White settler death drives: settler statecraft, white possession, and multiple colonialisms under Treaty 6

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes histories of white settler colonial violence in Treaty 6 territory by arguing that the 1870 Hudson’s Bay Company charter and transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada helped to make past imperial violence an ongoing settler colonial terror structure into the present. It argues that this transition from imperial to settler colonial control of territory is best understood by using a multiple colonialisms framework, to examine the ways in which heteropatriarchal family structures transitioned from Indigenous-European to white settler kin networks that crystallized whiteness as a racialized means to control land as private property. Following Kanien’kehá:ka feminist scholar Audra Simpson’s work, I suggest that this territory’s multiple and overlapping colonial histories (French, English/British, and Canadian) are a crucial lens through which to understand the historical and ongoing formation of Canada as a white settler state, and that these histories still relationally drive anti-Indigenous violence and the settler killing of Indigenous peoples today. The essay concludes by arguing that the seeming daily placidity of white settler violence against Plains Indigenous peoples under Treaty 6 ultimately supports a relational violence that supports a killing state and its armed citizens in the name of protecting private property for white settlers.