To Sell “Reconciliation”: 8th Fire, Idle No More and the Possibilities of Reconciliation

Abstract

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary series 8th Fire seems designed to reassure its imagined non-Indigenous audience that reconciliation with Indigenous peoples can emerge without challenges to hegemonic beliefs in the primacy of the individual pursuit of wealth and the commodification of land. Although the series gives some scope to positions that contest the hegemony of these driving principles of neoliberalism—positions held by Indigenous nations and their allies seeking decolonization—8th Fire contains the energy of such challenges within its own representation of the most viable terms for reconciliation. By marketing reconciliation to its audience as a pathway to a neoliberal sense of prosperity, 8th Fire risks constraining the possibilities of reconciliation to the most instrumentalized form.. The mobilization of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities during recent months under the banner of Idle No More has demonstrated the potential for a form of reconciliation that is very different from that suggested by 8th Fire. Idle No More demands that Indigenous peoples’ right to a unique form of citizenship be respected and that resource development be sustainable. In offering its terms for reconciliation, 8th Fire similarly invites non-Indigenous viewers to witness and participate in representations of Indigenous cultural identity. In Canada, powwows occasion such gatherings of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people on Indigenous terms. In this article, I discuss the broadcast content of 8th Fire and also examine its digital platform alongside the Idle No More movement. While I argue that the content of the 8th Fire documentary risks constraining the possibilities of reconciliation within parameters set by neoliberal imaginings of prosperity, I will show how the 8th Fire website and Idle No More demonstrate the potential for an alternative form of reconciliation, one grounded in the inclusive celebration of Indigenous cultural continuity and the ceremony of kinship between Indigenous peoples and land occasioned by powwow.