Integrating the Shadow Lands on which the modern world was built holds out the potential for reaching something resembling solid ground. As Baldwin wrote, only when we confront the terrors of the past can history become something we can all use, perhaps even to forge a new basis for unity. But no one said that integration was going to be painless. So, one way of seeing the convoy of eighteen-wheelers that made its way to Ottawa is as an angry reassertion of innocence, an attempt to stuff down these difficult truths ever deeper in the shadows, while trying to reanimate that comforting dream of righteousness and dominance—as individuals and as a nation.

XREF: Connects to Baldwin's essay on the uses of history and to themes of collective memory versus national myth-making. Also echoes similar dynamics in other settler-colonial nations. SEED: Angle for an essay examining how protests that claim innocence often function as resistance to uncomfortable national truth-telling, drawing parallels across countries.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 866