Settler colonial conscripts: Mennonite reserves and the enfolding of implicated subjects

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ABSTRACT Indigenous resurgence movements in states like Canada and the U.S. have challenged immigrant and settler groups to confront their presence on colonized lands, and transform their relations with land and with Indigenous peoples. Part of this process of re-evaluation entails immigrant groups within the national order considering the ways in which they become implicated in the reproduction of what Patrick Wolfe (2006) calls ‘the logic of elimination’. Taking inspiration from Jodi Byrd’s challenge to rethink dichotomies in settler colonialism, and utilizing Michael Rothberg’s (2019) framing of ‘the implicated subject’, this paper explores the conditions under which Russian Mennonites immigrated to Canada in the 1870s. It traces the ways that Mennonite reserve communities were subtly and overtly incorporated into settler colonial formations and its binaries, helping to illuminate the power and pull of everyday economic aspects of settling entangled with racial and political settler colonial formations. This examination of a racially privileged but self-identifying dissenting community explores the ways in which settler colonial nation building works to subtly and overtly incorporate populations into settler-native binaries despite their professed innocence and even dissent.