(Re)mapping Akikodjiwan: Spatial Logics of Dispossession in the Settler-Colonial City

Abstract

This article examines the socio-spatial reproduction of settler-colonial urbanism at a contested site of urban development in Canada’s capital city. Akikodjiwan is an Algonquin sacred site on the Ottawa River (Kichi Sibi) and the location of a large-scale private real estate development project. Using the Access to Information Act, this article demonstrates how the Canadian government—led by the National Capital Commission—orchestrated a land transfer to the developers amid long-standing calls by the Algonquins to have the land returned. This article contributes to understandings of the positioning of the settler city at the center of the spatial logic of coloniality in Canada, as a site of the deployment of socio-spatial strategies of settler-colonial governance and property relations, but also as a site of Indigenous resistance. Transpiring in a purported climate of reconciliation, the remapping of Akikodjiwan demonstrates the ongoing spatial implications and role of place making in settler-colonial city making, where racialized logics and regimes of private property are mobilized in an attempt to dispossess and exclude Indigenous peoples from their lands, alongside the simultaneous transfer of thousands of settlers onto an Algonquin sacred site.