Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects on limits encountered during fieldwork. Studying attempts at ‘decolonization’ or ‘reconciliation’ in Canadian settler colonial society was in some instances impossible: research access was denied to the German anthropologist, arguing that those issues belonged to North America

Paper long abstract:

Canada’s settler colonial violence made headlines in 2021, when the remains of more than 1,500 bodies were found on premises of “residential schools”. The discoveries were a shock for the Canadian public, despite the fact that 2008 to 2015, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had already conducted investigations into the practices and occurrences at these boarding schools. The TRC had published its findings in an extensive report and had furthermore concluded that the intentional alienation of Indigenous children constituted cultural genocide. Consequently, Canada started its official journey towards reconciliation in 2015. The question of genocide recognition and what it implies – morally, legally, in terms of reparations and current political relations between successors of perpetrators and of victims – includes various strands of state as well as non-state actors with differential claims and conflicting interests. And obviously, the narratives of the past also represent contested collective identities. As a social anthropologist with an interest in the impact of collective identification, memory politics and the practices that are employed with an intention to deal with such a violent past I started studying the complex system of power distribution and domination in Canadian settler colonialism. In 2022 I spent several weeks doing fieldwork in Canada. I was particularly interested in learning from different perspectives what it meant to unravel sociopolitical structures and hierarchies built upon colonization. In some instances research access was denied arguing that those processes belonged to the North American contintent. I will reflect on this limitation methodologically.