Brunner: Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides
2026/08/11 1 Comment
One of the rare examinations of the language and approach across different citizenship guides (Nora Sobel did an earlier analysis). This analysis also covers the evolution of the guides but fails to acknowledge IMO the reality that any such guide will invariably present a somewhat sanitized version of our history, and a guide that presents an overly “black armband” of Canadian history would never be accepted by any serious political party and by the vast majority of old and new stock Canadians. The last para of their conclusion partially acknowledges that reality.
Whether the current government releases its version of Discover Canada, first announced five ministers ago, remains to be seen. My guess is not, given other priorities and a weak Minister:
In federal citizenship guides, settler colonialism is never named; the foundational structure of the Indian Act is omitted; references to reserves appear as decontextualized descriptions; and residential schools are minimized in ways that individualize harm. Treaties are absent until 1995 and, when introduced, are framed through a transactional logic that naturalizes settler title and casts Indigenous rights as historical accommodations rather than living, nation-to-nation obligations. Land is repeatedly depicted through frontier and extractive imaginaries, while Indigenous relations to land are relegated to culture or history.
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In the context of ongoing settler colonial dispossession, education alone cannot serve as the ‘key condition for reconciliation’ (Chatterjee 2018, 3). State-produced citizenship guides in settler colonial contexts will not escape settler logics, nor can a revised narrative‘undo’ settlerism. Yet these texts still matter. They can either deepen so-called consensus and reinforce settler ignorance, or create openings for interruption.As Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) writes, ‘settler, native, and arrivant [must] each acknowledge their own positions within empire and then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism. has sought to obscure’ (xxx). Within settler states, even this more modest demand – for truth rather than structural transformation – remains politically fraught. Citizenship guides operate within an apparatus designed to stabilize, rather than interrupt, settler colonial authority; yet they nonetheless constitute one of the few official sites through which prospective citizens encounter state-sanctioned narratives of belonging. At minimum, such texts could invite immigrants – differently positioned within racial hierarchies and imperial histories – to confront citizenship not as an untroubled inheritance, but as a relationship constituted through ongoing colonial conditions and responsibilities. While this falls far short of dismantling settler colonialism, it gestures toward a refusal of innocence, historical amnesia, and citizenship as a completed project.
Source: Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
“In many countries, adult immigrants must pass a knowledge test to naturalize. The government-issued study guides (hereafter citizenship guides) that often accompany these tests are not merely administrative tools, but also authoritative state citizenship pedagogies: they seek to teach immigrants how to imagine the national community (Anderson 1983) and its history. In settler states, this pedagogical function is inseparable from colonial power.”
These are the opening sentences of this article. Opening sentences are not supposed to be controversial; I suspect that Brunner and Ellerman do not consider them to be so. But the authors do not define settler states or colonial power. When my mother’s family came to Canada in the early 1900s or my father came in 1970, they were immigrants. They came to large urban centres (Montreal and Toronto, respectively). In the 1500s, someone coming to Montreal from France could be called a settler, perhaps. Not recently. I reject the terminology in this first paragraph. I suspect I would find similar fault with the rest of the article.