Shortly after publishing my first book, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii (2018), I gave a talk in the community library of the Village of Masset, a historically non-Indigenous community on the islands of Haida Gwaii, unceded territory of the Haida Nation. The islands are also claimed by the federal and provincial governments of Canada as falling within their jurisdiction. My talk was attended primarily by settler members of the community loosely referred to as “Tow Town,” who live in the unincorporated area of Tow Hill just east of Masset. The most vocal of these had attended my talk to express their unhappiness with a chapter in that book that had critiqued the ways in which Tow Town residents were themselves engaged in the appropriation of Haida lands and resources, even as they understood themselves to be participating in collective and non-capitalist ecological futures that were not in and of themselves anti-Haida or overtly colonial. The Tow Town community members in my audience disagreed with my critique, arguing that I had misrepresented the good intentions of the community’s membership. I was particularly struck by one of their questions: “Why don’t you criticize the real racists?” These real racists, my audience made clear, did not even live in Tow Town, but in a different community on the islands historically tied to the settler-controlled logging industry.

The Tow Town residents were not like those real racists. Real racists, for my audience, were overtly anti-Indigenous, white supremacists in word and deed. They made it clear they did not like Haida people or want them around. By contrast, while the Tow Town residents acknowledged they were imperfect, they felt they were doing their best to be good neighbors and pointed to their many common causes with Haida people. They had attended my reading, they told me, because they were concerned that I was spreading bad feelings and opening up problems through my analysis. More than anything, in challenging my focus on settlers who do believe they are acting in good faith, the Tow Town residents were asking me to account for why those good intentions, those sincere beliefs in their own efforts to “be better” were not enough. What, after all, is wrong with settler good faith?

What I would like to suggest in this short essay is that this question represents a ruse. In her 2017 essay “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of Refusal,” Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson identifies the “ruse of consent” as being a critical dimension of how settler colonial authorities justify the ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands and waters. “Would you consent,” Simpson writes, “to have your lands taken? The trick of law in settler spaces is to pretend that this in fact was not a theft, that all parties consented to this fully and that appropriation of land was in fact just” (28). Indigenous participation in the politics of the settler colony—however, coerced, however partial—is taken by the settler state as consent to the expropriation of their own sovereign territories. This masks the essential violence of colonialism, rendering domination into a liberal fantasy of equity and partnership. Indigenous Peoples, Simpson also reminds us, recognize this ruse as a colonial tactic, refusing to be enfolded within this liberal framework even when they (must) engage with it.

My audience in the Masset library presented a kind of inversion of the ruse of consent. Here, it is the presumption of settler good faith that composes the kernel of the ruse, muting the ongoing structural character of settler colonialism through repeated claims of settlers as good people, only doing their best. To be clear, I am not accusing my audience of lying about their intentions. Quite the opposite, I sincerely believe that they sincerely believed that they were, indeed, acting in good faith. This is, in fact, the point—it is precisely the sincerity of settler good faith that enables it to disavow settler colonialism, to act as if domination is not ongoing, (or, for that matter, as if Indigenous Peoples have consented to their own dispossession). The real racists have bad intentions; they lie about their feelings towards the Haida or any other Indigenous People. By isolating themselves from that category via the sincerity of their own sentiments, Tow Town’s settlers thereby figure themselves as morally good and thus, by extension, not actively complicit in colonialism. This despite the fact that we are all participants in the colonial dynamics of property law in Canada, which makes it possible for settlers to purchase and own land that falls on territories that were never ceded and under the jurisdiction of sovereign Indigenous polities that were never extinguished (cf., Borrows 2015).

Property law is structural, and cannot be reduced to the question of morality. It reproduces settler colonialism regardless of the moral qualities of the people buying land or building houses on that land (Bhandar 2018). Being a settler is not inherently a moral failing, but a position in a structure of ongoing domination. This position includes not only the so-called “first waves” of colonizers who actively appropriated land and created their own settlements, but all those non-Indigenous people born within the settler colonies that the first wave founded, and which continue to be maintained by their descendants. It includes even those who might wish to reject the very project of colonization itself. I write this as a settler scholar myself, whose critiques of the colonial state do not thereby relieve me of my status as a participant in the very structures I criticize. The ruse of settler colonial morality masks those structural realities, offering a liberal formulation in which colonialism is a moral issue that can be overcome with the proper intentions, and, further, that it is only the “bad people” who participate in domination.

One can see the consequences of this ruse in Canada more broadly, which has been characterized by the federal government as an “era of reconciliation” between Indigenous Nations and the settler state. Crucial to this era is the “spectacle of reconciliation,” in Omeshkegowuk Cree geographer Michelle Daigle’s words, the “public, large-scale and visually striking performance of Indigenous suffering and trauma alongside white settler mourning and recognition” (2019, 706). The spectacle of settler reconciliation, as Daigle aptly puts it, thus “secures, legitimates, and effectively reproduces white supremacy and settler futurity in Canada” (706). Reconciliation reiterates the ruse of morality at a broad scale, figuring Canada as morally legitimate precisely because it recognizes the historical violence of colonialism, but severing that violence from the ongoing structures of the present. The state can thus be reproduced, structurally unchanged, but safely encompassed within the veneer of good faith. In turn, those Indigenous People(s) who refuse that good faith can be represented as the exception to the liberal norm, “savages,” “criminals,” or “terrorists” (cf., Barker 2021) whose actions justify police or even military intervention. The ruse of colonial morality is, thus, a closed circle.