Unreconciled: Indigenous Presents/Presence & Settler Memory

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores race, racism, history, and popular memory from the vantage point of the Indigenous world, and, specifically, Native peoples colonized within the present-day United States. Over the course of the past decade, Indigenous movements for land and life have shed light on the incomplete nature of conquest in Native North America and the instability of settler colonialism. “Unreconciled” explores the ongoing tension between Indigenous presence and the settler colonial “logic of elimination” in the context of land acknowledgments, commemoration, popular culture, and federal policy. We show that, despite changes with regard to the ways in which non-Indigenous people in settler states collectively remember or imagine community, elements of settler memory continue to reside within and limit public conversations on race, remembrance, reconciliation, and reparation. (DMC and MLC)