The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance.
Fraser Valleyin canada, after the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report on the Indian Residential Schools, universities and town halls have been flooded with questions about how they are going to implement its ninety-four calls to action and how they are going to promote reconciliation on stolen lands. 1 Many universities have taken heed of the call to "Indigenize" their curricula. 2 The worry remains, however, that the language of reconciliation is empty rhetoric that "metaphorizes" decolonization, rather than responding to the demands of Indigenous communities for self-determination and land back (Tuck and Yang). For example, we might be wary of the Canadian government's language of reconciliation when it is compatible with police raids against Wet'suwet'en land defenders opposed to the Coastal GasLink Pipeline Project (which prompted the creation of the hashtag #reconciliationisdead on Twitter). 3 This paper considers what the activity of "Indigenizing" academic philosophy (and ethics, more specifically) might involve, and envisions philosophy education that is responsive and responsible to land and community. 4 As a settler 5 to the Stó:lō territory, 6 where I currently live and teach, I question what "Indigenizing" ethics might look like in the academy, which is itself an apparatus of colonization. 7 While I have a vested interest in learning about Indigenous philosophizing 8 in order to better understand the place where I am (and how this place informs what and how I teach), framing these efforts in terms of "Indigenization" makes it about me and my learning, rather than about listening to Stó:lō elders when they say "S'ólh Téméxw te it'kwelo. Xyólhmet te mekw' stám ít kwelát" [This is our land. We have to take care of everything that belongs to us]. 9 In other words, I worry that the call to Indigenize philosophy ultimately serves settlers in assuaging settler guilt while leaving structural settler colonial power intact. This echoes Andrea
Accounts of grounded normativity in Indigenous philosophy can be used to challenge the groundlessness of Western environmental ethical approaches such as Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Attempts to ground normativity in mainstream Western ethical theory deploy a metaphorical grounding that covers up the literal grounded normativity of Indigenous philosophical practices. Furthermore, Leopold’s land ethic functions as a form of settler philosophical guardianship that works to erase, assimilate, and effectively silence localized Indigenous knowledges through a delocalized ethical standard. Finally, grounded normativity challenges settlers to question their desire for groundless normative theory and practice as reflective of their evasion of ethical responsibility for the destruction and genocide of Indigenous communities.
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