Unsettling as agency: unsettling settler colonialism where you are

Abstract

ABSTRACT A great deal of recent sociological scholarship in Canada has examined the ‘unsettling' process motivating non-Natives or ‘settlers' to act in solidarity with Indigenous movements and their experiences of becoming unsettled through such engagements. Informed by settler colonialism and Indigenous studies concerns, such conceptualizations of unsettling have focused primarily on individual trajectories', in conjunction with an overriding normative emphasis on settlers’ active support for, and accountability to, Indigenous leadership.While invaluable, these predominating conerns leave open questions about the scope of appropriate agency for non-Native people in challenging settler colonialism. Scholarship to date lacks an explicit affirmative model for settlers to interrupt the routine institutional reproduction of settler colonial understandings, discourses and practices, which also limits its applicability to the United States context. Drawing upon sociological concerns with the institutional and organizational reproduction of power, the article discusses and disentangles differing notions of unsettling and suggests that, under larger covering norms of following Indigenous leadership and relationality, settlers can actively destabilize the reproduction of settler colonial reality through a disruptive form of quotidian agency wherever they are.