“So-Called Reconciliation:” Empty Signifiers and Settler Political Community
Speaker: Dr. Joseph Weiss
Chair, Department of Anthropology, Wesleyan University
Abstract:
In this talk, I explore the ways in which the settler discourse of reconciliation operates as an empty signifier within Canada. I argue that mainstream, typical settler representations of “reconciliation” – and a semiotic universe of associated terms such as “healing” and “unity” – mean, precisely, nothing. And this, I contend, is precisely the point. Drawing in particular on the work of Ernesto Laclau, I characterize reconciliation as an “empty signifier,” that is, a term whose semiotic underdetermination plays a central role in its ability to bind together highly disparate meanings within the formation of a political community. “Reconciliation,” following this logic, does not simply bring together already established political unities; rather, it works to constitute a new socio-political order in Canada that would include both settlers and Indigenous subjects. What, then, happens to those Indigenous people (and Peoples) who do not wish to form part of this new “unity?” Not only are they cast out from “reconciled” Canadian society, but they have done so of their own volition. It is their fault they do not want reconciliation. Thus, Canadian settler subjects can sincerely believe they are working towards reconciliation – an undefined but affectively charged “good” – while in fact working to draw ever tighter the limits on what forms of Indigenous politics can be recognized by the settler state and what political actions should be cast out as the work of the terrorist, the enemy of the state. Put simply, reconciliation is not done with Indigenous Peoples; it is done to them.
About Dr. Joseph Weiss
Joseph Weiss is a settler scholar who works between sociocultural anthropology and Indigenous studies. His research explores the intersections between settler colonialism, time, ecology, and Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Dr. Weiss has been conducting fieldwork with the Haida community of Old Massett since 2010, where has also worked as a full-time volunteer teaching assistant and occasional school play director. His first book, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) is based on this fieldwork, exploring how the Indigenous Haida Nation in Western Canada addresses political and social change through a series of different future-oriented cultural strategies.
Dr. Weiss’s second book, Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Canada, analyses the ways in which the agents, structures, and ideologies of settler colonial erase their own constitutive and ongoing violence, and, in turn, how Indigenous Peoples refuse to become reconciled to these continuing modes of domination. Irreconcilable was just published in March, 2026, in the University of North Carolina Press’ Critical Indigeneities series. He is also at work on a third book, tentatively entitled How Settlers Think: Colonial Psychology and the Representation of Indigeneity, which explores the intersections of Indigenous Studies and Psychoanalysis, and has recently begun a new ethnographic project, examining settler colonial networks of extraction between Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Dr. Weiss also maintains abiding interests in commissions of inquiry, the production of political legitimacy, and research ethics in the social sciences. His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Philosophical Society, Wesleyan University, the Canadian Museum of History, and the University of Chicago. Dr. Weiss is formerly Curator of Western Ethnology at the Canadian Museum of History.
Photo Credit: Joseph Weiss