Indigenous Peoples and the State in Canada: The Limits of Reconciliation and Intercultural Dialogue

This paper examines critically the discourse of reconciliation and intercultural dialogue in the context of Indigenous peoples-settlers relations in Canada. It questions a growing tendency among scholars to argue that the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state are increasingly guided by a logic of hybridization and interculturalism, whereby settler state and society are now prepared to empower Indigenous peoples and relinquish the historical dominion they have exercised over them. The paper considers the public outcry sparked by the provisional comprehensive land claim agreement the Quebec and Canadian governments struck with four Innu communities in 2002 and the subsequent backtracking of the state (thirteen years later the agreement is still unsigned), to suggest that this episode shows rather that notions of reconciliation and intercultural dialogue are founded on an improper assessment of the prevailing socieconomic dynamics of power that inform the interaction between Indigenous peoples and settlers in Canada.