Reconciliation in the Context of Settler-Colonial Gender Violence: "How Do We Reconcile with an Abuser?"

SOCIOLOGISTS INFORMED BY CRITICAL, anticolonial praxis are called to reflexively consider social realties as they are, while actively participating in social transformation. I write from my position as a settler in Misâskwatôminihk (Saskatoon) on Treaty 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis and as an engaged sociologist. By settler, I do not simply mean “non-Indigenous”—like many non-Indigenous people living in Canada, my life is interwoven with the first people of this land, while also rooted in a colonial ancestry. As Dhamoon (2015) notes, in the context of settler colonialism, we are all “systemically (even if unintentionally) operating within, across, and through a matrix of interrelated forms and degrees of penalty and privilege” (p. 30). By settler, I primarily mean someone who benefits from the privileges of colonial dispossession and is protected from its many expressions of structural violence, even as I also work to resist ongoing forms of such violence. It is within this context of continued violence that I consider my role as an engaged sociologist in reconciliatory thought and action. There remain restricted possibilities for transformative change involving settler societies that are characterized by ongoing structural and material forms of domination. Truth telling necessitates continuous disruption of what Sunera Thobani (2007:4) refers to as the “master narrative” of the nation. Notions of Canadians as “responsible citizens, compassionate, caring, and committed to the values of diversity and multiculturalism” (Thobani 2007:4) elide the intent of the nation-building project and the civilizing instruments that constructed notions of what it means to be