Between Gratitude and Guilt: The Promise of a Better Life in a Settler Colony
Relying on auto ethnography, international law, refugee law and settler colonial studies, this paper aims to trouble the promises of refuge, as encapsulated within the various domestic and international protection regimes. Using my own lived experience as a survivor of a civil war and as a refugee that came to Canada hoping for safety, in this paper I will juxtapose the promises of the refugee system and the erasure of the original peoples of Turtle Island. By doing so, I seek to situate the grateful refugee in Canada within a settler colonial context. By locating this paper between gratitude and guilt, I will argue that the symbolic aspirations and promises embedded in the refugee convention and its domestic incorporation into the Canadian settler colonial legal framework traps refugees between guilt and gratitude. The promise of safety is contingent and eventually promotes erasure. It is contingent on the refugee being grateful to the settler colonial state for awarding the necessary protection while simultaneously forcing the erasure of the original and First Peoples of this land that is now known as Canada. The erasure is predicated on for example the lack of awareness amongst refugees of the history of settlement and colonization. The guilt is, for some, based on the erasure of Indigenous peoples through land dispossession, lack of services and by other means.
The paper will be unfolded in three section. First, I will set out the promises encapsulated within the international and domestic refugee protection regime as a means to afford protection to those fleeing persecution “by reason of a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion” (Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, S.C. 2001, c. 27, s.96). Then I will chronicle my own experiences of fleeing the then war torn state of Sri Lanka and arriving in Canada seeking asylum. In this section, I will explore how refugees are selected and are expected to perform, based on the exclusionary clauses of the Refugee Convention and the inadmissibility requirements of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The promise of safety is again contingent on what Carbado and Gulati have coined as “acting white” (Carbado and Gulati 2013). This performance in a number of ways requires an allegiance to the Canadian sovereign and a deep sense of gratitude. In the final section, I will then turn to my own journey of ‘uncovering’ the place and space of the First peoples of this land that I now call ‘home’. It is an account of how I became aware of my own complicity in the ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and how I have started to reconcile and contend with my own guilt and my gratitude.