Reconciling "Terror": Managing Indigenous Resistance in the Age of Apology

Abstract

Reconciling "Terror"Managing Indigenous Resistance in the Age of Apology Pauline Wakeham (bio) If recent years have witnessed the rise of a worldwide phenomenon of reconciliation and apology, so also in the past few decades, and with increasing force since September 11, 2001, the global forum has seen the increased mediatization of spectacles of terror. The present moment is thus characterized by two seemingly contradictory rubrics: the "age of apologies" and the "War on Terror."1 While political and critical discourses have tended to bifurcate discussion of these two contemporaneous phenomena, I argue that they are intimately interconnected.2 At the same time that governments and tribunals are reinscribing liberal humanist principles in their quest to find redemption from violence and to reaffirm a commitment to justice and peace—those concepts that seem to be the foundation of reconciliation processes—new crimes against humanity are being legitimated under the banner of "just war" and uncannily similar discourses regarding the spread of democracy and the upholding of global peace. This article examines the complex intersections between the age of apologies and the War on Terror and the political ramifications of these intertwined—rather than discrete—phenomena. In particular, this essay is concerned with the implications of the conjuncture of discourses of reconciliation and terror for Indigenous peoples in settler states such as New Zealand and Canada. Over the past two decades, several nations that have participated repeatedly in the globalization of "scenes of repentance, confession, . . . [and] apology" are former settler colonies that have been forced to reckon with the violence they have inflicted upon autochthonous populations.3 Within this context, "reconciliation" has become a deeply contested term, subject to a [End Page 1] range of conceptualizations that differ significantly with regard to what kinds of reparations and political processes it should entail. Although reconciliation initiatives could hold radically transformative potential, dominant formulations—as articulated by a range of actors, including settler states and mainstream media—have tended to foreclose alternative meanings and co-opt apologies as a strategy of containment, thereby seeking to manage Indigenous calls for social change by substituting rhetorical gestures of atonement for more radical processes of redistributive justice or political power sharing.4 Overshadowed by settler states’ self-promotion as sites of reconciliation, the assimilation of the "racialization of terror" to the terrain of settler colonial politics and the application of "homeland security" measures to Indigenous peoples have received far less media coverage and critical attention.5 And yet the expansion of the rhetoric and resources of state "counterterrorism" in these settler states has been similarly utilized to suppress Indigenous anticolonial activism. This is not to say that state policies of reconciliation and counterterrorism are reducible to one another or that they have been deliberately coordinated in tandem. Dominant logics of reconciliation and terror may not necessarily employ the same practices, but they nevertheless intersect in their efforts to manage a third term, namely, Indigenous anticolonial resistance. Through case studies of recent events in New Zealand and Canada, I analyze how reconciliation and terror may converge in ways that collapse the differences between a spectrum of Indigenous anticolonial resistance practices and strip them of their historical and political specificity. In the process, Indigenous struggles for justice are evacuated of their particular political content and framed as obstacles to national healing and threats to national security. Genealogies of Reconciliation and Terror Before delving into the specifics of recent case studies, I want to first establish a conceptual foundation for understanding the convergence of reconciliation and terror as complementary logics of contemporary settler colonial power. The task of this section is to briefly sketch out the general coordinates of state reconciliation initiatives in Canada and New Zealand and then demonstrate how, ideologically and politically, they have come to intersect with discourses of terror. In Canada the federal government responded to Indigenous peoples’ calls for redress [End Page 2] in 1998 with a "statement of reconciliation," delivered by the minister of Indian affairs and northern development.6 Although the statement expressed "profound regret for past actions of the federal government which have contributed to these difficult pages in the history of our relationship together," it fell short of a full...