Pathways of Reconciliation

Indigenous and Settler Approaches to Implementing the TRC's Calls to Action

Aimée Craft, Paulette Regan, Aimée Craft, Paulette Regan

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780887558559
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kolonialismus & Postkolonialismus

Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its Calls to Action in June 2015, governments, churches, non-profit, professional and community organizations, corporations, schools and universities, clubs and individuals have asked: "How can I/we participate in reconciliation?"

Recognizing that reconciliation is not only an ultimate goal, but a decolonizing process of journeying in ways that embody everyday acts of resistance, resurgence, and solidarity, coupled with renewed commitments to justice, dialogue, and relationship-building, Pathways of Reconciliation helps readers find their way forward.

The essays in Pathways of Reconciliation address the themes of reframing, learning and healing, researching, and living. They engage with different approaches to reconciliation (within a variety of reconciliation frameworks, either explicit or implicit) and illustrate the complexities of the reconciliation process itself. They canvass multiple and varied pathways of reconciliation, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives, reflecting a diversity of approaches to the mandate given to all Canadians by the TRC with its Calls to Action.

Together the authors—academics, practitioners, students and ordinary citizens—demonstrate the importance of trying and learning from new and creative approaches to thinking about and practicing reconciliation and reflect on what they have learned from their attempts (both successful and less successful) in the process.

Part One
Reframing

Chapter 1
Paved with Comfortable Intentions
Moving beyond Liberal Multiculturalism and Civil Rights Frames on the Road to Transformative Reconciliation

David B. MacDonald1

A few months before Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016, Barack Obama held up a gilded mirror to celebrate Canada. Addressing Parliament in a spirit of bilateral friendship, the now former U.S. president had this to say:

It’s our enduring commitment to a set of values—a spirit, alluded to by Justin, that says no matter who we are, where we come from, what our last names are, what faith we practice, here we can make of our lives what we will. It was the grit of pioneers and prospectors who pushed West across a forbidding frontier. The dreams of generations—immigrants, refugees—that we’ve welcomed to these shores. The hope of run-away slaves who went north on an underground railroad. “Deep in our history of struggle,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Canada was the north star. . . . The freedom road links us together.”2

To this he added: “More than any other system of government, democracy allows our most precious rights to find their fullest expression, enabling us, through the hard, painstaking work of citizenship, to continually make our countries better. To solve new challenges. To right past wrongs. And, Prime Minister, what a powerful message of reconciliation it was—here and around the world—when your government pledged a new relationship with Canada’s First Nations.”3

Broken down into its key components, Obama’s speech embodied many of the triumphalist beliefs of settler Canadians in their approach to how best to seek reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. He told us, first, that Canada is fundamentally a settler society, formed by settler determination and hard work against a wilderness beset with obstacles. Settlers are the founders and hosts, welcoming newcomers to a land of prosperity and tolerance.

Second, Canada is an acknowledged leader in civil rights and race relations, a beacon of hope for many, including those African Americans who sought refuge here. Third, the fact that Canada is a democracy, which can be imputed as the best form of government, means it has the institutional ability to solve any problem, including past wrongs against Indigenous peoples. Distorting Audre Lorde, Obama told his appreciative audience that there is nothing wrong with the master’s house that the master’s tools cannot fix. In retrospect, Canada now seems even better when compared with the malignant nationalism that has triumphed after Obama’s departure.

This chapter is divided into four sections. The first engages with framing theory and outlines the differences between what I see as liberal and transformative reconciliation, and their related terms: soft and hard Indigenous rights. I argue that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) views of reconciliation weave soft and hard, liberal and transformative forms of reconciliation together.

However, as the second section of this chapter posits, through a critical reading of the 2016 Environics survey on settler perceptions of Indigenous peoples, most settler respondents understand reconciliation primarily in terms of liberal equality; at least this is how they responded to the survey’s understanding of reconciliation. Both the U.S. civil rights movement and Canadian multiculturalism help frame how reconciliation might be conceptualized—as providing economic and other forms of equality to Indigenous peoples within the beliefs, institutional structures, and ideological boundaries of the settler state. This has also been noted in Australia, where equality, instead of land and Indigenous autonomy, is advanced. There is a growing literature that critiques the equation of economic equality on settler terms with reconciliation.4

The third and fourth sections detail some of the problems of state-controlled narratives of multicultural and civil rights—in particular their wilful forgetting of the long lineages of communities of colour in what is now Canada and their feigned ignorance of anti-Black racism. By advancing a liberal frame that does not threaten the dominance of Stephen Harper’s traditional “old stock” settler, these policies confine expressions of difference and collective rights to areas that do not threaten settler society. The same frames have been used to suppress Indigenous peoples and their sui generis rights to self-determination, and may continue to do so in the future.

Settler Comfort and the Liberal Frame

Defining “settler” is not straightforward. While a mental image of smiling Euro-Canadians may leap to mind, there is sometimes a question mark about racialized people (in my case, mixed-race Indians from Trinidad by way of Regina), since we function within a white-dominated system that privileges white settler comfort and marks out European identities as normal and unproblematic, while representing others as “ethnic” or “multicultural.”5 Further, given the European origins of the settler colonial system in Canada, racialized peoples are commonly seen in settler colonial studies as, in the words of Lorenzo Veracini, “appellants facing a political order that is already constituted,” rather than as settlers who are “founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them.”6

However, given that many racialized people, like me, see their primary identity as “Canadian,” a self-identity as “settler” may be valid. One might define “settler” in its broadest sense as everyone who is not Indigenous, while also making distinctions where appropriate between European settlers and settlers of racialized origin, based on the inherent racial hierarchies on which the settler state was constructed and still depends. “Settler,” in my view, is preferable to the more supposedly neutral terms used by the Environics survey (discussed later), such as “Canadians,” “the public,” and the “mainstream.” Terms such as these obfuscate the coloniality of settler-Indigenous relationships and whitewash settler dominance at the expense of...