Land is the demand: Keith Cherry, ‘”The Kids don’t want reconciliation, they want Land Back”: thinking about decolonization and settler solidarity after the death of reconciliation’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Land is the demand: Keith Cherry, ‘”The Kids don’t want reconciliation, they want Land Back”: thinking about decolonization and settler solidarity after the death of reconciliation’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2024

17Mar24

Abstract: When Wet’suwet’en matriarch Freda Huson declared that ‘reconciliation is dead’ and called on supporters to ‘Shut Down Canada’, activists responded with a nationwide series of blockades and occupations. Many commenters, even those sympathetic to the Wet’suwet’en, rushed to defend the idea of reconciliation. Such responses fail to take the contributions this movement offers to decolonial thought seriously. Drawing on interviews with movement participants, I explore what participants mean by reconciliation and what they intend by declaring it dead, showing how participants reject forms of decolonization that center the needs of the settler state. I also explore Land Back as an emerging, grassroots alternative to reconciliation that centers the resurgence of Indigenous governance systems in place of the settler state. Finally I explore settlers’ place within this project and considers its relation to the resurgence school of thought.

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