Reconciliation In Canada

Nearly three decades have passed since the eleven-week armed stand-off between the Mohawk Warrior Society, Sûreté de Québec, and Canadian Armed Forces, commonly known among Settlers as the Oka Crisis. While the relative success of the conflict on the behalf of the Kanien’kehá:ka people is still widely debated today, it is undeniable that it fundamentally changed Indigenous-State relations in Canada. One concrete measure that stemmed out of the stand-off was the creation of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal peoples (RCAP) a year later in 1991. The largest and most expensive commission in Canadian history, RCAP was tasked with contextualizing the history of the Indigenous-State relationship and producing recommendations for its improvement.

After its completion in 1996, the final report of RCAP listed over 400 recommendations to address the root causes of the relative poor state of affairs of Indigenous communities in the Canadian state. The main conclusion of the Final Report was that “the main policy direction, pursued for more than 150 years, first by colonial then by Canadian governments, has been wrong”. Notably, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples prompted the beginning of the use of the term ‘reconciliation’ as part of the discourse surrounding strategies to improve the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the federal government in Canada.

Despite the overwhelming use in political rhetoric, it is difficult to establish the Government of Canada’s precise definition of reconciliation. It is equally unclear as to what reconciliation entails substantively— as either a process or an outcome —in reconceiving the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples, Settlers, and the Canadian government. For my Reconciliation Essay, I intend to problematize the very term of reconciliation as used in Canadian politics by drawing primarily on its use in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 Residential Schools Apology. I will argue that the concept reconciliation as exercised in the political discourse of federal government is neither a meaningful gesture, nor consistent with Indigenous conceptions of same term. In fact, reconciliation as presented by the Government of Canada serves only as a tool to recolonize Indigenous peoples, in that its connotations leave the colonial relationship largely

undisturbed. Finally, I will draw on Taiaiake Alfred’s concept of restitution as explored primarily in the text Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom as a more suitable alternative to the colonial concept of reconciliation.
For the purposes of this essay, let us first establish the geographical history of the use of the term reconciliation by federal government actors in recent Canadian history. The term first emerged into the collective Canadian context after the Oka Crisis. The stand-off was initiated by the Mohawks of Kanesetake after the nearby Oka Township approved the expansion of a golf course onto disputed Indigenous territory. The Mohawk people had long asserted title over the parcel of land in question, and maintained that it was part of their traditional hunting grounds and home to a sacred burial site. Despite opposition from the local Indigenous community, the Township continued ahead with the infrastructure project. In early Spring 1990, a group of Mohawk people from Kanesetake established a modest blockade of a road just north of the City of Montréal in an effort to halt the golf course expansion. Threats of police intervention by April prompted the blockaders to arm themselves, fortify their position, and call for other Indigenous persons and allies to join in their cause. A disastrous raid of the Mohawk position in July led to the death of Sûreté de Québec police corporal Marcel Lemay, and the Canadian Armed Forces were called to respond to the crisis. The assault broadened as a result of the failed raid in early July— the Mohawks of Kahnawake decided to blockade the Mercier bridge out of solidarity with Kanesetake. Tensions continued to rise, especially among the 60 000 Settler commuters that used to Mercier Bridge every day to travel between Chateauguay and Montréal. While the conflict was prompted as an attempt to protect the traditional territory of a white pine forest, it quickly escalated to become a symbol of Indigenous resistance the larger political issue of Mohawk sovereignty. While little was resolved between the Mohawks of Kanesetake and the federal government in terms of Indigenous sovereignty, the widely-publicised armed conflict did provoke the creation of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Ottawa. The 350 million-dollar commission sought to examine the relationship between Indigenous peoples, the federal government, and the broader Canadian society. It is here that the language of reconciliation was first used in a substantial way to describe the process of healing Indigenous-Settler state relations. In the following decades, the term would be co-opted by Minister of Indian Affairs Jane Stewart and Prime Minister Stephen Harper in their apologies to Indigenous Canadians—in 1998 and 2008 respectively— for the abuses of the Residential Schools system.
The first official statement of apology from the federal government for the Residential Schools system was delivered by then-Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Jane Stewart, in January of 1998.

Her speech, delivered during a ceremony from which Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was notably absent, was titled “Statement of Reconciliation”. It was formally declared that this statement was the Canadian state’s response to the final report of RCAP. While it did acknowledge the commission’s position that colonial policy had been fundamentally misguided in its treatment of Indigenous peoples since pre-Confederation, the statement did not respond directly to the recommendations made by RCAP since as the dismantling of the Department of Indian Affairs or the establishment of an independent Aboriginal Parliament in Canada. Many Indigenous Canadians believed that Stewart’s statement lacked sincerity, especially since her speech deliberately omitted the word ‘apology’ as to avoid the potential legal implications of assuming this kind of responsibility for the abuses of students of Residential Schools. Others believed that the statement should have come from the Prime Minister

directly.