Michelle Daigle’s “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy” is another article from the list I got from my friend Matthew Anderson. Daigle is Cree, a member of Constance Lake First Nation in northern Ontario’s Treaty 9 territory, and a professor of geography at the University of Toronto. My summary of Daigle’s argument is long, but I think it’s an important discussion, and I don’t want to miss or ignore any of its details.

Daigle begins by locating herself on the Indigenous lands where she has lived in Canada and the United States, and describes her return to this country in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. She describes media coverage of TRC meetings as “sensationalized accounts of Indigenous peoples’ suffering coupled with white settler Canadians’ hollow displays of recognizing and mourning ‘past’ state violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples through the residential school system” (704). Those “narratives of Indigenous suffering and trauma,” while long familiar to her, “readily assaulted my everyday interactions with renewed zealousness” (704). That experience “was further magnified as visual media depicted one imager after the other of white Canadians shedding tears over this ‘past’ violence and images of Indigenous peoples forgiving and embracing politicians,” images which Daigle dismisses as “spectacles of reconciliation” and “a spectacle of settler sorrow coupled with a state-led production of good-feeling reconciliation” (704). Those spectacles made her angry and resentful. “I did not know when I would be subjected to trauma-based stories and images as I picked up the Sunday paper or turned on the radio as I drove to work,” she writes. “I was angry because my own family, friends, and mentors’ experiences had become blunted sensationalized accounts of violence, abuse, and trauma that were consumed by the white settler gaze” (704). She was also angry because the stories survivors told were often determined to be “uncredible and unreliable” by the TRC’s “colonial and racist forms of evidence gathering and evaluation” (704). “Meanwhile,” she continues,

the state’s fetishization of Indigenous suffering tied to the history of residential schools masked the ongoing truths of the colonial present, including state violence inflicted on land and water protectors, the ongoing apprehension of Indigenous children through the child welfare system and heteropatriarchal violence against Indigenous women, queer, Two-Spirit and trans individuals. (704)

Indigenous erasure was reproduced in Canada “through unrelenting performances of recognition and remorse” that wore Daigle out (704).

TRC events, Daigle continues, “had become confessional spaces of white guilt that were shaped by an ask-the-Indian dynamic whereby white people take up the majority of the space by asking Indigenous peoples what they could do to ‘achieve’ reconciliation and be a reconciled settler” (705). “Responsibility was oftentimes put on Indigenous peoples to do the emotional and time-consuming work of mitigating white guilt and creating a forgiving space to move forward,” she writes, while the colonial basis of Canada’s dependence on the extraction of natural resources—the focus of Daigle’s research as a geographer—was ignored (705). “I was bombarded by well-intentioned white Canadians who wanted to know specific steps and courses of action they could take to reconcile their relationship with Indigenous peoples,” she notes, and she was pressed by non-Indigenous faculty who had “suddenly jumped on the reconciliation bandwagon” to join their research projects. She was also asked by faculty, staff, and students about how to incorporate local Indigenous content in their courses. “I did not know most of these people,” she writes, “and often wondered why they were contacting a Cree visitor who was new to these Indigenous territories while they had lived there for many years” (705). She decided that “approaching an Indigenous academic—specifically an Indigenous woman—was likely less intimidating, unsettling, and definitely less time consuming than building relationships with the community on whose lands we found ourselves on,” and that “the unified Indian subject was becoming reified as Indigenous political and legal pluralities were quickly overlooked in settlers’ rush to reconcile” (705). For Daigle, “the time and emotional labor of doing this work for complete strangers was not sustainable in the long run and would inevitably take time away from the community-based relationships and work” that were important to her (705).

At the same time, Daigle’s grandmother, mother, and five siblings were seeking reparations for the years they had spent at St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario, a difficult, time-consuming, and hostile process. The federal government fought the St. Anne’s survivors every step of the way. As well, resistance was building “against resource extraction in Mushkegowuk territory as a number of communities were issued impact benefit agreements for mining developments, and as increasing rates of birth deformities, miscarriages, and infertility were correlated to the rising levels of methylmercury in our territory” (706). Her relatives in places like Thunder Bay were experiencing “white supremacist violence inflicted by schools and police officers,” and the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and Site C dam projects were approved despite Indigenous opposition. It was clear, Daigle writes, that “despite grand apologies and promises, the economic and political sovereignty of the colonial state trumped responsibilities to diverse Indigenous nations across the country” (706). 

“Despite the myriad and interconnected sites of colonial violence on Indigenous lands and bodies,” Daigle writes,

the Canadian government and many Canadians proclaim that they have entered a new era of reconciliation that is restoring ethical and responsible relations with Indigenous peoples.  Building on critiques of reconciliation led by Indigenous scholars, I argue that this is an era marked by the spectacle of reconciliation—a public, large-scale and visually striking performance of Indigenous suffering and trauma alongside white settler mourning and recognition—which secures, legitimates, and effectively reproduces white supremacy and settler futurity in Canada. (706)

Daigle draws on essays by Sandy Grande and Natalie J.K. Baloy which use Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle to argue that the spectacle of Indigeneity “is colonially framed through trauma or multicultural discourses, erasing the complexity of Indigeneity that is lived everyday through multiple embodied experiences across diverse landscapes” (706). Because of such spectacles, “settlers’ understandings of and encounters with Indigenous peoples become shaped through spectacular images rather than through direct experiences and relationships” (706-07). Spectacles “produce a false consciousness of time and space by reinscribing teleological narratives of colonialism and by restricting colonial relations and violence to the space of residential schools,” she writes (707). Moreover, “the language of renewing Indigenous-state relations and of reconciliation (rather than conciliation) ideologically imply that diplomatic and respectful relationships between the colonial government and Indigenous peoples once existed and can be returned to” (707).

The spectacle of reconciliation spatially limits colonial violence to isolated residential schools, thereby “erasing its various manifestations through, for example, the mass genocide of Indigenous peoples through warfare and the illegal theft of land” (707). Those erasures, Daigle continues, happen in the colonial present as “‘the archive of images’” (she cites Baloy here) “that make up settler colonial spectacles become centered and severed from the larger terrain of colonial violence that Indigenous peoples and lands continue to be subjected to” (707). Thus, “white settlers’ spectacular performances of apologies, land acknowledgments, and multicultural celebrations of Indigenous culture and art become crucial in reifying geographies of nation purity on a large scale” (707). Thus, “‘spectator-settlers’” (Daigle cites Baloy again—an article I need to read, clearly) “do not merely assume a passive role of spectator of voyeur, but take on active roles in a spectacular performative politics that depoliticizes Indigenous-settler relations, rather than activating political agencies that are accountable to Indigenous peoples on whose lands they live and work on” (707). These spectacular performances also legitimate and reproduce colonial hegemony in Canada (707). For instance, while the visibility of colonial violence in residential schools has threatened Canada’s “global reputation as a benevolent and peaceful nation,” the solution to that problem has been “the endless performance of sympathy and remorse coupled with the production of good feelings of reconciliation” as “part of the remedy and ostensible realization of justice for ‘past’ wrongs” (707).

Daigle draws on the work of Tanana Athabascan scholar Dana Million to argue that “responsibilities to Indigenous peoples are further severed as spectacles reify discourses of a unified wounded Indian subject that was codified and naturalized under the Indian Act, erasing Indigenous political and legal pluralities across space” (707) and reframing them through narratives of trauma and suffering (708). For that reason, “non-Indigenous people continue to have ruptured understandings of Indigeneity and what it means to embody responsible relations with Indigenous peoples, not to mention what it means to activate responsible relations with Indigenous peoples who experience colonial power in differential ways through, for example, heteropatriarchal violence” (708). The “erasure of responsibilities to Indigenous peoples occurs on a large scale,” Daigle argues (708).

Here Daigle turns to consider universities as crucial sites of settler colonial relations “as well as an intrinsic part of the settler colonial state,” hoping that her critiques “might come into dialog with those mounted against recognition-based strategies taking shape across post-secondary institutions in other settler colonial contexts” (708). She writes, “white settler futurities, including university futurities, remain unchallenged despite of good-feeling and albeit good intentioned reconciliation mandates” (709). The colonial power relations between “Indigenous and settler administrators, faculty, students, and staff on university campuses” cannot be “severed from the larger terrain of Indigenous land and bodily dispossession that universities continue to be complicit in on and off campus” (709). Her intention is “to trace how universities figure into present colonial capitalist relations on Indigenous territories” and “to contribute to ongoing dialogues on geographies of responsibility by further nuancing conceptualizations of social and spatial difference as they pertain to Indigenous peoples’ calls for responsibility and relational accountability along the lines of white settler/property and Indigenous/land and bodily dispossession” (709). Daigle asks what responsibility means “when one is occupying stolen Indigenous lands or is connected to such dispossession through the uneven power geometries of global colonial-capitalist development, as unsettling as that might be” (709-10). That’s one of the questions my own research asks.

At this point, Daigle returns to the spectacle of residential schools and The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, which was opened with an apology that situated colonial violence in the past rather than something that is ongoing and contemporary (710). That apology “marked an exceptional performance of recognition and remorsefulness,” part of “a larger architecture of performative acts that are increasingly visible on the UBC campus since the onset of the TRC” (710). She links that performance to the land acknowledgments that had become common on the UBC campus and elsewhere:

Many land acknowledgments on the UBC campus, and other university campuses, continue to be respectful and meaningful as the people undertaking them—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—do so in a manner which activates the relational accountability that is embedded in this legal and political practice, by calling up one’s kinship relations and, in UBC’s case, how those come into relationship (or should) with Musqueam people, lands, and waters. Furthermore, in such instances, land acknowledgments are proceeded by events, workshops, and seminars that critically and constructively take up settler colonialism, and center Indigenous peoples and knowledge in relation to the land. (711)

However, most land acknowledgments do not meet that standard. They are, Daigle writes, “hollow gestures of lip service as routine-like territorial acknowledgments are quickly forgotten and brushed aside to resume business as usual, according to well-established colonial and racialized power asymmetries” (711). Daigle’s reference to land acknowledgments as a “legal and political practice” (711) suggests that she sees this practice as rooted in Indigenous diplomacy, which is a contested notion, as Lila Asher, Joe Curnow, and Amil Davis suggest. 

Daigle wants people to think about “why this political and legal practice is important for Indigenous peoples in the region, and the personal responsibility they are expected to take on in making a land acknowledgment as a visitor on Indigenous territories” (711). She complains that settlers making such acknowledgments are more invested in pronouncing names correctly—getting their lines correct—“than actually learning about the place where they live and work, with all of the complexities of historical and ongoing colonial dispossession and violence, elaborate and sophisticated Indigenous kinship networks, and the legal orders and authorities that have cared for that place for millennia” (711). “In many instances, territorial acknowledgments merely become acts of multicultural recognition of Indigenous territories, void of any real political and legal change in structural relations between Indigenous hosts, faculty, students, and staff, and educational institutions and settlers working at such institutions,” she continues. “Indeed, such performances further propagate the myth that Canadians are reconciling their relationship and that everything is okay” (711). What might those changes in structural relations look like, though? There is a vagueness in this paragraph that bothers me; I would like to know what kind of legal and political changes between, say, settler faculty and Indigenous students that Daigle considers necessary, changes that land acknowledgments do not (and, I would argue, with Daigle, cannot possibly) make happen.

For Daigle, land acknowledgments are therefore part of the “plethora of performative politics” on Canadian university campuses, and they have caused “many Indigenous faculty, students, and staff and, most importantly, the original caretakers of those territories, to ask what follows such performances of recognition and remorse, or what should be put in action instead of hollow gestures and performances” (711). “In the case of land acknowledgments, for example, what are the responsibilities of individuals within universities, beyond simply performing routine acknowledgments, or, as an implication of adopting this practice? Or, best yet, what responsibilities should they be taking on as a means of having the privilege to adopt this political and legal practice in the first place?” (711). These are excellent questions, and I hope Daigle gives us some sense of what the answers to them might be.

Daigle notes that some universities require students to take an Indigenous studies course, and that others are including Indigenous content in their curricula (711). “Ironically, such mandates, while often hollow in creating transformative change run deep in the responsibility that is placed on Indigenous faculty, students, and staff, as well as local Elders and community members who take on the brunt of the time and labor, including emotional labor, to implement reconciliatory initiatives,” she contends. “That is, Indigenous peoples are routinely identified as the subjects on campus who are responsible for creating a space that is deserving of their presence while simultaneously educating their colleagues about colonization and Indigeneity (not to mention, at times, attending to their white fragility in doing so)” (712). In other words, “the rush to decolonize and Indigenize reifies colonial power asymmetries across Canadian university campuses” (712). There is a lack of institutional and interpersonal support for the Indigenous people who undertake this work, and “Indigenous self-determination is denied as mandates are set without proper consultation and consent while the onus of implementation is placed on Indigenous peoples as they are routinely asked to lend their time and expertise to carry out hollow mandates for Indigenous content” (712). 

For Daigle, following Eve Tuck, Canadian educational institutions need to begin this process by acknowledging how they “have not only played a role in assimilating Indigenous peoples but have and continue to indoctrinate Canadians with colonial and racialized discourses of Indigenous peoples and places” (712). She suggests that “it is precisely these types of settler colonial legacies and continuities that must be centered in courses rather than centring local Indigenous culture in ways that do not fundamentally change colonial power, and perpetuate the illusion that feel-good curriculum content on culture somehow equates being ‘reconciled’” (712). Courses should instead “compel students to think about how they benefit from the structures of settler colonialism and white surpremacy,” she continues, citing a talk given by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson at the University of Alberta (712). “Indigenous content should perhaps be reframed as content on colonialism that centers Indigenous activism and scholarship, to activate responsibilities to Indigenous places and peoples,” Daigle writes (712-13). Administrators need to spend money on all of this, particularly since Canadian universities “stand to fiscally benefit from the new pots of money that will be made available through calls for reconciliation”—I’m not sure those “pots of money” have actually materialized—and as administrators capitalize on the banner of reconciliation to promote the university’s reputation, credibility, and research which ostensibly seeks to reconcile settler Canadians’ relationship with Indigenous peoples” (713). That spending will need to include hiring Indigenous faculty to design and teach courses on colonialism (713). Indigenous Elders need to be appropriately compensated—a serious lack at my university—and “non-Indigenous administrators, faculty, and staff should be educated and trained on why these mandates are important, so they too can be responsible for explaining and defending this to students and colleagues” (713). Anti-colonial course content needs to be “implemented through a range of courses in a critical and constructive manner,” and “course content and pedagogy must center the experiences of Indigenous and other racialized students rather than re-centering whiteness in the classroom as the normative starting point” (713). All of these recommendations are sound, and yet it’s hard for me to imagine how financially stressed universities are going to be able to implement them, particularly since the “pots of money” for reconciliation appear to have not materialized.

“My intention in reiterating these recommendations is not to provide a prescriptive formula, nor is my intention to argue for a reframing of reconciliation,” Daigle concludes. Instead, she notes that “Indigenous self-determination lies in the autonomy to remain unreconciled” (714). Her recommendations are, she suggests, just a starting point. “A move from hollow performances to the aforementioned systemic changes is a good start,” she continues, but those changes would “remain inadequate if universities are to truly reckon with their role in reproducing colonial dispossession and violence in the present” (714). What Daigle wants to see happen, then, is a complete rethinking of what universities are and do, including a refusal to take donations from resource-extraction companies “that continue to violate Indigenous jurisdiction and inflict egregious physical and sexual violence on Indigenous peoples around the globe” (714). But Daigle is not just calling for an institutional revolution. “On a more interpersonal scale, many white settler faculty, students, and staff continue to engage in performances of recognition yet quickly flee, retreat, or become defensive when they are asked to sit with what it means to be more responsible and accountable to Indigenous peoples given that they are occupying stolen lands,” she writes. “Indeed, the mere mention of Indigenous demands for land restitution threatens the very foundation of colonial hegemony which the university and many of those who benefit from this institution continue to be heavily invested in” (714-15). Her understanding of the responsibilities that are owed to Indigenous peoples, then, is “not a performance or feel-good mandate, but relations of responsibility and accountability based on Indigenous law that Indigenous peoples continue to embody, regenerate, and demand for radical and transformative change” (715).

If I understand Daigle’s conclusion, she is demanding the kinds of changes that would constitute decolonization. The goals she outlines might be necessary, and I do appreciate their concrete nature, but I’m not sure that they are reachable, given the financial pressures universities experience. On a personal level, even after years of research, I’m still not sure what it might mean for me “to sit with what it means to be more responsible and accountable to Indigenous peoples” given that I am “occupying stolen lands,” or how those lands could be restored to Indigenous peoples without leaving me homeless. Daigle might dismiss such questions as defensiveness, but there are more than 30 million settlers in Canada, and we aren’t going to leave: most of us have no where else to go. So while I appreciate Daigle’s concrete proposals for changing universities, those changes would require broader social and economic changes that seem impossible. That’s the problem with utopian solutions to problems: as the etymology of utopia suggests—it’s a combination of two Greek words, ou (meaning not) and topia (meaning place)—utopias don’t actually exist. I don’t mean to disparage Daigle’s article—it’s important and worth reading—but while I would support the general thrust of her ambitions, I still find myself confused about how, in practical terms, to get there from here. One thing I’m certain of, though: my walking practice, or any notions of embodied territorial acknowledgments, would be dismissed by Daigle as performances that are hollow and therefore pointless.

Works Cited

Asher, Lila, Joe Curnow, and Amil Davis. “The Limits of Settlers’ Territorial Acknowledgments.” Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 48, no. 3, 2018, pp. 316-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1468211.

Daigle, Michelle. “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy.” EPD: Society and Space, vol. 37, no. 4, 2019, pp. 703-21.