Irreconcilable

Joseph Weiss's Irreconcilable examines how state-led reconciliation initiatives in Canada offer gestures of repair that simultaneously disavow responsibility for colonial violence and reinforce Indigenous subordination.

Drawing on Indigenous studies, anthropology, political theory, semiotics, and museum studies, Weiss identifies technologies of erasure—like disavowal and emptying—that make colonial violence legible as resolved while leaving sovereignty intact.

He pairs analyses of legal cases, hearings, museum policies, and ceremonial repatriations with on-the-ground accounts from Haida Gwaii to show both settler strategies and Indigenous refusals.

The book argues reconciliation as practiced by the settler state cannot be reconciled with the reality of Indigenous sovereignty, and instead traces alternative Indigenous practices that persist beyond colonial overdetermination.

Irreconcilable contributes to critical indigeneity scholarship by reframing reconciliation as a political technology that must be interrogated rather than assumed redemptive.