Nath - final


Correspondence Addresses: Nisha Nath, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Athabasca 
University, Canada; Email: nnath@athabascau.ca. Willow Samara Allen, Faculty of Education, 
University of Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2; Email: willowallen@uvic.ca. 

ISSN: 1911-4788 

Volume 16, Issue 1, 200-226, 2022 

Settler Colonial Socialization in Public Sector 
Work: Moving from Privilege to Complicity 

NISHA NATH 
Athabasca University, Canada 

WILLOW SAMARA ALLEN 
University of Victoria, Canada 

ABSTRACT  In this piece, we ask, what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that 
begins and ends with privilege? What does it mean to declare privilege when 
embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? These questions are raised 
through an ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on 
Treaty 6, 7 and 8 (Alberta, Canada) and Coast Salish Territories (British Columbia, 
Canada) about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. In 
the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler colonial 
socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures – the meso-
space where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler 
colonialism. For these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical 
processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence 
is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” In this 
paper, we narrow our focus to the declarations of privilege that many of our interview 
participants are making.  We reflect on these declarations and consider whether 
focusing on settler complicity and Indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial 
politics for settlers working in the public sector. We argue that declarations of 
privilege risk reproducing settler-centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, 
settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty, and we reflect on how to orient participants 
(and ourselves) towards the material realization of relational accountability and 
towards imagining otherwise. 

KEYWORDS  settler colonial socialization; settler colonialism; deep colonizing; public 
sector workers; reconciliation; antiracism; privilege; complicity 



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Introduction 
 
What are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with 
privilege? What does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in 
institutions of the settler colonial state? These questions are raised through 
our ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on 
Treaty 6, 7 and 8 (Alberta, Canada) and Coast Salish Territories (British 
Columbia, Canada) about their implications in settler colonialism through 
public sector work. In the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary 
framework of settler colonial socialization to consider the space between 
individuals and structures. It is in this meso-space where settlers are made by 
learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism (see Crosby & 
Monaghan, 2012; Matsunaga, 2021). Although public sector work is 
frequently perceived as serving the public good, it relies on and reproduces 
colonial domination, dispossession and violence, yet its inner workings are 
largely hidden (Matsunaga, 2021). For these reasons, in our research we ask, 
“what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us 
about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be 
disrupted or refused in public sector work?” 

In this paper we narrow our focus. At the present preliminary stage of our 
research, in which we are still recruiting and interviewing, we adopt Tuck’s 
(2015) pedagogy of pausing by “intentionally engaging in suspension of 
one’s own premises and project, but always with a sense of futurity” (p. xii). 
Our pause is with the notion of privilege. Despite our choice to veer away 
from privilege frameworks in our interview questions, many of our 
participants thus far have chosen to name their privilege. We reflect on these 
declarations, and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and 
Indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers 
working in the public sector. 

We begin this paper by outlining our project’s theoretical frame and 
methodology, and then consider the limitations of privilege. Illuminated 
through participant articulations, we reflect on how and why some 
participants have gone to a comfortable and legible space of declaring 
privilege. We argue that the declaration of privilege risks reproducing settler-
centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler 
certainty. This risk is particularly pernicious in the public sector given that 
the public sector relies on its jurisdiction to act as being treated as absolute, 
which is in part justified through notions that it works for the “public good” 
(Matsunaga, 2021). We then offer reflections on why we bring settler 
complicity and Indigenous refusals together in our interviews, through our 
interview structure and subsequent analysis, in order to foreground 
Indigenous people’s sovereignty and the material realization of relational 
accountability to orient participants (and ourselves) towards imagining 
otherwise.  



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Grounding this Research  
 
As researchers, we share experience with providing public-sector training on 
Indigenous specific racism. In our roles as facilitators, we witnessed direct 
links between workplace narratives and violent manifestations of settler 
colonialism across jurisdictions and sectors in health, child welfare, policing, 
and education (Allen & Nath, 2019). Encounters described by public sector 
workers, and widely witnessed by the public, made apparent the systemic 
nature of racism and the fatal implications of colonial myths. In a recent 
statement, coroner Gehane Kamel, who oversaw the inquiry into the death of 
Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamekw mother who confronted ongoing racism 
while in a Québec hospital, confirmed that Joyce’s death was preventable 
(Richardson, 2021). Although long voiced by Indigenous people and 
thoroughly documented in media, scholarship and reports, systemic harm 
continues (Blackstock et al., 2020; Gouvernement du Québec, 2019; Harding, 
2018; NIMMIWG, 2019; Rhoad, 2013; TRC, 2015; Turpel-Lafond & 
Johnson, 2021). Reflecting on our experiences in antiracism training, we 
witnessed that public sector workers across sectors and roles enacted, ignored 
or sometimes themselves experienced colonial violence rooted in a set of 
strikingly coherent mythologies. Some public sector workers did intervene; 
others were uncertain about how to do so, especially if institutional leadership 
and accountability mechanisms were lacking.  

Bearing witness to this harm brought us together as non-Indigenous 
researchers – Nath, a settler woman of colour living on the lands covered by 
Treaty 6, and Allen, a white settler woman living on lək̓ʷəŋən peoples’ lands 
– to investigate how colonial violence becomes institutionalized at the meso-
level. At this level the authorization to act (and not) is rooted in (re)asserting 
settler entitlement to Indigenous lands, and in the settler “logic of 
elimination,” which attempts to disappear and assimilate Indigenous people 
(Wolfe, 2006). Our focus on what we call the meso-level positions settler 
colonialism as a deep colonial structure,1 reproduced in part through the 
routine work of public sector workers (Neu & Therrien, 2003; Wolfe, 2006). 
Critically, these deep structures – of culture, norms, attitudes, and reward, 
recognition, and penalty – are not absolute. Instead, they are marked by 
spaces of “tension, resistance, subversion and sabotage” (Batliwala, 2013, p. 
200). Our research attempts to access the deep structures of settler colonial 
organizations in order to unpack the entrenched beliefs and practices 
grounding resistance to structural change, and to identify the organizational 
cultures that endure despite official commitments to reconciliation, 
antiracism and equity (Ahmed, 2012; Liu, 2020; Regan, 2010). Moreover, 
																																																													
1 We draw from feminist scholar Srilatha Batliwala (2013), who writes that deep structures are 
“the hidden sites and processes of power and influence, the implicit culture, the informal values 
and systems of reward and recognition… deep structures [invisible and obscured power 
hierarchies] are, in a sense, like the elephant in the room – we all know they’re there, but we do 
not know how to name them and tackle them analytically or practically” (pp. 199-200).  



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this research becomes distinctively urgent given that provincial public sector 
workers are entrenched in the most “visible and pervasive components of the 
state… [shaping] daily life like few others” (Leifso, 2020, p. 12).  

Our research is anchored by Rose’s (1996) concept of “deep colonizing,” 
which describes the “conquest embedded within institutions and practices 
which are aimed towards reversing the effects of colonization” (Rose, 1996, 
as cited in Veracini, 2011, p. 179). Deep colonizing reveals the temporal 
manipulation characterizing the settler colonial project, wherein equity, 
justice and sovereignty for Indigenous people are forever promised in the 
future (Tuck & Yang, 2016). Initiatives aimed at reconciliation have been 
accompanied by powerful critiques that they neither aim to effect structural 
change nor buttress Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty 
(Coulthard, 2014; de Costa & Clark, 2016; Yellowhead Institute, 2019). The 
implication is that state actors can further deep colonizing by simply 
following the aims and orders of their institutions. 

Consequently, in our project, we ask: How do white settlers, settlers of 
colour, and other people of colour learn to uphold the settler colonial state 
and reproduce the violence of colonialism? How might interrogating the 
meso-level with public sector workers – principally in the “helping” 
professions of health, education, child welfare – illuminate how they are 
socialized to reproduce settler colonial structures and enabled to resist them?2  

To respond to these questions, we articulate a framework we call “settler 
colonial socialization,” which integrates individual learning processes and the 
structures of settler colonial governance through two principal pillars: settler 
colonial common-sense (Rifkin, 2013, 2014) and settler colonial pedagogies 
(Hiller, 2017). Settler colonial common-sense refers to how “non-Native 
access to Indigenous territories comes to be lived as a given, as simply the 
unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, 
history, and personhood” (Rifkin, 2013, p. 323; emphasis added). Tied to 
settler colonial pedagogies, this learning works to “clear the land 
discursively, materially, and violently of its Indigenous occupants/owners in 
order to make way for (white) settlement and development” (Hiller, 2017, p. 
417). Critically, settler colonial pedagogies are social projects that “school 
our imaginations... rendering as well as enforcing the given-ness of our place 
here, and shoring up the legitimacy of our claims to be the true inhabitants of 
the land” (Hiller, 2017, p. 417; emphasis in original).  

																																																													
2 Although our focus in this paper is non-sectoral, our ongoing analysis is located in a rich body 
of research that examines the reproduction of settler colonial harm in various sectors; see e.g., 
Lafontaine (2018) and Allan & Smylie (2015) in health, Blackstock et al. (2020) in child welfare, 
and Battiste et al. (2002) in education. Moreover, other key threads of our analysis consider the 
specific complexities of positionality in processes of settler colonial socialization. Note that 
when referencing participant narratives, we include the racialized and gender identifications that 
participants themselves name in the interview process.  



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Settler colonial socialization pulls together logics (common-sense) and 
learning (pedagogy) to illuminate how structures of domination, jurisdiction 
and authority enact and codify extractive, siloed, and inequitable 
relationalities: to other people, to structures, and to land, waterways and 
other-than human life. This framework focuses on the impacts of colonization 
for Indigenous people within a context where Indigenous sovereignties are 
pre-existing and enduring, and where Indigenous relationalities are grounded 
in duties of care to human and other-than human kin. Critically, in the 
constant making of settler colonial common-sense is the potentiality for 
unmaking, particularly given our context of “enduring indigeneity” (Kauanui, 
2016).  

In light of our project’s focus on the meso-level and the learning processes 
that position public sector workers to take up the work of settler colonialism, 
we turn to the theme of privilege, which has been raised specifically by many 
participants thus far. What do privilege pedagogies tell us about patterns of 
learning for settlers? What can be learned through public sector workers’ 
declarations of privilege? Do these declarations, and the pedagogies they can 
be reliant on, disrupt or reinscribe settler colonial common sense and settler 
colonial pedagogies in public sector work?  
 
 
Methodology and Participants 
 
We center pedagogical processes and anti-racist interventions in our 
interviews, drawing on Okolie’s (2005) interviewing methodology. This 
methodology tasks researchers to respond to participant narratives and 
intervene by unpacking with participants how they understand their lives and 
broader structural conditions through the experiences and discourses they 
bring forward. Researchers are meant to critically analyze participant 
discourse, returning to build on their analysis with participants in a second 
interview. Our three-step interventive process consists of a brief survey and 
two 90-minute interviews.3 This staging supports participants in drawing 
connections between structures and their meso-level worlds, with the 
intention to animate reflection on complicity, and to prompt participants to 

																																																													
3 The survey contains questions about participants’ early lives, their memories of racism, and 
their learning about colonialism. This step is intended to set the stage for participant reflection, 
and to provide a sense of the participant’s experiential and relational entry points. Building on 
individual survey responses, the first interview is structured around three themes: (1) identity and 
social location, (2) relationships and distance, and (3) impacts of settler colonialism. Following 
the first interview we ask the participants to reflect on four questions during the intentional space 
of two to three weeks allocated between interviews. These questions foreground the four themes 
of our second interviews that focus on participant experiences in the workplace through non-
identifying examples based around four key themes: (1) settler colonial common-sense, (2) 
naming and disrupting complicity, (3) the authority and discretion to act, and (4) imagining 
relationships and governance otherwise in response to Indigenous refusals. 



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enter into a place that “confounds colonial ‘common sense’” (Martineau & 
Ritskes, 2014, p. iv).  

Seven months into the project, we are at different stages of interviewing 
with 24 participants from British Columbia (14) and Alberta (10) in the 
sectors of education, health, child welfare, lands and resources, housing, and 
business development. Participants work in a variety of policy, front-line and 
management positions. Participants thus far are predominantly white settlers 
(19) and settlers of colour (5), with upcoming interviews with Indigenous and 
non-Indigenous participants. Participants are being recruited through social 
media and snowball methods.  

In what follows we draw from the interviews we have conducted thus far to 
consider privilege and complicity, as part of a “pedagogy of pausing” in 
which we continually reflect back and sometimes disrupt our own interview 
scripts as spaces of our learning as well. We consider how the assumptions 
animating privilege pedagogies surface in interviews, what this illuminates 
about settler complicity within the public sector, and the implications of this 
for our research. In addition, in drawing on participant quotations, we 
recognize the limitations of including short excerpts of extensive dialogues, 
rich with the complexity of experience and analysis that participants brought 
forward. We analyze the excerpts not to center individuals, but to locate 
privilege pedagogies as social patterns of learning situated within the 
structures of settler colonialism. 
 
 
Circling Privilege 
 
Drawing from scholarship on privilege and complicity, we consider how 
privilege pedagogies can impede transformational politics in three ways: (1) 
by invoking a confessional politics, reinforcing a settler-move to innocence 
(Tuck & Yang, 2012) and colonial unknowing (Vimalassery et al., 2016); (2) 
by reproducing a static and non-relational understanding of power, and (3) by 
operating as a performative “declarative politics” (Charania, 2015, p. 383) 
where the declaration becomes “the doing” (Ahmed, 2012), and the 
“confession ends up being the antiracist action” (Lensmire et al., 2013, p. 
410).  

As Cabrera (2017) notes, white privilege pedagogy – or the conception that 
learning about one’s privilege is integrally transformative – is meant to 
disrupt “epistemologies of ignorance.” White people can learn about and 
name the unearned social benefits they receive but do not notice.4 Moreover, 
one can presumably shed or contest benefits according to one’s own volition, 

																																																													
4 Note, declarations of privilege can manifest variably, even in the absence of the word 
“privilege.” In that, we take up privilege declarations as a set of structured encounters invoking a 
set of discursive acts.  



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a framing that does not attend to the insidious ways that whiteness is 
“constitutive of one’s very being” (Applebaum, 2008, p. 294). Since 
McIntosh’s (1989) accessible metaphor of the invisible knapsack, “privilege” 
has emerged in many contexts as the focus of pedagogical disruption (e.g., 
Cabrera, 2017; Flynn, 2015; Margolin, 2015). While several critiques have 
emerged about white privilege pedagogies, we focus on their settler-
centricity. Patel (2021) describes settler-centric pedagogies as extractive and 
foreclosing engagement with “the power and heterogeneity of Indigenous 
peoples’ histories, resilience, and work of decolonization” (p. 7). Moreover, 
privilege as a settler-centric pedagogy comes packaged within narratives of 
“good intention” or “benevolence,” risking forms of allyship that happen “on 
behalf of Indigenous peoples like they are disappearing, and not already 
fighting colonialism more fiercely than racialized or white settler allies ever 
can” (Patel, 2021, p. 8; emphasis in original).  
 
 
The Confession 
 
As Levine-Rasky (2000) notes, the “body of the white individual resides at 
the fulcrum of the confessional model and at the core of white privilege 
pedagogy” (p. 274). When rooted in a liberal understanding that education is 
individual transformation, learning about one’s privilege fulfills a 
“redemptive function” in a confessional encounter (Levine-Rasky, 2000, p. 
276). This confession is powerful:  

 
It can purify us and change not what we do, but who we think we are... white 
people are revealed as racists and in this revelation are purified and made into 
non-racists, or at least people seeking to become non-racists. (Lockard, 2016, p. 
16; emphasis in original)  
 

Also released in the confession is the accountability to act (Levine-Rasky, 
2000, p. 276). This can be challenging given that our interviews can 
affectively feel like a confessional space that invites individualized 
declarations of privilege. The register of confessional and of performing the 
“good settler” can feel particularly “thick” when asking participants to reflect 
on their social location.  

Yet, thinking of these declarations of privilege as structured and patterned 
invites consideration of what privilege pedagogies “do,” anticipate or expect. 
As a relationally structured encounter, absolution lingers in the air; if one 
announces one’s privilege, and in that same gesture establishes that they are a 
“good settler,” they become the exception and their morality remains intact. 
This can be challenging to interrupt when participants name the privilege 
they possess, then move swiftly to resolve that privilege through good 
intention. For instance, after noting she wanted to take responsibility for her 



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family’s history of participation in colonial structures, a white woman in 
health stated: 

  
I certainly have privileges, someone who has white skin and has been born in 
Canada. And the biggest privilege that I do recognize is that I have a really good 
working brain….that’s another piece of privilege that I’ve added on to my scope 
of trying to ensure that when I’m leading a meeting, or if I’m the person in the 
room, like to advocate for someone...or give space... (Interview #1) 

 
Similar to some other white participants, this participant demonstrates how 

privilege can be an essential framework for knowing oneself as white and 
reconciling one’s relationship to power. Here, privileges are lived and 
embodied possessions that can be itemized. While this list can contract or 
expand, the declaration of privilege coupled with the declaration to use one’s 
power to advocate becomes the tentative resolution. In learning to understand 
and draw on privilege in these ways, setters are positioned as owners of 
privilege who can do better with that privilege and are (re)centerd as moral 
agents of change (Applebaum, 2008).  

Another participant, a white woman in child welfare/children’s services, 
described how early learning experiences related to settlement and whiteness 
shaped her. Articulating a commitment to equality from a young age, she 
shifted to focus on the intersection of whiteness with gender, navigating 
between racism she stated she could not know due to her racial identity, and 
her experiences of sexism. Following this, she noted: 

  
You get that sense of, ‘guilt’ like, okay, I am blessed. I mean I worked hard, and I 
was able to walk through the world system easier based on my colour and 
location. And then at the same time, it’s like, I fucking hate... those barriers that 
get put up for you as a woman. (Interview #2)  

 
One can consider how the confession of guilt can feel like an obligation of 
privilege pedagogies. Such declarations beg the question of what guilt is 
meant (or not) to do as a settler colonial politics of emotion, particularly 
when interwoven with conceptions of self-determined (hard work) and 
endowed (blessed) articulations of self. Although frequently unnamed, power 
operates palpably in discussions that turn to privilege, through its implication 
(e.g., what allows a white settler body to walk through the world with ease), 
and through its negation (e.g., barriers for white women).  

Relationally, power becomes “slippery” within these encounters. Those 
receiving the confession are positioned to exercise a narrow and constrained 
response. The pressure to praise, comfort or grant absolution for (often white) 
settler guilt and shame can be intense. These are dynamics that bring our own 
social locations into play. The expected absolution in the confessional space 
would “resolve” not only the tension in the moment, but a deep sustaining 
tension of the structures of settler colonialism.  



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Confessional declarations of privilege are settler-centric and powerful in 
their extension of settler innocence (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Discussing 
distance within relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, 
another white woman in health shared her memory of first coming to know 
that extreme racism against Indigenous people existed through hearing 
another woman’s strong racist utterance: 

 
She expressed something that I had never heard before, which was extreme 
racism against Indigenous people. And I had no idea that existed... that was the 
first time it clicked in my head about slurs, and like why would you be racist 
against Indigenous people? That didn’t make any sense to me... that was the first 
time that I really saw my whiteness and my privilege. (Interview #1) 

 
Another participant, a woman of colour in child welfare/children’s services 
identified how this innocence is a collective process of conditioning:  
  

A frame of mind is necessary to justify not only the harms that have been done, 
the harms that continue to happen, but also to remain kind of innocent of guilt. 
And also to maintain the certain status quo, right?... If you’re in a position of 
power and privilege, you’re going to want to hold on to that positionality... 
through learning and teaching, settlers have been conditioned in a way... to not 
have to see a lot of things. (Interview #3) 

 
These settler moves to innocence secure a colonial unknowing that is 

“[produced] and practiced in concert with material violences and differential 
devaluations”, and works to “preclude relational modes of analysis and ways 
of knowing otherwise” (Vimalassery et al., 2017, p. 1042). A woman of 
colour in health describes this as manifesting through “guilt, complacency 
and sometimes malice.” This obstinate unknowing is a response, an 
“epistemological counter-formation which takes shape in reaction to the lived 
relations and incommensurable knowledges it seeks to render impossible and 
inconceivable” (Vimalassery et al., 2017, p. 1042).  
 
 
Severed Relationality 
	
Colonial unknowing in the confessional requires several violent erasures, one 
being the obfuscation of agents of domination, or “who is doing what to 
whom” (Leonardo, 2004, p. 138). Privilege is articulated as a non-relational 
status, which “[renders] unintelligible” relational entanglements of power 
(Vimalassery et al., 2016, n.p.). Often functioning at the level of the 
individual who is expected to divest themselves of privilege through self-
awareness, understandings of privilege as a “status” that incurs material 
benefits erase settler colonialism’s reliance on a “constitutive relation to 
Indigenous peoples” (Vimalassery et. al., 2016, n.p.). These settler colonial 
relationalities that require both Indigenous displacement and settler 



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emplacement are produced through settler colonial knowledge formations 
(Monaghan 2013, p. 491). 

Settlers can name their privilege, yet never articulate that privilege 
emplaces us in relationship to Indigenous people and lands. This silence is 
imposing when declarations of privilege are accompanied by harmful 
colonial narratives. A white woman in education illustrates how the 
declaration of privilege cannot resolve how settler colonial violence 
continues, in spite of (and sometimes precisely through) the processes 
through which non-Indigenous people come to learn and name privilege. She 
named herself as a white settler for the first time in this interview, attributing 
her learning to a former student: 

 
And she talked quite a bit about colonialists, and how she had to deal with a lot of 
colonial stuff at [her university]. When she first said it, it was like, ‘Oh my god, 
she’s talking about me!’… I started thinking about it over the last couple of years, 
and in fact, a former principal and I ...had such a wonderful conversation about it. 
I realized in talking to him how much connection I’ve had with First Nations 
people, more than maybe the average colonialist… I just never thought about it. It 
just always seemed so normal and natural… I didn’t say it out loud at the time, 
but you’re saying it out loud definitely made me feel, ‘Okay, I’m just gonna come 
out and say it.’ That’s who I am. (Interview #4) 

 
Elaborating further, she stated that “there’s that little anxious, nervous kind 

of connecting to something that I’ve always thought was so horrible. But I am 
connected to it. So I have to start getting used to that idea.” After this 
moment, the participant named a family member’s specific role in residential 
school administration. Yet, the declaration of white settlerhood is buffered 
through recounting the openness of other family members and their “very 
positive connection” to Indigenous people. In this participant’s words, and 
variably in other interviews, we witness how the work of reconciling pulls 
violently in two directions: 

 
I do remember when they first started talking about the terrible things that were 
happening in residential schools. And I remember very well worrying about my 
[family member], and what happened and did anything happen? And, in fact, my 
cousin sent me a beautiful piece that was put into the newspaper... but it was all 
about how my [family member] had been a good man. And he let them speak 
their language. And he had let them continue on with their canoe building and 
different things... And that was written by a First Nations person who had been to 
the school, so I felt a little bit better about it then… I think it’s horrendous and 
would never condone anything like that now, but then you just sort of took for 
granted. (Interview #4) 

 
While declarations of privilege can be moments of recognition, they are 

often not moments of deep disruption, and instead can become spaces of 
intense (re)investment in settler colonial relationalities. These declarations 



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render it possible to not only reconcile extraordinary settler colonial violence, 
but to do so in service of the need for settlers to (re)constitute themselves and 
avoid implication.5 This impulse can be particularly strong given the 
exaltation of white femininity within the helping professions in which this 
participant is situated (Allen, in press, 2020).  

Focusing on the individual, as opposed to how settler colonialism is 
(re)established relationally, obscures power (Levine-Rasky, 2000, p. 274). As 
witnessed with many participants, they have power to shape their work lives 
(through mandate letters, policy development communications, intake 
procedures, assessment tools, consultation frameworks, etc.), and they have 
power to intervene and disrupt. Put differently, settler-centric pedagogies of 
privilege rely on obfuscations of the relationships of power in which settlers 
are implicated. Settler participants are challenged to even name where they 
exert power and discretion. This obfuscation renders it possible to “think” 
about oneself, instead of collectively reconstituting to dismantle power 
structures. The move is that by acknowledging my privilege, I can do better 
with my privilege, by acting more responsibly and being better intentioned. A 
woman of colour in health describes this as follows:  
 

I think it comes from, basically trying to convince ourselves that our presence 
here is okay... it’s almost like trying to tell ourselves whatever it takes to sleep 
better at night – that we stole these people’s land, and we’re living here and it’s 
completely unjust still, and nothing’s being done about it. (Interview #5) 

 
 
Retreat to Comfort  
 
Finally, while naming privilege can in some contexts be disruptive, its easy 
extraction from relational and structural understandings of power renders it 
comfortable. For example, as Ahmed (2012) notes, confessions of privilege 
regularly become the political project itself. Charania (2015, p. 383) 
elaborates: 

 
The impulse to narrate ourselves in these ways reveals the long reach of 
neoliberalism where auditing our politics and lives to some place comfortable and 
implicated, comes to stand in for collective forms of life and social organizing. 

 
																																																													
5 We also found that until intentional additions were made into our interview script, participant 
responses to our probing around hegemonic forms of settler colonial common sense and 
mythologies rarely if ever invoked the reliant forms of common sense and mythologies about 
settlers, white settlerhood and Canadian sovereignty. Put differently, the mythologies described 
were largely about Indigenous people, and few participants brought forward mythologies 
grounding white settler forms of entitlement, or mythologies about the benevolent and 
multicultural Canadian state. Where participants did trouble, for example, the myth of 
meritocracy, the focus was less on how the myth of meritocracy sustains forms of anti-
Indigenous racism, and more on their own negative experiences of navigating assumptions 
around meritocracy.  



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The implication is that the perpetual deferral of decolonial change reflects 
settler colonial temporalities (Tuck & Yang, 2016). If declarations of 
privilege are structured encounters that “do” something, they are “delimited 
by the timeframes of modern colonizing states as well as the self-
historicizing, self-perpetuating futurities of their nations” (Tuck & Yang, 
2016, p. 6). They push decolonial change into a future never meant to come. 

The responses privilege declarations invoke are not unlike “emotional 
responses evoked by a therapeutic model of unlearning racism” (Jafri, 2012). 
Reconfiguring anti-racist critique, this approach recenters “the subject rather 
than destabilizing the settler/native binary through which the settler’s social 
power is constituted in the first place” (Jafri, 2012). In effect, this approach 
ignores how “white emotionality is socially and politically produced within 
material, affective, and discursive structures of whiteness and white 
supremacy” (Barreiro et al., 2020, p. 138). Extrapolating further, this 
therapeutic approach depoliticizes whiteness, white supremacy, and white 
settlerhood.  

This settler-centricity enables a retreat to comfort as the possibility for (and 
accountability to) structural change is foreclosed (Jafri, 2012). Consider how 
MacIntosh’s metaphor has led to a series of checklists to visibilize the 
privileges that white people receive. These checklists operate from a white 
normative pedagogy that centers white people’s learning, delimiting 
understanding of how visibilization, and “privilege” itself, are experienced in 
vastly distinct ways for non-Black racialized people, Black people and 
Indigenous people (Jafri, 2012, 2013). The premise of visibilization negates 
the reality that these privileges are deeply visible to non-Black racialized 
people, Black people and Indigenous people. A woman of colour in child 
welfare/children’s services invoked this complexity as she began to unpack 
what she identifies as a “different experience” of mixed familial lineages, and 
structural processes of settlement: 

 
It’s a bit of a different experience as a person of color. And I’m also mixed race, 
so grappling with some of the complexities of knowing that, for example, my 
great grandfather was gifted land, and that’s part of my history. And my privilege 
is that I’ve benefited from. (Interview #3) 

 
Articulations like hers steer us toward a “messier” orientation that does not 
end with declaration, but is imbued with more analytical, pedagogical and 
relational possibilities.  
	

  



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Circling Complicity 
 
Moving to contemplate complicity can animate settlers to think through 
implication and power in settler colonial structures and then, most critically, 
build and enact relational accountabilities. Patel (2021), for example, invokes 
a relational ethos and describes thinking about complicity as “mandatory” 
work for white settlers and racialized people. She argues that interrogating 
our complicity asks more of us, in that we must attend to how to be “in better 
ethical relationships with Indigenous peoples of this territory” (Patel, 2021, p. 
7). Citing Probyn-Rapsey (2007) who describes thinking about complicity as 
ethical engagement, Patel (2021) foregrounds how complicity must be taken 
up at multiple scales, including methodology, practice, theory of ethical 
engagement, and as relational across time. Thus, acknowledging and naming 
one’s complicity must extend into “an effective regular practice for non-black 
and settler people” (Patel, 2021, p. 17).  

Where Patel is attuned to ethical engagements, Jafri (2012, n.p.) takes up 
complicity as “messy, complicated and entangled,” where settlerhood is not 
simply an “object that we possess.” Jafri (2012) points to the “field of 
operations’’ in which settlers are located and acting, inviting consideration of 
how complicity manifests in the exercise and extension of settler state 
authority and jurisdiction through agents of the state. Both orientations to 
complicity are instructive in this research with public sector workers who are 
bound by codes of conduct or ethical frameworks that discount the settler 
colonial context, existing Indigenous sovereignty, and the ethical 
accountabilities of settlers, particularly those vis-a-vis Indigenous people and 
nations.  

Part of the messiness that Jafri (2012) brings forward relates to how social 
location (e.g., migration status, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, 
religion, class, caste, education) mediates settler privileges and advantages. 
For example, when accounting for pervasive anti-Blackness, we cannot trace 
complicity “along the same coordinates as white people’s complicity” (Patel 
et al., 2015, p. 9). Moreover, positionality can animate distinct settler logics 
and feelings. For example, Rifkin (2014) and Mackey (2016) discuss feelings 
of entitlement and certainty for white settlers in securing intergenerational 
power and land, while Jafri (2013) addresses feelings of desire and precarity 
for racialized immigrants in securing a place in the settler state and economy. 
Taking up Patel’s understanding of complicity as ethical engagement, and 
Jafri’s (2012) call to distinguish between privilege and complicity, we shift 
our attention to systemic conditions and relationships rather than 
(re)centering the settler-self.6  
																																																													
6 This focus helps to sift through discussions over who is deemed to be a settler, the extent of 
access one has to settler privileges and citizenship advantages derived from living on and off 
Indigenous lands and resources, and recognition or status within state institutions, but also to the 
investments in sustaining settler colonialism certainty and power (Jafri, 2013; Mackey, 2016; 
Rifkin, 2013, 2014). As one does not become a settler through arrival to these lands alone, we 



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In the remainder of the paper, we explain our intentional move to 
complicity in our interviews in two ways: first, that complicity demands a 
relational understanding; and second, that complicity can illuminate the 
distinctive ways that non-Indigenous public sector workers are implicated in 
settler colonialism. Drawing from the interventions of participants, we 
foreground why locating complicity in the settler colonial bureaucratic 
context is critical. We stress how settler colonial logics shape the field of 
operations of public sector workers, but also how settler colonial 
relationalities can impede settlers from imagining and acting outside of these 
logics and the asserted authority and jurisdiction of settler governments.7  
 
 
Complicity and Relationality 
 
When privilege pedagogies characterize settlerhood as an inert status, the 
agency, domination, and investment of white settlers and some settlers of 
colour in settler colonial governance is submerged. Yet the structures of 
settler colonialism are reliant on particular relationalities. As Gaztambide-
Fernández (2012, p. 52; emphasis in original) writes, “individual subjects do 
not enter into relationships, but rather subjects are made in and through 
relationships.” As such, settler colonial socialization is a pedagogy of a 
particular kind of relationality that teaches, at a minimum, disconnection, 
extraction and settler innocence. Oriented differently, Indigenous 
relationalities are socially interconnected and premised on culturally 
embodied knowledges connected to other-than-human life, land and 
waterways. This understanding of relationality has been a core 
epistemological and ethical premise of the Indigenous social research 
paradigm that begins “with an awareness of our proper relationships with the 
world we inhabit, and is conducted with respect, responsibility, generosity, 
obligation and reciprocity” (Moreton-Robinson, 2017, p. 71). Wilson (2008) 
further explains that relational accountability is grounded in respect, 
reciprocity and responsibility. 

Settler colonial relationalities do not invoke these understandings, nor an 
“ecological understanding of human relationality” (Donald, 2012, p. 535). In 
this way, settler colonial relationalities are meant to foreclose the material 
realization of Indigenous conceptions of relational responsibilities, 

																																																																																																																																				
take up complicity to unpack how immigrant and arrivant settler subjectivity-making takes place 
and how “a process of becoming” contributes to ongoing settlement (Jafri, 2013, p. 81). For 
additional recent work on complicity and implication, see Rothberg (2019) and Shotwell (2016). 
7 Here it is helpful to note the distinction we are making between relationality, which, in this 
paper, references distinctive ways of being in relationship (e.g., settler colonial relationalities and 
Indigenous relationalities), from relational which references an analytic orientation to 
understanding power, processes and structures that decenters individuals qua individuals, and 
points instead to co-implication.  



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conceptions that could transform Indigenous-settler relationships in 
meaningful, liberatory ways. Analytically then, we understand settler 
complicity as “always enmeshed in complex social relations and influenced – 
though not fully determined – by one’s location within those relations” 
(Mihai, 2019, p. 506). Moreover, attuned to the complexities of power, we 
also consider the intra- and inter-dynamics of domination in relationships 
among Indigenous, Black and other people of colour (Dhamoon, 2021). 
Dhamoon (2021) describes this as relational Othering: “the interactive 
processes of re/making, re/organizing, and managing subjugating formations 
of difference… [operating] not only in contexts of dominance but in relation 
to one another as well” (p. 874). This invites a focus on systems of white 
supremacy, but also looks to how “nonwhites become sutured, even 
necessary, in racist and colonizing hegemonies” (Dhamoon, 2021, p. 877). 

These complex settler colonial relationalities are manifest in our 
interviews. For instance, a non-binary participant of colour in business 
development reflected on their implication in a work experience that did not 
feel ethical or just, and that had punitive consequences for an Indigenous 
business: 

 
I did something, but it’s like the safety of behaviors that I function in… I’m only 
willing to push this far because this is what I’m comfortable with... I am 
implicated in this, 100% implicated... if I’m in a place where I’m still mentally 
thinking about what I can do and what I can’t do, I’m mostly not gonna say 
anything… I guess the rights of Indigenous people, in terms of self-determination, 
access to their culture, identity, shouldn’t be dependent on... a settler’s emotional 
process. They shouldn’t have to trigger my emotions for me to say this is 
something that I should [do]. (Interview #6) 

 
This participant’s words are contextualized in the bureaucracy which they, 

and to differing extents other participants, describe as a space where one’s 
identity, humanity, and emotions are to be “checked at the door.” This is 
especially the case for Indigenous people, Black people, and people of colour. 
In their interviews, this participant named how the racialized, gendered and 
classed entanglements of immigration and settlement shape their position, 
access, safety, and experience of racism in the whiteness of the public sector, 
and what this means for their resistance to decision-making that negatively 
impacts Indigenous people. They identify settler affective processes we are 
witnessing and shed light on the emotional and cognitive distancing we 
encounter with some participants from colonial violence and their authority to 
act in their roles. This participant’s intervention links back to our assertions 
about settler-centric privilege frameworks, which rely on appeals to settler 
affectability as the basis for change.  

Participants seem to buttress the complexities of Jafri’s analysis of the 
logics of entitlement and certainty for white settlers, and desire and precarity 
for people of colour. Bringing forward how racialized participants can 
become adjacent to white settlerhood, participants also illuminate logics of 



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settler colonial relationality that are entrenched in the way of doing work and 
relationships in the public sector. The critical insight here is the coherence 
across provinces, sectors and roles that we can map from participant 
articulations. Strong themes of settler colonial common sense and 
relationality include: hierarchical, siloed working environments and 
relationships; tightly controlled and “sanitized” communications;8 the 
anticipation of resistance, hence the self-policing of one’s work from being 
“too” disruptive; pressures of leadership-imposed timelines and political 
mandates; paternalistic relationships in front-line work; extractive 
engagement and intentional absences of full consultation with Indigenous 
people; and a broader commitment to protect government from “risk.”  

Many participants spoke, for example, about the temporalities of extractive 
and transactional bureaucratic relationships. These relationships can 
deprioritize change as illustrated in statements made by a white woman in 
child welfare/children’s services, and by a woman of colour in education: 

 
It’s presumed common sense that we can just take, take, take info and – as 
opposed to flip it. What info do you want to share? Or... what can we give in 
return?... So it’s not even a relationship-building exercise, it’s an information 
gathering exercise, not a people-centric process. So common sense is missing 
people and humanity at the center of our processes. (Interview #2) 
 
Because we are the funders and working with Indigenous stakeholders, there is 
that power dynamic... I get the sense that it’s not a priority to sort of repair the 
relationships with Indigenous folks. Especially with my department, people are 
really bogged down by work with the daily grind, and there’s not many 
opportunities to think about things that are really higher level in terms of 
reconciliation and addressing problematic structures like racism and paternalism. 
(Interview #7) 

 
These articulations demonstrate how the bureaucracy is grounded in 
temporalities in which there is never “enough” time to consult with 
Indigenous people, to build relationships, or to think beyond the immediacy 
of meso-level demands. Participants describe how their work is shaped by 
multiple temporal pulls – where change is deferred, work is tied to electoral 
cycles and mandate letters, but also where everything must be done “right 
now.” In this, participants reveal how settler colonial temporalities do not 
simply exist but are deployed through public sector work and workers.  

Across provinces, sectors and roles, participants also describe how they are 
expected to come into this work. As opposed to mutuality and 
interrelatedness, themes of alienation, silos, abstraction, extraction and 
dissonance come forward clearly in participant narratives, especially around 
the ethics of “good intentions” and “the public good.” These discourses speak 

																																																													
8 For example, silencing terms like colonialism, racism, or violence in clinical communications.  



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to the role benevolence has in masking individual and institutional 
complicities.9 

 
Everything that we do in the public service is... grounded by good intentions... it 
rarely happens that there is good impact to the extent that it was intended. Like 
there might be marginal impact at most, like good impact at most, but I think a lot 
of good intentions are actually harmful. I always think about the residential 
schools policy – the government probably had, from their perspective, good 
intentions, but the impact was – it’s still felt to this day, and it’s very negative. I 
still think about [it], especially in working in education. (Interview #7; a woman 
of colour in education) 
 
It’s a common understanding that whatever the public service decides is for the 
public good... there’s a general acceptance of ‘this is just the way it is’ right? And 
that a public servant is here to provide our best in a way that’s palatable for 
whiteness as an institution. We’re such big institutions, so what’s decided as good 
policy must be good policy – how could it be that a ministry or department of 500 
people is doing something wrong? (Interview #6; a non-binary person of colour in 
business development)  
 
The coherence of these articulations of settler colonial relationality points 

to the importance of examining “the function of these convergences, 
divergences, and multidirectionality for modalities of governance” 
(Dhamoon, 2021, p. 877; emphasis in original). A shift to complicity invites 
interrogation (and interruption) in ways that are distinct from privilege 
frameworks. As Jafri (2012) writes, shifting to complicity can turn to the 
strategies that produce relational hierarchies and authorize settlers’ 
governance and sense of entitlement to act upon others.  
 
 
Complicity and Bureaucracy 
 
Turning to complicity is particularly salient in a bureaucratic context that 
positions itself as apolitical. Mihai (2019) describes this as “routinised, often 
unreflective, patterns of complicity or series of complicitous acts in 
temporally stable, structural violence” (p. 506). A non-binary participant of 
colour in business development names this bluntly: “the public service and 

																																																													
9 In our interviews the gendering of “good intentions” and benevolence, and the role of white 
women as exalted national subjects is a strong theme. Particularly as we interview a range of 
white women at various stages of their careers, how white women have found their authority to 
act within the state is a prominent theme that speaks to a distinct form of gendered and racialized 
relationality cultivated in this public sector work. This echoes back to a long lineage of white 
women’s particularized emplacement and complicities in settling and securing the state through 
the “helping” professions and within the home and community (Allen, in press). Also see 
LeFrançois’ (2013) discussion of the intersection of white identity and “benevolent” institutions 
in constituting the “good” social worker, all the whole reconstituting “the social relation of 
dominance and subordination with racialized and colonized others” (p. 116). 



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government in general... is extremely violent, right?... the basis of the 
crown... is... rooted in colonial violence, right?” (Interview #6). They go on to 
expand the conception of what counts as violence, describing systemic 
neglect and its implications for “access to shelter, food, healthcare, well-
being and identity” as a form of “state sanctioned violence.”  

In this context, the aforementioned sense of dissonance gains meaning, 
particularly given how participants describe the public sector as guarding 
against “risk”: 

 
I’ve looked very carefully at the high level... documents that are supposed to be 
guiding government operations. There’s UNDRIP. There’s the TRC report... then 
the missing and murdered Indigenous women report [and] the new report on 
health care… they’re about sovereignty, they’re about self-determination. The 
government reads those and interprets them through an assimilationist lens that 
they call reconciliation... And then a layer beneath that is actually how policies 
work and what they look like in the community... it just gets watered down at 
every step. (Interview #8; a white man in health) 
 
There’s always been a lot of fear... there’s a risk averse thing that you’re going to 
make a bad decision, it’s going to end up in the news and somebody is going to 
get fired… to be able to operate outside the bureaucracy, you need to have a sense 
of safety... emotional safety, physical safety, psychological safety, career safety, 
to take risks and do things differently. (Interview #9; a white woman in child 
welfare/children’s services)  
 
Participants illuminate a fundamental tension with respect to who they 

“serve.” Speaking about settler colonial common sense, and what it means to 
work as a bureaucrat, a white woman in child welfare/children’s services 
stated that “as a representative of government, you will not do harm to 
government” (Interview #2). Another white woman in child 
welfare/children’s services reflected, “I learned very quickly that... we needed 
to in some weird way protect the government from itself” (Interview #9). 
Complicity, then, lends a critical lens, allowing for “recognition of the 
historical, social and political conditions that render some sufferings and 
injustices permissible and habitual, or part of everyday repertoire and social 
interaction” (Zembylas, 2020, p. 323). Put differently, it is striking that harm 
to the state is clearly centered as requiring the vigilance of non-Indigenous 
public sector workers.  

Here, we recognize that in bureaucratic contexts “collaborators, 
beneficiaries of violence and bystanders often have mixed motives for action, 
that long-term, indifferent collective passivity frequently elides reflexive 
intent, and that the effects of complicity are often ambitious and difficult to 
isolate” (Mihai, 2019, p. 507). Pushing further, participants reflect on what it 
means to be a public sector worker who is implicated in the settler colonial 
state: 

 



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I’m choosing to make some pretty huge ethical compromises to live this lifestyle 
that I lead. I don’t delude myself into thinking that I’m making a positive 
difference in the world. I work for a colonial capitalist government, that’s hell 
bent on genocide… that’s a compromise that I have to find ways to live with right 
now. It’s a temporary compromise... But that’s kind of the sacrifice I needed to 
make to live the lifestyle I do. (Interview #8; a white man in health) 
 
I know that I’m very privileged to be in this position. This position provides me 
with all the benefits, like financial stability… I already see myself as complicit 
because I work for the state. I already don’t think that we should have states, I 
don’t think that people should have power over other people... hopefully, I’m 
helping people with my policy. But I am part of the state, I am complicit in the 
system that is enacting violence on people. (Interview #5; a woman of colour in 
health)  

 
Complicity is neither incidental, nor immaterial. Lethabo King (2013) writes 
of the materiality of settler colonialism in terms of settler commodification, 
conquering, and owning of land, but also of a cognitive ordering of the “mind 
of the Settler, shaping and allowing the settler to survey land, knowledge, 
bodies – and art – for potential yield as commodities” (as cited in Martineau 
& Ritskes, 2014, p. vi). This securing of settler colonial order is inextricably 
linked to presumptions that the authority, legitimacy and jurisdiction of the 
public sector are absolute. In variable ways, many participants describe their 
discretion to act within these assertions of settler jurisdiction:  
 

At the end of the day, I’m an entry-level administrator in a giant public service. 
And there’s only so much that I can do... There are things that I can do as an 
individual in terms of learning systems of colonialism and trying to challenge that 
part of my being, there are things that I can do in my team… then again, I’m the 
most junior member of our team. So there’s a power dynamic there in terms of 
how much I can get away with pushing back and challenging. (Interview #10; a 
white male in health) 
 
It’s very recommended that we need to consult with Indigenous people, but even 
then, today, my friend was like, ‘oh my god, I was just thinking about how we 
didn’t consult with Indigenous people on this framework.’ I know that he holds a 
lot of the same beliefs as we do, and he tried to push for it in his own work. But it 
just didn’t happen for whatever reason – you can still get away with not doing it. 
If we exist in Indigenous sovereignty, it would be like of course you have to do it. 
(Interview #5; a woman of colour in health) 
 
I’m consulting, but my duty is to seek consent not to get it. So right from the 
beginning, I know that I have all the power and the rights to make this decision. 
And I will take input from any group. And even if it’s no, it’s still my decision to 
make. (Interview #11; a white man in natural resources) 

 
These conversations on complicity have demonstrated how the investments 
of settlers are protected, and how this delimits imagining a future outside of 



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settler colonial governance. Still, we consider what complicity may open up 
imaginatively, particularly as we reflect on one participant’s utterances:  

 
 
I see a responsibility to do the best that I can from the position I’m in. I think it’s 
working towards ensuring that your position is no longer needed in the future... 
we should be working to work ourselves out of a job to ensure that we are limiting 
how complicit we are... It’s bigger in the public service, because it’s like, how are 
you going to work yourself out of the state? As an individual can I actually?” 
(Interview $5; a woman of colour in health) 

 
 

Orienting Towards Refusals and Otherwise 
 
Adopting a different framework or language does not unravel settler 
colonialism; this is not simply something that settlers can “think themselves 
out of” on their own. Reflecting on complicity can still activate a similar 
confessional process, ultimately centering and emplacing settler colonial 
futurities (Patel, 2021). Consequently, our focus on complicity is not meant to 
begin and end with transforming settler consciousness. Rather, this naming 
and rupturing of complicity is meant to disrupt settler colonial pedagogies 
and orient participants to act at this meso-level. More critically, complicity is 
never meant to be read outside the imperatives of decolonization, meaning 
that in this research and in the interview questions, complicity is not simply 
linked to settler agency, but framed as invoking relational accountability to 
Indigenous sovereignty and refusals. Put differently, our move to interrogate 
complicity is meant to support material practices of relational responsibility.10 

Thus, we end our interviews by inviting participants to imagine otherwise, 
and learning from Patel (2021), we similarly ground complicity by turning to 
Indigenous refusals. Critically, the invitation to imagine otherwise at the end 
of our second interview comes after extensive conversation in which we 
have: (a) supported participants in locating themselves and their learning 
within larger structures and patterns; (b) supported participants in identifying 
patterns (and impacts) of settler colonial common sense in which they (and 
we) are complicit; and (c) dislodged and disrupted the certainty of settler 
colonial jurisdiction to act. As an ongoing series of interview interventions 
meant to support participants in decentering themselves as settlers, we name 
both settler refusals to be in Indigenous sovereignty (Nicoll, 2004), and share 
Arvin’s (2019, p. 228) articulation of Indigenous regenerative refusals: 

																																																													
10 Notably, throughout most interviews, participants wanted to speak about their involvement in 
change. At times this serves as a pivot away from pointed questions about complicity, and in 
other contexts, their challenges to settler colonial common sense and relationalities are critically 
illuminative of how participants are trying to navigate the system to disrupt.  
	



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Regenerative refusals recognize violence and pain, but not to make that the center 
of Indigenous identity; rather, these refusals highlight the importance of 
envisioning and enacting different futures that are suffused with more love, 
humor, connection, and freedom… Refusals allow for a blooming of desires 
beyond the structures of settler colonialism that pretend to be eternal and 
unchangeable. 

  
Specifically, we ask participants to reflect on Indigenous refusals they have 

witnessed, often invoking a reinterpretation of previous encounters, and a 
recognition that the erasure and delegitimization of Indigenous refusals as 
intentional and political are critical sites of complicity. In doing so, we invite 
participants to contemplate how settlers can be accountable to Indigenous 
refusals moving forward, even when some refusals are not “for” settlers.11 
For settler participants, the invitation to imagine otherwise is meant to start 
from the already destabilized ground of settler authority, jurisdiction and 
legitimacy, from collective thinking away from individual narratives of self-
improvement, and towards creating futures where we are different selves 
under changed relations of governance.  

As Goodyear-Ka’ōpua (2019) notes, futurities are “ways that groups 
imagine and produce knowledge about futures, that assemble styles of 
thinking, practices that give content to futures, and logics” (p. 86). With this 
in mind, we ask participants to imagine beyond settler colonial relationalities 
and futurities of “containment, removal and eradication” (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 
2019, p. 86). Goodyear-Ka’ōpua (2019) describes Indigenous futurities as 
enactments of radical relationalities “that transcend settler geographies and 
maps, temporalities and calendars, and/or other settler measures of time and 
space” (p. 86). These settler colonial relationalities and scales obscure as 
opposed to illuminate – foreclosing horizons, as opposed to extending them. 
This has stood out to us when posing questions about what relationships and 
governance might look like outside of existing settler colonial dynamics of 
“power over,” and in imagining sovereign Indigenous nations. For example, a 
white male in health responded, “I guess that’s part of the trick of 
colonization is such a different reality, it makes it almost unimaginable” 
(Interview #8). A woman of colour in health answered that,  

 
It’s hard to imagine what [Indigenous sovereignty] would look like beyond the 
state, but still living in our modern society... if we continue with an allegory of the 
public service, then Indigenous people are their own ministry or something, and 
therefore their own nation, and we have to work with them – they’re not just like 

																																																													
11 Drawing from Coulthard (2014) and Simpson (2007), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) 
has described several sorts of refusals that have been articulated by Indigenous scholars, 
including the refusal of “state recognition as an organizing platform and mechanism for 
dismantling the systems of colonial domination” (p. 176). Refusal also includes refusing how the 
state frames the issues to be organized around (Simpson, 2017), and the refusal of “divisions of 
colonial spatialities, networks, or constellations” (p. 197). 



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an optional stakeholder that we can maybe consult with and not pay. (Interview 
#5) 

 
Lastly, a non-binary person of colour in business development said,  
 

I have always kind of thought about, ‘oh, let’s dismantle the system,’ but I don’t 
know if I’ve really visualized for myself what that looks like afterwards. It’s not 
that I don’t have an imagination... I think maybe it’s just how much we’ve 
accepted this is our reality that I haven’t really taken the time to think about what 
that may look like otherwise. (Interview #6) 
 

These articulations speak to the deep ways settler colonialism can delimit 
imaginations, and what is perceived as already existing, possible or 
impossible. We note this delimitation even for people with political 
orientations against settler colonialism, and even for several participants who 
engage in anticolonial and anticapitalist organizing.  

Of course, as Batliwala (2013) reminds us, deep structures are not absolute 
because they are contested, and subject to sabotage; this requires imagining 
that is relational. Drawing from Joy James and Edmund Gordon’s assertions 
on the foundation of radical subjectivity, Martineau and Ritskes (2014) 
describe that the task for decolonial researchers, activists and artists is not 
one of rehabilitation, or of offering “amendments or edits to the current 
world, but to display the mutual sacrifice and relationality needed to sabotage 
colonial systems of thought and power for the purpose of liberatory 
alternatives” (p. ii; emphasis added). We hope to prompt participants and 
ourselves to get to a place that is “not simply away from colonialism, but 
away from any standpoint where colonialism makes sense” (Martineau & 
Ritskes, 2014, p. iv; emphasis added). 
 
 
Conclusions: Implications of Complicity and Witnessing for Us 
 
In this paper we have paused while immersed “in the deep” with our 
participants. The reflection invited here is not only of our participants’ 
complicities, but of ours as well. Indeed, as Zembylas (2020) notes, “a 
critique of complicity is never free of complicities” (p. 323). Neither 
centering nor decentering our or our participants’ privilege enables us to 
think through ethical engagement, or our relational accountabilities in this 
research. While we have been and will continue to structure this work in 
discussion with Indigenous contacts and colleagues within our institutions, 
particularly vis-a-vis local protocols and accountabilities, we also see the 
limits of the academe, whose logics are not oriented to the temporalities of 
decolonial work, much less the fundamental refusal of settler colonialism. 
Yet, while the academe values settler colonial temporalities and certainty – of 
methodology, findings and impact – the framework of settler colonial 



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socialization implores a methodological opening that resists this settler 
hubris. Guided by Indigenous colleagues and educators who have made clear 
that settler decolonization work is for settlers to take responsibility for, as 
settlers, we still question, how are we being accountable and not reproducing 
extractive relationalities with Indigenous participants, colleagues, and 
researchers throughout this process?  

At this time, our intentions with the broader findings – to locate 
possibilities of antiracist learning and decolonial change, and bolster support 
for the development of policies and practices that challenge settler 
colonialism and foreground Indigenous people’s sovereignty – situate us in 
the paradoxical tensions of this work. Are we looking for change within the 
existing structures? Are we asking participants to make everyday disruptions 
and to create greater equity in violent institutions while also asking them and 
ourselves to imagine and act beyond them? We linger in this paradoxical 
space of asking participants and ourselves to do differently in institutions set 
up to harm, while being accountable to Indigenous refusals and honouring an 
orientation of otherwise.  

Theories of change are implicit in all social science research, shaping “the 
directions a project takes, how it begins and where it ends, who a project is 
responsible to, speaking to, and speaking for… how we think things are 
known, what counts as evidence, and what argumentation style will convince 
those we want to convince” (Tuck, 2018, p. 157). We hold that settler 
colonial socialization is never wholly determinative, given that settler 
colonial common sense and pedagogies are characterized by moments of 
learning, reproduction, and complicity, as well as possible contestation and 
disruption. Heeding the call to move “beyond telling a simple story about 
complicity” (Saranillio, 2013, p. 36), we aim to unpack settler colonialism as 
pedagogies of dominance and illuminate pedagogies of relationality grounded 
in material practices of relational responsibility that are and can be otherwise. 
 
 
Acknowledgements 
 
We wish to acknowledge the participants who committed to being “in the 
deep” of the research process with us, during a global pandemic no less. You 
have taught us so much, and we are grateful for the time, critical reflection 
and care everyone took to grapple with concepts, questions and settler 
colonial harms that cannot be easily responded to yet remain imperative to 
interrogate. This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities 
Research Council of Canada.  
 
 
  



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