The continuity of settler colonial narratives: the diary of a nineteenth-century dominion land surveyor and the enduring language of harm

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the writings of a prominent Canadian nineteenth-century land surveyor and scientist to show the continuity of settler colonial narratives from his time until ours. As a Dominion Lands Surveyor, Otto Julius Klotz (1851–1923) was part of the vanguard of his white-supremacist, expansionistic, industrializing society; a group of front-line invaders who facilitated the taking of land from Indigenous people and nations, and transferred it to mostly white men. Employing a biographical microhistorical approach to settler colonialism, this research examines Klotz’s personal diary and the events contained in it. Klotz was able to live the ideals of heteropatriarchal white masculinity and middle-class respectability, and his voluminous, life-long diary demonstrates the ways in which his privilege was actively advanced by dehumanizing others. I show the ways this land surveyor mourned the world he was destroying at the same time as he celebrated the world he was bringing into being, and how this apparent contradiction is central to settler colonialism and anti-Indigenous racism, and is still with us today. I argue that understanding the continuity of settler colonial narratives can help us to better understand our world while we strive to construct decolonial narratives and find ways to reconnect to one another and the land.