrenching settler colonialism in the curriculum. I think that the new

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curriculum has gone a long way in placing a greater and much needed emphasis on historical injustice in comparison with any previous iteration of the social studies curriculum. Instead, I hope this analysis will draw attention to the fact that social studies curriculum that uses the settler nation as its foundational organizational theme ends up inadvertently disconnecting citizenship and national identity with ongoing processes of settler colonialism. In thinking through the importance of building a renewed and equal relationship between Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous people in Canada emphasizing the structural and historical elements of this relationship is paramount.

 he Possibilities and Challenges of Teaching T Settler Colonialism I have demonstrated in this chapter that the problems of framing settler colonialism as an historical event have negative consequences on any true reconciliation efforts. Still, I argue there remains important and hopeful possibilities for educators trying to engage in educational efforts toward reconciliation that draw from Indigenous knowledges and demands for sovereignty and decolonization. I do not think this necessarily requires a rewriting of the curriculum. While I would argue most social studies and history curriculum in settler states do limit and frame historical injustices as an event, curricular requirements are also often flexible in their application. In the case of British Columbia, teachers have a great deal of autonomy as to how they teach the content expectations. This freedom creates possibilities for teachers in settler states to take the official curriculum and subvert some aspects of its problematic nature and draw attention to the ways in some foundational structures of the nation are unjust. In Canada, the governmental and public demand for schools to teach about Indian Residential Schools and toward a reconciled future provides the basis and justification for engaging in more meaningful discussions of settler colonialism. This call to pedagogical action opens the door for teachers to talk about issues Indigenous sovereignty, resurgence, and refusal. While this may be risky work, so too is ignoring the implications

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of failing to address the issue. In this chapter’s final section, I briefly suggest two straightforward and manageable ways for educators to rethink what is required for teaching historical injustice in settler colonial contexts. I have crafted these suggestions as two declarative statements for teachers: 1. Settler colonial nations must be recognized as settler colonial nations While this statement may seem self-evident and circular, I suggest that history educators and teachers must continually remember and draw attention to the fact that nations such as Canada remain colonial states. There has been a long history in Canadian schools of imagining Indigenous peoples as separate from the nation (Donald 2009), and also imagining that our multicultural present has moved beyond and disposed of its colonial past. However, it is essential to ensure in classrooms and curriculum that the colonial construct remains a defining aspect of the relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples. This reality cannot be ignored but must not be taken as inevitable or everlasting. If this is not recognized and emphasized non-Indigenous students will continue to perpetuate ignorance about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the nation state. 2. Sovereignty, rights, and citizenship are not solely granted by the settler nation state Citizenship education and building a sense of national identity remain key goals of history and social studies education. However, in this process students are most often taught the principle that the nation state is the sole provider of citizenship and rights. Teaching students that citizenship and rights are not an exclusive power of the settler state but in fact central to the sovereignty of Indigenous nations helps enforce the idea that Indigenous nations are in fact sovereign and on equal footing. This is not to suggest that educators should teach that Indigenous nations grant citizenship in the same way that the Canadian state does but rather to think about Indigenous nations as having a parallel and equal system of sovereignty. Truly respecting and understanding the Indigenous-Canadian

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state relationship as a “nation to nation” relationship allows students to critique aspects of the reconciliation discourse that demonstrably show how Canada might not be respecting this relationship or acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty. Implementing this suggestion requires more than simply acknowledging or stating that Indigenous sovereignty exists but teaching the history of treaties and Indigenous-settler relations as being at the foundation of the Canadian nation state. This is not to argue there has been an equal historical relationship or that there has been no conflict, betrayal, or disagreement but instead to assert that Indigenous history cannot be a separate issue from understanding the foundation and logic of Canadian nationhood. An emphasis on teaching the interwoven and yet separate and sovereign nature of Canada and Indigenous peoples is daunting and complicated, but absolutely necessary. Without it, students will continue to see historical injustices perpetrated by settler colonial states as aberrant events on the path to states of benevolence, tolerance, and multiculturalism.

Conclusion In this chapter I have briefly analyzed how social studies curriculum in Canada continues to replicate and maintain the logic of settler colonialism by ignoring the foundations of Canadian nationhood founded on Indigenous dispossession and colonial violence. I have argued that historical injustices are now an important part of the K-12 curriculum, yet their mere presence does not challenge the colonial nature of the state. Instead the framing of colonial injustice as a past event obscures its ongoing presence by emphasizing imagined and admirable values such as multiculturalism, cross cultural understanding, tolerance and Indigenoussettler reconciliation. The point I make here is not to criticize a desire to teach for or about such goals, but to suggest that this focus emphasizes individuals and events; rather than structures and nations. Such a process also works to further secure settler futurity by rendering the logic of the settler colonial present opaque and misunderstood. I suggest that such an approach to reckoning with or redressing the unjust past in history education will always remain symbolic and thus cannot adequately respond

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to Indigenous sovereignty, resistance, and refusal. James (2013) has referred to this symbolic approach, as promoted by the Canadian state, a “neoliberal heritage redress.” He argues that such an approach which emphasizes multiculturalism and social cohesion both “excludes critical voices” and “numbs critical memory” (p. 41). Despite these concerns formal history education remains an important and sustained place in which the legacies of historical injustice can be engaged. By no means is history education a comprehensive solution, but it allows the possibility of engaging critical voices and moving toward an approach that might challenge and imagine alternatives to ongoing colonial structures and relations in Canada. This chapter aims to take a step in that direction.

References Alfred, Taiaiake. 2009. Restitution Is the Real Pathway to Justice for Indigenous Peoples. In Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey, ed. Greg Younging, Mike DeGagné, and Jonathan Dewar, 179–190. Ottawa, ON: Aboriginal Healing Foundation. Bartlett, Lesley, and Frances Vavrus. 2014. Transversing the Vertical Case Study: A Methodological Approach to Studies of Educational Policy as Practice. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 45 (2): 131–147. BC Ministry of Education. 2005. Social Studies 11: Integrated Resource Package. Victoria, BC: Government of British Columbia. ———. 2006. Social Studies 10: Integrated Resource Package. Victoria, BC: Government of British Columbia. ———. 2019a. BC’s New Curriculum: Social Studies 9. Accessed 14 May 2019. https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/social-­studies/9. ———. 2019b. BC’s New Curriculum: Social Studies 10. Accessed 14 May 2019. https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/social-­studies/10. Bellino, Michelle. 2017. Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chrisjohn, Ronald, and Tanya Wacase. 2009. Half-Truths and Whole Lies: Rhetoric in the Apology and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey, ed. Greg Younging, Mike DeGagné, and Jonathan Dewar, 197–206. Ottawa, ON: Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

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Coulthard, Glen. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cutrara, Samantha. 2018. The Settler Grammar of Canadian History Curriculum: Why Historical Thinking Is Unable to Respond to the TRC’s Calls to Action. Canadian Journal of Education 41: 250–275. Donald, Dwayne. 2009. Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts. First Nations Perspectives 2: 1–24. Gibson, Lindsay, and Roland Case. 2019. Reshaping Canadian History Education to Support Reconciliation. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l’éducation 42: 251–284. Government of Canada. 1996. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Ottawa, ON: Queen’s Printers. ———. 2010. Statement of Apology to Former Students of Indian Residential Schools [Speech]. Accessed 14 May 2019. http://www.aadncaandc.gc.ca/ eng/1100100015644/1100100015649. Henderson, Jennifer, and Pauline Wakeham. 2013. Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Jacobs, Beverly. 2008. Response to Canada’s Apology to Residential School Survivors. Canadian Woman Studies 26: 223–225. James, Matt. 2013. Neoliberal Heritage Redress. In Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, ed. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, 31–46. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Keynes, Matilda. 2019. History Education for Transitional Justice? Challenges, Limitations and Possibilities for Settler Colonial Australia. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 13 (1), 113–133. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ijtj/ijy026. McGregor, Heather. 2017. One Classroom, Two Teachers? Historical Thinking and Indigenous Education in Canada. Critical Education 8: 1–18. Miles, James. 2018. Teaching History for Truth and Reconciliation: The Challenges and Opportunities of Narrativity, Temporality, and Identity. McGill Journal of Education/Revue des sciences de l’éducation de McGill 53: 151–182. ———. 2021. Curriculum Reform in a Culture of Redress: How Social and Political Pressures are Shaping Social Studies Curriculum in Canada. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 53(1): 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027 2.2020.1822920. Murphy, Jessica. 2018. Does Justin Trudeau Apologize Too Much? BBC News, March 28. Accessed 21 February 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-­us-­canada-­43560817.

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National Association of Japanese Canadians. 2019. Recommendations for Redressing Historical Wrongs Against Japanese Canadians in BC: Community Consultations Report. [Report]. Winnipeg, MB: National Association of Japanese Canadians. Paulson, Julia. 2015. ‘Whether and How?’ History Education about Recent and Ongoing Conflict: A Review of Research. Journal on Education in Emergencies 1: 14–47. Really Harper, Canada Has No History of Colonialism? (2009, September 28). Vancouver Sun. Accessed 23 October 2019. https://vancouversun.com/news/ community-­blogs/really-­harper-­canada-­has-­no-­history-­of-­colonialism. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tasker, John. 2017, March 8. Conservative Senator Defends ‘Well Intentioned’ Residential School System. CBC News. Accessed 14 May 2019. http://www. cbc.ca/news/politics/residential-­s chool-­s ystem-­w ell-­i ntentioned-­ conservative-­senator-­1.4015115. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2000. Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era. Interventions 2: 171–186. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). 2015a. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [Report]. Accessed 23 October 2019. http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final%20Reports/Executive_Summary_ English_Web.pdf. ———. 2015b. Calls to Action [Report]. Accessed 14 May 2019. http://nctr.ca/ assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. Tuck, Eve. 2009. Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review 79: 409–428. Tuck, Eve, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández. 2013. Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29: 73–89. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research 8: 387–409. Youngblood Henderson, James Sa’ke’j. 2013. Incomprehensible Canada. In Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, ed. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, 115–128. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

13 Narrative Justice? Ten Tools to Deconstruct Narratives About Violent Pasts Angela Bermudez

Introduction What is the role of history education in processes of historical justice, and what should it be? Historical justice denotes the aim of righting wrongs from the past. As Keynes et al. explain in the introduction to this volume, this broad aspiration involves legalist and material approaches focused on retribution, but also, and increasingly, processes and initiatives of truth telling that emphasize truth-as-justice and as a fundamental element of civic rebuilding. The most direct implication of this idea is the requirement that the accounts of the violent pasts taught in schools recognize the harm caused and reflect the experience and perspective of the victims. Yet, I argue that history education can and should embrace a more comprehensive task that includes the former but goes beyond it: History education should strive to de-normalize violence, as violence is the ultimate expression of injustice. A. Bermudez (*) University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_13

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If we judge by what is included in school textbooks, most of the history taught to young people across the world is the history of violent pasts. A high proportion of their contents refer, in a self-evident way, to violent events and processes. Students are bombarded with the names, dates, and sites of innumerable battles, coups d’état, conquests, and civilizing enterprises. Wars and revolutions are easy turning points in memorizing national histories. However, despite being a dominant motif, violence is rarely discussed or made the object of explicit analysis. Quite the contrary, violence tends to be normalized in textbook narratives (Bermudez 2019). That is, violence is most often treated as a natural trait of human affairs, an inevitable feature of historical processes that requires no explanation. The tendency of textbook narratives to sanitize and normalize violence runs counter to the call of ethical philosophers and peace and conflict scholars (Arendt 1970; Galtung 1990) to scrutinize the resort to violence as a means of solving social conflicts. They insist that political violence is not simply a natural and inevitable trait of human interactions, but rather a socially constructed, and often instrumental strategy that treats the “other” as a disposable means to achieve disputed goods. For that reason, it deserves the attention of our critical minds. Galtung’s concept of cultural violence (1990) is useful to understand the role that history education has played in normalizing violence. He conceptualizes three kinds of violence that are distinct although interdependent. “Direct violence” is physical and intended; war being its most typical form. Direct violence rests on and perpetuates “structural violence” and “cultural violence.” The former refers to built-in patterns of social organization marked by exclusion and inequality, and the latter to the host of normative beliefs and social practices that dehumanize certain people and legitimize the use of violence against them. The law, religion, science, language, and education can serve as channels of cultural violence through which instrumental, destructive, and unfair practices are rendered acceptable. Building on these concepts, I have argued that history education often operates as a form of cultural violence (Bermudez 2019). My analysis of textbook narratives in different countries revealed ten discursive mechanisms that allow historical accounts to talk about the violent past while taking for granted key aspects that are regarded as

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unproblematic, and thus not in need of explanation. In this manner, textbook narratives preclude any critical reflection about violence, making its roots, causes, consequences, and alternatives invisible to the reader. In this chapter, I argue that if history education is to contribute to the advancement of historical justice, it is essential that teachers learn to deconstruct historical narratives that normalize violence, which often populate history classrooms; and in this way help students develop a critical understanding of the violent past. Yet these tasks require an unusual integration of disciplined historical inquiry and ethical reflection. I first discuss these ideas against the backdrop of ongoing debates about what are legitimate goals of history education, particularly in current literature on the development of historical thinking skills and historical consciousness. The theoretical argument is then operationalized in the proposal of ten narrative keys that offer analytic tools to critically examine representations of the violent past conveyed through formal and non-formal means of history education such as school textbooks and museum exhibits.

Theoretical Considerations The contention that history education can and should serve as an instrument of historical justice rests on particular assumptions about what are legitimate goals of history education, a question that has sparked considerable discussion among scholars. One central assumption is that history is and should be taught in response to needs and questions that we have in the present. Already in Democracy and Education, Dewey (1916) stressed that it is the “present situation with its problems” that invites us to look at ourselves historically, and in turn orients our historical understanding toward agency in the present to address those problems. In his words, The segregation which kills the vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. […] But knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the present. […] The way to get some insight into any complex product is to trace

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the process of its making. To apply this method to history as if it meant only the truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its past, is one-sided. It means equally that past events cannot be separated from the living present and retain meaning. The true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems. (Dewey 1916, Chapter 16, #3, p. 250)

There is significant consensus about this claim among history educators. However, discussion emerges when the problems of the present are translated into specific social goals that history education should help to achieve. History education has been a cornerstone of nation-building projects, it has been instrumental to justifying war against perceived enemies, and it has been commonly used to create a sense of shared heritage among diverse communities (Carretero 2011; Grever 2012; Symcox and Wilschut 2009). It has also been regarded as a means to foster tolerance of diversity; a resource to promote intercultural dialogue, peaceful coexistence, and reconciliation; or a tool to defy racism and simplistic portrayals of “others” (Barton and Levstik 2004; Cole 2007; Epstein and Peck 2018; Korostelina 2013; McCully 2009; Psaltis et al. 2017). In all these cases, history education is conceived of as a means to form a desired citizenry. Advancing historical justice or de-normalizing violence are two new examples of such goals; they intend not simply to straighten the record of the past, but to affect public consciousness and collective memory in ways that can sustain inclusive and fair societies. However, and despite its appeal, the connection of history and civic education raises concern and controversy due to the risks of (ab)using the past for ideological and political reasons (Taylor and Guyver 2012). Positions in these debates reflect different views about what are legitimate or problematic social uses of history.

The Development of Disciplinary Thinking Skills A vibrant tradition of research and innovation has developed a “disciplinary approach” to history education that claims that this subject should not be reduced to teaching facts and telling stories, but rather, that it

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should also teach students to “think historically.” This implies mastering second order concepts and procedures of historical inquiry and explanation that form the epistemological basis that make knowledge of the past possible (Lee 2011; Seixas et al. 2000). These concepts and procedures include the assessment and interpretation of evidence, the reconstruction of multicausal relations, the analysis of intertwined processes of continuity and change, or the contextualization of historical beliefs and practices. They provide a framework for students to investigate historical issues within the parameters of reliability, rational explanation, and evidence-­ based justification typical of the discipline of history. For these scholars, the concern about connecting history and civic education is that if the civic objectives override the disciplinary objectives, history education can become an instrument to make students arrive at pre-determined conclusions without engaging in rigorous historical analysis (Lee and Shemilt 2007; McCully 2017). Lee assumes that “the point of history is to be able to say something valid about the past, often in thinking about the present and future,” but he warns that this should not translate in allowing “our present interests and future desires determine how we organize and understand the past” (Lee 2011, p. 64). Subordinating history to civic education can deform the integrity of the discipline, turning it into “fodder for politicians (rival) conceptions of what it might mean to be a good citizen,” (Lee 2011, p. 64) or treating the past as something to plunder in order to “produce convenient stories for present ends” (Lee 2011, p. 65). Along these lines, Wineburg noted that “history teaches us a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when necessary—about the stories we tell” (Wineburg 2001, p. ix). The risk of plundering the past is indeed real and problematic, and the tools to confront it should not be overlooked. However, this position rests on a distinction between intrinsic disciplinary goals and extrinsic social goals of history education, which merits further discussion. From this perspective, the role of history education is to foster rational scrutiny of the demands of the present. History “provides a host of tools that afford […] a way of seeing almost any substantive issue in human affairs, subject to certain procedures and standards, whatever feelings one may have” (Lee 1992, p.  23–24). Developing this analytic capacity equips

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citizens to live in and contribute to a democratic society, and there is no need to impose on history education other social goals to warrant its educational value. Cercadillo (2012), for example, contends that integrating history education with civic goals may reduce history to a “practical past,” selecting from the past only what is useful for present concerns, and “finding a use for history outside of itself, as a means for an end that is external to the discipline” (Cercadillo 2012, p. 7). This, to her, amounts more to social engineering than to authentic history education.

The Development of Historical Consciousness Researchers and practitioners who understand history education as the development of historical consciousness have a different take on this issue (Seixas 2004). They believe that academic history builds upon and develops social needs for interpretation and orientation related to the construction of meaning, the negotiation of identity, and the orientation of agency (Rüsen 2004). With his “disciplinary matrix of historical thinking” Rüsen (1983) argues that the procedures for rational inquiry are part of a dialogical relationship between the scientific knowledge produced by historians and the expectations and interests of practical life that inspire it. The interpretation of social interests as “needs for orientation in time” begins a cyclical process. Historians employ theories and methods of empirical research, which allow them to take distance from the lived history, open up a space for rational argumentation, and defend the independence of their work from “any obedience to political and ideological prescriptions which may aim at determining the understanding of the past” (Rüsen 2011, p.15). The resulting historical narratives feed back into the realm of practical life as they serve two fundamental functions: One, the formation and expression of historical identity. History discloses the temporal dimensions of human subjectivity, giving self-­ understanding a temporal feature by which a person becomes part of a temporal whole larger than his or her personal life (Rüsen 2004, p. 68). Two, the motivation and guidance of agency and action toward the construction of collective futures. History uncovers the temporality of circumstances shaped by human activity, revealing, “the web of temporal

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change in which our lives are caught up and (at least indirectly) the future perspectives towards which that change is flowing” (Rüsen 2004, p. 67). Historical consciousness is the product of this dialogic relationship between academic history and the interests of practical life, and this, in turn, is a response to the human strive to understand the past in order to orient themselves in the present and future (Rüsen 2004). Seixas (2016) revised Rüsen’s matrix, redefining the lower half of the cycle as the realm of collective memory and life practices, which interacts with the realm of disciplinary history (upper half of the cycle) and feeds back critical representations of the past that develop public memory. History education is placed as a stripe between the two semi-circles, a bridge that facilitates the negotiation and integration of academic history and public memory. This view recognizes that history education needs to address questions related to students’ identities and to the contested memories that circulate in fractured communities and cosmopolitan societies. But it also recognizes that history education should subject these questions and memories to the scrutiny of the critical, evidence-­ based, and truth-seeking methods of history. The role of history education is thus to develop students’ competencies for historical consciousness, and to ensure that the dialogue between the two realms does not get short-circuited. Otherwise, history education is reduced to an uncritical shaping of collective memory and community ties based on the transmission of unexamined narratives, or to the development of abstract and decontextualized disciplinary skills that do not engage with students’ identities or with the uses of history in the present. The concepts of historical consciousness and historical thinking are thus not antithetical, and scholars of each tradition have discussed their points of intersection and disagreement (Seixas 2017; Lee 2004). Still, the different emphasis they place on understanding substantive issues of the present and aiming for educational goals beyond the development of skills for rational inquiry is noteworthy. Seixas and Morton (2013) include in the competencies for historical consciousness the analytic procedures emphasized by the disciplinary tradition: the critical use of evidence, the identification of continuity and change, the analysis of cause and consequence, and the contextualized understanding of historical perspectives. But they add the competency to establish historical significance

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(why we care, today, about certain events, trends, and issues in history), and the competency to understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations. For Körber (2014) the competencies of historical consciousness include generating historical questions from life situations, working with historical methods to answer them, and developing representations that are useful for life orientation. In this view, there is no dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic goals, and it is not necessarily a problem that history education performs a “practical past.” This is not a use of the past that is external to the discipline, it is actually its very essence: A disciplined response to the need (and the capacity) of human beings to construct themselves and to orient their actions based on their understanding of the past. Undeniably, the problem lays in “reducing history to” or in “making history serve,” that is, narrowly selecting only what is useful to advance a particular interest at the expense of truth, fair representation, and rendering the complexity of an issue that is necessary for good understanding. When this happens, there is no dialogue between history and practical life, there is no reflective process of asking relevant questions, and exploring the intricacies of the past to shed light on current problems. We are thus left with a biased and overly simplistic crafting of a past, which in turn is not really practical because it is useless to understand and orient ourselves in the present. That is indeed poor history education, but it would also be poor social engineering. Plundering the past runs against a true search for a practical past.

Ethical Reflection in History Education The inclusion of ethical reflection in the framework of historical consciousness, and the conviction that it does not in itself compromise the rigor of historical explanation, is particularly propitious for the claim that history education should foster historical justice. According to Seixas and Morton (2013), the competency to understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations involves addressing how we, in the present, judge actors in different circumstances in the past; and how different interpretations of the past reflect different moral

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stances today. Seixas (2017) also includes coming to terms with past injustices and their legacies in the present. Let us now develop this argument from the standpoint of ethical philosophy. As Conill (2001) reminds us, there is no room for ethics in the explanation of natural phenomena that occur independently of human action and volition. But when dealing with phenomena that are socially constructed, ethical reflection is possible and necessary. For Conill, this presupposes four conditions: that different courses of action are available (possibility), that within a range of possibilities, people make choices and decisions (freedom), that the actions that follow enhance or hinder the life, dignity, and the potential for individual and collective development (consequences), and therefore that people should account for their choices and actions and if necessary, repair the harm caused to others (responsibility). Following this line of reasoning, Bermudez and Epstein (2020) propose that ethical reflection about the violent past involves asking questions about the courses of action available to participants in conflict situations and the conditions and obstacles that constrained their choices; questions regarding the consequences of violence in the short and long term; questions that shed light on the victims of violence and their experience; questions about the responsibility of the actors involved in the use of violence, and questions that confront the accounts and interpretations that seem to justify it. The concept of historical consciousness outlined above offers a promising framework to develop the claim that history education should contribute to historical justice. This framework stresses the importance of undertaking this task through disciplined inquiry and ethical reflection. However, we are still short of concrete indications for how to operationalize the advancement of historical justice. The model of ten narrative keys proposed here contributes to meet this need by offering a set of analytic tools to deconstruct historical narratives and identify the different ways in which they normalize or de-normalize violence. Reading historical accounts through these lenses can help teachers to identify narratives and to structure pedagogical opportunities that engage students in critical inquiry and ethical reflection about the violent past.

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Ten Tools for Narrative Justice The ten narrative keys emerged from a study that examined how 36 textbook accounts represent the violence intrinsic to 9 different episodes from the violent past of Spain, Colombia, and the United States (Bermudez 2019). Each key designates a discursive mechanism used to build narrative representations. They pay attention not only to what is said, but also to what is not said, and to how things are said. That is, they look for the structure and the dynamic features of narratives that frame the meaning of events: How some aspects are placed in the foreground of the story while others are moved to the background; how relationships between themes are established, broken, or mitigated; how some perspectives are subordinated or marginalized; or how silences are built into the story. In the original rendering, the keys described the narrative mechanisms used to normalize violence (Bermudez and Argumero 2018; Bermudez and Stoskopf 2019; Padilla and Bermudez 2016; Stoskopf and Bermudez 2017). However, subsequent research on memorial museums showed that these mechanisms could be inverted, so to speak, to expose past violence in ways that invite critical reflection about it (Bermudez and Epstein 2020). The analytic model proposed here integrates these two possibilities, so each narrative key can operate in two directions, toward normalizing violence or toward de-normalizing it. Descriptions focus on the extremes to stress the difference between them, but each key is better understood as a continuum, with gradations in between.

Relationship Between Conflict and Violence This key focuses on how narratives represent the relationship between conflict and violence. Conflict is a natural element of social life, and it can generate creative transformations of underlying contradictions, or be a source of violent destruction. Thus, violence is only one of the ways that people have to relate to each other when facing contradictions. However, narratives that normalize violence conflate the existence of social conflict and the recourse to violence, implying that where there is conflict,

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violence inevitably follows. In contrast, narratives that de-normalize violence differentiate the explanation of conflict from the explanation of violence, paying attention to questions such as: • • • •

What was in dispute in social conflicts underlying to historical events? Why and how did violence become the preferred means to deal with it? What alternatives where discarded? Did the transformation of social and political relations progressively close the possibility of non-violent options? • How did the use of violence shape the development of historical events?

F raming of Violent Events Within Larger Historical Processes This key examines how narratives frame the meaning of a violent past by positioning it as an episode of longer historical processes. The location of events within long-term processes is a distinctive feature of historical narration and explanation, which affords a sophisticated understanding of complex and dynamic phenomena. But the representation of specific events as being part of something larger than themselves confers meaning, purpose, or direction to them; and when applied to the violent past, this can serve to justify or to contest the use of violence. Even when narratives portray violent events as unfortunate or tragic episodes, they tend to regard them as the steps that laid the path to valued social goals; be them building a nation, gaining independence, advancing progress, or completing a revolution. This kind of framing tends to justify violence as a sad but inevitable reality, a sidebar to otherwise constructive processes, a minor cost to pay for the attainment of something precious. The de-­ normalization of violence therefore requires that violent events be reframed in narratives that articulate, • • • •

different dimensions and directions of historical process, the experiences of different actors within them, the multiple and often conflicting consequences they have, the devastating and unjust outcomes of violence.

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Such reframing allows raising questions and concerns that disrupt the social discourse that normalize violence.

Plurality of Narratives This key pays attention to how accounts of a violent past recognize and coordinate different narratives. Historical narratives are interpretative reconstructions of the past, crafted from the vantage points of different actors, and shaped by the questions we ask in the present. Inevitably, historiography and collective memory are sites of political struggle, in which multiple narratives coexist and relate to one another through dynamics of domination, exclusion, contestation, resistance, or critical dialogue. However, narratives that normalize violence convey dominant accounts of the violent past as matters of fact, and not of interpretation. Furthermore, events and perspectives that disrupt the official storyline are suppressed, marginalized, or distorted. The de-normalization of violence rests on plural accounts and multi-vocal narratives that make it possible to contrast and interrogate different representations of the violent past, and their grounds for validity. Narratives may be coordinated in multiple ways: • Weaving them as different strands or voices in a narrative plot. • Setting them side-by-side as contrasting views and inviting readers to reflect and make sense of the differences, divergences, and contradictions. • Mapping areas of overlapping consensus and discrepancy through analysis and synthesis. • Mapping the power relations among them that define which stories become dominant and which become marginal. Recognizing the interpretative nature and plurality of historical narratives prevents that a single representation is taken for granted as an absolute truth, a neutral depiction of the natural unfolding of events that merits no questions.

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Perspective and Experience of Victims This key sheds light on how the victims of violence are portrayed, and the extent to which their experience of unjust suffering is acknowledged. Narratives that normalize violence understate the extent and depth of the harm caused to certain sectors of the population. This may result from accounts that, valorizing violent acts as heroic deeds, conceal the suffering inflicted upon others. However, even when violence is regarded as unfortunate, the perspectives and voices of victims are given little attention. Consequently, accounts of a violent past came across as stories of violence with no hurt. The representation of victims is of course highly dependent on the side of the conflict on which they fall, with understatement and blaming being stronger when victims are part of the “others” Narratives that de-normalize violence and regard victims as people burdened with an unjust suffering that stripped them of their dignity, basic rights, and fair treatment. Therefore, they can highlight the perspectives and voices of victims, independently of the “side” they take in a conflict. In doing so, they • go beyond stating numbers and demographics data, to represent the texture of their experiences and the ways in which they made sense of them; for instance when trying to survive war, when displaced from their homelands, or when disposed from their material and cultural wealth, • go beyond the acts of victimization that reduce victims to vulnerable and passive actors, to also represent their active responses, and the strategies and resources employed to prevent, resist, or overcome violence, • expose the radical asymmetry between victims and perpetrators that allows some individuals to use others as objects or means for their own benefit or satisfaction.

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Agency Behind Violence This key focuses on the agency of the perpetrators of violence, their choices, and actions. Stressing the perspective of victims helps to understand the harm caused, but it does not explain why and how atrocities and injustice happen. For that, narratives must represent the role that perpetrators played in unleashing violence. However, narratives that normalize violence conceal or diffuse the agency behind it. Even though most of the characters that populate historical narratives are violent, they are often not portrayed as agents of violence. Their rationale for employing violence is rarely exposed. In this way, textbooks convey stories of hurt with no blame (or responsibility). In contrast, narratives that de-normalize violence expose the agency and responsibility of different actors, on different sides of a conflict when necessary. Importantly, they, • situate agency in context, that is, they stress the decisions taken by perpetrators and the reasons and motives that informed their choices, but also consider the conditions that shaped or constrained their options, • represent political violence as socially constructed, rather than a natural or impulsive response to conflict, • depict the consequences of violence as the outcome of deliberate practices, authored and enacted by individuals, rather than as unforeseen consequences of abstract or natural forces.

Social Factors That Underlie Violence This key examines how narratives account for the social structures, processes, and dynamics that propel and sustain violence. Narratives that normalize violence describe violent events in a social vacuum, disjointed from the complex interaction of social factors that generate conflict and trigger violent responses to them. Political, social, economic, or cultural factors may be described as causes that explain why a historical event took place, but not why it turned violent. In order to de-normalize violence,

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narratives must engage with questions that help to explain (not justify) violence: • What resources, goals, or beliefs were in dispute? • What interests or needs were put at risk, that violent actors were trying to protect or defend? • How did the agency of individuals interplay with other causal factors and mechanisms of violence? • What are the social, economic, political, cultural, or psychological roots of violent practices?

Non-violent Alternatives This key sheds light on how narratives represent non-violent alternatives available at the time. Narratives that normalize violence exclude, or at best marginalize, individual or collective actors that expressed disagreement, actively opposed the use of violence, or advocated for non-violent strategies to deal with the conflicts at stake. When included, they are typically portrayed as naïve, isolated, and ineffective individuals, abstracting them from the wider context and social movements that informed and supported them. Consequently, they imply that there were no reasonable alternatives to violence at the time. In contrast, narratives that de-­ normalize violence bring into the picture historical actors that challenged the use of violence on different grounds, revealing social disagreement regarding the convenience, fairness, and legitimacy of violence. Distinctive of these narratives is that they, • represent the complex interplay between individual leaders and social movements, • explain the beliefs that supported their positions, • describe different strategies employed to advance their views, • discuss the impact they had, whether this was significant or limited, • explain the pressures they faced, and the struggles that they put up.

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Costs of Violence This key examines how narratives represent the burden and costs of violence. Narratives that normalize violence provide rather simplistic or unclear accounts of this matter: Besides the number of human casualties, or abstract statements about the consequences of war in the future development of political affairs, little is said about what was destroyed or what was lost with the use of violence. In order to de-normalize violence, narratives must provide an accurate measure of the magnitude and range of the damage caused, conveying to the reader an unsettling sense of loss. Narratives that do so, • discuss material and non-material costs, for instance, the infliction of psychosocial trauma, the destruction of cultural heritage, the loss of economic resources, or environmental devastation, • articulate precise quantitative data with testimonies and descriptions that convey what they meant in everyday life, • consider the ramifications of the costs and losses over time and across space.

Profits of Violence Given the instrumental nature of violence, critical representations of the violent past must account for the benefits that some individuals or groups obtain from it. This is fundamental to shed light on the injustice of the asymmetries intrinsic to violence. Narratives that normalize violence make no reference to what is gained with it, or to who profits from it, casting a shadow over the interests that mobilize violence. In turn, narratives that de-normalize violence distinguish who profits and who pays the cost. In doing so, they make visible the economy of war (or colonialism, or dictatorships, or other forms of violence). For this they may, • inquire about the industries that depend or thrive on it, • examine the ways in which violence enhances the economic, political, or cultural standing of particular individuals or groups, • discuss what was sacrificed in exchange for the benefits obtained.

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Connections Between Past and Present This key looks into the connections that narratives of the violent past establish with the present. Narratives that normalize violence start and end in the past, disconnecting it from the questions and problems of the present that drive historical inquiry and make historical knowledge significant. Narratives that foster a critical understanding of the violent past establish a variety of links with the present. They, • introduce current questions and concerns to which the narrative tries to respond, • emphasize the legacies of past violence for societies as a whole, and for particular groups that continue to endure its consequences, • reveal how the past is present in our lives today and in our imagination of the future; and discuss the implications of “turning the page” or “looking back,” • analyze what elements of a past conflict remain in the present and which have changed. These connections help to de-normalize violence as they represent the violent past as something that is relevant today, a source of problems that need to be explained, and which therefore, cannot be taken for granted.

Closing Remarks The core assumption of this book, the idea that history education can and should serve as an instrument of historical justice, will most likely spark an intense controversy among scholars of history education. Therefore, I begin by discussing this idea in relation to current debates regarding the goals of history education in two traditions of research and practice that are particularly relevant. Reviewing literature on the disciplinary approach to history education and on the development of historical consciousness helps to understand why the aspiration of advancing historical justice could be met with hesitation, and what are the sources of concern.

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However, my discussion also points to key concepts and exchanges among these bodies of research that resonate with the goal of fostering historical justice and can aid us in pursuing it in a disciplined and reflective manner. I argue that the conception of history education as the development of historical consciousness offers a useful framework to develop the claim of this book. Recognizing the fundamental value of rigorous historical inquiry, this framework offers a set of disciplinary tools for rational scrutiny that protect history education from the risk of plundering the past. Recognizing that ethical reflection is a constitutive element of historical understanding, which does not in itself compromise the rigor of historical explanation, this tradition creates a novel conceptual space in which advancing historical justice becomes a legitimate and plausible goal. Situated in this conceptual space, I also argue that, for as long as history education serves as a channel of cultural violence through which instrumental, destructive, and unfair practices are rendered acceptable, this subject will not be well positioned to foster historical justice. My central claim is that historical justice requires the de-normalization of violence; and from this perspective, my response to the guiding question of this book is that an important role of history education in processes of historical justice is to help interrogate narratives that normalize violence and to foster a critical understanding of violent pasts. In order to do so, history educators need tools to deconstruct historical narratives and to guide students’ historical inquiry and ethical reflection toward key issues that make the problems and injustice of violence visible and repugnant. This is what the ten narrative keys offer, a set of analytic tools that can be used by scholars and teachers to deconstruct the narratives that circulate through formal and informal sites of history education, and to design pedagogical mediations that engage students in a critical and ethical examination of violent pasts. The narrative keys draw our attention to how historical accounts represent issues like victimization, the costs and profits of violence, resistance to it, and so forth. Underlying them is an invitation to interrogate the causes and consequences of violence, the human agency that provoked it, the changes and continuities in its development, or the different perspectives and interpretations offered by historical and contemporary actors. This choice of questions expose the ethical orientation of historical inquiry, as

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it aims to shed light on past injustices and their legacies in the present, on how such injustices are normalized or problematized, and on how different interpretations of the past reflect different moral stances today. If the narrative keys prove effective in undoing the work of cultural violence, we can think of them as a set of tools to perform some sort of narrative justice.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt Publishing. Barton, Keith., and Linda Levstik. 2004. Teaching History for the Common Good. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bermudez, Angela. 2019. The Normalization of Political Violence in History Textbooks: Ten Narrative Keys. Historical Dialogues, Justice, and Memory Network – Working Paper Series, No. 15, March 2019. Bermudez, Angela., and Diego Argumero Martínez. 2018. The Narrative Framing of Violence in Teaching Resources About the Spanish Conquest of America. Panta Rei 8: 93–118. Bermudez, Angela., and Terrie Epstein. 2020. Representations of Violent Pasts in Memorial Museums: Ethical Reflection and History Education. Journal for the Study of Education and Development / Infancia & Aprendizaje 43: 503–543. https://doi.org/10.1080/02103702.2020.1772541. Bermudez, Angela., and Alan Stoskopf. 2019. Representations of Political Violence in American History Textbooks: Interrogating the “Trail of Tears” Narrative. In Intercultural Education: Critical Perspectives, Pedagogical Challenges, and Promising Practices, ed. Cinzia Pica-Smith, Carmen N. Veloria, and Rina Manuela Contini. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Carretero, Mario. 2011. Constructing Patriotism: Teaching History and Memories in Global Worlds. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Cercadillo, Lis. 2012. Las controvertidas relaciones entre educación histórica y ciudadana. XXIII Simposio Internacional de Didáctica de las Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Sevilla, Marzo 27–29. Cole, Elizabeth., ed. 2007. Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Conill, Jesús. 2001. Aspectos éticos de la globalización. Justicia, solidaridad y esperanza frente a la globalización. Documentación Social 125: 225–242.

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Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education (Chapter 16. The Significance of Geography and History). New York: Macmillan. Accessed 10 March 2017 – via Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/democracyandedu00 dewegoog#page/n6/mode/2up. Epstein, Terrie., and Carla Peck. 2018. Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts. Milton: Routledge. Galtung, Johan. 1990. Cultural Violence. Journal of Peace Research 27 (3): 291–305. Grever, Maria. 2012. Dilemmas of Common and Plural History: Reflections on History Education and Heritage in a Global World. In History Education and the Construction of National Identities, ed. Mario Carretero, Mikel Asensio, and María Rodriguez-Moneo, 75–92. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Körber, Andreas. 2014. De-constructing Memory Culture. In Teaching Historical Memories in an Intercultural Perspective. Concepts and Methods, ed. H. Bjerg, C. Lenz, and A. Körber, 145–150. Berlin: Metropol. Korostelina, Karina V. 2013. History Education in the Formation of Social Identity: Toward a Culture of Peace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, Peter J. 1992. History in Schools: Aims, Purposes and Approaches. A Reply to John White. In The Aims of School History: The National Curriculum and Beyond, ed. P.  J. Lee, J.  Slater, J.  Walsh, and J.  White, 23–24. London: Tufnell Press. ———. 2004. Walking Backwards into Tomorrow: Historical Consciousness and Understanding History. International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 4 (1): 1–45. ———. 2011. History Education and Historical Literacy. In Debates in History Teaching, ed. I. Davis, 63–72. London: Routledge. Lee, Peter J., and Denis Shemilt. 2007. New Alchemy or Fatal Attraction? History and Citizenship. Teaching History 129: 14–19. McCully, Alan. 2009. The Contribution of History Teaching to Peace-building. In Encyclopedia of Peace Education, ed. Gavriel Salomon and Edward Cairns, 313–322. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. Teaching History and Educating for Citizenship: Allies or “Uneasy Bedfellows” in a Post-conflict Context? In Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts, ed. Terrie Epstein and Carla Peck, 160–174. Milton: Routledge.

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Padilla, Angelíca., and Angela Bermudez. 2016. To Normalize Conflict and Denormalize Violence: Challenges and Possibilities in a Critical Teaching of History of the Colombian Armed Conflict. Revista Colombiana de Educación 71 (1): 187–218. Psaltis, Charis., Mario Carretero, and Sabina Cehajic-Clancy, eds. 2017. History Education and Conflict Transformation. Social Psychosocial Theories, History Teaching and Reconciliation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rüsen, Jörn. 1983. Reason and History: An Essay on Metahistory (trans. Anne Cordero, Published as PDF by Rüsen in 2015). Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 2004. Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development. In Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas, 63–85. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2011. Using History: The Struggle Over Traumatic Experiences of the Past in Historical Culture. Historien 11: 11–18. Seixas, Peter., ed. 2004. Theorizing Historical Consciousness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2016. A History/Memory Matrix for History Education. https://public-­ history-­w eekly.degruyter.com/4-­2 016-­6 /a-­h istorymemory-­m atrix-­f or­history-­education/. Accessed 20 June 2020. ———. 2017. Historical Consciousness and Historical Thinking. In Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education, ed. Mario Carretero, Stefan Berger, and Maria Grever, 59–72. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Seixas, Peter., and Tom Morton. 2013. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts. Toronto: Nelson Education. Seixas, Peter., Peter N.  Stearns, and Sam Wineburg, eds. 2000. Teaching, Learning and Knowing History. New York: New York University Press. Stoskopf, Alan., and Angela Bermudez. 2017. The Sounds of Silence: American History Textbook Representations of Non-violence and the Abolition Movement. Journal of Peace Education 14 (1): 92–113. (Published online September 22, 2016). Symcox, Linda., and Arie Wilschut, eds. 2009. National History Standards: The Problem of the Canon and the Future of Teaching History, International Review of History Education. Vol. 5. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Taylor, Tony., and Robert Guyver, eds. 2012. History Wars and the Classroom: Global Perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Wineburg, Sam. 2001. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

14 History Education, Transitional Justice and Politics of Reconciliation: Multiand Univocality Around Violent Pasts in South African and Rwandan Textbooks Denise Bentrovato

Introduction Recent years have seen increasing scholarly attention to the nexus of history education, conflict and peace in the context of historical (in)justice, and to related representations of violent pasts and their aftermaths (Bentrovato et  al. 2016; Epstein and Peck 2017; Paulson 2015). Case studies from settings around the world have evidenced differing understandings and applications of history education’s relationship to peace and reconciliation in such contexts. Proceeding from this broader work, and attempting to deepen its focus, the original comparative case-study analysis presented in this chapter seeks to empirically investigate the impact and implications of varying politics of reconciliation and

D. Bentrovato (*) University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_14

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transitional justice (TJ) policies on post-conflict history education reform, particularly on history textbooks, after divisive and violent pasts. The study explores the political variables that may affect reform to history education and textbooks and impact its conciliatory and transformative potential. In earlier work (Bentrovato 2017b), I identified variables related to the nature, the temporal proximity, and the political outcome of conflict, alongside the ensuing power relations and TJ policies. This chapter compares and contrasts the experiences of post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, both of which embarked on a political transition to peace and democracy in 1994 after decades of protracted identity-based conflict and egregious human rights violations. The two countries, both headed by liberation movements turned ruling parties, took different approaches to reconciliation in the context of their transition: one based on truth and forgiveness, the other on justice and accountability; the former emanating from a negotiated settlement, the latter from unilateral military victory. As such, these two cases embody the ‘truth versus justice’ debate in the TJ field (Sriram and Pillay 2010). In reviewing post-1994 history curricula and textbooks, the findings of this study, in line with the differing routes these societies have taken, point to two distinct models for tackling historical injustice and its legacy in South African and Rwandan schools, which rely on state-sanctioned pedagogical strategies respectively mediating multivocal and univocal discourses on truth, justice and reconciliation. With a view to identifying lessons from the contrasting conceptions of a ‘usable’ past (Wertsch 2002, p.  70) these models reveal, I reflect on the differential transformative value of these disparate approaches, examining both their potential to serve as effective instruments of historical justice and reconciliation by mediating redress and accountability and their limitations in this context. Textbooks, specifically, in their reflection of ‘official’ state positionings on post-conflict transition and reconciliation and of the transformations already effected, represent illuminating data in this regard.

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 onceptual Framework: The ‘Transformative’ C Potential of Textbook Revision in the Wake of Historical Injustice Notwithstanding potential pitfalls inherent to mediating citizenship education via history teaching (McCully 2017), a central assumption of this study relates to the potential of history textbooks and their revision for promoting, or impeding, reconciliation after internecine conflict (Korostelina and Lässig 2013). I previously undertook a conceptualisation of this potential (Bentrovato 2017b) which framed it in terms of its ability to promote the ‘narrative transformation’ of the divergent, contradictory accounts typical of conflict and in so doing to crucially drive transformational interventions that seek to alter previously warring groups’ perceptions of one another and thus effect preconditions for reconciliation (Bar-Siman-Tov 2004). The role of textbooks in this process may be to create a ‘dialogical space’ (Hermann 2004) which gravitates towards greater narrative complexity and nuance on the basis of conversation and critique. This implies a move from clashing, irreconcilable historical narratives and their constituent accounts towards stories of greater plurality and inclusivity, heteroglossic, academically undergirded narratives which cast light on the multiplicity of perspectives on the past while raising awareness of productive, collaborative intergroup interactions in history. Such a development presupposes a turn away from the hitherto typical legitimisation (or delegitimisation) of historical knowledge by the dominant group and replaces it with an approach that takes account of multivocality, thus aspiring to impartiality, overcoming the ongoing marginalisation of former or current ‘outgroups’ and, in the ideal case, de-escalating existing tensions. This transformational trajectory entails a further shift, from the familiar shrouding of ongoing disharmonies or divergences in silence or putative consensus towards their open acknowledgement. If learners are to constructively engage with a shared past that divides, there must be fundamental recognition that multiple historical perspectives exist, legitimately and indeed inevitably so, and that the associated narratives, in their importance for each group’s distinct identity and in their perhaps

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painful and sensitive nature, need to be heard within a respectful space. This open engagement with sharply divergent perspectives will invariably unsettle entrenched perceptions of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ roles, providing a chance for cycles of animosity to be ruptured. The critical reflection and examination of one’s ‘own’ group’s actions required here will link to broader-based ‘myth-busting’ endeavours. Reciprocal recognition of suffering, alongside restoring dignity to victims and helping redress wrongs via rescinding denial of or silence on the harm sustained, has the capacity to support the emergence of a sense of justice which various authors note as vital to reconciliation (Lederach 1997; Minow 1998). As time progresses, upcoming generations may find their attitudes modified and moderated, creating space for the principles of plurality, democracy and human rights to prevail within a society. It is this transformative potential that the work leading to this chapter perceives in a dialogue-­ based re-exploration of long-held and long-defended polarising narratives, and whose presence and extent I aimed to establish in the models I examined.

Data and Methods The study analyses post-1994 history curricula and textbooks currently in widespread use in Rwandan and South African secondary schools, used by a generation of schoolchildren without direct recollection of the recent violent past. The significance of these cases resides in the way their approaches, albeit starkly dissimilar, both contrast with a more prevalent strategy, encountered across Africa and beyond, of sweeping narrative silence and evasion around recent violent histories (Bentrovato 2017a, b). The analysis in this chapter furthers a data-based conceptualisation of these approaches and their relationship to TJ via a grounded theory methodology. The chapter therefore delineates the two countries’ particular models of post-conflict history education through inductively analysing textbooks’ engagement with violent past events and their positions on the ensuing TJ route taken in each case, as manifest in text, sources and

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learning activities. By directly drawing on primary data, it seeks to illuminate emerging manifestations of the representational and pedagogical practices I identified, alongside their contextual determinants and their transformative potential. To this end, it engages in a situated synchronic qualitative content analysis of relevant sections in selected Rwandan and South African contemporary textbooks to examine the discourses and norms they echo through their representations of national experiences of historical injustice, and specifically of victimisation. In treating these excerpts as cultural artefacts embedded in specific historico-political and curricular contexts and subject to their influence, the analysis accesses a critical, discursive perspective on prevailing themes, emphases and silences, and inherent dominant and marginalised voices, and, via them, seeks to appraise textbooks’ comparative capacity to mediate the key TJ goals of redress and accountability. The Rwandan sample encompasses eight lower and upper secondary school history textbooks, published between 2010 and 2017; it includes books issued both before and after the most recent curricular revision in 2015. The South African sample includes five textbooks for upper secondary level which conform to the country’s latest history curriculum, issued in 2011 (Bentrovato and Wassermann 2018); they are exceptional cases among textbooks internationally on account of their substantial coverage of a TJ mechanism, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Importantly, both countries, via centralised curricular, textbook and examination systems, assign decisive influence over textbooks and classroom teaching to the state. Promoted by governmental authorities and widely adopted by teachers as the programmatic curriculum, especially in light of limited access to alternative materials (Bentrovato and Wassermann 2018; Bentrovato and Buhigiro 2020), the books attain a wide reach and therefore significant socio-­educational power (cf. Foster and Crawford 2006; Nicholls 2006). This is a crucial point: in the spirit of critical discourse analysis, this study directs its attention to ‘who can speak, when, where and with what authority’ (Ball 1990, p. 17−18), conscious that language serves ‘as a cultural tool [that] mediates relationships of power and privilege’ (Rogers et al. 2005, p. 367).

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Comparing Transitional Justice Approaches At the time of writing (2019), South Africa and Rwanda were commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversaries of their watershed transitions from decades of identity-based segregation, discrimination and violence. In South Africa, 1994 marked the end, via a negotiated settlement, of apartheid and its concomitant human rights violations against black South Africans. Nelson Mandela’s Government of National Unity, taking office following the country’s first democratic elections, prioritised restorative justice and the disclosure of truth as the preferred path to reconciliation. It established a truth commission whose remit was recording and acknowledging abuses committed and thereby generating ‘sufficient consensus’ on the country’s recent history (Republic of South Africa—RoSA 1995; Gibson 2004; Posel and Simpson 2002). In Rwanda, 1994 saw the close of three decades of Hutu dictatorship which had presided over systematic discrimination and violence against the Tutsi minority and ultimately the genocide of an estimated one million people. Here, the unilateral military victory of a Tutsi-dominated ‘liberation’ movement (the Rwandan Patriotic Front, RPF) preceded the political transition, during which historical justice centred around the prosecution of genocide perpetrators. The justice process saw the establishment of thousands of gacaca community courts, which, between 2001 and 2012, heard an unprecedented two million trials (Clark 2010; Ingelaere 2016). Additionally, a National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC) received a permanent mandate to ‘organize national public debates aimed at promoting reconciliation, foster tolerance and a culture of peace and human rights, [and] denounce any ideas aimed at disunity’ (www.usip.org), via, inter alia, public education on Rwandan history. Vital to the emergence of these nations’ collective historical narratives and commended by some as innovative engenderers of ‘miracle’ transitions, both paths to reconciliation have received wide criticism. A particular point of contention in each case has been the politically expedient selectiveness of the official historical records these highly controlled processes constructed, resulting in circumscribed definitions of injustice. In

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South Africa, the primacy of forging a political consensus drove the TRC’s exclusive attention to individual instances of politically motivated violence committed on all sides and its concomitant neglect of apartheid’s structural violence, which has hindered the accountability of white South Africans as apartheid’s beneficiaries (Posel 2002; Wilson 2001). Instead, what has arisen is a ‘master narrative of forgiveness, reconciliation and disclosure instigated by the TRC’ (De Smet et al. 2015, p. 222) and a teleological and triumphalist ‘narrative of national redemption’ (Wilson 2001, p. 111) in line with a founding myth describing a ‘Rainbow Nation’ whose unity-in-diversity has transcended the ‘divisions and strife of the past’ (RoSA 1993). Assessments of the TRC divide between those considering it instrumental in initiating dialogue and those seeing its official, authoritative function as having aimed, to the end of nation-­building, to ‘close the door on the past to establish a version of the past that somehow transcends subjective and contesting views’ (Bundy 2000, p.  15). The Rwandan path, meanwhile, has been subject to perceptions as one-­ sided victor’s justice (Mamdani 2001) manifest in the exclusion of RPF crimes from scrutiny and indeed the criminalisation of allegations of these as genocide denial (Waldorf 2011). Scholars largely agree that the government-sanctioned narrative disseminated via avenues including gacaca, NURC and school history teaching counters dialogue by promoting a single version of recent history and by decrying the expression of contending voices in the name of unity and reconciliation (Burnet 2009; King 2010; Reyntjens 2011). Belying the differences in their approaches, the discourses of both countries around reconciliation reference shared identity and the notion of a ‘new’, phoenix-like nation.

 ost-Conflict History Curriculum Reform: P History in the Service of Societal Transformation After 1994, both countries faced the task of thoroughly revising history curricula and textbooks formerly serving to shore up existing regimes and power structures. Pervasively infused with ideological bias and

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prejudice—racial in South Africa and ethnic in Rwanda—the rote-­ learned grand narratives they perpetuated constructed essentialist and antagonistic identities and legitimised identity-based inequalities in claiming the dominant group’s natural entitlement to resources and power. In South Africa, textbooks propounded Afrikaner nationalist ideology (Chernis 1990), celebrating white, particularly Afrikaner, superiority and denigrating and criminalising black African communities, thus ‘mirror[ing] patterns of inclusion and exclusion from citizenship rights’ (Chisholm 2004, p. 177). In Rwanda, pre-genocide school media asserted ethnic differences and a history of victimisation of an allegedly native Hutu ethnic majority by Tutsi invaders (Bentrovato 2015). Against this backdrop, education reform became a pillar of transition in both countries. While largely divergent in application, revisions in both cases soon adopted a presentist approach, blurring the lines between history and civic education. In both countries, timid reforms marked a preliminary transitional phase initiated under a government of national unity. South Africa, after an immediate emergency removal of curricular content deemed inappropriate, first unveiled a revised curriculum in 1997. While embracing ‘a culture of human rights, multilingualism and multi-culturalism and a sensitivity to the values of reconciliation and nation building’ (Department of Education—DoE 1997), the new curriculum diminished the status of history as a subject against the backdrop of a sensitive and contentious past that the TRC was nonetheless publicly confronting. Some regarded its incorporation of history into a ‘human and social sciences’ learning area at primary and lower secondary levels as a form of ‘collective amnesia’ (Chisholm 2004). Further, the curriculum made history optional at upper secondary level and presented an outcome-based framework which prioritised general skills and values over a ‘subject-bound, content-laden’ syllabus (Chisholm 2003, p. 3). Simultaneously, in Rwanda, the newly elected Government of National Unity (1994–2003) temporarily suspended the teaching of Rwandan history in primary schools and made it optional in secondary schools, claiming that a necessary textbook revision required a prior ‘rehabilitat[ion of ] certain historical truths’ (MINEPRISEC/MINPRISUPRES 1995, p. 44). The first revised history curricula for secondary schools appeared between 1996 and 1998.

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Echoing South Africa’s commitment to ‘advanc[ing] the democratic transformation of society’ via education (RoSA 1996), Rwanda’s history education aimed to ‘promote a culture of peace and democracy’ while combatting ‘divisionism, regionalism, ethnicism and any other forms of discrimination’ (Republic of Rwanda—RoR 1998). Void of detailed content, as in South Africa, these guidelines instructed history teachers to ‘teach only established facts’ (RoR 1996, 50; 1998, 28) and set young Rwandans the aim of ‘discern[ing] the truth from lies’ (RoR 1998). In both countries, an association was evident between curriculum revisions and post-transition changes of government. In South Africa, the ANC-led government’s electoral victory in 1999, straddled by the multi-­ volume publication of the TRC report in 1998 and 2003, set the scene for two revisions, introduced in 2003 and 2011 respectively, the latter returning to the practice of stipulating content (Department of Basic Education 2011). Pursuant to TRC recommendations urging ‘attention to the transformation of education’ alongside the curricular introduction of human rights and of a school version of its report, the revisions reinstated history to a curriculum now geared towards ‘creating value-laden critical thinking and producing active and compassionate democratic citizens’ (Wray 2017, p. 340). The curriculum thus revised conceives of history education as a source-based process of historical enquiry and interpretation, requiring learners to actively engage with ‘a broad range of evidence and diverse points of view’ and appreciate ‘that historical truth consists of a multiplicity of voices expressing varying and often contradictory versions of the same history’ (DoE 2003, p.  9). Nevertheless, within the past five years, a notion has arisen within government circles of a need to ‘shape th[e] mindset’ (Wassermann 2017, p.  65) of an increasingly government-critical, supposedly unpatriotic and ignorant South African youth, an idea manifesting in calls to teach ‘the real South African history’ through the introduction of compulsory school history and a single-textbook policy. In response, concerns have surfaced around a possible regression to a ‘nationalistic, exclusionary patriotic history that would […] reeducate the born frees on where they come from […] and the debts they owe to the struggle’ (Wassermann 2017, p. 69). In Rwanda, the end of the transition period, signalled by the election of a new RPF-led government, similarly resulted, particularly since 2008

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and most recently in 2015, in the production of revised curricula. As in South Africa, Rwanda’s history education is endowed with the remit of ‘promot[ing] a culture of peace, tolerance, reconciliation and patriotism among students in order to mould them as good citizens’ (REB 2015, p. 19; also in NCDC 2008, p. 6; 2010a, p. 5). In stark contrast to South Africa, however, Rwandan education policy has imposed upon students, in the name of peace and reconciliation, a positivist government-­packaged history which accommodates official reconciliation policies ‘requiring’ Rwandans to ‘learn the truth about their history’ (NURC 2000, p. 46) and thereby ‘change their mind completely’ (NURC 2007, p. 31), disavowing ‘ethnic’ identifications in favour of ‘a true unity’ grounded in ancient times (NURC 2000, p. 47).

 wanda’s Pedagogy of Truth: A History R Education Model Mediating Univocal Discourses History textbooks in post-genocide Rwanda are a prime manifestation of a history education model mediating univocal discourses and unequivocal political messages, arising from an equally univocal TJ process which, unilaterally driven by the conflict’s victors, has almost exclusively addressed Hutu crimes against Tutsi while undertaking to institute top-­ down reconciliation through the imagined and envisaged restoration of an ancient national harmony and unity. Consequently, Rwandan history textbooks today appear as the expression of a government’s desire to nation-build around a ‘monumental’ national past (Nietzsche 1997, p. 69) hinging on the state-legitimated propagation of a ‘closed national “historical” narrative’ (Nakou and Barca 2010, p. 8). These text-heavy, sparsely referenced works, reinforcing a single-story concept of history, have been key to what I have described elsewhere as a re-educative ‘pedagogy of truth’ (Bentrovato 2017c), exemplifying the propagation of ‘an authoritative discourse that presents particular truths for uncritical reception and assimilation by learners, privileges consensus-building for the

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purpose of political legitimation and societal unity, and relegates or disregards critical thinking’ (Bentrovato and Wassermann 2018, p. 345). In this way, Rwandan textbooks function as mnemonic devices, facilitating ritualised remembering and the assimilation of a myth of national rebirth and reunification notwithstanding the presence of a profound, yet suppressed, societal chasm. Key tenets of this narrative are the exaltation of pre-colonial golden days and the denunciation of the ‘disastrous’ colonial genesis and post-colonial intensification of ethnic divisions as the original sin that led to the ‘break-up of an alliance that was as old as Rwanda’s hills and history’ (Bamusananire 2012, pp.  355–356; Bamusananire and Ntege n.d.-a, p. 92). The textbooks charge this original sin with ultimately engendering the ‘Genocide against the Tutsi’, heroically halted by the ‘noble’, ‘Liberation War’ of the now ruling RPF (Bamusananire 2012, pp. 393, 413). Their narratives acclaim the accomplishments of a ‘visionary leadership’ (Ncungure 2017, p. 34) that did ‘what was necessary’ (p. 49) to overcome ‘one of the worst human tragedies of the 20th century’ (p. 33)—with the nation’s ‘full and unstinting support’ (Bamusananire 2012, p.  414)—and eventually enabled the Rwandan people to ‘miraculously recove[r] from the trauma of genocide’ (Bamusananire 2012, p. 425; Bamusananire and Ntege n.d.-b, p. 134) and ‘live together in greater harmony and mutual respect than ever before’ (NCDC 2010b, p.  151). One textbook concludes by suggesting that today ‘Rwandans are well-known all over the world as a good example of reconciliation’ after previously having been perceived as a country ‘without any humanity’ (Ncungure 2017, pp. 27, 32). Among textbooks’ brief mentions of specific TJ programmes are the characterisation of gacaca ‘as a solution to the crucial problem of a big number of the victims of genocide who were waiting for justice’ (Ncungure 2017, p. 31), a lauding of its achievement in convicting over one and a half million people of genocide (p. 52), and the assertion that government efforts had seen to it that ‘[a]ll forms of injustice and impunity were eliminated’ (p. 4). Remarkably, the highly partisan upper secondary school textbook, while exalting the government’s ‘excellent intentions and impressive achievements’ in dispensing justice, strikes a rare critical note by referencing gacaca’s ‘devastating impact on the community as thousands who feared being prosecuted for genocide crimes started fleeing the country or attacking

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those likely to testify against them during trial’ (Bamusananire 2012, p. 422). Rwanda’s post-genocide history textbooks thus strictly abide by contemporary discursive conventions, prioritising the safeguarding of a new unity over narrative divergence and engagement with controversy in the history classroom. They accord also with the criminally enforceable prohibition of what in government terms amounts to ‘divisionism’, ‘revisionism’ and ‘genocide ideology’, which has effectively induced pervasive practices of self-censorship and performed conformity and has specifically targeted educational institutions (Bentrovato 2015). It appears that these legislative practices have helped ensure the triumph of a hegemonic history that is ‘top-down, normative, expediently narrow and selective, homogenising and excluding or dismissive of alternative memories and narratives, and at odds with the historical record’ (Bentrovato 2017b, p. 50).

 outh Africa’s Dialogue of Dissonance: S A History Education Model Mediating Multivocal Discourses In contrast to Rwanda, South African history textbooks have adopted a pedagogical model encouraging enquiry-based learning and evidence-­ based reasoning that draws on divergent, multi-perspective sources and is predicated on an understanding of the provisional nature of all narratives. South African textbooks’ extensive engagement with the TRC offers a telling illustration of the application of this approach. Mirroring the practices and process of the TRC, these textbooks’ dialogic style conveys an often dissonant multivocality and encompasses narratives that contradict one another, challenging learners to critique the evidence before them and ‘the choices made in the process of coming to terms with the past’ (Dugmore et  al. 2013, p.  332). The forum they thus open up, accommodating divergent views around the extent to which the TRC has fulfilled its remit, represents an opportunity for a critical, dialogical

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history classroom which engages with a diversity of contentions around South Africa’s TJ process and the values that have carried it. Elsewhere, drawing on the concept of heteroglossia as advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) and applied to discourse analyses of the TRC hearings (Blommaert et  al. 2007; Verdoolaege 2008), I have described South African textbooks as ‘heteroglossic spaces’ mediating multivocal discourses that interweave ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ voices (Bentrovato and Wassermann 2018). The sources used in this endeavour, including quotations from Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness and testimonies of victims’ relatives, either support the official assertion of a successful TRC process or reject it in referencing the pain and anger of those who would have favoured retributive justice over amnesty and forgiveness and for whom reparations are too little, too late. The textbooks present a TRC testimony made by a woman whose child had been tortured and killed, appreciating the closure brought her by the TJ process (Bottaro et  al. 2013, p.  218; Dugmore et  al. 2013, p.  322), alongside counter-narratives as in the sense felt by relatives of one victim of having reconciliation ‘forc[ed …] down our throats’ (Stephenson et  al. 2013, p. 338) and the anger-driven act of violence committed by another victim’s relative against an amnestied executioner despite his ‘plea[s] for forgiveness’ (Fernandez et  al. 2013, pp.  299–300). Notwithstanding the intimate intertwinement between South Africa’s education reform and the political project of ‘rainbowism’, textbooks’ treatment of the TRC appears sharply distinct from Rwanda’s unequivocally triumphalist narrative of miraculous recovery and reconciliation. Instead, South African textbooks create space for students to critique the ‘Current State of the Rainbow Nation’, evidencing through sources the post-TRC persistence of a racial rift, of prejudice and violence (Fernandez et  al. 2013, pp. 326–327), and pointing to the treacherous ‘temptation to romanticise the South African transition’ (Bottaro et al. 2013, p. 225).

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 ediating Redress and Accountability: History M Textbooks’ Potential and Limitations Textbooks’ representations of historical injustice, specifically around matters of accountability and redress, can offer insights into the potential of the two educational models outlined above to promote TJ. The dedicated attention in both countries’ textbooks to sensitive national histories opens up a space, crucial to the sustainability of TJ aims (Nadler et al. 2008), for acknowledging abuses and exploring the ‘truth’ of events. Closer analysis of discourses of victimisation points to differences in the extent of this space in the two countries’ history textbooks. These cases are indicative of the breadth of the potential spectrum delineating textbooks’ capacity to promote dialogue, rapprochement and reconciliation via the upholding of inclusivity, nuance and ambiguity in narratives, ultimately encouraging ‘narrative transformation’, and the concomitant drawing of learners into processes of questioning assumed truths. South African textbooks promote a substantially inclusive redress via their non-partisan acknowledgment of victimisation and responsibility that mirrors and partly exceeds the actual TRC process. In making victims’ narratives visible, they act against a re-victimisation which might follow from inadequate recognition of past injury and injustice. One might read their accounts of systematic acts of discrimination and forced segregation alongside those of apartheid’s direct violence as at least partially remediating the TRC’s failure to recognise the collective victimhood of the majority of black South Africans and its limitation of victim status to political activists. The textbooks’ recognition of the victimhood of some white individuals, reflected in TRC testimonies representing a cross-section of victims, bears witness to a spirit of inclusivity; one textbook cites the sympathetic understanding of the anti-apartheid struggle, and the new societal age it sought to bring about, shown by a white father who lost his son to a bomb (Fernandez et al. 2013, p. 302). Such inclusive, nuanced narratives, in breaking free from rigid, competing, identity-­ based victim/perpetrator oppositions which may entrench polar antagonisms, have the potential to promote intergroup rapprochement. In terms similar to this inclusive recognition of victimhood, South

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African textbooks recognise responsibility for abuses across the conflict’s divide, referring to the TRC’s ‘moral equalizing’ of suffering (Wilson 2001, p. 111) and referencing evidence it heard, relating inter alia to the torture and killings of supposed traitors by the ANC during the anti-­ apartheid struggle. In not sparing those currently in governmental authority, and specifically in noting refusals of cooperation with the TRC and denials of responsibility for evidenced acts across the political spectrum, they counter the development of a victor’s discourse. The references in one textbook to the desire of specific figures, including F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid-era president, and ANC members, to emerge as justified in public perception are indicative of this inclusive level of engagement with the political aspect of TJ processes (Dugmore et  al. 2013, pp.  323, 324). This treatment of human rights violations signals the potential of textbooks to transcend the political and emphasise the universality of human rights in depicting abuses and their attempted rectification. Where these textbooks fall down in their endeavour is in their failure to adequately address and rectify the TRC’s incapacity to bring apartheid’s beneficiaries to account, with responsibility generally assigned to the ‘white minority government and their agents’ (Stephenson et  al. 2013, p. 331). While the textbook that includes this phrase does make an isolated explicit reference (via a source) to the exoneration of the broader group of white South Africans who profited from the system (p. 344), an additional lack of material substantively and critically exploring continuities and changes in power relations and structural societal inequity compounds the textbooks’ overall omission. This at least partial lacuna around the relationship of past and present risks glossing over engagement with that past’s active legacy of conflict and injustice and thus failing to teach its lessons for the future. The omissions are notably more drastic in Rwanda, whose textbooks recognise the longstanding victimisation of one group, the Tutsi, while neglecting the concurrent experience of Hutu, particularly at the hands of victorious, supposedly impeccable liberation forces. There is an evident mirroring of Rwanda’s TJ practices here, and specifically in the de facto outlawing of expressions of Hutu experiences through memory laws which have greatly influenced the history classroom. The TJ objectives of

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redress and accountability thus receive a distinctly asymmetrical manifestation. Echoing the narrative emerging from the gacaca process, several textbooks essentially collectivise guilt for genocide by emphasising the massive involvement of indoctrinated ‘ordinary people’ among the Hutu; one upper secondary school textbook speaks of a genocide, orchestrated by ‘extremists’ and ‘Hutu elites’, whose instruments were ‘mostly […] [the] population’, described as largely having been ‘susceptible to manipulation’ (Bamusananire 2012, p.  404). Textbooks’ sparse, narrow acknowledgement of instances of Hutu victimhood serves only to strengthen the notion of collective Hutu guilt; the contrast is between the ‘genocide against the Tutsi’ and ‘the killing of some Hutu [emphasis added]’, ‘moderate[s]’ who rejected ‘the government’s political extremism’ (NCDC 2010b, p. 142; Ncungure 2017, p. 24).1 Another textbook refers to the murder of ‘moderates from the killing group [emphasis added] who opposed the extremists’ (Sebazungu et al. n.d., p. 60); in this strikingly heightened formulation of collective guilt, even these victims are, by group identity, essentially defined as killers. Beyond the implicit recognition of the suffering of ‘ordinary’ Hutu under the ‘human disaster’ of the genocide (NCDC 2010b, p. 149; also in Ncungure 2017, pp. 30, 32), the textbooks barely acknowledge acts of Hutu resistance. A now-disused official civic education school guide (NCDC 2004, p. 36) stated that ‘[a] Hutu deemed a traitor for having hidden one or several Tutsi’, having refused to kill them as commanded, ‘was killed along with the members of his family’. These narratives are entirely absent from the new textbooks for history and citizenship brought into use since the latest curriculum revision analysed for this study. The only exception is in current primary six social studies textbooks, in a new section on ‘Heroism’—glorified as ‘a willingness to sacrifice your life for the sake of your country’ (Saka et  al. 2018, p.  78). Alongside RPF ‘soldiers who died while fighting for our country’ (p. 58) and a handful of Hutu politicians killed for opposing divisionism, the above-referenced textbook mentions a nun and a group of secondary school students killed for refusing to separate themselves from Tutsi compatriots (pp. 56–60). Rwandan history textbooks additionally reflect the country’s TJ process in remaining silent on the impact of RPF campaigns on Hutu

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civilians, the only acknowledgement of related casualties being a brief reference to ‘[m]any soldiers [emphasis added] […] killed on both sides’ in the Liberation War (Ncungure 2017, p.  24). There is an inherent threat to reconciliation and societal harmony in such obscuring practices of representation due to the sense of injustice and grievance they risk inspiring among those remaining unheard.

Discussion and Conclusion In uncovering and illuminating divergent models of TJ and the ensuing educational practices, this study’s comparative analysis of the parallel South African and Rwandan experiences of history education reform and associated textbook revision has identified a number of implications for the TJ objectives which history education in both cases professes to pursue. The initial post-transition delay in substantially reforming history education, evident in both countries, points, notwithstanding any urgency of the task as proclaimed in discourses around reconciliation, to a perceived necessity of the passage of time before educational examination of a divisive and traumatic past can begin. In both cases, educational silence on the past arose in the context of TJ processes whose remit was to draft a particular record of past historical injustice that subsequently entered school curricula and textbooks. The findings also note the importance assumed by history education reform as time went on and the successively growing extent of textbook revisions, further indicators of the powerful symbolic role of revised textbooks in signalling a radical break with the abhorred erstwhile state of division and setting out a vision for the envisaged new society in the context of governmental instrumentalisation of history education for reconciliatory and nation-building tasks. The disparate models eventually adopted in the two countries evidence the significant influence of the specific political dispensation in each case. The positivist, univocal approach exemplified in the Rwandan case, emerging after military triumph, presents hegemonic truth clothed in an allegedly consensual narrative, requiring contrasting and contradictory voices to give way to the construction of a unifying sense of nationhood. This strategy contrasts with the constructivist, multivocal discourse

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largely prevailing in South Africa, where, by and large, a questioning engagement with controversy and discursive contest reflects and promotes the societal advancement towards a democratic culture of critical citizenship which underlies TJ’s objectives. This approach, any incompleteness or deficits in its actual implementation notwithstanding, holds potential transformative value in terms of shifting the societal ground on which the lamented past events unfolded and defusing society’s susceptibility to future ideological manipulations. This potential for transformation struggles to come to fruition in Rwanda, a country increasingly considered as bordering on dictatorship, whose textbooks authoritatively apply a prescribed and prescriptive ‘pedagogy of truth’ which may ironically undermine governmental TJ objectives by discouraging critical engagement with past events. Further, in contrast to South Africa, where the multivocal nature of the intended and the programmatic curriculum on apartheid holds the capacity to transcend sectarian divisions (Robinson 2021), Rwandan textbooks’ severely limited acknowledgement of the complex, plural character of historical experience offers little resistance to the reproduction of polarised, generalised ascriptions of victim and perpetrator roles. Ethnographic research I have previously conducted into the effects of this approach among students in today’s Rwanda (Bentrovato 2017c) identifies the consolidation of such simplistic oppositions. These findings, taken together with this study, suggest that the contribution of current practices to national reconciliation may be at least questionable. It is evident that South Africa’s and Rwanda’s divergent approaches to history textbooks and teaching reflect differing conceptions around history education’s societal remit and, more specifically, around its role in promoting peace and reconciliation. Notwithstanding the doubtless justified critique of aspects of the South African approach, the conclusion emerging from this chapter, in line with other research voices, would appear to be that dialogic multivocality is more facilitative of reconciliation after violent pasts than a univocal approach. It would be for further empirical studies on the application and impact of models like those outlined in this chapter to determine on a practical level their effects on learners and on broader intergroup relations. Work in this area

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additionally requires precision analytical frameworks for exploring the transformative value of history education to which this study’s findings point.

Note 1. According to one textbook, this restricted victim group included ‘members of [the] political opposition […] and other dissents [sic] mostly who were Hutu journalists, human rights activists, lawyers and civil servants’ (n.a. 2017, p. 52).

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquis). Austin: University of Texas Press. Ball, Stephen J. 1990. Politics and Policy Making in Education: Explorations in Policy Sociology. London: Routledge. Bamusananire, Emmanuel. 2012. History of Africa for Rwanda Secondary Schools: Advanced Level. Kampala: Fountain Publishers. Bamusananire, Emmanuel, and Dorothy Ntege. n.d.-a. New Junior Secondary History Book 2. Kampala: NetMedia. ———. n.d.-b. New Junior Secondary History Book 3. Kampala: NetMedia. Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov, ed. 2004. From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bentrovato, Denise. 2015. Narrating and Teaching the Nation: The Politics of Education in Pre- and Post-genocide Rwanda. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. ———. 2017a. Learning to Live Together in Africa Through History Education. An Analysis of School Curricula and Stakeholders’ Perspectives. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. ———. 2017b. History Textbook Writing in Post-conflict Societies: From Battlefield to Site and Means of Conflict Transformation. In History Education and Conflict Transformation: Social Psychological Theories, History Teaching and Reconciliation, ed. Charis Psaltis, Mario Carretero, and Sabina Čehajić-­ Clancy, 37–76. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Part IV Pedagogy, Teachers, and Students

15 Practicing Reconciliation in a Canadian Book Club Jonathan Anuik

Introduction How does a book club contribute to the objective that ‘we teach adults about the past?’ My colleagues Michelle Bellino and Julia Paulson propose this question and in this chapter, the adults are teacher candidates who need to comprehend Indigenous stories to satisfy the teaching quality standards of Alberta, Canada, where many of these budding teachers plan to practice (Alberta Education, Office of the Registrar n.d.).1 These students are learning in an era of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada, and it is incumbent on us as faculty to show how we can practice reconciliation every day in spaces such as university libraries. How can we hold everyday encounters in reconciliation in the library? How do these encounters count as practicing reconciliation? Finally, how do we relate the Indigenous reality that a book depicts to the reconciliation mandate that teachers in Canada have to comprehend? J. Anuik (*) University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_15

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These questions interest me because this chapter is the outcome of conversations with an acquaintance about a book club that I was leading. As we spoke, I recognized that I practiced the beginning of reconciliation on the grassroots. Like many Canadians, my friend knew little about the church-state operated Indian Residential Schools system in Canada, the litigation that followed after the schools’ closure, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015), which had concluded recently. To help him comprehend the schools’ legacies, I suggested that he read Indian Horse: A Novel, by Richard Wagamese (2012). It is a fictional story that stars Saul Indian Horse as its protagonist. Like many Indigenous children, police remove him from his family on the land and place him in a residential school. At school, Saul discovers his ability to play hockey. Wagamese (2012) uses the character of Saul to analyze Canadian educational history with an Indigenous lens. My gesture to my friend to read Indian Horse and my openness for discussion with him, I thought, helped to educate an adult and to get him to recognize how he can play a part in reconciliation in Canada. On reflection, I recognized that I practiced reconciliation through my encouragement that my acquaintance read a book to begin to learn about the Indian Residential Schools. Prior to our encounter, I had thought of reconciliation in institutions of higher education as a highly formalized endeavor led by university administrators. These leaders had generated a substantial documentary record of commitments to changing and renewing relationships with Indigenous leaders, staff, faculty, and students and investing in research, teaching, and service to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities. Amid the flurry of speeches, articles in trade magazines, accords, and social media posts, I wondered how members of the university community experienced reconciliation in the common areas. Did everyone know about the reconciliation mandate, about residential schools? Did they care? Or, was their experience similar to that of my friend’s, who was a university student who was unaware that his institution sought to be a leader in reconciliation. With this reconciliation in higher education context set, the next part of this chapter provides the Canadian context of Indigenous-newcomer/ settler relations. I focus on Indian Residential Schools and reconciliation.

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I move next to an overview of my institutional setting. I am one of several faculty members who are responsible for the learning of undergraduate teacher candidates in the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Education about Indigenous peoples’ education. I share with you the content that we cover with the students. I then tell of a project in my Faculty of Education called On the Same Page. Piloted in the 2014–2015 academic year, members of the faculty read Indian Horse. I go on to show how in one such gathering teacher candidates investigated symbols of Canadian history and identity in the novel and began to comprehend Indigenous stories. I conclude with thoughts on how this book club experience for teacher candidates may help to begin the work of reconciliation at the grassroots.

A Note About Terms There are three ways to understand the terms that one can use to decipher who the Indigenous people of Canada are: (1) The standard; (2) The critical; and (3) The Indigenous. Legislation conditions self-identification options for Indigenous peoples in Canada. The first key piece of legislation since the Confederation of Canada in 1867 is the Indian Act. Passed by Parliament in 1876 and revised substantially by Parliament over the past 144 years, the objective of the Indian Act is to define legally who an Indigenous person in Canada is. Some Indigenous nations signed treaties with the British Crown as represented by the Dominion of Canada between the years of 1871 and 1930. There were 11 treaties signed in total, along with Treaties that the Crown concluded in the pre-­ Confederation years. Since 1939, the Inuit of northern Canada are status Indians for the purposes of the act. The Métis are a hybrid of Cree, Dene, Ojibwe, Mi’kmaq Indigenous and French, Scottish, German, and British European ancestry. Recent federal and Supreme Court of Canada rulings now include the Métis as status Indians. The disclaimer is that not all people who identify as Indigenous are registered Indians under the Indian Act. The 1982 Canadian Constitution recognizes in section 35(2) three Aboriginal peoples: (1) Indians; (2) Métis; and (3) Inuit. Finally, there are the categories of non-Status Indian (i.e., someone who identifies as

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Indigenous but does not have registration under the Indian Act) and someone of Native ancestry. Since the late 1960s, Indigenous scholars and their allies have ­criticized the terms handed to them by the state to identify who they are. The ­consensus is that legislation like the Indian Act invented a rigid Native category that excluded many and tore apart families because it made through classification schemes people into ‘others.’ The Indian Act’s legislative devices disenfranchised members of Indigenous communities through marriage, employment, military service, and completion of education. There is recognition that the Canadian state’s identifiers create an inability for Indigenous people to control how they identify (Anuik In Press). Indigenous nations root their identifiers in the land. Leaders ­determine the protocol for their nations, and state governments and their ­institutions (i.e., universities and schools) acknowledge the Indigenous lands where they operate. For example, I reside in Edmonton, Canada and teach at the University of Alberta, which is on the un-ceded homelands of the Papaschase Cree, Métis, and descendants of the signatories of Treaty Six.

Truth and Reconciliation in Canada The Truth and Reconciliation Commission sat from 2008 to 2015. Its mandate was to record and report on the stories of survivors of the Indian Residential Schools, provide and share a documentary record of the system, and recommend to Canadians how to deal with the legacy of the schools. The Canadian government opened the first Indian Residential Schools in 1883 and administered them through agreements with the Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and after 1925, the United Churches. Children and youth who were registered as Status Indians under Indian Act were to receive their primary and secondary education at the schools. In 1920, a revision to the Indian Act allowed the Canadian government to use the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country’s national police force, to remove children and youth from their homes to attend the schools. A thorough administrative history of the schools is beyond the scope of this chapter. Readers with an interest in this history

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can read complete treatments from the perspectives of the Canadian government, the churches, and Indigenous peoples in J.  R. Miller (1996) and John Sheridan Milloy (2017).

 he State of Indigenous Peoples’ Education T in Teacher Education The entry point for teacher candidates’ study of Indigenous learning in Canada is the story of the Indian Residential Schools. The Canadian government and its Christian church collaborators wanted to transform ‘Aboriginal students into “successful” white models’ liberated ‘from oppressive reserve life’ (Wilson and Battiste 2011, p.  40). This school system failed in its objective because the government underfunded the schools, teachers were incompetent, staff abused children, and pedagogy that educators practiced assumed that Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, heritage, and teachings were inferior to Christian belief systems or were nonexistent (Battiste 2000b; Miller 1996; Milloy 2017). Teacher candidates also learn that Indigenous peoples had their own systems of literacy and their own pedagogies prior to the opening of the schools (Battiste 2011). However, teachers and clergy did not honor the visions of Indigenous leaders who wanted the knowledge at the schools to be additive to their robust knowledge systems (Battiste 2012). Instead, educators at the schools had pedagogy that Marie Battiste dubs cognitive imperialism—Teachers sought to replace paradigms that governed Indigenous learning with Eurocentric and predominantly Christian frames (Barman 2003, p. 212; Battiste 2000b, pp. 192–193, 200–204). The legacy of instruction in such schools was an impression left in the minds and carved into the hearts of learners that their systems for knowing were inferior to the education that clergy, nuns, and lay followers offered them (Battiste 2000b; Miller 1996; Forrester 2008). Teacher candidates also learn that schools since 1970 have adapted their structures, pedagogies, and curricula to support Indigenous students’ learning (Anuik 2010a; Battiste 2000a; Pidgeon et al. 2013; Wilson and Battiste

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2011). Unfortunately, the knowledge base that frames and sustains schools remains for the most part above suspicion. While more and more Canadian students know the facts, especially the administrative history, of the schools, teachers need to examine their impacts on daily life in contemporary schools. Some instructors ask teacher candidates to question schools’ ongoing intentions in their education of Indigenous students (McAlpine et al. 1990). Professors suggest schools operate on a false premise, which is that Indigenous peoples don’t know how to educate their children. These instructors ask students to rid themselves of such an understanding and recognize that schools disconnect Indigenous learners ‘from their families, home communities, and from their own identities’ (Wilson and Battiste 2011, p. 12). The problem that teacher candidates need to understand is that schools operate on the assumption that students gravitate to the same value bases as their teachers (Monture-Angus 1995, pp. 94, 114–115, 117). Some instructors in education faculties are imparting to teacher ­candidates instructional strategies and curricular plans that can improve Indigenous students’ learning. However, Alex Wilson and Battiste (2011) argue that the impression such practices leave on teacher candidates is that Indigenous learners come to school with deficits and traumas that teachers can correct. Similarly, they believe that one requires only a limited space—in a unit or two in a few classes—for Indigenous knowledge. They package the content into discrete units, and their students don’t see the relationships of Indigenous peoples with the Canadian state. They leave these classes with the impression that Indigenous content is merely components to add to the existing knowledge base, and not a way of seeing, comprehending, and understanding the world. There is not a thorough account of historical mistreatment by the Canadian state beyond the tragedies in the Indian Residential Schools period. There needs also to be space in education faculties where teacher ­candidates can share reflections on stories about Indigenous peoples. It is here where they see that the knowledge from the teacher education courses is Canadian material that is necessary to comprehend if educators are to practice reconciliation. The challenge in education faculties is to build spaces where teacher candidates are comfortable to share their reflections on their encounters with Indigenous learning, and the book

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club may be an area where students and professors can collectively story a nuanced interpretation of Indigenous educational history.

 eflections on Indigenous Educational History R in Teacher Education Teacher candidates’ learning about the stories of Indigenous education is a good start to the work of reconciliation. For teacher candidates, ‘[s]torytelling is a universal communication technique through which children can learn values, teachings, and ways of the society in which they belong’ (Gardner 1988, pp.  105, 107). However, if we just tell stories about Indigenous peoples, we risk seeing them as history, as over, or as caught in ‘an ahistoric wilderness […] pressed flat and dry between the pages’ of books (Wilson 1998, pp.  276–277; see also Yunkaporta 2010). Even more profoundly for teacher candidates, there is a risk that they may teach these stories to their students and expect them to repeat without criticism the content. Thus, we are aware of stories, and where to find them, and we call some of them historical. Something is missing in this understanding. We know as educators that the Indigenous education mandate involves more than transmitting knowledge and adapting the curriculum. We know now that we are responsible for the practice of reconciliation. However, we struggle to share anew the facts that we know from the study of Indigenous education history. Teacher candidates struggle because they can experience conflict with what they understand Canada to be (Simon 2006, p. 197). Consequently, instructors need to start with a consideration of ‘the shapes of [students’] narratives, the sense they make of them, and the tools they have […] for assessing their truth and significance’ (Seixas 2006, p. 104; see also Lee and Ashby 2001, p. 43). Jocelyn Létourneau and Sabrina Moisan suggest students need to be able to ‘reinforce their own established ideas about the past with new ones they encounter’ and to feel as though the two parts are coherent (2006, p. 120, see also Lee and Ashby 2001, p. 43, Van Sledright 2001, p. 58). In order to do so, students must be able ‘to create

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their own’ stories. In this next section, I show how a book club can be a setting where students can explore Indigenous stories in an informal setting and link them to their comprehension of the story of Canada.

A Book Club Approach Peter Seixas teaches that ‘[t]here are many institutions where decisions about how to study, remember, and use the past are made’ (2006, p. 103). One of those institutions is the library, and one activity is a book club. Reading a common book can help participants generate topics in Indigenous education history and connect them with stories from their own lives that may be relevant for their ‘practice in the educational system’ (Akan 1999, p. 32). After setting the project context, I turn now to a reflection on one book club gathering from the 2014–2015 Book of the Year Project. The Book of the Year was a pilot project in the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Education in the 2014–2015 academic year. Over the spring and summer of 2014, faculty members developed a shortlist of books and later voted on the one they wanted to be the book of the year. Indian Horse received the most votes. The dean informed the students about the book of the year project at the annual orientation for new undergraduate students, and I encouraged my students to participate in the book club gatherings. We met approximately every two weeks in a library study lounge to reflect on the book. Faculty and students could just ‘show up’ to the meetings; we required no registration. Similarly, one did not have to read the entire book in anticipation of the meetings. We learned over the course of the year that some faculty and support staff met on their own in separate groups to read and discuss the book. We used a community frame to conceptualize our project. We ­envisioned that faculty, staff, and students would read one book and ­discuss it formally and informally over the course of the year. We saw ourselves as forming a community of interest around a single book. It was only after the year and as we continued the project that I recognized a single book’s role in beginning the work of reconciliation on the ­grassroots of teaching.

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At this meeting there was a student who had a First Nations woman as a business partner.2 This detail was significant for her as their relationship enabled her to learn about Indian Residential Schools as members of her partner’s family attended them. She knew the impacts of the pedagogies, practices, and abuses in the schools on a family. A PhD student, a First Nations woman from Ontario whose parents attended the schools and were devout Catholics, also attended, as did four undergraduate teacher candidates. After the students introduced themselves, I mentioned that I researched the Indigenous foundational concept Nourishing the Learning Spirit, a philosophical stance that asked us to think of everyone as born with an inherent capacity to learn.3 A teacher’s challenge was to build a setting that evoked an outpouring of passions, interests, and memories, these things that were brought to bear, in this case, on a book. I suggested then that I saw the university, specifically, the university classroom, as one of many settings where people learned. I concluded with the suggestion that the book club was a space where we learned together. As with previous gatherings, I read from a passage in Indian Horse. The passage came from Saul’s years as a student at the Indian residential school. Saul’s stories as a student in the school led to a discussion of its impact on him. As a refresher, I opened the filing cabinet that contained the basic facts about residential schools. They were mainly historical points so that we all knew some of the basic pieces of information. After I read the passage and taught briefly, we came up with three topics related to Saul’s stay at the school, which were as follows: 1) Abuse; 2) Religiosity or the practice of faith; and 3) Hockey. I facilitated with the premise that students tended to start in the present and moved to the past, to what they knew from their own memories. For them, the above topics came from their own memories. They started from their memories and interests as they looked back at Saul’s life. I followed this format, for students to share, and then for me to teach the relevant history, in this gathering. One student remembered Father Leboutier, the priest who at first seemed to nurture Saul’s interest in hockey. As an adult, Saul remembered that as Leboutier coached him, he used the opportunity to molest him. The story was one of many she heard. However, unlike the story of Saul, the ones that my student heard were true stories.

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Saul’s recognition in adulthood that the priest who provided him with a ‘sanctuary’ from his struggles at school actually used him to satisfy his own perverted desires was a tremor that First Nations across Canada felt, and feel, daily in their hearts and minds. When Saul disclosed his story of abuse by Leboutier to members of his hockey family—a husband and wife who adopted him so that he could play hockey—he learned that this same pervert victimized many students, including his own hockey father. Not only did Saul relive the abuse, so did his hockey father. Whenever someone discloses sexual abuse from the days at a r­ esidential school, the survivor learns that he is not the only one to have suffered abuse. He learns members of his own family and his community also have memories. This understanding turns the memory—the tremor— into an earthquake that the whole community experiences. The story shakes everyone who either lives with the memories or knows someone who suffered abuse, and everyone remembers the pain, humiliation, and suffering again. These feelings were consequences that we all understood. We ­recognized as a group that we tended to focus on victims and perpetrators of sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, on any form of abuse. Rarely did we consider the loved ones, friends, acquaintances, and ­colleagues, like my student and her business partner, who lived daily with the earthquakes, hourly, and by the minute, as people recalled the sickening tales of those who supposedly worked to educate. The church that signed the most contracts with the Canadian ­government to operate the residential schools (75% of them) was the Catholic Church. We turned to religiosity, a topic of interest to the First Nations woman. Her parents survived residential schools. They were Catholics who regularly attended church, a reality that she found tough to comprehend. We probed her reflection further as a group. I let everyone know that when I researched my PhD dissertation, I found that many Métis on the prairies, some of whom had parents who attended residential schools and held memories of physical abuse, continued to be devout Catholics. When I shared my finding with the group, the student replied that she thought that the issue with her parents was one of church power and not a matter of belief. I replied that Catholics not only ran these schools, they

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also opened private convent schools for Métis children and youth, attempted to recruit Métis to the clergy, served on the Northwest Territories Board of Education, administered mail service, and taught in northern public schools.4 Priests used their pulpits to tell their flocks who to vote for in provincial and federal elections and introduced alcohol in Métis villages, especially when they accompanied candidates who ‘campaigned’ for voters (Anuik 2009, 2010b). The memory of such authority in nearly every aspect of public and private life is not easy for people to undress and expose. Although Catholic clergy have relaxed their control in matters of faith and education, they still control people’s hearts and minds. Their actions have left the impression on Indigenous peoples that they are inherently inferior when they live without the church, its teachings, and its followers. For this PhD student, it is as though a priest always hovers over her parents and is ready to strangle them should they not follow God’s laws and his practice of faith.5 When we read about Saul playing hockey, one feels the sensations of ice, the smell of the cool crisp air in the arenas, the buzzer as it announces a goal, penalty, etc., and cheers and boos of those enveloped in the ecstasy and euphoria of the moment when a player scores, fails to score, or gains a penalty shot. Canadian media proclaims euphemistically ‘hockey brings people together’; advertisers imply that everyone watches and loves the game. However, like all stories within and outside of the book shared thus far, the impact of the game ‘off the ice’ does not always achieve what media says. The undergraduates collected all of the book’s hockey stories in a single discussion. After we briefly identified the ice’s sensations, we looked at Saul’s life ‘off the ice.’ We arrived at one place, a restaurant and lounge off a northern Canadian highway. Saul and his team stopped there for dinner on their way home after a game. The story that follows illustrates how the rural locals racialized outsiders and assigned treatment to them based on their conceptions of human inferiority. Approached in the restaurant by men who challenge them to a fight, Saul and his hockey buddies try to avoid the conflict but they soon discover that this is impossible to do. After a few punches, they succumb to

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the outsiders’ punishment, urinating on them. In disbelief, Saul and his buds get up, enter their van, and keep driving. I stopped at this story because I thought it concealed for students more than it revealed. On its surface, it would seem that the team face local men who target them with a ‘native’ bullseye label. However, I let the students know that my work with Métis on their concepts of identity led me to intuit that there were more roots to this story than just the racial prejudice of whites against First Nations. My research with Métis families was a collection of stories of folks who learned they were white as children and later found their Métis ancestors who posed as white, French, German, Italian, any European background that could bring them acceptance in settler society (Alberta, Aboriginal Services Branch 2005; Anuik 2009, 2018). Many understood that they were different from the newcomer townspeople with whom they learned, worked, worshipped, and played. Some stories broke my heart, as locals pointed to them and called them derogatory names like ‘squaw,’ ‘Indian,’ and ‘half breed,’ even as they and their parents held the same ambitions as the settlers held. It was racism that denied them the chance to learn as Métis; newcomer prejudice hijacked their learning spirits as they struggled to conform. Similarly, knowledge of a Métis past was a source of shame and hidden. Just this decision on the part of families was the result of racism (Absolon and Willett 2005). Northern Canadian residents are a hybrid of ancestries, among them Cree, Ojibwe, Métis, and French. Métis grew up as French or with some sort of Euro-Canadian ancestry that parents and grandparents gave to them. In recent years, people have challenged the authenticity or purity of their French root. They began to pay closer attention to comments from family members. A former student of mine said he heard his grandfather say, ‘Everyone here is a bit native.’ I paused with the undergraduates to consider the claim passed on to my former student by his grandfather. And I suggested that if we followed this old man’s logic, then could these men who urinate on Saul and his buddies really have been pissing on a part of themselves that they hate, which is a part of their heritages.6 When they see Saul and his friends as First Nations men who are proud of their victory in hockey does this image upset them and disrupt their understandings of Indigenous people

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in their minds and hearts? Did they feel provoked to restore what they know, the hate they nurture in their hearts and spirits, the knowledge of human inferiority that is rooted in them and practiced in their town? It is impossible for us to know if what the townspeople did was an expression of their hatred of themselves. What we learned as we talked was that people express racism and other forms of hate in ways that could be considered cerebral. On their learning journeys, they acquired knowledge of Indigenous people as inferior, likely in social spaces like restaurants and pubs, which they committed to their heads and hearts as concepts of how natives and settlers should interact. They acted rationally yet in their hearts intuited that they could also be Indigenous peoples, but this conflict over rational knowledge and intuition resulted in an outpouring of crude expression of racial bigotry. The act of urination on people that they dubbed as ‘others’ was a way that they could maintain the logic they learned as ‘truth.’ If we think of learning as a journey to find our spirits and learn of our gifts, then we understand the knowledge we teach in class, and the format we use to teach it, can be only a small part of the many spaces where people learn and the many formats where students and faculty encounter knowledge. I teach from this perspective. Therefore, I must as a faculty member build spaces where students understand that interaction in such settings is a way to learn of their passions and interests. They can comprehend the meanings of their memories as they look backward on their own life experiences and see such memories and experiences as knowledge. They can also consider how their interests and knowledge help them build their foundations, their calls to teach and their gifts as teachers, and most importantly, to begin to look forward to how they can teach Indigenous-newcomer/settler relations to the students they have not yet taught (Cajete 2000). Everyone came to the book club meeting with stories that they recalled as a result of their reading of Indian Horse. My teacher candidate knew of abuse and dehumanization of Indigenous children at residential schools from stories told by her business partner. The Indigenous PhD student saw how the Catholic Church, a major partner in the schools’ operation, controlled her parents’ spiritual cores. The church not only changed her parents’ spiritual knowledge base but controlled their daily lives. The

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phantom of a priest loomed behind them, and they felt his power over them. For the undergraduates, hockey, a game they saw as a way to build a ‘common ground’ among Canadians, also revealed our ongoing problems with race relations and attitudes of human inferiority that govern our encounters with Indigenous peoples.

Discussion The book club gathering’s style helped us avoid teaching Indigenous ­peoples’ knowledge in the past tense, sticking the stories in a book, ­shutting the book, and putting it on the shelf where it is held without changes, possibly for generations (Wilson 1998). Indian Horse ­complemented the content that our students learned in their teacher education courses because it not only animated the stories ‘in the books’ that Wilson mentions, but destabilized the boundaries of Indigenous and newcomer in Canada.7 Students use these boundaries to resist the c­ ontent in Indigenous education courses or the components in other education courses because they claim that the material is irrelevant to their ­becoming a teacher. In a book club, though, it is not as easy to push away Indigenous peoples because Wagamese framed its content according to topics that he knew were of interest to ‘Canadians.’ Indian Horse tells its story about Saul’s educational experiences through hockey, faith, and family. Teacher candidates learn currently content about Indigenous peoples in Canada. Where they struggle is in confidence to convert content into effective lessons for their students. The book club gives us a window into observing how ‘historical contextualization’ occurs. We see promising ‘pedagogical processes’ (Van Sledright 2001, 64). Our students learned how they could begin to effect changes in pedagogy and curriculum through the practice of leading a book club. The book club could be a safe space because there was no objective to evaluate comprehension of the content and similarly, students had the chance to relate personally their knowledge of Indigenous peoples with the material in the book. The community of interest formed in response to the objective that all of us as teacher educators and teacher candidates demonstrate an awareness

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and an attempt to learn not only more about Indigenous peoples but also to reflect on how we form relationships with each other as we learn. Teacher candidates require more opportunities to share what they know. Professors need to make teacher candidates confident to share. To do so, they must disarm any fears students may have that their interpretations are wrong. It is when students share their narratives and fit what they read and hear within their reference points that they can start to develop a coherent narrative that includes what they know and learn. To begin the work of reconciliation on the grassroots requires that one learn in a space like a book club gathering. My curriculum is a fictional book, and I go outside of the formal classroom space to use a social opportunity to teach students. These teacher candidates had experiences and lessons upon which to draw. They needed a chance to fit these parts into a coherent narrative. My method in the book club was to find out what the teacher candidates knew about Indigenous peoples, and to relate it to Wagamese’s (2012) Indigenous perspective on Canadian educational history. Students used their own stories to create the topics for discussion, and I filled the spaces with the educational history context. My facilitation of the book club can also disrupt a deficit view that Indigenous and non-Indigenous students learn about Canadian history and the place of Indigenous peoples in it. Although there is trauma, there is also hope in the stories—there is resilience. There is a new place for inquiry—in a book club gathering outside class—and second, one can use fiction to teach the history of students like Saul Indian Horse. We gain a greater sense of our inherent capacity to tell history; students got ready in the book club to tell their own stories and to hear those of many others. There is a consensus that residential schools were unacceptable places for Indigenous students to learn, and that argument is now a fact that educators in Canada teach in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary classes. However, teacher candidates must understand how the schools bred continual mistrust by Indigenous families in schooling as the religious authorities and federal,  provincial, and territorial governments offered it. Indian Horse teaches students to comprehend that Indigenous peoples see learning as a lifelong journey. It asks its readers to consider the residential schools’ impacts on the learning journeys of Saul and his hockey

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family. Teacher candidates can start to think about how their knowledge of schools shapes future generations. Students have their instructors’ interpretations of content but need their own. They require an ability to interpret the content if they are to be leaders in reconciliation, and Indian Horse helps us as educators to begin to comprehend the significance of history for reconciliation.

Conclusion The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) expects educators to not only teach about residential schools. They need to be able to comprehend the impacts of the history on contemporary Canadian schools. Similarly, their teaching must demonstrate that they are leaders in reconciliation. As a professor, I see students’ reading of Indian Horse and their participation in book club meetings as a chance for them to comprehend their responsibilities in reconciliation. Finally, a book club is a chance to comprehend how a book not only informs but also helps us practice reconciliation on the grassroots. I began this chapter with a proposition that students currently learned Indigenous education topics in their K–12 and teacher education programs. They learned the history of residential schools and their legacy for Indigenous peoples in Canada. They did so because mandates such as the Accord on Indigenous Education (2010) require such content to be present in teacher education programs. Students learn knowledge but don’t feel comfortable comprehending it as history that is relevant to Canadian society. I suggest that the reason is that they lack a way to fit the history with the stories they know. I propose that what faculty need is a space where students can feel comfortable to share what they know. In this chapter, I report on how the book club can be a grassroots space where students may begin the work of reconciliation and comprehend their role in it. They read a common book, in this case Indian Horse, a fictional account of a man who lives with removal from the land to a residential school where he encounters abuse and learns the impacts of the schools on his hockey family and his community.

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In our introductions at the book club gathering, we found topics ­relevant to our experiences. We turned experiences into stories as we read from passages. I used the opportunity created when students shared their stories to contextualize what they experienced and read with material from my historical research. Concurrently, as I instructed my teacher candidates in Indigenous education history, I visited with an acquaintance that lacked any knowledge about residential schools and Indigenous peoples in Canada or globally. I suggested to him that his reading of Indian Horse could help him to begin to learn about the schools and their impacts on Indigenous societies. This book served as a mechanism for students to connect their experiences and their lessons from their classes with Indigenous perspectives on schooling, Christianity, and importantly, the supposedly unifying game of hockey. As my teacher candidates move into their own classrooms, my objective is for them to comprehend how their participation in a book club and in acts of exchange such as suggested readings like Indian Horse may begin the work of reconciliation in Canada. My approach complements the institutionalized practices that seek to mandate reconciliation with grassroots encounters that serve to humanize the comprehension of residential schooling in Canadian history. The facts of history become relevant to daily living for my students, their friends, and the children and youth whom they seek to educate. As professionals and the postsecondary programs that train them seek to educate themselves about residential schools and Indigenous peoples in general, there is a tendency to compartmentalize First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in discrete units of study. The existing knowledge base remains unchallenged, as do the paradigms that govern the formation of knowledge. There is an expectation that the upcoming generation of teachers lead in truth telling and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada. However, there is still a lot to learn about pedagogy and curriculum that may be relevant for this competency. We see in this chapter that a common reading may build community as it educates students and staff about Indigenous education. Further research needs to consider how books like Indian Horse—pieces of historical fiction—may help its readers to empathize with the survivors of Indian residential schools.

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Researchers need to ask how historical empathy as pedagogy may help guide neophyte teachers as they begin the work of reconciliation on the grassroots. Proponents of the pedagogy ask professors and their teacher candidates to consider the context in which historical events occur (Yeager and Foster 2001). A preliminary review of the literature on historical empathy reveals two challenges for those who seek reconciliation on the grassroots with fictional texts like Indian Horse: (1) The literature concentrates on learning outcomes in the elementary and secondary school social studies and history classrooms; and (2) The reporting on data tends to focus on individual learners’ responses to lessons that receive a shaping with historical empathy pedagogy. We know less about how historical empathy and its cognate term historical thinking may operate in practice in ‘a community of inquirers’ (Van Sledright 2001, p. 65). I think that we need to consider how the pedagogy may be of value in a book club, which is an informal learning space, and with fictional as well as nonfictional texts (Buchanan 2014; De Leur et al. 2017; Kohlmeier 2006; Lee and Ashby 2001; Yilmaz 2007). In this chapter, I am able to speculate only on the prospect of use of historical empathy as a pedagogical framework to use to understand how a fictional historical text can be used to begin the work of reconciliation with Canadian teacher candidates. Another paper needs to be written with a more thorough reporting on a reading of the literature on historical empathy and the use of empathy in history teaching. Acknowledgment  I would like to thank Katherine Koch, Kim Frail, and Allison Sivak, librarians at the H.  T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, with whom I led the Book of the Year discussion groups. I also thank Faculty of Education Deans Fern Snart and Randolph Wimmer for their support of the project. Conversations with Katherine and Caroline Land of the Edmonton Public Library helped me with my conceptualization of this chapter. I share my gratitude to the participants in the international symposium Historical Justice and History Education, which took place from June 4 to 5, 2019, at Umeå University, in Umeå, Sweden, on whose feedback I base this final version of my chapter. My most important ­acknowledgment goes to the students who participated in the book club meetings, especially those who participated in the one profiled here.

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Notes 1. In Canada, the provincial and territorial governments are responsible for the design and delivery of early childhood, elementary, secondary, and postsecondary programs of study. For more information about the structure of Canadian education systems, see Wallner (2018). 2. I assigned Indian Horse to introduce my students to Indigenous peoples’ education in Canada from historical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives. 3. For a deeper explanation of nourishing the learning spirit, see Anuik et al. (2010) and Battiste (2013). 4. When the Northwest Territories entered the federation of Canada in 1870, its boundaries contained land that became the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905. In 1912, the boundaries of Manitoba and Ontario took their contemporary shape as a result of cession of land from the Northwest Territories. When I referred to the Board of Education of the Northwest Territories, I referred to the Northwest Territories that entered Confederation in 1870. 5. Read alongside Bruce A. Van Sledright (2001, p. 56), a student of history requires appropriate knowledge of the culture in which practices take shape. 6. For Peter Lee and Rosalyn Ashby, ‘It is not merely knowing that certain historical…groups had a particular perspective on their world, but being able to see how that perspective would actually have affected actions in particular circumstances’ (2001, p. 24). 7. I am grateful to the editors of this collection for this observation.

References Absolon, Kathy, and Cameron Willett. 2005. Putting Ourselves Forward: Location in Aboriginal Research. In Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-oppressive Approaches, ed. Susan Strega and Leslie Allison Brown, 97–126. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Akan, Linda. 1999. Pimosatamowin Sikaw Kakeequaywin: Walking and Talking: A Saulteaux Elder’s View of Native Education. Canadian Journal of Native Education 23 (1): 16–39.

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Alberta, Aboriginal Services Branch. 2005. Our Words, our Ways: Teaching First Nations, Métis and Inuit Learners. Edmonton: Alberta Education. Alberta Education, Office of the Registrar. n.d. Alberta Education: Teaching Quality Standard. Edmonton: Author. Anuik, Jonathan. 2009. Métis Families and Schools: The Decline and Reclamation of Métis Identities in Saskatchewan, 1885–1980. PhD diss., University of Saskatchewan. ———. 2010a. ‘In from the Margins’: Government of Saskatchewan Policies to Support Métis Learning, 1969–1979. Canadian Journal of Native Education 32: 83–99. ———. 2010b. From Protestant and Roman Catholic Missions to Public Schools: Educating Métis and Settler Children in the West to be Citizens of Modern Canada, 1866–1939. Saskatchewan History 62 (1): 22–35. ———. 2018. Language, Place, and Kinship Ties: Past and Present Necessities for Métis Education. In Roots of Entanglement: Essays in Native-newcomer Relations in Honour of J.  R. Miller, ed. P.  Whitney Lackenbauer, Myra Rutherdale, and Kerry Abel, 209–229. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. In Press. The Right to Self-identify as Métis at School: Lessons for Educators and their Supporters. In Métis Rising: Beading Métis Social and Economic Well-being: Historical and Contemporary Accounts, ed. Yvonne Boyer and Larry Chartrand. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press. Anuik, Jonathan, Marie Battiste, and Priscilla Ningwakwe George. 2010. Learning from Promising Programs and Applications in Nourishing the Learning Spirit. Canadian Journal of Native Education 33 (1): 63–82. Barman, Jean. 2003. Schooled for Inequality: The Education of British Columbia Aboriginal Children. In Histories of Canadian Children and Youth, ed. Nancy Janovicek and Joy Parr, 212–235. Don Mills; New  York: Oxford University Press. Battiste, Marie. 2000a. Introduction: Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization. In Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste, xvi–xxx. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ———. 2000b. Maintaining Aboriginal Identity, Language and Culture in Modern Society. In Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste, 192–208. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ———. 2011. Micmac Literacy and Cognitive Assimilation. In Racism, Colonialism and Indigeneity in Canada, ed. Martin Cannon and Lina Sunseri, 163–173. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 2012. Enabling the Autumn Seed: Towards a Decolonized Approach to Aboriginal Knowledge, Language and Education. In Schooling in Transition: Readings in Canadian History of Education, ed. Sara Z.  Burke and Patrice Milewski, 276–286. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2013. Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Limited. Buchanan, Lisa Brown. 2014. From Freedom Riders to the Children’s March: Civil Rights Documentaries as Catalysts for Historical Empathy. Social Education 78 (2): 91–95. Cajete, Gregory. 2000. The Pueblo Metaphor of Indigenous Education. In Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste, 181–191. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. De Leur, Tessa, Carla Van Boxtel, and Arie Wilschut. 2017. ‘I saw angry people and broken stones’: Historical Empathy in Secondary History Education. British Journal of Educational Studies 65 (3): 331–352. Forrester, L., ed. 2008. And Grandma Said…: Iroquois Teachings as Passed Down through the Oral Tradition (J.  K. Fadden, Drawings). Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation. Gardner, Ethel B. 1988. Ka-im’s Gift: A Sto:lo Legend (with Commentary by the Author). Canadian Journal of Native Education 15 (3): 101–108. Kohlmeier, Jada. 2006. ‘Couldn’t she just leave?’ The Relationship Between Consistently Using Class Discussions and the Development of Historical Empathy in a 9th Grade World History Course. Theory and Research in Social Education 34 (1): 34–57. Lee, Peter, and Rosalyn Ashby. 2001. Empathy, Perspective Taking, and Rational Understanding. In Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. Ozro Luke Davis Jr., Elizabeth Anne Yeager, and Stuart J. Foster, 21–50. Lanham; Boulder; New  York; and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Létourneau, Jocelyn, and Sabrina Moisan. 2006. Young People’s Assimilation of a Collective Historical Memory: A Case Study of Quebeckers of French-­ Canadian Heritage. In Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas, 109–128. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McAlpine, L., Cross, E., Whiteduck, G., and Wolforth, J. 1990. Using Two Pairs of Eyes to Define an Aboriginal Teacher Education Program. Canadian Journal of Native Education 17 (2): 82–88. McCallum, Mary Jane Logan. 2017. Foreword to A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, ed. John S. Milloy. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

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Miller, James Rodger. 1996. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Monture-Angus, Patricia. 1995. Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Pidgeon, Michelle, Marissa Muñoz, Verna J. Kirkness, and Jo-ann Archibald. 2013. Indian Control of Indian Education: Reflections and Envisioning the Next 40 Years. Canadian Journal of Native Education 36 (1): 5–35. Seixas, Peter. 2006. Part II. History Education and Historical Consciousness. In Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas, 103–107. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Simon, Roger. 2006. The Pedagogical Insistence of Public Memory. In Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas, 183–201. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. Honouring the Truth: Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Winnipeg: Author. http://www.trc.ca/ assets/pdf/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Future_ July_23_2015.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2019. Van Sledright, Bruce A. 2001. From Empathic Regard to Self-understanding: Im/positionality, Empathy, and Historical Contextualization. In Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. Ozro Luke Davis Jr., Elizabeth Anne Yeager, and Stuart J.  Foster, 51–68. Lanham; Boulder; New York; and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Wagamese, Richard. 2012. Indian Horse: A Novel. Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre Ltd. Wallner, Jennifer. 2018. Learning to School: Federalism and Public Schooling in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wilson, Alex. 1998. How our Stories Are Told. Canadian Journal of Native Education 22 (2): 274–278. Wilson, Alex, and Marie Battiste. 2011. Environmental Scan of Educational Models Supporting Aboriginal Post-secondary Education. Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. http://docs.education. gov.au/system/files/doc/other/wilson_and_battiste_2011.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2019. Yeager, Elizabeth Anne, and Stuart J. Foster. 2001. The Role of Empathy in the Development of Historical Understanding. In Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. Ozro Luke Davis Jr., Elizabeth

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Anne Yeager, and Stuart J. Foster, 13–19. Lanham; Boulder; New York; and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Yilmaz, Kaya. 2007. Historical Empathy and Its Implications for Classroom Practice in Schools. The History Teacher 40 (3): 331–338. Yunkaporta, Tyson. 2010. Aboriginal Pedagogies at the Cultural Interface. PhD diss., James Cook University.

16 Developing Historical Consciousness for Social Cohesion: How South African Students Learn to Construct the Relationship Between Past and Present Natasha Robinson

Introduction South Africa’s history of racial division has left deep scars of mistrust and segregation twenty-five years after the end of apartheid. This is exacerbated by a persistent racialised economic inequality, and political rhetoric which in various forms scapegoats racial groups. In a country so ravished by historical injustice, the new South African government tasked history education with the development of social cohesion (Asmal 2003). Kader Asmal (Minister of Education, 1999–2004) believed that a ‘society cannot reconcile itself on the grounds of a divided memory. Since memory is identity, this would result in a divided identity’ (Asmal 2003). Creating a shared and legitimate memory in post-­apartheid South Africa became critical to the challenge of national identity and the

N. Robinson (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_16

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peaceful existence of peoples who never imagined themselves as belonging to a single nation state (Weldon 2009). The resulting national curriculum that has been implemented since 2012 is highly structured and prescriptive. The narrative of racial segregation that is outlined in the Grade 9 history curriculum emphasises the damaging consequences of racism and human rights abuses, as well as the cross-community rejection of apartheid which eventually resulted in liberation and democracy. However in recent years the effectiveness of history education in creating shared memory has been called into question. Angier’s (2017) study of first year history undergraduate students, all of whom had completed the South African national history curriculum, indicated that students of different races held fundamentally different understandings in regards to the emphasis and agency of South African history. When asked to write a history of South Africa, White1 students were more likely to begin the historical narrative with the origins of human culture and end the narrative with the 1994 democratic elections. Black students however were more likely to begin their narrative with the start of apartheid in 1948, and end the narrative in the present day, making connections between apartheid legislation and the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ decolonisation protests in 2015/2016. While the historical facts were the same, Black students envisioned history as reaching into the present, while White students did not articulate any connection between the past and the present. Similarly, a study cited by Swartz (2016) found that South Africans have racially different beliefs regarding the contemporary legacy of apartheid; only 33% of White South Africans agreed with the statement, ‘Many Black South Africans are poor today as a result of apartheid’s legacy’, compared to 77% of Black South Africans, 67% of Indian South Africans, and 59% of Coloured2 South Africans. I suggest that South Africa does not have a divided memory of historical ‘facts’ (who did what to whom and when and why3), but rather is divided in its understanding of apartheid’s historical relevance for contemporary society and experiences; questions about why contemporary society is the way it is, and what caused it. This divided understanding of historical causality poses challenges for creating a shared national agenda since beliefs concerning the contemporary legacy of apartheid shape

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many of the defining questions that South Africa faces. The issue of land restitution for example was a central policy focus in the 2019 national elections, and questions regarding affirmative action, reparations, gang violence, social spending, and responses to government corruption are also debated and contested on the grounds of historical legacy, causality and interpretation. Rather than a shared memory of historical facts, this paper argues that the salient concern for a South African history curriculum that is interested in social cohesion should be shared historical consciousness. The term ‘historical consciousness’ has been broadly defined, but for the purposes of this study I draw on Duquette’s (2015) understanding of historical consciousness as an interpretation of the past that allows an understanding of the present and the consideration of the future (Charland 2003; Rüsen 2004; Seixas 2006). According to Duquette (2015), historical consciousness can be observed through the narratives used by an individual to make sense of the complex ties between past events and today’s ever-changing world. The definition of historical consciousness adopted in this paper is therefore intimately tied to the notion of causality; of whether or not one interprets the things that happened in the past as having caused—or at least impacted—on the things that happen in the present. While historical consciousness is often referred to as something individual and cognitive—as opposed to historical culture which is collective and institutional (Assmann 2010, cited in (Adriaansen 2017)—I suggest that historical consciousness forms part of a collective historical culture. In a school-based history curricula large groups of people are taught the ‘correct’ way to interpret the past, and to use history to understand how their situation is connected to where they came from and where they are going. In the context of identity politics, history is one of the more important instruments in negotiating and maintaining a common ground for a group of people who are understood to share an identity that may be seen as a basis for political action (Ahonen, 2012). This study is motivated by the concern that the lack of a nationally shared historical consciousness not only stifles political action regarding addressing historical injustice, but also undermines social cohesion as citizens develop different understandings of the causes of what they experience. To the extent that reconciliation deals with past events I suggest

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that a shared historical consciousness is the area in which history education has most to contribute. The current South African history curriculum does not intentionally promote historical consciousness; it presents a structured narrative of South Africa’s recent past but does not attempt to use history to help students to understand the present or consider the future (Sayed et al. 2017). The compulsory history curriculum (Grades 4–9) ends with the transition to democracy in 1994, and the most commonly used textbooks do not require students to reflect on the implications of the past for contemporary society. Despite this, a number of ethnographic studies have suggested that teachers do draw connections between the past and the present in their teaching in order to promote or undermine certain beliefs about the present. What’s more, while historical consciousness has never been the focus of a study of history classes in South Africa, studies show that teachers do evoke very different forms of historical consciousness. Dryden (1999), for example, details the difference in approach between a White and Black teacher in her ethnographic study of four Cape Town history classrooms. While the White teacher drew moral equivalence between the actions of Black and White people under apartheid—‘there is not one group that is wrong and the other were right’—in order to stifle a racialised historical interpretation, the Black history teacher aimed to show his students ‘that the New South Africa is in fact a legacy of what happened then and how it will affect them now’. His explicit purpose in teaching history was to help his students use the past to interpret the present. Similarly, Teeger’s ethnography (2015) of two multi-racial schools in Johannesburg draws on five months of daily observations in 17 9th-grade history classrooms and 170 in-depth interviews with teachers and students to document how and why students were taught not to attend to the effects of apartheid on their society. Teeger found that teachers aimed explicitly to prevent Black students from associating their current poverty with historical injustice, in an attempt to prevent inter-racial classroom conflict. According to one teacher, ‘a lot of kids started hating each other because, you know, the others are White and the others were Black. And they started saying, “My mother is a domestic worker because she was

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never allowed an opportunity to get good education […].”’ Conflict in the classroom arose not because of past events, but rather the perception that those past events had effects on contemporary life circumstances. A different teacher interviewed by Teeger from a similar school claimed that ‘if [the apartheid section]’s not taught correctly, it can lead to more division because you can have that whole idea of “but that’s how much we suffered” and “I should get this [compensation].” But if it’s taught correctly it should not do that; it should do the opposite’. ‘Correct’ teaching was determined by the type of historical consciousness that was developed in the students. By using ‘the wrongs of the past to try to unite the kids’, rather than using it to show how racial inequalities have persisted, teachers controlled the development of historical consciousness. The research presented in this chapter builds upon Dryden and Teeger’s previous studies but narrows the focus to explore how historical consciousness is specifically communicated, received and contested in the Grade 9 South African history classroom, and how Grade 9 students develop historical consciousness. Crucially, I do not assume that there is a ‘correct’ historical consciousness against which participants should be measured. Instead, I recognise that the contemporary legacy of South Africa’s historical injustice is contested even by professional historians and economists (Terreblanche 2003). The aim of this research is to explore the variety of ways in which the complex ties between past and present are woven in the minds of teachers and students, and how students use the past to explain contemporary social issues. In doing so, this study contributes to the development of history education that promotes social cohesion in post-conflict contexts.

Methodology The research design can best be described as four comparative ethnographic case studies, employing classroom observations, focus groups, and interviews with both teachers and students. The unit of analysis in this study was the Grade 9 class itself, in the context of their history lessons. I observed every history lesson that one Grade 9 class in each school

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participated in over the course of nine months (April–December 2018). In doing so this research offers a comparative study of how South African students learn about the legacy of apartheid. My study focused on the 9th grade where, for the first time, South African students across the country learn in-depth about apartheid in their history classes. For students who drop history at the end of the 9th grade, when it ceases to be mandatory, this may be the last time they learn history in a formal educational context. Grade 9 classes are therefore not a self-selecting group of students who have opted to study history. The Grade 9 history class represents one of the few contexts in contemporary South Africa in which racially diverse peoples routinely meet to think systematically through their history. The Grade 9 history curriculum includes a module on life under apartheid, and a module on resistance to apartheid. It was, therefore, relevant to the question of how the legacy of apartheid is understood. By focusing on young people age 14 to 15, I tapped into an age bracket in which lessons learned about ‘us’ and ‘them’, and history and politics more generally, are expected to be highly salient (Teeger 2015). According to Mannheim (1952, cited in Teeger 2015) political experiences and messages encountered during adolescence remain disproportionately influential throughout the life course. This study highlights the importance of understanding the lessons students learn about the legacy of the past and its contemporary effects during this crucial developmental period. The classroom observations were recorded as almost complete transcripts of teacher–student interactions with further notes taken on the social dynamics of the class. The teachers were interviewed twice; once at the beginning of the research, and once at the end. The first interview aimed to gather information regarding the history and culture of the school, the background of the students, the incentive for teaching, and the teacher’s approaches/aims when teaching history. The second interview involved sharing fieldnotes with the teacher to ask for clarity and reflection on the aims, outcomes, and approaches to teaching this class. Five students from each class volunteered to participate in interviews and focus groups which took place over the nine-month research period. Individual interviews took place at the beginning of the research and

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were aimed at understanding the background and identity of the students, as well as their personal relationship to history. The first of three focus groups concerned students understandings of why South African society is the way it is without introducing the assumption that history has influenced the present. This was similar to Duquette’s approach to assessing historical consciousness which involved participants discussing a contemporary problem to which the past may be relevant (Duquette 2015). Topics discussed included land reform, poverty, gang violence, educational inequality, and racism. The second focus group sought to understand the students’ thoughts regarding their history class. The third focus group concerned the students’ understandings of the legacy of apartheid and South Africa’s history more directly. During the classroom observations particular attention was given to the contributions and answers offered by the focus-group students, and where possible their history projects were collected. As well as observing history lessons, I spent ‘down-time’ in the schools between classes, and attended teacher meetings, assemblies, school events, and fieldtrips. This gave me the opportunity to experience school culture, and thus to contextualise the history lessons as the students experienced them.

Analysis Analysis of the ethnographic data sought to understand the relationships between past and present that were being communicated by the teacher and the students, and in particular the causal relationships that were being presented. NVivo was used to code the field notes. During the first wave of coding I simply identified every instance in which a relationship between the past and present was evoked, either by the teacher or a student in the class. This helped to give a sense of how often this relationship was spoken about in each class, with Siyabulela High School’s class speaking about it very infrequently, and John May High School’s class speaking about it very frequently. A second wave of coding then categorised the

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first codes into ways of speaking about the relationship between past and present. Seven codes emerged from this second wave. They were: 1. Presence: The past is present in the present 2. Personal recollection: Memories from the past 3. Value comparisons: The past is better/worse than the present 4. Heritage: Ideas about where we come from 5. Examples: Using examples from other times or places to illustrate a point from history 6. Causal: The present is the way it is because of the past 7. Call to action: History should make us do certain things in the present. This coding process highlighted that while many teachers evoked a relationship between the past and the present, most of these relationships were not ‘causal’ and therefore did not have a bearing on historical consciousness as defined in this study, since they were not ‘an interpretation of the past that allowed an understanding of the present and the consideration of the future’. I refocussed the analysis to compare across schools how and to what extent the past was used as a causal explanation for the present. I was also interested in whether teachers spoke about the past as being the same as the present—what I termed ‘continuous’—or whether they spoke about the past as being different from the present—what I termed ‘discontinuous’. I felt that this distinction would help me to understand whether the teachers view contemporary South Africa as having ‘moved on’ from the apartheid past, or whether they saw contemporary South Africa as still being very rooted in the past. I returned to the original code of ‘relationship between past and present’ and categorised those codes again according to whether those were ‘continuous’ or ‘discontinuous’ relationships. Within each of the ‘continuous’ or ‘discontinuous’ codes, I then coded for whether this relationship was spoken about as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. Examples of these codes taken from classroom observation fieldnotes can be found in Table 16.1 below: All of the student interviews and focus groups were recorded and transcribed. Despite the fact that the students did not openly disagree

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Table 16.1  Examples of codes from observation notes regarding connections made between the past and present Continuity Positive John May High School

Stamford High School

Change Negative

Positive

Negative

Less respect, No longer People still alive Land claims, increased living racially geographical from expenses, more identified on segregation, apartheid, crime, more ID, beaches poverty, wars Student corruption, less and sports no Representative (though now longer racially punishment of between Counsels. criminals, segregated, gangs), Black gangsterism, freedom, people don’t more equal get good unemployment, education, education, communities anger towards mixed-race were more White people, relationships, united. can attend Black people lots of feel inferior, different poor living educational conditions, institutions, low-income public communities holidays and still don’t national experience anthem mixed-race commemorate friendships. the apartheid struggle. Now have Racism, human rights, geographical people are no segregation, poverty, Black longer and Coloured bothered by apartheid people fight security police. each other, White people still benefit, still have student protests. (continued)

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Table 16.1 (continued) Continuity Positive Southgate High School

Change Negative

Positive

Geographical segregation, poverty.

People who were forcibly removed are now at university, people who were sent to Mitchell’s Plain have done ‘amazing things’, human rights no longer violated, we take a lot for granted, now have DA (opposition party)

Negative

People Siyabulela Freedom separated Charter is still High from families relevant. School because of political circumstances, colour separates us, South Africa struggles to attract investment.

with each other it was clear that very different and often contradictory ideas were articulated in the same focus group. I therefore began the analysis of the student interviews by disaggregating the focus groups and creating individual student portraits, so that I could better understand the world view of each individual student. I did this by creating two lists for each student; a list of their biographical details, and a list of

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statements that they made about South African history and contemporary South African society. This disaggregation was important for three reasons. First, it helped identify the similarities and differences between students, even in the same class. Second, it helped identify whether the claims that the students were making were similar or different to the ones that their teacher made in class. And third, it helped identify how a student’s life circumstances might factor into their world view. For example, in an interview one student spoke about how her father had fifteen children with seven different women, and in a focus group she said she thought that Black people were poor because they had so many unplanned pregnancies. In the second stage of the analysis I identified topics of conversation relating to contemporary social issues in South Africa that emerged from the focus group conversations, for example gang violence, wealth inequalities and inequalities in educational opportunities. I then made lists of all the different explanations that the students in a focus group gave for these contemporary social issues. This helped to highlight the extent to which the students were drawing on historical explanations versus other types of explanations, and how these explanations differed between students and classes. The teacher interviews were often many hours long and covered a broad range of topics, from school culture, pedagogy and teachers’ biographies, to the purposes of history education and reflections on data collection. In some regards the teacher interviews can be seen as a means of analysis themselves, since I invited the teachers to become co-researchers and reflect on the data with me. Through these exchanges—questions, points of resistance, clarifications and rejections—the teachers enriched the data and helped to develop interpretations of what was happening in the classroom.

Findings While this study focussed on four schools, in the interests of brevity only two—Southgate High and Stamford High—are discussed and compared.

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Southgate High School Southgate High School is a formerly White school, and its student body and teaching staff remain overwhelmingly White. With fees upwards of R40,000 it is one of the most expensive government schools in Cape Town4, boasting impressive facilities, a teacher–student ratio of 1:25, and a 100% matriculation pass rate. Southgate’s history teacher, Alfie, was a White male in his 60s. For most of his adult life prior to 1994 Alfie participated in anti-apartheid activism. He had been a teacher his entire career and was the head-teacher of his previous school. Alfie’s teaching had a strong focus on promoting human rights, and on the importance of being able to defend the rights of others which he sees as a primary purpose of history education. The school had recently been accused of a racist culture which excluded the minority non-White students from feeling like they belonged. In response, the school management organised a series of day-long workshops with all the staff and students to reflect on what it means to be part of this school. Despite being warmly welcomed into the school, these workshops were out of bounds to me, perhaps reflecting the moral panic that had gripped Southgate High during this time. Unlike his colleagues however, Alfie was excited by these workshops and the opportunity they presented for connecting ideas of ‘belonging’ to human rights and the history curriculum. The day after the workshop Alfie devoted an entire class to reflection on how his students felt about the discussions. A particular focus was on how bad it felt to be discriminated against, and this bad feeling became a touchstone for understanding discrimination and human rights abuses throughout both the Holocaust and apartheid. When the students were asked to interview someone who was alive during apartheid, Alfie encouraged his class to ask how their respondents felt. During a lesson Kristallnacht, students were asked how it would feel to be a Jew watching the synagogues burn. Sometimes he would go around the class giving every student the opportunity to say how they felt, while at other times students were encouraged to write their feelings down in their notebooks.

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Indeed a striking feature of Alfie’s teaching was the level of emotion that was expressed and drawn out of the students. The focus on emotion came from the belief that hatred, in extreme forms, can lead to genocide, and that the ability to love and empathise was one way of combating that hate. In one class activity he asked students to write positive things about each other, and then reflect on how good it feels when someone treats you well. Alfie followed this activity with a heartfelt sermon on the importance of love; The Holocaust is filled with hate. It’s filled with extreme hate. Hate is so intense that people suspend their morals and end up murdering close to 15 million people and think that’s OK. So there were two reasons why I gave you that. It’s difficult to like someone if you don’t like yourself. So I wanted you to see all the good qualities about yourself, so that you can identify those qualitied in someone else.” [He picked up a sheet from a girl’s desk.] There’s nothing better than getting something like this. I wanted you to feel good about yourself because it’s interesting to see how hate can lead to death.

However, this focus on the emotional consequences of apartheid and the Holocaust often eclipsed any discussion of the contemporary or structural legacy of these abuses. Instead, it reduced historical justice into ‘good feelings’ and ’bad feelings’. Apartheid was a lack of love. The Holocaust was a lack of love. Racial exclusion in the school corridors or on the hocky pitch was a lack of love. In an effort to make history relevant, the causes and consequences of the difficult past were abstracted to the point where the specific historical details did not matter. ‘The problem with South Africa’, the students told me, ‘is that people don’t treat each other kindly’. By following this logic the class arrived at an understanding that South Africa’s structural inequality could be solved with inter-personal kindness. Since the hatred that caused apartheid had largely ended, the ‘bad feelings’ that constituted the effects of apartheid must also have ended, and thus a discontinuity with the past was created. Crucially, this was not a pedagogy that denied the horrors of apartheid, but rather one which positioned those horrors in a distant past that South Africa had

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overcome, and which would continue to be overcome if history education instilled the importance of human rights. When analysed for ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’, it became clear that the strong focus of Alfie’s teaching was on the positive ways in which contemporary South Africa is different from the past. For example, he spoke about the ways in which Black and Coloured South Africans have overcome the discrimination of apartheid by working hard to go to university, or by doing ‘amazing things’ to improve the neighbourhoods that they were forcibly removed to. There was furthermore a frequent reminder in his teaching to be grateful for what we have today, suggesting that what we have today was very different from what previous generations suffered. Notably, however, the present was either never spoken about as being continuous with the past or was mentioned only briefly and in passing. Indeed, at times it appeared as though Alfie was intentionally trying to disassociate the past from the present. For example, when a student reflected that her grandmother still lives in the neighbourhood where she was forcibly relocated to under apartheid, and which is still ‘almost all Black people’, Alfie sidestepped a conversation about how historical injustice continues to affect South Africans. Instead he replied, ‘so you feel upbeat. You have a lot of information [for your history project].’ Similarly, Alfie avoided discussing who was responsible for apartheid. While studying the Holocaust the class were encouraged to reflect in some detail as to whether Germans knew about the ‘Final Solution’, and analysed various sources to answer this question. However, the same question was never posed in relation to White people during apartheid. The racial demographics of the school might explain why Alfie chose to focus on emotion and human rights rather than on the contemporary structural consequences of apartheid. On one occasion, when describing D.F. Malan as the architect of apartheid, a Coloured student asked why there was still a school in Cape Town named after D.F. Malan. The question sparked an impassioned discussion among the students regarding whether it is appropriate for schools to be named after racists. Some White students felt that it was ‘just a name’ while a Coloured student expressed with visible anger that it would be ‘shameful’ for her to attend D.F.  Malan school. This discussion—entirely unprovoked by Alfie— made apparent underlying racial tensions at Southgate High which

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remained hidden when apartheid was safely in the past but were exposed when contemporary decisions were at stake. The desire to maintain racial harmony, particularly at a time when Southgate High was coming under attack for a racist culture, might be one reason why Alfie directed the conversation away from issues of historical consciousness. Talking about the horrors of the past was uncontroversial, unless these past horrors had implications for how we should live today. Interestingly, Alfie was much more vocal about the structural legacy of apartheid outside of the classroom than he was when teaching. This suggests that the school culture at Southgate High might have shaped the teaching approach, particularly in regard to historical consciousness. The reactions of the students were in effect policing what was allowed to be taught.

Stamford High School Stamford High School, in contrast to Southgate High, was established under ten years ago, with the aim of serving low-income students who showed strong academic potential. It is highly selective, and its fees are approximately R7000 per year. The student body is half Coloured, half Black with no White students; however, almost half of the teachers are White. Stamford’s history teacher, Dan, is a White male in his 30s who, by his own admission, felt unprepared to teach history and so stuck closely to the textbook. Compared to the other teachers, Dan made very few connections between the past and the present. Rather he tended to situate his teaching in the past, making few remarks about contemporary South Africa. However on the occasions when Dan did refer to the present, he almost always spoke about the past as being continuous with the present. Furthermore, when Dan spoke about the past as being continuous with the present, this was without exception spoken about as being something negative. For example, Dan spoke about how racist attitudes, racial conflicts, geographical segregation, and racialised wealth inequalities were problematic aspects of contemporary South African society that had not changed since apartheid. On the occasions when Dan did describe a

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positive historical event, for example the effective resistance strategies of the United Democratic Front, or the first democratic elections in 1994, he did not make a connection to contemporary South Africa. On no occasion did Dan express regret, upset, or disapproval that contemporary South Africa was different from it’s past. The way in which Dan spoke about history as being continuous or discontinuous with the present was to position the past—particularly the apartheid era—as something which we should try to move away from but which still affects us. When discussing the negotiated settlement between Nelson Mandela and de Klerk, Dan conceded Mandela’s success in avoiding civil war, however expressed regret that ‘if you look at where we are, maybe it’s because we could have addressed it better […] it’s difficult because I would also want things to be better’. The compromise of the negotiated settlement, as Dan expressed it, is that history continues to trip us up. Dan’s history teaching had a strong emphasis on cause and consequence. A repeated activity that he set his students was to list the consequences of various historical events. For example, students were asked to identify the positive and negative consequences of the Defiance Campaign for the ANC, or the short-term and long-term consequences of the Sharpville Massacre. Although these activities never made reference to contemporary South Africa, they introduced a concept associated with historical thinking; that what happens in one period in history has a causal relationship with future circumstances. As Dan explained, ‘everything has consequences that leads to other things,’ and what’s more, ‘everything has long term consequences.’ Although Dan made few connections between the past and the present, the connections he did make emphasised the causal relationship between what happened under apartheid, and social injustices in contemporary South Africa. What was striking about these causal connections was the detailed and methodical approach that Dan employed which helped students to construct the structural and inter-generational effects of various apartheid laws. For example, in the fieldnote extract below I record a discussion between Dan and his students regarding the connection between the Group Areas Act5 which was introduced in 1950 and Cape Town’s contemporary racial demographics:

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T:  The reason I asked you to read this source was because it’s incredible. It mentions Newlands. And what colour are most people living in Newlands now? SS: White T:  Yes, not all but most. So, it’s amazing that a White neighbourhood is still like that after 1994, a long time ago. It’s still like that. The closer to the city the more White. Do we still have the Group Areas Act? SS: YES T:  Not legally but it’s still like that. Hopefully in the future it will be that more people with money will move closer, but even that’s messed up. So why don’t people just move back? S: They are used to it. T: Do you think they like it? I don’t understand what you are saying. S: They don’t like it. T: But they’re used to it, OK. Why else? SS: Not enough money. T: Why don’t they just earn more money to move back? S: Bantu education. T: But there’s no Bantu education now. So why don’t people earn money? S: White privilege. T: That’s part of it. S:  There are some people who get money for the land that they used to own and it splits between siblings. S:  If you have a lease then you should be able to kick out the White people who stole your home. T:  So I want to move away from people who have a claim to that land. That’s a no brainer. They should get the land back. But what about others. Why don’t they earn more money? S: They can’t. T:  Yes, grandparents didn’t have education so your parents couldn’t have good education, so they couldn’t get a good job, so they didn’t have money. S: Good schools are expensive. T: Yes, and what else? S: They’re far away. S: So you can’t go.

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T:  Catchment areas. Right yes. Stamford High School is unusual because it doesn’t have a catchment area but if you want to go to Highstead you have to live close. So it’s too much money, too far. But what about the actual space? The actual place where you’re living? A person doesn’t have starting money to get to interviews. Or maybe to get to many interviews. Students are very engaged. T:  The Group Areas Act wasn’t a law that popped up and went away. Its effects have stayed. Not everyone has access. If you live far away you can have all the desire in the world to improve but there’s so many barriers. So when we read a source about this family moving it’s doubly sad because it’s probably still affecting that society. In this exchange, Dan uses a process of Socratic questioning to tease out the various relationships between neighbourhood, education, poverty and social mobility in reference to specific apartheid laws across generations. His comments not only describe the lasting impacts of apartheid, but position individuals within the structural confines of their history. In doing so he implies to his students that success is influenced by circumstance, and circumstance is influenced by history; as a result of historical injustice some people will find it easier to be successful than others. It is notable that during this discussion Dan steered the conversation away from considerations of ‘White privilege’, racism, or discrimination as barriers to success. While not dismissing these concerns—‘that’s part of it’—he focused the class on the structural reasons why Black and Coloured people struggle to access accommodation in wealthy neighbourhoods. Attention was drawn to the understanding that it is the apartheid laws that have resulted in contemporary racialised inequality, rather than just the contemporary attitudes of South Africans. Given the structural diagnosis of the problem, it cannot be solved simply through non-racist attitudes. This is in contrast to Alfie who emphasised contemporary racist attitudes as being the cause for contemporary racialised inequality. When Dan did discuss White privilege, he again referred to it as being an aspect of structural inequality, rather than only personal or cultural attitudes. For example, in a rather vulnerable exchange, Dan told his students about his friend who realised that the house she was living in was forcibly removed from one of her student’s grandmothers:

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T:  Grade 9, I wanted to mention to you something interesting that I discovered over the weekend. A friend of mine is teaching at another school, their student was interviewing their grandmother who was removed by the Group Areas Act and the project was very nice with photos and looking at the photos the teacher realised that the house the grandmother was removed from was her house. SS: YOH!!! YOH!!6 T: Mass guilt, can you imagine? S: Did she remove the grandmother? T:  So it wasn’t the case that this grandmother was removed, and it passed to my friend. She was removed and then someone else bought it, and then someone else, and passed many times and now my friend’s boyfriend owns the house. So she confronts that reality much more hectically7 than just from a textbook, because we’re always learning, and she’s learning in a very intense way. In this instance, Dan talks about the emotion of guilt and the need to address contemporary privilege, even though the privilege wasn’t a result of any direct injustice that his friend had committed, or racist attitudes that his friend had displayed. Rather, as Dan explains, his friend’s boyfriend had simply bought the house years after her student’s grandmother had been removed from it. Yet despite not doing anything wrong, Dan describes how historical injustice means that his friend is benefitting from other peoples’ suffering, for example through her ability to afford a house in the wealthy Southern Suburbs. In this instance, Dan also embraces and legitimises the understanding that history has affective as well as structural consequences for the present.

Southgate High and Stamford High Comparison The historical consciousness of these two groups of students showed marked differences (Bentrovato 2021). When discussing the contemporary legacy of apartheid the Southgate students identified inter-personal racism as a primary effect, evidenced by the controversial racist comments that made media headlines. The problem with racism, in the students’ view, was that it hurt peoples feelings and made them feel excluded.

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It was therefore unpleasant but ultimately not life-­threatening, unlike the Holocaust. In regard to the structural legacy of apartheid their views were often complicated and contradictory. On the one hand, students identified Black poverty and unemployment as a consequence of apartheid and recognised that this poverty skewed the racial demographic at Southgate High. However, the students also believed that a poor and uneducated parent could send their child to Southgate High if they were ambitious and took the opportunities presented to them; they saw no reason for intergenerational poverty. A Coloured student identified that Black people live in shacks and White people live in wealthy areas. The other students agreed with her however attributed this disparity to the fact that South Africa doesn’t have enough money to rebuild the houses that were taken away under apartheid, unlike Germany which was able to rebuild the synagogues that the Nazis destroyed. The public discussion on land restitution prompted one student to express that she felt South Africans were unforgiving since apartheid was over yet Black people were not willing to move forward. To give land to Black people was seen as an act of ‘apartheid in reverse’. These views did not appear to change over the course of the year. For the students at Stamford High however, the structural legacy of apartheid felt very present. Students, for example, explained how poverty was replicated intergenerationally since Black families, unlike White families, did not have expendable income to invest in education. Racialised poverty, geographical segregation, family breakdown, and gang violence were all attributed to apartheid, often in very personal ways, with students explaining the historical reasons why their families were poor. Interestingly, however, their historical interpretations of these phenomena were not always straightforward. The Black students for example, believed that gang violence was a result of the violent trauma that people had suffered under apartheid and which had led them to a life of criminality. The Coloured students in contrast believed that gang violence was a result of the weakening of the authoritarian apartheid laws, which meant that people now felt more empowered to commit crimes. Both groups of students used the past to understand a contemporary phenomenon, but they used this past in different ways.

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Conclusion The brief analysis presented here points to the ways in which history teaching can direct students’ understandings regarding the legacy of the past in contemporary South African society, which may then result in very different forms of historical consciousness. While the historical narrative that Alfie presents is one that emphasises the positive ways in which the present is different from the past, Dan was more likely to mention the negative ways in which the present is similar to the past. Alfie’s celebration of the present, in which forces of hatred have been overcome, meant that his students often reflected on ‘how lucky we are now’, rather than how the past continues to affect them. Indeed the Southgate students felt that much of the contemporary discourse in South Africa was problematic and unjust, and that people who advocated for restitution or affirmative action were harking back to the past and being racist. Dan’s students, in contrast, felt a mixture of anger and ambition to reverse historical injustices, and believed that land restitution was not progressing quickly enough. If Dan and Alfie’s students were to meet, how would they interact with each other? In four years’ time when these Grade 9s become eligible to vote, will they have a similar understanding of what South Africa’s problems are? As they mature into the next generation of politicians and civil society, will their world views allow them to collaborate on similar agendas? This research suggests that history education does effect and respond to beliefs regarding the causes of contemporary society; students can have a united memory, yet have a divided understanding about the legacy of the past. If questions of social cohesion and historical justice are important to us, then history education requires a stronger focus on historical consciousness, rather than simply historical memory. This implies a history curriculum that explicitly engages with contemporary society, and in particular the contentious subjects that are debated with reference to the past. Without a unified view of how the past relates to the present, young people in post-conflict contexts are unlikely to be able to settle on a shared agenda for moving forward.

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Notes 1. While recognising that race is a cultural construct, often oppressive in nature, and with no scientific validity, it nonetheless holds meaning in the minds of many South Africans. To ignore race would not only be a refusal to acknowledge the lived reality of those I purport to study but would also blind me to the lines along which discrimination and privilege fall. In this study I therefore use capital letters in reference to racial terminology to serve as a reminder that these identities are politically constructed labels, rather than descriptive. 2. A multi-racial ethnic group that claim a distinct identity and were labelled as such by the apartheid government. 3. These questions were largely addressed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 4. Government schools in South Africa may choose to charge fees, however as a result of charging fees they receive reduced government funding. 5. Group Areas Act was the title of three acts of the Parliament of South Africa, which assigned racial groups to different residential and business sections in urban areas. Under the Group Areas Act Black and Coloured people were forcibly removed from neighborhoods which were designated as ‘White’. 6. A common South African expression of surprise or shock. 7. A South African slang term meaning ‘extreme’ or ‘stressful’.

References Ahonen, Sirkka. (2012). Coming to Terms with a Dark Past: How Post-Conflict Societies Deal with History. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Angier, Kate. 2017. In Search of Historical Consciousness: An Investigation into Young South Africans’ Knowledge and Understanding of ‘Their’ National Histories. London Review of Education. Asmal, Kader. 2003. Address of the Minister of Education on the Debate on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. Cape Town: www.info.gov.za/ speeches/2003/03041515461001.htm. Assmann, Aleida. 2010. Re-framing Memory. Between Individual and Collective Forms of Constructing the Past. In Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Europe, ed. Karen Tilmans, Frank Van Vree, Jay Winter, 35–50. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Bentrovato, Denise. 2021. History Education, Transitional Justice and Politics of Reconciliation: Multi- and Univocality Around Violent Pasts in South African and Rwandan Textbooks. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin (pp. 291–314). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Charland, Jean-Pierre. 2003. Les Eleves, l'Histoire et la Citoyennete: Enquete aupres d'Eleves des Regions de Montreal et de Toronto. Quebec: PUL. Dryden, Sarah.1999. Mirror of a Nation in Transition: History Teachers and Students in Cape Town Schools. Master of Philosophy in Education Dissertation submitted to the University of Cape Town, Faculty of Education. Duquette, Catherine. 2015. Relating Historical Consciousness to Historical Thinking Through Assessment. In New Directions in Assessing Historical Thinking, ed. Kadriye Ercikan and Peter Seixas, 51–63. New York: Routledge. Grever, Maria., and Robbert-Jan Adriaansen. 2017. Historical Culture: A Concept Revisited. In Palgrave Handbook of Research in Historical Culture and Education, ed. Mario Carretero, Stefan Berger, and Maria Grever, 73–90. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mannheim, Karl. 1952. The Problem of Generations. In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti, 276–322. London, UK: Routledge. Rüsen, Jörn. 2004. Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development. In Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas, 63–85. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sayed, Yusuf. et  al. 2017. Engaging Teachers in Peacebuilding in Post-conflict Contexts: Evaluating Education Interventions in South Africa. Cape Town: Centre for International Teacher Education (CITE). Seixas, Peter. 2006. What Is Historical Consciousness. In To the Past: History Education, Public Memory and Citizenship in Canada, ed. Ruth Sandwell, 11–22. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Swartz, Sharlene. 2016. Another Country: Everyday Social Restitution. BestRed: Johannesburg. Teeger, Chana. 2015. Both Sides of the Story’: History Education in Post-­ Apartheid South Africa. American Sociological Review 80 (6): 1175–1200. Terreblanche, Sampie. 2003. A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652–2002. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Weldon, Gail. 2009. A Comparative Study of the Construction of Memory and Identity in the Curriculum of Post-conflict Societies: Rwanda and South Africa. Pretoria: University of Pretoria.

17 Historical Justice and the Holocaust in History Education Andy Pearce and Stuart Foster

The horror unleashed by human hands makes it unclear whether justice can be achieved, and to the extent that justice cannot be achieved, the credibility of that ideal is jeopardized as well. The suffering that people have inflicted on one another, and the memory of that suffering, makes it hard to glimpse how reconciliation and forgiveness are possible, no matter how necessary they may be to curtail revenge, hate, and the violence that both ignited. In a post-Holocaust word, which unfortunately remains one where human beings fall prey to terror, mass murder, and genocide, how should forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice be understood? —Paterson and Roth (2004, pp. xv–xvi)

A. Pearce (*) • S. Foster University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_17

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Introduction The rise in prominence of a ‘humanitarian paradigm of human rights’ (Moyn 2014, p. 94) across Western culture in the late twentieth century was a development in which the history and memory of the Holocaust loomed large. Not only did the emergence of Holocaust consciousness at a popular level serve to ‘drive’ this occurrence, but—as Samuel Moyn (2014, pp. 95–96) has shown—it resulted in an ‘entangling’ of human rights and Holocaust memory ‘in our moral imaginations’. Accordingly, if we recognise that the burgeoning levels of interest in issues of historical justice over the past generation are fundamentally part and parcel of a broad paradigmatic shift, then we quickly see the intrinsic role that an emergent Holocaust culture has played in animating contemporary engagements with the darker episodes of human history. With the above in mind, another related development is more easily understood. This is the remarkable spread across the globe of teaching and learning about the Holocaust throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. The decision to integrate the Holocaust into national education systems and to promote learning about the Holocaust through sites of cultural pedagogy like museums and memorials has reflected a growing consensus that Holocaust education can serve multiple ends. This includes the preservation and perpetuation of memory, the affecting of attitudinal and behavioural change, and civic-orientated objectives such as inculcating tolerance and combatting prejudice. It has also become orthodoxy for many in the field of Holocaust education to promote approaches that rehumanise the victims—invariably in an attempt to redress the processes of humiliation and dehumanisation that they endured. Tellingly, however, these trajectories have—until recently— been pursued in lieu of any detailed empirical insights into what teaching and learning about the Holocaust looks like in classrooms, and the effects it has on young people’s knowledge, understandings and perspectives. In this chapter, we reflect on these trends and practices by drawing specifically on research into Holocaust education in England. In particular, we highlight how notions of historical justice do and do not appear to feature in teaching approaches and learning experiences, and consider

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what potential opportunities there are for learning about justice within a study of the European genocide of the Jews. Ultimately we argue that through learning about the Holocaust there is the possibility for students to confront the inherent complexities of justice; however, this potential is curtailed by much current pedagogical practice. Indeed, it is worth questioning whether, in fact, much Holocaust education in its current calibration actually amounts to ‘doing’ an injustice to the depths and the challenges of the historical record.

Curriculum and Pedagogy By way of orientation, it is necessary to note that since the National Curriculum first came into effect in English state schools in 1991, the Holocaust has featured in every subsequent iteration of the curriculum for school history (e.g. in 1995, 1999, 2007 and 2013). This means that any school financially maintained by the state has been required by law to include the Holocaust in the history curriculum delivered to students of 11 to 13 years of age. Without doubt this has had a considerable impact in heightening awareness of the Holocaust amongst a generation of schoolchildren, and has thus significantly contributed to the growth in interest in the Holocaust within broader culture and society. However, these changes have not necessarily been smooth or straightforward. Issues around what to teach, how, where in the curriculum and when have never been resolved and have been further compounded by structural pressures like demands on curriculum time and the prioritisation of public examination results. These have been added to in recent years with the spread of academy schools in the English system. Academies are a particular type of school which are directly funded by the government, but are run by a trust. This means academies have greater autonomy over how to operate, including choosing whether or not to follow the National Curriculum as it is outlined. Accordingly, while the Holocaust continues to enjoy a privileged position in the National Curriculum for History, it is a status which is increasingly under threat as a result of recent policy developments. It is onto this backcloth that we can juxtapose some of the findings of two major research projects conducted by the UCL Centre for Holocaust

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Education. The first of these, published in 2009, centred upon teaching practices. Over 2000 teachers of various subjects responded to an online questionnaire, with a further 68 participating in follow-up interviews. The research sought to explore a wide range of issues, including what content teachers would commonly look to cover during a series of lessons on the Holocaust. Revealingly, when presented with a list of 35 topics and asked to indicate which they would include, the topic of ‘post-war justice and the Nuremberg trials’ ranked well down the list in 25th place. This indication that teachers did not place much import on broaching these matters in the classroom was reinforced in interview, where the only time references were made to ‘justice’ it was of broadly ‘doing justice’ to the topic of the Holocaust. An indication of what some meant by ‘doing justice’ could be gleaned from some of the things teachers said in interview. What became evident was a number were very concerned with how the victims of the Holocaust were viewed and perceived by students. Commonly, this translated into a wish to personalise and humanise student encounters with this history. One teacher for instance spoke of the need to ‘humanise the whole experience so that they [the students] do actually empathize with them [the victims], they can see that these are children just like them, these are people just like them’ (Interview Transcript, HEDP09-IN1-AP-03, UCL n.d.-c). Others were more blunt: ‘to get any sort of edge on the stuff so they can empathize with it, you have to personalise it’, said one, while another strongly advocated ‘doing it from a personal perspective so kids can understand it’ (Interview Transcripts, HEDP09-IN1-AP-10 n.d.-f; HEDP09-IN1-AP-09, UCL n.d.-e). This sense of respecting the humanity of the victims and encouraging students to do the same thus served a dual purpose: as much as making the subject matter more accessible for students, it was also a means of restoring the humanity of past individuals to enable emotional engagement by students. This was well illustrated by one teacher who, whilst speaking about the use of graphic imagery in the classroom, noted the ‘humiliation’ that victims stripped of their clothes would have endured in the moments captured in these images and emphasised ‘that isn’t what it is [sic] wanted to be remembered, is it?’ (Interview Transcript, HEDP09-­ IN1-­AP-04, UCL n.d.-d). Pedagogically, these sentiments translated into

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teachers focussing in the classroom on ‘the experiences of individual men, women and children who were persecuted by the Nazis’ (Pettigrew et al. 2009, pp. 83, 124–125). Though we were not able to harvest extensive data about what this looked like in practice, there were indications that some teachers were keen, for instance, to emphasise exemplars of Jewish resistance. As one teacher explained, ‘one of my aims is to show well okay this number of people died or you there [sic] was this camp set up, [but] there was these groups that resisted’ (Interview transcript, HEDP09-IN1-AP-02-B n.d.-g). Encouragingly, those teachers who indicated that they did teach about resistance, placed accent on ensuring students understood the importance of historical circumstance as a critical factor which influenced individuals’ attitudes, actions and behaviours (Pettigrew et  al. 2009, p. 83). This finding related to how some teachers believed helping students grasp historical contingency was essential if they were to engage with the past in an empathetic way, but not all teachers understood empathy in this way; for others, ‘empathy entailed provoking an emotional response when imaging another person’s suffering’ (Pettigrew et al. 2009, p. 83). Restoring the humanity of the victims and thereby doing some justice to the memory of the past is also evidenced by the increasing use of Holocaust survivor testimony in schools. In the 2009 teacher study, for example, a significant number of teachers declared that the use of ‘eye-­ witness’ accounts, ‘personal testimony’ and ‘survivor stories’ were an integral aspect of their teaching. Indeed, as the 2009 study reported, ‘a number of teachers described the profound impact—both for themselves and for their students—of hearing survivors of the Holocaust recount their own personal experience.’ Teachers commonly reasoned that ‘having Holocaust survivors visiting school has given a whole new depth to our understanding’ (Pettigrew et al. 2009, p. 108). Others claimed that because the accounts came from ‘living memory’ it is not ‘a history thing any more’ and is therefore very powerful on a personal level. Most teachers who either used survivor testimony in the classroom and/or invited survivors to speak at the school remarked that the experience was educationally significant. Undoubtedly, such encounters were intended to re-­ humanise the victims and to ensure that young people understood the

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many and complex ways survivors have striven to confront and overcome the injustices of the past. It is possible to interpret the above pedagogical approaches by teachers as attempts to throw a light onto dimensions of the Holocaust students may not be aware about, and/or as pragmatic strategies aimed at garnering interest and inculcating engagement. Yet these approaches need themselves to be contextualised within the broader field of Holocaust education, where dominant orthodoxies prioritise approaches centred on the victims, emphasise the importance of remembrance, and promulgate the notion of learning ‘lessons’ from the Holocaust. Viewed in this way, we can suggest that these pedagogical approaches amount—at least in part—to a form restorative justice. That is, an attempt to right, ex post facto, some of the wrongs enacted against the victims by—on the one hand—foregrounding their experiences, their agency, their individuality—and, on the other, casting the tragedy of their death as an occurrence that can be ‘learnt’ from, and thus in some way redeemed.

Student Knowledge and Understanding What, then, of the students themselves? What do they know and ­understand about justice in terms of the historical record, and how—if at all—are their conceptions of justice shaped by studying the Holocaust? In 2016, the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education published its research into student knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust in English secondary schools. This research, which drew upon survey responses from over 8500 11–18 year olds together with qualitative data generated by focus group interviews, exposed a range of issues in terms of absent knowledge, ingrained preconceptions, and a predilection to reach for cultural mythologies for explanatory purposes. As part of the survey instrument, students were provided with a list of people, events, and places and asked to indicate whether or not they were associated with the Holocaust. Among these terms was listed the Nuremberg Trials—which just 35 per cent of respondents identified as being related to this history. While 17 per cent indicated they didn’t know whether or not there was an association, the majority—48 per

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cent—were more certain in affirming that the Nuremberg Trials had no relation whatsoever. Meanwhile, focus group interviews with students aged 11–16 reflected these findings, with references to the Nuremberg Trials or issues of justice generally virtually absent from all discussions. Among older students aged 16–18 years of age, the Trials were referred to on a handful of occasions, but this was neither wholesale or widespread. The overall picture was thus one where the majority of students did not appear to know about the principal way by which the international community sought to enact justice at the end of the war. One could dispute how much of an issue or problem this absence is, and—of course—any interpretation would need to take into account how curriculum pressures and time restrictions necessarily limit what content can be reasonably included in a programme of study. That all being said, it is salient to position students’ lack of awareness of how justice was (or was not) served at the end of the war alongside students’ conceptions of agency and responsibility. Tellingly, in this regard, the research found that the vast majority of students held extremely narrow and one-dimensional understandings of who was responsible for the Holocaust. Among younger students, most believed responsibility lay solely with Hitler, whilst with age students extended their frameworks to include ‘Hitler and the Nazis’. However, what problematised this latter conceptualisation was a discernible lack of knowledge among students about just who ‘the Nazis’ were or what the term referred to. Instead of recognising the phrase as referential to members of the Nazi Party, a political organisation which once enjoyed broad electoral support, many students spoke of ‘the Nazis’ as being Hitler’s personal bodyguard, his minions or a paramilitary organisation. Furthermore, the 2016 research made it strikingly apparent that most students had not considered the extent to which many ‘ordinary’ Germans and collaborators in other countries were responsible for the Holocaust. The study revealed that most young people saw the Holocaust arising as a result of explicitly ‘top down’ directives in which influential Nazi leaders demanded the compliance of the German people. Of note, significant numbers of students reasoned that many Germans complied because they were either frightened, brainwashed or ignorant of the unfolding genocide.

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This thinking explains why, when asked who was ‘responsible’ for the Holocaust, students responded in ways that marginalised German people. For the majority of students (50.7 per cent) it was Hitler alone who was responsible for the Holocaust, with a fifth of students (20.6 per cent) indicating it was ‘Hitler and the Nazis’. In sharp contrast, just 3.9 per cent of students referenced Germans as having any responsibility, with 3.1 per cent claiming it was Hitler and the German people. In addition, as the report concluded, ‘what was significant about the interviews (particularly with those aged 11 to 14) was the sense that the German people had no agency, no choice and, as a result, no responsibility’ (Foster et al. 2016, p. 158). The simplistic causal reasoning adopted by many students clearly ­demonstrated that they had limited awareness of the actions and ­inactions of the German population during this time. Certainly, important ­historical scholarship on the manifold and complex relationship between the Holocaust and German society had not penetrated the classroom and informed teaching practice (Bloxham 2001; Browning 1992; Goldhagen 1996; Hilberg 1993; Kershaw 2008; Lacquer 1998). Not surprisingly, therefore, most students would not even have begun to consider in what ways and by what process the German people should be brought to justice in the post-war era. Seen in this light, the general ignorance of the Nuremberg Trials among students is hardly surprising—for in conceiving of the Holocaust and its perpetration as something which principally began and ended with Hitler, no space is left for the notion that other individuals might be forced to answer for their crimes. Exceptions to this broad trend were found among older students. Some of these 16–18 year olds not only referred to the Nuremburg Trials, but also showed an appreciation of responsibility extending beyond Hitler and this leading to punishment. Thus in an exchange over what happened to the perpetrators, one student explained ‘the big ones were executed, they were trialled and then killed. Or killed themselves’, before continuing ‘I think some went to Mexico, fled, but then they were hunted down’. In an illustrative follow-up which exposed the strength of Hitler-­ centrism in students’ thinking, another member of the group rhetorically added ‘Hitler killed himself and his dog didn’t he?’ (Interview Transcript,

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Harlington Y12 G1 n.d.-b). Others, meanwhile, demonstrated the capacity to use their knowledge to engage in evaluation: ‘those at the Nuremburg Trials are probably the most important to be held to blame’, duly concluded one student, with another stating ‘it’s impossible to say who did what now, so I think people who were punished at the Nuremburg Trials were those who deserved to be punished’ (Interview Transcript, DCGS Group 3 n.d.-a). The awareness these students demonstrated was clearly welcome, and mirrored a more general trend in the research whereby those pursuing advanced study tended to demonstrate deeper knowledge and understanding of the history of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it should not be overstated, and certainly does not mitigate the finding that most young people were familiar neither with events at Nuremburg, or the overarching issue of post-war justice. The absence of this issue from students’ consciousness was made more peculiar by evidence that many young people were certainly aware that during the Holocaust people had been subjected to all manner of injustices. One particularly powerful way in which this reality had been imprinted on some students was through exposure to survivor testimony. As noted above, many teachers emphasised the importance of using survivor testimony to engage students and to re-humanise those who were victimised. In the broader sense, this could be seen as a form of restorative justice. The 2016 study offered a detailed exploration of the profound impact that hearing a survivor speak appeared to have on young people. In total, 89.4 per cent of students, for example, indicated that this experience made the Holocaust seem ‘more real’. As one Year 9 student explained, having ‘an actual person, face-to-face, talking to you it seems a lot more real, because they’ve been through it and their presence is there’ (Foster et al. 2016, p. 87). Typically, students who witnessed a survivor talking found the experience ‘emotional’, ‘powerful’, ‘humbling’ and ‘intimate’. A number stated that they were ‘honoured’ or ‘privileged’ to meet a survivor and often students commented on a profound learning experience. One student described the encounter as ‘momentous’ and remarked on the ‘special atmosphere in the room. We were utterly silent’, she recalled (Foster et al. 2016, p. 88).

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Significantly, many students were impressed by the positive messages conveyed by survivors, despite the horror of the catastrophic events they had witnessed. ‘Even at the end he still managed to make jokes about his life and his wife and it was really funny and I was crying’, recalled a Year 9 student. ‘It was so inspirational and moving about how he managed to survive through that terrible time’ (Foster et al. 2016, p. 80). Undoubtedly, such profound experiences had a clear impact on students across the country and underscored the importance of celebrating the voices and testimony of those who the Nazis sought to destroy. In some small, but important, way hearing survivors speak in educational settings thus potentially offered a sense of hope and, albeit indirect, social justice.

Analysis and Discussion Over the course of the last generation, Holocaust education has become a global phenomenon. Research has shown that this development is characterised by ‘convergence and divergence’, in terms of how the Holocaust is represented in educational systems and associated curriculum and classroom materials; it has also revealed a clear pattern towards national domestication of the Holocaust, which is informed by ‘conceptualizations, interpretations, expediencies, and narrative and didactic techniques […] founded in the local experiences and expectations of curriculum and textbook authors and users’ (Carrier et al. 2014, pp. 13–14). At the same time, on the supranational level, as much as the field of Holocaust education has become a space for the creation of pedagogical approaches and principles it has equally become a site for the production of social and cultural norms relating to teaching, learning, and remembering the Holocaust. Often, these norms are explicitly (and sometimes, exclusively) tuned in the keys of civics and morality. Accordingly, in the words of Patricia Bromley and Susan Russell (2015, p. 304), the Holocaust ‘is presented as important for students to know about because it is a central moral event in the Western story’, or ‘when linked to human rights, the Holocaust is presented as an instance of globally unacceptable behaviour, important for teaching universally-relevant lessons in tolerance and peace’.

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In either register, the experience of Holocaust education becomes a conduit through which young people—often didactically—encounter historical injustice, by learning about the persecution and murder of European Jewry. This is accompanied or followed by a developing sense that justice is ultimately ‘done’ through the emergence of human rights as an international concern in the post-war period, remembering the individuals and communities who perished, and/or through learning the so-called lessons of the Holocaust. What, if anything, could be wrong, objectionable or problematic with such a picture? In our view, the research suggests a programme of study or series of lessons centred on the Holocaust and issues of historical justice should be underpinned by a number of key fundamental principles. These can be articulated as the following five overarching considerations. The first concerns purpose: what, ultimately, is Holocaust education for? In asking such a question, we immediately encounter issues of conceptualisation. The term ‘Holocaust education’, though both popularised and institutionalised, does not lend itself to neat, tidy or consensual definition. Moreover, though influential organisations like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) have recently moved to try and promulgate alternative phrases—in this instance, teaching and learning about the Holocaust—Holocaust education still retains the transcultural status of what Raymond Williams (2015, p. xxvii) calls ‘keywords’: those being, ‘significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation’ and ‘significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought’. The opacity of ‘Holocaust education’ may have the benefit of allowing for multiple interpretations, but in so doing it can impede and even prevent serious consideration of foci and rationale. This does not mean that teaching and learning about the Holocaust is ill-suited to broaching broad issues of ethics and morality or specific questions around justice and injustice. On the contrary, the history of the Holocaust is arguably a catalogue which provides highly compelling and deeply profound insights into the gamut of human behaviour. That doesn’t preclude asking however, whether—and how far—focusing on these issues can or should be the primary purpose of studying the Holocaust. And of course the position one takes on that matter is inextricably bound up with what we

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understand history writ large and history education more generally to constitute and to enable. A second consideration concerns knowledge and understanding. Whilst it holds true that the Holocaust reveals much about justice, a prerequisite for accessing these insights is substantive knowledge. By way of crude example, drawing on findings we encountered earlier, a student who knows that a trial was held in Nuremberg at the end of the war where various persons were punished, is in a position to construct understandings of responsibility and make assessments about justice that a student who is unfamiliar with this event cannot. How nuanced and sophisticated these understandings are is another matter: the more a student knows about the Nuremberg Trials themselves, for instance, then the more likely they would appreciate that these proceedings were not fundamentally about the Holocaust per se. At the same time, the more students know about the complexities of the Holocaust, the greater the likelihood of recognising that the prosecutors themselves faced the considerable challenge of trying to ‘do’ justice in the face of events hitherto unseen on this scale. As this example also demonstrates, the possession of substantive knowledge is by no means divorced from second-order conceptual frameworks: without the two in unison, students can only move so far in their understanding and exploration of post-Holocaust justice. A third issue that potentially warrants theoretical attention and ­pedagogical focus is the use of historical empathy. For although the term has been regarded by some as controversial and amorphous (Knight 1989, p. 43; Jenkins 1991, p. 40), many leading history educators have emphasised its educational relevance and significance. Fundamentally, these advocates argue that historical empathy invites students to ­understand and appreciate why people in the past acted as they did. Levstik (2001, p. 72), for example, suggests it involves appreciating the ‘socio-cultural and political forces that shape human behaviour … ­understanding why people acted the way they did in the past, not just how they acted.’ Van Sledright (2001, p.  57) concurs, arguing that ­historical empathy ‘allows us to assemble accounts of the past that gets us as close as we may ever get to what life might have been ‘back then’. Similarly, Lee and Ashby (2001, p.  21) reason that it involves ­‘understanding why people took the actions they did.’

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In relation to teaching about the Holocaust, Riley (2001, p.  161) ­reasons that historical empathy has enormous potential. At its most fundamental level she asserts that engaging students in empathetic ­ ­activities which compel them to understand human actions during the Holocaust offers the possibility to deepen and extend students’ ­understanding of this most complex and disturbing history. ‘Without broadening the scope of the empathetical construct that deals with the actions of an historical figure,’ Riley argues, ‘answers to the obvious ­question, How was something like this possible? will largely remain out of our grasp.’ For Riley ‘a logical starting place for understanding the Holocaust might be with the obvious question, Why were Jews targeted for extermination?’ Such a broad and important question invites deeper enquiry and investigation. It involves understanding the motives and intentions of key perpetrators, the historical roots of such motivations and the political and contingent context which existed during the 1930s and 1940s. The overarching question also requires students to appreciate how and why other perpetrators and collaborators willingly participated in genocidal acts. Understanding their motivations and actions provides important classroom opportunities to consider individual and collective agency and responsibility. It also invites classroom enquiries focused on how these actions were punished in the post-war world and the extent to which this was ‘just’ and appropriate. Historical enquiries built on frameworks advocated by Yeager and Foster (2001), which emphasise the importance of enquiry, context and historical evidence, might also invite students to consider the complexity of human actions during the Holocaust. For although the use of key organising terms such as ‘perpetrator’, ‘collaborator’ and ‘bystander’ have enjoyed common use, emerging historical scholarship has problematised these terms, suggesting the lines between these neat categories is increasingly blurred (Lawson 2010; Matthaus 2008; Synder 2010; Stone 2010). Attention therefore to the inaction of those who allegedly stood by and were ‘passive’ during the Nazi era would undoubtedly yield interesting discussions about responsibility and, by extension, appropriate levels of post-war justice. Indeed, critical evaluation of Kershaw’s (1984, p. 277) notable claim that ‘the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference’ or Wiesel’s (1986, n.p.) assertion that ‘We must always

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take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim’ have the potential to stimulate thought-provoking discussion about appropriate levels of responsibility and justice. The use of historical empathy in the classroom also has the potential to restore the humanity of the victims. Indeed, the IHRA (2010) guidelines urge teachers of the Holocaust to help students ‘see those persecuted by the Nazis not as a faceless mass of victims but as individuals’. Accordingly, the guidelines encourage students to ‘use case studies, survivor testimony, and letters and diaries from the period to show the human experience’ and ‘emphasise the dignity of the victims at all times’. Using historical empathy to help students understand the diverse and complex experience of those who were victimised by the Nazis thus allows students to appreciate what was lost as a result of the Holocaust and to consider how people responded, confronted and survived the horrors of genocide. It also opens up the opportunity for students both to understand how Holocaust survivors dealt with the past and consider their perspective on the ways in which those who murdered their families and neighbours were punished after the Second World War. A fourth key issue is what we might call historical reality, and the extent to which—in the case of the Holocaust—this reality clashes with and even subverts common understandings. Put simply, if historical knowledge of the Holocaust is a bedrock for considering historical justice after the Holocaust, then we have to accept that the former has the potential to expunge established ideas and expectations. One of the stark realities of the Holocaust was that it exploded moral and ethical coda deeply ingrained in Western culture and civilisation. Concepts of right and wrong, just and unjust, were overturned by circumstances and events where people were faced with intractable dilemmas or confronted with so-called choiceless choices. For those targeted by the regime and its collaborators, survival often required individuals to break laws, abandon codes or ignore social procedures. Such realities necessarily throw notions of justice into turmoil. They also call into question how far an accent on redemption—on retrieving from the wreckage of the Holocaust salutary, but often instrumentalised and abstract ‘lessons’, actually can encourage students to hold a distorted view of this history.

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This relates to a fifth and final issue of practicalities and possibilities. In the ways outlined above, learning about the Holocaust can make a ­distinctive contribution to the development of students’ understanding of justice. But to do so effectively and not render history as emollient, is a complex, and not inconsiderable task. As a starting point, as much as it requires clarity around rationale, aims and objectives, it demands candour about what is and what is not reasonable to expect. This applies two-­fold: both with regard to the Holocaust, and in terms of a series of lessons about it. In the first instance, we must accept that ‘for what transpired in the Holocaust […] no justice can be done, at least no justice that could balance or make good on the harm or wrong inflicted’ (Lang 2005, p. 18). Acknowledging in this way that ‘history can never be fully undone or overcome’ means abandoning the conviction that in teaching and learning about the Holocaust, in rehumanising the victims and remembering them, it is possible to restoratively enact some form of justice or redeem the dead. Instead, it requires pedagogies to be recalibrated so that the Holocaust is properly contextualised—both in its historical, and its human contexts; more pragmatically it places emphasis on curriculum mapping and interdisciplinarity—on ensuring that students’ experiences of Holocaust education are holistic in the sense of equipping them with the knowledge, understanding and critical faculties—drawn from a range of subjects—necessary to then engage with the multidimensionality of the issues which arise out of continental genocide in our modern world. None of these measures can or will reduce the bleakness of the Holocaust. But in enabling students to get closer to historical actuality, they stand as the best hope for helping young people develop a critical historical consciousness of humankind’s potentialities which they can take forward into adulthood.

Conclusion It has become axiomatic to speak of the so-called lessons of the Holocaust—in relation to both Holocaust education and Holocaust remembrance. It is a problematic notion, and one that at root is about

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what history is, and what a study of history is for. If we explore the idea that through historical knowledge and understanding we can potentially bring an informed perspective to bear on the present, then exploring historical justice in the context of the Holocaust can give students plenty of food for thought. There are, for instance, issues related to meaning: fundamentally, in the face of the Holocaust or any instance of genocide, what does it mean to ‘do’ or to pursue justice? There are matters of form: as a species, are the legal and judicial frameworks we have erected for ourselves, able—at an elemental level—to dispense ‘justice’ in the face of genocide; particularly given the societal dynamics of the phenomenon? And there is the clash between ideals and reality: when faced with the task of surviving genocide (or any human atrocity), how far are the belief systems which underpin our principles of right and wrong, just and unjust, unavoidably compromised? These are of course but a sample of the questions that might be explored in the confines of a classroom and they could be supplemented by numerous others. Equally, the extent to which it is possible (or desirable) to examine such issues with any given group of students will be determined by a host of considerations and factors. Still, as the above lines of enquiry demonstrate, learning about the Holocaust in history can make a distinctive—and potentially telling—contribution to the development of students’ understanding of historical justice. For this to be achieved teacher and student alike must be as prepared as possible to confront some elemental challenges. Whilst some of these relate to education generally and history education specifically, others flow forth from the very nature of the Holocaust itself. On this, we cannot avoid engaging—sooner or later—with the reality that we are dealing with ‘an event that is unthinkable, and yet we live after the unthinkable has been thought’ (Sicher 1998, p.  298). Or, as the French theorist Maurice Blanchot (1986, p. 1)—himself a figure with a complicated history—was to opine, ‘the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact’. If we truly want our students to acquire an appreciation of how the Holocaust as past relates to their present, then it is beholden upon us to find ways to do justice to this complexity.

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References Blanchot, Maurice. 1986. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bloxham, Donald. 2001. Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bromley, Patricia, and Susan Garnett Russell. 2015. The Holocaust as History and Human Rights: A Cross-National Analysis of Holocaust Education in Social Science Textbooks, 1970–2008. In As the Witnesses Fall Silent: 21st Century Holocaust Education in Curriculum, Policy and Practice, ed. Zehavit Gross and E. Doyle Stevick, 299–320. Heidelberg: Springer. Browning, Christopher. 1992. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins. Carrier, Peter, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Torben Messinger. 2014. The International Status of Education about the Holocaust: A Global Mapping of Textbooks and Curricula. Paris: Unesco. Foster, Stuart, et al. 2016. What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust?: Evidence from English Secondary Schools. London: UCL Institute of Education. Goldhagen, Daniel. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage Books. Hilberg, Raul. 1993. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe. New York: Harper Perennial. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). 2010. How to Teach about the Holocaust in Schools. Accessed 18 November 2019. https://www. holocaustremembrance.com/educational-­m aterials/how-­t each-­a bout-­ holocaust-­in-­schools. Interview Transcript. n.d.-a. UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, DCGS Group 3. ———. n.d.-b. Harlington Y12 G1. ———. n.d.-c. HEDP09-IN1-AP-03. ———. n.d.-d. HEDP09-IN1-AP-04. ———. n.d.-e. HEDP09-IN1-AP-09. ———. n.d.-f. HEDP09-IN1-AP-10. ———. n.d.-g. HEDP09-IN1-AP-02-B. Jenkins, Keith. 1991. Re-thinking History. London: Routledge. Kershaw, Ian. 1984. Popular Opinion and Dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933–1945. London: Clarendon.

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———. 2008. Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Knight, Peter. 1989. Empathy: Concept, Confusion and Consequences in a National Curriculum. Oxford Review of Education 15: 41–53. Lacquer, Walter. 1998. The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. New York: Henry Holt. Lang, Berel. 2005. Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lawson, Tom. 2010. Debates on the Holocaust. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lee, Peter, and Rosalyn Ashby. 2001. Empathy, Perspective Taking and Rational Understanding. In Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. O.L. Davis, Elizabeth Yeager, and Stuart Foster, 21–50. London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Levstik, Linda. 2001. Crossing the Empty Spaces: Perspective Taking in New Zealand Adolescents’ Understanding of National History. In Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. O.L. Davis, Elizabeth Yeager, and Stuart Foster, 69–96. London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Matthaus, Jurgen. 2008. Agents of the Final Solution: Perpetration in Historical Perspective. In Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements, ed. D.  Bankier and D.  Michmann, 327–337. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. Moyn, Samuel. 2014. Human Rights and the Uses of History. London/New York: Verso. Patterson, David, and John K.  Roth. 2004. Prologue: ‘Did You Say: After? Meaning What?’. In After-words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation and Justice, ed. David Patterson and John K.  Roth, xv–xvi. Washington: University of Washington Press. Pettigrew, Alice, et al. 2009. Teaching about the Holocaust in English Secondary Schools: An Empirical Study of National Trends, Perspectives and Practices. London: Institute of Education. Riley, Karen. 2001. The Holocaust and Historical Empathy: The Politics of Understanding. In Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. O.L.  Davis, Elizabeth Yeager, and Stuart Foster, 139–166. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Sicher, Efraim. 1998. The Holocaust in the Postmodernist Era. In Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, ed. Efraim Sicher, 297–328. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Stone, Dan. 2010. Histories of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Synder, Timothy. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books. Van Sledright, Bruce. 2001. From Empathetic Regard to Self-Understanding: Im/Positionality, Empathy and Historical Contextualization. In Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. O.L. Davis, Elizabeth Yeager, and Stuart Foster, 51–68. London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Wiesel, Elie. 1986. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo (10 December 1986). Accessed 18 November 2019. http://eliewieselfoundation.org/elie-­wiesel/ nobelprizespeech/. Williams, Raymond. 2015. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeager, Elizabeth, and Stuart Foster. 2001. The Role of Historical Empathy in the Development of Historical Understanding. In Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, ed. O.L. Davis, Elizabeth Yeager, and Stuart Foster, 13–20. London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

18 Do Teachers Care About Historical Justice? Teaching About the Holocaust, Genocide, and Colonialism in England Heather Mann

Introduction Genocide education is tied to processes of justice. Dating back to the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, there have been an increasing number of truth commissions and International Criminal Court Tribunals prosecuting various Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes, and serious Human Rights violations, the most serious being the crime of genocide. Recognition through judicial process has determined the amount of attention a particular crime, war, or period receives internationally within the education system. Among history teachers in England, education about historic genocides primarily centres on the three genocides for which there has been legal prosecution through International Criminal Tribunals: the Holocaust, the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda and the Srebrenica genocide in

H. Mann (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_18

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Bosnia-­Herzegovina. Russell (2006) revealed that Holocaust education in the United Kingdom was born out of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on War Crimes, established in 1987 to investigate Nazi War criminals harboured in the United Kingdom. Their efforts resulted in the 1991 War Crimes Act and led to the establishment of the influential Holocaust Educational Trust. Scholars have perhaps underestimated the connection between legal justice and history education. Trials have formed the basis for historical narratives, the Holocaust has been a history first written in a courtroom, argued by lawyers, testified by witnesses, and decided by judges. The most famous is the Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted 19 high ranking Nazis in 1946, including Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess (International Military Tribunal 1949). The judgement, a 178-page document which reads like a historical textbook, splitting the history of Jewish persecution and genocide into the same headings that were used in school textbooks in the 1990s and 2000s: Hitler’s rise to power, failed policy of appeasement, Jewish persecution and the Nuremberg laws, Anschluss, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Poland, total war, ghettoisation, liquidation, to the final solution. These Nazi trials could be described as a didactic or pedagogic tool. Beyond their primary purpose in prosecution, Douglas (2016) has shown that the trials’ purpose was to create a historical record and teach a narrative of history from which political and human lessons could be drawn. The testimony of witnesses and the wealth of documented evidence has understandably led historians to use the proceedings as evidence, including history textbook authors such as Reid et al. (1993) and Lang (1998). However, is there an appetite for justice among educators far-removed from the conflict? Is there ‘justice fatigue’, as James Miles (2021) has demonstrated in school student’s resistance to lessons about reservation schools? In short, how much do teachers in England ‘care’? Is a sense of justice central to their lessons? Do teachers apply the ‘lessons from history’ learnt from conflicts abroad, to issues of historical justice in their own countries, be it the transatlantic Slave Trade or the atrocities committed under the British Empire? This chapter assesses whether historical justice motivates history teachers in England, particularly when teaching about genocide. Concentrating on four history teachers across Leeds,

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Bradford, and Lincolnshire, this chapter considers cultural and political influences on these teachers. It looks at what importance they place on victim’s voices, testimony and historical truth, and historical documentation when studying conflicts and injustices that took place outside of British territory. In particular, it asks the extent to which teachers care about justice when teaching the past, and whether the National Curriculum mandate to teach about the Holocaust provides opportunities to explore historical justice in other settings. As all of these teachers display a considered approach to teaching about genocide, even when they lack family, cultural or community connections to the genocides and massacres in question, this chapter considers what these teachers do care about, and whether their lessons, distant in time and geography from the atrocities themselves, can be considered as a manifestation of historical justice, or whether the goals of history teaching are inevitably parochial.

History Teaching in England and Methodology Education in the United Kingdom is devolved so that England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are each responsible for their own system of education. This study focuses on history education in secondary schools in England, where lessons on the Holocaust are taught either in Year Nine, when students are aged 13–14, or increasingly a year earlier in Year Eight to provide schools greater time to focus on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE; AQA 2016) school examinations. Teaching the Holocaust is mandatory in the National Curriculum at Key Stage Three. Though Academy schools (72% of secondary schools converted to academy status as of 2018) are entitled to opt out of the National Curriculum, many still continue to follow it. Some history departments choose to teach another genocide alongside their lessons on the Holocaust. My research takes the form of oral ‘life history’ interviews with secondary school history teachers in the rural county of Lincolnshire and the cities of Leeds and Bradford. The purpose of the interviews were to understand teachers’ historical memory of the Holocaust and genocide, and the ways in which their personal identity, family history, national myths, and cultural memory affect their understanding of the purpose of

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history, and ultimately, their pedagogy when teaching about genocide. The life history interview returns autonomy to the teachers when writing the history of education, preventing a top-down analysis of the classroom that relies too heavily on textbooks and curricula whilst ignoring the realities of teaching practice in England. While Cannadine et al. (2011) have attempted a comprehensive survey of history education in the classroom in England, their study overlooks Holocaust and genocide education.

Teaching Historical Truth One way to approach the question of whether teachers care for historical justice is to study the weight teachers place on truth. Historical truth was surprisingly unimportant to several history teachers interviewed in England. As one of the few European countries in which the genocide did not occur, with the exception of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, teachers did not have to address British complicity and culpability in the perpetration of genocide. Teaching the history did not redress a British historical injustice, and as such did not risk rousing feelings of guilt, shame or resentment. Most teachers neither witnessed nor feared Holocaust denial, and thus, documentary ‘evidence’ was more expendable than in lessons across the English Channel. The emotional truth of films and novels often preceded teachers’ requirements for historical documentation or archival evidence. When teaching the Holocaust, teachers sometimes considered cinema to serve as sufficient historical documentation for the topic. In my interviews in England, teachers were less likely to use documentary than they were to use screen cinema in their classrooms. Schindler’s List (1994) maintained much of its popularity 25 years after its release and was adjoined by The Pianist (2002) as films that teachers regularly screened in history lessons. John Boyne’s novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) and the subsequent cinema adaption were commonly used in Key Stage Three English lessons in England, and some history teachers used this film as an introduction to the Holocaust. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas narrates the Holocaust through the eyes of Bruno, the son of the German SS Commander of ‘Out-With’, a fictional imitation

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of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Bruno’s life is most likely based on that of Rudolf Höss’ family who lived in a villa beside the camp. Bruno befriends Shmuel, a Jewish child prisoner of the camp who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas. The two young boys are characterised by their innocence and ignorance to the genocide that is happening around them, and when Shmuel’s father disappears from the camp, Bruno slips under the barbed-wire fence to look for him. The story concludes with the roundup of the two boys and their march to the gas chamber, where they die hand-in-hand. The book and film adopt the expected imagery of the Holocaust—notably barbed wire, gas chambers, and striped uniforms—but it is ultimately an implausible story. Despite its historical inaccuracies and impossibilities, the film was advertised by the film’s distributor Miramax, in tandem with Film Education, as an educational film, running multiple screenings across the United Kingdom for schools and producing a wide supply of online educational resources for school teachers, and pupils. Twelve thousand schools received letters advertising the film (and book) to teachers (London Jewish Cultural Centre 2008). Gray’s (2013, pp. 7–9) research found that Boyne’s fictional narrative became increasingly popular after its release in 2006, leading some teachers to present historically inaccurate conclusions about life and death in Auschwitz. Justifying his use of the film, Andy, a young history teacher who grew up and taught in North Leeds, argued ‘but I think its point is, its wider isn’t it, it’s the morals behind the story that are more important’. Though his school had become more ethnically diverse over the past 20 years, it remained very White-British in comparison to neighbouring schools. Andy openly expressed his jealousy that the English Department had monopolised the use of the book, but showed the film to his students, talking to them about his love of it. The film, though derided by academics and many within the Jewish community, was created for young teenagers and appealed to teachers in England as an engaging fable about childhood innocence, friendship, and evil, acted by English child-actors with whom it was easy to identify with. The film included discernible ‘Auschwitz’ imagery awarding it an air of authenticity, but without displaying the violence or suffering inside the concentration camp. For

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many teachers in England, distant in time and geography from the crimes of the Holocaust, the cinematic representation of the Holocaust provided a narrative as well as the opportunity for an emotional response. It was therefore a sufficient historical resource to teach a history of the past where emotion mattered more than the use of historical documentation.

The Genocide Appendage Lesson The temporal and geographic distance between school classrooms and the Holocaust curtailed the sense of justice teachers felt and imagined in their classrooms. But, for recent genocides and atrocities, was justice a pertinent theme in teachers’ lessons? From the late 1980s there has been increasing study and awareness of other genocides (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Rummel 1994), including studies by Huttenbach (1988) and Katz (1994), attempting to locate the Holocaust within a longer history of genocide. This field exploded in the mid-1990s, as the international community reckoned with its failure to prevent the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the ethno-nationalist clashes following the breakup of former-Yugoslavia, leading to concentration camps and the Srebrenica genocide in 1995. The field of education was slow to react. Between 1983 and 2010, articles written in the British professional journal Teaching History focused solely on teaching the Holocaust, with the exception of one article in 2005 which made the case for teaching the Rwandan genocide (Beer 2005). By the 2010s, article themes evolved to address other genocides and argue the merits of comparative genocide studies. The 2013 issue ‘The Holocaust and Other Genocides’, included articles on ‘learning the lessons from genocides’ and ‘can we educate year 9 in genocide prevention?’ (Haydn et al. 2013; Stephen 2013). In England, participating teachers who opted to teach about another genocide most often looked to Rwanda and Bosnia, whilst some teachers referenced Darfur and other teachers drew parallels with ongoing genocides, such as Syria and Myanmar. Whilst a few teachers made references to historic genocides of indigenous groups in Australia and North

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America, no teachers in England made reference to the Armenian genocide, and the majority concentrated on atrocities that occurred within their living memory and they had, themselves, witnessed on the news. With the exception of the settler genocides, teachers did not draw parallels with colonial atrocities. There was space for the teacher’s agency within the Key Stage Three curriculum and it was common for teachers to follow their lessons on the Holocaust with the example of another genocide. For example, Emma, who taught in Lincolnshire after a career in the Royal Air Force, now taught in a very white all-boys selective school with predominantly middle-class pupils. Every year Emma asked her pupils the question, ‘why is it then that we study the Holocaust, but we don’t necessarily study other events, you know, other genocides and things like that?’. Her pupils gave a range of responses, relating to race geography. For example, [My pupils] said possibly because it’s white Europeans […] Is there a particular shock factor then because it happened in a white European country but we’re not so shocked at it happening somewhere else […] and then they would get indignant at themselves and say, ‘why should we be more shocked that it happens in a white European country than somewhere else.’

Her pupils were aware of the civic importance of teaching the Holocaust, commenting, ‘most of them that say one of the reasons [we teach it] is because we don’t want it to happen again’. Yet, they also perceived a competition within history that favoured white Europeans. This was corroborated by other parts of the history curriculum which overall was dominated by British and European histories. During the same academic year, her pupils learnt about the First World War, the Second World War and the Slave Trade, all topics which have the geographic breadth to be taught as world histories, but were framed from an Anglo-European perspective. Emma and her pupils were perhaps ignorant of the silence that surrounded the Jewish genocide from the end of the Second World War until the mid-1980s, and the struggle to convince teachers and the National Curriculum Council to include Holocaust education as part the history curriculum. They viewed race and antisemitism during the

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Holocaust through a contemporary lens: the Ashkenazi Jewish population of 1930s and 1940s Europe were not considered as ‘Aryan’, and as a consequence, subjected to a genocidal racial antisemitism. However, today, the Jewish population living in Britain were not perceived by Emma or her students to face the same oppression and persecution as people of other races and ethnicities, despite the prevalence of contemporary antisemitism. Emma was not aware of, or did not acknowledge, the historical justice element of Holocaust education, yet it was pertinent to her reasoning as to why she teaches about other genocides. The centrality of Holocaust education over other histories of victimisation seemed at odds with her pupils perception of racism. As a result of her pupils’ observations of racism, Emma was insistent on referencing other genocides in her lessons. In a later lesson, Emma gave her pupils a research task to independently research another genocide event and to write about it. Her research task did not include historic genocides, such as the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the Nama and Herero in the former South-West Africa, or against indigenous populations in Australia and North America. Instead, she wanted her class to recognise genocide could happen again, in ‘modern’ societies, and for this objective history was an ineffective tool. Though her lessons were not analytically comparative of different genocides, the inclusion of Holocaust education within the National Curriculum coupled with her appreciation for world history, in addition to her percipience of unspoken racial bias in the discipline of history, meant that Emma was able to provide a space in her scheme of work for the histories of a multitude of genocides that would have otherwise gone unspoken. Her objective was to spread awareness of historical injustices in the United Kingdom that she perceived were less well known due to the nation’s geographic, cultural, and racial biases. Were Emma’s lessons a reflection of her care for justice? She believed that studying other genocides had civic objectives, commenting, ‘so yeah, they’re aware that this isn’t the only case and it’s not necessarily resigned to the distant past. It also happens in the more recent past as well’. However, the lessons were not focussed on the victims of other genocides, their struggles for justice, recognition, apologies, or reparations, but about injustices at home in Britain, in which she perceived the voices and histories of minority communities were often marginalised or forgotten in the school curriculum.

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From Genocide Abroad to Injustice at Home Teachers sometimes selected the genocide they would teach in addition to the Holocaust based on the identities of their pupils. This was exemplified in James’ lessons. James taught in Bradford where there is a large Muslim population emigrated from the Indian sub-continent. The city was split between Pakistani and White districts, and since the 1990s, school populations were increasingly bounded by religious and ethnic identities. James taught in a school with a 98% British-Pakistani Muslim population. James wanted to teach ‘world genocide’ rather than only teaching about the Holocaust, briefly looking at genocides that occurred in Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Darfur. Out of these, Srebrenica had become an important part of his scheme of work. He commented, I think the Srebrenica one is very important […] I think it’s important that we make them understand that with Srebrenica it was Muslims that were being persecuted there […]. [Addressing Islamophobia] is not specifically planned into the curriculum, the only one where it really crops up is in the Srebrenica, with it being a genocide targeted against Muslims. But we don’t plan specifically to talk about that.

The genocide has been recognised by the international community through prosecutions in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The former commander Ratko Mladić, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Bosnia’, was sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in 2017. In this case, the trial has so far made little impact on education. However, the short temporal distance to the genocide, its relative lack of awareness among the general public, and the shared religious identity between Bradford’s Muslim population and Bosniak Muslims, created a sense of activism and justice that did not exist in their lessons on the Holocaust. By acknowledging the fate of Bosnian Muslims in 1995, students and young people were also protesting modern-day Islamophobia in the United Kingdom. The sense of justice applied neither to the historic genocide, the victims or descendants of that genocide, but to Muslims in the United Kingdom of whom the majority had no personal

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connections or ties to Balkans region. Though some other participating teachers mentioned the Srebrenica genocide, it was only teachers in Bradford who dedicated a lesson to teaching about its history. The history appealed to James’ students, as it kindled their interest and engaged with their identity as European Muslims. It was perhaps easier to care for historical justice in cases where you could identify closely with the victims. Teaching the Srebrenica genocide provided an opportunity to teach a history of Muslim victimhood that was considered to be non-contentious in Britain. Teaching history provided James with a platform to challenge this cycle of inequality because he believed learning history was empowering. He explained, You can’t have a sense of why you are in a situation you are in socially and why the society you live in is like it is unless you know the history behind it […] for me it opens up your understanding of the world around you and history enables you to be empowered in that sense, so you have more of a sense of your own position in society.

The sense of ‘position’ in society, related to his own educational upbringing in the southern seaside town of Hastings. He believed that he prospered due to the support of his parents, but he reflected that many of his friends had children as teenagers because of the lack of opportunities, knowledge, and motivation to do anything else. Hastings’ economy collapsed after the town’s fishing and tourism industries went into decline, resulting in intergenerational unemployment and deprivation. His youthhood encouraged James into socialist politics and he believed history enabled his pupils to understand power and social inequality. Since moving to Bradford, James had recognised that his pupils’ ‘position’ in society was affected by their ethnicity as well as their class, and they required knowledge of history if they were to take part in any struggle for change. He said, 99 percent of our kids are Pakistani origin, third-, fourth- generation immigrants. That connects them […]. If they don’t have a sense of the actual situation they are in and why they are in that situation, how are they

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going to change that? You know if all of the working classes around the world and poorer countries are blind to history and don’t understand why they are where they are, that will never change. So, it is a catalyst for that as well.

He connected his pupils’ ethnicity to their levels of poverty. The 2015 Index of Multiple Deprivation (Bradford Metropolitan District Council 2017) placed wards in and around Bradford as belonging to the lowest tenth percentile of deprivation in the country, measuring income, employment, education, health, crime, housing, and living environment. The wards facing the highest levels of deprivation were all British-­ Pakistani neighbourhoods. James’ inclusion of Bosnian history in education was recent. Education about the event was promoted by Remember Srebrenica, an NGO established in 2013 and supported by governmental funding. Since 2013, the United Kingdom has participated in Srebrenica Memorial Day commemorated annually on 11 July, and Remembering Srebrenica has created teaching resources and a travelling exhibition to be used in schools and libraries. By teaching about a genocide, wherein the victim group shared a religious identity with his pupils, James aimed to extend their comprehension and definition of genocide, allowing his pupils to develop empathy and solidarity with the victims of all genocides. Like Emma, James cared to spread awareness of the genocide and honour the memory of the victims. But justice was equally about today; a conduit for James to publicly acknowledge the discrimination his students faced in contemporary England.

 ritish Injustices: Richard B and the British Empire This study highlighted the strength of the word ‘genocide’, not only in international law and politics, but in education, culture, and historical memory. Teachers did not follow their lessons on the Holocaust with lessons on other human rights abuses that could be compared to aspects the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, such as slavery, torture, or repression

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of civilian populations. Sporadic, drawn out systems of violence, including British imperialism, were not once articulated by participating teachers in connection to the Holocaust. Other atrocities, even those enabled by racist ideology or on the basis of identity are absent from Holocaust museums, memorials, and education. As a result, only those atrocities articulated in the language of genocide benefited from the multidirectionality of teachers’ memory of the Holocaust. Justice through history education was reserved for historical events of sufficient political and cultural status. Symbolic or material forms of historical justice, such as acknowledgements of the past, recognition of culpability and apologies or reparations, are often missing from history education in England. Remembered as a foreign crime, education about the Holocaust provided no sense of redemption or restorative justice. Among teachers I interviewed, British responses to the Holocaust were an unpopular lesson topic. For example, the resource entitled ‘Britain and the Holocaust’ on the Holocaust Educational Trust’s website, were the least accessed and downloaded as teachers prioritised the experience of the Holocaust on the continent. As British teachers were not compelled to consider British responsibility when teaching the Holocaust or other history topics, there was no convention, to study other injustices committed by Britons or the British state. Richard had a historical background in the study of colonialism. At university, his favourite course critically considered colonialism, and after finishing university and training as a history teacher, Richard lived and taught in Kenya, a former British colony, as part of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), a British-founded international development organisation that recruited skilled professionals to volunteer in Africa and Asia. There he taught a course of Kenyan history, where he was often challenged by some of his students. He said of his experience, There was a lot of research coming out of eighties as well. Late eighties kind of the way people had been treated during the Mau Mau rebellion and I think the word genocide which […] quite a bit about the way in which Kikuyu tribe had been treated … quite often have thirty grown adults talking to you about […] and they would have quite strong views on it. But no, never any problems.

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He knew the history of Kenya in depth, including a variety of perspectives from Northern Kenya (where he taught), Southern Kenya (where the Mau Mau rebellion occurred) and British narratives of Empire, learnt at home and in university. Despite this knowledge, and his Kenyan students’ use of the word genocide, he verbalised no connections between the Holocaust and Empire, and did not teach about Empire in either Hull or Leeds. Comparisons between the Holocaust and the Mau Mau uprising could be drawn, and were vocalised by his Kenyan students. Elkins’s (2005) history of British rule in Kenya exposed that the British colonial authorities established concentration camps that held between 160,000 and 320,000 Kenyans, in order to supress the Mau Mau uprising. Colonial authorities imprisoned Kikuyu women and children into around 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. Thousands were murdered and many men were castrated as a form of punishment and ethnic cleansing. Richard knew these facts, but when teaching as a British volunteer, he never faced animosity, which perhaps shielded him from the emotional legacy and intergenerational trauma of colonialism. The theoretical connection between the Holocaust and colonialism have been explored in the 1950s and 1960s by writers including Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, W.E.B.  Du Bois and Aimé Césaire (Rothberg 2009). Both histories involved the violent implementation of racial hierarchies. In recent years, the history of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry has been written as a history of imperial conquest. Weinberg (1995, p. 1) argued that ‘[the Germans] had fought for vast conquests, and, within whatever areas they conquered, for a demographic revolution, which would leave them the sole possessors of the land’. However, Weinberg avoids using the terms colonialism or imperialism to describe the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. From 2006, a number of historians were more comfortable arguing that the Nazi conquest in Eastern Europe was a continuity from colonialism (Zimmerer 2006; Langbehn and Salama 2011; Kühne 2013), leading Dirk Moses (2010) to describe the Holocaust as a ‘subaltern genocide’. Browning (2010) argued that the Nazi Empire was born from a confluence of antisemitism, racism, imperialism, and eugenics. German economic growth required the destruction of the workers’ movement and the construction of an empire, which provided lebensraum and cheap (or slave) labour, justified

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by antisemitism and culminating in the Holocaust. Isabel Hull’s history of the German military concluded that the annihilation of the enemy was regarded as essential in German military culture; a culture that began at the advance of Imperial Germany in 1870, descended from ‘administrative murder’ to genocide in Southwest Africa (1904–1907), and tolerated the genocide of the Armenians as an ally of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War (Hull 2004). When explaining the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and Poland, teachers occasionally referenced ‘lebensraum’, a word which describes settler colonialism. However, teachers did not otherwise connect land expansion to genocidal activity. Overall, the memory of colonialism and memory of the Holocaust did not intertwine within school history lessons. Thus, whilst nearly all teachers in England taught the Holocaust, most teachers, including Richard, were silent on Empire. Perhaps Richard’s knowledge of colonialism meant he was more reluctant to teach it. After all, his proud history as a Voluntary Service Overseas teacher in Kenya, could be critiqued as a colonial adventure. It was during the same year that Richard was teaching in Kenya that Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) published the ground-breaking article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, dismissing white male altruistic educative projects in India as colonialist, and an advance on civilising missionary adventures. Colonial atrocities in Kenya were only widely acknowledged in Britain after Caroline Elkin published her book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya in 2005, and whilst Richard acknowledged British violence towards the Mau Mau in the South of Kenya, he maintained a pretence that the North, where he taught, was unaffected by British rule. That is another myth about British colonial stuff, that there was a kind of line drawn between North and South. And the North was a Northern frontier district and basically the British just said we are not interested at all and left them to get on with it. […] But the bits that the British could exploit, like the famous bits where the tea plantations are and things like that, they really controlled that and they moved people off the land etc. etc. In the North they weren’t interested in the land because it was just a nomadic pastoral kind of area. So they never touched that, so where I was teaching actually had not really been that much impacted upon by the British.

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His historical interpretation is disputed by historians of Kenya, who have argued that the colonial period restricted resource access to wells and the grazing lands in the North, resulting in structural changes and resource scarcity that altered patterns of migration and led to poverty and violent ethnic conflict (Oba 2011; Whittaker 2015). The recognition of colonial memory did not only relate to the identities of second- and third-­ generation immigrants, and community claims for historical justice, but also to white ‘indigenous’ Britons who would need to inspect British memory, self-identity and acts of altruism, such as Richard’s VSO, through a post-colonial lens. There were also practical considerations: if Richard were to teach the colonial history of his pupil’s ancestors, whose history would he choose? In Bradford, where the majority of students’ parents or grandparents migrated from Pakistan, teaching about the British Raj and 1947 partition would provide the school students a historical awareness and consciousness that related to their own identity. But in Leeds, pupils with ancestry from various former British colonies were disparate in the ethnicity, ancestral history and identity. Teaching the Holocaust avoided all of these questions and decisions. The history was mandatory in the National Curriculum and thus did not need justifying to Heads of Departments or Headteachers; and was universally accepted as a history of evil that humanity must learn from. Concentration camps, violence, and genocide were all addressed through the history of the Holocaust, and thus were perceived as appropriate events to teach about the immorality of racial hierarchies. There were numerous decisions to be made about narratives, victim groups, responsibility, scope, and geography, but these were guided by textbooks and institutions such as the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Imperial War Museum and the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education. That Holocaust education was not perceived as historical justice meant that it was politically non-contentious. Teachers’ knowledge and cultural memory of the Holocaust was substantive, whereas their knowledge and cultural memory of British colonialism was limited. The Runnymede Trust and the TIDE Project (2018) (McIntosh, Todd and Das 2019) published their report ‘Teaching, Migration, Belonging, and Empire in Secondary Schools’ in response to changing demographics in school classrooms. This study found that

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teachers did not feel confident teaching about Empire and that 74% of History teachers wanted training on teaching about Empire. Like all participating teachers in England, Richard did not make connections between the Holocaust and the British’ Empire. Occasional references were made to concentration camps in the Boer Wars, but the histories were not taught comparatively, and teachers did not engage emotion or mnemonic sources in relation to the Boers as they did with the Holocaust. Teachers largely framed Nazi occupation as an exercise of war, not imperialism and excluded the legacy of the Holocaust including financial and symbolic reparations. Teachers were silently or unknowingly complicit in maintaining myths about Britain’s moral role in the world, and were unwilling to fight for historical justice for crimes committed by Britons, the British state, or in the furtherance of British economic interests.

Conclusion In the predominantly white British demographic in Andy’s school, the history of the Holocaust was used to teach about racism. The geographical and psychological distance of the Holocaust from their school settings provided enough space for the Holocaust to be taught as a fable, whereby truth and evidence did not matter. Emma, who taught a similar demographic in an all-boys school, attempted to address inadequacies she perceived in the euro-centric school curriculum, by using her lessons on the Holocaust to research genocides elsewhere; all be it, without the depth of knowledge to provide an authoritative history or discuss the legacies of conflict in any other setting. As Richard and James taught in schools with significant ethnic minority populations, they felt a greater need to teach histories that related to their students’ identities, though their goal was to address social injustices at home rather than historical injustices abroad. Despite Richard’s historical knowledge of the British Empire and experience teaching in Kenya, he did not attempt to redress this past through his own teaching. James’ lessons on the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina came closest to progressing historical justice through education. Sharing knowledge and victims’ stories was a form of justice for those who were murdered and those who survived. However, James was more interested

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about addressing racial and religious discrimination for his Muslim students in England. The genocide created a bridge to discuss current rather than historic injustices. Did these lessons achieve justice for the victims of genocide? In some cases, teachers used the same remembrance rituals common in Holocaust education, focusing on individual testimonies and supported by survivor-­ focussed NGOs such as Remembering Srebrenica. These victim-focussed lessons honoured the suffering of those affected by the genocide though lacked historical context, as they instead attempted to address imbalances as perceived by teachers in the history curriculum, and establish discourses on British Islamophobia, racism, and prejudice. In fact, most teachers gave the sense that post-1945 genocides were interchangeable, in order to achieve their lesson objectives. The purpose of the ‘genocide appendage’ lesson was to ‘emphasise the Holocaust’s relevance’ by reframing genocide as a modern and contemporary threat to all societies. Teachers had neither the time nor the knowledge to consider the genocide’s specificity, or to compare ‘the stages of genocide’ in order to comprehend the common risk factors and warning signs. Teachers’ motivations to impart the history of the Holocaust reflected a deep care for humanity, for social cohesion in Britain, and for the security of future generations, yet there was limited yearning for historical justice. When asked about Empire, teachers were critical of Britain’s role, but it was rare that teachers taught that past, and few pushed for greater acknowledgements, education or apologies for Britain’s former crimes. Overall, teachers followed processes of justice rather than led them.

References AQA. 2016. GCSE History Specification Specification for First Teaching in 2016. https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/history/gcse/history-­8145/subject-­content/ shaping-­the-­nation. Beer, Martyn. 2005. Voices from Rwanda: When Seeing Is Better Than Hearing. Teaching History 120: 54–457. Boyne, John. 2006. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A Fable. Oxford: David Fickling Books.

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council. 2017. Deprivation at Ward Level. Accessed 8 May 2019. https://ubd.bradford.gov.uk/media/1292/imd-­2015-­ deprivation-­at-­ward-­level.pdf. Browning, Christopher R. 2010. The Nazi Empire. In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 407–425. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cannadine, David., Jenny Keating, and Nicola Sheldon. 2011. The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Chalk, Frank., and Kurt Jonassohn. 1990. The History and Sociology of Genocide, 58–229. New Haven: Yale University Press. Douglas, Lawrence. 2016. The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Elkins, Caroline. 2005. Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. London: Jonathan Cape. Gray, Michael. 2013. Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hull, Isabel V. 2004. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Huttenbach, Henry R. 1988. Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3 (3): 289–304. International Military Tribunal. 1949. Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945–1 October 1946. Katz, Steven T. 1994. The Holocaust in Historical Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelleway, Elisabeth., Terry Haydn, Thomas Spillane. 2013. ‘Never Again’? Helping Year 9 Think about What Happened after the Holocaust and Learning Lessons from Genocide. Teaching History 153: 38–44. Kühne, Thomas. 2013. Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities. Journal of Genocide Research 15 (3): 339–362. Lang, Sean. 1998. The Twentieth Century World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langbehn, Volker. and Mohammad Salama., (eds). 2011. German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany. New York: Columbia University Press.

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London Jewish Cultural Centre. 2008. Press Release: ‘Full Scale of Holocaust Unknown to British Children’. McIntosh, Kimberly., Jason Todd, Nandini Das. 2019. Teaching, Migration, Belonging, and Empire in Secondary Schools. TIDE-Runnymede Report, 8. Miles, James. 2021. Redressing Historical Wrongs or Replicating Settler Colonialism? Social Studies Curriculum Reform in Canada. In Historical Justice and History Education, ed. Matilda Keynes, Henrik Åström Elmersjö, Daniel Lindmark, and Björn Norlin (pp. 249–267). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Moses, A. Dirk. 2010. Colonialism. In The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, 68–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oba, Gufu. 2011. Colonial Resource Capture: Triggers of Ethnic Conflicts in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya, 1903–1930s. Journal of Eastern African Studies 5 (3): 505–534. Reid, Andy., Colin Shephard, Keith Shepherd. 1993. Peace & War. London: Hodder Education. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rummel, R. J. 1994. Death by Government. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Russell, Lucy. 2006. Teaching the Holocaust in School History: Teachers or Preachers? London: Continuum. Schindler’s List. 1994. [Film]. Stephen Spielberg (Dir.) USA, Universal Pictures. Stephen, Alison. 2013. Patterns of Genocide: Can We Educate Year 9 in Genocide Prevention? Teaching History 153: 30–37. The Pianist. 2002. [Film]. Roman Polanski (Dir.) USA, StudioCanal. TIDE-Runnymede Trust. 2018. Teaching Migration, Belonging, and Empire in Secondary Schools. The Runnymede Trust and University of Liverpool. Weinberg, Gerhard L. 1995. Germany’s War for World Conquest and the Extermination of Jews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whittaker, Hannah. 2015. Legacies of Empire: State Violence and Collective Punishment in Kenya’s North Eastern Province, c. 1963–Present. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43 (4): 641–657. Zimmerer, Jürgen. 2006. The Birth of the Ostland Out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination. Patterns of Prejudice 39 (2): 197–219.

19 Political Good-Will, Moral Lessons, Historical Justice? Upper Secondary School Students on the Motives and Effects of Historical Apologies Jan Löfström

Introduction Apologies for historical wrongs by institutional actors, like states, have been numerous in recent decades. There is an extensive body of research that discusses the justification, uses and outcomes of acts that are here called historical reparations (see, Nobles 2008; Neumann and Thompson 2015; Cunningham 2014). These are acts that institutional agents, like governments, churches and corporate enterprises have carried out, with the declared intention that the acts serve as a symbolic or material redress to the victims of historical wrong. The term ‘reparation’ has been used as an umbrella term (Torpey 2006; Thompson 2002), but also the term ‘restitution’ has been mobilised for the same use (Barkan 2001). Explanations for why historical reparations, and historical apologies in particular, have proliferated in recent times have been diverse. They include the rise of identity politics and greater sensitivity to historical J. Löfström (*) University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_19

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identities as aspects of cultural citizenship; an increased emphasis on addressing historical burdens in conflict resolution and transitional justice; replacement of transformative socio-political programmes with symbolic politics and an increased emphasis on principles of justice in international politics (Torpey 2006; Barkan 2001). What people think of historical reparation has been touched upon in some studies. In a survey of 15-year-old Europeans, in 1995, the participants were asked which states should pay if a world court of justice would rule on a compensation to formerly colonised countries (Borries 1997). In a survey on Finnish people, in 2010, it was asked how much the participants agreed with the statements, ‘It is futile to apologise for centuries-­ old things today’, ‘Finland has nothing to apologise for in its policy toward the Jews during WW II’ and ‘There should be an annual Day of Reconciliation in memory of the events of 1918 [Finnish Civil War]’ (Torsti 2012). In the surveys, participants did not have an opportunity to explain how they see historical responsibility or guilt, or justifications, aims and effects of historical reparations. Such topics can be approached more easily in qualitative studies, as exemplified by a study of Finnish upper secondary school students’ views on historical responsibility and reparation, with the focus on what the students’ response told about their historical consciousness (Löfström 2014). Promoting historical justice can be one of the aims, or motives, of historical reparation. In this chapter the material of the aforementioned Finnish study is revisited, and it is analysed how the motives and consequences of historical apologies were seen by the students, and how the theme historical justice featured in their responses. The Finnish study took place in 2008–09. The participants were 53 upper secondary school students and they were invited to discuss historical responsibility and historical reparation in groups of three or four. Their academic achievements varied from modest to excellent. They were posed questions about historical moral responsibility and reparation in general, but also about reparations regarding two cases, namely atrocities in the Finnish Civil War, in 1918, and the deportation of eight Jewish refugees in Finland, in 1942. These topics had been discussed in public in the context of the 90-year commemoration of the Civil War, and in the wake of new research on the Civil War and WW II.  The Civil War

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between the Red and the White had caused deep bitterness, not the least because of acts of terror on both sides during the War, and the large number of deaths in the prison camps where the defeated Red were in Summer 1918 in poor conditions. Reconciliation took place in the post-WW II decades, but the suffering of the defeated became a topic of wider discussion in the 2000s when academic studies and works of art gave voice to it, raising also the question about repairing this historical injustice (Ahonen 2012). As for Finland’s role in the Holocaust, the then prime minister of Finland apologised in year 2000 for the episode when eight Jewish refugees were  handed over to Germans during WW II.  In the 2000s new research showed that in addition to those eight, who perished, numerous prisoners of war—also Jewish—were handed over to Germans by Finnish authorities during WW II. Such information on close collaboration between Finland and Germany called into question the image of Finns as immune to the ideological aims of Nazism and triggered discussion on the need of deeper national soul-searching (Silvennoinen 2013). For this chapter, the material was analysed with the aim of identifying what motives and effects historical apologies were assumed by the students to have. Also when the motives and effects of apologies can be distinguishable analytically, the students were not expected to make this distinction because they were unlikely to have detailed knowledge of concrete cases of historical apologies. The students did not, and were not expected to, know the detailed background in particular cases of historical apology, or of consequences that particular apologies have had. In the students’ explanations the aims and effects of apologies often intertwined so that the assumed motives and effects were combined in a circular way. The main idea in a focus group study, like this one, is to get a view of what arguments and notions are accepted as plausible and appealing, or implausible and unconvincing, in the group when a topic is discussed. Instead of opinions of individual participants, the value of a focus group is rather on what interpretations are readily shared and accepted in the group, or in the reverse case, seen as controversial or questionable (Barbour 2007). The aims of Finnish history education will be discussed in the final section of the chapter, with focus on the curricular content that is most relevant for the interpretation of the material. It can be noted here that

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the students in the focus groups were 17–18-year-old second- and third-­ year upper secondary school students. Most of them had studied two of the four obligatory history courses in upper secondary school, titled ‘International relations’ and ‘Turning points in Finnish history’ with focus on the twentieth-century European and Finnish political history. The courses consist of 28–30 lessons at 45 minutes each. History is obligatory also in lower secondary school where twentieth-century history is studied in Grade 8 where students are 13–14 years old. In Finnish history education a lot of weight is often put on studying historical substance rather than historical thinking skills, despite the fact that the latter were given more space in the national core curriculum already in the 1990s (Rantala and Ouakrim-Soivio 2019). What is missing in the Finnish history core curricula, however, is attention to the moral dimension of history and history’s personal meaning to the student (Silfver-Kuhalampi et al. 2021). Finnish teachers have a lot of autonomy, however, in terms of what content and methods they choose to emphasise in the classroom. In the following sections, three themes are presented that were ­identified in connection with what interpretations about the motives and effects of historical apologies were constructed in the focus groups. The themes were crystallised in the analysis of the students’ judgements and explanations concerning historical apologies. They are promoting strategic interests; conveying moral lessons and redressing victims of historical wrong. Conclusions on the findings are made, and in the final section their implications for history teaching are discussed. The focus groups took place in 2008–09 and cannot be directly taken as evidence of the present state of history teaching; however, the findings and conclusions may be interesting also today.

 pologies as Acts of Promoting Strategic A Interests of the Apologising Institution One of the recurrent interpretations in the focus groups was that ­historical apologies are pragmatic policy, used for purposes of improving inter-­state relations and creating good-will that will benefit the party that makes the

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apology. The apology may address real historical grievances, and make a contribution towards resolving a historical conflict, but the point is that it is issued primarily for selfish reasons. The aim can be, for example, to clear the way for beneficial trade agreements, or give the government a positive image internationally. The following excerpt brings out such interpretations [Focus group 1]:1 Q: Why has the number of apologies increased? Is it an indication of moral progress in the world, or what could be the explanation? F1: […] maybe some things that now have been apologised for, the people in that state have gone through it, maybe it doesn’t anymore raise … But I’d say it’s not necessarily about something that happened yesterday, but a long time ago. F2: I think apologising for something that took place decades ago maybe happens mostly because it could promote, or improve relations between states, which is very sensible, politically. But I don’t believe in most of that there is any deep repentance. I think it’s mostly just for improving relations between the countries, clearing old issues off the table. M2: Globalisation prevails. Alliances between states emerge, like the European Union. It must have made apologies more frequent. There is a lot of trade. Closer relations between countries can be reached by token apologies: ‘we’re very sorry, let’s be good friends, we can have a lot of trade.’ Also the European Union is more and more integrated, the goal is it would be unified and there would be no big nationalist movements, and one way to try to become more unified is to apologise for old things and admit that one was wrong. No reason to war against each other. F1: I don’t believe any country is ready to apologise before the matter has been discussed through, and they are ready to face it and speak freely about it, also in public. As long as that laundry has

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not been washed, I don’t believe it would be possible to ­apologise. […] The cause [for the increased number of apologies] must be that now enough time has passed since those events, there has been time to think, and also the decision-makers are no more directly involved, they think they can apologise on other’s behalf, and it isn’t anything personal anymore. Certainly it would be much more difficult for contemporaries to apologise, and they wouldn’t necessarily do that, either, but apologising after decades doesn’t really concern you anymore. It’s easier to detach yourself from it when time has passed and it’s not about you. Besides, I’m pretty sure governments and state leaders are prepared to do anything, to improve relations between states. There are a lot of trade relations, and all that would be positive for a country.

Two explanations for the rise of historical apologies are suggested in the group. One is that political leaders want to cultivate relations with other states, and this is all the more pressing because of the increased interdependence between states. Students M2 and F2 formulate this argument, supporting each other’s reflections. Globalisation and the European integration are suggested as the factor that has affected the dynamics of inter-­ state relations and history politics. However, students F2 and M1 also suggest that the wave of apologies is a reflection of there being now enough space between the present and the past when the wrong was committed. It is likely that the students, partly because of the topics raised in the focus group, are thinking of the events during WW II particularly. Student M1 also conjectures that apologising may be easier when the victims and perpetrators are no longer faced with each other. Student F1, however, doubts if pragmatic calculations alone can explain the proliferation of apologies, without some shared understanding of the moral stakes in the matter. The others do not elaborate this further, neither does F1, who does not explain why historical apologies have become so numerous nowadays.

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Also in the next excerpt the focus is on strategic interests of states, but it then moves on to how the fading away of pain can make it easier to adopt a conciliatory tone regarding injustices of the past [Focus group 13]: Q: Why has the number of apologies for historical injustices increased in recent years? F24: What first comes to my mind is that states simply promote their own interests. I don’t know, but I feel that when one state apologises, then also other states apologise so that they wouldn’t appear worse. F22: Yes, an image thing. F24 & F23: Yes. F23: I think so much time has passed in many cases that those matters are no longer so painful, you can more easily speak about them. F24: It’s easier to apologise [when] there are no longer two different parties. [I]n many countries there is more unity, and it’s easier now to apologise for such things… The more time has passed after what happened, that much easier it is to speak about it, and apologise for it. M26: The perpetrators are not alive anymore, and perhaps we don’t feel that we’re in that way personally responsible. It’s more like a collective, it’s easier for you to forgive when you’re not personally responsible for that injustice. F23: And to apologise. Here it is suggested that, with enough temporal distance, events of the past can be apologised for without too much personal investment. But F23 and F24 also make the point that, because of the distance, pain may fade out and the past may be judged more neutrally. Student F24 also suggests that a strong sense of community may contribute to preparedness to face also dark chapters of the community’s history. This may connect with a notion of historical apologies having pedagogical value that is discussed in the next section. The notion that historical apologies are made for pragmatic reasons and perhaps without a moral commitment did mostly not provoke counterarguments in the groups, and also the possibility that historical

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apologies might have negative consequences for political leaders or states making them was not raised. This is interesting because the students expressed a shrewdly disillusioned view of the motives of historical apologies but they were not judgemental regarding them, neither did they seem to think wider audiences should. As student F2 noted, apologies can be ‘very sensible, politically’.

 pologies as Acts of Giving a Moral Lesson A to the Apologising Community One interpretation of the motives and effects of historical apologies that was raised in the groups as frequently and as spontaneously as the previous one was that the apologies can have a message to the community that makes the apology. There were two variants of this interpretation, and the first is visible in the following excerpt [Focus group 4]: Q: Does the increased number of apologies show the world has progressed in moral terms, or is it something else? In what you previously said the idea is that making gestures like these may also have pragmatic purposes, or what do you think? M7: Of course I can’t be one hundred percent sure of what they think, but if a big bunch of political leaders apologise for things that happened one hundred, or one thousand years ago, I smell a rat. F7: But it’s difficult to say what’s morally right or wrong. That’s why we can’t even know how many mistakes we make. Really, our society … we are still babies when we think of moral. We do an awfull lot of immoral things and don’t notice it, and find out only much later that, Hey! We may have done something immoral! Humans are animals that break against moral all the time […] By making these apologies we try to cover up how little we can do about big moral issues. We make it look like we try to do, repair something, because we can’t do anything about the big things.

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Q: You mean the apologies are symbolic gestures that may have some value but can’t address the really important wrongs or injustices? Have I understood right? F7: Yes, we try to show we do something. We think we have some self-respect, sense of morality, we want to be moral and act according to morality. But the only thing we can, is to do little things like these. We can’t make big moral choices. It seems we make some moral decisions when we do these small things. Student M7 voices that political leaders’ apologies for historical wrongs appear suspect but this is challenged by F7 who argues that even though apologies are mostly vicarious activity, they are not cynical or dishonest: people want to appear as moral actors to others and to themselves, also when they cannot change the world much. But although great transformative social projects are unrealistic, symbolic gestures have some declaratory value. Student F7 speaks here of a human behavioural pattern generally, thus she does not give explanation why apologies have proliferated now. She claims that people often do things they only afterwards perceive as morally reprehensible, and apologies are a testimony of the moral reflexivity that people are capable of. The moral quality of past actions can be judged more clearly as time goes by, hence historical apologies are not to be dismissed as fake. They serve the members of the apologising community as a testimonial of their moral conscience. This interpretation did not raise immediate objections in the group. A more openly pedagogical variant of the interpretation comes up in the next excerpt. The students discuss the apology that the then prime minister of Finland, Paavo Lipponen, made in 2000, for the deportation of Jewish refugees during WW II [Focus group 11]: M21:

When we speak of the Holocaust, surely it was in its own class of horrible things, so it’s good that… Again we come to the fact that [Paavo Lipponen’s apology] doesn’t awfully much help those who were targeted, but as we have participated in some small degree [in the Holocaust], it’s good that at least the next generations will notice it.

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I totally agree, it’s good that an apology has been made. After all, we should perhaps all feel touched [by the deportation] so that nothing like that will happen again. […] For example, the events during WW II are so far by now that the people who lived at that time are mostly not alive, and the new generation now in power maybe understands better the mistakes. But perhaps they still feel guilty about this […] Maybe it’s exactly they want to take care those mistakes won’t be repeated. Research is still being done about what really happened, and how awful things happened in WW II, and that way our understanding of it improves. Surely the generations that were involved didn’t see the whole picture, but we can have a more detached view on that much better.

Students F19 and M21 both suggest that apologies are for making the members of the apologising community aware of the moral mistakes of the past, and that they must not be repeated. Apologies are a signal of increased moral perceptiveness, and maybe also guilt, but more particularly there is a pedagogical message to the apologising community—in principle, all people—to take heed of what has been learnt after the events. Historical apologies are a moral lesson that can help prevent future moral failures. But no explanation is offered why such moral lessons have now become popular, or why moral perceptiveness has increased, except that, as far as WW II is concerned, there is now more temporal distance and solid research on what really happened. The interpretations discussed in this section express optimism, ­regarding people’s ability to make more perceptive moral judgements on past events when temporal distance increases. This, however, does not mean the students believed in moral progress of the humankind. The notion of such moral progress was met with spontaneous doubts in the groups.

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 pologies as Acts of Redressing Victims A of Historical Wrongs The third category of interpretations for the motives and effects of ­historical apologies in the focus group material is that the apologies serve as acts of redressing the victims of historical wrongs and promoting ­historical justice. This interpretation was less frequently and less clearly expressed than the interpretations discussed earlier. The next excerpt shows one of these occasions [Focus group 12]: Q: What explanations for this phenomenon [of historical apologies] can you come up with? Why have they become more numerous? M17: Maybe it’s difficult to make material reparation, it’s easier to apologise. The [unjust] event can have taken place such a long time ago that you don’t even know what you should give, then it’s easier to make an apology. I think the victims, it’s also good for them that someone apologises for such events. Then it’s easier for them to accept it, and they won’t bear so much grunt anymore. Q: Can you elaborate on that: why is it easier for the victims to accept it? And what is easier to accept, actually? M17: All that happened, whatever that is. That somebody takes ­responsibility for what happened to them. It’s maybe better for them when they know someone says they were behind it and apologise. Maybe it helps them to understand they have been wronged and it has been apologised for. F20: If some concrete compensation would be made, who would it be given to? Should we start studying the family trees of those Jews [the refugees deported from Finland in 1942], and looking for a closest relative alive? That could be pretty far […] and difficult because surely most of them are now dead. And if [the money] would be given to a little cousin’s aunt’s brother or so, would it have any meaning anymore, to give some money to them? Student M17 suggests that apologies may be an easy way of addressing historical wrongs and can be resorted to when it is difficult to say what

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material compensation would be appropriate, and to whom. Apologies are as if secondary to material compensation. But student M17 also suggests that apologies may genuinely have a positive meaning for the victims because they convey to victims that someone is guilty of having caused them harm, and this may alleviate feelings of resentment among them. Asked to elaborate this point, the student suggests that an apology may also confirm to the victims that they have been wronged by someone, in other words they have not caused their own suffering. This is noteworthy because sometimes the victims may have feelings of shame, or guilt, accusing themselves for the tragedy they have encountered. Student F20 indirectly supports the use of historical apologies when she suggests that material compensation for historical wrong necessitates identifying who is due and what, which is a complicated issue. It cannot be deduced from this that student F20 regards historical apologies as highly meaningful to the victims. It must also be added that the students in the groups formulated very fluently the argument that former colonial powers should compensate former colonies for the harmful consequences of colonialism. The interpretation that was easily constructed in the groups was that historical apologies are not meaningful to the supposed victims because transgenerational trauma does not exist, and neither does transgenerational moral responsibility. The previous excerpt is an exception to this. The next excerpt is an even more uncommon case because there the students briefly discuss the meaning of historical apology to perpetrators’ descendants [Focus group 13]: Q: Could the [Finnish] Government today apologize to those who became orphans when their Red parents were killed [after the Civil War] in 1918, for example? F22: I think it doesn’t sound reasonable because surely there were orphans also on the White side, or… I don’t somehow… F24: It’s so distant, anyway. If you think of the orphans, surely some of them are also dead by now. F22: True. F23: Sure it’s sad there are orphans like them, and they would like to see that someone is guilty of their being orphans, but I can’t see how they could expect someone will come and apologise now.

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I somehow feel the state is now the same as in 1918, also when those in power have changed dozens of times, of course. And when you think there were blatant war crimes later, like ­executing thousands of prisoners, and especially when you know your relatives executed people there. You would like someone to apologise; you feel a little ashamed of what the relatives did on the White side. Yes, and maybe it would also clear the air if it would be openly talked about, maybe not blame anyone because who is there to blame anymore, but one would openly talk about it. It could maybe make it easier for the nation to get over it, and the Civil War would not be a taboo anymore. True. I don’t know… It might be good that at least someone would say something about it.

The students first respond sceptically to the idea that the state in Finland would apologise for what the White—the Government forces—did to the defeated Red, in 1918. Student F23 gives voice to the idea that the orphans of the killed may want to know who can be held accountable for their fate but they should not expect anyone to apologise anymore. Also earlier in the discussion the students had refuted the notion of transgenerational moral responsibility, but here student M26 departs from his earlier stand. He supports the idea that a state, after all, may have historical continuity, and thus presumably historical moral obligations, and he then moves on to what seems to have bothered him, namely that through his family he is connected with people who were guilty of summary killings of the Red in 1918. In the focus group it became clear that this was a real situation, not a hypothetical one. In the excerpt he says he feels ashamed and would like someone to apologise for the events of 1918. It appears he expects this could be a source of relief to him personally. He does not entertain the idea of making an apology himself, but would like someone else to make it, presumably from a more authoritative position. Two other students, hearing about M26’s feelings of vicarious shame, or guilt, spontaneously support the interpretation that some reparative gesture might reconcile old grievances in society. The testimony of M26

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makes them think seriously about the possibility of transgenerational trauma that they had refuted earlier, before the exchange in the excerpt. In fact, they resumed a sceptical stand after this exchange, pondering whether perpetrators’ descendants could make reparations in the name of their ancestors: F24: F22: F24: F22:

F24:

I don’t know, I don’t think it’s right that […] say, if my ­grandfather or his father had done something awful, and even if he had, I don’t know, I don’t see it would be… Your responsibility. …my responsibility, or my concern. It’s maybe like a personal thing, whether or not to feel that one is closely connected with one’s ancestors or relatives. I don’t really know. Maybe it depends on the person, but some may feel that their position and what they have is due to their grandparents, then perhaps they can think that if [the ancestors] did something wrong, they must repair something. But I don’t believe it is of any help in any way. Somehow it doesn’t concern them.

Conclusions The aim of the study is to analyse what interpretations Finnish upper secondary school students make about the motives and effects of historical apologies. The interpretations the students in the study constructed for the motives and effects of such apologies can be categorised in three groups: • apologies as acts directed to others, for the purpose of bringing some benefit to the subject of the apology (a state or other institutional actor), • apologies as acts directed primarily to the community that is the ­subject of the apology, for the purpose of making its members behave better in the future,

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• apologies as acts directed to those harmed by historical wrongs, for the purpose of alleviating their pain. The first two interpretations were raised spontaneously and elaborated effortlessly. This suggests that the motives and effects of historical apologies in those interpretations appeared plausible and easily conceivable to the students. The third interpretation occurred less often and was less fluently elaborated. The idea of pecuniary compensation by former colonial powers to former colonies for transgenerational material harm was easily captured in the groups, but historical apologies, issued for the purpose of addressing psychological or cultural harm, were more difficult for the students to grasp. How to explain these findings? Earlier research has shown that Finnish young people are sceptical towards the very notion of historical responsibility because they conceive moral responsibility strongly in terms of personal responsibility (Löfström 2014). This notion of responsibility also comes up in the studies where the young people have readily explained success and failure in people’s lives as an outcome of people’s personal qualities or choices (van den Berg 2010). This matches with the findings that the Finnish young people have difficulty to explain in a wider historical context how the past can effect their lives (Löfström and Hakkari 2003). Hence, it can be difficult for them to find plausible the idea that people could be indebted to the past, or burdened by the past. Indicatively, in a survey in 1995, the Finnish young people, albeit living in a country that has benefited a lot from the colonial structures of the world, gave very little support to the idea that all European states should pay if a world court of justice would rule on a compensation to the African states for the consequences of colonialism, and they gave only lukewarm support to the idea that the former colonial powers should pay (Borries 1997). Considering such findings, it is understandable that in the focus groups the students spontaneously suggested that historical apologies are acts of strategic political scheming, rather than a reflection of political leaders thinking that moral responsibility for transgenerational harm is involved. That state interests had a prominent place in the students’ ­interpretations can be understood also against the relief of studies that show that the Finnish young people are prone to see institutions and structural factors,

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like economy, as engines of social change, whereas ‘ordinary people’ only have a small role (Ahonen 1997; van den Berg 2010; Hakkari 2005.) This matches with the finding that the young people in Finland do not see civic participation as an important part of being ‘a good citizen’ (Suutarinen 2002; Suoninen et  al. 2010). The students in the focus groups were probably not aware that victims of historical injustices and their descendants are often in a central role in initiating states’ apologies, but considering the aforementioned findings it is likely that the students had difficulty in recognising the possibility of such agency in the first place. In surveys Finnish young people have been asked about their view of the meaning of history. Among the available options they have strongly supported the view that history provides instructive stories about good and evil and opportunities to learn from mistakes of earlier generations (Löfström and Hakkari 2003; Hakkari 2005). The notion of history as moral instruction is reflected in the focus groups in the suggestions that apologies remind people of the mistakes made in the past, and warn against repeating them. They are not about repairing harm, but speaking of a duty to remember the injustices of the past. Words like ‘Never again!’ are often used in the context of remembering the Holocaust, and this rhetoric also appeared in the focus groups. The rhetoric has been criticised for being too shallow, and also in the focus groups the students did not elaborate how remembering can prevent future human rights violations. The notion of apologies having a pedagogical effect was for the students perhaps a benign assumption rather than a conviction. Historical apology, as a form of immaterial reparation, was a difficult notion for the students to grasp. It is not surprising, considering that in earlier studies Finnish young people have explained historical development primarily with material structural factors, rather than people’s individual or collective action or cultural or psychological factors. Demands for historical apology often concern injustices that are central to the historical and cultural identity of the victims and their descendants, but the notion of transgenerational immaterial ‘trauma’ seems to have appeared implausible, even inconceivable to the students. Consequently, they had difficulty to conceive that historical apology could be personally meaningful to someone in a victim or a perpetrator perspective.

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Implications What implications do the conclusions have for the history curriculum and history teaching? Before exploring the question, it is important to note that people’s view of history, historical thinking and historical consciousness are stimulated also by factors outside of school. Considering that the focus groups took place at school and in connection to the history lesson it is justified, however, that the implications of the conclusions are discussed precisely in relation to the history curriculum. The students had been studying according to the National Core Curriculum for Upper Secondary Schools, from year 2003. The ‘objectives of instruction’ in history included that the student would ‘perceive the present as being the result of historical development and the starting point for the future [,] and be capable of relating their own time and themselves to the continuum of history, thus formulating their awareness of history’ (National Core Curriculum 2003, p. 180). The emphasis on perceiving interconnections between the past, the present and the future parallels the emphasis on developing students’ historical consciousness in modern theories of history education (see, Seixas 2004). In the focus groups the students actually were able to construct that the past may affect the present and the future at the material level, and that remembering historical injustices may ideally help prevent them from being repeated in the future. Thus they connected different layers of time with each other. They were also able to construct the argument that contemporaries may not have seen clearly all aspects of their acts, and may have had only bad options available to them. Further, they were able to construct the idea that historical truths may be relative. They expressed here understanding that was compatible with the objectives of history teaching: in the national core curriculum of 2003 it was stated that the student should be able to ‘acquire information about the past and assess it critically, understanding its relativity and susceptibility to multiple interpretations and the complexity of its causal relationships [and] assess human activity in the past and examine historical phenomena both in terms of each specific period and from the present-day perspective’ (National Core Curriculum 2003, p. 180). In the 2003 national core curriculum, ability

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to analyse uses of history was not an objective of instruction (it was included in the core curriculum in 2015), but the students could perceive this aspect in their discussion on historical apologies rather well. Thus, the focus groups witnessed of many cognitive abilities that ­history teaching was expected to develop in students. But what challenges can be identified? It was difficult for the students to see historical apologies as acts of reparation and promoting historical justice. This was partly because they saw moral responsibility as strictly personal, and partly because they apparently found it implausible that guilt, shame, resentment and grief can be transgenerational. Among the objectives of instruction in history in the core curricula have been ‘to create individual, national and European identity’ (National Core Curriculum 2003, p. 180)—in the core curriculum of 2015 also global identity—but apart from this, cultural meanings of history have not been addressed in these core curricula. In the newest core curriculum for upper secondary schools it is stated that the students should ‘gather experiences that deepen their interest in history and develop their understanding of its significance’ (Lukion opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2019, p. 282). The impact of history teaching on people’s relation to history may be very limited, yet the passage in the new core curriculum is noteworthy. As the focus groups show, Finnish young people have had difficulty to recognise that history can have powerful cultural and existential meaning to people, connected with their collective memories of painful past and transgenerational harm. Such memories often lie at the heart of conflicts and antagonisms (see Ahonen 2012), thus it is salient that in the history curriculum space is given to developing students’ ability to analyse and reflect on the cultural, existential and ethical meanings of history, that is, how people see history as a resource, or a burden, in their lives. It has been suggested that ‘trasformative history teaching’ entails that ‘students become reflective of the role of collective memory’, and this requires in history teaching ‘a better grasp of the way attributions of past wrongdoings […] relate to processes of moral disengagement, apology, guilt, shame or regret’ (Psaltis et al. 2017, p. 19). It has also been pointed out that discussions on moral questions of history trigger more qualified historical reasoning among students in the history classroom (Ammert 2015). Bridges between

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historical and moral consciousness still remain largely unexplored (Ammert et al. 2017), but it is conceivable that giving moral questions more space in the history lessons may also contribute to more sophisticated historical thinking and more nuanced historical empathy among students. It is difficult to say how the students conceived the notion of h ­ istorical justice since the concept was not elaborated in the focus groups, but as the relativity of moral judgements and historical truth appeared to be a default assumption to the students, their view on historical justice may have been pragmatic rather than principled. However, an interesting question is if the concept of justice, with its emphasis on the distinction right/wrong, is the most fruitful view on issues of transgenerational harm in the history classroom? In the focus groups, transgenerational harm and historical apology was actually approached from the perspective of ethics of care, more than ethics of justice: what concerned the students was if someone has been harmed and feels pain that has to be and can be recognised, not so much if action is needed, to restore the moral balance that has been violated. The challenge is, as Ann Chinnery has written, to explore ‘what it might mean to understand the moral demand the past makes on the present as the “I must” that arises out of a relationship of care for the past’ (Chinnery 2013, p. 254). Cultivating a relationship of care for the past, rather than care about the past, emerges here as a potentially inspiring way of reformulating the aim of developing students’ sensitivity and perceptiveness to ethical questions of history, and in history.

Notes 1. Letter Q stands for the interviewer, M for male, F for female, and

the number is the student’s number in the focus group material. All excerpts are translated by the author, like also other text documents in Finnish, unless official translation is available.

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Löfström, Jan, and Johanna Hakkari. 2003. Kohti antropologista ­historiandidaktiikkaa [To anthropological history education]. Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 101 (2): 318–326. Lukion opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2019 [National Core Curriculum for Upper Secondary Schools 2019; no official translation available in March 2020]. Helsinki: Finnish National Agency for Education. National Core Curriculum for Upper Secondary Schools 2003. Helsinki: Finnish National Board of Education. Neumann, Klaus, and Janna Thompson. 2015. Introduction: Beyond the Legalist Paradigm. In Historical Justice and Memory, ed. Klaus Neumann and Janna Thompson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nobles, Melissa. 2008. The Politics of Official Apologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Psaltis, Charis, Mario Carretero, and Sabina Cehajic-Clancy. 2017. Conflict Transformation and History Teaching: Social Psychological Theory and Its Contributions. In History Education and Conflict Transformation: Social Psychological Theories, History Teaching and Reconciliation, ed. Charis Psaltis, Mario Carretero, and Sabina Cehajic-Clancy, 1–32. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rantala, Jukka, and Najat Ouakrim-Soivio. 2019. Historical Thinking Skills: Finnish History Teachers’ Contentment with Their New Curriculum. International Journal of Research on History Didactics, History Education and History Culture 40: 33–52. Seixas, Peter. 2004. Introduction. In Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter Seixas, 3–20. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Silfver-Kuhalampi, Mia, Jan Löfström and Liisa Myyry. 2021.  Moraali ja näkökulmanotto historian opetuksessa  nuorten vastauksissa  [Morals and perspective-taking in history in young people’s essays]. Psykologia 56 (1), 33–49. Silvennoinen, Oula. 2013. Finland, the “Vernichtungskrieg” and the Holocaust. In The Holocaust as Active Memory: The Past in the Present, ed. Marie Louise Seeberg, Irene Levin, and Claudia Lenz, 153–164. Farnham: Ashgate. Suoninen, Annika, Pekka Kupari, and Kari Törmäkangas. 2010. Nuorten yhteiskunnalliset tiedot, osallistuminen ja asenteet: Kansainvälisen ICCS 2009-tutkimuksen päätulokset [Civic knowledge, participation, and attitudes of the young: Main results of the international ICCS 2009 study]. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä: Finnish Institute for Educational Research.

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Suutarinen, Sakari. 2002. Tietävillä nuorilla syrjäytyneiden asenteet: Suomalaisten nuorten yhteiskunnallinen ajattelu ja toiminta kansainvälisessä vertailussa. In Tulevaisuuden yhteiskunnan rakentajat: Yhteiskunnallisen opetuksen kansainvälinen tutkimus Suomen näkökulmasta, ed. Viking Brunell and Kari Törmäkangas, 11–60. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, Finnish Institute for Educational Research. Thompson, Janna. 2002. Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparations and Historical Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Torpey, John. 2006. Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Torsti, Pilvi. 2012. Suomalaiset ja historia [The Finns and history]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.

Index1

A

Abuse, 2, 5, 7, 12, 23–41, 68, 69, 74, 108–110, 118, 138, 199, 202, 203, 208, 215, 226, 238, 252, 256, 296, 304, 305, 325, 326, 329, 332, 342, 352, 353, 395 Academisation, 138 Accountability, 7, 10, 14, 108, 110–112, 116–118, 121, 160, 215, 225, 238, 292, 295, 297, 304–307 Africa, 4, 53, 171, 199, 200, 205, 209, 210, 294, 396 African National Congress (ANC), 51, 52, 58, 61, 305, 356

Antiziganism, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 35, 37, 41 Apartheid, 15, 50, 51, 54, 55, 61, 63, 72, 77, 195, 209, 296, 297, 304, 305, 308, 341, 342, 344–348, 352–356, 358–360, 362n2 Apology, 2, 6, 15, 25, 27, 48, 58, 101, 181, 216, 237, 249, 251, 254–256, 392, 396, 401, 405–423 Art, 38, 48, 50, 90, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102, 199–201, 204–206, 208–210, 407 Australia, 4, 24, 254, 256, 257, 390, 392

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Keynes et al. (eds.), Historical Justice and History Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4

427

428 Index B

Beckles, Hilary, 197, 198 Bereavement, 178, 189–191 Black history, 56, 60, 344 Boer War, 51, 400 Boundary-work, 140, 141 Bradford, 387, 393–395, 399 Britain/Great Britain, 154–157, 165, 196–198, 204, 207, 217, 237, 392, 394, 398, 400, 401 British Columbia, 14, 250–253, 257, 258, 260, 262 British Empire, 4, 163, 166, 386, 396–400 C

Canada, 7, 14, 24, 70–73, 75, 132, 249–265, 317–321, 323, 324, 326, 330–333, 335n1, 335n2, 335n4 Care, 15, 25, 27, 156, 161, 162, 233, 276, 318, 385–401, 423 Caribbean Community (CARICOM), 197, 201, 202, 207, 209 Causality, 342, 343 Chinnery, Ann, 423 Church of Sweden, 13, 131–147 Cinema, 388 Citizenship education, 109, 111, 121, 123n2, 263, 293 Civil War (in Finland), 406 Colombia, 79, 278 Colonialism, 2, 7, 13, 14, 143, 145, 154, 159, 197–201, 205, 209, 210, 249–265, 284, 385–401, 416, 419

Comfort station system, 177, 178, 180, 184, 188 Comfort women, 13, 92, 177–192, 195 Commemoration, 24, 99, 101, 116, 153–168, 186, 406 Committee on Missing Persons (CMP), 225, 226, 234, 240n6 Constitution, 186, 319 Copenhagen School, 231 Critical understanding, 14, 271, 285, 286 Cultural violence, 270, 286, 287 Culture of redress, 250 Curriculum, 14, 41, 59, 60, 62, 71, 74, 91, 103n6, 108, 240n1, 249–265, 295, 298, 299, 306, 323, 330, 331, 333, 342, 367–371, 374, 379, 391, 393, 400, 408, 421, 422 history curriculum, 61–63, 250, 262, 295, 297–300, 342–344, 346, 352, 361, 367, 391, 401, 421, 422 Cyprus Conflict, 224, 227, 228, 241n9 D

Decolonization, 254, 261, 262 Difficult past, 49, 52, 60, 111, 117, 121, 251, 353 Disability, 154, 165–167, 170 Discourse, 4, 9, 13, 16, 30–32, 35, 37, 40, 70, 89, 91, 92, 113, 114, 121, 158, 219, 226, 227, 229–232, 236, 238, 239, 254–256, 264, 280, 292, 295, 297, 300–305, 307, 361, 401

 Index 

Diversity, 8, 51, 112, 113, 115, 154, 160, 163, 166, 171, 172, 272, 303 E

Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), 52, 62 Educationalisation/ educationalization, 9–12, 30, 41, 68, 69, 73, 75, 78, 133, 134, 147, 182, 188 Educational justice, 237 Educational policy, 40, 76, 94, 223, 240 Emotion, 188, 353, 354, 359, 390, 400 Empire, 13, 154, 157, 159, 161, 165, 170, 172, 177, 181, 397–401 Enduring injustice, 200, 205, 206, 209 Engagement Centres, 153–168, 172 Ethics, 13, 15, 47, 190, 195–210, 277, 375, 423 Ethnography, 344 European integration, 410 F

Finland, 7, 139, 140, 406, 407, 413, 417, 420 First Nations, 50, 318, 325, 326, 328, 333 Focus group, 345–348, 350, 351, 370, 371, 407–413, 415–417, 419–423, 423n1 Forgetting, 154, 223

429

G

Galtung, Johan, 270 Genocide, 2, 5, 14, 15, 27, 51, 71, 157, 195, 197, 252, 292, 296, 297, 301, 302, 306, 353, 367, 371, 378–380, 385–401 Holocaust, 367, 378–380, 385–401 Mau Mau Uprising, 198, 202, 208, 397 Rwanda, 14, 292, 298, 300, 302, 385, 390, 393 Srebrenica, 385, 390, 393–395, 401 Germany, 4, 227, 360, 407 Globalisation/Globalization, 3, 112, 410 Greek-Cypriot, 222–230, 232, 236, 240n2, 240n5, 241n8, 242n13 Guatemala, 73, 78 Guilt, 15, 26, 48, 49, 51, 55, 57, 60, 88, 196, 238, 306, 359, 388, 406, 414, 416, 417, 422 H

Hague, William, 208 Hammarberg, Thomas, 28 Hanaoka monogatari (Tale of Hanaoka), 96 Harper, Stephen, 255 Historical consciousness, 8, 9, 13, 14, 29, 30, 48, 50, 52, 60, 97, 98, 102, 208–210, 271, 274–277, 285, 286, 341–361, 379, 406, 421 Historical culture, 9, 48, 343

430 Index

Historical empathy, 14, 40, 334, 376–378, 423 Historical identity, 52, 59, 61–63, 274, 406 Historical justice, 1–16, 23, 24, 26–30, 32–41, 48, 49, 51, 53, 55, 58–62, 67–80, 88, 108, 109, 118, 134, 136, 139, 140, 155–159, 170, 178, 179, 182, 185, 190–192, 195–210, 215–239, 250, 252, 254–256, 269, 271, 272, 276, 277, 285, 286, 292, 296, 353, 361, 366–380, 385–401, 405–423 Historical knowledge, 4, 12, 13, 16, 25, 28, 32, 49, 59, 68, 69, 75, 98, 131–147, 201, 203, 208–210, 225, 285, 293, 378, 379, 400 Historical memory, 117, 172, 226, 361, 387, 395 Historical narrative, 12, 50, 52, 68, 76, 107–123, 124n2, 157, 220, 224, 232, 271, 274, 277, 280, 282, 286, 293, 296, 300, 342, 361, 386 Historical thinking, 8, 14, 47, 53, 256, 271, 274, 275, 334, 356, 408, 421, 423 History, 2, 23–41, 47, 79, 87–102, 109, 138, 153–168, 177, 196, 216, 250, 269, 292, 319, 342, 366, 386, 408 History education, 1–16, 37, 47, 89, 108, 166, 177–192, 209, 215–239, 253, 269, 291–309, 318, 341, 366–380, 386, 407 History education models, 300–303 History textbooks, 13, 14, 60, 94, 102, 180, 181, 216–222,

224–239, 292, 293, 295, 300, 302, 304–308, 386 History wars, 50 Hitler, Adolf, 371, 372, 386 Holocaust, 15, 26, 33, 40, 113, 195, 352–354, 360, 366–380, 385–401, 407, 420 Human dignity, 52, 115, 208, 219, 220 Human rights, 2–4, 12, 15, 25, 27, 28, 33–35, 37–41, 53, 56–58, 61, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 107, 110, 157, 215–216, 219, 226, 235, 238, 292, 294, 296, 298, 299, 305, 309n1, 342, 352, 354, 366, 374, 375, 385, 395, 420 I

Ideology, 190, 298, 302, 396 Ienaga, Saburō, 91, 94, 103n6 Indian Act, 319, 320 Indian Residential Schools, 250, 251, 255, 262, 318, 320–322, 325 Indigenous peoples’education, 319, 321–323 Indigenous sovereignty, 254, 260, 262, 264, 265 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), 375, 378 Inuit, 318, 319, 333 J

Japan-China Friendship Association, 99, 101 Japanese Canadian internment, 258

 Index 

Jews, 352, 367, 406 Justice, 6, 8, 10, 13–15, 39, 48, 55–60, 62, 63, 68, 101, 109–111, 115, 118–123, 157, 167, 169, 172, 178, 179, 184–187, 196, 201, 203, 204, 206–210, 216–222, 225, 229, 230, 232, 236–239, 252, 254, 261, 292, 294, 296, 301, 303, 367–376, 378–380, 385–387, 390, 392, 393, 395, 396, 400, 401, 406, 419, 423 K

Kajima (Corporation), 87, 88, 90, 101

431

113, 116–121, 146, 154–155, 157, 172, 179, 186, 219, 226, 234, 241n7, 253, 272, 275, 280, 302, 305, 325–327, 329, 341–343, 348, 361, 366, 369, 387, 391, 395, 396, 398, 399, 406, 422 Métis, 318–320, 326–328, 333 Militarism, 96, 178, 179, 183, 187–191 Military expansion, 177 Minority rights, 33 Mourning, 156, 178, 179, 189–192, 229, 230 Multiculturalism, 60, 110, 113, 155, 261, 264, 265 Multivocality, 293, 302, 308 Myth, 50, 165, 297, 301, 387, 398, 400

L

Liberal democracy, 3, 6, 7, 109–111, 117, 120 Lifetime stories, 178, 179 Lincolnshire, 387, 391 Lipponen, Paavo, 413 Literature, 16n1, 48, 109–111, 115, 121, 123n2, 157, 210, 217, 219, 271, 285, 334 Living History Forum, 27, 29 M

Macron, Emanuel, 200, 208 Matsuda, Tokiko, 91 Mau-Mau movement, 198 Media affordance, 134, 147 Media convergence, 135 Memory, 3, 12, 13, 47, 48, 51, 53–63, 87–102, 109, 110,

N

Narrative, 3, 8, 11–14, 24, 26, 29, 32, 34, 38, 40, 48–53, 59, 61, 68, 88–95, 97, 98, 102, 107–123, 143, 156–160, 162, 163, 165, 171, 172, 178, 182, 184, 185, 187, 192, 192n2, 196, 216, 220, 231, 232, 234, 237, 253, 259, 260, 269–287, 293, 294, 297, 298, 301–304, 306, 307, 323, 331, 342–344, 374, 386, 389, 390, 397, 399 historical narrative, 12, 50, 52, 68, 76, 107–123, 157, 224, 232, 271, 274, 277, 280, 282, 286, 293, 296, 300, 342, 361, 386

432 Index

Nation-building, 77, 116, 180, 186, 272, 297, 307 Nationhood, 115–116, 120, 264, 307 Nations, 257 The Nazis, 360, 369, 371, 374, 378 Neoliberalism, 52, 110, 112–113, 120 New Zealand, 24 Northeast Asia, 177 Norway, 26, 27, 139, 140, 197 Nozoe, Kenji, 88, 90, 95, 102n1 Nuremberg Trials, 4, 368, 370–372, 376, 386 O

Official knowledge, 11, 25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39–41, 217 Orientation, 8, 10, 11, 16, 40, 63, 68, 234, 274, 276, 286, 324, 367

282, 294, 296, 304, 308, 326, 372, 377, 410, 416, 418, 420 Personalisation, 143 Persson, Göran, 26 Peru, 71–73, 77 Policy, 3, 13, 14, 23, 28, 40, 52, 54, 55, 58, 76–78, 94, 165, 166, 216, 223, 226, 228, 240n1, 249–252, 258, 299, 300, 343, 367, 386, 406, 408 Policy reform, 77 Political violence, 270, 282 Popular science, 133, 137, 140–145 Post-conflict, 5, 6, 12, 13, 23, 70, 109–113, 115, 118, 120–123, 124n3, 209, 217, 218, 229, 234, 256, 292, 294, 297–300, 345, 361 Post-war, 24, 112, 120, 187, 368, 372, 373, 375, 377 Public memory, 275 R

P

Peace education, 15, 69, 74, 75, 216, 219, 226, 228, 230, 233, 238 Pedagogical discourse, 30–32, 35, 37, 133 Pedagogy, 6, 9, 11, 14, 78, 79, 96, 97, 101, 111, 115, 172, 217, 300–302, 321, 325, 330, 333, 334, 353, 366–370, 379, 388 Pedagogy of truth, 300–302, 308 Perpetrator, 54, 55, 57, 89, 95, 117–119, 187, 202, 203, 205–207, 216, 235, 238, 281,

Race, 35, 115, 154, 163, 330, 342, 362n1, 391 Rainbow nation, 51, 52, 59, 297, 303 Reconciliation, 3, 9, 11, 13, 14, 49, 54, 58, 60, 62, 63, 69, 77, 131–147, 206, 207, 209, 210, 219, 225, 228, 235, 250–255, 257, 258, 262, 264, 272, 291–309, 317–334, 406, 407 Recontextualisation, 134, 138, 139, 147 Rectification, 195–210, 305

 Index 

Rectificatory justice, 196, 201, 203–207, 210, 211n1 Redress, 2–7, 9, 15, 16, 24–27, 37, 157, 158, 166, 179, 195, 203, 210, 218, 224, 237, 249–252, 261, 265, 292, 294, 295, 304–307, 366, 388, 400, 405 Remediation, 135, 143, 146, 147 Remembrance, 96, 156, 370, 375, 379, 401 Reparation, 2, 10, 26, 48, 63, 68, 109, 117, 157, 186, 197, 216, 220–222, 225, 236–238, 251, 303, 343, 392, 396, 400, 405, 406, 418, 420, 422 Repoussi Scandal, 227, 233 Representation, 14, 48, 72, 96, 143, 158, 234, 258–262, 271, 275, 276, 278–281, 284, 291, 295, 304, 307, 390 Resistance, 50–52, 57, 62, 109, 118–120, 216, 224–231, 237, 238, 265, 280, 286, 306, 308, 346, 351, 356, 369, 386 Responsibility, 28, 47–63, 77, 97, 102, 112, 115, 118, 137, 138, 140, 167, 184, 185, 188, 196, 219, 220, 225, 237, 238, 250, 277, 282, 304, 305, 371, 372, 376–378, 396, 406, 415–419, 422 Restitution of African art, 196, 200–201 Right to justice, 220, 222, 239 Roma, 12, 23–41, 134 Rwanda, 7, 11, 217, 296, 298–303, 305, 308

433

S

Sami, 13, 24, 131–147 Seaton, Philip, 92–94 Secondary, 306, 405–423 Securitisation, 224, 231, 232 Sierra Leone, 71, 73, 76 Slave trade, 4, 24, 195, 197–199, 201, 202, 205–207, 209, 386, 391 Social cohesion, 7, 10, 113, 223, 265, 341–361, 401 Social memory, 12, 47, 48, 52–59, 61–63 South Africa, 4, 7, 12, 15, 49–51, 54, 59, 62, 77, 78, 131, 195, 217, 292, 296–300, 302–303, 305, 308, 341–348, 351, 353–356, 360, 361, 362n4, 362n5, 362n6, 362n7 South African Commission on justice and reconciliation, 209 Spencer, Baldwin, 197 Stories of Omission, 161–167, 170 Structural reform, 217, 227 Survivors, 88, 89, 95, 99, 101, 102, 132, 136, 178, 179, 187, 188, 190, 202, 231, 251, 252, 254, 255, 320, 326, 333, 369, 370, 373, 374, 378, 401 Survivor testimony, 369, 373, 378 Sweden, 7, 12, 13, 24, 26–29, 32–39, 197, 242n13 Syllabus, 59, 298

434 Index T

Teacher education, 321–324, 332 Teachers/educators, 3, 9, 12, 14, 15, 29, 31, 36, 67, 69, 71, 72, 75–79, 94, 95, 102, 116, 117, 122, 209, 227, 231, 235, 240n1, 250, 251, 257, 260–263, 271, 277, 286, 295, 299, 317, 321, 322, 329, 330, 333, 334, 344–346, 348, 351, 355, 368–370, 373, 378, 385–401, 408 Teamwork, 209 Textbook, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 23–41, 59, 60, 77, 94, 95, 102, 103n6, 108, 115–117, 180, 215–239, 270, 271, 278, 282, 292–295, 297, 298, 300–308, 309n1, 344, 355, 374, 386, 388, 399 Transformation, 24, 25, 30–32, 69, 77, 108–111, 120, 124n3, 132, 133, 278, 279, 292, 293, 297–300, 304, 308 Trans-generational responsibility, 48 Transitional justice, 4–6, 14, 23, 24, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 215, 217–221, 229, 250, 254, 256, 257, 291–309, 406 Travellers, 28, 33–35 Treaties, 264, 319 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 5, 72, 249 Truth commission/TRC, 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 16, 24–26, 37, 67–80, 196, 216, 217, 231, 296, 385

Truth-telling, 10, 71 Turkish-Cypriot, 223–225, 228, 240n5, 241n8 U

UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, 367, 370, 399 Univocality, 291–309 Upper secondary school, 15, 29, 295, 301 V

Victimhood, 49–52, 60, 115, 187, 192, 224, 225, 230, 304, 306, 394 Victims, 10, 15, 25, 27, 28, 54, 55, 58, 89, 91, 95, 99, 102, 117, 118, 143, 156, 195, 196, 199, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 216, 219, 220, 222, 225, 228, 231, 234, 236–239, 251, 269, 277, 281, 282, 294, 301, 303, 304, 306, 326, 366, 368–370, 378, 379, 392–395, 400, 401, 405, 408, 410, 415–418, 420 Victor’s justice, 13, 178, 187, 188, 191, 297 Violence, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 58, 60, 69, 72, 78, 107, 116–119, 121–123, 172, 179, 180, 183, 186–188, 190, 191, 223, 224, 237, 255, 256, 264, 269–272, 277–287, 296, 297, 303, 304, 343, 347, 351, 360, 365, 389, 396, 398, 399

 Index 

Violent past, 11, 14, 108, 117, 216, 220, 269–287, 291–309

World War I, 13, 153–156, 159–163, 165, 167, 170–172, 391, 398 World War II, 12, 26, 33, 40, 251, 258

W

War dead, 178, 180, 189, 190, 192 White paper, 2, 11, 13, 23–41, 132–134, 136–142, 145–147

435

Y

Yokohama War Crimes Tribunal, 88, 89