The spectacle of reconciliation: On (the) unsettling responsibilities to Indigenous peoples in the academy

‘Homecoming’ ¹

It was the autumn of 2015, and I was returning to Canada a few months after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) had released its report and calls for action. Established in 2008, the TRC commission was tasked with leading a comprehensive investigation and response to the violence and abuses inflicted on seven generations of Indigenous children in Indian residential schools, an assimilative and genocidal system that was administered under the Indian Act for more than 100 years (TRC, 2015). ²

My return to settler colonial Canada came after almost a decade of living in the neighboring colonial nation of the U.S., specifically Duwamish territory. However, I was not returning home to Mushkegowuk (Cree) lands and waters. I had moved to the unceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish nations, otherwise known as Vancouver British Columbia and, as I crossed the colonial border, I quickly found myself immersed in a rather distinct settler colonial climate. It is not as though my everyday experiences of colonialism were suddenly fundamentally different than they had been my entire life growing up in Canada. Rather, it was the sensationalized accounts of Indigenous peoples’ suffering coupled with white settler Canadians’ hollow displays of recognizing and mourning “past” state violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples through the residential school system. ³

Although narratives of Indigenous suffering and trauma had become familiar to me throughout my lifetime, they readily assaulted my everyday interactions with renewed zealousness. This started every day, while I drank my morning coffee and turned on the CBC radio to tune in to yet another segment on residential schools which detailed the intimate violence of survivors’ experiences. ⁴ This was further magnified as visual media depicted one image after the other of white Canadians shedding tears over this “past” violence and images of Indigenous peoples forgiving and embracing politicians. Indeed, the spectacle of reconciliation came into stark contrast with my daily life in the U.S., where Indigenous issues were rarely covered by national media and Indigenous peoples were largely erased from mainstream consciousness. ⁵

In the words of Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (2016, 2018), I had come back to a spectacle of settler sorrow coupled with a state-led production of good-feeling reconciliation. But, I did not feel good. ⁶ I was angry and resented the fact that I did not know when I would be subjected to trauma-based stories and images as I picked up the Sunday paper or turned on the radio as I drove to work. I was angry because my own family, friends, and mentors’ experiences had become blunted sensationalized accounts of violence, abuse, and trauma that were consumed by the white settler gaze (Barkaskas and Hunt, 2017; George, 2017). I was angry because, as Patricia Barkaskas (Metis) and Sarah Hunt (Kwakwaka’wakw) (2017) argue, the truth in the TRC process had not occurred as survivors’ stories were subjected to colonial and racist forms of evidence gathering and evaluation which frequently determined Indigenous survivors to be uncredible and unreliable. ⁷ Meanwhile, the state’s fetishization of Indigenous suffering tied to the history of residential schools masked the ongoing truths of the colonial present, including state violence inflicted on land and water protectors, the ongoing apprehension of Indigenous children through the child welfare system and heteropatriarchal violence against Indigenous women, queer, Two-Spirit and trans individuals (Blackstock, 2007; Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network, 2016). The erasure of Indigeneity and the colonial present that I became familiar with in the U.S. was, in effect, reproducing itself in Canada albeit through unrelenting performances of recognition and remorse. ⁸ Hollow performances that wore me out quickly (McKittrick, 2017). ⁹

During my first year living in Vancouver, I quickly noticed how TRC events had become confessional spaces of white guilt that were shaped by an ask-the-Indian dynamic whereby white people take up the majority of the space by asking Indigenous peoples what they could do to “achieve” reconciliation and be a reconciled settler. Responsibility was oftentimes put on Indigenous peoples to do the emotional and time-consuming work of mitigating white guilt and creating a forgiving space to move forward—a key point which was repeatedly critiqued by Indigenous peoples at such events. For one such event, I participated on a panel that focused on whether a dependence on natural resource extraction in Canada can be reconciled with Indigenous self-determination. The framing of the panel implied an unwillingness to reckon with the structural colonial foundations that such resource extraction is facilitated by and reproduces. Still, I decided to participate, in an effort to raise awareness of violent forms of extraction in Mushkegowuk territory. Once the panel was over, I was bombarded by well-intentioned white Canadians who wanted to know specific steps and courses of action they could take to reconcile their relationship with Indigenous peoples—“how could something like residential schools ever happen in Canada because we treat our Indigenous peoples so well here.” ¹⁰ While settlers had always asked me for my opinion on Indigenous-state/settler relations, the heightened coverage of the TRC further propagated such inquiries.

The ask-the-Indian complex carried over into my work life, as I started a postdoctoral position at the University of British Columbia (UBC). ¹¹ At times, questions took the shape of requests to join new research projects that were funded under the banner of reconciliation—something which many Indigenous faculty are experiencing across Canadian university campuses. In some instances, such requests came from people who have longstanding relationships with Indigenous communities, and who conduct respectful and reciprocal research that contributes to Indigenous efforts for self-determination. However, in many other instances these relationships do not exist. Indeed, many non-Indigenous scholars have suddenly jumped on the reconciliation bandwagon as this research topic currently provides a great deal of academic currency, both financially and for one’s reputation and career advancement (de Leeuw et al., 2013). ¹²

In other moments, faculty, staff, and students across campus, and on other campuses in the region, sought advice on how they could best implement local Indigenous content in their courses. I did not know most of these people, and often wondered why they were contacting a Cree visitor who was new to these Indigenous territories while they had lived there for many years. While many of these people no doubt had good intentions, I wondered whether it occurred to them that the Indigenous political and legal practices of this place were much different than those of my own territory, and that I myself needed to build relationships in place? Indeed, approaching an Indigenous academic—specifically an Indigenous woman—was likely less intimidating, unsettling, and definitely less time consuming than building relationships with the community on whose lands we found ourselves on. As this experience became more common, I could not rid myself of the thought that the unified Indian subject was becoming reified as Indigenous political and legal pluralities were quickly overlooked in settlers’ rush to reconcile. I met with a few people but quickly realized that the time and emotional labor of doing this work for complete strangers was not sustainable in the long run and would inevitably take time away from the community-based relationships and work that were important to me.

At the same time as being asked to work with settlers on issues of reconciliation, my grandmother, mother, and five of her siblings sought reparations for the years they attended St Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario. Like many residential school survivors, hours were spent on phone call conversations with oftentimes hostile and patronizing TRC representatives, not to mention all of the embodied grief and shame that came with providing “objective” evidence to justify their truth-claims to TRC representatives. Meanwhile, a group of St Anne survivors challenged federal officials for breaching the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement and for procedural unfairness in the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) (Barrera, 2018). They launched an appeal to gain access to records that have been withheld from St Anne survivors and to address false reports that were filed by federal government officials between 2007 and 2014. Despite appeals, the Justice Department of Canada has withheld documents which has prevented some from “proving” they attended St Anne’s or from supporting their claims of abuse (i.e. proof as framed by the IAP). These ongoing struggles tied to the TRC process have caused a great deal of stress and agony for the survivors of St Anne, as well as their relatives who continue to support them in their fight for justice.

As my family and thousands more Indigenous peoples across the country sifted through the TRC process, concerns and resistance mounted against resource extraction in Mushkegowuk territory as a number of communities were issued impact benefit agreements for mining developments, and as increasing rates of birth deformities, miscarriages, and infertility were correlated to the rising levels of methylmercury in our territory (Daigle, 2018b). Meanwhile, in urban areas such as Thunder Bay Ontario, relatives increasingly mobilized against the white supremacist violence inflicted by schools and police officers (Talaga, 2017), while Indigenous peoples to the west organized against the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and the Site C dam developments that were passed with the support of the liberal government despite of Indigenous opposition (Kurjata, 2017; Tasker, 2016). While the Liberal Party had capitalized on reconciliation in the 2015 federal election through the party’s “real change” campaign , their purchase of the pipeline project in May 2018 made it clear that, despite grand apologies and promises, the economic and political sovereignty of the colonial state trumped responsibilities to diverse Indigenous nations across the country (Secwepemcul’ecw Assembly, 2018). ¹³

Geo-graphing the spectacle of reconciliation

Despite the myriad and interconnected sites of colonial violence on Indigenous lands and bodies the Canadian government and many Canadians proclaim that they have entered a new era of reconciliation that is restoring ethical and responsible relations with Indigenous peoples. Building on critiques of reconciliation led by Indigenous scholars, I argue that this is an era marked by the spectacle of reconciliation—a public, large-scale and visually striking performance of Indigenous suffering and trauma alongside white settler mourning and recognition—which secures, legitimates, and effectively reproduces white supremacy and settler futurity in Canada (Barkaskas and Buhler, 2017; Barkaskas and Hunt, 2017; Blackstock, 2011; Corntassel et al., 2009; Corntassel and Holder, 2008; Coulthard, 2014; George, 2017; Hunt, 2016; Million, 2013; Simpson, 2016, 2018; Tuck, 2017; Whetung, 2018).

Drawing on French theorist Guy Debord’s text Society of the Spectacle (1994), Sandy Grande (Quechua) (2018a) and Natalie JK Baloy (2016) argue that settler colonial spectacles erase Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences of ongoing colonial dispossession and violence as well as resistance to such violence. As Baloy (2016) argues, spectacle “[…] functions as a central regime of Indigenous (in)visibility in settler colonialism today” (211) as Indigeneity is colonially framed through trauma or multicultural discourses, erasing the complexity of Indigeneity that is lived everyday through multiple embodied experiences across diverse landscapes. As such, settlers’ understandings of and encounters with Indigenous peoples become shaped through spectacular images rather than through direct experiences and relationships.

In the era of reconciliation, spectacles produce a false consciousness of time and space by reinscribing teleological narratives of colonialism and by restricting colonial relations and violence to the space of residential schools. As Glen Coulthard (2014) argues, reconciliatory rhetoric relegates colonialism to the past and ideologically manufactures the illusion that Canada has entered a renewed era with Indigenous peoples that is amicable, cooperative, and mutually beneficial. For example, the TRC process was framed through a language of transitional justice that focused on claimants’ past suffering, their responsibility to heal from past wounds and, ultimately, their ability to transition from an injured past into a new reconciled present with Canadians (see also Simpson, 2016, 2018). Further, the language of renewing Indigenous–state relations and of reconciliation (rather than conciliation) ideologically imply that diplomatic and respectful relationships between the colonial government and Indigenous peoples once existed and can be returned to (Garneau, 2016).

Spatially, the spectacle of reconciliation manufactures what Katherine McKittrick (2006) calls “geographies of nation-purity” (118) as historical colonial violence is relegated to the isolated site of residential schools while erasing its various manifestations through, for example, the mass genocide of Indigenous peoples through warfare and the illegal theft of land (Simpson, 2016, 2018). Such erasures occur in the colonial present as “the archive of images” (Baloy, 2016: 212) that make up settler colonial spectacles become centered and severed from the larger terrain of colonial violence that Indigenous peoples and lands continue to be subjected to. Specifically, in an era of reconciliation, white settlers’ spectacular performances of apologies, land acknowledgments, and multicultural celebrations of Indigenous culture and art become crucial in reifying geographies of nation purity on a large scale. In this sense, “spectator-settlers” (Baloy, 2016: 212) do not merely assume a passive role of spectator or voyeur, but take on active roles in a spectacular performative politics that depoliticizes Indigenous–settler relations, rather than activating political agencies that are accountable to Indigenous peoples on whose lands they live and work on.

As Audra Simpson (2016) elucidates in what she calls “an emotional history of the present,” spectacular performances are a manifestation of an affective mode of governance that has become crucial in legitimating and reproducing colonial hegemony in Canada. As she details, over the last 30 years, the increased visibility of residential school violence has made it increasingly impossible for the Canadian government and settlers to deny colonial settlement in Canada, which has threatened its global reputation as a benevolent and peaceful nation (particularly in comparison to the U.S., and with respect to Indigenous peoples). From the state’s perspective, the increased visibility of residential school violence and the role of the Canadian government in legalizing such violence have required some kind of remedy in the present to restore white settler innocence and absolve the state and settlers of any guilt and wrongdoing. As A. Simpson (2018) states, the endless performance of sympathy and remorse coupled with the production of good feelings of reconciliation has been part of the remedy and ostensible realization of justice for “past” wrongs: “It is the age, at least in Canada, of overt, very cozy, cuddly reconciliation.”

Drawing on the work of Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million, I argue that responsibilities to Indigenous peoples are further severed as spectacles reify discourses of a unified wounded Indian subject that was codified and naturalized under the Indian Act, erasing Indigenous political and legal pluralities across space. As Million (2013) details, during the onset of neoliberalism in Canada, the Canadian government increasingly relegated Indigenous self-determination to health and healing programs that were aimed at capacity building and self-management. Discursively, these programs reinforced narratives of Indigenous suffering and trauma as pathologies that Indigenous peoples had to heal themselves from, which functioned to both reify a unified wounded Indian subject and erase the ongoing realities of structural colonialism. Reconciliatory rhetoric, mandates, and programs shaped by a trauma and healing ethos are a continuation of these neoliberal colonial humanitarian interventions, whereby the complexities of Indigenous polities across space continue to be erased as Indigeneity remains framed within pathologizing and trauma-based narratives (see also Renee Linklater, 2014). ¹⁴ Accordingly, non-Indigenous people continue to have ruptured understandings of Indigeneity and what it means to embody responsible relations with Indigenous peoples, not to mention what it means to activate responsible relations with Indigenous peoples who experience colonial power in differential ways through, for example, heteropatriarchal violence (Hunt, 2015; Simpson, 2015, 2017).

The erasure of responsibilities to Indigenous peoples occurs on a large scale and, as such, Million stresses the need to read across a range of texts to trace how technologies of colonial governance pervade multiple institutional sites within settler colonial societies. For this reason, I turn toward how colonial power gets reproduced through spectacles and good-feeling reconciliation mandates implemented by Canadian postsecondary institutions. While spectacular performances of recognition, remorse, and multicultural celebrations of Indigenous culture and art might not occur on as grand of a scale on university campuses as they do in highly publicized apologies and events in Canadian Parliament—or as they did in TRC testimonial spaces—I argue that they are nonetheless constitutive to the larger terrain of affective governance as theorized by A. Simpson. That is, I focus on the university as I understand it to be a crucial site of settler colonial relations as well as an intrinsic part of the settler colonial state. In the words of Grande (2018b), the University “as an arm of the settler state […] (is) a site where the logics of elimination, capital accumulation, and dispossession are reconstituted — which is distinct from other frameworks that critique the academy as fundamentally neoliberal, Eurocentric, and/or patriarchal” (47; see also Tuck and Yang, 2012). While I focus specifically on reconciliation mandates on Canadian university campuses, my hope is that the critiques shared here might come into dialog with those mounted against recognition-based strategies taking shape across postsecondary institutions in other settler colonial contexts, as well as administration-led diversity agendas responding to antiracism protests, including anti-Black racism protests led by Black students, on Canadian and U.S. university campuses (see also Grande, 2018b).

Ultimately, this paper is motivated by my own experiences, as a Mushkegowuk woman who is a child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of residential school survivors and who moved back to settler colonial Canada to assume a position at a Canadian postsecondary institution as the TRC report was released. As I have done thus far, I draw on my own experiences, my own stories, as a junior Indigenous scholar not as a means of providing a personal biography, nor to center and isolate my experiences from broader geographies of colonial power and Indigenous resistance. Rather, I evoke such experiences to claim political space and to offer a counter-narrative amidst the spectacle of reconciliation. ¹⁵ However, I do so by only speaking for myself. I do not claim to speak for other Indigenous scholars and the multiple Indigenous nations who host Universities across Canada, although my hope is that this paper will resonate with many Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples who are woke to the colonial-capitalist motives of reconciliation.

As Million argues, Indigenous peoples’ experiences, testimonies, and stories are felt experience—“felt theory”—that are not solely personal and individual but which exist within a larger landscape of community experiences and knowledge (Million, 2013: 30; see also Million, 2008). Drawing on Robin D.G. Kelley, Million (2013) frames these felt experiences as a “poetic knowledge” that has the ability to incite feelings and affects for transformative change (30). She states:

Story has always been practical, strategic, and restorative. Story is Indigenous theory. If these knowledges are couched in narratives, then narratives are always more than telling stories […] they seek the nooks and crannies of experiences filling cracks and restoring order. Narratives both make links and are the links that have been made. Narratives are our desire to link one paradigmatic will to knowledge to discursive and material projects that have consequences. Narratives serve the same function as any theory, in that they are practical vision. (Million, 2014: 35)

Along similar lines, Sarah de Leeuw argues that geographers must rework the ways we produce knowledge on Indigenous geographies and colonialism. She states: “[…] I am first proposing changes to mainstream conversations, including those by geographers, about settler-normalized violences lived by Indigenous peoples” (de Leeuw, 2017: 311). While de Leeuw (2017) specifically refers to the role of non-Indigenous geographers, and hones in on creative literary writing and expressions such as poetry, I hope to contribute to what she calls a “geo-graphing scholarship” (315). As she explains, geo-graphing scholarship is a practice of “earth (geo) writing” (308) that expands on the kinds of stories geographers tell about the lived and embodied experiences of colonialism. While I certainly do not claim to create the poetic brilliance of scholars such as Million and de Leeuw here, I hope that the centering of my lived and felt theory make a modest contribution to geo-graphing scholarship on colonialism.

In what follows, I continue to geo-graph settler colonial spectacles in Canada by unpacking how white settler futurities, including university futurities, remain unchallenged despite of good-feeling and albeit good intentioned reconciliation mandates (de Leeuw et al., 2013; Tuck, 2017). While I center colonial power relations between Indigenous and settler administrators, faculty, students, and staff on university campuses, I argue that such relations cannot be severed from the larger terrain of Indigenous land and bodily dispossession that universities continue to be complicit in on and off campus. In this way, my aim is to trace how universities figure into present colonial capitalist relations on Indigenous territories. Simultaneously, I hope to contribute to ongoing dialogues on geographies of responsibility by further nuancing conceptualizations of social and spatial difference as they pertain to Indigenous peoples’ calls for responsibility and relational accountability along the lines of white settler/property and Indigenous/land and bodily dispossession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Scholarship on geographies of responsibility has overwhelmingly focused on unequal power geometries and responsibilities to spatially distant neighbors by rupturing geopolitical boundaries of north–south and to spatially proximate strangers along the lines of a Marxist class-based analysis (Massey, 2007). Meanwhile, the unsettling political implications of colonial difference, particularly within settler colonial nations such as Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand have been largely invisibilized within this literature, as it has from a range of other geographic fields (Hunt and de Leeuw, 2018; Hunt, 2014; cf. Daigle, 2018a). As such, my aim is to foreground settler colonialism and what responsibility means when one is occupying stolen Indigenous lands or is connected to such dispossession through the uneven power geometries of global colonial-capitalist development, as unsettling as that might be.

Spectacles on Canadian university campuses

On 9 April 2018, UBC held the grand opening for The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC), one of two national centers established in Canada as part of the TRC process. At this public and well-attended event, UBC administrators issued an official apology to residential school survivors which seeped with a language of transitional justice. UBC administrators apologized for “the actions and inactions of our predecessors,” and the failure “to confront a heinous history, even if it is one that we did not cause” (University of British Columbia, 9 April 2018, italics mine). The apology stressed the responsibility UBC must assume in “acknowledging” the history of residential schools, including the university’s role in training administrators and policy-makers who implemented residential schools, and for its failure to break the silence on this history. As administrators proclaimed, the opening of the dialogue center signaled the university’s commitment to be more responsible moving forward, as the center is focused on providing survivors’ access to historical records, as well as providing information to the general public and promoting dialog (see also Ono, 2018).

Headlines and opening statements of media stories on the event overwhelmingly focused on UBC’s apology, with a particular attention to its emotional nature (Baker, 2018; Crawford, 2018; Givetash, 2018; Kwan, 2018; McCabe, 2018). Many stories proclaimed that the event was an indication that a dark chapter in Canada’s history was coming to a close. Some of the media coverage focused on the survivors who spoke after the administration’s lengthy apology. Overall, however, inadequate attention was directed toward aspects of their speeches that called attention to historical and contemporary sites of colonialism beyond residential schools, as well as their insistence that UBC administrators substantiate their apology with systemic and structural changes. Rather, the university’s apology became front and center to much of the media coverage, while the complex narratives shared by a number of Indigenous speakers loomed in the background. Five months after the elaborate opening, The Ubyssey, a student-led UBC newspaper, reported that the university had lost residential school records, and that the IRSHDC was understaffed, underfunded, and remained unable to formally open to the public (Chase, 2018). The director of the IRSHDC, Mary Turpel-Lafond (Cree), powerfully asserted that the IRSHDC should not be framed and capitalized as “a trophy for UBC” but, rather, should be viewed as “a serious place that has to make an impact,” and financially and infrastructurally supported as such (Chase, 2018).

While the university’s apology certainly marked an exceptional performance of recognition and remorsefulness, it is part of a larger architecture of performative acts that are increasingly visible on the UBC campus since the onset of the TRC. For example, as I joined the university in 2015, land acknowledgments proliferated across campus as I moved from one event, lecture, and workshop to another. ¹⁶ Indeed, this was not a new practice on UBC campus as Indigenous faculty, students, and staff had acknowledged Musqueam hosts for years. What had changed, however, was the pervasiveness of land acknowledgments performed by a growing number of settler administrators, faculty, students, and staff that was no doubt a reflection of UBC’s relatively new mandate to make land acknowledgments a common practice on campus (Wilkes et al., 2017). Indeed, a number of administrators across the country felt a heightened sense of obligation to implement initiatives that would uphold the TRC’s recommendations, which was reinforced as the TRC released its calls for action as some specifically pertained to the role of postsecondary and granting institutions in reconciliation. ¹⁷

Many land acknowledgments on the UBC campus, and other university campuses across Canada, continue to be respectful and meaningful as the people undertaking them—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—do so in a manner which activates the relational accountability that is embedded in this legal and political practice, by calling up one’s kinship relations and, in UBC’s case, how those come into relationship (or should) with Musqueam people, lands, and waters. Furthermore, in such instances, land acknowledgments are proceeded by events, workshops, and seminars that critically and constructively take up settler colonialism, and center Indigenous peoples and knowledge in relation to the topic at hand. Many others, however, are hollow gestures of lip service as routine-like territorial acknowledgments are quickly forgotten and brushed aside to resume business as usual, according to well-established colonial and racialized power asymmetries.

It is not uncommon for acknowledgments to begin with “it has now become routine to acknowledge the territories here,” without utterance about why this legal and political practice is important for Indigenous peoples in this region, and the personal responsibility they are expected to take on in making a land acknowledgment as a visitor on Indigenous territories. At times, non-Indigenous people on campus seem to be more preoccupied with learning how to recite a territorial acknowledgment—“can you say that again so I can write it down properly?”—rather than actually learning about the place where they live and work, with all of the complexities of historical and ongoing colonial dispossession and violence, elaborate and sophisticated Indigenous kinship networks, and the legal orders and authorities that have cared for that place for millennia. In many instances, territorial acknowledgments merely become acts of multicultural recognition of Indigenous territories, void of any real political and legal change in structural relations between Indigenous hosts, faculty, students, and staff, and educational institutions and settlers working at such institutions. Indeed, such performances further propagate the myth that Canadians are reconciling their relationship and that everything is okay.

The plethora of performative politics taking shape across Canadian university campuses has urged many Indigenous faculty, students, and staff and, most importantly, the original caretakers of those territories, to ask what follows such performances of recognition and remorse, or what should be put in action instead of hollow gestures and performances (Wilkes et al., 2017)? In the case of land acknowledgments, for example, what are the responsibilities of individuals within universities, beyond simply performing routine acknowledgments, or, as an implication of adopting this practice? Or, best yet, what responsibilities should they be taking on as a means of having the privilege to adopt this political and legal practice in the first place?

Universities’ rush to reconcile: Good-feeling Indigenous content mandates

Many universities and individual departments have attempted to substantiate institutional calls for land acknowledgments, and more generally address the TRC’s calls for action, by implementing the requirement of Indigenous content. ¹⁸ Some universities now require that all incoming undergraduate students complete an Indigenous content course in order to graduate (Gaudry, 2016; UAlberta ICR, 2017a). ¹⁹ In other instances, departments have taken it upon themselves to implement Indigenous content into their curriculum with various degrees of formality and/or are attempting to center decolonial objectives in departmental diversity initiatives. Ironically such mandates, while often hollow in creating transformative change run deep in the responsibility that is placed on Indigenous faculty, students, and staff, as well as local Elders and community members who take on the brunt of the time and labor, including emotional labor, to implement reconciliatory initiatives. That is, Indigenous peoples are routinely identified as the subjects on campus who are responsible for creating a space that is deserving of their presence while simultaneously educating their colleagues about colonization and Indigeneity (not to mention, at times, attending to their white fragility in doing so).

As Adam Gaudry (Metis) (2016) argues, the rush to decolonize and Indigenize reifies colonial power asymmetries across Canadian university campuses. Indigenous content mandates are oftentimes envisioned without extensive consultation with Indigenous hosts, and Indigenous faculty, students, and staff on campus (Gaudry, 2016; UAlberta ICR, 2017a). At the same time, the implementation of these initiatives is seen as the primary responsibility of these same individuals who do this work in isolation, and without adequate institutional and interpersonal support. As such, Indigenous self-determination is denied as mandates are set without proper consultation and consent while the onus of implementation is placed on Indigenous peoples as they are routinely asked to lend their time and expertise to carry out hollow mandates for Indigenous content. Moreover, gendered colonial power dynamics get reproduced through such mandates as Indigenous women, queer, and Two-Spirit people—oftentimes those occupying more precarious and untenured positions with lower pay in the university—are disproportionately taking on the burdens of such labor. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Nishnaabeg) asserts:

It is unfair to ask junior scholars to take on this work, when they are being evaluated for tenure based on research and publications, when we are already asking them to teach new courses and develop curriculum. And I think that there’s a gendered aspect to that in terms of seeing Indigenous men as having more authority than Indigenous women. So I think that often Indigenous women professors are targets. I think Indigenous women oftentimes in these departments bear a heavy amount of the emotional labour. The TRC says “we need to do this, we’re going to do this, we’re going to implement it right now”, without doing the research around what are all the different models? What are all the concerns that Indigenous faculty have? Listening to Indigenous faculty and Indigenous students is really, really, really important. (UAlberta ICR, 2017b)

Ultimately, university administrators and faculty must cease from reproducing the models of responsibilization that have shaped the reconciliation era in Canada (UAlberta ICR, 2017a, 2017b). Administrators must commit to fiscally support Indigenous peoples who are asked to lead Indigenous-centered mandates and localize the involvement of Indigenous hosts. This is particularly crucial given that Canadian universities stand to fiscally benefit from the new pots of funding that will be made available through calls for reconciliation, and as administrators capitalize on the banner of reconciliation to promote the university’s reputation, credibility, and research which ostensibly seeks to reconcile settler Canadians’ relationship with Indigenous peoples.

If, indeed, Indigenous content courses are deemed desirable by Indigenous hosts, faculty, students, and staff, they must be classified as service courses, particularly when they have large enrollments. University administrators must hire skilled and experienced scholars who are qualified to design and teach courses on colonialism in critical and constructive manners which, in many cases, will necessitate fiscal support for cluster hires. Meanwhile, administrators must be held responsible for developing training for teaching assistants who will moderate discussions on colonial dispossession and violence in such courses, and must not assume that Indigenous graduate students will take on these roles. Further, the university must commit to financially supporting and valuing the labor of Indigenous Elders and community members who are invited to university courses and events as guest speakers, facilitators, and consultants. As L.B. Simpson (2014) points out, university programs have rolled back fiscal support for Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Holders since she first held a faculty position as a junior scholar. In re-implementing such programs, she argues that fiscal support must not be marginalized to small sum honorariums but, rather, should provide established funded positions for Indigenous intellectuals and community leaders (UAlberta ICR, 2017b). In doing this, university administrators should first and foremost expand resources to programs and departments that have been doing de/anticolonial and Indigenous-centered work much longer than the onset of the TRC.

In cases in which universities have prioritized the development of Indigenous content, non-Indigenous administrators, faculty, and staff should be educated and trained on why these mandates are important, so that they too can be responsible for explaining and defending this to students and colleagues (UAlberta ICR, 2017a). As Gaudry argues, department heads must assume the responsibility to communicate why Indigenous mandates are important rather than expecting their Indigenous colleagues to assume this task, particularly if they are junior and untenured as this puts them in a visibly precarious position. Moreover, content on colonialism must not be thought of as a one course requirement within a program, degree requirement, or department (UAlberta ICR, 2017a). Rather, departments and programs must consider how this content can be implemented throughout a range of courses in a critical and constructive manner, whereby introductory topics are built upon in upper-level courses. In doing this, all faculty must assess whether they are reproducing colonial imaginaries, a colonial citational politics, and colonial power dynamics in their courses. The erasure of Indigenous peoples and colonialism speaks volumes to students when they only encounter such topics in courses taught by Indigenous faculty, particularly given the colonial and racialized discourses that students may bring with them into the classroom (Daigle and Sundberg, 2017). More than this, however, course content and pedagogy must center the experiences of Indigenous and other racialized students rather than re-centering whiteness in the classroom as the normative starting point.

(The) unsettling geographies of responsibility to Indigenous peoples

My intention in reiterating these recommendations is not to somehow provide a prescriptive formula, nor is my intention to argue for a reframing of reconciliation. Rather, drawing on Madeline Whetung’s (Nishnaabeg) (2018) work, Indigenous self-determination lies in the autonomy to remain unreconciled (Whetung, 2018). That is, the numerous and constructive critiques of reconciliation articulated by Indigenous peoples should not be blunted as or forcibly placed into alternative framings of reconciliation. While some critiques might adopt this approach, many others point to Indigenous conceptualizations of responsibility, relational accountability, relationship-building, and diplomacy-making which have been practiced and renewed for much longer than recent calls for reconciliation.

Rather, such recommendations are, in the words of Tuck, simply a starting point to think about “the spatio-temporal changes that need to happen for any given university to become a place that is deserving of Indigenous students, faculty, staff, Elders and community members.” A move from hollow performances to the aforementioned systemic changes is a good start; however, in and of itself, this remains inadequate if universities are to truly reckon with their role in reproducing colonial dispossession and violence in the present. Further, while inclusionary spaces on campus such as rooms and buildings designated for Indigenous use, renamed campus buildings, and the display of Indigenous art are certainly not insignificant, overall, these still fall short from the radical and transformative responsibilities that would support Indigenous efforts for self-determination. ²⁰ Such inclusionary spaces, while at times providing temporary refuge for Indigenous peoples and/or raising awareness of aspects of colonialism and Indigeneity, remain part of a larger settler colonial landscape across and beyond the university campus, including: everyday spaces of racist and colonial micro-aggressions (Mahtani, 2014) which include discourses of wounded or angry Indians circulated through interpersonal interactions; the ongoing devaluation of Indigenous knowledge and community-based work as they are continually framed as solely empirical, and void of any theoretical rigor; the privileged political and material space that extractive industries continue to hold across university campuses and the interconnected spaces of dispossession and violence on Indigenous lands, waters, and bodies (Tuck, 2017); spaces of rape culture on university campuses which are part of the larger continuum of sexualized violence in settler colonial Canada (Benedet et al., 2016); and the space of stolen Indigenous lands that universities continue to occupy (Simpson, 2014). As Tuck (2017) stresses:

I don’t think that (university administrators and faculty) are ever talking about space beyond a couple of rooms. We (Indigenous administrators and faculty) are fighting for our lives for a couple of rooms. And, maybe a building, or a longhouse. But what does it mean to spend years of academic work fighting for a building when mining already has a building on campus?

Yet, to frame responsibility to Indigenous peoples solely through relational geographies of colonial dispossession continues to blunt responsibility from the longstanding and diverse Indigenous legal orders across space. While difference can be traced along the lines of whiteness/property and Indigenous/land dispossession, spatial difference, as I understand it to be evoked by Indigenous peoples across (and beyond) Canada, simultaneously pertains to a difference in Indigenous ontologies of place, relationships with place and legal practices of place. In this way, responsibility to Indigenous peoples and places becomes contextualized not only within colonial power structures, but also emerges from sophisticated Indigenous intellectual frameworks and legal orders that have existed much longer than the onset of colonialism, and which continue to govern diverse Indigenous territories despite of colonialism. This is therein what I understand to be at the root of responsibilities to Indigenous peoples: not a performance or feel-good mandate, but relations of responsibility and accountability based on Indigenous law that Indigenous peoples continue to embody, regenerate, and demand for radical and transformative change.