Realizing Reconciliation: Analyzing Resource Revenue Sharing Agreements and Indigenous-Settler Relations in Ontario's Mining Industry

In 2018, the Government of Ontario and the Grand Council Treaty #3, the Mushkegowuk Council and the Wabun Tribal Council announced that they had entered into three resource revenue sharing agreements. These new agreements were publicly celebrated as an example of reconciliation with First Nations in Ontario. This dissertation critically studies the development of these new agreements, from their conceptual origins in reconciliation to how they reshape Indigenous-settler relations in Ontario. Relying on settler colonial studies, governmentality, and Mills’ legality tree as theoretical frameworks, and through archival research, textual analysis and the principles of Indigenous research methodologies, this dissertation paints a complex picture of reconciliation, resource revenue sharing and settler colonialism in Ontario. I begin by theorizing the lifeworld of liberalism, noting how Christian creationism influenced liberal philosophy, settler colonialism, and reconciliation discourses. I argue that Christian theology is anthropocentric, which is reflected by how state actors use reconciliation discourses, and that this contrasts with Indigenous worldviews. Despite the narrower conception of reconciliation, I contend that reconciliation, as a political rationality, was heavily influenced by Indigenous peoples seeking to remake their relationship with the state in the 1990s. I explicate that resource revenue sharing emerged as a new governmental concept for repairing Indigenous-settler relations. Next, I trace the development of reconciliation as a new political rationality in Ontario. I then examine the decade and a half long story of how resource revenue sharing went from a divisive concept to one that was widely accepted by a diverse assemblage of Indigenous, state, extractive and market actors in Ontario, and how it was developed into a reconciliatory technology. With humility, I also consider how these new agreements can affect Indigenous-settler relations in Ontario. I reason that while reconciliation produces concessions for Indigenous peoples from settlers, it may still leave in place asymmetrical power relations, as settlers seek to govern Indigenous peoples in accordance with their own settler colonial interests regarding resource extraction. However, rather than concluding that reconciliation is an ideology that only shields settler colonial relations, I argue that since reconciliation has a concessionary logic, reconciliation discourses have the potential to affect the actions of settler actors, even if it does not end settler colonialism. This is further explored by how the Progressive Conservative government eschewed reconciliation to de-Indigenize resource revenue sharing, and how there are fierce discursive struggles to define reconciliation and influence the scope of its concessions. Finally, I assert that reconciliation produces messy alliances, technologies and outcomes, and that future scholarship requires a careful and contextual analysis of reconciliation.

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