Reconciling for a culturalized past: The collective memory of Indigenous residential schools in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square

Since 2011, the City of Toronto has been co-implementing place-making efforts in Nathan Phillips Square with Indigenous communities, people, and organizations that holistically acknowledge the historical presence of Indigenous people and promote their resilience and vibrant contemporary existence. Using autoethnographic work, metaphors established in collective memory studies, and interviews with relevant actors, I argue that Toronto’s reconciliation strategy through these initiatives operates within culturalist and multiculturalist praxes, producing a ‘legitimate’ Indigenous subjectivity according to a past chiefly characterized by cultural genocide. Although the resulting reconciliatory relationship between the municipality and Indigenous people is premised on accepting and equitably including the latter in history-making and memory-preserving processes, thereby resolving Toronto’s memory and identity crisis between multiculturalism and settler colonialism, it limits possible ways of creating and changing discourses about Indigenous experiences, histories, and voices. They become constrained within a politics of recognition, reinforcing cultural recognition as the primary means for reconciliation.