Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides

This article examines Canadian citizenship guides as state pedagogies that socialize immigrants into a white settler colonial common sense of land, sovereignty, and belonging. Through a critical content analysis of seven federal guides published since 1947 and the 2020 Canadian Orientation Abroad (COA) guide for refugees, as well as interviews with civil servants and personnel involved in their production, we trace how these texts narrate Indigenous – settler relations across four themes: colonialism, treaties, land, and reconciliation. In the federal guides, settler colonialism is not named, the foundational structure of the Indian Act is omitted, reserves are referenced in decontextualized ways, and residential schools are minimized in ways that individualize harm and preserve settler innocence. Treaties are absent until 1995 and framed as land-for-benefits transactions that naturalize settler title. Land is repeatedly depicted through frontier and extractive imaginaries while Indigenous relations to land are relegated to culture. Reconciliation is largely absent from citizenship pedagogy, appearing mostly in the non-binding COA guide where it is translated into low-stakes actions of respect, learning, and consumption rather than material obligations such as land restitution or Indigenous jurisdiction. These persistent framings reveal the durability of colonial citizenship and the limits of state-led reconciliation within citizenship pedagogy.