Marc Woons

Despite ever-increasing pressure for Indigenous self-determination, Canadian society continues to resist its implications. Describing the conflict as a clash of two fundamentally incompatible paradigms, I create a framework that sheds light on the inner workings of paradigmatic political change. With the goal of self-determination clearly at the centre, this article studies whether such a direct constitutional challenge can be supplemented by indirect approaches. Two types of indirect approaches are considered: self-government approaches that accept elements of the existing constitutional paradigm and institutional approaches that see Indigenous peoples working within existing rules and institutions. Rejecting the former outright in the case of Indigenous peoples in Canada, I apply analogous principles from chemistry to help assess the qualities institutional approaches must have to be considered effective political catalysts. In particular, any successful political catalyst must not compromise self-determination’s goals and must hasten the process through a series of more attainable intermediate changes. Institutional approaches must also meet a third criterion, which speaks to establishing Indigenous security and trust in the ability of institutional approaches to bring about self-determination. With these criteria in hand, I suggest that introducing guaranteed Indigenous representation and Indigenizing legislatures can work together as political catalysts that hasten self- determination in ways that Indigenous peoples feel secure pursuing.

Contemporary theories of decolonial citizenship struggle to have universal appeal. In the Canadian context, two types of theories dominate within the literature. On the one hand, there are theories that promote a shared identity. These appeal to the settler majority but often push Indigenous peoples away. On the other hand, theories that suggest that Indigenous peoples and settlers simply need to respect one another and get on with business in a more just way fail to offer convincing accounts of how this state of affairs will come into existence. In other words, such theories have little appeal for the more numerous and more powerful settler population upon whose success such proposals depend. This article considers two insufficient prominent expressions of the two perspectives by, respectively, Alan C. Cairns and Melissa S. Williams. In so doing, it is suggested that greater consideration for the psychological dimension of citizenship offers a better starting point for building a sense of common purpose and shared belonging between Indigenous and settler peoples, promoting a thinner mutual identification with shared Canadian institutions.