L07(a) - Workshop on Indigenous Politics - Reframing the Conversation: Challenging Central Concepts and Ideals in the Study of Indigenous-Canadian Politics
Date: Jun 2 | Time: 03:15pm to 04:45pm | Location:
Joint Session / Séance conjointe : Canadian Politics
Chair/Président/Présidente : Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (University of Victoria)
Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Heidi Stark (University of Victoria)
A State-shaped Hole in Our Analyses: Canadian Settler Imperialism: Phil Henderson (University of Victoria)
Abstract: A growing body of literature studies Canada as a settler colonial state, created through the ongoing dispossession and disappearance of Indigenous peoples. Propelled by Indigenous scholars and their allies, this literature focuses on the colonization of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian state and Canadian society more generally; primarily, it analyzes colonialism as a process occurring within the borders claimed by Canada.
A simultaneously expanding body of scholarship investigates Canada’s position within global processes of ‘empire.’ Political economy looms large in this literature, as does military interventionism, and coercive manipulation of international institutions. Consistent throughout this literature, then, is a focus on Canada’s involvement in empire as a matter of foreign affairs. Ostensibly, Canadian imperialism occurs outside the borders claimed by the state.
The isolation of these two literatures serves, in part, to reify the state’s own account of itself through the reproduction of a foreign/domestic dichotomy - wherein either side of this dichotomy is normatively accepted or analytically elided.
Beyond the bifurcation of Canadian settler colonialism from Canadian involvement in empire, I propose to develop an account of Canadian settler imperialism. This, paper argues that settler colonialism is always already embedded within and enabled by global processes of empire, further asserting that Canada’s position within empire is necessarily predicated on ongoing settler colonialism. The Canadian state’s two projects, as presented in the current literatures - one foreign, one domestic - are re-presented here as co-constitutive and best approached as a singular process rather than as separable.
The Future of Reconciliation from the Standpoint of its History: Corey Snelgrove (University of British Columbia)
Abstract: Reconciliation has become a key concept in Canadian political and social life. Most histories of this emergence trace it to the rise of transitional justice and the TRC Final Report released in 2015. Much has been made of the relationship between these histories and the future of the concept. Some insist that the concept’s application in non-transitional contexts ideologically manufactures a break between a colonial past and a post-colonial present, while others argue that we can redefine reconciliation as a critical conceptual intervention into a settler colonial context. In this paper, I examine the concept of reconciliation from the standpoint of its history.
I begin by questioning the diffusionist story for the emergence of reconciliation, locating its emergence in the ideological problem-space of the confidence of liberalism following the defeat of anti-colonial and socialist challengers. I then argue that our current moment is defined less by the confidence of liberalism than a period of competing visions and ask whether reconciliation can survive such a change in ideological problem-space. My contention is that reconciliation minimizes this ideological competition in the assumption of its own possibility, and that this avoidance marks a conceptual and not only contingent political link between reconciliation and resource extraction. This is a conceptual link because resource extraction is an economic program that does not require redistribution, and thus allows reconciliation to be ‘all things to all people’. I conclude with a call to abandon the reconstruction of reconciliation and shift towards the concept of articulation.
Liberalism and the Wrong of Land Appropriation: Elena Choquette (University of Cambridge)
Abstract: Many of the largest – and indeed richest – countries in the world owe their territorial magnitude to their history of settler colonisation. This paper foregrounds the ideas that authorised and facilitated land annexation in the political development of Canada as a settler state. In conversation with two scholarly fields (1 – intersections of liberalism with empire, with Arneil 1996, Bell 2016 and Rana 2010 and 2 – territorial appropriation in settler colonies, with Frymer 2017 and Williams 1990), I first argue that the most successful advocates of territorial expansion in Canada self-identified with the larger Western tradition of liberalism. Next, I scrutinise the various liberal ideas that helped achieve territorial expansion by focusing on the political thinking of one of the most sophisticated and influential expansionists in the nineteenth century British settler colonial world: Canadian liberal thinker George Brown. His ideas on the territorial underpinnings of liberty and self-rule, his project for the British peopling of the “New World” and his understanding of labour and progress clarify the connection between liberalism and territorial consolidation in British settler colonies. As many struggles for achieving social equality continue to take place on liberal terms, it is all the more critical to clarify the connection between liberalism and certain wrongs, including that of land appropriation. This historical and critical investigation of the mobilisation of liberal precepts in the production of settler sovereignty over Indigenous lands brings into view and helps uproot the potential of liberalism for exclusion, especially of Indigenous Peoples.