Shame

In the literature, guilt is about a failure of doing whereas shame is about a failure of being. Unlike guilt, which focuses on failing to live up to a norm or breaking a rule, shame is often taken to be a response to a global failure of the self.Footnote ⁷ This is because shame is, in structure, ontological rather than action-based—it is tied to our identity. For example, I might feel guilty about not paying my required bus fare (an act of will), but ashamed that I am a poor person who is unable to afford bus fare (an identity). As I will explain below, shame can sometimes be expelled precisely through feeling bad about who I am as a person. Indeed, I will show that this kind of feeling bad often serves as an antidote to a true moment of self-criticism.

Self-presentation theorists, such as Erving Goffman, have suggested that we have a vested interest in controlling how other people understand our social identities (Goffman Reference Goffman1959). From small everyday actions up to the most crucial and important social relationships, how we present ourselves matters. Because it matters to us, we seek to control how we are understood and the meaning of our (often unchosen) intersecting identities. The impressions others form of us has a significant impact on how seriously we are taken as possible social agents, that is, how well we can get along in our communities, our work places, as lovers, or in our places of worship. These anxieties, then, reflect the relative lack of control over how we are seen and that the loss of social recognition is something we want to avoid. It is worth noting that built into this theory is the assumption that we can control, in some sense, the meaning of our identities. For many, this is already something curtailed by dominant narratives about race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, and so on. This presumption of control will become important, below, in understanding settler shame.

Krista Thomason builds on theories of self-presentation in her work on shame. We experience anxiety about how our social self is perceived, and we feel shame about the lack of control we have over our identity when some “negative” aspect is revealed. She argues that we feel “that this thing defines [us] as a whole” (Thomason Reference Thomason2015, 11). She continues, noting that when we experience shame, we are “defined by, reduced to, or totalized by” some part of ourselves (11). We do not necessarily need to endorse or even accept this reductive identity; we need only feel the possibility of being so defined (12). Thus shame involves an uncovering of some part of ourselves and an accompanying sense of loss of control over how that part of us changes how we are seen in ways that threaten (or at least inspire anxiety about the possibility of threatening) relationships and our sense of belonging with people and communities.

If shame is tied both to our identity and the anxiety of being discredited as social agents, then what is unique to the settler experience of shame? Theories regarding shame under conditions of oppression can help us understand what I argue is an important mechanism of settler shame.Footnote ⁸ For example, Sandra Bartky's foundational work sheds light on the effects of systemic shame experienced via gendered oppression. Bartky argues that women's shame is, in part, a “pervasive affective attunement to the social environment” (Bartky Reference Bartky1990, 85). Put in other words, women relate to and are shaped by the ever-present experience of being ashamed in intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional ways. Self-presentation theory assumes we have some control over how we are considered as social agents, and though I do not think we are entirely powerless, there are undeniably extremely powerful social scripts operative in the culture that are often difficult to control. For women, who do not have full control, “shame is the background against which other experiences stand” (Ginzberg Reference Ginzberg and Bianchi1999, 55). Men's shame, however, is a temporary experience, and “his feelings are expected to return to ‘normal’” after the shameful experience has subsided (55). The shame of those with more social power, then, has a different character via oppressive systems. This is a useful distinction for unpacking settler shame in that it highlights the ways in which certain identities might form a special kind of immunity to the effects of shame as a potentially transformative experience, which some theorists, like Elspeth Probyn, advance. If, as a settler, I am insulated by social privilege and control over my identity, the experience of shame can take place and I can “return to normal” in ways that would be much more challenging for those with fewer insulations or less control. As such, the immunity to settler shame operates as a kind of ignorance that Anna Cook, drawing on Charles Mills's notion of white ignorance, calls settler ignorance.Footnote ⁹ This form of ignorance is not the mere lack of recognition of Indigenous peoples, but rather a form of structural ignorance built into settler colonialism and settler identity.

However, that the settler can return to normal once the experience of shame has subsided does not prevent the experience of settler shame from being deeply painful and disorienting. The phenomenon of settler shame touches on our self-understanding as citizens, and thus, our self-presentation of being Canadian. Feeling ashamed of our identity as settlers can cause a confrontation between who we take ourselves to be as Canadians and what we want being a Canadian to mean. We find that we are not whom we had hoped we were: allies, socially enlightened or “woke,” “good Canadians.” Indeed, we might feel defined as this other, bad, colonial self.

I take settler shame, then, to be a personal experience related to the recognition of our identity as complicit in a racist and colonial world (being bad), as well as the concomitant realization that we might lose control over our identity and become defined solely as this bad self both by ourselves but also by our social world at large. Settler shame causes anxiety and is profoundly painful precisely because we do not want to jeopardize our social standing or lose the ability to self-define. The shame I am interested in is not shaped by the affective attunement to social environments that oppression can generate; it is far more myopic and self-focused. As I show in the next section, settler shame, as an affective experience of a privileged class, is easily appropriated back into narratives of Canadian goodness. Thus settler shame does not, and perhaps cannot, confront racism or settler colonialism.

Recognition of the Shameful

Paulette Regan argues that the myth of the “benevolent Canadian peacemaker” conditions the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers in both past and in present times. The basis of this myth begins with the early “peace and friendship” treaties coupled with the belief by early settlers that British justice and rule were the pinnacle of civilization. In establishing these treaties, the early British-Canadians saw themselves as imparting this good and neutral governance to otherwise “backward” Indigenous peoples in the spirit of peace and friendship—a narrative still very much alive today. As opposed to the “unchecked violence of the American frontier,” the myth of Canadian settlement was constructed as “peaceful,” and Canadian identity became the “antithesis of violence” (Regan Reference Regan2010, 102). The nation thus became seen as “keepers of the Queen's peace,” not only in Canada but worldwide (103). Today, this same sense of peacemaking is evident in the reconciliation movement in Canada. Even if our ancestors were, in fact, “morally suspect,” we can now see ourselves as “morally superior” in virtue committing to a new form of “peace”: reconciliation (108). Regan writes, “the peacemaker myth lies at the heart of the settler problem; it informs, however unconsciously, the everyday attitudes and actions of contemporary politicians, policy makers, lawyers, and negotiators, and it remains an archetype of settler benevolence, fairness, and innocence in the Canadian public mind” (87).

In a liberal democratic framework, which I return to below, the process of state recognition, either in the form of special rights or in the recognition of pain, is always already a process saturated with notions of Canadian goodness, fairness, and even blamelessness. Reconciliation, therefore, becomes written back into the script of Canadian identity as proof of settler peacefulness and level-headedness. Although there have been positive changes in settler–Indigenous relationships, the myth of the “good Canadian” remains entrenched in the hearts and minds of most settler Canadians. The politics of reconciliation operates to cover over colonial violence, both past and present, with the belief that Canada—and settler Canadians—are a “constant good work in progress” (109).

Discussing the Australian settler colonial context, Sara Ahmed writes, “[t]o acknowledge wrongdoing means to enter into shame; the ‘we’ is shamed by its recognition that it has committed ‘acts and omissions,’ which have caused pain, hurt and loss for indigenous others” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004a, 101; italics mine). Confronting past and ongoing colonial violence toward Indigenous peoples means exposing the myth of a good and kind Canada as a myth. By pulling away the façade of innocence, settlers might well come to feel ashamed of—even trapped or defined by—what it reveals about who we really are. Indeed, this is how shame is said to be a more useful candidate than guilt for responding to ongoing systemic issues. Shame plugs us into the lattices of oppression along identity lines, whereas guilt only enables us to remedy individual acts of will. Being more ontologically basic, shame renders me responsible for this “we.” As I discussed, above, we have a vested interest in controlling our identities to remain viable social agents. As such, an apprehension or anxiety about my social-self-as-Canadian being shown to be “bad” could potentially empower me to change myself and encourage my fellow citizens to do the same.Footnote ¹⁰ However, something peculiar takes place when national sentiment is evoked; I argue that this is very clear in the Canadian context. Recognition of wrongdoing becomes detached from individuals and tacked onto history or the collective, and, as such, the responsibility that shame elicits changes in function as well (72).

Rather than operating as an affective transformative experience, settler shame leads to a collapse back into a remaking of settler identity. In other words, the responsibility becomes a responsibility to fix the image of the settler rather than repair the damaged relationship with Indigenous peoples. This is because we, as settlers, want to stop feeling bad so we take steps to discharge our shame in such a way that does not challenge the material conditions that have created and maintain racist and colonial injustice. Our individual (and national) efforts to resolve the experience of shame have taken place through the recognition of our shame experience: it is self-referential. To flee this shameful identity becomes, then, a project to restore our identity as superior. In essence, we create a kinder, gentler colonial identity that has the capacity to feel bad for what has been with “well-intentioned hand-wringing over the plight of ‘our Aboriginal people’” (Regan Reference Regan2010, 106). Ahmed writes, “it is striking how shame becomes not only a mode of recognition of injustices committed against others, but also a form of nation building … Recognition works to restore the nation or reconcile the nation to itself by ‘coming to terms with’ its own past in the expression of ‘bad feeling’” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004a, 103).

In feeling shame for our identity, we can thus begin to reassert ourselves as settlers without confronting the pain that settler colonialism entails. We reassert ourselves by both admitting to the bad deeds themselves and the bad feelings about the deeds. Admitting to our racism and complicity in colonialism is, then, a form of confession, the expression of which allows us to, once again, feel good about ourselves for having completed introspective work. Thus, settler shame is motivating but begins to look suspiciously like a form of white guilt that Audre Lorde and bell hooks remind us is not useful (Lorde Reference Lorde1982; hooks Reference hooks1994).

However, settler shame is not merely wallowing, it is a motivator to heal the self and the national myth. Writing about the manner in which Canadian archives transform the narratives of national shame and guilt to glory and honor for the nation, J. J. Ghaddar notes the capacity to feel shame reifies the narrative that the settler is the “self-reflexive” agent and the “colonized or racialized subject is the occasion for the self-reflexivity” (Ghaddar Reference Ghaddar2016, 17). Relatedly, Maria Lugones's concept of “boomerang perception” is useful here. On her reading, colonial oppressors tend to see ourselves as superior and original whereas Indigenous peoples are seen as the mirrored image of the original copy—the colonizer—hence fake, inferior, and distorted (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 156). This “colonizing gaze” shapes the way colonized peoples see themselves through colonial eyes. For my purposes, the point is that settlers tend to see themselves, usually unconsciously, as superior and the reflexive agents against whom all others are defined. Thus, settler identity continues its structural development through the appropriation of Indigenous pain via self-reflexivity about that pain. This refocusing gesture tends to take the direction of witnessing others’ pain only through our own solipsistic understanding. In so doing, we can employ shame to cover over that which is not being challenged to showcase that which is.

Settler reflexivity, however, extends only so far. Bound by the myth of the peacemaker, a desire to be blameless, and a lack of engagement with actual Indigenous peoples, this reflexivity ensures that reflexivity is a project available only to settlers (Ghaddar Reference Ghaddar2016, 16). The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a series of national events that took place from 2008 to 2015 with the purpose of documenting the history and effects of the Indian Residential School system, demonstrates this quite well. Testimony of horrific abuse and trauma that took place and the generational effects of this abuse was given, but, in a settler colonial society, the burden of those realities remains on Indigenous peoples while settlers can engage in thinking about what this testimony says about us. I am not saying that these truth-telling events were not meaningful for many who participated, settler and Indigenous alike. However, if, as I suspect is true, this testimony was taken up by the Canadian public as the occasion for settler reflexivity, then Indigenous people and their stories have not been heard on their own terms. There is an element of what Ahmed calls the “non-performativity of anti-racism” wherein antiracist work does not, in fact, do what it claims to do—it does not perform as it ought (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004b). The reconciliatory paradigm does not, in reality, do the work of reconciliation but rather prioritizes a “hearing” of testimony that is settler-self-referential. How do I feel when I hear this? What does it say about me, the perpetrator, to be a listener? In this way, recognition of the shameful becomes a process of “restoration of an identity of which we can be proud” rather than a commitment to some anticolonial and equitable future for all (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004a, 110). As Ahmed notes, “the shameful subject expresses its shame, it ‘shows’ that it is ‘not racist,’ if we are shamed, then we mean well. The subject that is shamed by its racism is hence also a subject that is proud about its shame. The very claim to feel bad … also involved a self-perception of ‘being good’” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2005, 81).

The problem of settler shame is that it tends toward repairing the damaged self by using the Indigenous other as a mute foil to enact “peace” upon. Settler colonialism has an active interest in maintaining itself, and the maintenance of a national identity of innocence and peacemaking binds itself to all attempts to dismantle it. The privileges invested in settler identity (which are also heightened by whiteness) must be continually reproduced and reinvested into the cultural and material disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples, often in subtle ways. The TRC and other reconciliation events and initiatives can thus be seen as a form of both shame in action and the inaction of shame. I am not suggesting that the TRC's national testimonial events were only a result of or for the benefit of settler sentiment, but I do suggest that the uptake in the Canadian public mind tends to erase the people telling the story. That is, the self-reflexivity of the well-intentioned erases Indigenous subjectivity, thereby recreating the settler self and the settler myth but failing to “build trust or genuine reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the settler population” (Ghaddar Reference Ghaddar2016, 19–20). The stories that elicit settler shame become separated from living and existing communities and written into the “Canadian shame-cum-national triumph” narrative (20). What settler shame does is create an illusion that there is such a thing as the peacemaking settler Canadian, that it ought to be maintained, and, most disturbingly, that Indigenous peoples have no place as subjects, only objects, in this vision of the past, present, and future of Canada.

Another function of shame is to confirm our love for others and our desire to be in community.Footnote ¹¹ We would not feel ashamed if we did not have some desire to get back to good standing—to be loved again, whether this is rational or not. Coming to love ourselves, or feel proud again, is about seeing ourselves as fundamentally good once more. This is striking if I am correct, for it makes clear, in a stark sense, that the love and desire to be in community is only a desire to be in settler community, to feel loved by settler colonialism. Indeed, as I see it, there is nothing in the structure of settler shame that could entail actual love or even respect for Indigenous peoples, not to mention restitution to the Other. Settler shame, then, seems not to provoke an anxiety of loss of community with everyone, just those with whom we already share a community. Ahmed writes, we “feel pride at approximating an ideal that has already taken [our] shape” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004a, 109). As I have shown, settler shame is a form of nonperformativity that, though perhaps painful and disorienting, is insufficient to move us beyond the settler self. As above, our affective attunement to the world is not significantly altered, and we can return to normal after the experience. Indeed, we can return to normal feeling even better that we have lived up to the ideal of the kind and peacemaking Canadian. Robinder Kaur Sedhev notes, “rather than cleaving a space in colonial culture for decolonial recognition, shame can indicate the complete failure of recognition” (Sehdev Reference Sehdev2008, 228). In that sense, feeling shame becomes a way to love ourselves more but, as a failure of recognition, remains a mere optics of justice.

Elspeth Probyn discusses shame as a form of interest (Probyn Reference Probyn2005). To experience shame requires at least some interest in the object, person, or situation. Settler shame, and the form of politics that emerges from feeling this shame, is interested, if not totally then at least primarily, in the self and the national myth. Theorists like Probyn, Alexis Shotwell, and Samantha Vice, to name a few, find positive value in what this form of interest can do. Shame might well lead to a revaluation of who we are and reorient us toward solidarity or humility. Indeed, I suspect that there are forms of shame that can and do have transformative value, both for the person feeling or experiencing it and for others around them. I am not considering these other forms of shame in this article; however, below I discuss how Janice Keil's shame might not be a form of settler shame because of the material and temporal commitments it appears to make. I suspect that Ahmed is quite correct when she argues that shame is not a necessary or sufficient condition for responsible action; it merely presents the possibility to do better (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004a, 120). However, as I see it, settler shame contains such a risk of being performed merely to “feel better” that I argue that, as a species of shame, it is a form of interest that is an insufficient condition for responsible action.

Recognition as Settler Colonial Violence

Political state recognition as a normative goal in modern political debates is another way to interrogate the function of settler shame. Glen Coulthard, drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, notes that the discussion on reconciliation in Canada is saturated in recognition-talk insofar as it seeks to make Indigenous peoples’ experiences recognizable to settlers. However, this process of making recognizable is only ever done in reference to colonial subjectivities, epistemologies, and structures. Thus, this form of recognition remains entrenched in what Anna Cook calls “settler ignorance,” which does not function, opposed to the claims of liberal recognition, to truly see Indigenous Others as culturally distinct and autonomous peoples (Cook Reference Cook2018). In this section, I show how the political project of recognition obfuscates individual responsibility for decolonial efforts through this mechanism of ignorance.

Coulthard articulates how settler colonial power is maintained via Charles Taylor's recognition-based model of liberal pluralism (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014). On this model, Indigenous peoples claims to nationhood are understood through the “accommodation of Indigenous identities in some form of renewed relationship with the Canadian state” (Taylor Reference Taylor and Gutmann1994, 3). Therefore, the prior damage inflicted on Indigenous peoples by the Canadian state will be avoided in the present and future through political recognition of Indigenous peoples as a unique group in Canada with special rights, privileges, and laws—think, for instance, of the addition of section 35 to the Canadian Constitution in 1982 whereby the rights and treaties with the Crown were “recognized and affirmed.” By committing to this form of cultural recognition and institutional accommodation, the state is supposedly committing itself to a project of reconciliation and nation-to-nation respect. However, Coulthard argues that this recognition ultimately fails to live up to these goals, rendering it both ineffective for improving relations between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians as well as continuing settler colonial violence (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014). This has been made abundantly clear through the Canadian government's refusal to engage with section 35 in good faith.

Taylor considers recognition a “vital need,” the lack of which is considered to be a form of oppression, and Coulthard argues that a liberal politics of recognition reproduces, rather than transcends, a colonial structure of dominance (Taylor Reference Taylor and Gutmann1994, 26; Coulthard Reference Coulthard2007, 439). Indeed, liberal democratic recognition work “promises to reproduce the very configurations” of colonial power that Indigenous “demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend” (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014, 3). Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Coulthard's understanding of colonialism has both an objective and subjective form. The objective is constituted through the legal, political, and economic structures of settler society whereas the subjective relies on the creation of “colonized subjects” (16). In broad strokes, subjective colonialism takes place through a process of internalization whereby the colonized comes to both accept and identify with the misrecognition of and by state structures, echoing the Lugonian concept of the boomerang of perception, above. Coulthard writes, “in situations where colonial rule does not depend solely on the exercise of state violence, its reproduction instead rests on the ability to entice Indigenous peoples to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognitions either imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society” (25).

In this way, liberal recognition work remains “incapable of curbing the damages wrought within and against Indigenous communities by the structures of state” (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2007, 448). That is, the recognition granted is always already in the shape of the colonizer. In this way, settler colonialism can work through the inclusion of Indigenous peoples on settler terms rather than overt exclusion. Once more, this is made clear through the Canadian federal government's attempts to extinguish treaty and land-claim rights in favor of representing Indigenous peoples as just another minority in the cultural mosaic of the Great North.

For Coulthard, then, settler colonialism shapes Indigenous peoples and perspectives via settler state discourses. In so doing, liberal recognition becomes a “kinder and gentler” form of colonial assimilation and elimination. However, settler society operates in denial and ignorance of this structure most of the time. Cook's conception of settler ignorance will help make this clear and will set up the conditions through which settler shame ultimately plays into liberal politics of recognition and thus fails to confront colonial injustice.

Unlike the historical act of colonialism, contemporary settler colonialism continues the project of Indigenous elimination quietly and invisibly in the background. Cook rightly claims that this work requires a certain ignorance of its operations (Cook Reference Cook2018, 17). Drawing on Mark Rifkin, Cook notes that this ignorance takes place through a specific form of invisibilization called “settler common sense.” This species of common sense is at play in the “settler everyday in which Canadian sovereignty is taken to be both obvious and natural” (17). Settler common sense thus requires a “certain kind of forgetfulness” of the mechanisms of colonial violence in order that the logics of colonial elimination may continue unfettered. However, this forgetfulness is not the result of a pernicious or active hatred of Indigenous peoples; rather it is form of perpetual repression for the sake of “national unity” (18). To return to Regan's language, for the sake of the myth of the peacemaker and legitimization of the “good works” of Canada, settler colonial violence, dispossession, and appropriation must be repressed. This is, of course, much easier to do if you are insulated against the effects this logic of elimination as I have argued that settlers are, of course to greater or lesser degrees.

Presuming the settler experience to be the experience structures our selective memory lapses and coalesces into settler ignorance. For Cook, settler ignorance functions in two ways: first, by distancing “present testimonies of settler colonialism to the past” and, second, by discrediting Indigenous voices as “irrational” (18–19). We might hope settler shame could disrupt settler common sense and ignorance by making clear who we are, what role settlers have to play in a settler colonial state. However, the very fact that it could disrupt our memory lapses is precisely what makes it so dangerous. Settler shame brings us, in that horrible shameful moment, to the very edge of true self-/national recognition. This is what is so very disorienting and painful about the experience and also what makes it so easy to flee. If we can understand this shame to be about the past, we can remain confident that who we are now is nothing like those historical boogeymen. Indeed, if we can retreat to a sense of pride about feeling bad for these past wrongs, we can form an immunity to contemporary Indigenous demands for justice. Can they not see we have already felt bad and are the good people now? Are those protesting ongoing settler colonialism not irrational for refusing to witness my transformation? Although settler shame might tug at the edges of this common sense, it ultimately retreats from the precipice of understanding. In turning away from present and ongoing injustice, we can remain convinced that things have changed and that, for example, the Indigenous water protectors engaging in resistance to colonial and imperial power are irrational precisely because, in this line of thinking, the wrongs no longer exist. On a very everyday level, this ignorance-as-distancing makes sense. By this I mean not that it is correct, but that the sheer weight of dismantling settler colonialism requires real sacrifice and is much more challenging than rebuilding our immunity against a decolonial affective attunement.

Settler shame can, therefore, manifest change, but nothing so dramatic that would require dismantling our deep ignorance and commitment to settler privilege. The efforts of liberal pluralist theories, such as a Taylorian politics of recognition, are evidence of the inroads that settler shame can make in Indigenous–settler relations in Canada. However, the desire to be proud and good operates as an affective tool to mask the ongoing logics of elimination in Canada. Further, I argue that political recognition in and by the Canadian state, however well-intentioned, has diffused our sense of personal responsibility for the injustices of settler colonialism.

As I have argued above, there is something peculiar that happens to shame when it becomes expressed as a national sentiment. Citizens come to feel less personally responsible for injustice. It is in this manner, I argue, that settler shame can lead us to accept political recognition as a sufficient response. A political platform based on recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples becomes a viable option precisely because “something is being done” and that something can appear, from the settler perspective, as something both just and the “good work of a good nation.” I can be proud of my nation and government for recognizing “those others,” even though I personally have, in fact, done nothing (other than, perhaps, voting for a particular candidate) to remedy injustice. Moreover, as I have shown above, these responses are themselves insufficient responses to colonial injustice. Thus, in conjunction with a placid and ignorant attitude, small and often empty gestures toward recognition on the part of provincial or federal government enable settlers to feel satisfied that good has been done or that the good project is evolving still. Indeed, these mechanisms of shame and pride and self and nation set up the settler to find calls for restitution of Indigenous lands or rights completely irrational and unrealistically utopian.

As such, not only has the responsibility been diffused, but this “something being done” and the “good work of the nation” drives us more fully into settler ignorance and privileged insulation. Indeed, the very fact that shame can be rewritten into pride through these national narratives of peacekeeping demonstrates the lack of connection settler shame has to actual Indigenous peoples or to anticolonial praxis. Tellingly, Sehdev remarks that “shame politics” only serves to reinforce colonial and settler violence. She writes, “shame does expand recognition, but the expansion of recognition … means little if the terms of the recognition and the power structures implicit to them are not challenged … shamefulness and its resulting form of recognition is not sustainable because it does nothing to challenge the organization of power” (Sedhev Reference Sehdev2008, 223).

Good will and feeling good about feeling bad do, as Sedhev suggests, expand recognition, but the restoration of the Canadian myth of goodness and innocence does not challenge, and in fact reproduces, the politics of recognition/the reconciliatory paradigm that is bestowed on the colonized Other. Built into the politics of recognition is an attempt for a nation to “feel better” about its treatment of Indigenous peoples without challenging the organization of power that fails to recognize them in the first place. Indeed, settler shame demands recognition of settler transformation, settler reflexivity, and settler goodness—nothing more. The recognition “given” to the Other is thus solipsistic and related to the anxiety and discomfort of my confrontation of something about my self or my identity. As Ahmed insightfully argues, reconciliation projects make visible some wounds while hiding others (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004a, 105). Thus, both political recognition and emotional recognition make visible my wounds as settler while remaining firmly entrenched in ignorance of the wounds of others, except insofar as it relates to myself. Insofar as experiences of settler shame seek to engage in transformative politics, I argue that, at the very least, harnessing the power of settler shame will be continually undermined so long as it is hinged to the understanding of recognition criticized in the work of Ahmed, Coulthard, and many others. Given the structure of settler shame provided, no matter how well-meaning, it “enacts and thereby entrenches [our] power rather than identifying and challenging it” (Sedhev Reference Sehdev2008, 229). In the Canadian context, the resolution of settler shame has come in the form of a politics of recognition and reconciliation. Settler shame, then, serves only as a mechanism for expunging overtly problematic aspects of colonial racism without offering restitution as a component of justice for Indigenous peoples.

Materiality and Futurity

In this article, I have defined settler shame as an emotional and affective experience through which settlers come to both recognize their complicity in a racist and colonial system and, further, feel defined by their involvement. Being ontological in structure, settler shame hits us at the core of who we think we are, often in very painful ways. The desire to return to good standing, or to rehabilitate our understanding of being “Good Canadians” involves a frantic desire to flee this negative appraisal or to feel safe again knowing that we are good. Attempts to preserve our self-conception and maintain a sense of control over our identity are enacted via the “nonperformativity” of settler shame whereby settlers can come to feel good again by feeling bad.

Taiaiake Alfred (Mohawk Nation) notes that real restitution does not seek bad political affect or bad feelings, for these only get in the way:

I argue that any prioritization of settler shame ultimately prioritizes recognition work over restitution work. That is, settler shame makes it only so far as disclosure before retreating to the self and pernicious national myths. Settler shame that operates in the service of recognition and reconciliation continues a pollution of over-identification with settler affect and innocence but does not engage in “genuine” affective realization of wrongs nor with a commitment to changed behavior or policy. Alfred's work points toward an embrace of the material conditions of justice that eschew this politics of reconciliation. The pollution of faulty recognition and the reinstitution of new settler habits ought to be “purified” through, for example, restitution of lands, compensation and the establishment of nation-to-nation relationships. Without restitution and support of the self-determination of Indigenous peoples, apologies and truth commissions engage in a “politics of distraction” whereby “they shift the discourse away from restitution of indigenous homelands and resources and ground it instead in a political/legal rights-based process that plays into the affirmative repair policies of states and ultimately rewards colonial injustices” (185). This politics of distraction or ignorance operates in service of the obfuscated responsibility of settler shame. Restitution, on the other hand, requires engagement with others harmed by colonial violence coupled with dismantling the myth of goodness built into Canadian settler colonialism, or, more directly, involves dismantling the structure of settler colonialism.

Regan argues that in order to be truly committed to justice, settlers must decolonize themselves. To do so, we must let go of the myth of the good Canadian that both ignores and devalues Indigenous experiences. This experience should be profoundly “unsettling” in that settlers “must risk interacting differently with Indigenous people—with vulnerability, humility, and a willingness to stay in the decolonizing struggle of our own discomfort” (Regan Reference Regan2010, 13). The material demands of transformative justice require a new affective attunement for settlers that is neither fleeting nor self-focused and that does not use Indigenous peoples’ pain as a canvas on which to explore our own reflexivity. I am not lauding or holding Janice Keil up as a model de-settler—I do not know her personally nor her motivations—but her story can make clear the need for settlers to do and be more than ashamed. We can read Keil's situation as a shift from affect to materiality, but not mere materiality. I read Keil's case as different from recognition-based settler shame in three ways. First, it commits to Indigenous futurity; second, it shifts the discussion from apologies to land; and finally, the agreement takes place outside of official Canadian government processes.

Eve Tuck and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández make a distinction between settler futurity and Indigenous futurity that is illuminating here. Futurity is the manner in which “the future is rendered knowable through specific practices ... and, in turn, intervenes upon the present” (Baldwin 2012, 173, quoted in Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández2013, 79). Settler futurity aims to remove and replace the original inhabitants of this land. That is, settler futurity is invested in “that which will have had to have happened” for these inhabitants to be gone—either through death or complete and total erasure of Indigenous ways of life, knowing, and understanding (Campt Reference Campt2017, 34). Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández write, “anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity” (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández2013, 79). Rather like the Indian Residential Schools, settler futurity is committed to “killing the Indian in the child.” Mere recognition cannot possibly be a commitment to Indigenous futurity, for this recognition entails the disappearance of Indigenous peoples through imperialism. Whereas settler futurity demands erasure and replacement of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous futurities, although foreclosing settler colonialism and epistemologies, does not demand erasure of settler peoples, nor their existence on Indigenous lands (79). To be clear, foreclosing settler colonialism and epistemologies does not mean erasing or removing individual people from their homes. What it does mean is that settler colonialism as a structure and its associated colonial epistemologies are to be prevented from being a possibility in the future. Activists and scholars have detailed what such an Indigenous resurgence and futurity might entail (Alfred Reference Alfred2005; Alfred and Corntassle Reference Corntassle2005; Simpson, Reference Simpson2011; Martineau Reference Martineau2015), but generally speaking it entails an on-the-ground praxis. Although Keil herself is not Indigenous and is not reclaiming or reoccupying her Indigeneity, her action to return the land in partnership with the Alderville First Nation supports an active commitment to a future other than this one.

This action entails a commitment to that “which will have had to have happened” to support resurgence and autonomy of the Alderville First Nation. Let me be clear: I am not attempting to laud Keil as a model ally, but rather I see within this case the possibility of settler praxis that can make commitments to support Indigenous futurity and resurgence rather than settler narratives of comfortable reconciliation. The act of returning land (which she will remain a steward of in partnership with the Alderville First Nation until her death) is not merely a material act; it is a commitment to time and space outside of settler colonialism that settler shame seems ill equipped to enable settlers to do in any meaningful sense.

Moreover, Keil's case is further illuminating because it takes place at the limits of the liberal understanding of politics. Though she is relinquishing a deed, her action is not mediated through an election or a traditional mechanism of the Canadian state. Indeed, what Keil is doing has never been done in Canada before as far as I am aware. In working directly with the Alderville First Nation community, Keil can be read as making a commitment to transformative, restorative, and decolonized justice. Cases like this open a space to theorize the normative dimensions of decolonized affects. What I find so fascinating about Keil's case is that she claims to be both motivated by a sense of shame and a desire to return to pride in self and nation. However, I argue that we can read her case as something remarkably different from the phenomena of settler shame I have discussed throughout this article. Though I remain concerned that cases such as Keil's may still serve to reify a “good Canadian,” I would like to imagine her case as a challenge to settlers to both do and be better.Footnote ¹²