Determinants of Attitudes Toward Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples

Abstract Existing research on public opinion towards Indigenous peoples tends to focus on the extent to which citizens hold racist and anti-Indigenous attitudes. In contrast, few empirical studies have examined the extent to which citizens support reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Drawing on data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study (CES), we construct a novel Indigenous reconciliation scale to measure non-Indigenous support for policies that seek to address the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools. We then compare this scale to existing measures of Indigenous resentment before investigating the effects of several individual-level determinants related to attitudes, elite cues, and policy preferences on support for Indigenous reconciliation policies. Our findings shed light on the ongoing efforts in settler countries in North and South America and Australasia to decolonize their settler institutions and to create new and renewed relationships with Indigenous communities in those countries.