Transculturality and Uneven Belonging in Multicultural Canada: Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness and Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Probably Ruby

Abstract

Set chiefly in the Canadian prairies’ Indigenous-settler contact zones, Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness and Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Probably Ruby illuminate how histories of colonial violence and trauma shape contemporary Canadian society and show the inadequacies of transcultural theory in capturing Canadian cultural formations. In the Canadian lifeworld depicted in these texts, cultures are imagined as distinct and separate, with asymmetrical power dynamics serving as the ideological bulwark of Canadian multiculturalism. While Forgiveness depicts the capacity of Canadian multiculturalism to pave the way for non-white migrants’ transculturation, Probably Ruby uses Ruby’s deracination from her Métis roots to portray how settler colonial histories affect Indigenous cultural lifeworlds, dictating Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the Canadian state. The structural erasure of Indigenous identities through historical acts of cultural genocide continues to hinder bidirectional settler-Indigenous cultural exchange and instead fosters the assimilation of Indigenous persons, such as the deracinated Ruby, into the dominant culture.