Treaty and the Problem of Colonial Reification

Over the last two decades, Canadian political and social thought has experienced a "treaty turn" that calls for non-Indigenous Canadians to remember a forgotten "settler treaty tradition." In this diagnostic essay, I draw out both a conceptual limitation of this turn in its obfuscation of the critical moment in Indigenous treaty visions, and a political limitation of overlooking the social forces that block and might enable the realization of treaty that follows its emphasis on the vertical (self-interpretation) rather than horizontal (social relation) axis of settler colonial reification.