Multicultural Meanderings

Ellermann and Brunner: Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides

Hard to imagine any government adopting such an all-embracing approach to the citizenship study guide. The current draft, never approved by over four ministers, reportedly has increased emphasis on Indigenous peoples, but is unlikely to satisfy the academic focus on settler colonialism. 

It remains to be seen whether the current minister will release the revised guide, given her poor communications skills, and whether the government may find the version overly expansive compared to its more restrained approach to Indigenous peoples and diversity in general:

..In federal citizenship guides, settler colonialism is never named; the foundational structure of the Indian Act is omitted; references to reserves appear as decontextualized descriptions; and residential schools are minimized in ways that individualize harm. Treaties are absent until 1995 and, when introduced, are framed through a transactional logic that naturalizes settler title and casts Indigenous rights as historical accommodations rather than living, nation-to-nation obligations. Land is repeatedly depicted through frontier and extractive imaginaries, while Indigenous relations to land are relegated to culture or history.

The 2020 COA guide diverges most clearly in its explicit engagement with reconciliation, including interactive exercises that invite immigrants to plan tangible actions. This participatory approach positions immigrants as active agents; still, this participation remains low stakes. Most significantly, other than a brief acknowledgement of an official 2008 federal apology in the official 2009 guide, reconciliation appears only in this preparatory COA arrival guide, rather than in authoritative citizenship pedagogy tied to membership, rights, and national belonging. Reconciliation thus surfaces precisely where it does not condition citizenship itself, reinforcing its status as a moral supplement rather than a foundational political principle. Each attempt to produce a Canadian consensual history through citizenship pedagogy can be read through Cook’s (2018) account of settler ignorance, in which even recognition-oriented narratives historicize colonial violence and sustain a shared misrecognition of the present.

In the context of ongoing settler colonial dispossession, education alone cannot serve as the ‘key condition for reconciliation’ (Chatterjee 2018, 3). State-produced citizenship guides in settler colonial contexts will not escape settler logics, nor can a revised narrative ‘undo’ settlerism. Yet these texts still matter. They can either deepen so-called consensus and reinforce settler ignorance, or create openings for interruption.

As Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) writes, ‘settler, native, and arrivant [must] each acknowledge their own positions within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism . . . has sought to obscure’ (xxx). Within settler states, even this more modest demand – for truth rather than structural transformation – remains politically fraught. Citizenship guides operate within an apparatus designed to stabilize, rather than interrupt, settler colonial authority; yet they nonetheless constitute one of the few official sites through which prospective citizens encounter state-sanctioned narratives of belonging. At minimum, such texts could invite immigrants – differently positioned within racial hierarchies and imperial histories – to confront citizenship not as an untroubled inheritance, but as a relationship constituted through ongoing colonial conditions and responsibilities. While this falls far short of dismantling settler colonialism, it gestures toward a refusal of innocence, historical amnesia, and citizenship as a completed project.

Source: Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides