Indigenous Resurgence In An Age Of Reconciliation

What would Indigenous resurgence look like if the parameters were not set with a focus on the state, settlers, or an achievement of reconciliation? Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation explores the central concerns and challenges facing Indigenous nations in their resurgence efforts, while also mapping the gaps and limitations of both reconciliation and resurgence frameworks. The essays in this collection centre the work of Indigenous communities, knowledge, and strategies for resurgence and, where appropriate, reconciliation. The book challenges narrow interpretations of indigeneity and resurgence, asking readers to take up a critical analysis of how settler colonial and heteronormative framings have infiltrated our own ways of relating to our selves, one another, and to place. The authors seek to (re)claim Indigenous relationships to the political and offer critical self-reflection to ensure Indigenous resurgence efforts do not reproduce the very conditions and contexts from which liberation is sought. Illuminating the interconnectivity between and across life in all its forms, this important collection calls on readers to think expansively and critically about Indigenous resurgence in an age of reconciliation.

The two major schools of thought in Indigenous-Settler relations on the ground, in the courts, in public policy, and in research are resurgence and reconciliation. Resurgence refers to practices of Indigenous self-determination and cultural renewal whereas reconciliation refers to practices of reconciliation between Indigenous and Settler nations, such as nation-with-nation treaty negotiations. Reconciliation also refers to the sustainable reconciliation of both Indigenous and Settler peoples with the living earth as the grounds for both resurgence and Indigenous-Settler reconciliation. Critically and constructively analyzing these two schools from a wide variety of perspectives and lived experiences, this volume connects both discourses to the ecosystem dynamics that animate the living earth. Resurgence and Reconciliation is multi-disciplinary, blending law, political science, political economy, women's studies, ecology, history, anthropology, sustainability, and climate change. Its dialogic approach strives to put these fields in conversation and draw out the connections and tensions between them. By using "earth-teachings" to inform social practices, the editors and contributors offer a rich, innovative, and holistic way forward in response to the world's most profound natural and social challenges. This timely volume shows how the complexities and interconnections of resurgence and reconciliation and the living earth are often overlooked in contemporary discourse and debate.

Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its Calls to Action in June 2015, governments, churches, non-profit, professional and community organizations, corporations, schools and universities, clubs and individuals have asked: “How can I/we participate in reconciliation?” Recognizing that reconciliation is not only an ultimate goal, but a decolonizing process of journeying in ways that embody everyday acts of resistance, resurgence, and solidarity, coupled with renewed commitments to justice, dialogue, and relationship-building, Pathways of Reconciliation helps readers find their way forward. The essays in Pathways of Reconciliation address the themes of reframing, learning and healing, researching, and living. They engage with different approaches to reconciliation (within a variety of reconciliation frameworks, either explicit or implicit) and illustrate the complexities of the reconciliation process itself. They canvass multiple and varied pathways of reconciliation, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives, reflecting a diversity of approaches to the mandate given to all Canadians by the TRC with its Calls to Action. Together the authors — academics, practitioners, students and ordinary citizens — demonstrate the importance of trying and learning from new and creative approaches to thinking about and practicing reconciliation and reflect on what they have learned from their attempts (both successful and less successful) in the process.

Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which includes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for survivors, families, and communities to share their memories and stories with the Canadian public. The commission closed and reported in 2015, and this timely volume reveals what happened on the ground. Drawing on field research during the commission and in local communities, the contributors reveal how survivors are unsettling colonial narratives about residential schools and how churches and former school staff are receiving or resisting the new “residential school story.”

By combining provocative prose with photo-essay, Time and the Suburbs explores the disappearance of cities in North America under the weight of suburban, exurban, and other forms of development that are changing the way we live and do politics. Drawing on social theory from Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord to Antonio Negri, this book reconceptualizes the tasks facing activists and social movments. This is both a provocative essay and introduction to important social theory for anyone interested in cites and urban development.

Reconciliation, Transitional and Indigenous Justice presents fifteen reflections upon justice twenty years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa introduced a new paradigm for political reconciliation in settler and post-colonial societies. The volume considers processes of political reconciliation, appraising the results of South Africa's Commission, of the recently concluded Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and of the on-going process of the Waitangi Tribunal of Aotearoa New Zealand. Contributors discuss the separate politics of Indigenous resurgence, linguistic justice, environmental justice and law. Further contributors present a theoretical symposium focused on The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice, authored by Colleen Murphy, who provides a response to their comments. Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices from four regions of the world are represented in this critical assessment of the prospects for political reconciliation, for transitional justice and for alternative, nascent conceptions of just politics. Radically challenging assumptions concerning sovereignty and just process in the current context of settler-colonial states, Reconciliation, Transitional and Indigenous Justice will be of great interest to scholars of Ethics, Indigenous Studies, Transitional Justice and International Relations more broadly. With the addition of one chapter from The Round Table, the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Global Ethics.

In 2008 the Canadian government apologized to the victims of the notorious Indian residential school system, and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose goal was to mend the deep rifts between Aboriginal peoples and the settler society that engineered the system. Unsettling the Settler Within argues that in order to truly participate in the transformative possibilities of reconciliation, non-Aboriginal Canadians must undergo their own process of decolonization. They must relinquish the persistent myth of themselves as peacemakers and acknowledge the destructive legacy of a society that has stubbornly ignored and devalued Indigenous experience. Today’s truth and reconciliation processes must make space for an Indigenous historical counter-narrative in order to avoid perpetuating a colonial relationship between Aboriginal and settler peoples. A compassionate call to action, this powerful book offers all Canadians – both Indigenous and not – a new way of approaching the critical task of healing the wounds left by the residential school system.

More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom is about Indigenous resistance and resurgence across lands and waters claimed by Canada. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors describe and analyze struggles against contemporary colonialism by the Canadian state and, more broadly, against the global colonial-capitalist system. Resistance includes Indigenous survival against centuries of genocidal policies and the on-going dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands and waters. Resurgence is the re-invention of diverse Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in politics, economics, the arts, research and all realms of life. The underlying argument of More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom is that colonial-capitalism is a historical fact but not an inevitability. By analyzing and detailing various forms of Indigenous resistance and resurgence, the authors here describe practices and visions that prefigure a possible world where there is justice for Indigenous peoples and renewed healthy relationships with “all our relations.”