As I showed in Chapter 4, Canada's peacekeeping myth has sustained a romanticised and, in many instances, falsified account of what the Canadian military has done overseas in the name of peace. Yet the peacekeeper myth also relates to romanticised accounts of Canada's violent history of Indigenous–settler relations and facilitates political legitimisation of martial politics (Howell 2018) within the so-called peaceful Canadian state. Canada's peacekeeping myth has explicit neo-colonialist overtones, reproduced in romanticised accounts of the formation of the Canadian state with civil, just and orderly treaty-making processes with Indigenous nations. This account has been myth-busted by scholars who take aim at the ‘myth of the peaceable kingdom’ (Choquette 2019) or ‘peace-making myth’ (Regan 2011) as a problematic representation of Indigenous–settler relations in Canada that impede modern-day efforts for reconciliation. This chapter asks: What happens when Canada engages in violent ‘peace-keeping’ at home?

Canada's peacekeeper myth, and its implied political values of benevolent paternalism, innocence, altruism and non-violence, is contiguous with discourse about Canada's formation as a modern nation state and the history of ‘peaceful’ Indigenous–settler relations in this political project. Canada's peacekeeper myth has stood to legitimise foreign martial violence (as shown in Chapter 4 during the war in Afghanistan), but also stands to legitimise ongoing domestic deployments of militarised force against Indigenous populations. Martial violence and colonial violence have been mutually reinforcing in the state-making of contemporary Canada. Not unlike the mobilisation of the peacekeeper myth in gendered and racialised ways in the representation of the CAF in Afghanistan, mediated representations and accounts of martial force used against Indigenous nations also legitimise violence within the state, where violence has been justified because of a stated intent to produce peace and order. The relationship between martial violence and colonial violence becomes evident as the enforcement of ‘peace’ in Canada requires martial violence to enforce. Martial peace in Canada, therefore, involves repression of meaningful opportunities for justice that might address long-standing colonial violence. In the ‘domestic’ accounts of martial force, the state-led police force is positioned as legitimate, while grassroots and Indigenous-led resistance efforts have been positioned as threating, risky or uncivilised: antithetical to the presumed intrinsic peace and order of Canada.