Measuring Anti-Indigenous Attitudes: The Indigenous Resentment Scale

The Politics of White Identity and Settlers’ Indigenous Resentment in Canada

“…The way that legacies of inequality continue to shape social hierarchies in Canada and the United States has important implications for political attitudes and behaviour. Similar to the way White Americans' anti-Black attitudes predict opposition to welfare (Gilens, 1995(Gilens, , 1996DeSante, 2013), White Canadians' anti-Indigenous attitudes predict opposition to welfare (Harell et al, 2014;Beauvais, 2020Beauvais, , 2021. Comparative experimental research also shows that Canadians are less willing to redistribute when target group members are Indigenous (Harell et al, 2016).…”

“…With respect to White Canadians' attitudes toward racialized outgroups, there is a growing interest in the political consequences of racism (Johnson and Emonoto, 2007) and anti-Indigenous attitudes in Canada (Harell et al, 2014(Harell et al, , 2016Beauvais, 2020Beauvais, , 2021. Indigenous peoples constitute 4.9 per cent of Canada's population (Statistics Canada, 2017) and play a significant role in the Canadian racial hierarchy.…”

“…With respect to outgroup attitudes, we draw on existing American and Canadian scholarship (Harell et al, 2014(Harell et al, , 2016Beauvais, 2020Beauvais, , 2021 to hypothesize that negative outgroup evaluations decrease support for welfare, which is often perceived as disproportionately benefiting people of colour in the United States and Indigenous peoples in Canada. We also expect that Indigenous resentment negatively shapes any support for minorities vis-à-vis support for Canadian culture.…”

“…In our present work, we focus primarily on how White identity shapes Canadian attitudes and behaviour. While existing scholarship considers the association between attitudes toward Indigenous peoples and welfare spending in Canada (Harell et al, 2014(Harell et al, , 2016Beauvais, 2020Beauvais, , 2021, none of the existing scholarship considers the association between White identity and policy preferences. However, it is still important for us to consider negative outgroup evaluations in our analysis of White identity politics.…”

“…We review existing research on the role of intergroup attitudes and group-based identification for political outcomes in the United States and Canada, as well as the growing literature on White identity in the United States (Jardina, 2019(Jardina, , 2020Berry et al, 2021;Petrow et al, 2018;Sides et al, 2018;Croll, 2007). For the comparison between White identity and Whites' negative outgroup attitudes, we refer to the American literature on how anti-Black attitudes shape policy preferences and political behaviour (Gilens, 1995(Gilens, , 1996DeSante, 2013) as well as the burgeoning Canadian literature on how anti-Indigenous attitudes shape politics (Harell et al, 2014(Harell et al, , 2016Beauvais, 2020Beauvais, , 2021.…”