‘Truth before reconciliation’: the difficulties of transforming higher education in settler colonial contexts^*

* The first part of this title comes from a lecture by Patricia Barkaskas and Sarah Hunt (2017).

ABSTRACT

In response to the contemporary context of reconciliation in Canada, colleges and universities have made efforts to ‘Indigenise’ their campuses, extending earlier, Indigenous-led efforts to create more space for Indigenous peoples and knowledges. While many welcome these efforts, others express concern that they fail to go beyond conditional inclusion to fundamentally shift relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. In this article, I examine these developments and suggest that most institutions and individuals have yet to face the full extent of their complicity in colonisation. I argue that perhaps it is only by doing so, and thus, arriving at the impossibility of reconciliation, that a transformation of settler–Indigenous relationships might be possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• indigenisation
• reconciliation
• decolonisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Sharon Stein http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6995-8274

Notes

* The first part of this title comes from a lecture by Patricia Barkaskas and Sarah Hunt (2017).

1 I use ‘settler’ in the sense developed by Flowers (2015): ‘a critical term that denaturalizes and politicizes the presence of non-Indigenous people on Indigenous lands, but also can disrupt the comfort of non-Indigenous people by bringing ongoing colonial power relations into their consciousness’ (p. 33–34).

2 In Canada, ‘Indigenous peoples’ encompasses First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

3 This extraction does not only happen domestically but also abroad. For instance, many multinational mining corporations operating abroad are headquartered in Canada.