Footnotes on "Religion and Ethnicity in Canada"

Summary of two chapters from Religion and Ethnicity in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2009): Mathieu Boisvert, Chapter 4, “Buddhists in Canada: Impermanence in a Land of Change,” and David Chuenyan Lai, Jordan Paper and Li Chuang Paper, Chapter 5 “The Chinese in Canada: Their Unrecognized Religion.” From a series of lectures by Dr Frances Garrett from a University of Toronto course that surveys historical, cultural, and textual contexts for Buddhist meditation, with a focus on the role of race in the history of Buddhist meditation in North America. We examine how Buddhist meditation practices including mindfulness have been shaped by, and even contributed to, forces like colonialism, orientalism, capitalism, and white supremacy in the last hundred years or so in North America.