Settler colonialism is built on the ideology of progress – the notion of progress is mystified by settlers to further the logic of exceptionalism that justify ongoing perception of settlers as the ‘chosen people’ and new forms of genocides.

The logics of elimination and expansion are rooted in the colonial ideology of ‘progress’ – the steady and inevitable march towards an evolutionary apex of western civilisation. The ideology of progress, in turn, is inflected with a logic of exceptionalism, which rationalizes, and renders essential, inevitable and heroic the self supersession of settler colonialism. As Collins explains, exceptionalism gives settler colonialism its sense of purpose, mission, righteousness and, indeed, destiny. Settlers, as ‘chosen people,’34 are charged with ‘a daring, necessary and even altruistic undertaking.’35 At the same time, settler colonialism relies on denial of the ‘hidden structures of violence that extend into the present.’36 Collins borrows Cohen’s taxonomy of denial.37 ‘Literal denial’ denies the ‘raw facts’ of atrocity or wrongdoing Interpretative denial invests the raw facts with different meanings. Implicatory denial denies neither the facts nor their common meanings, but denies the moral, psychological or political implications that flow from the wrong. Cultural denial encourages social disregard or normalization of wrong. For Collins, all of these modes of denial characterize settler colonies. Mississauga Nishnaag scholar and artist, Leanne Simpson, captures the imbrication of exceptionalism and denial in Canada’s historical narrative: Mistakes were made. Land was lost. Children were stolen. Cultures were adapted. Treaties didn’t work out. We [settlers] meant well. We tried our best. Progress is inevitable, and while it is regretful you [Indigenous peoples] didn’t have the intelligence or fortitude to be successful, that’s life. Maybe we’ll try and be nicer and help more.38 Denial, in its myriad forms, is imperative to the invisibilization and trivialization of elimination, but is also foundational to self-supersession: ‘The most basic form of denial,’ writes Collins, ‘is that which enables members of the dominant culture in settler societies to examine their surroundings and view no evidence of colonization.’39 Indeed, settler societies are founded on a disavowal of originary violence, the ongoing disavowal of Indigenous presence on the land and the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty,40 while asserting settler sovereignty. The imbrication of eliminationism, expansionism, exceptionalism and denial, and their culmination in settler self supersession renders a picture of settler colonialism as a totalizing, perfectionistic project that strives to extinguish Indigenous futurity and establish a settled future. Importantly, settler colonialism is our ‘colonial present,’41 not a finished project ‘neatly located in the past.’42 Understanding settler colonialism through this theoretical constellation raises questions about what it means to engage in transitional justice in settler democracies. I turn, now, to a paradigmatic concept of transitional justice as a heuristic device to guide an analysis of the limits of transitional justice in the face of settler colonialism.