Intergenerational Responsibility for Settler Colonial Violence

2014

This thesis offers a critical discourse analysis of the Canadian government’s 2008 apology to the former students of the Indian Residential School system. The Indian Residential School apology claims to begin to pave the way for healing and reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and other Canadians, and, I argue, it makes this claim while reiterating colonial narratives of settler innocence, entitlement to land, and moral-ethical superiority. The apology claims to right wrongs that are discursively situated in a remote and distant past, without addressing ongoing colonial violence or the historic and contemporary benefits both the state and its citizens have inherited from colonialism. I contend that the apology enables a celebratory national narrative that allows the state and its citizens, and not the Indigenous peoples to whom it was putatively addressed, to recover from (and re-cover) a violent and traumatic past (and present) while repudiating responsibility on both an indiv...

In recent decades, individual reparations in the form of financial compensation programs have gained popularity as mechanisms of redress for mass atrocities that violate victims' civil and political rights. Proponents of financial compensation suggest that it is capable of restoring victims' dignity, recognizing their equality, and providing them with concrete means to address material and moral damages. This article explores how the structural violence of ongoing settler colonialism directed at Indigenous Peoples complicates financial compensation as a response to the physical and sexual abuse that took place in Canada's Indian Residential School system. It builds on settler colonial scholarship to develop a critique of proportional valuation of money for injuries and harm and considers the roles of key actors as active agents in the construction of discourses victimization, victimhood, and compensable violence. The analysis explores how a state-sanctioned financial compensation program may constitute a product of settler colonial structural violence that inflicts further injustice on survivors of institutionalized abuse.

2021

Since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's final report in 2015, there has been a political and societal focus on the atrocities that occurred in residential schools. The abuse, sexual abuse, murder, and genocide of Indigenous children through the residential school system has become the main focus for many settlers in Canada. However, focusing our attention on the most heinous acts alone can obfuscate manifestations of Indigenous regulation and oppression that are subtler or more covert. This project takes a genealogical approach to allow for the exposure of naturalized settler colonial logics, while also placing residential schools within a continuum of Indigenous regulation and oppression. This project uses Foucault's concepts of power (disciplinary power, biopower, governmentality) and contemporary colonial concepts of recognition and accommodation to uncover the governmental technologies used within the residential school system and the Cor...

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

University of Manitoba, 2016

Canadian processes such as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and Comprehensive Land Claims as well as flashpoint events (Simpson & Ladner, 2010) such as the Kanien’kehaka resistance at Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke (the “Oka Crisis”) and more recently, the Idle No More movement, signal to Canadians that something is amiss. What may be less visible to Canadians are the 400 years of colonial oppression experienced and the 400 years of resistance enacted by Indigenous peoples on their lands, which are currently occupied by the state of Canada. It is in the context of historical and ongoing Canadian colonialism: land theft, dispossession, marginalization, and genocide, and in the context of the overwhelming denial of these realities by white settler Canadians that this study occurs. In order to break through settler Canadian denial, and to inspire greater numbers of white settler Canadians to initiate and/or deepen their anti-colonial and/or decolonial understandings and work, this study presents extended life narratives of white settler Canadians who have engaged deeply in anti-colonial and/or decolonial work as a major life focus. In this study, such work is framed as living in Indigenous sovereignty, or living in an awareness that we are on Indigenous lands containing their own protocols, stories, obligations, and opportunities which have been understood and practiced by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial. Inspired by Indigenous and anti-oppressive methodologies, I articulate and utilize an anticolonial research methodology. I use participatory and narrative methods, which are informed and politicized through words gifted by Indigenous scholars, activists, and Knowledge Keepers. The result is research as a transformative, relational, and decolonizing process. In addition to the extended life narratives, this research yields information regarding connections between social work education, social work practice, and the anti-colonial/decolonial learnings and work of five research subjects who have, or are completing, social work degrees. The dissertation closes with an exploration of what can be learned through the narrative stories, with recommendations for white settler peoples and for social work, and with recommendations for future research.

untref.edu.ar

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy

Drawing on Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book and Irene Watson’s expansive critique of Australian law, this article locates within the settler–Australian imaginary the figure of the ‘wounded Aboriginal child’ as a site of contest between two rival sovereign logics: First Nations sovereignty (grounded in a spiritual connection to the land over tens of millennia) and settler sovereignty (imposed on Indigenous peoples by physical, legal and existential violence for 230 years). Through the conceptual landscape afforded by these writers, the article explores how the arenas of juvenile justice and child protection stage an occlusion of First Nations sovereignty, as a disappearing of the ‘Aboriginality’ of Aboriginal children under Australian settler law. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality is also drawn on to analyse this sovereign difference through the figures of Terra Nullius and ‘the child’.

International Indigenous Policy Journal, 2020

In this timely and morally necessary book, Tamara Starblanket gives particular attention to the forced transfer of Indigenous children to institutions whose raison d’être was to indoctrinate and “educate” them away from their culture and heritage so as to erase Indigenous memory and reprogram younger generations as “Canadians.” These institutions were notorious for death and disease, torture, forced starvation, forced labour, and sexual predation. The book’s structure is well-ordered, the argumentation compelling, but not in phoney “scholarly detachment,” instead in conscious compilation and analysis of the evidence, supported by the force of ethics and a commitment to truth and justice, regardless of zeitgeist and political correctness.

2014

Setting the scene 2 The way things are 6 Shifting the focus 8 The Tisdale case Coming to the research questions Thesis outline Contribution Chapter 2: The West in Canada: Building a nation 21 A. The 1869-1870 Resistance B. Asserting control: On the road to the National Policy C. Fulfilling its purpose: Agriculture, racial segregation and hard times in the 1880s D. The legacy of 1885 E. The West in Canadian nation-building narratives F. Regional histories as a challenge to nationhood G. Remembering Riel and national anxiety H. A fair country Conclusion Chapter 3: Exploring 'The Land of Rape and Honey': Race, 69 space and gender in a settler colonial society A. Area of study and research questions B. Interlocking systems of domination in a settler colonial society: Thinking about privilege and talking about difference C. Strategy for Interpretation D. Reflexive ethical engagement 114 Conclusion Chapter 4: 'Fitting In' in Saskatchewan: Normalising the accused 126 A. Introducing the accusedindividually B. Young white men in cars: A legacy of settler violence C. Drinking, driving and male bonding in settler society D. 'Fitting in' in Saskatchewan Conclusion Chapter 5: Insiders and outsiders: Familiarity and the boundaries of community in settler society A. Drilling down 160 B. Young men of good character: Constructing 162 the accused as community insiders C. The source of difference: Locating Melanie as an outsider Conclusion Chapter 6: Melanie as fantasy other: Narrative and counter-narrative 210 A. Intoxicated and uncooperative: Denying Melanie's bodily integrity 212 B. Melanie as a runaway: Connecting to the stories of missing and 225 murdered Indigenous women and girls C. Constructing Melanie as the sexual aggressor D. In her own words Conclusion Chapter 7: Conclusion Thesis summary Research questions revisited and contribution