ABSTRACTSince the release of the Final Report of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many non-Indigenous Canadians, politicians, and educational and cultural institutions have embraced reconciliation. Yet, many Indigenous people in Canada remain skeptical. In this article, I examine six reasons Indigenous people may resist reconciliation. Reconciliation may aim to restore a relationship that never existed in the first place, and may limit an Indigenous future. Reconciliation may look more like adaptation than transformation. Reconciliation may serve as a government project (...) whose primary aim is to bolster state legitimacy. Reconciliation may reflect the desire, for settler-descendants, for expiation or a ‘move to innocence.’ Ultimately, reconciliation is about living together, which may be incompatible with more transformative political projects, such as decolonization. (shrink)

This article brings into conversation two important literatures in contemporary political theory that have, for the most part, failed to engage one another: work spanning more than two decades on multiculturalism and identity politics, and neo-republican work on nondomination. The authors take as their starting-point two widely endorsed claims: that identities are constructs and that state actors play a crucial role in their construction. Their question is how democratic states should shape identity, and their central claim is that states should (...) do so in ways that promote what they call democratic nondomination. This ideal, they stress, is multifaceted. It has both an action-level and a system-level component. In addition, it has both an inter-agentive and an impersonal dimension. Attending to democratic nondomination in its complexity is crucial to the project of evaluating alternative possible forms of state identity construction. (shrink)