"Doing the Work": How Settlers Negotiate Responsibility for Genocide in Canada


Lily Ivanova, University of British Columbia

What does it mean for settlers to take responsibility for past and ongoing harms against Indigenous communities? The importance of settlers "doing the work" to understand and interrupt Canada's colonial harms has become a shorthand for the personal ethics of decolonizing, both in popular discourse and academic texts. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang incisively stated in 2012, "decolonization is not a metaphor" and requires a commitment to tangible changes that people and states need to make. Since this time, and with the increasingly public stories of Residential School survivors, the Truth and Reconciliation's 94 Calls to Action , and rising Indigenous voices in arts, storytelling, and political action, what it means for settlers to "do the work" is wide-ranging--from the responsibility to "bear witness" to lived experiences of suffering, undertake organizational and institutional changes, and unpack one's lived experiences and positionality. This paper takes up the question of how settlers in Canada understand their responsibility for colonial genocide. Drawing on an ethnographic and interview-based study of xʷʔam̓ət (home) , an interactive theatre production about the intergenerational effects of colonial harms in contemporary Canadian society, I look at the approaches that participants took to intervene on the "blockages" to reconciliation they saw in the non-Indigenous characters in the play. Analyzing their on-stage interventions and in-depth interviews reveals the different and complex facets that facilitate settlers taking responsibility, such as nuanced understandings of Indigenous experiences and politics, a self-awareness about emotional reactions like guilt, shame, and fear, and the interpersonal ability to de-center their own experiences when hearing about the harms to Indigenous people and communities have experienced. These insights contribute to conversations about the role and responsibilities of allies in decolonization, the self-oriented and interactional skills and practices involved in identity work, and shifting societal meanings about identity as Canada acknowledges genocide.

This paper will be presented at the following session: