Alexandra Lepine: Position of Innocence: Initial Thoughts on Settler Ideology and Victimhood in Canada

In the days since October 7th 2023, social media and all manner of news outlets have been flooded with images of death and tragedy in Gaza, but among the cacophony of suffering there has emerged a narrative of settler victimhood. While this narrative is especially fraught within the context of Israeli settlerism because of the specific ways in which the genuine oppression of the Jewish people and the Holocaust has been leveraged as proof of the impossibility of Israeli violence against Palestinians, this is by no means unique to Israeli settlerism. Settler victimhood has been mobilized within the past months (and decades) to whitewash the genocide being waged against Palestinians and transmute Palestinian self-defense into terrorist aggression, just as settler victimhood has been mobilized in North America against First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people for hundreds of years. It is essential that we understand what is happening to Palestinians as a settler-colonial project, not unlike the settler-colonies who daily arm and fund the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Canada is one such settler project, and the similarities between Canada and Israel’s performances of settler victimhood has not been lost on Indigenous people in Canada, who recognize themselves in the Palestinian people daily fighting for their lives, land, and liberation.
Furthermore, Canada’s Indian Act and its treatment of Indigenous people has been used as a template for settler-colonialism around the world. Its colonial policy was reported as an inspiration to Israeli settlement in Palestine,¹ and its reserve system has long been considered the blueprint for South African apartheid. Thus, Canadian settler-colonialism should be studied by anyone wishing to understand how settler-colonialism functions. Perhaps more importantly still, those of us who organize for a future beyond settler-capitalism here in Canada need to reinvigorate the tradition of material investigation. The situation continues to evolve, and our understanding of colonialism must evolve with it if we are to have a hope for the freedom of all Indigenous Peoples of the world. Those of us organizing in the imperial core, regardless of our social position or the axes of oppression we occupy, can best serve the global movement by rooting out settlerism and capitalism at home and embracing a materialist position. As such, this article is an attempt to draw preliminary conclusions about victimhood as an ideological feature of settler-colonialism and examine some of the symptoms of this feature—namely the rhetorical variant of victimhood that settlers use to avoid the reality of colonialism and obscure the path to liberation. This article considers examples of settler victimhood from recent events such as Trumpism, the Freedom Convoy, residential school denialism, and the curious phenomena of “Pretendianism,” in an attempt to disambiguate one of the ideological struggles our movements are faced with at this moment.
One begins, as ever, when considering questions of colonialism, with Fanon:

Colonialism is not satisfied with snaring people in its net, or of draining the colonized brain of any form or substance. With a kind of perverted logic, it turns its attention to the past of the colonized people and distorts it, disfigures it, destroys it. This effort to demean history prior to colonization today takes on a dialectical significance.²

Colonialism in Canada continues to function in this way. Settlers confronted with the actions of their ancestors attempt to temporally distance themselves from the events of colonization and render them equal to any inequalities present in traditional Indigenous societies: “Well, Native Americans kept slaves too,” or “Europeans learned scalping from Indigenous people.” The relative truth or untruth of these claims is irrelevant because they do not represent present, or even recent, manifestations of power. When this false equivalency is defeated, the settler inevitably falls back on the typical Hail Mary of “Well, we conquered North America fair and square, you people need to get over it.” In a split second the position of the settler changes from an attempt to establish innocence to that of a victor, a rhetorical move only possible when one already occupies a position of relative power. In perhaps even more insidious instances, there is a further attempt to establish settler innocence by posing oneself and one’s ancestors as innocent bystanders or even as victims of the Canadian government themselves. In both instances the action of colonization is located in the past, safely out of sight, in attempt to assuage settler guilt and comfort the settler psyche. As Tyler A. Shipley argues in his political history, Canada and the World:

Canadians today like to imagine that this country has moved beyond the racism of the past, but this is largely a myth sustained by the self-delusion of settlers who cannot bear the consequences of admitting Canadians came here as conquerors. The evidence that Canada remains a segregated society founded upon conquest is everywhere around us, if we only choose to look. Just as they once claimed Indigenous Peoples to be “savages” who “would scalp you as soon as look at you,” modern settlers peddle myths that bear equally little resemblance to the truth: They don’t pay taxes. They only get jobs because of affirmative action. All they do is whine about the past. These misleading platitudes are shared and affirmed at every level of Canadian settler society.³

When settlers are confronted with the reality that Canada remains a colonial project and that they themselves benefit from this project there is an ideological instinct to deny and deflect.
The specific iteration of settler victimhood with which we are currently faced, and which at its root is an ideological attempt to deny culpability for past wrongs, is in part a reaction against attempts at decolonization; more importantly we can understand it as emerging from the cleavage of Canada’s colonial ideology from its curated image as a multicultural nation state. By this I mean that the colonial government granting special rights and concessions to its internal colonies—in Canada this takes many forms, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)⁴—appears to the settler as an act of dispossession. Not necessarily because the settler is themselves a direct beneficiary of colonialism in the same way an early settler granted a homestead would be, but because the settler-colonial ideology that permeates all of Canadian society hinges on the idea that settlers deserve their current position in our social formation—or at the very least shouldn’t be blamed for it, as they did not benefit as much as those other settlers who are long dead, or those British or those Americans.⁵ The recent turn by settler-capitalist nations towards “inclusion,” is as much an attempt to retain this position of innocence as it is to address the deep disparities that exist between Indigenous people and settlers. One example of this turn towards inclusion that maintains colonial power structures would be the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which Canada reluctantly signed in 2021.⁶ Although UNDRIP claims that “nothing in this Declaration may be used to deny any peoples their right to self-determination, exercised in conformity with international law,” and acknowledges the right of self-determination, Canada’s sole focus has been “renewing the Government of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples” and the self-determination in question has been restricted to consultation on issues which would directly impact Indigenous people and the elimination of racism and discrimination on the basis of being Indigenous.⁷ The government of Canada’s definition of self-determination does not include the offer of secession, meaning that while Indigenous nations have a say over their legal status in Canada, they do not have a say over their statehood or sovereignty. The Canadian state is unwilling and incapable of fully doing away with colonialism, and so it seeks to reduce the outward appearance of its nature through the deployment of vulgar identity politics and toothless rights discourse, presenting itself as the sole source of empowerment for oppressed groups.
It is clear why settlers would gravitate to a position of innocence to avoid having to deal with the issues of the past: this position allows settler states to continue with settler-colonial policy while distancing themselves from an overtly genocidal version of colonialism through acts of reconciliation, eliminating the legal and political category of Indigenous, and rationalizing the continuation of the settler nation in place of an “eliminated” Indigenous population.⁸ But how does a position of victimhood emerge from a “supremacist” ideology? Meredith and Ryan Neville-Shepherd offer us an entry point into this puzzling rhetorical shift. They recall the 2019 viral video in which Omaha Elder Nathan Phillips was blocked and surrounded by MAGA teenagers on the steps the Lincoln Memorial near the end of the Indigenous Peoples’ March.⁹ In this video Phillips faces off with one teen wearing a MAGA hat (Nick Sandmann), while others chanted and even performed the infamous “Tomahawk Chop.”¹⁰ This event demonstrates how victimhood is rendered inaccessible to true victims of the settler-capitalist state and its cultural hegemony. Phillips suffered additional public backlash after the story hit major news outlets, proving that his “victimhood” as a Native man and long-time activist, nor even his status as a veteran, afforded him any true privileges in the face of systemic racism and colonialism. Allegedly, the young white Trump supporters fell victim to the court of public opinion as well. Nick Sandmann, the MAGA teen smirking jubilantly in the infamous picture that began circulating social media after the event, argued that the backlash he received was unjustified. And after additional video footage emerged showing Phillips had initially approached the teens himself, Sandmann successfully sued several major news outlets for defamation, stating at the Republican National Convention that he was the victim of a liberal culture war that was “anti-Christian, anti-conservative, [and] anti-Donald Trump.”¹¹ At the end of the day both Phillips and Sandmann were vilified by sections of the public, but Sandmann faced no real consequences; hell, he even got paid! The fact of the matter is that no matter what Phillips’ story is, or how much suffering he has experienced in his life at the hands of settler-capitalism, it would not measure up to the cultivated illusion of white victimhood.
The Neville-Shepherd article understands Sandmann’s victimhood as an example of rehearsed victimhood: “a performance of vulnerability that allows those in historically powerful positions to claim victim status by manifesting material evidence of their subjugation.”¹² Distinguished from therapeutic victimhood which emphasizes the individual experience of suffering, and material victimhood which is, as Bryan McCann argues, “grounded in political, historical, and economic contextualization,” rehearsed victimhood is an attempt to render the imagined oppression of white settlers material.¹³ In happening upon the “evidence” that Phillips approached him first, Sandmann seemingly manifested material proof that he was not the aggressor, and therefore could be nothing other than a victim. We are now living in an era in which fascists and conservatives are so emboldened, that the threat of public backlash is worn like a badge of honour and mobilized as “self-fulfilling evidence for their claim to marginalized status.”¹⁴
While certainly rehearsed victimhood is a defining feature of the current right-wing movement, it is not a new phenomenon. The actions of Indigenous people in the course of anti-colonial resistance are always used as an ideological justification for the disproportionate retaliation of the occupying force. Shipley offers up the example of the so-called Frog Lake Massacre in which a group of Cree killed nine European settlers in 1885.¹⁵ Never mind that the Cree had legitimate grievances with the Department of Indian Affairs agents and their running dogs which made up the death toll, or that their people had been intentionally starved by those same colonial administrators—never mind that the Cree had spared three other settlers in the course of this “massacre”—the response by the Canadian government was overwhelming force, justified in the eyes of the settler public as self-defense. The Cree were hunted down, subjected to a show trial, and hanged as a public spectacle.¹⁶ Today we see this same denial of settler responsibility, and the demonization of Indigenous self-defense. Blockades, like the one erected by the Wet’suwet’en to oppose the Coastal GasLink pipeline, are portrayed as unreasonable or illogical; land defenders are harassed by the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police)—it’s the same story.¹⁷ Indigenous people have the temerity to defend themselves and the land, and the colonial state turns their defense into an unprovoked act, which in turn justifies any further violence on the part of the settler state. We also see the same pattern in residential school denialism which attempts to convince settlers that they are being scapegoated for the crimes of a long-dead colonial force, that residential schools were merely the cost of civilization, or worse that the investigation into graves on residential school grounds might be “fake news.”¹⁸ This is of course the product of settler ideology, which takes white victimhood as implicit and denies the legitimacy of any political structures that are not subsumable by the state.
One would hope that in the decades that followed Canadian Confederation, the economic oppression experienced by the settler working class at the hands of the colonial state would have emboldened proletarians against the settler project, but historically this has not been the case. Large sections of the settler proletariat embraced colonial ideology, believing that they were deserving of the land as compensation for their service as colonial agents. Again, Shipley offers us a succinct explanation of this:

These promises were typically illusory. John A. Macdonald and I. G. Baker didn’t want to share their wealth with glorified peasants, even if they had English names. The horizon of settler capitalism was a highly stratified society where the majority worked hard and earned little, in order to sustain the enormous profits of the few. But in the establishment of that system, it needed a settler vanguard convinced that they would be the winners and that the only thing preventing them from realising their dreams was the presence of Indigenous people. Thus, in periods of Indigenous resistance, the elite needed to keep settlers on their side or face outright catastrophe.¹⁹

The specter of the warlike and resentful Native, and the rebellious and criminally minded Métis, was continually evoked to keep white settlers anxious, particularly those who were already living precarious lives at the fringes of Canada’s settler-capitalist economy. As Canada consolidated itself as a nation, settler subjectivity was also consolidated and Indigenous people were rendered subjects of the Canadian state. As Indigenous people were killed en masse—confined to reserves and residential schools and assimilated into the Canadian nation—the necessity of cultivating an overtly violent settler subjectivity dwindled and settler-capitalist ideology began to reproduce itself, primarily via social institutions. While the daily disenfranchisement, violence, and racism did not cease, settlers (particularly in the long-settled urban centres) began to slip into a collective denial about how colonization had unfolded in Canada. They pretended they did not know how the Black and Indigenous slaves in the town homes of Montreal and Toronto had arrived there, or convinced themselves this enslavement was the normal order of things because the colonial project had won, and the Indigenous polity no longer existed. They thought of reserves as far off impoverished places and tourist traps, and all the while school children and new immigrants were fed the myth that the “Indian” had all but disappeared and left the land to be inherited by deserving settler caretakers.
Even the radical left for a time was influenced by this powerful mythology. In 1925, the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) initiated a campaign for “Canadian Independence,” which openly attacked the British North America Act (BNA).²⁰ While the CPC was certainly aware of Indigenous struggles, there is little evidence to suggest that they considered Indigenous people an oppressed group separate from the settler proletariat, or that they acknowledged Indigenous movements for self-determination, or even considered that before colonization “Canada” was comprised by many Indigenous nations. The campaign made no mention of Indigenous liberation and was solely focused on liberating the settler proletariat from its colonial leadership.²¹ Three years prior, Chief Deskaheh of the Six Nations of the Grand River made an appeal to the League of Nations, asking them to recognize the sovereignty of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and his appeal was backed by the newly appointed delegate from the Irish Free State (though he was not allowed to vote in favor).²² How is it possible that the CPC was unaware of this? How is it possible that, as Marxists, their investigation into Canadian society did not reveal the contours of settler-colonialism? Without dwelling too much on this topic we can say that, at the very least, the methods of investigation employed by the CPC were insufficient and that settler ideology was so pervasive that even progressive settlers were unable to come to terms with their position as beneficiaries of colonialism. While the CPC was certainly campaigning against real economic suffering when they challenged the BNA, their inability to overcome settlerism on the ideological level kept them from having a complete materialist analysis of Canada and cut them off from the possibility of a united front between the settler proletariat and the oppressed Indigenous nations of Canada.
At this juncture we may be reminded of Fanon’s caution in Black Skin, White Masks that “[a] white man in the colonies has never felt inferior in any respect whatsoever.”²³ While this is true on the basis on racial and colonial hierarchy, we are left to wonder then how white victimhood has become so pervasive. However, this victim mentality is not based on the idea that the colonizer is inferior—quite the opposite. In rendering himself a victim, the colonizer attempts to occupy a space of moral superiority in order to nullify any accusations from the colonized. He claims colonization had good intentions, denies personal involvement, and decries his own oppression at the hands of his nation as a proletarian. The colonizer may even, and we shall expand more on this shortly, attempt to understand himself as colonized. This is a type of victimhood, specific to settler-colonialism, and which hinges on the pseudo-proletarian populism of the Fascist movement. Ignoring the benefits of colonialism, the settler imagines his oppression as a proletarian—and ignoring the complicated categories of labor aristocrat and petty bourgeois which may define his economic role—to be equal to or greater than that of the colonized person. He claims the resentment that colonized peoples feel towards him as a settler is unfounded. He imagines himself a martyr—occupying a position of moral and social superiority, fetishizing himself as a subject of colonization—and in doing so, polluting a potential wellspring of the anticolonial movement. He internalizes the colonial propaganda which claims the “special rights” of the colonized nation are equal or greater to the rights of the settler proletarian.
Here, it is necessary that we distinguish settlers from those who have taken up the cause of settler-colonialism. There are of course many settlers who, despite benefiting from the settler-colonial system, do not operate on the ideological basis of being settlers. Furthermore, there are those living in Canada who do not fit the term settler comfortably either due to their status as refugees, migrants, and/or immigrants who have been forced into settler-colonial patterns. I am in no way claiming that a settler cannot experience economic oppression, or a myriad of other oppressions, but any reasonable revolutionary understands that there is a material basis for Indigenous people and settler proletarians to organize together; our liberation is one and the same. As such, my use of the term “settler” should be taken contextually: I mean those who have internalized their role as settler.
Just as the settler takes on the guise of victim, so does the bourgeois adopt the guise of the proletarian. The bourgeois imagines himself as a hard-working proletarian both because he fetishizes labor and because he wants to ease his conscience. Both moves to innocence/victimhood rely on the reversal of the subject position between oppressor and oppressed. Again, this is an easily observable trend in the populist pseudo-blue collar politics of the far right. The Freedom Convoy is a pertinent example of a movement that presented itself as a working-class movement with the goal of securing rights for an oppressed group. A major claim by many of the “protestors” was that the vaccine mandate was preventing them from being able to work and that their personal freedom to choose not to be vaccinated was being infringed upon. The reality is that this was not a working-class protest—most of the protestors not even being proletarian truckers themselves—but was a protest in service of far right ideals. But this idea that the protestors were proletarians being targeted by the Trudeau government was an effective means of stirring up dissent and division. Many critics have compared the Freedom Convoy to Michael Kimmel’s concept of “aggrieved entitlement”—a perception that the benefits and/or status you believe yourself entitled to have been wrongfully taken away from you by unforeseen forces.²⁴ The settler’s victimhood is rooted in aggrieved entitlement. Settlers feel entitled to continue reaping colonial benefits, and those who have internalized their role as an occupying force are threatened by the idea that what they are entitled to may never come—or worse, may be given to groups deemed less-than by their ideology. The Freedom Convoy participants, lacking a material understanding of Canadian settler-capitalism and their role within it, blamed their woes on Trudeau, immigrants, and the progressive movement at large, seeking any possible route to victimhood.
Victimhood being deployed as a counter-tactic to progressive identity politics is so deeply and ironically North American that Mark Twain must have written this timeline himself. Not only does the far right fundamentally misunderstand identity politics, their performance of victimhood is not based on material oppression but in an imagined precarity that is really just equality at the bottom of the capitalist system. The cooptation of victimhood eases any psychological discomfort settlers have to reckon with when gaining consciousness, but it does so at the expense of the truly oppressed.²⁵ A 2018 survey from the Angus Reid Institute revealed that:

Fully 53 per cent [of Canadians] surveyed said the country spends too much time apologizing for residential schools and it’s time to move on (compared to 47 per cent who believe harm done by the schools continues and cannot be ignored); more than half of respondents said Indigenous people should have no special status that other Canadians don’t; the same proportion said Indigenous peoples would be better off if they integrated more into broader Canadian society, even if the cost is losing more of their traditions and culture.²⁶

In reality, the “special status” Indigenous people in Canada have does not make up for the economic and social disparities that exist between them and settlers. The incoherence of this position matters not, because any attempt to demonstrate that settler oppression does not exist, or is based in some other mechanism like class, is met with aggressive denial that mirrors how conservatives and fascists fear identity politics will be used against them. But this understanding of identity politics is completely untethered from any material conditions of oppression, and lives entirely in the ideological realm. This postmodern leap away from materialism is embraced by reactionaries and the liberal bourgeoisie alike, because they cannot win on the battlefield of materialism. History is not on their side.
Fanon points out that the colonist/settler will often argue that colonialism was for the good of the colonized or benefitted them in some way; we have already mentioned this, but it is necessary to return briefly to this notion.²⁷ It is becoming increasingly difficult for settlers to make this claim in the face of overwhelming historical evidence of colonization and ongoing settler colonial violence. While reactionaries still try to make this point, even going as far as denying genocide and quibble over which acts of colonialism fit this definition, large sections of the colonial state apparatus are turning towards a different version of settler colonialism.²⁸ No longer able to deny the wrongs of the past or point to advantages in the present, the liberal bourgeoisie, sets out to subsume indigeneity and present the nation as tolerant of Indigenous self-determination. Many settlers are perfectly comfortable with this, and it does not antagonize their worldview because it does nothing to alter the core material conditions of settler-colonialism. However, the settlers who remain entrenched in setter colonial ideology are left with two paths of psychological recourse to cope with this ideological shift: continue to deny the past or become Indigenous themselves.
There has been an incredible amount of overlap between the Freedom Convoy and residential school denialism. This makes perfect sense as both are connected to far right movements and parties like the People’s Party of Canada that, in addition to being settlerist movements, have an economic stake in continuing to keep Canada capitalist and dependent on extractive industries—a major front of ongoing colonialism in Canada. However, victimhood has not only been deployed by these movements to coopt working class symbolism and to reinforce white supremacist power structures, but it has also been used to attempt to “indigenize” far right ideas. Bound up in the notion that settlers are deserving of the land is the homestead principle—the idea that working land that was not being “actively used” renders it the property of the person who does the work.²⁹ In a bizarre attempt to further cement their claim to land, settlers have attempted to claim Indigenous status. The right reinterprets the Indigenous connection to land as an extension of the homestead principle; this reinforces the aforementioned moral and social high ground and opens the possibility of the settler becoming Indigenous himself. If the settler is Indigenous, he is able to further marginalize the immigrant on the basis of his “identity” as Indigenous and he shields himself from being “marginalized” through the process of decolonization.
Pretendianism, as it is widely known now, is the result of these ideological features of settler colonialism. By clinging to a past relative who may have been Indigenous, or fabricating one entirely, the settler is able to relieve some of the guilt they hold about benefitting from colonization or deny those benefits entirely.³⁰ It is an attempt of the settler to regain humanity lost through the perpetuation of colonialism. There are of course many people in Canada who have mixed blood, or who occupy odd positions within the Canadian social formation. (I myself am one such person, being of both Métis and settler heritage.) However, there is a vast difference between understanding that your family history and identity is complex and claiming to belong wholly and presently to an oppressed nation. Pretendianism is defined, not just by the exaggeration or fabrication of Indigenous heritage, but by the opportunistic deployment of that identity in disconnection from the political and social life of an Indigenous nation. When I speak of pretendianism, here, I am not talking about non-status, mixed-race, or reconnecting Indigenous people, as they have a material claim of varying degrees, to the experience of colonial oppression. However, I would urge anyone in one of those positions, as I do myself daily, to consider how you can organize to serve your people and their eventual liberation—consider how your complicated identity is being used now, as a means of reinforcing the myth of the post-colonial and multicultural Canadian state. And further, to consider what comes after our liberation from settler capitalism and what kind of political subjectivity best serves that future or may emerge because of it.
During the Freedom Convoy, many right-wing organizations and people opportunistically used Every Child Matters banners and orange shirts, to draw people into the argument that the government was forcing children to get vaccinated.³¹ They used the horror of residential schooling to fear monger and associate their movement with genuine victimhood. Freedom Convoy Leader Pat King, for example, contributed to this narrative heavily and even claimed Indigenous status himself.³² While this seems like a counterintuitive move for a fascist movement to make, it unfortunately is not: the fascist, the patriot, the settler all identify with the nation, and the settler-colonial nation’s ultimate goal is to eliminate, by genocide or assimilation, the Indigenous people and their identity.³³ Pretendianism is another attempt to subsume the political and cultural identity of Indigenous people and nations. Furthermore, it is an attempt to fix the Indigenous subject in a state of victimhood, which can then be leveraged more readily by those who already occupy positions of power within settler-colonialism.
But victimhood and moral martyrdom are not our goals. The right believes victimhood is the radical left’s source of ideological power and so attempts to outmaneuver us on the basis of ideology. However, our goal is the liberation of all peoples from economic and social oppression. This goal will not be realized on the basis of ideology alone. This historic task necessitates that we understand our material conditions as thoroughly as possible, including the sources and characteristics of oppression on the basis of identity. We should not endeavor to make these categories of identity transhistorical, but to understand them, as we do class, as the outgrowth of features of our current epoch which must be smashed. It feels impossible right now to escape the petulant screams of settlers and fascists, lamenting the shift that is occurring in human consciousness, but this is all the more reason we need to get organized. The settler proletariat has a vested interest in the destruction of the settler capitalist state, but this destruction is impossible without large-scale collaboration between the proletarian movement and the Indigenous movement in these settler capitalist formations. Indigenous people do not stand in the way of settler proletarian liberation; “Land Back” is not a threat but a revolutionary promise. It is only the internalized white supremacy of the settler proletarian, which tells him his exploitation is at the hands of Indigenous people and not the settler bourgeoisie, that stands in the way of cooperation between these movements.

1. Mike Krebs, “Architect of apartheid: Canada’s support for Israel has taken many forms, but perhaps its greatest gift has been its example,” Briarpatch Magazine, May 1, 2020, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/architect-of-apartheid.; Brandi Morin, “Canada and the First Nations: A history of broken promises,” Aljazeera, March 17, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/3/17/canada-and-the-first-nations-a-history-of-broken-promises.
2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 149.
3. Tyler A. Shipley, Canada and the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2020), 90.
4. The TRC “was created through a legal settlement between Residential Schools Survivors, the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit representatives, and the parties responsible for creation and operation of the schools: the federal government and the church bodies.” The TRC’s mandate “was to inform all Canadians about what happened in residential schools. The TRC documented the truth of Survivors, their families, communities, and anyone personally affected by the residential school experience. This included First Nations, Inuit, and Métis former residential school students, their families, communities, the churches, former school employees, government officials and other Canadians.” “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada,” National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, University of Manitoba, March 15, 2024, https://nctr.ca/about/history-of-the-trc/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-of-canada/. The TRC’s final report was published in 2015 and has been the subject of heated debate since then, with many Indigenous people feeling it does not go far enough and many settlers rejecting its content as inaccurate. In a 2019 opinion piece for the National Post, Conrad Black, a central figure in conservative Canadian media, called the report “shocking and dangerous.” Conrad Black, “Conrad Black: The truth about truth and reconciliation,” National Post, March 20, 2021, https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-7.
5. For further reading on the topic of legitimizing settler colonialism: Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 36, 105–106.
6. Department of Justice, Backgrounder: United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, December 10, 2021, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/declaration/about-apropos.html#shr-pg0
7. UN General Assembly, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: resolution / adopted by the General Assembly, A/RES/61/295, October 2, 2007, https://www.refworld.org/legal/resolution/unga/2007/en/49353, March 13, 2024; Department of Justice, Backgrounder.
8. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocidal Research, vol. 8, no. 4 (2006): 141.
9. Neville-Shepard, Meredith and Ryan Neville-Shepard, “Outfitting the Conservative Civil Rights Movement: Rehearsed White Victimhood and the MAGA Hat,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 25 no. 4 (2022): 35–63.
10. The “Tomahawk Chop” is a sports celebration associated with many sports teams in the US, including the Washington Commanders, which previous to 2019 were the Washington “Redskins,” a name widely acknowledged as racist and anti-Indigenous. Craig Melvin, “The Tomahawk chop and other reasons why the incident at Lincoln Memorial is offensive,” MSNBC, January 21, 2019, video, 1:48, https://www.msnbc.com/craig-melvin/watch/the-tomahawk-chop-and-other-reasons-why-the-incident-at-lincoln-memorial-is-offensive-1429428291889.
11. Neville-Shepard, Meredith and Ryan Neville-Shepard. “Outfitting the Conservative Civil Rights Movement: Rehearsed White Victimhood and the MAGA Hat.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 25, no. 4 (2022), 35–63.
12. Neville-Shepard, 39.
13. Neville-Shepard, 39–40, quoted from Bryan J. McCann (2007), Therapeutic and Material hood: Ideology and the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty Controversy, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 4:4, 382–401, DOI: 10.1080/14791420701632931
14. “Outfitting the Conservative Civil Rights Movement,” 39.
15. Shipley, 66–67.
16. Shipley, 67.
17. Blockades are a widely used tactic in Indigenous activism in Canada, both as an act of asserting sovereignty and protest. More information on Wet’suwet’en can be found here: “Criminalization of Wet’suwet’en Land Defenders,” Amnesty International, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/03/criminalization-wetsuweten-land-defenders/.
18. Niigan Sinclair and Sean Carleton, “Residential School Denialism Is on the Rise,” The Tyee, June 20, 2023, https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/06/20/Residential-School-Denialism-On-Rise/.
19. Shipley, 69.
20. Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada (Bloomington: Trafford Publishing, 2006), 167.
21. Tim Buck, “Canada and the British Empire,” March 21, 1925, The Worker.
22. “Six Nations appeals to the League of Nations, 1922–31,” History Beyond Borders, May 26, 2020, https://historybeyondborders.ca/?p=189.
23. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 73.
24. Conroy, J. Olive, “‘Angry white men’: the sociologist who studied Trump’s base before Trump,” The Guardian, February 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/27/michael-kimmel-masculinity-far-right-angry-white-men.
25. Michelle Cyca, “The Dangerous Allure of Residential School Denialism,” The Walrus, January 8, 2024, https://thewalrus.ca/residential-school-denialism/.
26. Aaron Hutchins, “On First Nations issues, there’s a giant gap between Trudeau’s Rhetoric and what Canadians really think: exclusive poll,” Maclean’s, June 7, 2018, https://macleans.ca/news/canada/on-first-nations-issues-theres-a-giant-gap-between-trudeaus-rhetoric-and-what-canadians-really-think/.
27. Fanon, 149.
28. The Canadian Press, “‘Genocide’ isn’t the right word to describe what’s been done to Indigenous women and girls: Andrew Scheer,” The National Post, June 10, 2019, https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/canadas-treatment-of-indigenous-women-not-a-genocide-andrew-scheer.
29. John Locke, “Two Treatises of Government (1823),” March 15, 2024, https://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf.
30. Jean Teillet, “Indigenization: How Genealogy and DNA Justify Race Shifting in Eastern Canada,” Canadian Issues (Spring 2020), 40–43.
31. Orange shirts were adopted as the symbol of residential school survivors, later the campaign also adopted the slogan “Every Child Matters.” John Boyko, “Orange Shirt Day,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, September 28, 2021, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/orange-shirt-day.
32. Max Lamoureaux and Anya Zoledziowski, “An Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theory Video Went Viral. An Indigenous Community Paid the Price,” Vice, October 20, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvwep/conspiracy-black-lake-pat-king.
33. Wolfe, 141.