Workshop II
Reconciliation Refused:
Poetic Interrogations of Imperial Reparations

In this workshop, we explored the limits of reconciliation. When is reconciliation impossible? When is harm irreconcilable? There has been extensive critique by Indigenous writers, artists, academics, and Elders of settler state reconciliation efforts that do little to disrupt settler colonial extraction and the continued dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the United States. Reconciliation and reparations at the level of the nation-state and in international diplomatic terms are often envisioned as monetary compensation and, thus, only occur on the same capitalist terms that justified settler colonialism, enslavement, internment, and imperial warfare in the first place. They are also meant to end discussion, to cease the memory of harmful pasts that continue to shape our present and future; refusal is a means of not “just getting over it.”

The use of refused in our session title is meant to evoke the politics of refusal that Indigenous scholars and artists like Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson have called for. They understand refusal as an alternative to recognition by the state. Because recognition reaffirms the state as the primary seat of power, it does little to change the social and political dynamics that reproduce inequity and violence–the very acts that required reconciliation in the first place. Refusal seeks affirmation by other means, outside settler nation-states, outside patriarchy, outside capitalist accumulation, outside empire. 

All three of our invited poets, Kazim Ali, Layli Long Soldier, and Philip Metres grapple, with U.S. and Canadian legacies of violence and explore the ability of poetry to confront irreconcilability and seek healing, accountability, and care elsewhere. What solidarities open up and merge when we reject a reconciliation model and turn to other forms of healing, memory-keeping, and justice? How does poetry, in particular, bear witness to unspeakable historical violence? How does it invite us not to turn away from injustice but find paths forward that are beyond the reified transits of global power, international politics, and state-sanctioned violence? And finally, how does poetry enable us to attend to the role of language in these questions?