Reconsiderations of Reconciliation and Recognition

INDIGENOUS AND NON-INDIGENOUS SCHOLARS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED the steadfast existence of structural and ideological barriers undermining the recognition of Indigenous rights – especially pre-existing rights to land and governance. Indigenous legal scholars, for instance, have regularly drawn attention to the intricate connection between Canadian law and colonialism, particularly the manner in which violence continues to be deployed through the Canadian legal system in relation to Indigenous women and alternate relationships to land.1 More recently, in this current era of rights “recognition” and “reconciliation” with Indigenous populations, scholars in such disparate fields as anthropology and political theory have offered incisive accounts of how liberal discourses of recognition and reconciliation have served to undercut Indigenous claims and sustain structures of domination by reconfiguring and reproducing settler-colonial assemblages of power – ultimately drawing Indigenous peoples further into the ambit of the state.2 Given the presumed efficacy and prominence of discourses of reconciliation in Canada today, such concerns continue to resonate. Indeed, the four texts reviewed in this essay not only continue to “unsettle” prominent national mythologies and conventional legal conceptions but also trace strategies of resistance and possibilities for establishing decolonial relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples: Arthur