This essay reviews three recent works on Indigenous women's life histories. It examines their importance to studying Canadian Indigenous and colonial history through the lens of local, lived experiences within broader processes of colonial change. In their presentation, methodologies, and, in particular, the collaboration at the heart of these life histories, the books set new standards for community-based, oral history research. Not only do the women's life stories provide local, alternative perspectives on histories of colonial change in Indigenous communities, but they are also striking examples of scholarship founded on shared authority, negotiation, and dialogue with Indigenous collaborators.

Engagement with the concept of reconciliation, broadly understood as the process or goal of transforming relations among Canada's Indigenous and non‐Indigenous peoples, became commonplace in the philanthropic sector after the 2015 release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Institutional responses to the TRC (e.g., by universities, businesses, healthcare institutions, governments, etc.) have been widely discussed in the academic literature—lauded by some as pivotal to the transformation of Indigenous/settler relations, and critiqued by many as no more than a shift in rhetoric covering over ongoing racialized colonial violence. Through a critical analysis of reconciliation talk as articulated through blog posts, press articles, conference recordings, webinars, and professional development resources produced by and for progressive settler philanthropy from 2012 to 2020, this essay analyses the hearty uptake of reconciliation in the sector. I bring these texts into dialog with the larger body of critiques of reconciliation, with the aim of interrogating settler philanthropy's place and roles in Canada's settler colonial order, past, and present. I focus on common terms and concepts that appear in conjunction with reconciliation talk such as diversity and inclusion; community‐engagement and relationship building; learning and listening. I also explore instances of obfuscation and renaming, such as a scarcity of explicit references to race and racism, colonialism and white supremacy and a tendency to relegate colonialism to the past in texts produced by non‐Indigenous authors. The themes I identify across these texts resemble those apparent in other institutional contexts. Reconciliation talk has potential to transform how settler philanthropy engages with Indigenous communities. Yet, many of the most urgent critiques raised in other fields apply to this context. Ultimately, I conclude, reconciliation talk may elevate and uphold—and indeed conceal—the white supremacist, colonial status quo in settler philanthropy and in Canada more broadly. Occlusions and renaming common to settler philanthropy's reconciliation talk contribute to what Vimalassery et al. describe as “colonial unknowing” and what Tuck and Yang call “settler moves to innocence.” In these ways, reconciliation serves a mystifying function for settler philanthropy, masking ongoing coloniality, absolving settler guilt, and avoiding more radical, transformative possibilities.

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This essay identifies the creative and often divergent constructions of place and race in one document, the proceedings from a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1857, which empowered officials three thousand miles across the Atlantic to make varying claims to a vast and diverse expanse of Aboriginal lands and peoples in Canada. I apply theory from existing scholarship about the “mutually imbricated” nature of place and race in the making settler-colonial worlds to find how six hundred pages of testimony from white men with only marginal experiences on the land itself legitimized the dispossession and marginalization the original inhabitants of those territories.[1] I focus mostly on the lands between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, the bulk of which were fashioned in distant, imperial imaginations as “wilderness,” unfit for or in need of settler “civilization.” In conjunction with wilderness discourses, speakers defined the Indianness of the northwest interior. Mostly Plains peoples, the indigenous groups discussed in this document were universally painted as one with their environment: wild and uncivilized. They were, according to the commission, incapable of governing themselves responsibly, and were, worst of all, the sure victims of the “onslaught of colonization,” should they not become in some way transformed.The document provides some fascinating divergences in the mindsets of different colonial powers: the HBC, British settlers in Canada, and humanitarians. These divergences reflect how, as Bronwen Douglas suggests, “within colonial regimes and contexts […] the efflorescence of racially charged utterances and practices betrays an astonishing variety, fluidity and internal contradiction.”[2]During the sessions of testimony and debate for this enquiry, constructions of land and Indianness in the northwest interior came together to justify variant and often contradictory solutions to the “problems” colonizers identified in the “unsettled” territory. All discourses that produced, and produced by, colonialism could be harnessed to dispossess Aboriginal peoples; the means and justifications for doing so in this document varied.[3][1] Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds, eds., Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 3.[2] Douglas, “Race,” 245.[3] Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 48.

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