Democracy, Decolonization and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada

Using Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (IRS TRC) as an occasion and a lens, this dissertation aims to critically assess the capacity of the Canadian state to make good on the promise of transformation that the politics of reconciliation harbours. Canada’s IRS TRC is an opportunity to renew reflection on the sort of transformations that might bring about post-settler-colonial forms of commonality that do not presuppose the impossibility of decolonization and Indigenous self-determination. Using the topic of collective memory and methods drawn from emergent anti-imperialist sub-traditions in Western political thought, this dissertation forwards the claim that the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential entails both democratic and decolonial elements. This, in turn, grounds an attempt to bring radical democratic thought (with a focus on Sheldon S. Wolin) and Indigenous resurgence theory (with an emphasis on Glen S. Coulthard) into a conversation based on the assumption that not only are these two traditions of political thought not mutually exclusive but can be brought together in ways that can contribute towards the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential. This, however, entails a systematic decolonization of those elements of the foundations of Western democratic thought that render it amenable to imperial projects as a condition for freeing it up as a resource in the struggle for decolonization. This approach resulted in a twofold conclusion. First, the politics of reconciliation in liberal-democratic, settler-colonial contexts can be broadly divided into two contrasting and diametrically opposed models of political reconciliation: reconciliation ‘from above’ and reconciliation ‘from below.’ The second conclusion is that the form that the politics of reconciliation assumed in Canada is a form of reconciliation ‘from above,’ which, amongst other things, might be characterized by its selective social amnesia, its non-participatory and elitist decision-making processes and an incapacity to make good on the promise of change that the politics of reconciliation harbours. The liberal-democratic settler state’s inability to facilitate political reconciliation’s transformative potential is due to an enduring structural predisposition to promote the opposite of a decolonizing transformation in Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts such as Canada.