Relational Identities in Aotearoa/New Zealand

It's important in any consideration of Kiwi lessons, such as they are, to be clear about the obvious differences in the two cases. First, NZ was colonized much later than Canada, and by only one colonizing power, with one treaty and one fairly culturally and linguistically cohesive Indigenous population, concentrated within a geographic area the size of the British Isles (Salmond, Reference Salmond1997). Conversely, Indigenous peoples in Canada have a wide range of geographical, legal, social, cultural and linguistic differences, with 633 Indian bands, some 3,500 reserves, and 11 language families divided into 53 languages (Voyageur and Cailliou, Reference Voyageur and Calliou2000/2001: 109–24).

While Christian conversion was widespread alongside the development of syncretic religious forms such as the Rātana Church, Māori were not forced to attend Indigenous residential schools, although integrated day schooling was designed to assimilate and indoctrinate, to create “Brown Britons” (Simon and Tuhiwai Smith, Reference Simon and Smith2001: xi). Ranginui Walker notes his people's “success in maintaining cultural continuity in the face of tremendous assimilative pressures” (Reference Walker and Kawharu1989: 96). However, Maori and Indigenous peoples in Canada share similar experiences of colonization, with long records of broken agreements, structural discrimination, high levels of incarceration and problematic socio-economic and health indicators. Neither country has successfully decolonized nor have there been any serious efforts to undertake this process.

The first Māori settlements date back to 500 AD, and by 1200 AD there were over twenty tribes in the North Island and some three or four in the South Island, each possessing its own territory, government, and self-sustaining economy (Alves, Reference Alves1999: 3–5; Consedine and Consedine, Reference Consedine and Consedine2001: 79). Initial contact between European explorers and Māori took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed soon after by slow British colonization, which rapidly increased in the nineteenth century.

The term “Māori” was used as far back as 1801, possibly earlier, to mean “local, inland or normal people” but could also denote natural features, such that wai Māori refers to fresh water, while wai tai is used for sea water. Tangata Māori denoted ordinary, established institutions, people, food, treasures, family and larger groups (Salmond, Reference Salmond1997: 21–22). A sense of coherent Māori identity was the product of contact with foreign explorers and traders, which marked a change from the primary forms of identity, based on whanau (family), hapu (community) and iwi (tribe or extended community). Of these, the primary unit for identification, with the right to self-determination traditionally, is the hapu (Maaka and Fleras, 2005; Mutu and Jackson, Reference Mutu and Jackson2016). As such Māori identify most prominently as members of a hapu, and the secondarily according to their membership in an iwi, such as Ngāi Tahu, Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Porou, and Waikato-Tainui, to name just some of the larger contemporary ones.

Māori generally define their iwi and hapu affiliations through whakapapa or genealogy. There are five primary types of whakapapa, the most common being tararere, which narrates “a single line of descent from an ancestor” (Taonui, Reference Taonui2016). Identity is contingent on the discretion of the community, with little government involvement as to who is a member of a whanau, hapu or iwi. There is no blood quantum or status as in the United States and Canada, and no equivalent to the Indian Act which regulates who is or is not Māori in a general sense, or more specifically a member of a particular hapu and iwi (Mutu and Jackson, Reference Mutu and Jackson2016: 8, 27, 30–35; O'Sullivan, Reference O'Sullivan2007: 35, 80–81, 96–7).

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pākehā was used to refer to non-Māori, a term said to have come from the term pakepākehā after an ancient light-skinned people who travelled from the sea, outside of Māori lands. Historian Anne Salmond notes a range of terminology from this period: “‘maitai’ in the north, ‘tupua’ in Hauraki, ‘Pākehā’ on the East Coast and ‘tangata pora’ in the south,” most of which disappeared from common usage by the end of the century (Reference Salmond1997: 279). Both Māori and Pākehā embodied dynamic, evolving, and relational identities, to which must be added the intermarriage between Pākehā and Māori, which produced further levels of hybridity (Wanhalla, 2013).

Pākehā identity as relational and contingent was evident by the signing in 1840 of the Treaty of Waitangi, which is considered NZ's founding document and the basis of an enduring myth of biculturalism between Māori and Pākehā (Orange, Reference Orange1987: 2). The treaty has only one reference to Pākehā, referring to those who lived under the governance traditions and protocols of Māori iwi (Tikanga Māori), and often intermarried, making them what Goldsmith has called a “naturalized native” (Reference Goldsmith2005: 78).

Not unlike the Canadian situation, nineteenth century NZ was marked by settler duplicity over the implications of treaty (Walker, Reference Walker and Kawharu1989: 263–72). By 1900, 95 per cent of Māori land had been taken away, which resulted in the destruction of traditional culture and modes of living (Jackson, Reference Jackson and Ihimaera1993: 70–71, 77; Walker, Reference Walker and Gold1990: 322). War, disease, cultural destruction and a declining birth rate also took their toll. From an estimated Māori population of 300,000 in 1840, by the turn of the century, numbers had declined to 30,000 (Balzar, 1999: 342–43). Yet, Māori have a long history of resistance to colonization, which includes a Declaration of Independence in 1835 to create a nation-state, the Kingitanga or Māori King movement from 1858 and resistance to British expansion during a series of colonizer-instigated land wars from 1845 to 1872 (Bargh, Reference Bargh2010: 43–44; Consedine and Consedine, Reference Consedine and Consedine2001: 83–85; Orange, Reference Orange1987: 226–27; Walker, Reference Walker and Gold1990: 321–22, 338).

Māori also gained political representation before other Indigenous peoples in the British imperial system. In 1867, Māori males of voting age had the right to elect four representatives to the colonial assembly (Bargh, Reference Bargh2010: 38–41). Further, Māori were never considered wards of the state. The downside was that Māori were grossly underrepresented, with four seats for 56,000 Māori, versus seventy-two seats for 171,000 Europeans. This imbalance was not properly rectified until 1981 (Bargh, Reference Bargh2010: 49, 89–90).

By the 1940s, assimilative schooling and the internalization of colonial narratives of British superiority resulted in many Māori turning their backs on traditional religion, cultural practices and language, resulting in a Māori “non-culture which existed in a sort of limbo” (MacDonald, Reference MacDonald1989: 57–58). At the same time, government officials touted New Zealand as a “paragon of racial harmony” (Maaka and Fleras, Reference Maaka, Fleras, Ivison, Patton and Sanders2000: 98), a tapestry “in which light and dark threads were interwoven” (Sharp, Reference Sharp1990: 6) with Māori and Pākehā “glorifying alike in the one title of ‘New Zealander’” (Sinclair, Reference Sinclair1986: 204). Until the 1970s, claims of biculturalism were primarily rhetorical, used to disguise British mono-cultural hegemony (Maaka and Fleras, Reference Maaka, Fleras, Ivison, Patton and Sanders2000: 98; Spoonley, 2005).

The myth of Māori acquiescence to British hegemony was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, epitomized by such highpoints as Whina Cooper's land march (1975), and the rise of a range of groups struggling against the state for their Indigenous treaty-guaranteed rights (Poata-Smith, Reference Poata-Smith, Spoonley, MacPherson and Peterson1996: 105; Walker, Reference Walker and Gold1990: 331). De facto forms of biculturalism grew out of Māori protest, and the idea of a Māori-Pākehā partnership developed through such signposts as the 1975 Waitangi tribunal. David Lange's Labour government from 1984 signally promoted a bicultural turn. Te Reo Māori became an official language in 1987, Māori educational systems were promoted, there was widespread introduction of Māori names for institutions and a reinvigoration of Māori culture. Overall, the relationship was reframed during this period as one between tangata whenua (people of the land) and the tangata tiriti (settlers represented by the treaty) (King, Reference King1985; Orange, Reference Orange1987; Walker, Reference Walker and Kawharu1989, Reference Walker and Gold1990).

The state introduced a range of bicultural policies, beginning at the shallowest level with recognition of the cultural traditions of Māori (but little else). Further along the scale, the state worked to distribute some resources back to Māori, while a third bicultural focus was the transformation of all monocultural institutions, with a sharing of decision making and resources (Durie, Reference Durie1998: 101). Durie has divided biculturalism another way, into “bicultural reformism (adapting Pākehā institutions to meet Māori requirements) and bicultural distributivism (developing different and specifically Māori institutions to share the authority defined by the treaty).” The term is still contested and there remains considerable debate about whether biculturalism has gone far enough, or too far, or has achieved some rough form of balance (Durie, Reference Durie1998: 98–102).

This puts Māori-Pākehā partnership at the centre of the way the state is imagined and governed. It does so at two levels, first through the biculturalization of centralized state institutions. This can also have a sort of trickle-down effect by being mirrored in regional and municipal institutions and in universities, schools, churches and other local institutions. Second, it is expressed through the treaty settlement process (not perfect by any means), which confers a level of financial compensation, territorial settlement, and political authority to selected iwi.

Biculturalism and Pākehā Identity

A sense of two-pronged relational Pākehā identity flowed from settler support for Māori activism of the 1970s and 80s, asserting solidarity with the political and social goals of Māori but also expressing a form of settler distinctiveness (Bell, Reference Bell, Spoonley, Pearson and MacPherson1996). Paul Spoonley, for example, sees Pākehā as “a product of New Zealand, not of Europe.” Spoonley has used the term since the 1970s to identify himself, as a “political statement as much as one that describes my cultural associations and origins,” as well as “obligations and a commitment” (Reference Spoonley and King1991: 146).

Being Pākehā has both progressive and overtly self-serving and colonizing dimensions. For the prominent historian Michael King, Pākehā embodied two meanings. In a descriptive sense, the word “applied to non-Polynesian people and things in New Zealand that derive originally from outside New Zealand—most often from Europe.” Second, there was a discursive meaning: “things that are no longer simply European … people and things that derive from abroad but that, through the transformations of history and geography, through their new characteristics and combinations, are now unlike their sources and antecedents” (King, Reference King and King1991: 16, italics added).

King's desire for rapprochement with Māori implied bringing both groups together, stressing the settler aspects of being Indigenous, alongside the putatively Indigenous elements of being a settler. For King, Māori were also settlers, just settlers who had come earlier (Reference King1985: 160). As he put it, “In the beginning we were all immigrants to these islands, our ancestors boat people who arrived by waka, ship or aeroplane. The ingredients of our indigenous cultures, too, were imported: the Polynesian language that became Māori, and English” (Reference King and King1991: 9). Since Māori were merely the first settlers, King had problems with what he saw as the radicalization of Māori politics during the 1980s. Ideally, Pākehā figured as one-half of a partnership, which implied that Māori demands for self-determination could not be tolerated if they impinged on the privileges of Pākehā. Radicals, King felt, were racist, with their views “the matching precepts of Hitler's Germany, Enoch Powell's Britain and Idi Amin's Uganda” (Reference King and King1991: 9).

At the same time, settlers were provided with a more rooted settler identity, since Pākehā were, King averred, “a second indigenous New Zealand culture” (Reference King and King1991: 19). This conclusion was supposed to reassure settlers that they too belonged in NZ, that their “symbiotic relationship to Māoritanga” relied on shared territory, shared history, and respect for the individual histories of the two peoples. His arguments simultaneously contested Māori status as tangata whenua and sought to unilaterally impose boundaries in terms of what was acceptable for an Indigenous people demanding self-determination, and what was not (19–20).

This framework of supporting Māori rights while also seeking to rein in their purported radicalism is to some extent echoed in the work of some prominent sociologists. David Pearson, for example, presents Pākehā self-identification as “an explicitly nationalist endeavour to create a postcolonial identity that fully acknowledges the bicultural, possibly binational, foundations of the settler state.” Such a vision would include “constructing a treaty-based vision of shared origins and destinies.” The ideal behind this is a relationship founded on partnership between two founding peoples, and as such “is supportive of recent moves towards greater Māori autonomy and recognition” (Reference Pearson and Ip2009: 49).

Given this partnership ethos, both King (Reference King and King1991) and Pearson raised concerns about Māori “radicalism” or “more radical claims for Māori self-determination” which, Pearson argues, may “be seen as undermining a socially cohesive partnership” (Reference Pearson and Ip2009: 49). Pākehā are thus committed to a partnership framed by the treaty but one defined by Pākehā that imposes limits on the ability of Māori to push for Indigenous rights. There is clearly a boundary; if demands are deemed too radical, they must be suppressed to enable a harmonious partnership.

Avril Bell identifies the deeply problematic implications of allowing Pākehā to determine the acceptable boundaries of Māori behaviour, especially given the continued privilege settlers hold. Bell defines Pākehā through the lens of racial domination, as “the white, ‘political descendants’ of the group who colonized Aotearoa [and who] inherit the political (and material and symbolic) privileges ‘secured’ by the practices of colonization.” Being Pākehā is then to acknowledge the inherited “colonial relationality to Māori” (Reference Bell2004: 17). For Bell, self-identifying as Pākehā should be a disruptive exercise, “displac[ing] white New Zealanders from their position of discursive exnomination as the (normal, ordinary) New Zealanders.” Explicitly identifying different types of New Zealanders and highlighting racial hierarchies enables Bell to discursively undermine “white hegemony” while promoting “progressive or ‘postcolonial’ politics” (Bell, Reference Bell, Spoonley, Pearson and MacPherson1996: 280–81, 153–54).

She puts it appositely that while Pākehā may be “broadly sympathetic to Māori and critical of the way in which colonization has worked in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” this doesn't change the reality that “Pākehā are the beneficiaries of those colonizing processes” (155). Self-identified Pākehā are not necessarily aware of these benefits, Claire Gray adds. Through a series of interviews, she demonstrates that whiteness was largely invisible to her respondents and that Pākehā self-reflection as progressive rarely translated into concrete political action. Indeed, “Questions of power were … overwhelmed in the interviews by the implication that a mutually beneficial relationship exists and that primarily the adoption of the label Pākehā is in Māori interests.” The core issue for interviewees was being “tolerant,” bicultural” and “in touch with Māoridom” versus the “cultural prejudice” of less enlightened white New Zealanders. Racism for respondents was then about “interpersonal interactions” and not about unequal access political power (Reference Gray2012: 60).

This lack of reflexiveness means that Pākehā may have clear limits to what they will tolerate in a bicultural situation. Surveys and focus groups by Ward and Liu note a strong rhetorical commitment to Māori rights among Pākehā for “the symbolic representation of biculturalism and acknowledg[ment of] treaty grievances.” They are however “largely unprepared to support initiatives that are perceived to provide categorical privileges for Māori in terms of material resources in order to address past injustices or achieve social equality” (2012: 63). Another way of expressing it is that Pākehā have been supportive of “symbolic biculturalism,” which involves changing how the state and society is perceived, but they are more reluctant to endorse “resource biculturalism,” in the form of financial disbursements and other perceived privileges to Māori (Callister, Reference Callister2011: 1).

Overall, Pākehā remains a term invoked primarily by academics and activists. As an ethnic descriptor it appeared only once on the NZ census, in 1996 as the category “NZ European/Pākehā.” It resulted, as Statistics NZ reports, in “a significant adverse reaction from some respondents,” and was subsequently changed in the 2001 census to “New Zealand European” a term first introduced in 1991 to refer to “people of European ancestry who had strong generational attachments to New Zealand” (2009: 14). A 2013 study of over 4,000 white respondents demonstrated that the primary mode of self-identification is as “New Zealander” at 52 per cent, followed by much lower levels of support for “New Zealand European” and “Kiwi,” with Pākehā a distant fourth (Auckland University, 2013).

NZ's biculturalism is hardly perfect. On the positive side, Māori have achieved parliamentary representation higher than their percentage of the overall population, alongside prominent Māori in cabinet and in other positions of leadership. Recent studies demonstrate that Māori and Pākeha are equally committed to common NZ symbols and national culture, a unique situation relative to other Western settler societies (Sibley and Liu, Reference Sibley and Liu2007). Changes since the 1980s have resulted in a rise of symbolic biculturalism and a Māori resurgence. This has also been accompanied by numerous settlements for iwi (roughly 1 to 2 per cent of the value of what was taken), which have helped generate a growing “Māori economy” worth $40 billion annually (Te Amo, Reference Te Amo2015).

The treaty settlements process has been uneven, and some rightly signal the low economic status of most Māori relative to Pākeha, in part a result of successive neoliberal policies from the 1980s onwards. Māori unemployment as well as the percentage of Māori living below the poverty line has risen significantly. Similarly, access to housing has plummeted (Poata-Smith, Reference Poata-Smith and Rashbrooke2013: 150–55; Rashbrooke, Reference Rashbrooke and Rashbrooke2013: 27). The percentage of prisoners who are Māori has also increased since the 1980s; currently 52 per cent of male prisoners are Māori and 63 per cent of women. This marks a starkly negative trend compared with earlier figures from the 1980s (Statistics NZ, 2012).

Added to this skewed rise of symbolic biculturalism coupled with increasing Māori poverty is the marginalization of non-Māori and non-Pākehā groups, including established South Asian and Chinese communities. The idea that biculturalism is about Māori and Pākehā to the exclusion of other ethnic groups who are tolerated but not officially recognized reflects a long history of discriminatory legislation (Pearson, Reference Pearson and Ip2009: 49). While political leaders pay lip service to NZ as an evolving multicultural society within a bicultural framework, there is little support for culture or language retention by communities of colour. Other terms such as Tauiwi and Tangata Tiriti have been deployed in recent years to create a more inclusive political atmosphere; neither is widely used, although the government has been keen to promote Tangata Tiriti as a catch-all term for non-Indigenous New Zealanders (Mila, Reference Mila and Rashbrooke2013: 92). This term was used by the government during their 2013 constitutional reform process to denote all those who are non-Māori, and was also used by the 2016 independent Māori constitutional review process organized through the Iwi Chairs Forum (Burrows and O'Regan, Reference Burrows and O'Regan2013; Mutu and Jackson, Reference Mutu and Jackson2016).

Finally, a concomitant to the rise of biculturalism has been a white nativist backlash, organized through groups such as the One New Zealand Foundation and the rightwing publisher Tross. The arguments are facile and rather predictable, and include presenting biculturalism as a conspiracy between a cabal of Māori elite and weak governments seeking to destroy the country at the expense of white NZers and the majority of Māori (Baker, Reference Baker1998: 4; 17; see also Robinson, Reference Robinson2011: 8).

Equally prevalent is the argument that Māori leaders relinquished sovereignty to the crown in 1840 and agreed to live under British law in return for protection and status as imperial subjects (Baker, Reference Baker1992: 11). To suggest Māori deserve more than other New Zealanders is inflammatory and creates an “Apartheid Aotearoa with different rights for different races” (Robinson et al., Reference Robinson, Moon, Round, Butler, Barr and Cresswell2013: 8). Any recognition is seemingly illegitimate because Māori are not really Indigenous, having come to what is now NZ only “a short time before the Europeans” (Baker, Reference Baker1992: 19). To this can be added the claim that since many Māori are of mixed origins, they are not Indigenous enough, rendering them at best “pale, part-Māoris” (Robinson et al., Reference Robinson, Moon, Round, Butler, Barr and Cresswell2013: 14).

If these arguments prove insufficient, Māori governance traditions and cultures are denounced in one publication as “not just dysfunctional but mad, criminally insane” societies (Robinson, Reference Robinson2011: 20). A recent Tross publication asserts, “With endemic warfare, bloody conquest, cannibalism, infanticide (especially of female children) and slavery, Māori society had become pathological” (Moon et al., Reference Robinson, Moon, Round, Butler, Barr and Cresswell2013: 28). Such overt racism suffuses the right of the political spectrum; it arguably existed well before the onset of biculturalism, and has impeded a fuller development of its conceptual vocabulary and practice.

Where are Canada's Pākehā? Métis and Settlers

In Canada we have no shorthand term to denote a settler of European origin in a discursive relationship with Indigenous peoples, except perhaps “settler ally.” One might use shognosh, an Anishinaabe term to refer to settler Canadians, which Spielmann uses throughout his book Anishinaabe World (Reference Spielmann2009), but this normally denotes settler ignorance (Spielmann pokes fun at his own lack of knowledge), not any sort of constructive relationship. From his own settler experiences, Fitzmaurice writes that for the Anishinaabe, the term implies “someone who does not understand the Aboriginal perspective of the world and fully believes him/herself to be superior to, and to know what is best for, Aboriginal people” (Reference Fitzmaurice and Davis2010: 55).

The term “settler” has attained little mainstream acceptance in either Canada or the United States, although it is certainly used in an academic and activist context, as evidenced by former TRC Research Director Paulette Regan's Unsettling the Settler Within, Adam Barker and Emma Battell Lowman's Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada and Barker's forthcoming book Settling: Invasion, Space-Making, and the Northern Bloc of Settler Colonialism. In the United States, some recent works include Mark Rifkin's Settler Common Sense and Fujikane and Okamura's edited Asian Settler Colonialism. Indigenous academics and activists are equally adopting the tropes of settlement and unsettlement, such as Arthur Manuel's Unsettling Canada: Rebuilding Indigenous Nations.

Those adopting “settler” do so in a manner similar to NZ progressives. Regan aims in her work to “unsettle” the settler through a process of transformation to uncover “the colonizer who lurks within.” This process of engaging with one's inner colonizer allows the settler to “confront the history of colonization, violence, racism, and injustice that remains part of the IRS [Indian Residential Schools] legacy today” (Reference Regan2010: 11). An unsettled settler would act in a manner similar to a progressive Pākehā and would as Regan posits, “risk interacting differently with Indigenous people—with vulnerability, humility, and a willingness to stay in the decolonizing struggle of our own discomfort” (15). In so doing we can then transform our settler identity “from that of colonizer to ally.” The role of the TRC is largely to bring the facts to light, and to encourage settlers to question their comfortable settler narratives, through “a public truth telling in which settlers link critical reflection, enlightened vision and positive action to confront the settler problem head on” (16).

Similarly, Barker and Lowman assert that Canadians need to accept the term settler and engage with its negative colonizing implications if they desire to bring about constructive relationships with Indigenous peoples. Being a settler is to embrace an identity “shared by many but claimed by few,” and this embrace involves recognizing unequal power relations, how settler comfort has been “forged through violence and displacement of Indigenous communities and nations” (Reference Barker and Lowman2015: 2). The adoption of settler, like Pākehā, encourages a sense of agency, responsibility and accountability for what the settler state has done to Indigenous peoples, to understand in what ways settler people have benefited from “the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous peoples” while simultaneously denying that reality (13–14, 16).

Yet, as with Bell, Gray, and Regan, self-identification is insufficient; settlers need to actually bring about change for the term to have any meaning. As such, being a self-aware and self-conscious settler implies working “actively against” colonial power, while “pursuing decolonizing relationship building can be a form of ‘direct action’ against settler colonialism” (Barker and Lowman, Reference Barker and Lowman2015: 117). Morgensen similarly sees the potential in settler to highlight positionalities and bring about decolonizing change. It can be, he argues, “a trenchant tool to expose power relations, cultural logics and subjects formed by white-supremacist settler colonialism” (2014). South of the border, Rifkin has aimed to unravel what he calls “settler common sense” often epitomized by settler comfort and ignorance of the coloniality embodied in settler-Indigenous relationships (Reference Rifkin2014: xvi–xvii).

This relational, contingent presentation of settler as a self-conscious and activist identity differs from its more commonplace academic use as a descriptor for those seeking to establish colonies to control Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands (Veracini, Reference Veracini2010, Reference Veracini2015). Docker uses “settler colony” to refer to a “colonial society where the indigenous population was reduced to a small or tiny proportion of the overall population, whose majority population becomes composed of colonizers/migrants” (Reference Docker2004: 2), a definition little different from Pearson's “settler societies” (Reference Pearson2001: 5–6). Regan, Barker and Lowell, Rifkin and others deploy settler in a way similar to that of Pākehā: it can be a basic descriptor for a non-Indigenous person, or it might also express a commitment to a changing relationship with Indigenous peoples.

Tangata Tiriti: We Are All Treaty People

Paralleling settler, a cognate of tangata tiriti has developed over the past decade. The concept of “Treaty people” is in part based on the work of Sakej Henderson (2002), and is promoted by the Office of the Treaty Commissioner (OTC) in Saskatchewan through publications and teaching resource kits. Their 2008 volume describes a “‘brother-to-brother’ relationship between the First Nations peoples and the newcomers.” While the legal text is important, the OTC is clear that the treaty relationship will last forever and constitutes “a living relationship that can change to reflect the current realities of both Canadian and First Nations peoples.” It was further seen as being of mutual benefit, generating wealth, rights, and security, while promoting peaceful co-existence between partners. Including in this understanding is that both parties should be involved in joint decision making through regular consultation (OTC, 2008: 15–17).

Roger Epp similarly uses “treaty people” in his essay collection of the same name. Epp, who served as a TRC honorary witness, saw the inherent problem in reconciliation as fundamentally a “settler problem.” Returning to a treaty relationship which had been “ruptured” by settlers offered the hope of a new legacy between both communities (Reference Epp2008: 137–38). Former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Georges Erasmus has similarly made clear the importance of this treaty-based relationship, seeing treaties creating a “unique historical relationship,” which confers benefits as well as commitments (Reference Erasmus, Mathur, Dewar and DeGagné.2011: vii).

This focus on shared responsibilities, benefits, and a renewed relationship was recently explored in Coates and Poelzer's From Treaty Peoples to Treaty Nation. Like the OTC, the authors emphasize the spirit of the original agreements and promote the treaty system as “first and foremost a pact between cultures and peoples and only secondarily a set of legal documents” (Reference Coates and Poelzer2015: xv). The focus is on the broad sweep of historical interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, the “hundreds of agreements [that] have been signed since the eighteenth century: constitutional agreements, self-government agreements and agreements to devolve federal and provincial responsibilities to Aboriginal government” (xviii). The authors are broadly hopeful, given what they see as the minimal level of overt violence and confrontations between the two groups. Notably, this tells the reader little about the larger climate of cultural genocide, which has been a central focus of the TRC, nor do the authors appear to be in favour of self-determination as such.

Echoing King and Pearson in the Māori case, Coates and Poelzer are wary of what they see as potential radicalism and criticize so-called “traditionalists” like Kiera Ladner, Taiaiake Alfred, Joyce Green, Glen Coulthard and Patricia Monture-Angus. The not-so-tacit conclusion here is that such claims are too unreasonable for the average settler Canadian to accept. For the authors Indigenous peoples are clearly “Canadians” and thus “treaty people” alongside settlers. Their “status and honour” and political “empowerment” are to be provided within the existing Canadian state, with potentially new forms of representation such as a “commonwealth of Aboriginal Peoples” serving potentially as a third order of government (Reference Coates and Poelzer2015: xx).

A prima facie objection to this concerns the nature of the treaties. While this concept might hypothetically work in areas where there are coherent treaties, it works less well in areas like much of British Columbia where no lands were ceded by Indigenous peoples, or where the treaties were created in a situation of coercion by the colonizing state (Barker and Lowman, Reference Barker and Lowman2015: 66–67). Daschuk, in Clearing the Plains, has cogently outlined the use of starvation under John A. Macdonald to induce Indigenous leaders to agree to treaties, on terms which were hardly equitable (Reference Daschuk2013: 134–35). Further, highlighting relations between early settlers and Indigenous peoples does not necessarily include people of colour and reflects broader concerns within settler colonial studies that whiteness can become normalized, as white settlers assume to speak for everyone who is not Indigenous (Fitzmaurice, Reference Fitzmaurice and Davis2010; Morgensen, Reference Morgensen2014).

Canada's Tauiwi?

Critical race theorists (Lawrence and Dua, Reference Lawrence and Dua2005; Mathur, Reference Mathur, Rogers, DeGagné, Dewar and Lowry2013; Phung, Reference Phung, Rogers, DeGagné, Dewar and Lowry2013; Thobani, Reference Thobani2007) raise general concerns about the nature and cohesiveness of non-Indigenous Canadian category when discussions of reconciliation and settler responsibility arise. How do people of colour (and I include myself here) fit into the emerging narrative about bicultural relations between Indigenous peoples and settlers? Are non-white people settlers, or can and do they fit into another category?

For settler colonial theorists like Veracini, settlers are a distinct category, and may not include people of colour. In his work, the settler state comprises three distinct groups: Indigenous peoples, European settlers and later migrants, who are often people of colour. As he puts it, “Settlers are founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them (on the contrary, migrants can be seen as appellants facing a political order that is already constituted)” (Reference Veracini2010: 3, italics in original). As such, settlers create new political and social systems over the pre-existing systems of Indigenous peoples, while more recent immigrants do not necessarily have input in the creation of these systems into which they are obliged to integrate (Veracini, Reference Veracini2015: 41). Settlers then have a particular role; they are the ones who assume Bell's “inherited coloniality” (Reference Bell2004: 17). Their ancestors were presumably the ones, acting in their names, who suppressed what Veracini calls “indigenous and exogenous subalternities,” while similarly casting the European settler as normal (Reference Veracini2010: 18), as generative of the “common sense” Rifkin identifies.

The role of non-Europeans as settlers in Canada is contested, and there is no one size fits all model. Many people of colour have been marginalized, and for much of the history of Canada have been barred entry on the basis of racially discriminatory immigration legislation (Backhouse, Reference Backhouse2010). This feeling of not fully belonging is all the more salient for black Canadians, who continue to be the target of carding, and other egregious racist policies (Cole, Reference Cole2015). Black Lives Matter has been working in solidarity with Idle No More, notably in the recent occupation of the Indigenous Affairs office in downtown Toronto. Should black Canadians be considered settlers too, given a context of demonstrably widespread anti-black racism?

Barker and Lowman, for example, are somewhat vague on this question. Certainly, they argue, slaves and indentured labourers are not settlers. However, “their descendants might be” (Reference Barker and Lowman2015: 18). Presumably, then, the key issue is not whether the person in question is positioned at the top of a social or racial hierarchy but to what extent he or she as an actor is responsible for and complicit in an exploitative relationship with Indigenous peoples (Corntassel et al., Reference Corntassel, Snelgrove and Dhamoon2014). It is beyond the scope of this article to fully engage with this topic. However, among people of colour there are divergent voices over the extent to which the term “settler” works or does not, including trenchant critiques of those who would argue that people of colour can be complicit in settler colonialism (Sharma and Wright, Reference Sharma and Wright2009).

Arguably, people of colour can and do express solidarities with Indigenous peoples, and can share some experiences of settler racism, and yet they may echo settler stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as part of their journey to integrate into what they understand as mainstream Canada. Phung notes, “Assimilated people of colour can produce similar settler colonial narratives in order to emplace their settler belonging on Indigenous lands” (Reference Phung, Rogers, DeGagné, Dewar and Lowry2013: 294). To this, Mathur describes how newcomers are first confronted with the symbols of settler colonial power and “all too often remain blithely unaware of histories inscribed into the land that far predate Confederation and both British and French incursions onto this terrain.” Newcomers can in an effort to fit into the settler colonial hierarchies allow their understanding of Indigenous peoples to be mediated through a “colonial gaze” (Reference Mathur, Rogers, DeGagné, Dewar and Lowry2013: 3).

Multiculturalism is sometimes critiqued on the basis that it has been deployed by the settler state to integrate Indigenous peoples, by marginalizing them as another cultural group seeking recognition for their diversity. For Lawrence and Dua, those of us who are people of colour must recognize that we too are settlers and while we may experience instances of structural racism, we nevertheless maintain “colonial relationships with Aboriginal peoples” (Reference Lawrence and Dua2005: 134). This is not to position people of colour and white settlers as equals, but it is to recognize that people of colour nevertheless “live on land that is appropriated and contested, where Aboriginal peoples are denied nationhood and access to their own lands” (134).

Thobani has highlighted similar dynamics, noting how in the complicated game of settler colonialism, people of colour can become part of the structural processes of colonization, becoming complicit in “supporting the nation's erasure of its originary violence and its fantasies of progress and prosperity” (Reference Thobani2007: 16). This is of course not always the case, and many of the most trenchant critics of the settler state and its treatment of Indigenous peoples are from racialized peoples. Nevertheless, this progressive work suggests that everyone, whatever their skin colour or positionality, has a stake in working towards a better future.