Introduction

When we sent out our call for chapters for this monograph in the fall of 2020, we did so in a period of tragedy and significant social transition. People all over the world had, seemingly overnight, reconsidered their collective pasts. The murders of George Floyd, Breana Taylor, and others by police officers, were, of course, the catalysts. However, knowledge of the horrifying treatment of children who died during the residential school experiment in Canada, the continued official resistance to Indigenous history and the ongoing impacts of colonisation in Australia and the South Pacific, and the marginalization of peoples at their own cultural sites had already drawn attention to the reconsideration of some form of an agreed upon “public” past.