Legitimacy, citizenship and state redress

Abstract

This article explores how state redress programmes work to legitimate the state. The primary thesis concerns how state redress aims to restructure citizenship identity. This restructuring enables civic identification by victims of state wrongdoing which in turn enables greater legitimacy. Consequently, redress constitutes a movement by the state from lesser to greater legitimacy. The article illustrates the legitimating thesis by examining two Canadian responses to state wrongdoing with regard to indigenous peoples, Gathering Strength (1998) and the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (Indian Residential Schools Adjudication Secretariat). This context provides material for contrasting the legitimating thesis with a competing approach – redress as ‘therapy’.

Keywords:

• legitimacy
• citizenship
• indigenous peoples
• reconciliation
• redress
• Canada

Notes

 1. An exception is James (1999).

 2. Including Brooks 1999, Barkan 2000, De Greiff 2006, Govier 2006, Miller and Rahul 2006 and Walker 2006. Further references are provided in Note 5.

 3. Examples of campaign accounts include Pross (1998) and Maki et al. (1999). Literature focusing on particular modes of redress includes Hayner 2002, Nobles 2008, Smith 2008, Celermajer 2009. Works emphasizing justification include Ivison 2002 (Chapter 5), Thompson 2002 and Brooks 2004. The broader question of how redress fits into historiography is posed in Brown (2001) and Torpey (2006).

 4. This is less true of scholars working in the critical theory tradition. See the citations in the final paragraph of this section.

 5. Forms of corrective justice appear in Gathering Strength and IRSSA as programs for monetary reparations. But corrective justice is clearly insufficient as a descriptive theory. State redress programs frequently contain elements for which corrective justice offers little descriptive guidance. Inadequate on its own, corrective justice is part of the best descriptive theory. For an overview of corrective justice see Benson (1992).

 6. However for literature locating Canadian civic identity with regard to complex ethnocultural structures examples include Yack (1996), Thobani (2007) and Harder (2010).

 7. For critical discussion see: Pupavac (2001), Roth and Forges (2002), Humphrey (2005) and Chrisjohn and Young (2006).

 8. The ADR was relaunched in 2003/2004 before being incorporated into IRSSA.

 9. IRSSA also included $20 million for commemoration initiatives and $125 million for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

10. For example, Gathering Strength announced itself as ‘…the start of a new chapter’ and ‘a turning of the page’ (Canada 1998, p. 25). But note Gathering Strength suggested that making its new partnership a reality would be ‘a long journey’ (Canada 1998, p. 6). Also the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was a long-term commitment that ended in 2010.

11. This ‘negotiation’ appears to be less inclusive than the Assembly of First Nations would have liked (Jung 2009, p. 16).

12. Opting-out preserved the individual's rights to sue. Actual opt-out numbers were around 340 (Popic 2008).

13. The program is available on the TRC website: http://www.trcnationalevents.ca.

14. I thank both the reviewers for the Journal for pressing me to expand on this point