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Settler Shame: A Critique of the Role of Shame in Settler–Indigenous Relationships in Canada

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2020

Sarah Kizuk
Sarah Kizuk*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Marquette University, Marquette Hall 115, 1217 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 53233
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article both defines and shows the limits of settler shame for achieving decolonialized justice. It discusses the work settler shame does in “healing” the nation and delivering Canadians into a new sense of pride, thus maintaining the myth of the peacekeeping Canadian. This kind of shame does so, somewhat paradoxically, by making people feel good about feeling bad. Thus, the contiguous relationship of shame and recognition in a settler colonial context produces a form of pernicious self-recognition. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed and Glen Coulthard, this article shows that a politics of recognition informed by settler shame has done little to actually see or hear Indigenous peoples on their own terms. Since settler shame is a self-directed emotion that seeks to be discharged through reconciliatory processes that are dependent on liberal recognition, it remains a mere optics of justice wedded to settler ignorance. The dependence on insufficient recognition renders the reconciliatory drive in Canada similarly insufficient, even harmful. Settler shame, then, is dangerous in relationship with recognition and reconciliation in Canada today, maintains settler colonialism, and forestalls Indigenous futurity and resurgence.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 1: Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2020 , pp. 161 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © by Hypatia, Inc. 2020

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Footnotes

I presented earlier versions of this article at the Feminist Ethics and Social Theory Conference, October 2017; Duquesne Women in Philosophy Conference, April 2018; Building Bridges Conference at the University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale, October 2018; and PhiloSophia, May 2019. I wish to thank the organizers of and participants in these events for their insightful comments and challenges. Special thanks to Theresa Tobin, Grant Silva, James South, Kevin Gibson, and the anonymous reviewers at Hypatia.

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