“There’s no word in my language for reconciliation”: Challenging the settler appropriation of the discourse of reconciliation

• Main Authors: Duhamel, Karine, Grafton, Emily, Gaywish, Rainey, Schuler, Peter, Fayant, Russell
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2024
• Subjects: reconciliation; Indigenous languages; language revitalization; colonization; anishina*
• Online Access: https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/jcrid/article/view/7983; https://doi.org/10.22329/jcrid.v1i1.7983

The purpose of this conceptual article is to evidence the emergence of the discourse of reconciliation in the last two decades with an aim to identify Canadians’ under-developed understanding and application of reconciliation and to critically interrogate the way in which the concept has been appropriated and applied by governments, organizations, and individuals. The many “faces” of reconciliation include political reconciliation as understood outside of the TRC, truth and reconciliation as reflective of the TRC, and institutional reconciliation (or co-optative and performative applications). The opaqueness around these differing movements leads to easy co-optation of reconciliation within colonial institutions, limits the transformational opportunities within the broader reconciliation movement, and contributes to stagnation and collective malaise towards reconciliation to the detriment of broader settler colonial decolonialism. Our methodology includes a review of existing literature and selected interviews with Indigenous language speakers who discuss a range of understandings and applications of reconciliation within Anishinaabemowin and Michif. Inspired by these new conceptions, the authors argue in an original contribution to scholarship that reconciliation can only be a useful narrative if it is anchored, through language, in Indigenous understandings of justice. The social impact of this work includes understanding that the ways in which reconciliation is mobilized in Canada is important and understanding how Indigenous language, instead, may offer key cultural insights and understandings for what it means to address wrongs.