
Unsettling Reconciliation: Decolonial Methods for Transforming Social-Ecological Systems
'Political reconciliation' refers to processes for establishing right relations between groups that are emerging from a history coloured by violent relations. However, dominant Western, euro-descendent philosophies of political reconciliation rarely focus on ecological forms of harm
or consider practices of ecological violence as constitutive of the violent relations that reconciliation hopes to repair. This article argues that the exclusion of ecological dimensions of harm from dominant Western models of political reconciliation is one way of understanding Indigenous
claims of dissatisfaction with such reconciliation projects. This article analyses and contextualises these claims of dissatisfaction by focusing on how dominant Western, euro-descendent models of reconciliation in the North American context import settler-colonial commitments that obscure
the primacy of ecological violence in settler-Indigenous land-based conflicts. Furthermore, this article posits that settler-colonial commitments in reconciliation models pose an obstacle to deeper forms of reconciliation, partly because these models uphold dominant euro-descendent cosmologies
and conceptions of land over and above Indigenous ones. Finally, this article suggests that that the possibility of deep reconciliation exists, and requires engaging with Indigenous philosophies that place land and relations to land at the centre of right relations, thus working toward decolonising
settler-colonial-infused forms of reconciliation.
Keywords: Indigenous philosophies; Political reconciliation; ecological violence; settler colonialism
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: October 1, 2018
- Environmental Values is an international peer-reviewed journal that brings together contributions from philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, geography, anthropology, ecology and other disciplines, which relate to the present and future environment of human beings and other species. In doing so we aim to clarify the relationship between practical policy issues and more fundamental underlying principles or assumptions.
Environmental Values has a Journal Impact Factor (2020) of 2.518. 5 Year Impact Factor: 2.313. - Editorial Board
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