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137 /////////////~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 6 Genocide, Affirmative Repair, and the British Columbia Treaty Process ANDR EW WOOLFOR D This chapter examines the ways in which genocidal violence (understood here as physically, biologically, or culturally destructive violence targeted toward groups) is potentially transformed into symbolic violence through transitional justice processes. The British Columbia Treaty Process, which began in 1992 and has for the past seventeen years made a halting attempt to negotiate treaties between First Nations and the governments of British Columbia and Canada, is used as a case study to illustrate this argument.1 A key component of transitional symbolic violence is the failure or refusal to recognize the harms of the past. The British Columbia Treaty Process was established on the pillars of “justice” and “certainty,” with the former referring to the need to right past wrongs, while the latter speaks to the desire to create economic and jurisdictional security within the province (BCCTF 1991). However, so far the goal of justice has been treated in a confused and imprecise manner within the process. In particular, the question must be asked, What injustices does the process intend to address? Representatives of the provincial and federal governments often respond to this question by vaguely pointing to the history of unresolved land claims within the province , suggesting the need to settle once and for all questions of ownership of and jurisdiction over lands. However, for First Nations peoples, territorial loss is only one part of a broader history of colonial destruction wrought upon their communities. Indeed, in my interviews with First Nations informants , they did not hesitate to label these injustices “genocide.”2 Before moving this discussion forward, however, a comment is required on the application of the term “transitional justice” to this process. “Transitional justice” typically refers to justice processes intended to facilitate a societal shift from authoritarianism and mass violence toward democratic rule (as noted by Duthie, this volume). However, such a narrow 138 A NDR E W WOOLFOR D understanding of transitional justice suggests a certain ethnocentrism that views only nondemocratic nations to be in need of transition. It also limits the notion to a Westphalian framework in which transition is located within the spatial confines of the nation-state. A more capacious notion of transition would enable examination of the ways in which settler societies must also negotiate the existence of self-determining indigenous groups within their midst while at the same time redressing injustices committed against these populations, so as to transition toward new models of confederated association that may indeed burst the Westphalian model. Without this broadening of the term, transitional justice is rightly subject to the criticisms of teleology and hierarchy that Alexander Hinton identifies in his introduction to this volume. It is also the case that, when addressing matters of transition, scholars must remain attuned to questions of who or what is being transitioned, and on whose terms. The First Nations peoples who are the focus of this chapter have resisted years of transitional justice in the sense that past vehicles for redressing Aboriginal land claims in British Columbia have sought to transition Aboriginal groups toward the economic norms of settler society. This was the case, for example, with the McKenna-McBride Commission (1913–1915), which gathered information about Aboriginal groups that was subsequently used to unilaterally and forcefully fit them into a colonial territorial framework. Such experiences provide an important reminder that societal transition is a constitutive process through which new societal visions and subjectivities are constructed and performed. Moreover, what is built through transitional processes may not amount to a justice that is transformative of the generative conditions of injustice, but rather affirms and reinforces entrenched patterns of power through the offering of merely palliative forms of redress (see also Dwyer, this volume). Land Claims, Assimilation, and Genocide in British Columbia When examining the plight of First Nations in what is now British Columbia, it is important to recognize that we are dealing with multiple localities, each possessing regional and cultural variations with respect to their experiences of colonialism. In the northern reaches of the province, for example, First Nations lands were expropriated largely for purposes of resource exploitation and development, whereas First Nations close to the southern cities of Victoria and Vancouver also faced greater degrees of settler encroachment. However, most First Nations groups in the province faced a series of similar damaging events that, because of their cumulative destructive impact on these groups, raises serious questions about what...

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