Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics
Session: L2 - Reconciliation, Redress, and Rights: Indigenous Politics in Comparative Perspective
Date: May 31, 2016 | Time: 10:30am to 12:00pm | Location: Science Theatres 57
Chair/Présidente: Sheryl Lightfoot (University of British Columbia)
Discussant/Commentatrice: Sheryl Lightfoot (University of British Columbia)
Participants & Authors/Auteurs:
Matt James (University of Victoria) : Robust: Canada’s 2008 Residential Schools Apology
Abstract: Like truth commission reports and international law documents, political apologies respond to past wrongdoing with normative benchmarks for judging future conduct. This paper examines Canada’s official 2008 apology for the residential schools policy in this light. Because of its ceremonial vigour, detailed accounting of many of the relevant harms, and clear acceptance of responsibility, the 2008 case satisfies several of the classic criteria for judging political apologies. However, the apology has not led to any corresponding transformation in the Canadian federal government’s truculently neo-colonial approach to Indigenous relations. The case thus raises critical questions about political apologies. One possible response is to call them “abortive rituals” (Trouillot), cheap talk in an era of “contrition chic.” Another is to judge political apologies pragmatically for their contribution to reconciliation (Cunningham, 2014); this approach would declare the 2008 apology a failure. A third approach (Smith, 2014) treats political apologies as living deeds requiring follow-up action; on this view, the 2008 statement turned out not to be an apology at all. In contrast, I argue that insisting on the robustness of the 2008 case clarifies a crucial function of political apologies: their accountability-promoting role as official statements of normative disavowal that specify key criteria for judging future regime performance. Put differently, the gap between this robust apology and its stunningly inadequate legacy shows us both the value of the original act and of the very idea of political apology itself.
Joyce Green (University of Regina) : Enacting Reconciliation
Abstract: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has concluded its painstaking and pain-filled exposition of the misery inflicted by the Canadian policy of enforced residential schooling on Indian children and has issued its final report (2015). In its evidence is the truth part: Canadian democracy legitimated genocide and human rights abuses against children. The residential school policy was not for the benefit of “Indians” but for settlers: it was intended to de-Indianize the youngest generations so that there would be “no Indians and no Indian problem”, in the crystal-clear words of Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932. Few settler Canadians have heard this truth, much less embraced its implications. The reconciliation part is far less clear. Reconciliation is a state of peace achieved by processes and practices intended to convey contrition, empathy, and commitment to transformation for a renewed relationship. In this paper, and drawing on scholarship attending to colonialism, race, privilege and decolonization, I explore the path to renewed relationship between settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples, a path marked by historic oppression and the potential for a transformed and equitable future. That path must wend its way through the quagmire of pain, anger, privilege, power, transformation and potential for a better relationship in the future.
Paper / Communication
Kiera Ladner (University of Manitoba), Myra Tait (University of Manitoba) : Irreconcilable Differences – UNDRIP and Indigenous Visions meet Australian Constitutional Politics
Abstract: In 2010, the Prime Minister of Australia announced the government’s intent to establish the ‘Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’. The Panel was charged with the responsibility for recommending options to be put to the Australian people by referendum. Accordingly, the Panel travelled the country, hosting public consultations, culminating in a final report, delivered to Parliament in 2012. Working from this Expert Panel Report, submissions to the panel, and our primary research, this paper will discuss settler state-sponsored constitutional discourses, international instruments including UNDRIP, and Indigenous constitutional visions. While the goal of the proposed Australian constitutional revision is generally to recognize Indigenous peoples and to remove its current race-based foundation, it is clear that neither the meta-narrative of the state nor the constitutional realities of assumed state sovereignty can be reconciled with UNDRIP. The guiding principles for constitutional amendment, advanced by the Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition, as well as the Expert Panel Report, look to international instruments like UNDRIP as providing mere guidance, and insist that Australia “find its own solutions”.
The findings and report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) recurrently refer to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in the recommendations. Though UNDRIP was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007, the challenge in implementation internationally was the focus of a major global conference, the United Nations World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, in New York in 2014. Canada was among the most reluctant states, originally declining to endorse the UNDRIP on claimed grounds that it was in conflict with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 2010, Canada reversed this position and signed on. However, the TRC stressed the continuing failure of the Canadian government to take seriously both the spirit and letter of the UN Declaration in regard to the impact of residential schools. On this panel, authors consider various comparative contexts and implications of Canada’s apparently contradictory, ambivalent, or ambiguous relationship to these key documents – the UNDRIP and the report of the TRC – and related issues regarding indigenous rights. The papers in this panel consider, compare and contrast the politics of these documents in terms of: constitutional politics in the age of UNDRIP; Canada and other states regarding truth and reconciliation; UNDRIP and UN conferences on human rights; and the Canadian government’s various positions regarding redress and reconciliation.
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