The Political Economy of "Truth and Reconciliation": Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy - Frances Widdowson

The Political Economy of “Truth and Reconciliation”:

Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the

Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy 

Frances Widdowson 

Mount Royal University

fwiddowson@mtroyal.ca 

Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Ryerson University, May 30-June 1, 2017

In his 2013 book Truth and Indignation, Ronald Niezen shows how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has transformed the assessment of the residential schools. While historically the schools were seen as a paternalistic and misguided effort to “protect, civilize and assimilate” the aboriginal population,1 they now are described as instruments of “cultural genocide”. This assessment, according to Niezen, is due to the increasing tendency to conceptualize aboriginalnon-aboriginal relations in terms of a “victim/perpetrator dichotomy”.2 In such a dichotomy, all aboriginal people are seen as victims and all non-aboriginal people perpetrators, obscuring the complex historical interaction within and between these two, very diverse, categories of people. Although Niezen’s book is an important addition to the literature, in that it shows how historical viewpoints on aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations are being transformed by entities like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, his work is limited by the fact that he does not explain why this has occurred. More specifically, Niezen does not recognize how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the product of particular historical and material circumstances connected to the processes of neotribal rentierism. As will be explained below, neotribal rentierist processes are oriented towards extracting “rent” so as to incorporate aboriginal groups into late capitalism. The “rent” being sought3 in this instance is the dispersal of compensation payments – a form of circulation that is becoming increasingly common in addressing the conflicts between aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state. The creation of a victim/perpetrator dichotomy justifies these payments, but it also acts to disguise the connection between the development of capitalism and the residential schools. The uncritical reliance on unsubstantiated aboriginal memories by “truth and reconciliation” processes, as well as postmodern relativism’s opposition to developing a universal conception of history, also has impeded understanding...

continued reading here .. https://cpsa-acsp.ca/documents/conference/2017/Widdowson.pdf