One evening after they had been plagued a long time with fearful visitations, the Flying Head came to the door of a lodge occupied by a woman. She was sitting before the fire roasting acorns which, as they became cooked, she took from the fire and ate. Terrified by the power of the woman, who he thought was eating live coals, the Flying Head left and bothered them no more. An alternate version of this part of the legend says that, rather than seeing a woman eating acorns and thinking she was eating live coals, the Flying Head stole live coals from her and tried to eat them, thinking they were acorns. The results of course disastrous, the Flying Head flees in agony, never to be seen again. (Canfield, William Walker, and Cornplanter. 1904. The Legends of the Iroquois : Told by the "Cornplanter")

Background

Since the early 2000s, especially following the work of Patrick Wolfe, we have witnessed the rapid growth and consolidation of settler colonial studies as a distinct field of inquiry and theoretical framework for analyzing political, legal, social and economic dynamics in historical and contemporary societies. These societies are typically those that were founded through imperial invasion by European countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Portugal, but the framework has found wider applications in other societies such as Israel/Palestine, the Sudan and Hawaii. At the core of settler colonial studies is the oft-repeated formulation offered by Wolfe that “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” The implications of this observation is that settler colonial societies are not essentially geared towards the exploitation of the labour of the native and of the resources of their land to enrich the metropole—as with exploitation colonialism. Rather, settler colonial societies are geared towards the de facto and de jure acquisition of land already occupied by Indigenous peoples and in the process of acquiring this land, their interactions with Indigenous peoples will follow a logic of elimination. In some contexts, this will be achieved by displacing Indigenous peoples, by extorting from them the cession of their land and through various assimilation policies that, as it was said, ‘kill the Indian’ but ‘save the man’. In its more nefarious forms, settler colonialism relies on genocidal tactics to clear the land: starving nations into submission, notably in the Great Plains of North America by exterminating the Bison Nation that sustained the Oceti Sakowin and that allowed it to militarily stand in the way of the US settlers’ westward expansion, or through ethnic cleansing. Settler colonialism, in all of its forms, can be said to be structurally genocidal.

In contrast, contemporary Indigenous-settler politics, especially in Canada, is framed in terms of reconciliation, which is described by settler politicians and citizens as a project about how settlers and natives can move on together from a remote genocidal past, since, in the words of the Supreme Court of Canada, we are all here to stay. At the moment of writing, however, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is intervening on unceded Wet'suwet'en territory and Gitxsan lax yip in the service of a court injunction related to the construction of a pipeline. This last event inscribes itself in a long history of disquieting violent enforcements of settler law on Indigenous peoples that puts in doubt the discourse of reconciliation held by the state. In 2020, the Wet'suwet'en popularized the rallying cry of ‘Reconciliation is dead’. About the current events, Indigenous activists on social media ridicule the idea of reconciliation and the faithfulness of the state’s commitment to this idea. For instance, on a video showing the RCMP entering Gitxsan lax yip with assault rifles, one can read that this is the RCMP carrying “reconciliation sticks to their treaty partners.” Others ironize that the RCMP will begin their dismantling of Indigenous barricades with a land acknowledgment recognizing that their activities are taking place on unceded Wet'suwet'en territory. Considering that both Canada and British Columbia have committed themselves to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), in which Indigenous peoples are recognized as holding rights to their land and as having to be protected in that right by the State (art. 26) and in which it is affirmed that Indigenous peoples have “the right to live in freedom, peace and security” and to “not be subjected to any act of genocide or any other act of violence” (art 7.2), it is easy to appreciate why the project of reconciliation is viewed with growing Indigenous skepticism.

While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada that examined the Indian Residential School system did raise greater awareness among Canadians, it faced political obstacles to providing a full examination of the schools, including an accounting of the victims, whose unmarked graves are now being uncovered, as well as an accounting of the officials who were responsible for the assimilationist and eliminationist policies of successive Canadian governments over its 150-year history. The question of reconciliation can be posed as follows: How can Indigenous peoples come to affirm the social/political structures that enabled or produced (and still are enabling and producing) social and political injustices, and which still may constitute so many of the options and limits of their lives? Given the lack of fit between Indigenous governance and settler state structures, how can the disalienation of Indigenous peoples from contemporary domestic and international orders be achieved, and what kinds of structural transformations of domestic and world order are required? Answering these questions, which are key to conceptualizing reconciliation as a meaningful project for Indigenous peoples, requires interrogating the tasks of decolonization. These tasks may entail fundamental modifications of the constitutive political and territorial rights of states, and the coercive architecture of the modern sovereign states system that enforces such rights. They may also entail, as Mahmood Mamdani argues, transformations of political identities through which both settlers and natives come to see themselves as survivors.

To motivate such change, progress in normative decolonization is necessary, which partly involves destroying legitimating, obscuring, or excusing myths that sustain illusory and distorted views of contemporary domestic and international constitutional orders. Indigenous resistance and resurgence are vital to the destructive and constructive tasks of decolonization and reconciliation. As Glen Coulthard writes, the success of such politics depends on a “resurgent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically nonexploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions.” Rauna Kuokkanen also observes that since the climate crisis has settler colonial roots, a reconsideration of climate governance and policy through an Indigenous feminist lens is necessary to forge robust and viable climate futures. These views point to the general idea that the process of decolonization is not a process that the settlers can carry out by themselves. It requires a revitalization and recentering of Indigenous lifeways. As Walter Mignolo writes: “if the colonizer needs to be decolonized, the colonizer may not be the proper agent of decolonization without the intellectual guidance of the damnés.” On this view, decolonization and reconciliation are processes that do not leave the settler state, settlers and Indigenous peoples unchanged.

In sum, transcending settler colonialism requires deep transformations. In this conference, we propose to bring together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from diverse horizons to explore whether and how the settler colonial present in which we find ourselves can be transcended, if at all. What would it mean to ‘transcend’ settler colonialism? And how will we know if and when transcendence has occurred? The scholars that we have invited all have developed, in different ways and degrees, the need for profound transformations in the pursuit of more just relationships between settlers and native. Accordingly, the conference recognizes the inextricable connections between decolonization, transformation, and reconciliation. There cannot be reconciliation without decolonizing and transforming the settler order and the settlers themselves. The diverse social positionality of the invited researchers, as well as their diverse views on these themes, are propitious for critical discussions and creative engagement.