‘The depth of the plough’: white settler tautologies and pioneer lies

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the concept of the white settler tautology – something that seems true by the very nature of its repetition and logical irrefutability in white settler histories, stories, and laws – to analyze the naturalization of settler colonial topographies and ecologies of Mi’kma’ki (Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag territory in Atlantic Canada). Settler tautologies such as written Biblical and visual art historical references to oxen and plough clearing lands and Acadian coastal dyke irrigation systems each advance the figure of a pacified, willing Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag subject. This erases the histories of wilful, resistant, and complex Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag whose ongoing presence evokes an ongoing settler violence that settlers do not want to see. We argue that white settler tautologies not only provide cyclical rationales to justify white settler nativism to claim originary European ownership of colonized Indigenous lands, but also violently declared evidence of white settler nativism in the name of white settler futurity through the re-interpretation of treaty and kin. We further suggest that the importance of understanding the violence of white settler tautologies, past and present, is that they still help to justify historical and continuous genocidal occupation in Mi’kma’ki since European invasion began in 1604. To reject such tautological logic is to make visible the unbroken presence of resilient and resistant Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag that white settlers have dispossessed and tried to eliminate for 400 years.