Reconciliation and Its Articulations: Crisis, Counter-Hegemony, and the Struggle over Indigenous Self-Determination

In this essay, I turn to Stuart Hall's use of articulation—in the sense of both "connection" and "expression"—to examine the politics of reconciliation in Canada. I argue that articulation enables an appreciation of ideological struggle within the politics of reconciliation—the contestation over the meaning of reconciliation—while refusing to treat that struggle as exogenous to social structure and social forces—allowing us to understand what reconciliation is doing. This provides a framework to explain the belated take-up of reconciliation in 2015, as it was then that reconciliation was articulated to a resource-led accumulation strategy across the Canadian federation in an effort to suture crisis. As I argue, the articulation of reconciliation to a resource-led accumulation strategy de-economizes Indigenous self-determination, amplifies patriarchal settler colonialism, and garners consent for coercive action against those who refuse this new arrangement. The upshot of this counter-history of reconciliation is that it (1) foregrounds the role of capitalist property as a constraint on Indigenous self-determination and flourishing; (2) identifies the role and function of "the economy" as a conceptual abstraction in circumscribing Indigenous self-determination and suturing crisis; and (3) facilitates a more productive reinterpretation of the "resurgence-reconciliation" debate as one that revives the politics of counter-hegemony.