Indigenous healing is a paradox in the liberal settler colony, where an intervention fostering well-being might simultaneously aim to eliminate distinct Indigenous societies. This book aims to explain and complicate the prominence of “Indigenous healing” in Canadian public discourse in recent decades through theoretically-informed historical and ethnographic analysis disentangling the multiple meanings, practices, and social and political implications of healing. The book centres late twentieth-century Indigenous social histories in Treaty #3 territory and cities in northern and southern Ontario to show how practices of re-membering—mobilizing traditional ways of being and knowing towards social repair and rejuvenation of the collective—are in part enabled by tactical engagements with the settler state which fuel the emergence of an Indigenized biopolitics from below. Analysis of the possibilities, tensions, and risks inherent to Indigenous biopolitical tactics is inflected by attentiveness to the longstanding role of liberalism in settler colonial social dismemberment of Indigenous peoples. Informed by Indigenous feminist scholarship’s focus on relationality, care, and the everyday, as well as the intimate workings of settler colonialism, this book is intended to contribute to ongoing critical conversations about reconciliation and resurgence politics, and problematize their presumed opposition.

Krista Maxwell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. A settler scholar, her research focuses on Indigenous social and political organizing around healing, care, and child welfare from the mid-twentieth century to the present. These interests are motivated by an analysis of the biopolitics of liberal settler colonialism as both a mode of assimilative governance and social dismemberment, and affording space for tactical Indigenous agency.

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"Indigenous Healing as Paradox is an important contribution to the historiography of Indigenous health and social wellbeing. Maxwell offers a critical lens on the perils of adopting reconciliation and healing discourses that focus on historic injustices and the individual in need of treatment at the expense of ongoing systemic issues." Kim Anderson, University of Guelph

"Maxwell is attentive to the complexities of Indigenous people's responses to the insidious violence of settler colonial intrusion and governance. Indigenous Healing as Paradox is an important book that takes an original stance." Alexandra Widmer, York University

"Indigenous Healing as Paradox is a sophisticated study that explains how Indigenous encounters with settler colonial healthcare systems that could potentially improve their lives also threaten to destroy their collective wellbeing. Beautifully written and tightly focused, it follows Indigenous biopolitical actors navigating this paradox through tactical engagements with the settler state." Maureen Lux, author of Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada