White Terror, Canada's Indian Residential Schools, and the Colonial Present: from Law Towards a Pedagogy of Recognition

What does it mean to say that settler states have a colonial present? In this thesis, I first draw upon the anti-colonial theory of Frantz Fanon (1963, 1967) and contemporary anti-colonial theorists, to understand the nature of colonial power and settler occupation. I develop the theoretical framework of “white terror as colonial force field” structured by the triadic relation of land—terror—white identity, and emphasize that any given site within a colonial force field must be understood as systematically interrelated with other sites, maintained by a settler collectivity. The old European political rationality of “possessive individualism,” the historical rationale for not only capitalist accumulation but modern liberal law, government, and sovereignty, is especially useful for tracing interconnections (symbolic and material) among sites within a colonial force field. This ideology functions, in Fanon’s words, to “bring settler and native into being” through processes which dehumanize the latter as property. Marking the Indigenous collective as inherently damaged, reconstitutes the settler collective as legitimate occupiers of land. Next, I provide an illustration of this theoretical framework. I argue that the Canadian government and law’s response to Indigenous peoples’ demand for justice regarding the genocidal violence of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) must be read within the context of a contemporary colonial force field. I trace possessive individualism and the ontological force of property in IRS case law, specifically, R v. Plint, Blackwater v. Plint, Cloud v. Canada and Baxter v. Canada. I also examine the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement and Canada’s 2008 Apology to “former students” of IRS. I show how discursive strategies on the part of Canada, recuperate and perpetuate anew the familiar relation of colonized and colonizer. Canada’s response is thereby intimately tied to issues of land, white identity and sovereignty today. Finally, I lay the groundwork for an anti-colonial pedagogy of recognition which requires settler occupiers to recognize the re-colonizing moves which reconstitute settlers as racially dominant in relation to Indigenous nations and their lands. This pedagogy has relevance for the Government’s (now unfolding) IRS Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and other anti-colonial social change and education initiatives.Ph