Canadian Settler Philanthropy and Reconciliation: A Critical Textual Analysis

This thesis presents a critical textual analysis of what I call the reconciliation change narrative in the Canadian settler philanthropy sector, as expressed across an archive of 156 texts produced from 2008-2022 by four philanthropic organizations and their members: one Indigenous-led intermediary (the Circle); three settler-led philanthropic intermediaries (Imagine Canada, Community Foundations Canada [CFC], and Philanthropic Foundations Canada [PFC]); and one widely read sector publication called The Philanthropist. Engagement with the concept of reconciliation became common in the Canadian settler philanthropy world after 2015. Change narratives like reconciliation are stories whereby philanthropic actors situate themselves in the social order and justify their activities; they are simultaneously discursive and affective formations with important material functions, directing organizational and sectoral policies, and shaping giving and granting decisions, institutional practices, and giving relationships. Across my chapters, I explore how diverse and dissonant expressions of the reconciliation change narrative can maintain colonial durabilities, working to mask or obscure the ongoing workings of colonial violence in the settler philanthropy sector and the wider world, especially through what Coulthard (2014) calls colonial recognition and Vimalessary et al. (2016) describe as colonial unknowing. At other times the texts I analyze present alternative possibilities for and beyond dominant expressions of reconciliation and settler philanthropy. These shift the focus away from the colonial politics of reconciliation toward the advancement of relations of reparations, reciprocity and refusal. Drawing on diverse approaches and theoretical frameworks from critical discourse analysis, affect theory, decolonial studies and philanthropic studies, I demonstrate through this analysis that Canadian settler philanthropy's relations to coloniality are, and always have been, characterized by dissonance.