Irreconcilable – Joseph Weiss

Countrywide walkout. All schools. Protect your children. Wear orange tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Orange Shirt Day,’ King said on Facebook Live” (Zoledziowski 2022). King was no stranger to such strategies, having earlier released a video falsely suggesting that RCMP officers were forcing members of the Black Lake First Nation to receive vaccinations and pursuing those who did not comply into “the freezing wilderness.” Both the Athabasca Health Authority and the chief and council of Black Lake have denounced King’s narrative as completely invented (Lamoureux and Zoledziowski 2021). While King attempted to refigure antivaccine activism as an articulation of anticolonial struggle, his peers in the convoy movement participated in direct and indirect appropriations of Indigenous ceremonialism, from falsely claiming that a 2018 video of a round dance in Frog Lake, Alberta, was an “Algonquin dance in support of truckers” (Reuters Fact Check 2022) to constructing a “teepee” and conducting their own “pipe ceremony” and building a “sacred fire” in Ottawa’s confederation park (Zoledziowski 2022).

These latter appropriations were roundly condemned and even mocked by Indigenous participants on social media (Ede 2022), and became so egregious that the leaders of multiple Algonquin Nations released a joint statement on February 2 making clear that they and their Nations did not give permission and would not consent to these mimicries of Indigenous ceremonial form, noting that they “could cause more harm to who we are as First Nations/Algonquin people” (Algonquins of Pikwanagan, Algonquin Anishinaabeg Tribal Council, and Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg 2022). As absurd as these race-shifting gestures were on the surface, they demonstrated something very serious indeed.

For the convoy organizer Pat King, indigeneity was not simply available for appropriation; it was a necessary dimension of his articulations of white supremacist politics. The convoy’s organizers positioned Indigenous communities in opposition to a figure of Canadian politics that is akin to the “deep state,” that phantasmagoric configuration of different far-right and white supremacist conspiracy theories that is imagined as responsible for limiting white “freedom.”9 But, of course, Indigenous actors do not need to invent fantastic scenarios as Pat King did in order to convey the possibility of state violence against “innocent” protest.

Rather, that possibility is a simple and ever-present reality for Indigenous Peoples.

Critical Indigeneities publishes pathbreaking scholarly books that center Indigeneity as a category of critical analysis, understand Indigenous sovereignty as ongoing and historically grounded, and attend to diverse forms of Indigenous cultural and political agency and expression. The series builds on the conceptual rigor, methodological innovation, and deep relevance that characterize the best work in the growing field of critical Indigenous studies. A complete list of books published in Critical Indigeneities is available at https://uncpress.org/series/critical-indigeneities. OceanofPDF.com Irreconcilable Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada Joseph Weiss The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL OceanofPDF.com © 2026 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weiss, Joseph, 1985– author Title: Irreconcilable : indigeneity and the violence of colonial erasure in contemporary Canada / Joseph Weiss.

Other titles: Critical indigeneities Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2026. | Series: Critical indigeneities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2025045097 | ISBN 9781469693729 cloth | ISBN 9781469693736 paperback | ISBN 9781469693743 epub | ISBN 9781469693750 pdf Subjects: LCSH: Indigenous peoples—Canada—Government relations | Indigenous peoples—Crimes against—Canada | Reconciliation—Moral and ethical aspects—Canada | Haida Indians— Government relations | Haida Indians—Land tenure | Settler colonialism—Canada | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / Native American Studies Classification: LCC E92 .W45 2026 | DDC 323.1197/071—dc23/eng/20251118 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025045097 Cover art: Maple leaf © Custom Scene / Adobe Stock.

Recycled paper © ~LENA BUKOVSKY~/ Adobe Stock. For product safety concerns under the European Union’s General Product Safety Regulation (EU GPSR), please contact [email protected] or write to the University of North Carolina Press and Mare Nostrum Group B.V., Doelen 72, 4831 GR Breda, The Netherlands. OceanofPDF.com Dedicated to the memory of Raymond D. Fogelson For Bruce OceanofPDF.com It will never be enough to recognize or reconcile or apologize or compensate for the violence and fraud committed against Indigenous peoples without abolishing the system in which that violence and fraud operate.

Imperialism and colonialism must be undone, not as threads that pull at the others but a woven amalgam of ideologies and institutions that must be obliterated. —JOANNE BARKER, Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist I think for Indigenous peoples, whether we are talking about justice or solidarity or whatever, we need to start within our intelligence systems, or what Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard calls “grounded normativity”—the systems of ethics that are continuously generated by a relationship with a particular place, with land, through the Indigenous processes and knowledges that make up Indigenous life.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Pages: 262
• Language: English (en)

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