Citation: Stein, S. (forthcoming).

‘Truth before reconciliation’: The difficulties of

transforming higher education in settler colonial contexts. Higher Education Research
and Development.

“Truth before reconciliation”1: The difficulties of transforming higher

education in settler colonial contexts

Sharon Stein
Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
sharon.stein@ubc.ca

In response to the contemporary context of reconciliation in Canada, colleges and

universities have made efforts to “Indigenize” 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 paper, I examine these developments and suggest that most institutions
and individuals have yet to face the full extent of their complicity in colonization. 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; Indigenization; reconciliation; decolonization

In a recent symposium in this publication, Manathunga and Grant (2017) argue for the

need to attend to

higher education’s implication in local legacies of colonial violence towards

indigenous peoples and their knowledges. Such histories are not over: they have

bequeathed entire peoples with alienation from land, language, epistemologies,

cultural forms and access to a good life. They shape the present and require a

response. (pp. 2-3)

This article addresses efforts to respond to ongoing legacies of settler colonial violence in

the context of higher education. Specifically, I emphasize the challenges and circularities

that often emerge in efforts to address colonial legacies when these efforts are premised

on the promise of redemption and resolution. In contrast, I gesture toward the as-yet-
1
The first part of this title comes from a lecture by Patricia Barkaskas and Sarah Hunt (2017).

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unimaginable possibilities that might emerge if settlers2 could arrive at a space of

uncertainty and humility in which they recognize the impossibility of ever repaying their

colonial debt, yet feel a deep sense of responsibility to try nonetheless. Although I focus

on the example of Canada, the issues raised will have relevance in other settler colonial

contexts, in particular those that have gone through similar processes of national

reflection on their colonial histories, including Australia and South Africa.

From the 1880s until 1996, residential schools in Canada separated over 150,000

Indigenous children from their families, communities, and lands in an effort to assimilate

them into Euro-Canadian society (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada,

2015). In 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada was

established to “provide a forum for survivors to tell their stories and to educate the public

about this history” (Martin, 2009, p. 51). The TRC prompted many institutions to respond

to the emergent national discourse of reconciliation. Often framed in the contemporary

moment as “Indigenization,” these institutional responses have extended earlier efforts to

make space for Indigenous peoples and knowledges in higher education.3 Recent

responses have included commitments to hire more Indigenous faculty, recruit more

Indigenous students, incorporate Indigenous content into existing courses or create

entirely new ones, and strengthen relationships with local Indigenous communities.

While many welcome these efforts, others express concern that they have largely

proven inadequate to the task of transforming Canadian higher education, given the

extent to which these institutions remain rooted in colonial logics, economies, and

2
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)
3
In Canada, “Indigenous peoples” encompasses First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

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relationships. In particular, many Indigenous people have suggested that Indigenization

efforts remain largely tokenistic and superficial, and respond selectively to Indigenous

concerns. These critical responses represent one side of a wider emergent phenomenon I

describe as “reconciliation fatigue.” On the other side of this fatigue are settlers who

believe Canada has adequately atoned for the sins of colonization, and resist continued

efforts to address its ongoing impacts. These different forms of fatigue are not equivalent,

given that they are rooted in uneven relations of power: settler fatigue arises from

unwillingness to take responsibility for colonial violence, and resistance to the loss of

colonial entitlements; this is distinct from the fatigue of Indigenous people who are

exhausted from being subject to colonial violence, and frustrated by settlers who seek to

transcend that violence without giving anything up (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Fatigue is not

universally felt on either side of the Indigenous-settler relationship, and people may feel

fatigued more in some moments than in others. Yet, it is nonetheless the case that with

these fatigues, the opportunity for shifting this relationship is at risk of being lost entirely.

As the editors of this special issue suggested in their call for papers, “it is now

common to see calls for universities to ‘restructure’, ‘refresh’, ‘rejuvenate’, ‘revitalise’,

‘renew’.” In these calls “the underlying assumption is that what is fixed with the prefix

‘re’ will be new, better, different.” Much the same can be said of dominant assumptions

about reconciliation. In this article, I consider how this assumption has actually stalled

the possibility for a different relationship between Indigenous people and settlers to

emerge in the context of higher education. However, as I suggest in the title of this

article, we cannot even begin the long-term process of changing this relationship until

settlers are first willing to face the full extent to which colonial violence has shaped

Canadian higher education for over three hundred years.

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 I begin the article by addressing critiques of settler colonialism in Canada in

general, and of reconciliation specifically. Next, I briefly review the colonial history of

higher education in Canada, and the history of Indigenous efforts to access and transform

Canadian institutions. Then, I outline some existing critiques of more recent

Indigenization efforts before proposing some questions that might deepen

acknowledgement of the extent to which higher education is entangled with coloniality.

Rather than suggest that these questions offer a way out of complicity and toward

reconciliation, I consider how they might enable us to grapple with the difficulty of

imagining, let alone enacting, decolonial futures in the context of higher education.

Critiques of Settler Colonialism and Reconciliation

In order to address the colonial nature of Canadian higher education, it is

necessary to consider the contours of settler colonialism in what is currently called

Canada. Settler colonialism “is a form of colonization in which outsiders come to land

inhabited by Indigenous peoples and claim it as their own new home” (Tuck &

McKenzie, 2015, p. 59). According to Coulthard (2014), settler colonialism produces a

“relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to

facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining

authority” (p. 7). The exact formation and goals of settler colonialism differ by context

(see Kelley, 2017). But in Canada, “the ultimate goal” has been Indigenous peoples’

“elimination, if not physically, then as cultural, political, and legal peoples

distinguishable from the rest of Canadian society” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 4). However,

Indigenous resistance has made settler colonization an unfinished project.

Although Coulthard (2014) notes a marked shift away from more overtly

aggressive approaches toward more conciliatory approaches to elimination in the 1960s

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and 70s, he asserts, “the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has

remained colonial to its foundation” (p. 7). The discourse of reconciliation entered the

lexicon of Canadian-Indigenous relations in the 1990s, but its most recent and visible

manifestation has been in conjunction with the TRC. In 2008, then Prime Minister

Stephen Harper formally apologized for Canada’s complicity in the residential school

system, and since then “reconciliation” has entered mainstream public discourse.

According to Martin (2009), the term reconciliation is “easily, frequently, and

perhaps purposefully misunderstood as resolution—a term which also evokes the end of

conflict but which is less clear about the extent to which it entails an ongoing relationship

or responsibility” (p. 52). The notion that reconciliation implies resolution has come

under sustained critique by Indigenous scholars who perceive that they are being asked to

reconcile themselves to a still ongoing settler colonialism, “where there is no period

marking a clear or formal transition from an authoritarian past to a democratic present”

(Coulthard, 2014, p. 108). Mainstream framings of reconciliation take on a temporality in

which isolated historical harms have ceased, and thus, Flowers (2015) argues, do not

indicate “a commitment to changed behavior in response to recognizing the structures

and systems that are predicated on violence and permit it to occur in the first place” (p.

47). Rather, they exonerate non-Indigenous peoples and governments for their role in

continued colonization, and ignore ongoing calls for decolonization.

While these frustrations do not mean all Indigenous people refuse to engage with

reconciliation, or devalue the healing or closure that the TRC process offered for some

survivors, there is nonetheless an emergent “reconciliation fatigue” among those who are

frustrated by the demand that they “get over” a colonial relationship that is not yet over

(Coulthard, 2014, p. 126). Indeed, this demand to “get over it” often comes from a very

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different kind of reconciliation fatigue that is rooted in settlers’ perceived entitlements to

rights, property, and opportunities that are guaranteed at the expense of Indigenous

peoples, and oriented by a desire for colonial futures (Hunt, 2016). This form of colonial

hope seeks redemption and resolution, and therefore cannot face the full implications of

the fact that settler societies would not exist were it not for ongoing colonial violence.

As Martin (2009) notes, following the 2008 apology, “many [settlers] were

hopeful. ‘Is it enough now? It is over?’ they asked, ‘Can we finally move on?’ Such

remarks rarely make it into reputable print sources; however, they are common enough

around dinner tables and in the ‘Comments’ sections of internet media sites (where they

often take on a less-than-compassionate tone)” (p. 53). From this perspective, efforts to

challenge or reframe the reconciliation narrative in order to address ongoing colonialism

are dismissed as obstructive, unproductive, and unhealthy in ways that pathologize

Indigenous people (Coulthard, 2014). Martin (2009) concludes,

[settlers] are more interested in reaching a point where the wounds will have

healed and the country will have reached that nebulously defined state of having

atoned for its sins and reconciled with Aboriginal peoples. The actual work or

process of reconciliation seems to be less interesting, and less compelling, than

that promise of absolution. (p. 53)

The speed with which settlers sought absolution without doing “the actual work” was

evident at the highest levels when, in 2009, a year after issuing an apology for residential

schools, Harper publicly declared Canada had “no history of colonialism.” Mainstream,

state-sponsored approaches to reconciliation can therefore be understood as colonial

“moves to innocence” (Tuck & Yang, 2012), that is, “strategies or positionings that

attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or

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power or privilege, without having to change much at all” (p. 10). In the remainder of this

paper, I apply these insights to the context of higher education.

The Coloniality of Canadian Higher Education

In his reflections on “the idea of a Canadian university”, Jones (1998) notes, “it is

important for us to articulate and review the idea of the university as it is understood

within our context” (p. 70). He further suggests that, in the face of growing public

scrutiny about the purpose of higher education, these efforts should “be based on a series

of principles that will tell us what the Canadian university should or could be” (p. 28).

The contemporary context of reconciliation is also an opportunity to reconsider “what the

Canadian university should or could be,” including in ways that go beyond defenses of

the “public good” of higher education if that “public” is still presumed to be the citizenry

of an otherwise unchanged colonial society. As Boggs and Mitchell (2018) assert, to

uncritically valorize public universities in an effort to defend them from the admittedly

troubling trends of privatization and marketization “repeats the forgetting of the

dispossession at the university’s origins” (p. 441).

One exception to this institutionalized “forgetting” of Canadian universities’

colonial foundations comes from Hampton’s (2016) study of the racial/colonial politics

of McGill University. As part of her examination of founder James McGill’s role as a

colonial merchant in the transatlantic slave economy, Hampton argues, “understanding

the conditions under which universities were founded in Canada reveals their intended

roles in society and provides a baseline for understanding how they have and have not

changed, and are and are not changing now” (p. 139). While there is no definitive account

of dispossession in Canadian higher education history, Indigenous peoples have long

contested the coloniality of Canadian institutions.

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 Indigenous peoples never lacked “higher education,” if the term is viewed beyond

the narrow confines of Western tradition. They “undertook lifelong pursuit of specialized

knowledge in order to become hunters, warriors, political leaders, or herbalists”

(Stonechild, 2006, p. 21). Nonetheless, since the establishment of Western colleges and

universities in Canada, Indigenous people have struggled to assert their access to and

presence in these institutions. For instance, there are ongoing struggles to have higher

education funding secured as a treaty right – despite the common misconception that

Indigenous peoples access free higher education. Particularly since the 1970s, efforts to

seek access have been accompanied by efforts to denaturalize the Eurocentric and

capitalist logics that order teaching and research, and to create space for Indigenous

knowledges to thrive on their own terms, rather than be treated as objects of study

(Battiste & Henderson, 2009).

Stonechild (2006) traces the evolution of higher education in Canada “from a tool

of assimilation to an instrument of empowerment” (p. 2) for Indigenous peoples, although

others suggest this distinction might not be so clear-cut (Ahenakew, 2016). At various

points from 1876 until 1951, attending university could lead to forcible enfranchisement

for Indigenous people, and thus, a loss of their federally recognized “Indian status” and

accompanying rights. After World War II, the federal agency responsible for policies

relating to Indigenous peoples started to offer scholarships “to encourage Indians to

pursue higher education in order to help them integrate into mainstream society” (p. 31).

In the early 1970s, Indigenous peoples sought greater control over their education,

including by making demands for their own higher education programs and institutions.

Although the Canadian government did not accede to these demands, in the late

1970s, it established what is now known as the Post-Secondary Student Support Program

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to fund First Nations and Inuit higher education. However, Métis and other Indigenous

people who lack federal “Indian status” cannot access these funds. Further, funding for

the program was capped in 1989, and the funding formula was changed. Thus, even

though more Indigenous students have sought to access higher education, the available

funding covers less of their overall costs (Pidgeon, Muñoz, Kirkness, & Archibald, 2013;

Stonechild, 2006). In fact, among the “Calls to Action” issued alongside the TRC’s final

report was for “the federal government to provide adequate funding to end the backlog of

First Nations students seeking a post-secondary education.”

The first Native Studies program was established at Trent University in 1969, and

today there are over a dozen more. Several Native teacher education programs have also

been established. In 2018, the University of Victoria launched a program in Indigenous

law. In addition to academic programs like these, many universities have established

support services for Indigenous students (Pidgeon, 2016). Alongside the development of

these programs and services at predominantly white universities, there are now a number

of Indigenous-led institutions, including First Nations University of Canada, and several

colleges. However, Stonechild (2006) notes, “First Nations-controlled institutions are

generally funded tenuously at a level below that of mainstream public institutions” (p.

69). Furthermore, most Indigenous students are enrolled at predominantly white

institutions (Pidgeon, 2016).

As this brief review suggests, thanks primarily to the persistent advocacy of

Indigenous communities, questions about the place of Indigenous peoples and

knowledges in Canadian higher education have been on the table for a long time. The

reconciliation imperative that emerged in conjunction with the TRC has prompted a

renewed emphasis on these questions, but there is much work still to be done. As Marker

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(2017) suggests: “Universities are in increasingly paradoxical positions as they ostensibly

invite Indigenous expression, but resist the undoing of hierarchies that maintain

hegemonic equilibrium” (p. 3). Below, I review some of these paradoxes and the

persistent limits that they signal in efforts to transform Canadian higher education.

Conditional Inclusion

Several (predominantly Indigenous) scholars have written about the successes and

challenges of efforts to Indigenize and/or decolonize Canadian higher education. In

particular, scholars identify an enduring form of conditional inclusion. This does not

mean that other, more transformative approaches to change are not present in higher

education – led most often by Indigenous peoples and in some cases non-Indigenous

collaborators – but these other approaches rarely receive the same degree of institutional

backing, and may even be punished for the perception that they violate sanctioned norms

of critique or liberal limits of difference.

As Gaudry and Lorenz (2018) note, there is significant debate over the meaning

of “Indigenization” itself, which reflects a larger set of contestations between

perspectives and priorities. They find three specific visions of Indigenization:

Indigenous inclusion, reconciliation indigenization, and decolonial

indigenization—exist on a spectrum. On one end of this continuum, the academy

maintains most of its existing structures while assisting Indigenous students,

faculty, and staff in succeeding under this normalized order, and on the other end,

the university is fundamentally transformed by deep engagement with Indigenous

peoples, Indigenous intellectuals, and Indigenous knowledge systems for all who

attend. (p. 218)

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They suggest that while many institutions offer rhetorical commitments to “reconciliation

indigenization,” in practice they remained stalled at “Indigenous inclusion”, and

decolonial Indigenization is “off the radar of most university administrators” (p. 223).

The “Indigenous inclusion” approach offers the guise of change while largely

reaffirming the universal value of Western epistemologies, ontologies, and political

economies. Indigenous peoples and knowledges are expected to adapt to existing

university values; specifically, Indigeneity is expected to fit within the slot it is granted

within the epistemological and political economic framework of Canadian liberal

multiculturalism (Simpson, James & Mack, 2011). Difference that cannot be subsumed or

translated into sameness within this framework is censored, castigated, or outright

excluded.

Conditional inclusion also frames the creation of (limited) space for Indigeneity

as a benevolent gift that can be revoked at any time, and produces debts and expectations

for those who are included. Ahmed (2012) offers a useful framework for making sense of

the conditional inclusion that is granted to Indigenous peoples and knowledges. She

argues diversity is often operationalized in ways that reinforce rather than interrupt

institutional whiteness: if Indigenization is framed as a form of inclusion, then those who

are “being included” still remain objects of difference that are being invited into the

institution by those who retain the power to make – or rescind, or deny – that invitation.

As Ahmed notes, “To be welcomed is to be positioned as the one who is not at home” (p.

43), that is, the one who does not really belong and who is only present because of the

benevolence of their hosts. This hospitality is highly conditional not only before but also

after the invitation. Those who are “welcomed” are expected to perform gratitude, and

affirm (rather than challenge) existing organizational values and structures.

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 The effects of conditional inclusion in Canadian higher education have been

identified by many Indigenous scholars. Conditional inclusion places the labor of

transformation onto Indigenous peoples who are expected not only to adapt to existing

organizational cultures, but also to advocate for Indigenous peoples and communities in

ways that do not make their non-Indigenous colleagues uncomfortable (Ahenakew &

Naepi, 2015). Considerable time is spent explaining to non-Indigenous administrators the

values, importance, and foundations of Indigenous knowledges, and Indigenous students

and faculty are expected to speak on behalf of all Indigenous people, while non-

Indigenous students are rarely asked to do to the same (Marker, 2004).

The conditional nature of inclusion refers not only to Indigenous individuals, but

Indigenous knowledges as well. Kuokkanen (2008) argues, “when [Indigenous people]

speak from the framework of their own epistemic conventions they are not heard or

understood by the academy” (p. 60), while Marker (2004) notes, “Indigenous scholars

must either invent new words and then struggle upstream against the prevailing current to

wedge them into an academic lexicon, or expand the meaning of conventional terms to

include Indigenous perspective” (p. 103). The extractive practices of earlier eras continue

when Indigenous knowledge is selectively engaged, removed from its context, and forced

into Western knowledge frames in order to be incorporated into the university.

However, when Indigenous peoples become frustrated or fatigued with the often-

unspoken but strictly enforced regulations about what they can speak, write, or teach,

they are perceived as being ungrateful for “being included”, and injurious to the

institution. Critiques of colonialism often activate the settler side of “reconciliation

fatigue,” which seeks to invalidate the fatigue of Indigenous people who are actually

experiencing colonialism. As Ahmed (2012) describes, “To bring a problem to

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institutional attention can mean becoming the problem you bring – becoming what ‘gets

in the way’ of institutional happiness” (p. 147). In other words, those who point out the

problem are perceived to be the problem. This perception is rationalized by pointing to

“proof” of the institution’s commitment to Indigenization. Much as the discourse of

reconciliation can become an alibi for continued state-backed colonialism, Indigenous

strategic plans can become an alibi for continued institutional colonialism, as can the

mere presence of greater numbers of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty – no matter

how poorly they might be treated by their professors, peers, or colleagues.

In this and the previous section, I briefly reviewed the history of Indigenous

struggles to access and transform higher education, and critiques of current

Indigenization efforts. Indigenous peoples are not waiting on institutions to change, but

rather continue “rebuilding and strengthening Indigenous culture, knowledges, and

political orders” (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018, p. 224). Indigenous-led transformation must

be central to any larger effort to transform Canadian institutions. Yet there is also a risk

that when settlers focus on this they are avoiding the work of addressing their own

enduring investments and complicity in colonialism – another “move to innocence.”

When “Indigenous subjects” become the object of concern, we lose sight of the colonial

relationships that structure institutions like higher education (Coulthard, 2014). After all,

settler colonialism is not something that “happened” to Indigenous peoples; rather, Arvin,

Tuck, and Morrill (2013) assert, “settler colonialism is a structure, and not an event, that

continues to shape the everyday lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples” (p. 27,

emphasis added). Given the extent to which colonial relations have been internalized by

both settlers and Indigenous peoples, much work is required before a transformation of

their relationship can be possible. However, non-Indigenous people rarely address our

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side of the equation. Hunt (2016) notes, “the onus for unsettling colonial narratives is

often placed on Indigenous peoples…This results in an uneven distribution of labour in

the process of transformation” (p. 39).

Cooper (2017) asserts, “A re-examination of our existing relationships in the

context of a burgeoning new relationship is called for” (p. 157). In other words: we need

to be honest about an existing relationship before we can transform it. Yet, as the title of

this paper suggests, most settlers fail to address the full extent of their role in colonial

harm, and their ongoing investments in its perpetuation. Perhaps transformation will only

be viable once we can face this complicity without turning our backs on it (Hunt, 2018).

This would also require disinvesting from the promise of redemption that is often sought

through reconciliation efforts, given that colonialism remains ongoing, and the

impossibility of ever repaying our colonial debt. It may be only that once we arrive at this

space of impossibility that the possibility for different kinds of relationship can actually

emerge.

Beyond Inclusion

Below I offer some provisional questions that may support deeper examination of the role

of colleges and universities in perpetuating settler colonialism. I group these questions

under five “dimensions” of coloniality (historical, political, economic, epistemological,

psycho-affective), but they are interconnected, and overlap in many cases; thus, a

question might touch on more than one dimension. I developed these categories based on

my own engagements with decolonization in higher education institutions, including

through formal research and informal conversations with Indigenous and settler

individuals; however, other categories or groupings are certainly possible.

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 These questions will likely only lead to more questions, as many answers will be

indeterminate, inconvenient, uncomfortable, or suggest the need for changes that appear

unfeasible or highly unlikely from where we currently stand. My primary intention is thus

to invite a fuller understanding of where and why we find ourselves in the colonial

present. Paradoxically, I do so not because I believe that a fuller understanding will point

to a clear pathway out of our colonial complicity, but rather because it might enable us to

more fully appreciate the enormity of the challenge of enacting decolonial futures. As

Shotwell (2016) suggests, many settlers “cannot look directly at the past, because we

cannot imagine what it would mean to live responsibly toward it. We yearn for different

futures, but we can’t imagine how to get there from here” (p. 6). These questions will not

point us toward clear solutions or strategies for change, though certainly asking them

might generate important ideas. Rather, they can prompt us to think about complicity “as

a starting point for action” (p. 5) based not in the search for affirmation, absolution, or

authority, but rather in humility, uncertainty, and responsibility. Perhaps the only ethical

response to colonialism in higher education is “one that leads us somewhere that we

cannot yet see” (Manathunga & Grant, 2017, p. 3).

Historical Dimension

While few existing histories of higher education institutions in settler colonial states

directly acknowledge their role in the colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands, we

cannot address our colonial present without a clear account of our colonial past. Thus,

relevant historical questions about a particular institution might be:

• By what processes did the land on which the institution sits come to be held by the

institution? Who (including humans and other-than-human beings) was affected by those

processes?

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 • What has been the historical relationship between the institution and Indigenous peoples

and knowledges, and how has this relationship shifted across time (or not)?

Other questions might address more broadly the history of higher education in a

particular settler colonial country, beyond a single institution. For instance:

• How does the historical development of higher education in the country relate to (and

support or contest) the development and dominance of a settler society?

• How might histories of higher education shift if they started from the perspective of the

land itself, and the knowledge of its Indigenous caretakers, rather than that of institutions’

colonial founders?

Only once we start to ask these questions, can we then consider the contemporary

implications, such as:

• Who benefits from forgetting certain histories, and what are the responses when we try to

remember differently?

• How does the colonial past shape the colonial present, and what contemporary

responsibilities follow?

To speak of responsibilities also requires asking about the distribution of power and

resources – that is, the political dimension of coloniality.

Political Dimension

In the broadest sense, politics encompasses relations of power, including the distribution

of resources and governing authority in a particular place. Land acknowledgements that

recognize the Indigenous caretakers of the lands that a university occupies can create

openings for substantive considerations of our political responsibilities when we teach,

learn, and research on colonized lands. However, this is only the beginning of the

conversation. Vowel (2016) suggests, “Moving beyond territorial acknowledgments

means asking hard questions about what needs to be done once we’re ‘aware of

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Indigenous presence’. It requires that we remain uncomfortable, and it means making

concrete, disruptive change.” This can lead to questions such as:

• Is there a relationship between the institution and local Indigenous

community/communities, and if so, how is power distributed within that relationship?

What, if any, treaty obligations are relevant to this relationship (Gaudry & Lorenz,

2018)?

• Can universities shift from relationships premised on ownership and mastery (of land and

knowledge) to ones premised on answerability, that is, “being responsible, accountable,

and being part of an exchange” (Patel, 2015, p. 73)? What would be the biggest

challenges involved in making such a shift?

We might also ask how higher education institutions support the reproduction of a

political system within a nation-state premised on settlement:

• In what ways do universities contribute to the socialization of settler citizens who

presume the inevitability of colonialism?

Beyond the political dimensions of socialization, there are economic dimensions as well.

Economic Dimension

As much as institutions of higher education are expected to support the reproduction of

political institutions, they are also expected to support the economy. In capitalist

societies, this means preparing students for employment and contributing to knowledge

creation that will either indirectly or directly generate profits. The emphasis on higher

education’s contributions to economic growth has recently intensified, but even as critical

scholars argue that institutions should pursue a more measured balance between

economic concerns and educational considerations, few advocate for a full rethinking of

institutions’ role in capitalist growth. Yet, Coulthard (2014) points out, “the predatory

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nature of capitalism continues to play a vital role in facilitating the ongoing dispossession

of Indigenous peoples” (p. 14). It will not be possible to interrupt higher education’s

complicity in settler colonialism if we do not consider how institutions support the

reproduction of a capitalist economy, including resource extraction that: requires

unfettered access to Indigenous lands (through e.g. agriculture, forestry, mining,

hydroelectric power, oil, gas); often results in poisoning lands, humans and other-than-

human beings; and contributes to rapid climate change. In order to address the role of

settler colonial capitalism in higher education, we might ask:

• How are public and private sources of funding for higher education derived (directly

and indirectly) through extracting ‘natural resources’ from Indigenous lands?

• How do colleges and universities contribute to the reproduction of a capitalist

economy by training people as labourers within it – including not only those working

directly in trades related to extraction (Walker, 2018), but also as engineers,

managers, and other middle class professionals?

• What are the origins of the wealth from which institutional endowments derive, and in

what industries are those endowments invested?

• How do universities derive profits from the ‘development’ of (Indigenous) lands for

which they hold the title, and how might that ‘development’ contribute to the

presumption that the land is ‘settled’ (Tetrault, 2016)?

Processes of commodifying land and extracting ‘natural resources’ for profit are not only

justified through colonial claims of settler ownership, but also through the modern

Western epistemology in which the land/earth is a possessable object rather than, as is the

case in many Indigenous epistemologies, a living being and reciprocal relation. Below are

questions about the implications of the epistemological dimension of coloniality.

Epistemological Dimension

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Many efforts to incorporate Indigenous knowledges still leave untouched the presumed

universality of Western knowledge (Battiste & Henderson, 2009). The problem is, in part,

a failure to recognize that knowledge is not simply about epistemology (ways of

knowing), but also ontology (ways of being). According to Marker (2004), Indigenous

“oral traditions, ceremonies, and rituals all reinforced not only ways of knowing, but

ways of being without separating knowing from being” (p. 106). When Indigenous

epistemologies are grafted onto Western ontologies (Ahenakew, 2016) – for instance, by

being instrumentalized toward reproducing and relegitimizing settler colonial society –

the gifts of Indigenous ways of knowing, and being are lost (Kuokkanen, 2008).

In order to interrupt these patterns of engagement, we might ask:

• How/why was it decided that European knowledge would be taught in higher education

institutions in settler colonial states, to the exclusion of Indigenous knowledges that

developed in and emerged from that place? How do these epistemic foundations continue

to shape institutions’ curriculum, research, and administrative organization, and affect the

reception of and resources granted to Indigenous peoples and knowledges?

• Why do so few settler scholars “research the limits of their own epistemic biases and seek

out Indigenous scholars and Indigenous critiques of the Western modernist

hegemonies”(Marker, 2017, p. 11)?

• Are settlers expecting Indigenous people to engage in pedagogical labor that should be

their own responsibility (Ahmed, 2012)?

• What are settlers expecting to hear when Indigenous people speak, and are they able to

‘hear’ Indigenous people when they deviate from that script? Do engagements with

Indigenous knowledges romanticize and/or homogenize Indigenous communities?

• Are Indigenous critiques engaged in earnest, or in selective and instrumentalizing ways?

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 • What institutionalized norms prevent Indigenous knowledges from thriving on their own

terms – for instance: productivity requirements that cannot account for the time required

to produce knowledge in/with Indigenous communities; failure to recognize forms of

knowledge production/transmission/translation beyond traditional scholarly publishing;

rewarding “ambition and self-promotion”, which goes against many Indigenous values

oriented by interdependence and humility (Marker, 2004, p. 108); or failure to recognize

that some knowledge is not open and accessible to all?

• What institutional values would need to be rethought in order to affirm the equality and

integrity of Indigenous knowledges?

Importantly, the epistemic dimension of the coloniality is not the result of mere

misunderstanding, but of willful ignorance of other ways of knowing and being. The

Western episteme was constituted and consolidated through assertions of its own

universal value and relevance, and thus, through denial and denigration of Indigenous and

other non-European ways of knowing and being (Kuokkanen, 2008). Further, this

epistemic violence was only able to take on such force because of simultaneous material

violence against Indigenous and other non-European peoples (Grosfoguel, 2013). To not

only acknowledge but actually make space for and affirm the intrinsic value of other

onto-epistemologies without conditions therefore “carries the risk (for the white majority)

of a radical disruption of the social order” (Mills, 2017, p. 162), as these onto-

epistemologies both challenge Western epistemic universality and potentially expose the

violence that has historically been required to assert that universality. As Marker (2004)

suggests, “If educators and politicians were to consider seriously the discourse of

Aboriginal Elders, they might slow their thoughts and actions to a more cautious and

measured state of consideration. Such a change would frustrate neoliberal sensibilities

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about hurriedly preparing students for competition in a globalized marketplace” (p. 103).

It is no wonder, then, that this discourse is rarely seriously considered. If the epistemic

dimension of the coloniality of higher education is partly rooted in an investment in not

knowing how violent colonial relations secured (and continue to secure) the hegemony of

Western knowledge, then it is necessary to also consider the psycho-affective dimension.

Psycho-Affective Dimension

As noted above, the overwhelming failure to face the full extent of higher education’s

role in colonialism is not due to a simple ignorance of relevant information, but rather the

learned unwillingness of most settlers to seek it. This is not to say that we already have

full accounts of these colonial entanglements, or that having these accounts would

necessarily get us closer to achieving reconciliation, but rather that the lack of these

accounts is not happenstance. It is the result of an ongoing investment in the sense of

supremacy, ownership, and control that is granted to settlers as part of the colonial

relationship. This investment feeds an “epistemology of forgetting” (Boggs & Mitchell,

2018, p. 442), in which the violence required to establish and maintain domination is

foreclosed, and thus, domination is naturalized as commonsense, and partly or even

wholly invisibilized for the settler whom it benefits. In this way, one’s innocence can be

comfortably maintained, and the failure to face one’s complicity in harm can be painted

as a problem of ignorance about colonialism rather than an investment in colonialism.

Because of this, none of the questions posed above will move us toward

transforming colonial relationships if settlers remain unwilling to loosen our “deep

attachments” to the colonial values, entitlements, and habits of being that we have been

socialized into – including those of demanding control over, and seeking certain outcomes

from, the process of transformation itself. We will continue to ask questions, and pose

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answers, that protect our attachments – particularly when our emotional fragilities are

activated (DiAngelo, 2011). Cooper (2017) suggests that these attachments have the

effect of concealing something, and in effect, foreclosing other possibilities from

emerging: “To keep something concealed requires an effort, even if we are not always

conscious of such efforts, nor of that which we conceal. Such an effort smacks of

Sartrean bad-faith” (p. 157). In other words, transformation of Indigenous-settler relations

will not be possible unless we undertake this work in good-faith – and even then, there are

no guarantees of the outcome. Further, this work often won’t feel good or affirming; as

Cooper suggests, “genuine dialogues if they are to be truly transformative will require us

to change, and change can be painful and traumatic, for some, more than others” (p. 158).

The work of transformation must be collective, but also requires that settler

individuals who are committed to transformation self-reflexively question whether we are

ready, in “good-faith,” to lose our perceived entitlements and loosen our deep

attachments – while also recognizing the limits of our transparency to ourselves:

• Am I willing to put in the affective, political, and intellectual work that is required of me

in order to transform existing relations with Indigenous peoples?

• Am I willing to reimagine and reconstruct how I have been socialized to think about and

engage knowledge, kinship, labor, the environment, property, rights, governance, my own

‘goodness’ – in short, nearly everything about my existence as a settler on these lands?

• How can I go from merely stating my commitments to decolonization to enacting them,

while recognizing that no action or intervention will ever be “enough”, and that I will

likely make new mistakes in the process of trying?

• How do I react when someone suggests that my ideas or actions reproduce colonialism?

Am I willing to be held accountable for my (inevitable) mistakes?

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 • Do I know how to sit with my complicity in colonial violence without running away from

it, disidentifying with it, or seeking immediate absolution?

• Can I surrender my desires for control, authority, certainty, and security so that I might

develop the humility and stamina that are required to be a part of a long-term, multi-

layered, messy transformation toward decolonial futures that are not-yet-knowable?

Conclusion

The context of reconciliation has created an ambivalent opportunity for

addressing the enduring coloniality of Canadian higher education. In this article, I have

examined how reconciliation has manifested in the form of Indigenization, emphasizing

Indigenous critiques of institutions’ continued tokenism and selective engagement. I

suggested that in order to interrupt and transform enduring colonial relations, settlers and

settler-dominated institutions will need to reckon with how the values that have thus far

oriented colleges and universities contribute to and benefit from ongoing colonialism –

and will need to consider the possibility that reconciliation itself might be impossible. It

may be that institutions cannot “right the wrongs that brought them into being” (Belcourt,

2018). But particularly in the context of growing reconciliation fatigue, if settlers remain

unwilling to name the wrongs of colonialism, and face up to our ongoing complicity in

them, then the Indigenization of higher education may continue to operate as a form of

conditional inclusion that serves as an alibi for the continuation of colonial relations.

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