Indigenous struggle is unsettlement: Shana Siegel, ‘What disruption, whose status quo? Non-Native narratives of victimization surrounding a First Nations’ land reclamation’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous struggle is unsettlement: Shana Siegel, ‘What disruption, whose status quo? Non-Native narratives of victimization surrounding a First Nations’ land reclamation’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

13Apr16

Abstract: This paper examines some of the non-Native narratives of disruption that were constructed in opposition to a 2006 Haudenosaunee land reclamation in order to discern what these narratives can tell us about the future obstacles Canadians and their government will need to overcome if true reconciliation with First Nations is to be achieved. Some of these obstacles include Western conceptions of linear progress that continue to justify the ongoing dispossession of First Nations peoples from their territories and their treaty, Aboriginal, constitutional and human rights. Other obstacles include non-Native future expected profits from this dispossession, non-Native attachment to settler colonial lifestyles based on both of the former, and –closely related to Western conceptions of linear progress – the ongoing attempts to impose Canadian monoculture on First Nations peoples. The paper concludes with a brief suggestion that Western/Canadian monoculture is, in many ways, harmful to non-Native Canadians as well as those upon whom they seek to impose it. Though this exploration focuses on non-Native expressions of opposition to the 2006 reclamation, and acknowledges that not all non-Natives were involved in these expressions, these expressions are things that all Canadians need to reconcile within their own monoculture if they are to achieve true reconciliation with First Nations.

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