Conquest Reformed: A Review of Jaskiran Dhillon's Prairie Rising

Abstract

In Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention, Jaskiran Dhillon thoroughly critiques Canada’s liberal project of inclusion and participation of First Nations peoples into the settler state. 1 Dhillon’s book stands out with its incisive critical analysis and thoughtful ethnographic inquiry. Prairie Rising is an important addition to Native studies literature with its ethnographic methodology and the powerful action of telling the stories of Indigenous youth affected by the settler state. She accomplishes her critique of Canada’s participatory politics with a detailed analysis of the state’s attempt to address the “Indigenous youth problem” through education and interventions within child welfare, incarceration, gang involvement, substance abuse, mental health, and sexual violence. The “Indian Problem,” as Dhillon argues, continues to be a source of concern amongst settler states. Canada, with its alleged “kinder, gentler” form of colonialism, is no exception. 2 Reacting to First Nations’ continued demands for sovereignty over the same lands the state dominates, settlers have dynamically reformed the logics of conquest into a liberal strategy of incorporation. Dhillon explains that continuing and maintaining a colonial mode of existence through a reformed system is nonetheless premised on Native erasure. 3 Specifically, the project of incorporation further deprives Native nations the ability to regenerate sovereign ways of being on their own lands. 4 These discourses are a part of a longer genealogy of liberal amelioration of which residential schools were a part. The current mode of liberal domestication within the governance of Canada, argues Dhillon, proudly displays First Nations