Dispossession by municipalization: Property, pipelines, and divisions of power in settler colonial Canada

Abstract

In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process that subverts Indigenous authority to the state, then delegates forms of state authority to Indigenous peoples, and concludes by asserting that delegated authority satisfies the terms of Indigenous self-determination. This article centers municipalization in two steps that connect it to how Canada divides power regarding foreign and domestic affairs. The first examines the history of municipalization and its evolution alongside changes in Canadian federalism. The second examines dispossession by municipalization to show how state divisions of power facilitate extraction of value from land. It uses a case where the federal government considered creating new, privatized reserves of Indigenous land explicitly to facilitate oil pipelines. Together, these support an argument that municipalization is not only a powerful language of critique, but critical to understanding the on-going production of settler colonial space.