Legibility, misrecognition and the Aboriginal Peoples Survey: understanding knowledge production as a settler-colonial project

Abstract

ABSTRACT Knowledge production has been integral to colonial projects and the making of the contemporary state. This paper brings these two processes together in the contemporary settler-colonial context of Canada, arguing that knowledge production remains a central technology in the contemporary (re)production of settler sovereignty. The paper uses the Aboriginal Peoples Survey as a case study, reading it through the lenses of legibility and a politics of misrecognition to advance an understanding of the Survey as a “settler project.” Not only does the Survey reinforce the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, but this erasure and misrecognition work together to limit the “universe of policy possibility” by establishing an evidence base that enables further colonial policymaking interventions. In doing so, such projects reaffirm the existing colonial relations of power between Indigenous nations and the settler state rather than supporting Indigenous self-determination through policymaking.