Rekinning the homeland: Rurality, gender-based genocide, and Indigenous sovereignty in colonial Canada

Abstract

In the colonial state of Canada, rurality is quintessentially necropolitical, a technology of colonial nation building that has forcibly displaced hundreds of sovereign Indigenous nations to accommodate white occupation. Throughout vast rural social geographies that remain conservative political strongholds, Indigenous peoples living in their ancestral homelands are positioned as contaminants of dignified white rural life and obstacles to food and resource exploitation, agri-industrial expansion, and growing multicultural diversity. Under colonial rural logics, Indigenous bodies are disposable and ungrievable, in deeply gendered and sexualized ways. In this paper, I draw on Achille Mbembé’s concept of necropolitics to examine rural genocide as a form of colonial and neocolonial settler placemaking, with a specific focus on gender-based violence as one form of enacted necropolitics. I examine how stark racial rural inequities precipitate racialized-gendered death by enabling incessant white entitlement to Indigenous lands and bodies, allowing what the United Nations has called the gender-based genocide of Indigenous girls, women, and 2Spirit people to occur with impunity. I then consider the imperial logics of homesteading as a new/old settler tactic emerging under new anthropogenic and pandemic-related pressures, where urbanites seeking rural escapes fuel the colonial appropriation and commodification of sacred Indigenous land-based knowledges while eroding already precarious Indigenous territories. I conclude by exploring how reimplicating increasingly mobile and urbanized Indigenous young people in kinscapes—mobile, temporal circles of relations with their kin and homelands—might fortify vital Indigenous land and body sovereignties and unsettle colonial necropolitical rural ontologies.