“It is useless to seek this consistency anywhere except in the colonizer himself” (Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized).

As Daniel Justice has pointed out, settlers have opinions about Indigenous peoples. Many of those opinions are ill-informed, hateful, and, grounded in an unwavering certainty about identity, rights & responsibilities, authenticity, and the ongoing history of settler colonialism. We hold these opinions despite their incoherent logic and internal contradictions.

Justice writes that,

The Settler with Opinions believes herself to be above critique or even questioning, as she is The One with All the Answers. She assures us she knows our problems better than we do. Her lack of knowledge is no obstacle: She claims her ignorance as a badge of honour, for it confirms that she’s Objective.

Her solutions are a tiresome regurgitation of devastating imposed policies that have failed time and again. But because she doesn’t do any careful research, because she feels no need to actually engage with people who’ve experienced these things firsthand, she’s unfamiliar with this long and ugly history.

If we are committed to working against settler colonialism, as Indigenous peoples or allies, we need a system to untangle and deconstruct settler opinions. We need to cut the logic off at its root and move forward without getting lost in the myriad of contradictions in settler arguments.

Colonial Kettle Logic (CKL) is a method of appraising and undermining settler opinions. It is based in psychoanalytic interpretive structures and situates the unconscious in relation to the ongoing history of Empire. It is defined as such: CKL is an interwoven set of mutually exclusive arguments employed within settler colonial discourse that tacitly function to disavow settler histories of erasure and dispossession. Read alone, these arguments are baseless and without political import as a means of unpacking and critiquing settler discourse, but taken together, they illustrate precisely what they are attempting to deny—namely that the settler state is built on the strategic disavowal of, and erasure of, Indigenous peoples, histories, and rights.

In Canada, where popular discourse re-imagines that ’[w]e have a government who is unlike any government to have walked the face of the earth in its commitment to doing what’s right’ [1], Kettle Logic illustrates the disavowal and wish fulfillment implicit to the banality of the settler unconscious.

The phrase itself, Colonial Kettle Logic, paraphrases an intervention from Sigmund Freud. ‘Kettle Logic’, as he uses it, refers to an old joke that Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, used to illustrate the inconsistency of the unconscious and the ways in which a careful analyst can interpret denial positively as a means of intervention.

The joke goes like this: a man borrows a kettle from his neighbour, breaks it, and then tries to return it broken. When the neighbour complains that the retuned item has been damaged, the offender retorts with a series of denials, each contradicting the last, ostensibly to get himself off the hook for replacing the kettle. The three arguments he levies are:

1. I never borrowed a kettle from you
2. I returned it to you unbroken;
3. The kettle was already broken when I got it from you. [2]

The humour of the joke, as Freud explains it, is that while each of the three arguments that the borrower offers in his defence are on their own logically viable, offered together as part of a single defence they cancel one another out, rendering visible the hard kernel of disavowal. As such, the sum of the whole confirms precisely what the borrower is attempting to deny: that he broke the kettle.

As intent expressed through lack (we learn of the broken kettle by tracing what has been said around the outline of what is disavowed) kettle logic is an inverted articulation of what Freud famously calls, in the same text, ‘wish fulfillment’: the satisfaction of desire through an involuntary thought process.

For Freud, wish fulfillment allows for the camouflaged expression of a repressed desire, which would, if expressed in its undisguised form, inflict traumatic damage to the ego. According to Freud, ‘in every dream an instinctual wish has to be represented as fulfilled. The shutting off of mental life from reality… which makes this possible enables this wished-for instinctual satisfaction to be experienced in a hallucinatory manner’ [3]. Kettle logic is therefore wish fulfilment insofar as it demonstrates not so much a desire, but a truth that cannot be repressed. It gives the lie to the conscious by tracing the outline of the desire that sustains it: to be understood as a good neighbour.

CKL functions similarly to wish fulfilment in how it conceals to reveal, or how it provides access, via close reading, to the unconscious of settler colonialism.

Indeed, settler colonialism is built on the deferred desire of the settler to be ‘of’ a land which history insists belongs to an other: the Indigenous occupants. The wish of this positionality is’ fulfilled’ via the hallucinatory dreams of terra nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery, which evade the reality of Indigenous presence in order to affirm ‘ownership’ of stolen land.

Johnston and Lawson argue that, ‘the typical settler narrative [has] a double goal. It is concerned to act out the suppression or effacement of the indigene; it is also concerned to perform the concomitant indigenization of the settler’ [4]

As wish fulfillment, (i.e the desire to erase and replace) settler colonialism has its own set of kettle arguments, which are deployed to downplay the grievances of Indigenous people and fulfill the wishes of the State. Taken individually, these arguments are difficult (if not pointless) to argue against because they are not based on any logical assertion, but are rather revisionist acts of history aimed at retrospectively creating grounds for contemporary debate.

Frantz Fanon argued that colonialism does not work within the rules of the equation it is handed; it sets its own: ‘colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it’ [5]

Settler colonialism does precisely what Fanon suggests, twisting history so that it serves the narrative of the state. Around the hard kernel of truth (dispossession and genocide) it constructs a series of lies. However, like the man in the kettle joke, the Settler Colonialist reveals the contradictory core of their position, and thus a point of intervention for their critic: by flooding the conversation with a series of contradictory arguments, they reveal what they aim to disavow.

What follows are the three core arguments of Colonial Kettle Logic that support settler wish fulfillment. They can be mobilized as a reading template for those that Daniel Justice aptly names “settlers with opinions.”

1. Colonialism never happened (terra nullis)
2. Indigenous people need to get over colonialism (forgive and forget, or ‘get over it’);
3. Colonialism actually benefited Indigenous people (the ‘gift of civilization’).

When read with and against each other, these three arguments provide key insight into settler colonialist discourse by illustrating precisely what they aim to deny: the continuing violence of colonialism.

For example, consider Stephen Harper’s 2009 insistence, offered at the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, that Canada ‘has no history of colonialism’ [6]—an almost laughable insistence of CKL argument number 1: a statement made even more stark given that it was offered only months after his official apology to survivors of Indian Residential Schools [7].

Take for example as well the racist letter published in the Nanaimo Daily News [8], in which the author attempts to list all of the things Indigenous people ‘lacked’ before the onset of colonization including, the wheel, astronomy, and written language (taking for granted, of course, that all ‘knowledge’ comes from a Western framework). In its egregious, and massively fallacious appeal to the ‘gifts of civilization’ this letter to the editor embodies the logic of CKL argument number 2.

“Get over it” is also essentially what Frances Widdowson is arguing when she writes that “a certain amount of ‘cultural loss’ was inevitable if aboriginal people were to survive in the modern context.” “Get over it” is what Rex Murphey is insisting when he argues that “Natives need to tone down the anger” and that “going all radical, hitting the racial/racist buttons and constant invocations of empty pseudo-academic framings of ‘colonialist, settler, imperialist’ mentalities do nothing but burn time.” “Get over it” is behind what Canadian Senator Lynn Beyak was asking when she insisted that the public look for the “good” in residential schools and argued that “none of us are leaving, so let’s stop the guilt and blame and find a way to live together and share.”

The following is Chief Justice Murray Sinclair’s response to the Canadian public’s demand that Indigenous peoples “get over” residential schools:

Because this is about memorializing those people who have been the victims of a great wrong. Why don’t you tell the United States to “get over” 9/11? Why don’t you tell this country to “get over” all the veterans who died in the Second World War, instead of honouring them once a year? … until people show that they have learned from this, we will never forget, and we should never forget, even once they have learned from it, because this is part of who we are. It’s not just a part of who we are as survivors and children of survivors and relatives of survivors, it’s part of who we are as a nation. And this nation must never forget what it once did to its most vulnerable people.

Despite the fact that these examples (and there are many, many more; once you start looking you’ll begin to find them everywhere) were shared in different times and place and were offered by different speakers, these arguments must always be held in relation to one another. Indeed, they are always already of the same structure. While each egregious in its own right, the interruption of settler discourse comes not from deconstructing the logic of each disillusioned speaker, but from addressing the contradictory pieces as part of a whole, thus exposing their ultimate contingency on one another. Settlers want colonialism to not exist at the same time they want Indigenous peoples to “get over it.” That is what is key here.

To put it differently, the contradictions are not incidental to the discourse; the contradictions are the discourse.

Held together, the sum of these arguments confirms precisely what they attempt to deny–that colonialism has inflicted irrevocable violence on Indigenous peoples, that activism and resentment are indeed still necessary in a nation state that insists on the primacy of its benevolence, that the colonial nation state is built on the blood of Indigenous people who–under the precepts and principles of the very state that displaces them–have real claim to restitution, sovereignty and self-determination.

In Canada, where the fallacious narrative of moral benevolence maintains such pre-eminence in nation state identity, illustrating the antithetical core of colonial kettle logic can be an act of resistance.

Thomas King suggests that ‘the truth about stories is that that’s all we are’ [10]. The persistence of Canada’s own story of its moral benevolence, the insistence by which that story is encoded into the definition of who ‘we’ are is a story that needs to change. And it will change when we begin to question its naturalization.

Colonial Kettle Logic is an indictment of a ‘rational’ democracy built out of the historical and continuing dispossession and murder of Indigenous peoples. In a country that insists on its ‘commitment to doing what’s right’ illustrating the wish fulfillment and perverse logic that structures its discourse is one step in the movement towards decolonization.

Works Cited

[1] Daniel Friedman, ‘Gov’t has finally righted a historical wrong.’ The Canadian Jewish News. April 14, 2005.

[2] Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed and trans James Strachey (London: Hogarth). 119-20.

[3] —. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed and trans James Strachey (London: Hogarth). 18-19.

[4] A. Johnston & A. Lawson, ‘Settler Colonies.’ In H. Schwarz & R. Sangeeta (Eds.), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. (Boston: Blackwell, 2000). 360–376.

[5] Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, [1961] 2005.

[6] Stephen Hui. Shawn Atleo criticizes ‘Stephen Harper over ‘no history of colonialism’ remark.’ The Georgia Straight. October 2, 2009.

[7] Stephen Harper. Statement of Apology. June 11, 2008. Transcript: https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1100100015649

[8] Huffington Post. ‘’Racist’ [sic] Nanaimo Daily News Letter About First Nations Sparks Outrage.’ March 28, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/03/28/racist-nanaimo-daily-news-first-nations-letter_n_2971956.html?

[9] Rex Murphy, ‘Natives need to tone down the anger.’ The National Post January 12, 2013. http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-natives-need-to-tone-down-the-anger

[10] Thomas King. The Truth About Stories. Toronto: Anansi Press, 2003.