Unsettling Miss Chief and Buffalo Boy: Interrupting Canada's Politics of Reconciliation

This project explores how the interruptive elements of queer Indigenous art shows reconciliatory processes as founded on desires for a unified national political community.I draw out how these processes centre on a myth of a self-enclosed sovereignty that maintains settler colonial violence.I specifically examine how the artwork of Canadian Two-Spirit artists Adrian Stimson and Kent Monkman is critical of Indigenous-settler relations and in what ways their criticisms speak to current practices of reconciliation.I argue that their artwork are examples of how queer Indigenous art presents alternative images of being that destabilize the conceptualization of sovereignty underpinning Canada's framework of reconciliation.Such art interrupts by disrupting Canada's image as a benevolent state and by opening up a space to imagine what political, social, and legal relations might look like with alternative conceptions of sovereignty.Rifkin's structures of feelings has a dual reference.Firstly, it refers to the presence of Indigenous sociopolitical formations that are not recognizable within settler institutions.Second, it refers to the impact on Indigenous individuals living with the dismissal of those sociopolitical formations.8 On a whole, settler structures of feeling involves questions of how emotions and sensibilities take part in the continuing processes of exerting settler authority over Indigenous peoples.Settler structures of feeling, however, also exert authority over non-Indigenous peoples as well since they determine attitudes and modes of conduct in Indigenous-settler relations on a whole.Mackey's use of settler structures of feeling refers to how settler certainty is dependent on the dismissal of Indigenous sociopolitical formations and how this dismissal enables a structure of control and authority.In short, decolonization for settlers and for settler law requires making uncertain settler futures by destabilizing notions of certainty in relation to settler entitlement and settler relations with Indigenous communities.Using Mackey as a point of departure, I suggest Canada's reconciliatory gestures are less about substantially creating new Indigenous-settler relations than about (re)cultivating certainty in Canada's future, both in settler law and settler sovereignty.In large part this stems from Canada's reconciliatory approaches being too focused on closure and unity, thus depicting reconciliation as a goal and not a process.9 Andrew Woolford makes a similar argument contending that Canada's reconciliatory gestures offered to Indigenous communities appear to be little concerned with the issues of ongoing relationship building within Indigenous-settler relations.He suggests that to treat reconciliation as an ongoing process or living relationship is too problematic in the legal contexts of 8 Mark Rifkin, Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) at 3. I want to note here that sociopolitical is the term used specifically by Rifkin.These sociopolitical formations include emotions and sensations that are categorized by the state as private and therefore warrant being dismissed.9 Yule Schmidt, "So Much Litigation, So Little Reconciliation", online: (2014) C2C Journal .

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