Professor Joseph Weiss 'Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada'

This talk, drawn from Weiss's most recent book, argues that settler-driven reconciliation works to erase Indigenous sovereignty, quietly burying claims to political autonomy and territorial Title beneath the appearance of progress. Reconciliation makes colonial domination look like common sense, and Indigenous disappearance look inevitable. But Indigenous Peoples have refused these terms, consistently, creatively, and on their own grounds. Joseph shows that it is not Indigenous Nations passively responding to settler strategies, but settler society desperately reacting to the unextinguished realities of Indigenous sovereignty, community, and world-making. Reconciliation, he argues, is not a shared horizon but a settler demand, and a far more fragile one than its proponents like to admit.