Settler biopower: accumulation and dispossession in Canada’s Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement

Abstract

ABSTRACTThrough the example of Canada’s 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), this article explores the work of settler biopower within seemingly progressive policies of inclusion. The IRSSA catalyzed a range of policy initiatives, aimed at the reconciliation of Indigenous/settler populations as well as the constitution of a national redress climate, together with a relatively private, unprecedented compensatory regime. The management and regulation of Indigenous populations to the ends of dispossession and displacement – via genocidal practices or amalgamation – are characteristic of settler biopower. This article explores the Canadian discourse of reconciliation and the logic of ‘healing’ as biopolitical technologies of settler governmentality. In the context of the IRSSA, settler biopower works to ‘make heal’ Indigenous populations and ‘let die’ pathologised Indigenous refusal. The products of the IRSSA’s work of statement gathering, regulating compensation, national event planning, and history making are both ephemeral and material. The engagement of participants, both Indigenous and settler, results in psycho-affective yields; these emotions, experiences, and new memories ossify into the new, shared archive of the settler state. This generative mode of settler biopower perpetuates settler primitive accumulation of Indigenous lands via dispossession, working beyond land, toward the dispossession of Indigenous bodies and the yields therein: desire, affect, and imaginaries.