Shared Histories looks deeply into what happened at the intersection of settler dreams and Witsuw... more Shared Histories looks deeply into what happened at the intersection of settler dreams and Witsuwit’en reality in the small northwestern British Columbia town of Smithers. Planted in a swamp at the base of a mountain, this railway town tried to exclude the region’s first inhabitants. This collection of hidden histories reveals how generations of Witsuwit’en made a place for themselves in town despite local, provincial, and national efforts push them, and indeed all Indigenous peoples, to the fringes.
University–community partnerships have long sought to develop interventions to empower historical... more University–community partnerships have long sought to develop interventions to empower historically marginalized community members. However, there is limited critical attention to tensions faced when community engaged courses support urban planning initiatives in communities of color. This article explores how three Florida State University planning classes sought to engage the predominantly African-American Griffin Heights community in Tallahassee, Florida. Historically, African-American communities have been marginalized from the planning process, undermining community trust and constraining city planning capacity to effectively engage and plan with African-American community members. In this context, there are opportunities for planning departments with relationships in the African-American community to facilitate more extensive community engagement and urban design processes that interface with broader city planning programs. However, mediating relationships between the communit...
Black thought has long emphasized the vital importance of aesthetic politics to Black activism an... more Black thought has long emphasized the vital importance of aesthetic politics to Black activism and community life. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of analyzing the aesthetic geographies of festivals. In this paper, we extend the discussion of festival geographies through theoretical engagement with Black thought and empirical engagement with Black parades in the US South. Specifically, we use an examination of the aesthetic geographies of Florida A&M University’s Marching 100 to think through the relationships between form and improvisation, performance and belonging and affirmative aesthetic politics. Following Black scholars, we show that Black aesthetic geographies work to counter the normative containment and erasure of Black spatiality in a white supremacist society. We demonstrate that Black aesthetic practices act as a refusal of this containment and erasure, disrupting normative geographies of whiteness and asserting Black socio-spatial presence and relation...
Abstract This paper engages geographic literature on diverse economies by foregrounding an analys... more Abstract This paper engages geographic literature on diverse economies by foregrounding an analysis of racial capitalism. Prevailing conversations on diverse economies aptly point out that there exist economic formations that do not adhere to capitalist modes of production. However, these same conversations lack an explicit engagement with the ways in which establishing non-capitalist economies entails attending explicitly to the question of race. Ignoring how racialization underlies capitalism runs the risk of inadequately understanding the role that race plays in configuring alternatives to capitalist formations. Thus, the authors argue that analysis of diverse economies must explicitly attend to the fact that both capitalism and its alternatives are shaped by racial difference. After discussing prominent geographical work on diverse economies, the authors explore racial capitalism as an analytic for interrogating present-day capitalism. They argue that racial capitalism shows how the marginalization of racialized populations is a central component of capitalist reproduction. The second half of the paper draws on empirical examples from Canada and the United States to demonstrate how Black and Indigenous communities both recognize the role that their oppression plays in capital accumulation and find ways to create economic alternatives to those forms of accumulation. Specifically, the authors discuss public housing initiatives among Indigenous communities in Winnipeg and Minneapolis and the creation of urban commons by Black communities in Detroit and Jackson. By emphasizing the racialized nature of capitalism and showing how racialized communities create economic alternatives to capitalism, this paper offers a nuanced approach to discussing the possibilities of diverse economies.
This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We ... more This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We contend that international environmental law and general international law are structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature that is incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. We maintain that environmental issues should not be confined to a disciplinary specialization because humanity's relationship with nature has been central to making international law. Foundational concepts such as sovereignty, development, property, economy, human rights, and so on, have evolved through understanding nature in ways that are unsuited to perceiving or observing ecological limits. International law primarily sees nature as a resource for wealth generation to enable societies to continually develop, and environmental degradation is treated as an economic externality to be managed by special regimes. Through tracing the co-evolution of these assumptions about nature alongside seminal disciplinary concepts, it becomes evident that such understandings are central to shaping international law and that the discipline helps universalize and normalize them. By comprehending more broadly the relationship between nature and international law, it is possible to see beyond law's potential to correct environmental harm and identify the disciplinary role in driving ecological degradation. Venturing beyond the purview of international environmental lawyers, this article considers the role of all international lawyers in augmenting and mitigating ecological crises. It concludes that disciplinary solutions to environmental problems require radical departures from existing disciplinary tenets, necessitating new formulations that encapsulate rich and diverse understandings of nature.
Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossi... more Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossil capitalism helps elucidate the tensions shaping tar sands development. Conflicts over pipelines and Indigenous territorial claims are challenging development trajectories, as tar sands companies need to expand access to markets in order to expand production. While these conflicts are now well recognised, there are also broader dynamics shaping development. States face a rentier's dilemma, relying on capital investments to realise resource value. Political responses to the emerging climate crisis undercut the profitability of hydrocarbon extraction. The automation of production undermines the industrial compromise between hydrocarbon labour and capital. Ultimately, the crises of fossil capitalism require a radical transformation within or beyond capital relations. To mobilise against the tar sands, organisers must recognise the tensions underpinning it, developing strategies that address ecological concerns and the economic plight of those dispossessed and abandoned by carbon extraction.
Recent scholarship on environmental justice highlights a concern about the relationship between t... more Recent scholarship on environmental justice highlights a concern about the relationship between the racial state and social movement strategy. This paper addresses the ingenuity of environmental justice organizing in the Proctor Creek and South River watersheds of Atlanta, Georgia, each home to predominantly Black communities and unjust flows of toxicants and sewage through urban creeks, streams, and rivers. We begin from critiques of the failure of institutionalized environmental justice and the state’s role in maintaining environmental racisms. To examine organizing responses to these circumstances, we analyze the improvisational politics of social movements in the context of the racial state, theoretically drawing from Charles Lee’s Ingenious Citizenship (2016). Empirically investigating the work of Atlanta community organizers, we emphasize pathways of strategic innovation among environmental justice organizers that improvise against the racial state even while negotiating with ...
This article examines the conflicting subjectivities and space-times of Indigenous and colonial l... more This article examines the conflicting subjectivities and space-times of Indigenous and colonial law that underpin the recent shutdown of the Canadian economy as people barricaded railways and ports in solidarity with the Witsuwit'en hereditary chiefs' blockade against the Coastal GasLink pipeline across their territory. The article argues that this conflict between Canadian and Witsuwit'en law reflects fundamental tensions between their respective foundations in relations of the commodity and the gift. Within settler capitalist society, the value of a commodity is constructed relationally through a political economy of exchange that aims to speed transactions to maximize profits. With an ongoing drive for time-space compression, there is continual pressure in settler capitalism to develop new infrastructure that can speed the circulation of commodities. In Witsuwit'en society, the gift presents a contrasting logic of place-time extension. Rather than focusing on closing transactions to increase profits, gift giving stretches reciprocal obligations into the past and future. Contrasting these distinct conceptions of the relationship between value and time, the article argues that the Witsuwit'en struggle with Coastal GasLink should be understood as conflict between colonial temporal enclosures and a radical promise to open futures different to those engendered by the colonial present.
This article explores the geographies of education at the National Museum of Canada in the first ... more This article explores the geographies of education at the National Museum of Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of the spatialization of children’s museum education, we highlight how the museum sought to inculcate in young Canadians knowledges about their country, its people, and natural resources. We situate children’s museum education within the broader context of Canadian nationalism, other museum activities, and public education in the capital. Focusing on the design and material organization of the museum, we highlight how the space of the museum, from the objects on display to the imposing grandeur of the building, sought to impress upon students the importance of the knowledge it conveyed. Finally, we illustrate how the museum’s programming aimed to provide children with knowledge of their national heritage, building citizenship through claims of development as destiny.
This paper argues that theorizing pipeline governance in Canada necessitates engaging with Indige... more This paper argues that theorizing pipeline governance in Canada necessitates engaging with Indigenous modes of effecting jurisdiction over development. Focusing on the Unist’ot’en land defence against the TransCanada Coastal GasLink pipeline, the paper argues that Indigenous resistance disrupts the scales of settler pipeline governance in British Columbia, Canada. Contesting the authority of the state, Indigenous territorial assertions constitute countervailing forms of jurisdiction grounded in and operationalized through distinct scales of resource governance.
This article uses a literary-geographic method to critique the recognition of Indigenous differen... more This article uses a literary-geographic method to critique the recognition of Indigenous difference in settler-colonial resource governance. Situating analysis on Haisla traditional territories over which the Canadian state claims jurisdiction, we analyze how Indigenous culture is represented in an environmental assessment and a novel set in the same location. The environmental assessment of a liquefied natural gas terminal renders Haisla Indigeneity subject to forms of political economic calculation. In contrast, Haisla novelist Eden Robinson disrupts a colonial desire for Indigeneity as a contained and manageable object of governance. Placing these texts from different domains into productive interference, we expose the continued colonial captures that accompany recognition of Indigeneity in settler-colonial resource governance processes, and the necessity of thinking Indigeneity otherwise. This examination of the politics of recognition highlights how literary-geographic methods can be used to investigate both normative orderings and contestations of racial capitalism in the context of settler colonialism.
This essay charts the shifting assemblage of the conduct of state, corporate, and Indigenous auth... more This essay charts the shifting assemblage of the conduct of state, corporate, and Indigenous authority through four historical moments: mercantilism, settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and corporate reconciliation. With reference to Gitxsan territories, it makes a series of interrelated arguments. The development of colonial territorial claims and regimes of governance overlapped pre-existent and ongoing Indigenous territorial relationships. The historical division between the political and economic domain reshaped the relationship between state and corporate authorities, the state deferring to corporate actors to manage relations in the economic domain. The conduct of state and corporate authorities has constrained and modified the exercise of Indigenous jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Indigenous resurgence has opened space for renegotiating the colonial legal order, including relations between extractive resource companies and Indigenous authorities. Emergent corporate practices of contracting with Indigenous authorities over development, however, reflect a reconfiguration rather than rupture of the settler colonial legal order. Corporate-Indigenous agreements rely upon colonial modes of organizing lawful political and economic conduct, and continue to block more radical and anti-colonial expressions of Indigenous jurisdiction. To expand possibilities for articulating forms of Indigenous jurisdiction that refuse the categories of colonial political economy, it is necessary to problematize the relationship between colonial state and corporate authority.
This paper examines whether environmental assessments (EAs) influence the ability of Aboriginal p... more This paper examines whether environmental assessments (EAs) influence the ability of Aboriginal peoples to advance community employment aims in resource development projects. Environmental assessment and labour policy and practices have been conventionally understood as distinct processes. Our investi- gations demonstrate that EAs play a significant, if indirect, role in Aboriginal efforts to regulate resource sector work. While Aboriginal communities increasingly rely upon private negotiations with development proponents to secure resource sector employment, participation in EA processes provides Aboriginal peoples a space to negotiate language around employment commitments and leverage to secure Aboriginal employment provisions in impact benefit agreements with project proponents.
in this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's... more in this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.
In this paper, I interrogate the forms of recognition that are produced through the Gitxsan and W... more In this paper, I interrogate the forms of recognition that are produced through the Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en hereditary chiefs’ efforts to litigate claims to territorial title and jurisdiction within the Canadian court system in the 1980s and 1990s. Through the case known as Delgamuukw v. the Queen, Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en hereditary chiefs sought to deploy evidence from their distinct legal tradi- tions in court to prove their continued ownership and governance of their traditional lands. The case thus principally involved questions of the status of Indigenous traditional legal authorities and legal orders within Canadian law. Although the lower courts ruled against the Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en, and the Supreme Court of Canada determined the matter had been mistried, I argue the case was nonetheless productive of new relations between Indigenous and Canadian legal authorities. This paper argues that courtroom encounters enmeshed Indigenous and colonial authorities in a complex skein of relations that continues to unravel in new ways. Responding to Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en litigation efforts, the courts recognized the authority of traditional Indigenous leaders to speak for their communities and make claims vis-à-vis the Canadian state. This was a rupture with state policy that had heretofore sought to displace Indigenous hereditary leadership with imposed models of democratic band governance. By recognizing Indigenous traditional authorities as domestic polities, the court reinvented colonial structures of authority. Thus, alongside the recognition of Indigenous traditional political life, the judiciary extended new forms of colonial sovereign authority over it. But if Indigenous traditional political life was reconstituted under the aegis of the colonial sovereign, the judicial emplacement of Canadian sovereignty in relation to Indigeneity also reconfigured the meaning of Canadian sovereignty. The court determined that constitutionally the exercise of Canadian sovereignty had to be reconciled with the continued existence of Indigenous political communities.
This article examines the relationships between representations and operations of sovereignty in ... more This article examines the relationships between representations and operations of sovereignty in natural resource governance. We advance a ‘political ecology of sovereignty’, examining the participation of non-state actors in resource governance processes. We particularly argue that processes of integrating subaltern populations through mapping local ecological knowledge can modify effective governance practices while nonetheless reproducing the legibility of state sovereign authority and its territorial boundaries. Exploring the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline in Canada, we suggest that state jurisdictional authority is secured through incorporating indigenous interests as a delimited geography of tradition. Examining the Hatgyi hydroelectric development along the Thai–Burmese border, we argue that the territorial boundaries of those nation-states are rearticulated through the governance of this transboundary development. Through these cases, we demonstrate how the insertion of local knowledge works not only to reconfigure effective governance processes but also to reinforce the effect of state sovereignty in new ways.
This paper examines the ontological politics of an encounter between proposed energy pipelines an... more This paper examines the ontological politics of an encounter between proposed energy pipelines and Indigenous peoples. The Enbridge Corporation has applied to construct a pipeline system to deliver diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, but the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council and their member communities have asserted the authority to prevent this project from passing through their unceded territories. Studying Carrier Sekani contestation of Canadian regulatory assessment of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, we examine how the processes of Indigenous becoming exceed notions of Indigenous being that are included in the permitting process as traditional knowledge. We focus both on the performance of legal obligations to consider Aboriginal traditional knowledge and the emerging politics of Carrier Sekani resistance. Our intention is not to question the integrity of traditional knowledge that the regulatory process incorporates, but to highlight how traditional knowledge functions as an anchor for a field of governmental inquiry and action. Providing a historical and geographical context of Carrier Sekani relations with development and the state, we argue that the coding of Indigenous being as traditional works to disavow contemporary processes of Indigenous becoming that are surplus to the spatial ontology of capitalist energy development for global markets. Against efforts to sanction development on disputed territory through formal recognition of a constrained Indigeneity, Carrier Sekani people assert the sovereign authority to prevent or permit development on their lands and waterways using traditional governance systems. Broadly, this paper suggests that recognizing the ontological politics at stake in this permitting process provides a useful opening to understand continued colonial captures at work in the inclusion of traditional knowledge in environmental governance. But it also demonstrates the capacity of Indigenous resistance to these enclosures to challenge and reshape global geographies of energy, capitalism, and climate.
Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post-secondary education through Aboriginal... more Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post-secondary education through Aboriginal-directed programs and policies in non-Aboriginal institutions. However, these gains have occurred alongside, and in some cases through, neoliberal reforms to higher education. This article explores the political consequences of the neoliberal institutionalization of First Nations empowerment for public sector unions and workers. We examine a case where the indigenization of a community college in British Columbia was embedded in neoliberal reforms that ran counter to the interests of academic instructors. Although many union members supported indigenization, many also possessed a deep ambivalence about the change. Neoliberal indigenization increased work intensity, decreased worker autonomy and promoted an educational philosophy that prioritized labour market needs over liberal arts. This example demonstrates how the integration of Aboriginal aspirations into neoliberal processes of reform works to rationalize public sector restructuring, constricting labour agency and the possibilities for alliances between labour and Aboriginal peoples.
Shared Histories looks deeply into what happened at the intersection of settler dreams and Witsuw... more Shared Histories looks deeply into what happened at the intersection of settler dreams and Witsuwit’en reality in the small northwestern British Columbia town of Smithers. Planted in a swamp at the base of a mountain, this railway town tried to exclude the region’s first inhabitants. This collection of hidden histories reveals how generations of Witsuwit’en made a place for themselves in town despite local, provincial, and national efforts push them, and indeed all Indigenous peoples, to the fringes.
University–community partnerships have long sought to develop interventions to empower historical... more University–community partnerships have long sought to develop interventions to empower historically marginalized community members. However, there is limited critical attention to tensions faced when community engaged courses support urban planning initiatives in communities of color. This article explores how three Florida State University planning classes sought to engage the predominantly African-American Griffin Heights community in Tallahassee, Florida. Historically, African-American communities have been marginalized from the planning process, undermining community trust and constraining city planning capacity to effectively engage and plan with African-American community members. In this context, there are opportunities for planning departments with relationships in the African-American community to facilitate more extensive community engagement and urban design processes that interface with broader city planning programs. However, mediating relationships between the communit...
Black thought has long emphasized the vital importance of aesthetic politics to Black activism an... more Black thought has long emphasized the vital importance of aesthetic politics to Black activism and community life. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of analyzing the aesthetic geographies of festivals. In this paper, we extend the discussion of festival geographies through theoretical engagement with Black thought and empirical engagement with Black parades in the US South. Specifically, we use an examination of the aesthetic geographies of Florida A&M University’s Marching 100 to think through the relationships between form and improvisation, performance and belonging and affirmative aesthetic politics. Following Black scholars, we show that Black aesthetic geographies work to counter the normative containment and erasure of Black spatiality in a white supremacist society. We demonstrate that Black aesthetic practices act as a refusal of this containment and erasure, disrupting normative geographies of whiteness and asserting Black socio-spatial presence and relation...
Abstract This paper engages geographic literature on diverse economies by foregrounding an analys... more Abstract This paper engages geographic literature on diverse economies by foregrounding an analysis of racial capitalism. Prevailing conversations on diverse economies aptly point out that there exist economic formations that do not adhere to capitalist modes of production. However, these same conversations lack an explicit engagement with the ways in which establishing non-capitalist economies entails attending explicitly to the question of race. Ignoring how racialization underlies capitalism runs the risk of inadequately understanding the role that race plays in configuring alternatives to capitalist formations. Thus, the authors argue that analysis of diverse economies must explicitly attend to the fact that both capitalism and its alternatives are shaped by racial difference. After discussing prominent geographical work on diverse economies, the authors explore racial capitalism as an analytic for interrogating present-day capitalism. They argue that racial capitalism shows how the marginalization of racialized populations is a central component of capitalist reproduction. The second half of the paper draws on empirical examples from Canada and the United States to demonstrate how Black and Indigenous communities both recognize the role that their oppression plays in capital accumulation and find ways to create economic alternatives to those forms of accumulation. Specifically, the authors discuss public housing initiatives among Indigenous communities in Winnipeg and Minneapolis and the creation of urban commons by Black communities in Detroit and Jackson. By emphasizing the racialized nature of capitalism and showing how racialized communities create economic alternatives to capitalism, this paper offers a nuanced approach to discussing the possibilities of diverse economies.
This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We ... more This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We contend that international environmental law and general international law are structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature that is incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. We maintain that environmental issues should not be confined to a disciplinary specialization because humanity's relationship with nature has been central to making international law. Foundational concepts such as sovereignty, development, property, economy, human rights, and so on, have evolved through understanding nature in ways that are unsuited to perceiving or observing ecological limits. International law primarily sees nature as a resource for wealth generation to enable societies to continually develop, and environmental degradation is treated as an economic externality to be managed by special regimes. Through tracing the co-evolution of these assumptions about nature alongside seminal disciplinary concepts, it becomes evident that such understandings are central to shaping international law and that the discipline helps universalize and normalize them. By comprehending more broadly the relationship between nature and international law, it is possible to see beyond law's potential to correct environmental harm and identify the disciplinary role in driving ecological degradation. Venturing beyond the purview of international environmental lawyers, this article considers the role of all international lawyers in augmenting and mitigating ecological crises. It concludes that disciplinary solutions to environmental problems require radical departures from existing disciplinary tenets, necessitating new formulations that encapsulate rich and diverse understandings of nature.
Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossi... more Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossil capitalism helps elucidate the tensions shaping tar sands development. Conflicts over pipelines and Indigenous territorial claims are challenging development trajectories, as tar sands companies need to expand access to markets in order to expand production. While these conflicts are now well recognised, there are also broader dynamics shaping development. States face a rentier's dilemma, relying on capital investments to realise resource value. Political responses to the emerging climate crisis undercut the profitability of hydrocarbon extraction. The automation of production undermines the industrial compromise between hydrocarbon labour and capital. Ultimately, the crises of fossil capitalism require a radical transformation within or beyond capital relations. To mobilise against the tar sands, organisers must recognise the tensions underpinning it, developing strategies that address ecological concerns and the economic plight of those dispossessed and abandoned by carbon extraction.
Recent scholarship on environmental justice highlights a concern about the relationship between t... more Recent scholarship on environmental justice highlights a concern about the relationship between the racial state and social movement strategy. This paper addresses the ingenuity of environmental justice organizing in the Proctor Creek and South River watersheds of Atlanta, Georgia, each home to predominantly Black communities and unjust flows of toxicants and sewage through urban creeks, streams, and rivers. We begin from critiques of the failure of institutionalized environmental justice and the state’s role in maintaining environmental racisms. To examine organizing responses to these circumstances, we analyze the improvisational politics of social movements in the context of the racial state, theoretically drawing from Charles Lee’s Ingenious Citizenship (2016). Empirically investigating the work of Atlanta community organizers, we emphasize pathways of strategic innovation among environmental justice organizers that improvise against the racial state even while negotiating with ...
This article examines the conflicting subjectivities and space-times of Indigenous and colonial l... more This article examines the conflicting subjectivities and space-times of Indigenous and colonial law that underpin the recent shutdown of the Canadian economy as people barricaded railways and ports in solidarity with the Witsuwit'en hereditary chiefs' blockade against the Coastal GasLink pipeline across their territory. The article argues that this conflict between Canadian and Witsuwit'en law reflects fundamental tensions between their respective foundations in relations of the commodity and the gift. Within settler capitalist society, the value of a commodity is constructed relationally through a political economy of exchange that aims to speed transactions to maximize profits. With an ongoing drive for time-space compression, there is continual pressure in settler capitalism to develop new infrastructure that can speed the circulation of commodities. In Witsuwit'en society, the gift presents a contrasting logic of place-time extension. Rather than focusing on closing transactions to increase profits, gift giving stretches reciprocal obligations into the past and future. Contrasting these distinct conceptions of the relationship between value and time, the article argues that the Witsuwit'en struggle with Coastal GasLink should be understood as conflict between colonial temporal enclosures and a radical promise to open futures different to those engendered by the colonial present.
This article explores the geographies of education at the National Museum of Canada in the first ... more This article explores the geographies of education at the National Museum of Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of the spatialization of children’s museum education, we highlight how the museum sought to inculcate in young Canadians knowledges about their country, its people, and natural resources. We situate children’s museum education within the broader context of Canadian nationalism, other museum activities, and public education in the capital. Focusing on the design and material organization of the museum, we highlight how the space of the museum, from the objects on display to the imposing grandeur of the building, sought to impress upon students the importance of the knowledge it conveyed. Finally, we illustrate how the museum’s programming aimed to provide children with knowledge of their national heritage, building citizenship through claims of development as destiny.
This paper argues that theorizing pipeline governance in Canada necessitates engaging with Indige... more This paper argues that theorizing pipeline governance in Canada necessitates engaging with Indigenous modes of effecting jurisdiction over development. Focusing on the Unist’ot’en land defence against the TransCanada Coastal GasLink pipeline, the paper argues that Indigenous resistance disrupts the scales of settler pipeline governance in British Columbia, Canada. Contesting the authority of the state, Indigenous territorial assertions constitute countervailing forms of jurisdiction grounded in and operationalized through distinct scales of resource governance.
This article uses a literary-geographic method to critique the recognition of Indigenous differen... more This article uses a literary-geographic method to critique the recognition of Indigenous difference in settler-colonial resource governance. Situating analysis on Haisla traditional territories over which the Canadian state claims jurisdiction, we analyze how Indigenous culture is represented in an environmental assessment and a novel set in the same location. The environmental assessment of a liquefied natural gas terminal renders Haisla Indigeneity subject to forms of political economic calculation. In contrast, Haisla novelist Eden Robinson disrupts a colonial desire for Indigeneity as a contained and manageable object of governance. Placing these texts from different domains into productive interference, we expose the continued colonial captures that accompany recognition of Indigeneity in settler-colonial resource governance processes, and the necessity of thinking Indigeneity otherwise. This examination of the politics of recognition highlights how literary-geographic methods can be used to investigate both normative orderings and contestations of racial capitalism in the context of settler colonialism.
This essay charts the shifting assemblage of the conduct of state, corporate, and Indigenous auth... more This essay charts the shifting assemblage of the conduct of state, corporate, and Indigenous authority through four historical moments: mercantilism, settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and corporate reconciliation. With reference to Gitxsan territories, it makes a series of interrelated arguments. The development of colonial territorial claims and regimes of governance overlapped pre-existent and ongoing Indigenous territorial relationships. The historical division between the political and economic domain reshaped the relationship between state and corporate authorities, the state deferring to corporate actors to manage relations in the economic domain. The conduct of state and corporate authorities has constrained and modified the exercise of Indigenous jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Indigenous resurgence has opened space for renegotiating the colonial legal order, including relations between extractive resource companies and Indigenous authorities. Emergent corporate practices of contracting with Indigenous authorities over development, however, reflect a reconfiguration rather than rupture of the settler colonial legal order. Corporate-Indigenous agreements rely upon colonial modes of organizing lawful political and economic conduct, and continue to block more radical and anti-colonial expressions of Indigenous jurisdiction. To expand possibilities for articulating forms of Indigenous jurisdiction that refuse the categories of colonial political economy, it is necessary to problematize the relationship between colonial state and corporate authority.
This paper examines whether environmental assessments (EAs) influence the ability of Aboriginal p... more This paper examines whether environmental assessments (EAs) influence the ability of Aboriginal peoples to advance community employment aims in resource development projects. Environmental assessment and labour policy and practices have been conventionally understood as distinct processes. Our investi- gations demonstrate that EAs play a significant, if indirect, role in Aboriginal efforts to regulate resource sector work. While Aboriginal communities increasingly rely upon private negotiations with development proponents to secure resource sector employment, participation in EA processes provides Aboriginal peoples a space to negotiate language around employment commitments and leverage to secure Aboriginal employment provisions in impact benefit agreements with project proponents.
in this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's... more in this article, we examine depictions of race, nature, and childhood in Harlan Ingersoll Smith's early ethnographic films at the National Museum of Canada. Created in the 1920s for a children's education programme, Smith's films construct ethnographic portraits of different indigenous peoples in Western Canada. We demonstrate how museum education appropriated Indigeneity as a discursive resource to immerse viewing children in particular narratives of Canadian national heritage and development. The films worked through a complex double movement, bringing children in the Ottawa museum audience into association with Indigenous children based on shared experience as children while simultaneously differentiating Indigenous peoples as other. The films inculcated white youth at the museum in a romanticized connection to Canada's prehistory through knowledge of the nation's Indigenous peoples as well as nature. In the films, the position of Indigeneity within the future remained ambiguous (traditional practices sometimes disappearing, sometimes enduring). Yet, despite Smith's uncertainty about colonial beliefs in the disappearance of Indigeneity, his films nonetheless presented the teleological development of the settler nation as certain. Our article highlights how thinking about children, as audience for and thematic focus of these films, extends discussions of the geographies of film, of children, and of settler colonial nationalism.
In this paper, I interrogate the forms of recognition that are produced through the Gitxsan and W... more In this paper, I interrogate the forms of recognition that are produced through the Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en hereditary chiefs’ efforts to litigate claims to territorial title and jurisdiction within the Canadian court system in the 1980s and 1990s. Through the case known as Delgamuukw v. the Queen, Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en hereditary chiefs sought to deploy evidence from their distinct legal tradi- tions in court to prove their continued ownership and governance of their traditional lands. The case thus principally involved questions of the status of Indigenous traditional legal authorities and legal orders within Canadian law. Although the lower courts ruled against the Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en, and the Supreme Court of Canada determined the matter had been mistried, I argue the case was nonetheless productive of new relations between Indigenous and Canadian legal authorities. This paper argues that courtroom encounters enmeshed Indigenous and colonial authorities in a complex skein of relations that continues to unravel in new ways. Responding to Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en litigation efforts, the courts recognized the authority of traditional Indigenous leaders to speak for their communities and make claims vis-à-vis the Canadian state. This was a rupture with state policy that had heretofore sought to displace Indigenous hereditary leadership with imposed models of democratic band governance. By recognizing Indigenous traditional authorities as domestic polities, the court reinvented colonial structures of authority. Thus, alongside the recognition of Indigenous traditional political life, the judiciary extended new forms of colonial sovereign authority over it. But if Indigenous traditional political life was reconstituted under the aegis of the colonial sovereign, the judicial emplacement of Canadian sovereignty in relation to Indigeneity also reconfigured the meaning of Canadian sovereignty. The court determined that constitutionally the exercise of Canadian sovereignty had to be reconciled with the continued existence of Indigenous political communities.
This article examines the relationships between representations and operations of sovereignty in ... more This article examines the relationships between representations and operations of sovereignty in natural resource governance. We advance a ‘political ecology of sovereignty’, examining the participation of non-state actors in resource governance processes. We particularly argue that processes of integrating subaltern populations through mapping local ecological knowledge can modify effective governance practices while nonetheless reproducing the legibility of state sovereign authority and its territorial boundaries. Exploring the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline in Canada, we suggest that state jurisdictional authority is secured through incorporating indigenous interests as a delimited geography of tradition. Examining the Hatgyi hydroelectric development along the Thai–Burmese border, we argue that the territorial boundaries of those nation-states are rearticulated through the governance of this transboundary development. Through these cases, we demonstrate how the insertion of local knowledge works not only to reconfigure effective governance processes but also to reinforce the effect of state sovereignty in new ways.
This paper examines the ontological politics of an encounter between proposed energy pipelines an... more This paper examines the ontological politics of an encounter between proposed energy pipelines and Indigenous peoples. The Enbridge Corporation has applied to construct a pipeline system to deliver diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, but the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council and their member communities have asserted the authority to prevent this project from passing through their unceded territories. Studying Carrier Sekani contestation of Canadian regulatory assessment of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, we examine how the processes of Indigenous becoming exceed notions of Indigenous being that are included in the permitting process as traditional knowledge. We focus both on the performance of legal obligations to consider Aboriginal traditional knowledge and the emerging politics of Carrier Sekani resistance. Our intention is not to question the integrity of traditional knowledge that the regulatory process incorporates, but to highlight how traditional knowledge functions as an anchor for a field of governmental inquiry and action. Providing a historical and geographical context of Carrier Sekani relations with development and the state, we argue that the coding of Indigenous being as traditional works to disavow contemporary processes of Indigenous becoming that are surplus to the spatial ontology of capitalist energy development for global markets. Against efforts to sanction development on disputed territory through formal recognition of a constrained Indigeneity, Carrier Sekani people assert the sovereign authority to prevent or permit development on their lands and waterways using traditional governance systems. Broadly, this paper suggests that recognizing the ontological politics at stake in this permitting process provides a useful opening to understand continued colonial captures at work in the inclusion of traditional knowledge in environmental governance. But it also demonstrates the capacity of Indigenous resistance to these enclosures to challenge and reshape global geographies of energy, capitalism, and climate.
Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post-secondary education through Aboriginal... more Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post-secondary education through Aboriginal-directed programs and policies in non-Aboriginal institutions. However, these gains have occurred alongside, and in some cases through, neoliberal reforms to higher education. This article explores the political consequences of the neoliberal institutionalization of First Nations empowerment for public sector unions and workers. We examine a case where the indigenization of a community college in British Columbia was embedded in neoliberal reforms that ran counter to the interests of academic instructors. Although many union members supported indigenization, many also possessed a deep ambivalence about the change. Neoliberal indigenization increased work intensity, decreased worker autonomy and promoted an educational philosophy that prioritized labour market needs over liberal arts. This example demonstrates how the integration of Aboriginal aspirations into neoliberal processes of reform works to rationalize public sector restructuring, constricting labour agency and the possibilities for alliances between labour and Aboriginal peoples.
Schools, colleges, and universities are vibrant human communities, instruments of public policy, ... more Schools, colleges, and universities are vibrant human communities, instruments of public policy, and powerful political symbols involving, at one point or another, most members of society (Manzer 1994). They serve as a central mechanism for transmitting cultural knowledge and skilling future generations, as key sites of neighbourhood integration, in social capital formation, and in the development of civil society (Basu 2004a). Education is a central institution through which governing rationalities are materialized, creating educational spaces and land-scapes of educational disparities observable at various scales within nations, regions, communities, and schools (Apple 2001a; Basu 2004b; Hay 2004). As it is in schools, colleges, and universities that future generations are formed into the citizenry imagined in powerful political and economic ideologies, jurisdictional disputes over who controls education and the function it serves have been central aspects of educational politics (Bale and Knopp 2012). Education remains a key site for ideological contestation and for resistance to regimes of control even, and especially, as neoliberal reforms and the introduction of new technologies are transforming the spaces, subjectivities, and power relations of education (Apple 2001b; Giroux 2001, 2002). For all these reasons, educational spaces are rich subjects of critical geographical analysis (Basu 2010). In this collection we place particular emphasis on what geographic analysis can contribute to understanding the dynamic of difference in contemporary schools. Geographical analysis necessarily includes critical social analysis: race, class, and gender are not fixed identities but ongoing social productions; the multi-scalar spaces in which such social production takes place are vitally important to understanding how our societies work and, most importantly, how we might improve our social processes, especially for the most marginalized in our society. As critical scholars of education have long argued, schools are sites of cultural and social reproduction that legitimize broader social stratifications. As Marxist critics have suggested, schools discipline students for the workforce and inculcate dominant class structures, norms, and values (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Apple 2004). The streamlining of the production of knowledge into professional, vocational, and technical programs signals the differential subjection of students into deeply spatially structured roles within capitalist regimes, while the spatial segregation and redlining of schools further perpetuates inequalities (Dippo and James 2011; Harris and Mercier 2000; Robinson 2001, 2010). Similarly, the imposition of exclusionary spatial practices of a colonial system of education based on an idealized white norm have contributed to demoralizing and marginalizing Indigenous and racialized communities (Miller 1996; Kelm 1998; Milloy 1999; Lewis 2001; Harris 2002; Schick 2002; McCreary 2011). However, classrooms re-main sites of challenge and possibility.
Indigenous Health and Well-Being in the COVID-19 Pandemic Book Indigenous Health and Well-Being in the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2023
Over the last decade, debates over Indigenous self-governance and hydrocarbon pipeline permitting... more Over the last decade, debates over Indigenous self-governance and hydrocarbon pipeline permitting have punctuated the politics of Northwestern British Columbia, Canada. Following these political struggles, this chapter examines how the emergence of COVID-19 has impacted relations between Indigenous Peoples and provincial authorities in Northwest British Columbia. We highlight how settler authorities have recognized Indigenous jurisdiction to institute emergency public health measures while declaring exceptions to emergency lockdowns for resource extractive industries. The effect has been to recognize Indigenous autonomy to lockdown their communities but not control the flow of hydrocarbons across their territories. Thus, the pandemic created the context for expanded Indigenous control of non-essential movements on their lands, while essential services designations simultaneously define an exception that enables the expansion of colonial extractive regimes. To understand these developments, we argue that it is necessary to comprehend how Indigenous-settler relations entwine with the biopolitics of security, where authorities establish limits to movement and declare exceptions to restrictions in the name of protecting the health and well-being of society and the economy.
Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, 2020
With this intervention, we aim to resituate Pigford -- the landmark case recognizing financial di... more With this intervention, we aim to resituate Pigford -- the landmark case recognizing financial discrimination against Black farmers -- within a broader account of the Black farmers’ movement. Rather than simply celebrate the Pigford settlements, we argue for an approach that recenters land ownership and refuses financial compensation for dispossession as an end goal of struggle. The paper begins with a critical review of the Pigford litigation, highlighting how lawyers and politicians transformed the injustice of land dispossession into a case about financial compensation. Then, in order to disrupt the notion of federal malfeasance as bookended within a finite timespan, as the lawsuits mandate, we highlight a history of Black resistance that predates the Civil Rights era. Third, drawing on Indigenous and postcolonial critiques of regimes of recognition, we address how the forms of recognition affected by liberal legal orders normalize commodified social relations and foreclose more radical visions of Black liberation. Finally, while we support Black farmers’ acceptance of financial compensation, we argue that a radical Black agrarian politics must look beyond the teleological finality of compensation and the individualistic notions of landownership to which it is tied. We conclude the chapter with an epilogue that returns to Pigford and positions compensation claims as a tactical but not a strategic recourse, with the goal of agrarian struggle being land restitution and the development of communal forms of Black land use and ownership.
In S. D’Arcy, T. Black, T. Weis, J. K. Russell (eds.), A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice, 146-159. Toronto: Between the Lines., Sep 15, 2014
Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada edited by Stephanie Ross & Larry Savage, Mar 1, 2012
Situated in the literature on social unionism and union efforts to link with other social justice... more Situated in the literature on social unionism and union efforts to link with other social justice movements, in this chapter we argue that union engagement with Aboriginal peoples in Canada has varied from partnership to conflict. Drawing on secondary sources as well as primary research we conducted in several distinct projects, we discuss and problematize the labour movement's selective engagement with Aboriginal peoples. We begin by presenting some early examples of alliances between unions and Aboriginal peoples that indicate a genuine engagement with anti-colonial struggle. These early examples are contrasted with the now-prevalent forms of social union engagement with Aboriginal peoples. Addressing Aboriginal political developments from the 1970s to the present, we argue increasing Aboriginal political power has changed the political economy of resource development in Aboriginal territories and work in Aboriginal communities, creating a more complex and contradictory terrain for union engagement.
In J. Johnson and S. Larsen (eds.), A Deeper Sense of Place: Stories and Journeys of Indigenous and Academic Collaboration, 2013
Based on personal research experiences, this chapter examines Indigenous-academic collaboration i... more Based on personal research experiences, this chapter examines Indigenous-academic collaboration in cultural resource management in British Columbia, Canada. We begin with a critique of how the prevalent archaeological lens for research on cultural resource management continues to focus on material aspects of culture and displaces understanding of Indigenous cultural resources from their relationships to their broader environment. As a counter-point we describe the contemporary importance of relationships to particular lands to Indigenous ways of being in the world. We stress these ways of being must be understood not simply as cultural differences, but as a product of distinct Indigenous legal orders. Examining the traditional institutions of Indigenous governance, we describe the feast system of the Northwest Coast, and how through our research with Indigenous communities we were brought into the feast system. Our embedded research experience contrasts the compartmentalization of dominant research paradigms. Simply abstracting elements of from Indigenous orders and incorporating them into dominant cultural management paradigms, we argue, obscures the complexity of Indigenous ways of being and knowing. To ground cultural resource management in the context of Indigenous communities and their distinct traditions of governance, we argue research should adopt a “landed” methodology that recognizes the importance spending time on Indigenous territories and listening to the voices of Indigenous peoples.
Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada, 2011
In this paper, we explore the narrative inscription of whiteness in the travelogue of Samuel Hear... more In this paper, we explore the narrative inscription of whiteness in the travelogue of Samuel Hearne, the first European to travel on foot through what would become the Canadian North to the Arctic Ocean. We argue this exploration literature engenders an early version of whiteness in North America simultaneously embedded within overt colonial articulations of power and the vestments of innocence. The text renders a prototypical account of the Great White North as a colonial landscape intelligible through resource speculation and the globally systematized knowledge of natural history that deterritorialized Indigenous knowledge. It develops a harsh landscape aesthetic but also performs anxieties of identity and subjectivity as the explorer-narrator engages in intercultural exchange and negotiation. Indigenous people are both valued as knowledge-holding guides and systematically dehumanized through racist ethnography. In this complex play of spatial and cultural orientation, implicit claims to European authority through surveillance and intellectual management of 'undiscovered' space are registered alongside, and softened by, explicit claims to innocence.
Andreas Malm’s incendiary new book, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," calls for increased militancy in... more Andreas Malm’s incendiary new book, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," calls for increased militancy in defense of the climate. Malm wants activists to disrupt the infrastructure fueling carbon emissions. As the climate emergency expands, Malm suggests that such forms of militancy will become increasingly necessary to create political and economic pressure for change. As Malm argues, climate activists must continue to fight for necessary changes and seek to engage a broad public. However, Malm’s arguments tend to focus on strategic orientations in Europe and neglect important considerations within a necessarily global movement. By way of his focus, his analysis stresses the agency of Europeans to make change and understates the importance of decolonial and postcolonial struggles in the broader world.
As physical geography students learn, since the glacial retreat 11,650 years ago, people have bee... more As physical geography students learn, since the glacial retreat 11,650 years ago, people have been living in the Holocene. However, in their new book, The Human Planet, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin charge that we should instead speak of our epoch as the Anthropocene—the age in which humans have become the dominant biogeophysical force shaping the world. Hoping that recognising the impact of our species on the planet may enable us to chart a more responsible path into the future, Lewis and Maslin survey the relationship between the planetary and human history.
The book begins with a review of how geologists divide geologic periods. The first chapter provides a fascinating discussion of the history of how geologists have defined the present. As Lewis and Maslin emphasise, the idea that humans have reshaped the planet has a long lineage, stretching beyond Paul Crutzen's popularisation of the concept of the Anthropocene in 2000 to the very beginnings of geologic science. The second chapter turns to contemporary criteria used to delineate geologic eras. Here, Lewis and Maslin flag the irregularity of defining the Holocene by the end of the last glacial period, as epochs contain multiple glacial–interglacial cycles. Instead they suggest the contemporary period could be better understood by interpolating earth and human history.
The next five chapters chart how the emergence of different human modes of life reshaped the environment. First, the diffusion of hunter-gather societies contributed to megafauna extinctions, although these societies were ecologically sustainable once established. The development of agriculture more radically transformed the landscape, replacing forests with crops. This change interrupted the cyclic warming and cooling of the planet, as humans inhibited the growth of trees and uptake of carbon that would induce a new period of cooling.
However, Lewis and Maslin particularly flag the emergence of colonialism and capitalism as radically changing the world. Colonialism reordered life on the planet, changing global distributions of people, plants and diseases. This introduced invasive species, led to new waves of extinctions and killed the majority of the Indigenous population of the Americas. Moreover, the profits accumulated through slavery and genocide facilitated the Industrial Revolution. The development of fossil fuels warmed the planet beyond interglacial norms to a new planetary state. Finally, the establishment of new global financial and trade institutions after WWII further integrated the globe, creating the foundations of consumer society.
Lewis and Maslin argue the Anthropocene began with colonialism, selecting the 1,610 Orbis Spike as marker of its beginning. The Orbis Spike marked a nadir in global carbon dioxide levels that occurred as forests in the Americas took over fields abandoned by Indigenous communities devastated by new diseases. In subsequent years, the expansion of a plantation slavery and integration of the world into capitalist markets steadily accelerated the impacts of people on the planet. Lewis and Maslin justify their choice of the Orbis Spike based on its clarity as a marker. They note that while the development of agriculture also had significant climatic impacts, it happened at different times in different parts of the world and unfolded slowly. The global change initiated by colonialism marked the beginning of a new world system, a new global state.
Closing the book, Lewis and Maslin argue that we now face a choice between catastrophic collapse or transition towards postcapitalism. They argue we need a new mode of living. To achieve this, they champion, first, the introduction of Universal Basic Income. Arguing sustainability is impossible without addressing inequality, they suggest standardised economic supplements would support people through a just transition. Secondly, they advocate a massive program of rewilding to create expansive natural corridors for nonhuman life to adapt to climate change and continue to evolve.
At points Lewis and Maslin's survey of world history seems to understate the importance of the political and cultural contingencies that have shaped development. For instance, while they chose the development of colonialism and slavery as the point where the Anthropocene begins, their analysis pays no regard to the role of racism in that process. This gap is significant because the endurance of racism continues to be one of the major barriers to addressing inequality today. However, for those who want to understand the debate around defining the Anthropocene, The Human Planet provides a great place to start.
The Canadian Geographer / Le Geographe Canadien, 2018
In his recent volume, Space after Deleuze, Arun Saldanha both demands a reconceptualization of ge... more In his recent volume, Space after Deleuze, Arun Saldanha both demands a reconceptualization of geographic theorizing in response to Gilles Deleuze and calls for new geographic theorizing to extend, rework, and exceed Deleuze. One of the most original philosophers of the 20th century, Deleuze was an incredibly productive and promiscuous thinker. To theorize the nature and dynamism of the world, he drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, including mathematics and art, biology and cinema, chemistry and psychoanalysis, vitalist philosophy and political economy. Part of the Bloomsbury Deleuze Encounters series—dedicated to providing short, accessible introductions to the application of Deleuze's theories to particular fields of study—Space after Deleuze tackles the relationship between geographic thought and Deleuze.
The Right Relationship: Reimagining the Implementation of Historical Treaties John Borrows and Mi... more The Right Relationship: Reimagining the Implementation of Historical Treaties John Borrows and Michael Coyle, editors. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. 428 pp. $39.95 paper.
In the 1764 Treaty of Niagara, representatives of the British Crown met with a gathering of more than two thousand Indigenous leaders and committed that North American settlement would only proceed with Indigenous consent. At this gathering, the language of kinship was used to express a shared understanding of treaties as the foundation of peaceful settler-Indigenous coexistence. In the wake of the sestercentennial of the Treaty of Niagara, John Borrows and Michael Coyle have assembled a series of chapters reflecting on the state of the treaty relationship. The Right Relationship brings together a mix of Indigenous and settler legal scholars, whose interventions range from pointed arguments about judicial interpretation to comprehensive engagements with Indigenous legal principles.
A co-authored introduction stages the questions framing the volume; however, it is the opening chapter by Borrows that ultimately frames the collection. In "Canada's Colonial Constitution," Borrows both presents the vision for the treaty relationship established at Niagara and charts the continual shape-shifting of the Crown as it has undermined the promise of a treaty federation through the decades. He argues against asking Indigenous peoples to reconcile themselves to colonialism and, instead, suggests that it is necessary to centre Indigenous law in constructing remedies to eroded settler-Indigenous relationships.
The other chapters of the first section of the book continue to ask after the relationship between treaties, history, and the present. Coyle examines the historical conception of treaties as land-sharing agreements. Kent McNeil excoriates the historical evidence and scholarship of Paul McHugh, a regular expert witness for the government. Julie Jai proposes a method to extend modern treaty frameworks to historic treaties. Francesca Allodi-Ross suggests a means of balancing individual and collective interests in treaty rights cases, while Sari Graben and Matthew Mehaffey address the inequalities that continue to pervade negotiations of financial transfers to implement self-government agreements.
The second section, which addresses the role of Indigenous (particularly Anishinaabe) law in treaty implementation, is the most provocative section of the book. It opens with Mark Walters's inquiries into how Anishinaabe travel can help us think about law as a canoe negotiating a river, just one jurisdiction operating in relation to many others. Against contractual understandings of treaties, Aaron Mills positions treaties within Anishinaabe constitutionalism, arguing that they should be approached politically as enactments of citizenship. Heidi Stark similarly argues that treaties should not be read textually but, rather, within the context of a storied Anishinaabe world. Finally, Sarah Morales interrogates how Hul'qumi'num law can highlight the improper conduct of British Columbia in contemporary treaty negotiations.
The book concludes with a set of chapters examining the possibility of establishing other forums to implement treaties. Jacinta Ruru discusses the Treaty ofWaitangi claims process in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Jean Leclair reflects on the role of the courts in treaty disputes. Finally, in a pair of complementary chapters, Sara Seck and Shin Imai reflect on how emerging corporate norms around securing Indigenous consent to development can model new modes for the conduct of different authorities in international and domestic contexts, respectively.
The authors at times conflict in their respective emphases on Canadian jurisprudence and the practice of Indigenous law. For instance, Mills is emphatic that repairing treaty relationships will not occur through the courts and compellingly argues for instead embodying treaties through interpersonal relationships, following the Anishinaabe mode of lawful conduct. However, through all their diversity, the contributors hold in common a desire to support and extend the spirit and intent of treaties as a shared relationship. As a whole, the collection invites readers to take the first steps in a collective process towards reconceptualizing how we understand and approach treaties.
The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty collects a decade of writing by... more The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty collects a decade of writing by Aileen Moreton-Robinson interrogating the racial politics of Australian settler colonialism. An Indigenous woman belonging to the Goenpul tribe of the Quandamooka people, Dean of the Indigenous Research and Engagement Unit at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, and Director of the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network, Moreton-Robinson presents a powerful challenge to resurgent white nationalism in Australian settler society. Through the book, she unpacks the racial logics undergirding a structure of colonial territorial possession that continues to disrupt the exercise of Indigenous territorial sovereignty. Her work draws Indigenous studies into dialogue with critical analyses of whiteness and biopower, exposing how a settler discourse of security rationalizes interventions to control Indigenous populations as a potential threat to white national patrimony. Most provocatively for geographers, Moreton-Robinson extends analyses of the territorial dimensions of white possessiveness often neglected in critical studies of racialization and biopolitics.
Glen Coulthard’s first book, Red Skin, White Masks, is a timely one, resonant with the frustratio... more Glen Coulthard’s first book, Red Skin, White Masks, is a timely one, resonant with the frustration of Indigenous communities who have pursued formal political negotiations with the Canadian settler colonial state for decades without meaningful change. Coulthard's central contribution is explaining why the Indigenous movement turn to towards more militant strategies of resistance is appropriate and necessary. Through the book, Coulthard makes three arguments. First, settler colonialism can be effectively understood as governed by a drive to enact ongoing forms of primitive accumulation, maintaining and extending the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Second, efforts to secure state recognition of Indigenous peoples inevitably flounder as the settler state is structurally founded on this dispossession of Indigenous lands and the concomitant delimitation of Indigenous self-governing authority. Third, in developing a counter to colonial politics and a vision of a better world, Indigenous traditions remain a vital source of knowledge for alternative frameworks for orienting to the land.
Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management, Dec 1, 2014
There is increasing recognition of the need to consider how large-scale industrial developments i... more There is increasing recognition of the need to consider how large-scale industrial developments impact Indigenous communities. In Canada, Aboriginal rights are protected in the constitution and the courts have established that the government has a duty to consult impacted Aboriginal communities and amend developments to accommodate Aboriginal interests as circumstances require. But how the duty to consult and accommodate should be enacted remains a matter of substantial debate. Interceding into this debate, Lambrecht’s book argues that Aboriginal consultation can and should be integrated within environmental assessment and regulatory review processes in Canada.
Lambrecht’s perspective is intriguing and informative, founded upon three decades of experience as a lawyer for the Government of Canada. Over that period, he has been involved in Aboriginal consultation processes related to some of the most important and also most contentious developments in Canadian history, including the Mackenzie Gas Project, the Shell Jackpine Oil Sands Mine Expansion Project, and the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project. Lambrecht’s writing serves as a marked contrast to the antagonistic discourse that regularly dominates discussion of energy politics. Rather than stressing fundamental conflicts between Aboriginal interests and industrial development, Lambrecht strikes a propitious tone, depicting how the integration of Aboriginal consultation into existing regulatory structures can work to reconcile Aboriginal interests with those of development.
Composed of six relatively short chapters, supplemented with thorough footnotes and a book website with hyperlinks to relevant materials, the book is surprisingly comprehensive for such a pithy text. The first chapter begins by focusing attention on the function rather than the form of governance processes. Lambrecht argues that Aboriginal consultation and environmental assessment can be effectively merged, as both are processes that inform decision-making. The following three chapters provide a concise review of the emergent case law that frames Aboriginal and treaty rights, environmental assessment and regulatory review processes, and the doctrine of Aboriginal consultation in Canada.
In the fifth chapter, Lambrecht provides two case studies of the integration of Aboriginal consultation within the work of the National Energy Board, an agency regulating aspects of the oil, gas, and electric utility industries in Canada. Here he charts a reorientation of the regulatory body from a position that required government consultation external to the review process towards a position that the regulatory review process itself served the consultative function of gathering and assessing information on the impacts of development on Aboriginal communities. In the final chapter, Lambrecht broadens discussion from his case studies, highlighting some residual questions regarding the relationship between Aboriginal consultation and environmental assessment.
However, there remain certain gaps in the analysis. Reflecting the conventions of legal scholarship, the text focuses heavily on primary legal sources and references to the secondary academic literature are infrequent. As a result, at points Lambrecht simply echoes the orientation of government policy or jurisprudence without noting the substantial academic debate about its merits. For instance, Lambrecht lauds how the integration of Aboriginal consultation into assessment processes can reduce the costly duplication of effort in overlapping governance processes. The streamlining of regulatory processes, however, remains contentious, as it reduces the extent to which environmental or Aboriginal issues are considered. Ultimately, while Lambrecht usefully reviews how Aboriginal consultation relates to environmental assessment, his analysis elides important questions about the structure of regulatory processes and how they can be reformed to more effectively (rather than simply efficiently) integrate Aboriginal voice.
Overall, the book provides an accessible overview of the intersection of Aboriginal law with the jurisprudence on environmental assessments in Canada. Lambrecht highlights both how court decisions compel changes to reconcile resource governance processes with recognition of Aboriginal interests, and how recognition of Aboriginal rights must be balanced against broader public interests. While Lambrecht’s discussion needs to be placed in conversation with more critical viewpoints, his description of regulatory authorities changing approach to
Aboriginal consultation is useful for both students and practitioners of environmental assessment. Such understanding is crucial in Canada, as increasingly assessments of the impacts on Aboriginal communities are determinative of how or if developments proceed. But the questions that Lambrecht addresses are not simply of national interest; the development of consultation processes in Canada overlaps with international shifts to incorporate Indigenous communities in resource governance processes, and researchers working in different international contexts may find interesting contrasts between their study areas and the Canadian context.
Countering the powerful mythologies that position frontiers in the backwoods and borderlands, Pen... more Countering the powerful mythologies that position frontiers in the backwoods and borderlands, Penelope Edmonds's Urbanizing frontiers clearly enunciates how early colonial towns and cities were crucial transactional spheres where contested and unequal relationships between settlers and Aboriginal peoples constituted new spaces and subjectivities. Her comparative and transnational study of the early history of Victoria, British Columbia and Melbourne, Victoria, traces how the global network of British imperialism and the particularities of local encounters and development shaped urbanization. Thus, Edmonds is able to document the settler city as constituted by a series of overlapping, interlocking, and contested processes.
Reading legal records, urban planning documents, and missionary archives together, Edmonds demonstrates how imperial politics imbricated settler cities and intimate spaces, particularly Aboriginal women's bodies. Urbanizing frontiers is a welcome addition to the scholarship on imperial cities, addressing the particular dynamics of racialized urbanization in settler colonies. Colonial discourse presented urbanism as simply diffusing from the metropole to the colonies. Edmonds' new volume registers how settler colonial cities were spaces of urban innovation. Particularly emphasizing how transcolonial networks connected urbanizing Victoria to earlier developments in Melbourne, Edmonds demonstrates how imperial relationships contoured settler cities and conversely how settler cities reimagined imperial practice.
In both cities, the story of settler urbanization was fundamentally one involving the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples to construct a colonial regime of private property. Discourses of development, constructed through a racialized imaginary of Indigenous societies as primitive, presented the project of a white colonial city and polity as the progressive unfolding of history. The imposition of a new colonial geography entailed both reterritorializing space and constructing an entitled imperial white subject. This was an inherently racialized process built upon the denial of Aboriginal territorial claims and the violent exclusion and coercive control of Indigenous people within the city. Through the idealized narrative of historical development, the city itself figured as the consummation of empire and its claims to territory.
While attentive to the importance of global imperial visions, Edmonds highlights how the process of colonial urbanization in the settler society was marked by instability and anxiety. As Adele Perry (2001) and Renisa Mawani (2009) have cogently demonstrated, the early history of settler spaces on the periphery of empire, in places such as British Columbia, was racially heterogeneous. Edmonds builds upon this scholarship, exposing Melbourne and Victoria as initially fluid, plural sites, constituted through imperialism and immigration, but also indigenization. Edmonds uses the term indigenization “to suggest the presence and agency of Indigenous peoples and their cultures within the history of settler-colonial urbanism” (p. 9). Indigenous peoples did not simply vanish into the wilderness as the city developed, but resisted and refuted settler spatial hegemony. While they were increasingly forced to live in the gaps of the spreading cadastral grid, their shanties, reserves, and camps constituted counter-sites to the imagined order of the city. While Indigenous resistance was often inscribed as crime within the colonial annals, it remains a mark of their spatial infringements and territorial defenses on the palimpsest of colonial history. Edmonds argues that Indigenous peoples transformed by imperialism continued to resist deterritorialization, insisting on a claim to the city and constituting heterotopias, or the other space of contested heterogeneous social spaces.
Recognizing how this counter-history vitally informed colonial development, Edmonds argues that urban historiography must register how not only Indigenous peoples were colonized, but newcomers were also indigenized. Edmonds, however, remains careful not to seek to rehabilitate Indigenous voices, instead developing a devastating critique of the urban biopolitics of settler colonialism and its effects on Indigenous society. Thus, Edmonds details how the syncretism of settler space was negotiated through asymmetrical relations of power, whereby a politics of segregation and partition sought to control Indigeneity and contour the emergence of white settler space.
Motivated by anxieties about the threat of miscegenation and the corruption of whiteness, colonial regulations focused particularly on the bodies of Indigenous women. Colonial fears constituted the Indigenous prostitute as a spectre haunting the settler city, and colonial officials and moral reformers sought to correct and disappear these identities. According to Edmonds, colonial fears contributed to the emergence of new regimes of biopolitical regulation, linking the regulation of bodies and intimate relationships in urban space to larger processes of constructing frontiers. However, Edmonds is careful to note that the dichotomy between biopolitics and the violent authority of the sovereign that Foucault theorized in France did not hold on the colonial periphery, as biopolitical regimes of settler urbanization worked in concert with, not in contrast to, the background of frontier violence.
While attentive to the broad contours of empire, Edmonds is also careful to document the particularities of the two urbanizing frontiers. The white pastoral settlement of Port Phillip District that preceded the development of Melbourne was a sharp contrast to the interculturalism of the fur trade that constituted early Victoria. While Aboriginal camps on Port Phillip's periphery were displaced by the colonial policing of space in Australia, in Victoria Aboriginal claims to the city, formally recognized in treaty and the geography of urban reserves, remained a prominent feature of municipal discussions. Both cities sought to control Aboriginal bodies, relying upon a regime of both colonial violence and discipline to constrain the terms of Aboriginal occupation of the streetscape; however, Victoria invoked a discourse of sanitation that had not been present in Melbourne a few decades earlier.
Focusing on the unstable negotiation of identity and power, Edmonds exposes processes that not only occur in the space of the settler city, but more fundamentally constitute them. Through this, she elucidates how the dispossession of Indigenous peoples rests at the centre of the settler colonial project within its urban core. However, Indigenous presence was never completely eradicated, and Edmonds argues that the tensions of this definitional moment of the colonial past still reverberates through the city today, continuing to bring the moral order of the urban into dispute.
References
Mawani, R. 2009. Colonial proximities: Crossracial encounters and juridical truths in British Columbia 1871–1921. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Perry, A. 2001. On the edge of empire: Gender, race, and the making of British Columbia 1849–1871. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
On June 11th, 2008, Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, formally apologized to the survivor... more On June 11th, 2008, Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, formally apologized to the survivors of the Indian residential school system. On behalf of the Canadian government, he recognized the schools were a travesty not only for the appalling cases of sexual and physical abuses perpetrated against students, but also in the schools' very inception as part of a policy of forced assimilation. Invoking the infamous dictum that the residential schools were designed “to kill the Indian in the child,” the Prime Minister recognized the removal and isolation of “children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures … to assimilate them into the dominant culture” was a horrible wrong (Harper 2008). Following the apology, and years of struggle by residential school survivors and Aboriginal leaders, the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help all Canadians understand the legacy of these schools.
In her recent book, Unsettling the settler within, Paulette Regan, the director of research with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, attempts to set residential school reconciliation within the broadest compass of exposing the colonial roots of Canadian settler society. In congruence with critical residential school historians, such as J.R. Miller (1996) and John Milloy (1999), Regan's analysis looks through residential schooling's focus on the “Indian problem” to expose the “settler problem” at the heart of colonial practices. Refusing to reserve these schools as a site of Aboriginal suffering and grievance, Regan argues that listening to the stories of residential school survivors can be a decolonizing space for developing critical self-knowledge of settler history and identity.
Regan suggests survivors' stories work to disrupt the Canadian peacekeeper myth, which holds that Canadians are a benevolent people, “heroes on a mythical quest to save Indians” (p. 34) and build a nation. Uprooting this myth involves a discomforting pedagogy that unsettles deeply held truths about Canadian settler society and exposes the imperial basis of its reigning legal order. Rather than registering residential schools as simply an historical aberration, Regan urges readers to consider how the colonial violence embedded in the institutional structures that gave rise to the residential school system was foundational to Canadian society and remains endemic today. Eschewing the false boundaries delineating residential school research from histories of dispossession, Regan insists on connecting the paternalism and parsimony that has guided residential school development to the history of colonial land transfers.
Drawing this legacy of feigned bureaucratic benevolence forward, Regan traces the persistence of the myth of settler beneficence towards Aboriginal peoples “from its roots in nineteenth century treaty making to a contemporary reconciliation discourse that purports to be transformative but actually replicates colonial relations” (p. 14). She demonstrates how colonial power relationships continue to condition the terms of recognizing and reconciling with Aboriginal peoples around issues of land and justice. With reference to residential school survivors, Regan exposes the minimalism of early state recognition of the hurt of residential school abuse, which sought to limit government legal liabilities through the creation of an Alternative Dispute Resolution Program restricted to sexual and physical abuse claimants. Such false tokens of reconciliation serve to assuage white guilt, reproducing the structure of the peacemaker myth while recycling the patterns of colonial violence that continue to silence the experiences of Aboriginal people.
Regan argues that the necessary ameliorative to colonial relations is the historical counter-narrative of Indigenous law, diplomacy, and peacemaking. Decolonizing the practice of reconciliation, according to Regan, entails engaging with “the possibilities of apology and testimonial exchange that is experiential, subjective, and emotionally engaged” (p. 15). Demonstrating how traditional Indigenous storytelling and ceremony can shape contemporary negotiations to recognize past violence and reconcile peoples, Regan describes her experiences as a federal government representative in an apology feast for Gitxsan residential school survivors. Resonant with Rauna Kuokkanen's (2007) discussion of the gift of Indigenous epistemes, Regan suggests that these exchanges enable “settlers to bear ethical witness and learn to listen differently” (p. 15).
Regan's articulation of the importance of critical memory work through a diversity of registers, and a diversity of spaces, is provocative. She extends the often metaphoric use of the language of space in critical pedagogy to register the importance of different dynamic traditions in the construction of intercultural pedagogic spaces that allow us to access counter-narratives of relationships between peoples and places. However, even if provocative, Regan's repeated invocation of space remains frustratingly under-theorized, simply parroting Leslie Brown's (2005) dichotomization of colonization as taking Indigenous space and decolonization as making Indigenous space. Reading further into the geographical literature would have enabled a richer theorization of the productive and performative aspects of space.
Furthermore, I fear Regan's “critical hope” that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission can create decolonizing spaces capable of prompting action towards “solving the settler problem” (p. 230) may harbour the lingering vestiges of Utopian thinking. While listening to Indigenous testimony can be transformative, this requires that Indigenous voices be heard. Repeated resignations and issues of under-funding evidence the colonial topographies that continue to contour the Commission and dull the broader resonance of its reconciliatory performances.
Nevertheless, Regan's efforts to extend the discussion of residential schools to the broader (geographic) processes of colonization and decolonization remain laudable, and her interdisciplinary gamut offers significant insights for geographers focused on relations between Aboriginal people and settlers. Regan's book productively integrates the literature on Canadian colonial history with the scholarship on intercultural dispute resolution and theorizations of transformative pedagogy to make a powerful call for decolonization. Whether or not the Truth and Reconciliation Commission can fulfill the mandate of a truth telling in which Canadians confront our own history and identity, Regan clearly articulates the necessity of such a truth telling as prerequisite to an “ethical or just reconciliation” (p. 235). If we fail to meet this threshold, she convincingly demonstrates how we advance only a sorry regifting of established patterns of colonial violence, and “achieve nothing but a reassertion of the colonial status quo” (p. 235).
References
Brown, L. 2005. Research as resistance: Critical, Indigenous and anti-oppressive approaches. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press.
Kuokkanen, R. 2007. Reshaping the university: Responsibility, Indigenous epistemes and the logic of the gift. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Miller, J. R. 1996. Shingwauk's vision: A history of Native residential schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Milloy, J. 1999. A national crime: The Canadian government and the residential school system, 1879–1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Anthony Hall's voluminous Earth into Property is an epic offering, weaving together the stories o... more Anthony Hall's voluminous Earth into Property is an epic offering, weaving together the stories of various figures, moments and ideas that informed the global development of colonialism and capitalism as well as decolonization movements. In this volume, the second in a series entitled The Bowl with One Spoon, Hall develops a twinned history of globalization, informed not only by the commodifying and exploitive drive of capital but equally by the development of confederacies to defend the commons. Hall broadens the metaphor of the bowl with one spoon, a treaty depicting territory shared among the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabe peoples, as a powerful Indigenous conception of the possibility for international confederation against colonial dispossessions and aggression. Hall deploys this image of the commons as a contrast to the master parable of the West, that of property and capital protected by force of arms.
Hall constructs an account of dispossession as a formative and enduring feature of capitalism that also continues to be a central node of resistance. Rather than following a strict chronology, Earth into Property braids together themes, connecting the interests of industrial and financial capital to the development of the military–industrial complex. The breadth of the book is admirable, traversing the period of European imperialism and the rise of American empire, carrying the narrative forward to the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Hall exposes how the Cold War and subsequently the War on Terror extend the trajectory of conquest originating in the colonization of the American continent. Hall is unfortunately prone to drawing overstated parallels in repetitious prose, and his treatment of different episodes often serves polemical and mythopoetic ends that obscure the complex social forces involved. This is aggravated by his propensity to read key figures, such as Henry Ford or Tecumseh, metonymically as representatives of larger social movements. Nonetheless, the breadth of his reading presents a pattern of historical development and contestation often neglected in more nuanced post-structural studies.
Although Hall elucidates the genocidal consequences of imperialist globalization, he does not eschew the Enlightenment rationalities that spawned it. Rather he attempts to recuperate an alternative globality, an Indigenous globality grounded in respect for cultural and ecological diversity. Rather than an empire built through conquest, Hall envisions a global confederacy of law. For Hall, the Enlightenment put forward the promise of protecting and promoting human dignity; but the overemphasis on the individual above the collective, and the denial of the value of cultural diversity, subverted the promise of the Enlightenment. Thus in Earth into Property, the legacy of empire represents the distortion of law as a tool of the powerful, selectively embraced to advance elite interests. Against this, Hall counterposes a competing lineage of law, at once more pluralistic and more universal, emerging from the hybrid marriage of revolutionary ideas and traditional identities in myriad pan-Indigenous, pan-African, and international confederacies.
Aspects of Hall's history parallel Hardt and Negri, who position the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples as the negative foundation of the American constitution. However, rather than a progressive unfolding of history that produces new dialectical tensions, Hall suggests that the formative contradiction between recognition and abjection of the Indigenous Other continues to animate the present. For Hall, Anglo-American imperialism is a contested lineage, characterized both by the violence of colonial dispossessions and the mutualities of trade and peace treaties between the Crown and Aboriginal nations. While the imperial sovereignty of the British Crown exploited Aboriginal labour through mercantile relationships, it also conditioned its exercise of authority within the terms of alliances with Aboriginal peoples. However, the revolutionary sovereignty of the United States, rather than developing a robust treaty federalism, gave broader expression to Locke's seminal ideal that the primary purpose of government was to legitimize and protect private property. Centering settler territorial designs, the United States justified the projection of ever-expanding American frontiers through the abjection of Indigeneity. Thus, America created a vehicle to remodel corporate power unbound from the prior obligations of the European sovereign, eventually translating into the growth of transnational corporations. In Hall's transnational account, however, the dynamic process of privatizing land and wealth has been and continues to be resisted by a lineage of struggle for the commons extending from treaties to the New Deal, from anti-colonial movements to the contemporary struggle for the recognition of Aboriginal rights to self-determination.
Hall admirably refuses the containment of national histories, and refuses to separate the anti-imperial movements of Africa and Asia from the political assertions of Aboriginal peoples submerged within North American states, but his transnational and interdisciplinary approach is marked by significant gaps. His work draws heavily upon political histories and studies of political economy, and neglects many of the important developments in cultural studies. As a result, some of Hall's most central and important claims, such as the vitality of Aboriginal traditions as an active force within movements for global justice, are under-theorized. Aside from gestures to Edward Said, Hall also accords little attention to post-colonial and post-structural theory. His analysis of the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from the benefit of law would have benefited from further engagement with legal theorists such as Elizabeth Povinelli or Giorgio Agamben.
In the end, Hall's Manichean meta-narrative is simply too neat. From the birth of America and forced relocations of Indigenous peoples, through American corporate support of Nazi Germany as a bulwark against communism and the reconstruction of post-war America as the bastion of free enterprise, to the current War on Terror and massive corporate bailout, Hall presents an account of the growth of corporate power and the military–industrial complex that, while often compelling, suffers from over-stretch. Hall regularly conflates not only socialist and Keynesian attempts to defend the commons, but also often parallels these traditions with those of anti-imperialism and Indigenism. However, the policies that benefit industrial workers cannot be assumed to serve Aboriginal peoples. Similarly, his conflation of post-colonial societies in Africa with Aboriginal peoples in America at times neglects important differences between their encounters with imperialism, neo-colonialism, and settler colonialism. In simplifying historical events, Hall also has a predilection for conspiracy theories that overemphasize the role of particular individuals and, correspondingly, understate the importance of social forces. Suspicions of elite conspiracies, such as government malfeasance in the events of 9/11, often overstate the degree of competence and coherence of the state and economic elites, and underestimate the extent to which elite consensus is structurally produced rather than planned. While Hall proposes an alternative world, flush with diversity, his historical narrative is, ironically, homogenizing, organized by the monolithic categories of imperialism and resistance.
This over-simplified model of power relations as elite manipulations and resistance as broadly inclusive but far too uncomplicated better suits the conventions of movement propaganda than academic literature. Hall neglects the complex and substantive tensions between various constituencies of the common (white settlers, different Indigenous nations, industrial labour, etc). Earth into Property highlights the importance of interrogating the imbrication of capitalism and colonialism, and provocatively questions the parameters of current scholarship; however, it will remain for future scholars to more fully integrate the insights of contemporary theorizing, particularly on the complex workings of power, to extend Hall's project.
In a publication coincident with the launch of the inquiry into the police investigation of convi... more In a publication coincident with the launch of the inquiry into the police investigation of convicted serial killer Robert Pickton, David Hugill’s Missing Women, Missing News poses a vital and timely challenge to common-sense frames for understanding the crisis of missing women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Exploring national newspaper coverage of the arrest and trial of Pickton, originally charged with murdering twenty-six street-level sex workers, Hugill argues that the media failed to present the public with a framework within which to critically understand what made this crisis possible. Media discourse continued to circulate images of street-level sex workers and the space of the Downtown Eastside as morally corrupt and degenerate. While journalists focused on bringing attention to the fringes, their “analysis fail[ed] to interrogate the existence of the fringe itself” (29). While the news coverage offered a series of coherent explanations to hold police accountable for their malfeasance, Hugill exposes the media’s omission of the broader social and political context that rendered violence against marginalized women possible. Thus, an overly simplified media narrative failed to contextualize sex workers’ marginality within the raced and gendered context of state abandonment of social services, colonialism, and the criminalization of sex work.
Working within a Marxist framework, Hugill provides a cogent argument that registers both the centrality of material factors in shaping the experience of marginalization and the importance of organizing marginalized communities to engage in the struggle to reconstruct social solidarity. The readability of Hugill’s text demonstrates that one does not need to adopt obtuse or indecipherable language to disrupt reigning common-sense frameworks. With a broadened historical awareness and spatial sensitivity, Hugill maps the series of dispossessions and disavowals that rendered particular women vulnerable in a place of marginality. He ably reconstructs the silences in the prevailing media narrative, which placed gendered vulnerability in the context of state policies that stripped women of social supports, particularly Aboriginal women, while criminalizing sex work. In the most compelling section of the work, Hugill contends with the media’s geographic accounts of the crisis. While the media located the violence of these street-level sex workers’ lives and deaths in the dynamics of their neighbourhood, Hugill situates it within a longer history. Disrupting a naturalized portrayal of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a space of depravity, he positions that place within the historical process of the production of urban space. Historicizing the fragmentation of urban space through a series of gentrification projects and stroll evictions that worked to co-locate deprivation and street-level sex work in the Downtown Eastside, Hugill provides a powerful antidote to common-sense accounts of skid row as autogenetically produced.
However, while the account of urban dispossession is the strongest section of Missing Women, Missing News, the account of colonial dispossession is the weakest. Hugill adroitly recounts the gendered exclusions of federal Indian policy and notes the impact of residential schools. However, he fails to relate either of these policies to the broader strokes of the well-documented history of deterritorializing Aboriginal space through colonial land policies, as does Cole Harris in Making Native Space (UBC Press, 2002). This is a crucial lapse as the foundations of Vancouver rest with the historical reterritorialization of Aboriginal into colonial space and the concomitant disruption of the traditional kinship-based networks of social solidarity within Aboriginal communities. However, Hugill develops his arguments through inverted chronologies. Centering the withdrawal of the state through the last two decades within his critique, Hugill’s book can be read as a lament for the welfare state that fails to convey the extent to which that state was grounded in the historic dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and the disruption of their pre-existing networks of social solidarity.
Hugill registers the contested and contestable terrain of the political sphere. However, in failing to take a longue durée approach to colonialism, he misses the dynamic of colonial dispossession and Aboriginal resistance. Addressing this gap would fundamentally reorganize his argument, but it would also render it far more internally consistent as, for Hugill, a critique of silencing does not preclude the possibility of engaging subjugated knowledges. Indeed, his critique appears in part to be motivated by the way the media controlled the moment of crisis that the Pickton trial represented. The case of the missing and murdered women presented the opportunity to expose the workings of race, class, and gender in the neoliberal colonial state. Hugill effectively bares the ideological bias of the national newspaper coverage, but in penning a threnody to the welfare state, he inadvertently fails to account for his own ideological investment in colonial frameworks. In his conclusion, Hugill argues that it remains necessary to recognize the leadership of oppressed communities in struggles to reconstruct networks of social solidarity and to build a more fundamentally just world. This is a potent call to responsibility; following this call, however, entails extending the terms of Hugill’s analysis to position gendered violence and the criminalization of the Canadian margins within a critical history of the settler state.
Renisa Mawani's book, Colonial proximities, sets a provocative new research agenda for postcoloni... more Renisa Mawani's book, Colonial proximities, sets a provocative new research agenda for postcolonial scholarship, theorizing the multiplicity of encounters between white colonists, Aboriginal peoples, and racialized migrants. Calling into question governing dyads of white-Aboriginal and white-Chinese relations, Mawani seeks to unravel the many threads of race tangled within the skein of colonial law. Exploring the multiple points of the production and enactment of law, Mawani's study includes legislation and court cases, as well as colonial correspondence, government reports, and commissions. Through this, Mawani registers the expanded scope of legal geographies, including administrators and Indian agents, as well as legislators and judges, as vital nodes in both colonial knowledge production and governance.
Throughout the book, Mawani looks to track how “encounters between Chinese migrants, Aboriginal peoples, Europeans, and mixed-race populations in British Columbia prompted colonial agents, missionaries, and legal authorities to generate new forms of colonial knowledge and emergent practices of racial governance” (p. 5). Following a Foucauldian method, Mawani constructs her argument thematically, developing episodic accounts of colonial anxieties regarding cross-racial encounters and mixing in salmon canneries, prostitution and bondage, and the illegal liquor trade. Since the period of her study overlaps with the emergence of responsible government in Canada, Mawani does not bracket colonialism to the period of formal British rule. Instead, she registers how the shifting geographies of empire forged new connections and intimacies between variegated colonial diasporas and Aboriginal communities, and crafted enduring legacies of colonial thought and governance.
Mawani notes that analyzing the colonies demonstrates the falsity of Foucault's contrast between the modes of sovereign and biopolitical power. While Foucault articulated the shift from sovereign to biopolitical power as the transition from a regime controlling death to one governing life, Mawani demonstrates the simultaneity of these forms of power in early British Columbia. Rewriting Foucault's blinkered French theorizing through a study of colonial sites, Mawani demonstrates how in British Columbia “only some populations were invested with life. Others, in the interests of national purity and state security, were thought to endanger the (white) masses, albeit in different ways, and thus needed to be expunged and eliminated” (p. 29). Biopolitical control of processes of social interaction and reproduction sought to enact Aboriginal cultural death through racial improvement and discipline. Simultaneously but differently, Chinese people were relegated to a political death through their segregation and exclusion.
Colonial proximities extends Ann Laura Stoler's analysis of the development of colonial biopolitics in Race and the education of desire (1995), recognizing the multiplicity of the taxonomic field against which colonial officials sought to negotiate and maintain notions of racial purity. Like Stoler, Mawani centres an analysis of the productive capacity of racial anxieties, inciting the creation of new racial truths and mobilizing new forms of governance. However, beyond Stoler's emphasis on the constitutive role of colonial encounters in the construction of metropolitan identities, Mawani argues that the circuit of colonial knowledge production was not simply tied to the metropole but moved across multinodal colonial networks, as Richard Philips’ has argued in Sex, politics, and empire (2006).
Through this, Mawani is able to resituate Mary Louise Pratt's (2007) contact zone within “a wider analytic and historical approach” that recognizes the multiplicity of the cross-racial encounters between geographically and historically separated peoples (p. 5). Negotiating the racially variegated topography of the contact zone, colonial agents did not simply focus on a singular other but rather sought to control the extent and terms of multiple cross-racial encounters. To do so, colonial administrators drew upon global repertoires, integrating knowledge circulating through the globe to construct local racial truths and practices of governance. Thus, Mawani seeks to chart both “the conjunctive processes of colonial encounters and migrations in regional topography,” and “those global circuits of knowledge production and exchange” that epistemically joined disparate lands and peoples within the field of colonial knowledge (p. 207).
Mawani effectively traces the transnational weave of colonial negotiations of racial difference in British Columbia, but her account at times leaves elements of the Canadian national dynamics at play unstated. While the reader is readily apprised of the invocation of discourses of oriental despotism into local restrictions on members of the Chinese diaspora, the book provides slender details with which to understand British Columbia's uneasy place in relation to Canadian Indian policy. For example, terms such as “non-treaty Indians” (p. 196), derived from national debates on policing liquor among non-Status Indian populations in areas where the government determined Indian Status based on treaty rolls, needed to be further contextualized to understand their uneasy fit within British Columbia, where treaties were not signed throughout the majority of the province.
Further while the study crucially expands postcolonial discussions to register the plurality of racial contestations in the contact zone, Mawani continues to repeat and work within established frames of postcolonial discourse. Mawani documents the heterogeneity of state racisms; however, her recitation of postcolonial mantras about the fractured, inchoate, and vulnerable nature of “a white settler regime … fraught with inconsistent and competing colonial agendas” (p. 207) remains problematic. While fissures of colonial discourses render them unstable, and colonial practices never fix final boundaries, they have effectively derived longevity through their capacity for reinvention. Further, in targeting colonial discourses and practices, Mawani reinscribes their centrality and constitutes non-white people not as subjects in their own right, but rather as limits to colonial discourses and practices. This fails to register how change is not simply a product of contradictory drives within colonial regimes but also the resistance and ungovernability of colonized populations. Thus, it remains crucial that scholars construct not only critical histories of colonial discourses and practices, but also recognize those resilient affinities that remained beyond the scope of colonial governance. This trajectory is partially evident in Mawani's conclusions, which celebrates the affinities and friendships that Chinese and Aboriginal peoples are forging today, but remains a necessary agenda for both future research and political work.
References
Philips, R. 2006. Sex, politics and empire: A postcolonial geography. Manchester , UK : Manchester University Press.
Pratt, M. L. 2007. Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. 2nd ed. New York , NY : Routledge.
Stoler, A. L. 1995. Race and the education of desire: Foucault's history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham , NC : Duke University Press.
Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, 2006
"First published in the early 1980s to inform and empower people of colour struggling against the... more "First published in the early 1980s to inform and empower people of colour struggling against the white capitalist hegemony of American society, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat remains a relevant historical materialist interrogation of “whiteness” that has much to offer our understanding of the workings of race. However, despite Settlers’ vitality, Sakai’s critical inquiry is hobbled by certain critical lapses and overly strict conceptual categories. While acknowledging the ingenuity of Sakai’s thought, I intend to address some of his work’s shortcomings in an effort to advance our struggles against the politics of domination."
In his debut book, Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow, Neal McLeod speaks back to the darkness haunting us ... more In his debut book, Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow, Neal McLeod speaks back to the darkness haunting us as individuals and collectivities. He courageously accomplishes a representation of this inhabitance of specters through a shifting sardonic, disdainful wit and deceptively simple humour in a volume that combines his poetry with plates of his visual art. The poems, like the images, elicit textured imaginings of the hurt and the degradation of collective dispossession and of personal losses that comprise a colonial legacy. But finally, Songs to Kill a Wîhtikow speaks to the sheer resiliency of the spirit in struggle against these oppressions.
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Indigenous jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Indigenous resurgence has opened space for renegotiating the colonial legal order, including relations between extractive resource companies and Indigenous authorities. Emergent corporate practices of contracting with Indigenous authorities over development, however, reflect a reconfiguration rather than rupture of the settler colonial legal order. Corporate-Indigenous agreements rely upon colonial modes of organizing lawful political and economic conduct, and continue to block more radical and anti-colonial expressions of Indigenous jurisdiction. To expand possibilities for articulating forms of Indigenous jurisdiction that refuse the categories of
colonial political economy, it is necessary to problematize the relationship between colonial state and corporate authority.
Indigenous jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Indigenous resurgence has opened space for renegotiating the colonial legal order, including relations between extractive resource companies and Indigenous authorities. Emergent corporate practices of contracting with Indigenous authorities over development, however, reflect a reconfiguration rather than rupture of the settler colonial legal order. Corporate-Indigenous agreements rely upon colonial modes of organizing lawful political and economic conduct, and continue to block more radical and anti-colonial expressions of Indigenous jurisdiction. To expand possibilities for articulating forms of Indigenous jurisdiction that refuse the categories of
colonial political economy, it is necessary to problematize the relationship between colonial state and corporate authority.
as an end goal of struggle. The paper begins with a critical review
of the Pigford litigation, highlighting how lawyers and politicians
transformed the injustice of land dispossession into a case about
financial compensation. Then, in order to disrupt the notion of
federal malfeasance as bookended within a finite timespan, as the
lawsuits mandate, we highlight a history of Black resistance that
predates the Civil Rights era. Third, drawing on Indigenous and postcolonial critiques of regimes of recognition, we address how the forms of recognition affected by liberal legal orders normalize commodified social relations and foreclose more radical visions of Black liberation. Finally, while we support Black farmers’ acceptance of financial compensation, we argue that a radical Black agrarian politics must look beyond the teleological finality of compensation and the individualistic notions of landownership to which it is tied. We conclude the chapter with an epilogue that returns to Pigford and positions compensation claims as a tactical but not a strategic recourse, with the goal of agrarian struggle being land restitution and the development of communal forms of Black land use and
ownership.
The book begins with a review of how geologists divide geologic periods. The first chapter provides a fascinating discussion of the history of how geologists have defined the present. As Lewis and Maslin emphasise, the idea that humans have reshaped the planet has a long lineage, stretching beyond Paul Crutzen's popularisation of the concept of the Anthropocene in 2000 to the very beginnings of geologic science. The second chapter turns to contemporary criteria used to delineate geologic eras. Here, Lewis and Maslin flag the irregularity of defining the Holocene by the end of the last glacial period, as epochs contain multiple glacial–interglacial cycles. Instead they suggest the contemporary period could be better understood by interpolating earth and human history.
The next five chapters chart how the emergence of different human modes of life reshaped the environment. First, the diffusion of hunter-gather societies contributed to megafauna extinctions, although these societies were ecologically sustainable once established. The development of agriculture more radically transformed the landscape, replacing forests with crops. This change interrupted the cyclic warming and cooling of the planet, as humans inhibited the growth of trees and uptake of carbon that would induce a new period of cooling.
However, Lewis and Maslin particularly flag the emergence of colonialism and capitalism as radically changing the world. Colonialism reordered life on the planet, changing global distributions of people, plants and diseases. This introduced invasive species, led to new waves of extinctions and killed the majority of the Indigenous population of the
Americas. Moreover, the profits accumulated through slavery and genocide facilitated the Industrial Revolution. The development of fossil fuels warmed the planet beyond interglacial norms to a new planetary state. Finally, the establishment of new global financial and trade institutions after WWII further integrated the globe, creating the foundations of consumer society.
Lewis and Maslin argue the Anthropocene began with colonialism, selecting the 1,610 Orbis Spike as marker of its beginning. The Orbis Spike marked a nadir in global carbon dioxide levels that occurred as forests in the Americas took over fields abandoned by Indigenous communities devastated by new diseases. In subsequent years, the expansion of a plantation slavery and integration of the world into capitalist markets steadily accelerated the impacts of people on the
planet. Lewis and Maslin justify their choice of the Orbis Spike based on its clarity as a marker. They note that while the development of agriculture also had significant climatic impacts, it happened at different times in different parts of the world and unfolded slowly. The global change initiated by colonialism marked the beginning of a new world system, a new global state.
Closing the book, Lewis and Maslin argue that we now face a choice between catastrophic collapse or transition towards postcapitalism. They argue we need a new mode of living. To achieve this, they champion, first, the introduction of Universal Basic Income. Arguing sustainability is impossible without addressing inequality, they suggest
standardised economic supplements would support people through a just transition. Secondly, they advocate a massive program of rewilding to create expansive natural corridors for nonhuman life to adapt to climate change and continue to evolve.
At points Lewis and Maslin's survey of world history seems to understate the importance of the political and cultural contingencies that have shaped development. For instance, while they chose the development of colonialism and slavery as the point where the Anthropocene begins,
their analysis pays no regard to the role of racism in that process. This gap is significant because the endurance of racism continues to be one of the major barriers to addressing inequality today. However, for those who want to understand the debate around defining the Anthropocene, The Human Planet provides a great place to start.
In the 1764 Treaty of Niagara, representatives of the British Crown met with a gathering of more than two thousand Indigenous leaders and committed that North American settlement would only proceed with Indigenous consent. At this gathering, the language of kinship was used to express a shared understanding of treaties as the foundation of peaceful settler-Indigenous coexistence. In the wake of the sestercentennial of the Treaty of Niagara, John Borrows and Michael Coyle have assembled a series of chapters reflecting on the state of the treaty relationship. The Right Relationship brings together a mix of Indigenous and settler legal scholars, whose interventions range from pointed arguments about judicial interpretation to comprehensive engagements with Indigenous legal principles.
A co-authored introduction stages the questions framing the volume; however, it is the opening chapter by Borrows that ultimately frames the collection. In "Canada's Colonial Constitution," Borrows both presents the vision for the treaty relationship established at Niagara and charts the continual shape-shifting of the Crown as it has undermined the promise of a treaty federation through the decades. He argues against asking Indigenous peoples to reconcile themselves to colonialism and, instead, suggests that it is necessary to centre Indigenous law in constructing remedies to eroded settler-Indigenous relationships.
The other chapters of the first section of the book continue to ask after the relationship between treaties, history, and the present. Coyle examines the historical conception of treaties as land-sharing agreements. Kent McNeil excoriates the historical evidence and scholarship of Paul McHugh, a regular expert witness for the government. Julie Jai proposes a method to extend modern treaty frameworks to historic treaties. Francesca Allodi-Ross suggests a means of balancing individual and collective interests in treaty rights cases, while Sari Graben and Matthew Mehaffey address the inequalities that continue to pervade negotiations of financial transfers to implement self-government agreements.
The second section, which addresses the role of Indigenous (particularly Anishinaabe) law in treaty implementation, is the most provocative section of the book. It opens with Mark Walters's inquiries into how Anishinaabe travel can help us think about law as a canoe negotiating a river, just one jurisdiction operating in relation to many others. Against contractual understandings of treaties, Aaron Mills positions treaties within Anishinaabe constitutionalism, arguing that they should be approached politically as enactments of citizenship. Heidi Stark similarly argues that treaties should not be read textually but, rather, within the context of a storied Anishinaabe world. Finally, Sarah Morales interrogates how Hul'qumi'num law can highlight the improper conduct of British Columbia in contemporary treaty negotiations.
The book concludes with a set of chapters examining the possibility of establishing other forums to implement treaties. Jacinta Ruru discusses the Treaty ofWaitangi claims process in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Jean Leclair reflects on the role of the courts in treaty disputes. Finally, in a pair of complementary chapters, Sara Seck and Shin Imai reflect on how emerging corporate norms around securing Indigenous consent to development can model new modes for the conduct of different authorities in international and domestic contexts, respectively.
The authors at times conflict in their respective emphases on Canadian jurisprudence and the practice of Indigenous law. For instance, Mills is emphatic that repairing treaty relationships will not occur through the courts and compellingly argues for instead embodying treaties through interpersonal relationships, following the Anishinaabe mode of lawful conduct. However, through all their diversity, the contributors hold in common a desire to support and extend the spirit and intent of treaties as a shared relationship. As a whole, the collection invites readers to take the first steps in a collective process towards reconceptualizing how we understand and approach treaties.
Lambrecht’s perspective is intriguing and informative, founded upon three decades of experience as a lawyer for the Government of Canada. Over that period, he has been involved in Aboriginal consultation processes related to some of the most important and also most contentious developments in Canadian history, including the Mackenzie Gas Project, the Shell Jackpine Oil Sands Mine Expansion Project, and the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project. Lambrecht’s writing serves as a marked contrast to the antagonistic discourse that regularly dominates discussion of energy politics. Rather than stressing fundamental conflicts between Aboriginal interests and industrial development, Lambrecht strikes a propitious tone, depicting how the integration of Aboriginal consultation into existing regulatory structures can work to reconcile Aboriginal interests with those of development.
Composed of six relatively short chapters, supplemented with thorough footnotes and a book website with hyperlinks to relevant materials, the book is surprisingly comprehensive for such a pithy text. The first chapter begins by focusing attention on the function rather than the form of governance processes. Lambrecht argues that Aboriginal consultation and environmental assessment can be effectively merged, as both are processes that inform decision-making. The following three chapters provide a concise review of the emergent case law that frames Aboriginal and treaty rights, environmental assessment and regulatory review processes, and the doctrine of Aboriginal consultation in Canada.
In the fifth chapter, Lambrecht provides two case studies of the integration of Aboriginal consultation within the work of the National Energy Board, an agency regulating aspects of the oil, gas, and electric utility industries in Canada. Here he charts a reorientation of the regulatory body from a position that required government consultation external to the review process towards a position that the regulatory review process itself served the consultative function of gathering and assessing information on the impacts of development on Aboriginal communities. In the final chapter, Lambrecht broadens discussion from his case studies, highlighting some residual questions regarding the relationship between Aboriginal consultation and environmental assessment.
However, there remain certain gaps in the analysis. Reflecting the conventions of legal scholarship, the text focuses heavily on primary legal sources and references to the secondary academic literature are infrequent. As a result, at points Lambrecht simply echoes the orientation of government policy or jurisprudence without noting the substantial academic debate about its merits. For instance, Lambrecht lauds how the integration of Aboriginal consultation into assessment processes can reduce the costly duplication of effort in overlapping governance processes. The streamlining of regulatory processes, however, remains contentious, as it reduces the extent to which environmental or Aboriginal issues are considered. Ultimately, while Lambrecht usefully reviews how Aboriginal consultation relates to environmental assessment, his analysis elides important questions about the structure of regulatory processes and how they can be reformed to more effectively (rather than simply efficiently) integrate Aboriginal voice.
Overall, the book provides an accessible overview of the intersection of Aboriginal law with the jurisprudence on environmental assessments in Canada. Lambrecht highlights both how court decisions compel changes to reconcile resource governance processes with recognition of Aboriginal interests, and how recognition of Aboriginal rights must be balanced against broader public interests. While Lambrecht’s discussion needs to be placed in conversation with more critical viewpoints, his description of regulatory authorities changing approach to
Aboriginal consultation is useful for both students and practitioners of environmental assessment. Such understanding is crucial in Canada, as increasingly assessments of the impacts on Aboriginal communities are determinative of how or if developments proceed. But the questions that Lambrecht addresses are not simply of national interest; the development of consultation processes in Canada overlaps with international shifts to incorporate Indigenous communities in resource governance processes, and researchers working in different international contexts may find interesting contrasts between their study areas and the Canadian context.
Reading legal records, urban planning documents, and missionary archives together, Edmonds demonstrates how imperial politics imbricated settler cities and intimate spaces, particularly Aboriginal women's bodies. Urbanizing frontiers is a welcome addition to the scholarship on imperial cities, addressing the particular dynamics of racialized urbanization in settler colonies. Colonial discourse presented urbanism as simply diffusing from the metropole to the colonies. Edmonds' new volume registers how settler colonial cities were spaces of urban innovation. Particularly emphasizing how transcolonial networks connected urbanizing Victoria to earlier developments in Melbourne, Edmonds demonstrates how imperial relationships contoured settler cities and conversely how settler cities reimagined imperial practice.
In both cities, the story of settler urbanization was fundamentally one involving the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples to construct a colonial regime of private property. Discourses of development, constructed through a racialized imaginary of Indigenous societies as primitive, presented the project of a white colonial city and polity as the progressive unfolding of history. The imposition of a new colonial geography entailed both reterritorializing space and constructing an entitled imperial white subject. This was an inherently racialized process built upon the denial of Aboriginal territorial claims and the violent exclusion and coercive control of Indigenous people within the city. Through the idealized narrative of historical development, the city itself figured as the consummation of empire and its claims to territory.
While attentive to the importance of global imperial visions, Edmonds highlights how the process of colonial urbanization in the settler society was marked by instability and anxiety. As Adele Perry (2001) and Renisa Mawani (2009) have cogently demonstrated, the early history of settler spaces on the periphery of empire, in places such as British Columbia, was racially heterogeneous. Edmonds builds upon this scholarship, exposing Melbourne and Victoria as initially fluid, plural sites, constituted through imperialism and immigration, but also indigenization. Edmonds uses the term indigenization “to suggest the presence and agency of Indigenous peoples and their cultures within the history of settler-colonial urbanism” (p. 9). Indigenous peoples did not simply vanish into the wilderness as the city developed, but resisted and refuted settler spatial hegemony. While they were increasingly forced to live in the gaps of the spreading cadastral grid, their shanties, reserves, and camps constituted counter-sites to the imagined order of the city. While Indigenous resistance was often inscribed as crime within the colonial annals, it remains a mark of their spatial infringements and territorial defenses on the palimpsest of colonial history. Edmonds argues that Indigenous peoples transformed by imperialism continued to resist deterritorialization, insisting on a claim to the city and constituting heterotopias, or the other space of contested heterogeneous social spaces.
Recognizing how this counter-history vitally informed colonial development, Edmonds argues that urban historiography must register how not only Indigenous peoples were colonized, but newcomers were also indigenized. Edmonds, however, remains careful not to seek to rehabilitate Indigenous voices, instead developing a devastating critique of the urban biopolitics of settler colonialism and its effects on Indigenous society. Thus, Edmonds details how the syncretism of settler space was negotiated through asymmetrical relations of power, whereby a politics of segregation and partition sought to control Indigeneity and contour the emergence of white settler space.
Motivated by anxieties about the threat of miscegenation and the corruption of whiteness, colonial regulations focused particularly on the bodies of Indigenous women. Colonial fears constituted the Indigenous prostitute as a spectre haunting the settler city, and colonial officials and moral reformers sought to correct and disappear these identities. According to Edmonds, colonial fears contributed to the emergence of new regimes of biopolitical regulation, linking the regulation of bodies and intimate relationships in urban space to larger processes of constructing frontiers. However, Edmonds is careful to note that the dichotomy between biopolitics and the violent authority of the sovereign that Foucault theorized in France did not hold on the colonial periphery, as biopolitical regimes of settler urbanization worked in concert with, not in contrast to, the background of frontier violence.
While attentive to the broad contours of empire, Edmonds is also careful to document the particularities of the two urbanizing frontiers. The white pastoral settlement of Port Phillip District that preceded the development of Melbourne was a sharp contrast to the interculturalism of the fur trade that constituted early Victoria. While Aboriginal camps on Port Phillip's periphery were displaced by the colonial policing of space in Australia, in Victoria Aboriginal claims to the city, formally recognized in treaty and the geography of urban reserves, remained a prominent feature of municipal discussions. Both cities sought to control Aboriginal bodies, relying upon a regime of both colonial violence and discipline to constrain the terms of Aboriginal occupation of the streetscape; however, Victoria invoked a discourse of sanitation that had not been present in Melbourne a few decades earlier.
Focusing on the unstable negotiation of identity and power, Edmonds exposes processes that not only occur in the space of the settler city, but more fundamentally constitute them. Through this, she elucidates how the dispossession of Indigenous peoples rests at the centre of the settler colonial project within its urban core. However, Indigenous presence was never completely eradicated, and Edmonds argues that the tensions of this definitional moment of the colonial past still reverberates through the city today, continuing to bring the moral order of the urban into dispute.
References
Mawani, R. 2009. Colonial proximities: Crossracial encounters and juridical truths in British Columbia 1871–1921. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Perry, A. 2001. On the edge of empire: Gender, race, and the making of British Columbia 1849–1871. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
In her recent book, Unsettling the settler within, Paulette Regan, the director of research with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, attempts to set residential school reconciliation within the broadest compass of exposing the colonial roots of Canadian settler society. In congruence with critical residential school historians, such as J.R. Miller (1996) and John Milloy (1999), Regan's analysis looks through residential schooling's focus on the “Indian problem” to expose the “settler problem” at the heart of colonial practices. Refusing to reserve these schools as a site of Aboriginal suffering and grievance, Regan argues that listening to the stories of residential school survivors can be a decolonizing space for developing critical self-knowledge of settler history and identity.
Regan suggests survivors' stories work to disrupt the Canadian peacekeeper myth, which holds that Canadians are a benevolent people, “heroes on a mythical quest to save Indians” (p. 34) and build a nation. Uprooting this myth involves a discomforting pedagogy that unsettles deeply held truths about Canadian settler society and exposes the imperial basis of its reigning legal order. Rather than registering residential schools as simply an historical aberration, Regan urges readers to consider how the colonial violence embedded in the institutional structures that gave rise to the residential school system was foundational to Canadian society and remains endemic today. Eschewing the false boundaries delineating residential school research from histories of dispossession, Regan insists on connecting the paternalism and parsimony that has guided residential school development to the history of colonial land transfers.
Drawing this legacy of feigned bureaucratic benevolence forward, Regan traces the persistence of the myth of settler beneficence towards Aboriginal peoples “from its roots in nineteenth century treaty making to a contemporary reconciliation discourse that purports to be transformative but actually replicates colonial relations” (p. 14). She demonstrates how colonial power relationships continue to condition the terms of recognizing and reconciling with Aboriginal peoples around issues of land and justice. With reference to residential school survivors, Regan exposes the minimalism of early state recognition of the hurt of residential school abuse, which sought to limit government legal liabilities through the creation of an Alternative Dispute Resolution Program restricted to sexual and physical abuse claimants. Such false tokens of reconciliation serve to assuage white guilt, reproducing the structure of the peacemaker myth while recycling the patterns of colonial violence that continue to silence the experiences of Aboriginal people.
Regan argues that the necessary ameliorative to colonial relations is the historical counter-narrative of Indigenous law, diplomacy, and peacemaking. Decolonizing the practice of reconciliation, according to Regan, entails engaging with “the possibilities of apology and testimonial exchange that is experiential, subjective, and emotionally engaged” (p. 15). Demonstrating how traditional Indigenous storytelling and ceremony can shape contemporary negotiations to recognize past violence and reconcile peoples, Regan describes her experiences as a federal government representative in an apology feast for Gitxsan residential school survivors. Resonant with Rauna Kuokkanen's (2007) discussion of the gift of Indigenous epistemes, Regan suggests that these exchanges enable “settlers to bear ethical witness and learn to listen differently” (p. 15).
Regan's articulation of the importance of critical memory work through a diversity of registers, and a diversity of spaces, is provocative. She extends the often metaphoric use of the language of space in critical pedagogy to register the importance of different dynamic traditions in the construction of intercultural pedagogic spaces that allow us to access counter-narratives of relationships between peoples and places. However, even if provocative, Regan's repeated invocation of space remains frustratingly under-theorized, simply parroting Leslie Brown's (2005) dichotomization of colonization as taking Indigenous space and decolonization as making Indigenous space. Reading further into the geographical literature would have enabled a richer theorization of the productive and performative aspects of space.
Furthermore, I fear Regan's “critical hope” that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission can create decolonizing spaces capable of prompting action towards “solving the settler problem” (p. 230) may harbour the lingering vestiges of Utopian thinking. While listening to Indigenous testimony can be transformative, this requires that Indigenous voices be heard. Repeated resignations and issues of under-funding evidence the colonial topographies that continue to contour the Commission and dull the broader resonance of its reconciliatory performances.
Nevertheless, Regan's efforts to extend the discussion of residential schools to the broader (geographic) processes of colonization and decolonization remain laudable, and her interdisciplinary gamut offers significant insights for geographers focused on relations between Aboriginal people and settlers. Regan's book productively integrates the literature on Canadian colonial history with the scholarship on intercultural dispute resolution and theorizations of transformative pedagogy to make a powerful call for decolonization. Whether or not the Truth and Reconciliation Commission can fulfill the mandate of a truth telling in which Canadians confront our own history and identity, Regan clearly articulates the necessity of such a truth telling as prerequisite to an “ethical or just reconciliation” (p. 235). If we fail to meet this threshold, she convincingly demonstrates how we advance only a sorry regifting of established patterns of colonial violence, and “achieve nothing but a reassertion of the colonial status quo” (p. 235).
References
Brown, L. 2005. Research as resistance: Critical, Indigenous and anti-oppressive approaches. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press.
Harper, S. 2008. Statement of apology—to former students of Indian Residential Schools. Speech in Parliament. Ottawa, ON: Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/DAM/DAM-INTER-HQ/STAGING/texte-text/rqpi_apo_pdf_1322167347706_eng.pdf.
Kuokkanen, R. 2007. Reshaping the university: Responsibility, Indigenous epistemes and the logic of the gift. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Miller, J. R. 1996. Shingwauk's vision: A history of Native residential schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Milloy, J. 1999. A national crime: The Canadian government and the residential school system, 1879–1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Hall constructs an account of dispossession as a formative and enduring feature of capitalism that also continues to be a central node of resistance. Rather than following a strict chronology, Earth into Property braids together themes, connecting the interests of industrial and financial capital to the development of the military–industrial complex. The breadth of the book is admirable, traversing the period of European imperialism and the rise of American empire, carrying the narrative forward to the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Hall exposes how the Cold War and subsequently the War on Terror extend the trajectory of conquest originating in the colonization of the American continent. Hall is unfortunately prone to drawing overstated parallels in repetitious prose, and his treatment of different episodes often serves polemical and mythopoetic ends that obscure the complex social forces involved. This is aggravated by his propensity to read key figures, such as Henry Ford or Tecumseh, metonymically as representatives of larger social movements. Nonetheless, the breadth of his reading presents a pattern of historical development and contestation often neglected in more nuanced post-structural studies.
Although Hall elucidates the genocidal consequences of imperialist globalization, he does not eschew the Enlightenment rationalities that spawned it. Rather he attempts to recuperate an alternative globality, an Indigenous globality grounded in respect for cultural and ecological diversity. Rather than an empire built through conquest, Hall envisions a global confederacy of law. For Hall, the Enlightenment put forward the promise of protecting and promoting human dignity; but the overemphasis on the individual above the collective, and the denial of the value of cultural diversity, subverted the promise of the Enlightenment. Thus in Earth into Property, the legacy of empire represents the distortion of law as a tool of the powerful, selectively embraced to advance elite interests. Against this, Hall counterposes a competing lineage of law, at once more pluralistic and more universal, emerging from the hybrid marriage of revolutionary ideas and traditional identities in myriad pan-Indigenous, pan-African, and international confederacies.
Aspects of Hall's history parallel Hardt and Negri, who position the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples as the negative foundation of the American constitution. However, rather than a progressive unfolding of history that produces new dialectical tensions, Hall suggests that the formative contradiction between recognition and abjection of the Indigenous Other continues to animate the present. For Hall, Anglo-American imperialism is a contested lineage, characterized both by the violence of colonial dispossessions and the mutualities of trade and peace treaties between the Crown and Aboriginal nations. While the imperial sovereignty of the British Crown exploited Aboriginal labour through mercantile relationships, it also conditioned its exercise of authority within the terms of alliances with Aboriginal peoples. However, the revolutionary sovereignty of the United States, rather than developing a robust treaty federalism, gave broader expression to Locke's seminal ideal that the primary purpose of government was to legitimize and protect private property. Centering settler territorial designs, the United States justified the projection of ever-expanding American frontiers through the abjection of Indigeneity. Thus, America created a vehicle to remodel corporate power unbound from the prior obligations of the European sovereign, eventually translating into the growth of transnational corporations. In Hall's transnational account, however, the dynamic process of privatizing land and wealth has been and continues to be resisted by a lineage of struggle for the commons extending from treaties to the New Deal, from anti-colonial movements to the contemporary struggle for the recognition of Aboriginal rights to self-determination.
Hall admirably refuses the containment of national histories, and refuses to separate the anti-imperial movements of Africa and Asia from the political assertions of Aboriginal peoples submerged within North American states, but his transnational and interdisciplinary approach is marked by significant gaps. His work draws heavily upon political histories and studies of political economy, and neglects many of the important developments in cultural studies. As a result, some of Hall's most central and important claims, such as the vitality of Aboriginal traditions as an active force within movements for global justice, are under-theorized. Aside from gestures to Edward Said, Hall also accords little attention to post-colonial and post-structural theory. His analysis of the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from the benefit of law would have benefited from further engagement with legal theorists such as Elizabeth Povinelli or Giorgio Agamben.
In the end, Hall's Manichean meta-narrative is simply too neat. From the birth of America and forced relocations of Indigenous peoples, through American corporate support of Nazi Germany as a bulwark against communism and the reconstruction of post-war America as the bastion of free enterprise, to the current War on Terror and massive corporate bailout, Hall presents an account of the growth of corporate power and the military–industrial complex that, while often compelling, suffers from over-stretch. Hall regularly conflates not only socialist and Keynesian attempts to defend the commons, but also often parallels these traditions with those of anti-imperialism and Indigenism. However, the policies that benefit industrial workers cannot be assumed to serve Aboriginal peoples. Similarly, his conflation of post-colonial societies in Africa with Aboriginal peoples in America at times neglects important differences between their encounters with imperialism, neo-colonialism, and settler colonialism. In simplifying historical events, Hall also has a predilection for conspiracy theories that overemphasize the role of particular individuals and, correspondingly, understate the importance of social forces. Suspicions of elite conspiracies, such as government malfeasance in the events of 9/11, often overstate the degree of competence and coherence of the state and economic elites, and underestimate the extent to which elite consensus is structurally produced rather than planned. While Hall proposes an alternative world, flush with diversity, his historical narrative is, ironically, homogenizing, organized by the monolithic categories of imperialism and resistance.
This over-simplified model of power relations as elite manipulations and resistance as broadly inclusive but far too uncomplicated better suits the conventions of movement propaganda than academic literature. Hall neglects the complex and substantive tensions between various constituencies of the common (white settlers, different Indigenous nations, industrial labour, etc). Earth into Property highlights the importance of interrogating the imbrication of capitalism and colonialism, and provocatively questions the parameters of current scholarship; however, it will remain for future scholars to more fully integrate the insights of contemporary theorizing, particularly on the complex workings of power, to extend Hall's project.
Working within a Marxist framework, Hugill provides a cogent argument that registers both the centrality of material factors in shaping the experience of marginalization and the importance of organizing marginalized communities to engage in the struggle to reconstruct social solidarity. The readability of Hugill’s text demonstrates that one does not need to adopt obtuse or indecipherable language to disrupt reigning common-sense frameworks. With a broadened historical awareness and spatial sensitivity, Hugill maps the series of dispossessions and disavowals that rendered particular women vulnerable in a place of marginality. He ably reconstructs the silences in the prevailing media narrative, which placed gendered vulnerability in the context of state policies that stripped women of social supports, particularly Aboriginal women, while criminalizing sex work. In the most compelling section of the work, Hugill contends with the media’s geographic accounts of the crisis. While the media located the violence of these street-level sex workers’ lives and deaths in the dynamics of their neighbourhood, Hugill situates it within a longer history. Disrupting a naturalized portrayal of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a space of depravity, he positions that place within the historical process of the production of urban space. Historicizing the fragmentation of urban space through a series of gentrification projects and stroll evictions that worked to co-locate deprivation and street-level sex work in the Downtown Eastside, Hugill provides a powerful antidote to common-sense accounts of skid row as autogenetically produced.
However, while the account of urban dispossession is the strongest section of Missing Women, Missing News, the account of colonial dispossession is the weakest. Hugill adroitly recounts the gendered exclusions of federal Indian policy and notes the impact of residential schools. However, he fails to relate either of these policies to the broader strokes of the well-documented history of deterritorializing Aboriginal space through colonial land policies, as does Cole Harris in Making Native Space (UBC Press, 2002). This is a crucial lapse as the foundations of Vancouver rest with the historical reterritorialization of Aboriginal into colonial space and the concomitant disruption of the traditional kinship-based networks of social solidarity within Aboriginal communities. However, Hugill develops his arguments through inverted chronologies. Centering the withdrawal of the state through the last two decades within his critique, Hugill’s book can be read as a lament for the welfare state that fails to convey the extent to which that state was grounded in the historic dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and the disruption of their pre-existing networks of social solidarity.
Hugill registers the contested and contestable terrain of the political sphere. However, in failing to take a longue durée approach to colonialism, he misses the dynamic of colonial dispossession and Aboriginal resistance. Addressing this gap would fundamentally reorganize his argument, but it would also render it far more internally consistent as, for Hugill, a critique of silencing does not preclude the possibility of engaging subjugated knowledges. Indeed, his critique appears in part to be motivated by the way the media controlled the moment of crisis that the Pickton trial represented. The case of the missing and murdered women presented the opportunity to expose the workings of race, class, and gender in the neoliberal colonial state. Hugill effectively bares the ideological bias of the national newspaper coverage, but in penning a threnody to the welfare state, he inadvertently fails to account for his own ideological investment in colonial frameworks. In his conclusion, Hugill argues that it remains necessary to recognize the leadership of oppressed communities in struggles to reconstruct networks of social solidarity and to build a more fundamentally just world. This is a potent call to responsibility; following this call, however, entails extending the terms of Hugill’s analysis to position gendered violence and the criminalization of the Canadian margins within a critical history of the settler state.
Throughout the book, Mawani looks to track how “encounters between Chinese migrants, Aboriginal peoples, Europeans, and mixed-race populations in British Columbia prompted colonial agents, missionaries, and legal authorities to generate new forms of colonial knowledge and emergent practices of racial governance” (p. 5). Following a Foucauldian method, Mawani constructs her argument thematically, developing episodic accounts of colonial anxieties regarding cross-racial encounters and mixing in salmon canneries, prostitution and bondage, and the illegal liquor trade. Since the period of her study overlaps with the emergence of responsible government in Canada, Mawani does not bracket colonialism to the period of formal British rule. Instead, she registers how the shifting geographies of empire forged new connections and intimacies between variegated colonial diasporas and Aboriginal communities, and crafted enduring legacies of colonial thought and governance.
Mawani notes that analyzing the colonies demonstrates the falsity of Foucault's contrast between the modes of sovereign and biopolitical power. While Foucault articulated the shift from sovereign to biopolitical power as the transition from a regime controlling death to one governing life, Mawani demonstrates the simultaneity of these forms of power in early British Columbia. Rewriting Foucault's blinkered French theorizing through a study of colonial sites, Mawani demonstrates how in British Columbia “only some populations were invested with life. Others, in the interests of national purity and state security, were thought to endanger the (white) masses, albeit in different ways, and thus needed to be expunged and eliminated” (p. 29). Biopolitical control of processes of social interaction and reproduction sought to enact Aboriginal cultural death through racial improvement and discipline. Simultaneously but differently, Chinese people were relegated to a political death through their segregation and exclusion.
Colonial proximities extends Ann Laura Stoler's analysis of the development of colonial biopolitics in Race and the education of desire (1995), recognizing the multiplicity of the taxonomic field against which colonial officials sought to negotiate and maintain notions of racial purity. Like Stoler, Mawani centres an analysis of the productive capacity of racial anxieties, inciting the creation of new racial truths and mobilizing new forms of governance. However, beyond Stoler's emphasis on the constitutive role of colonial encounters in the construction of metropolitan identities, Mawani argues that the circuit of colonial knowledge production was not simply tied to the metropole but moved across multinodal colonial networks, as Richard Philips’ has argued in Sex, politics, and empire (2006).
Through this, Mawani is able to resituate Mary Louise Pratt's (2007) contact zone within “a wider analytic and historical approach” that recognizes the multiplicity of the cross-racial encounters between geographically and historically separated peoples (p. 5). Negotiating the racially variegated topography of the contact zone, colonial agents did not simply focus on a singular other but rather sought to control the extent and terms of multiple cross-racial encounters. To do so, colonial administrators drew upon global repertoires, integrating knowledge circulating through the globe to construct local racial truths and practices of governance. Thus, Mawani seeks to chart both “the conjunctive processes of colonial encounters and migrations in regional topography,” and “those global circuits of knowledge production and exchange” that epistemically joined disparate lands and peoples within the field of colonial knowledge (p. 207).
Mawani effectively traces the transnational weave of colonial negotiations of racial difference in British Columbia, but her account at times leaves elements of the Canadian national dynamics at play unstated. While the reader is readily apprised of the invocation of discourses of oriental despotism into local restrictions on members of the Chinese diaspora, the book provides slender details with which to understand British Columbia's uneasy place in relation to Canadian Indian policy. For example, terms such as “non-treaty Indians” (p. 196), derived from national debates on policing liquor among non-Status Indian populations in areas where the government determined Indian Status based on treaty rolls, needed to be further contextualized to understand their uneasy fit within British Columbia, where treaties were not signed throughout the majority of the province.
Further while the study crucially expands postcolonial discussions to register the plurality of racial contestations in the contact zone, Mawani continues to repeat and work within established frames of postcolonial discourse. Mawani documents the heterogeneity of state racisms; however, her recitation of postcolonial mantras about the fractured, inchoate, and vulnerable nature of “a white settler regime … fraught with inconsistent and competing colonial agendas” (p. 207) remains problematic. While fissures of colonial discourses render them unstable, and colonial practices never fix final boundaries, they have effectively derived longevity through their capacity for reinvention. Further, in targeting colonial discourses and practices, Mawani reinscribes their centrality and constitutes non-white people not as subjects in their own right, but rather as limits to colonial discourses and practices. This fails to register how change is not simply a product of contradictory drives within colonial regimes but also the resistance and ungovernability of colonized populations. Thus, it remains crucial that scholars construct not only critical histories of colonial discourses and practices, but also recognize those resilient affinities that remained beyond the scope of colonial governance. This trajectory is partially evident in Mawani's conclusions, which celebrates the affinities and friendships that Chinese and Aboriginal peoples are forging today, but remains a necessary agenda for both future research and political work.
References
Philips, R. 2006. Sex, politics and empire: A postcolonial geography. Manchester , UK : Manchester University Press.
Pratt, M. L. 2007. Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. 2nd ed. New York , NY : Routledge.
Stoler, A. L. 1995. Race and the education of desire: Foucault's history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham , NC : Duke University Press.