Social ignorance and Indigenous exclusion: public voices in the province of Quebec, Canada

Abstract

This article explores the mobilization of ignorance to uphold and perpetuate settler privilege and domination in the public voice record generated by the Bouchard–Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation, held in Quebec, Canada from February 2007 to May 2008. The Commission was a provincially funded inquiry into how the public felt about accommodating ethnocultural deviance from an assumed norm. Focused primarily on recent immigrant difference, Aboriginal accommodation, Aboriginality and Aboriginal rights were deliberately excluded from the Commission's purview, yet they are suggestively apparent in the public display and performance of ignorance in the briefs received by the Commission. The role of the intellectual elite in shaping and perpetuating ignorance is clear in the interplay between the Commission parameters established by Bouchard and Taylor and the public response to those parameters. In this article, we theorize ignorance and its role in reinforcing colonial logics; discuss the Commission's work; analyse the written briefs submitted to the Commission; discuss the Commission's final report; and reflect on the personal and collective dynamics of ignorance and its consequences for settler–Aboriginal relations. Ignorance is understood here not as an absence of knowledge but as an active, though not necessarily self-conscious, agreement to “know the world wrongly” in a way that supports settler interests and masks its own existence.