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Alexandra Arellano

University of Ottawa
Towards an Anicinape understanding of reconciliation: The Kitcisakik land-based immersion camps
Towards an Anicinape understanding of reconciliation: The Kitcisakik land-based immersion camps
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been understood as a renewed mechanism for managing Indigenous resistance, where centering the nerve of Indigenous claims on the Residential School System as a past historical error, appeases Indigenous claims and settlers’ quest for absolution. While giving the appearance of structural change and settler decolonization, these renewed controlled points - enquiries, commissions, special programs – shift, yet consolidate dispossession. What would reconciliation look like for Indigenous peoples? This paper presents the experiences of an Anicinape community (Kitcisakik) that has been practicing what settlers would understand as acts of reconciliation. For more that 10 years, this little community from the Quebec province in Canada, has been receiving settler students for an Anicinape land-based outdoor immersion. While perceived as squatting in its own ancestral lands, Kitcisakik have always rejected the reserve displacement and deals with high levels of state-imposed poverty. As a local initiative, the immersion trips provide countless teachings on what reconciliation could look like for the Anicinape community. While this initiative was initially created to sustain resurgence and cultural revitalization, intercultural dialog, settler allyship formation and land repatriation processes also became central to what could be seen as a reconciliation enactment.