Colonial Canada Research Articles

Gambling with the Windigo: Theorizing Indigenous Casinos and Gambling in Canada

The legacy of colonialism in Canada manifests through land dispossession, structural violence and assimilative policies. Casinos are an anomaly emerging in Canada, becoming major economic engines, generating capital for housing, education, health, and language and cultural rejuvenation programs. On the other hand, the literature on Indigenous casinos raises crucial questions about compromised sovereignty, addiction, and neocolonial economic and political entrapment. This article theorises Indigenous casinos as a modern expression of the windigo. In Algonquian oral history, the windigo is a mythic giant cannibal. The underlying meaning of the windigo is the consumption of Indigenous peoples leading to illness and death. One can become a windigo and consume others, and one must always be cautious of this possibility. I propose casinos and Indigenous-provincial gambling revenue agreements are modern-day windigook (plural form of windigo). This framework provides an urgently needed new theorisation of casinos, grounded in Indigenous epistemology and ontology.

Graphic Reminders: Confronting Colonialism in Canada through Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story

David Alexander Robertson’s 2015 graphic novel Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story connects non-Indigenous Canadians to the racial realities of Canada’s intentionally forgotten past. Robertson translates Helen Betty Osborne’s biography into the accessible format of the graphic novel which allows for a wide range of readers to connect present day racial injustices to the past, generating new understandings surrounding violence against Indigenous peoples in Canada. Helen Betty Osborne, a young female Cree student was abducted and murdered in 1971, targeted for her race and gender. The horrors Betty experienced reveal the connection between her story and the contemporary narrative of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada. Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story deconstructs Betty’s life from the violence she is subjected to, personifying a historical figure. The graphic novel allows for a visual collision of past and present to express the cycle of colonial violence in Canada ignored by non-Indigenous Canadians despite its continued socio-economic and political impact on Indigenous peoples. As an Indigenous author, Robertson preserves the integrity of Indigenous voice and revives an integral gendered and racialized historical perspective that is necessary to teach. This close reading of Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story explores how Robertson uses the graphic novel to revive history and in doing so, demonstrates connections between past and present patterns of racial injustice against Indigenous women in Canada today.

Settler Colonial Structures of Domestication: British Home Children in Canada

There has been a surge of research on Home Children in the past several decades, as the phenomenon previously unknown to many came into the spotlight. However, much of the historical research has focused on either the psychological and physical impacts on the children at the hands of their new “families” (there were many reports of child abuse and neglect) or the ways they were saved from their poverty in Britain by being sent to the colonies. This article will put this existing historical research into conversation with theories of settler colonialism, considering Home Children as a tool of domestication for the social reproduction of Canadian white settler society, which was paired with the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This analysis stems from and is intertwined with personal reflections on my own family history as a white settler woman descending from a Home Child to explore the gendered labour of social reproduction as a crucial pillar in creating and maintaining settler colonial Canada. Following Lorenzo Veracini’s argument that settler colonialism is a distinct structure that uses domestication as one of its key tenets and relies on its “regenerative capacity”, this paper will explore how British Home Children were a key component of settler colonialism in Canada and how this history has manifested in the current gendered, racialized, and classed politics of “settling”.

Fuelling toxic relations: Oil sands and settler colonialism in Canada

How does the often‐invisible nature of pollution affect people's physical health and psychosocial relations, and their well‐being near major industrial projects? Based on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Alberta, Canada, this article explores this question by focusing on oil sands extraction on Cree, Dené and Métis nations' homelands with its environmental and socio‐cultural consequences. Looking at different forms of dispossessions and Indigenous concepts of relationality and home, the author argues that pollution should be seen as an act of settler violence instead of merely a by‐product of industry.

The Representations of British North America in the British Press after the American Revolution (c. 1783–1815)

The ways Britons imagined and represented their British North American colonies after the loss of the thirteen colonies in 1783 is a theme that is largely under researched. Through the study of British newspapers, both London-based and local, this article aims at understanding what images and representations Britons had of their Canadian colonies from the end of the War of Independence to the end of the War of 1812. Such analysis shows British North America offered more than the image of “a few acres of snow”. It also explores the manners in which those images of North America sprang from and contributed to the spreading of the imperial propaganda in the British public sphere.

“Eskimo” Immigrants and Colonial Soldiers: Icelandic Immigrants and the North-West Resistance, 1885

How did marginalized and racialized ethnic immigrants transform themselves into active, armed colonial agents in nineteenth-century Western Canada? Approximately twenty Icelanders enlisted to fight Louis Riel’s forces during the North-West Resistance in 1885, just ten years following the arrival of Icelandic immigrants in present-day Manitoba. Forty more reportedly enlisted in an Icelandic-Canadian battalion to enforce the government’s victory in the fall. This public, armed stance of a group of Icelanders against Indigenous forces in 1885 is somewhat unexpected, since most Icelanders were relatively recent arrivals in the West and, in Winnipeg, members of the largely unskilled urban working class. Moreover, they were widely rumoured among Winnipeggers to be from a “blubber-eating race” and of “Eskimo” extraction; community accounts testify to the discrimination numerous early Icelanders faced in the city. These factors initially make Icelanders unexpected colonialists, particularly since nineteenth-century ethnic immigration and colonial suppression so often appear as separate processes in Canadian historiography. Indeed, this scholarship is characterized by an enduring belief that Western Canadian colonialism was a distinctly Anglo sin. Ethnic immigrants often appear in scholarly and popular histories as sharing a history of marginalization with Indigenous people that prevented migrants from taking part in colonial displacement. Proceeding from the neglected history of Icelandic enlistment in 1885 and new developments in Icelandic historiography, this article argues that rather than negating ethnic participation in Indigenous suppression, ethnic marginality and the class tensions it created could actually fuel participation in colonial campaigns, which promised immigrants upward mobility, access to state support, and land.

Decolonial Performance Practice: Witnessing with an Ethic of Incommensurability

The starting premise of this paper is that our current crisis of environmental degradation is inextricably linked with capitalist, colonial and patriarchal exploitation. If environmental and colonial histories are co-constitutive, then performing ecology needs to attend to structures of power that function to control human relationships to land and the nonhuman world. In this paper, I will explore the act of witnessing another’s story in the context of settler colonial Canada through my personal experience as a settler Canadian watching Cree playwright and performer Cliff Cardinal’s solo show, Huff, which premiered in 2015 and has since gone on to tour nationally and internationally. How do we witness something outside ourselves in a way that recognises relationship and difference? Drawing on theories of witnessing and incommensurability, I explore what being an ethical witness to another’s story in theatre and performance might look like, especially when a play like Huff is situated in Canada’s supposed era of Truth and Reconciliation.

Review: A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada, by Cole Harris

Review: <i>A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada</i>, by Cole Harris

W(h)ither the Indian Act? How Statutory Law Is Rewriting Canada’s Settler Colonial Formation

This article documents how the Indian Act, the historic legal regime structuring settler colonialism in Canada, is being displaced by new statutory law, as nearly fifty federal statutes passed by successive governments between 2005 and 2020 rewrite First Nations land, taxation, resource, and governance regimes. I focus attention on these new laws, asking how they differ in instrument and ideology from the Indian Act. Particularly, I explore how new legislation responds to the Indian Act’s (unintended) affirmation of the unique political status of Indigenous peoples and manages the long-sedimented legal and regulatory differences between reserve and Canadian jurisdictions. Transferring our attention from the Indian Act to actual sites of legislative activity, we are better positioned to perceive, critique, and challenge the evolving formation of settler colonialism in Canada today.

Racial stereotyping of indigenous people in the Canadian media: A comparative analysis of two water pollution incidents.

This article examines the discourse surrounding issues affecting Indigenous peoples within the Canadian mainstream media. We compare the coverage of two cases of water poisonings-one in a primarily-white town and the other in an Indigenous community-in 282 newspaper articles from the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Windspeaker. We show that the dominant coverage of these two very similar cases diverged significantly. The Indigenous workers in charge of the water supply were regarded as incompetent and incapable to fill their position while the entire community was described as drunk, lazy, helpless, and perpetually dependent on government aide. By contrast, white workers were seen as relatable and in command of their erroneous actions, while the residents of the town were described simply as the victims of an unfortunate tragedy. Such reporting fails to contextualize the events or point out the injustices of Canadian colonialism, thus contributing to the perpetuation of these injustices.

Disrupting Settler-Colonial Capitalism: Indigenous Intifadas and Resurgent Solidarity from Turtle Island to Palestine

This article explores the resurgence of Indigenous/Palestine solidarity during the Wet’suwet’en land sovereignty struggle in Canada that took place around the same time Donald Trump’s Middle East “peace plan” was released in early 2020. Historicizing this resurgence within a longer period of anti-colonial resistance, the article attends to the distinct historical, political-economic, and juridical formations that undergird settler colonialism in Canada and Israel/Palestine. It contends with the theoretical limits of the settler-colonial framework, pushing back against narratives of settler success, and shows how anti-colonial resistance accelerated economic crises that led both settler states to enter into “negotiations” with the colonized (reconciliation in one case, and peace talks in the other) as a strategy to maintain capitalist settler control over stolen lands. The analysis also sheds light on a praxis of solidarity that has implications for movement building and joint struggle.

Scriptural Relations: Colonial Formations of Anishinaabemowin Bibles in Nineteenth-Century Canada

In 1829 Anishinaabe chief and Methodist minister Kahkewaquonaby, or Peter Jones, published his first translation of the Christian bible into Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), an edition of the first seven chapters of the Gospel of Matthew printed in Toronto by the colonial government in Canada. This publication was soon followed by Anishinaabemowin translations of other Christian scriptures including the Gospel of John published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in London, England (1831) and Genesis published by the Toronto Auxiliary Bible Society in Toronto (1835). Despite deep imbrications in Indigenous, religious, political, and print histories of the country—and by contrast to vibrant scholarship produced on Indigenous-language bibles published in the United States—scholars have paid relatively little critical attention to Indigenous-language bible translation in colonial Canada. This article examines the materiality of Jones’s bible translations to argue that Indigenous-language bible translations mediated a range of relations between and among Indigenous peoples, missionaries, and colonial agents. In so doing, this paper shows how books can serve as useful archival objects to construct histories of religion and colonialism in North America, and how Indigenous-language bibles can reveal Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.

The racialized logics of settler colonial policing: Indigenous ‘communities of concern’ and critical infrastructure in Canada

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, critical infrastructure has become a central organizing node of national security policing. At the same time, ongoing Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism in Canada has highlighted the centrality of critical infrastructure as a network of dispossession, a focal point for insecurity governance practices, and a fixation of settler colonial policing efforts. Scrutinizing an internal police report released under Canada’s Access to Information Act, this article examines how Indigenous communities have been framed as a primary threat to the country’s critical infrastructure. This article contributes to recent scholarly work examining the evolution of critical infrastructure protection and resilience in the Canadian context, including the integration of private sector corporations as security peers within a reorganized national security environment. In particular, it emphasizes the racialized ideological formations of settler colonialism that code and surveil Indigenous communities who assert self-determination as a source of menace to the vital systems and networks that sustain the prosperity of settler society on stolen Indigenous land.

Settler colonialism’s container technologies: photographing crates in the Canadian Arctic (1926–1953)

ABSTRACT Wooden crates are a recurring subject in the visual archive of settler colonialism in Canada’s Arctic, appearing on the shores of eastern Baffin Island throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Reading some of the hundreds of photographs that appear in the holdings of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, this essay charts the symbolic and political work that crates performed in the settler colonial imaginary. It draws on David L. Eng’s call to examine the ‘colonial object relations’ that have split Indigenous subjects into ‘good and bad objects’ in the liberal imaginary to propose that wooden crates are symptomatic of settler colonialism’s unconscious drive to make and unmake Inuit subjects into citizens in response to the demands of national and transnational political events. Tracing the intersection of crates, photography and ballot boxes in the archive, the essay examines the settler colonial state’s attempts at imposing and consolidating power, but also points to the practices of continuity and resistance enacted by Inuit subjects.

“Theorizing Our Place”: Indigenous Women’s Scholarship from 1985-2020 and the Emerging Dialogue with Anti-racist Feminisms

In this article, I review contemporary Indigenous women’s scholarship, describing transformations from 1985 to the present, first to characterize this scholarship on its own terms and second to situate this literature with respect to recent, nascent dialogues with anti-racist feminisms. What is the focus and range of Indigenous women’s scholarship, from 1985 until today? What does this work seek to do, that is, what are the intertwined political and scholarly aims of this scholarship? I suggest that Indigenous women’s scholarly writing is concerned with resilience, or survival, resistanceor challenges to colonial power and relationships, and resurgence, or a turning-inward to renew Indigenous knowledges and practices. In the discussion, I briefly consider how the increasingly rich and diverse field of Indigenous women’s theorizing and praxis informs an emerging dialogue with anti-racist feminist scholars within the academy and in the broader context of colonial Canada.

Take and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Democratic Colonialism in Canada

Tillotson’s Give and Take is a major contribution to Canadian history, a highly engaging analysis of culture and politics in the critical yet wildly understudied field of fiscal policy. The book makes the persuasive argument that the taxpayer was never somehow anathema to the citizen but rather that the two figures were mutually constitutive. After presenting a general overview of the Give and Take, this review considers its treatment of First Nations and taxation. While the book fruitfully covers the topic, the review argues that Tillotson might have used her material to profile not the rise of Canadian democracy but that of democratic colonialism in Canada.

Temporal trends of essential omega-3 fatty acids in Atlantic and Pacific food webs as measured in eggs of Leach’s storm-petrel Oceanodroma leucorhoa

Leach’s storm-petrel Oceanodroma leucorhoa populations in the North Atlantic have declined in recent decades. The cause of those declines is not clear but one potential contributing factor could be reductions in the availability of essential nutrients due to changing marine ecology resulting from global warming. One group of particular concern is the omega-3 highly unsaturated fatty acids (n-3 HUFAs), in particular, eicosapentaenoic (EPA) and docosahexaenoic (DHA) acids. Dietary sources of EPA and DHA are required for normal growth and development in higher consumers, including birds. However, previous work has predicted increases in sea surface temperatures may cause declines in their availability. Here, we investigate this possibility by examining temporal trends (1992-2015) in EPA and DHA concentrations in Leach’s storm-petrel eggs from 5 Canadian colonies: 2 on the Atlantic coast (Gull, Kent Islands) and 3 on the Pacific coast (Hippa, Storm, Cleland Islands). Neither EPA nor DHA concentrations in eggs decreased with time on either coast; rather, on the Atlantic coast, both EPA and DHA increased over the period of study. Carbon stable isotopes in the same eggs indicated that storm-petrels foraging in offshore, pelagic waters may have had increased access to n-3 HUFA. The data generated here provide a baseline for future comparisons. Ongoing regular monitoring of fatty acids in seabird eggs would be prudent given the likelihood of further increases in ocean temperatures.

Toward an ethics of decolonizing allyship in climate organizing: reflections on Extinction Rebellion Vancouver

Since launching in the UK in 2018, Extinction Rebellion (XR) has become a global social movement that uses mass civil disobedience to pressure governments to take immediate action on the climate crisis. While XR has shifted the conversation on climate change, it has also been critiqued for its lack of attention to privilege and oppression, and for its ‘apolitical’ approach to climate organizing. In this article, we argue that XR must develop an intersectional approach in order to address the climate crisis. In particular, we reflect on our experiences as participants in XR-Vancouver, located on unceded Indigenous territory in the settler colonial state of Canada. Settler colonialism in Canada is intertwined with the climate and ecological crises, as Canada's status as a petrostate is built on the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples through a strategy of racial extractivism. To attend to these dynamics, we build on Kyle Powys Whyte's concept of ‘decolonizing allyship’ and suggest three ethics – of relational accountability, care, and incommensurability – that settler-led movements like XR can cultivate. We conclude by inviting XR to (re)engage with a ‘politics of refusal’ that subverts the state and allows XR to collectively enact what different systems (rooted in intersectional, decolonizing allyship) could look like.

“It should be equal across the board”: how treaty opposition among hunters and anglers upholds settler colonialism in Canada

ABSTRACT The Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) is an influential organization that has opposed Indigenous peoples’ treaty harvesting rights and land claims for allegedly threatening conservation and egalitarian values. Using data from twenty semi-structured interviews and the OFAH’s official documents, this paper analyses and compares the views on treaty rights between the OFAH leadership and ordinary hunters and fishers inside and outside the organization. Group Position and Colour-Blind Racism theories were used to understand how the meanings and perceived legitimacy of treaty rights are constructed and negotiated, and whether treaty opposition reflects a response to maintain settler-Canadians’ group position. Although nine respondents displayed varying degrees of support for treaty rights, the general pattern showed that both the OFAH and most respondents drew on similar interpretive repertoires to oppose treaty rights. These latter responses reveal a defensive reaction to uphold settler-colonial power, privileges, and access to land and resources.

Demobilised Soldiers, Small Holdings Colonies and the Compulsory Acquisition of Land after World War One: Scotland and Canada

This article compares the Small Holdings Colonies Acts (1916 and 1918) for demobilized WWI soldiers in Britain upon which the Land Settlement (Scotland) Act of 1919 was established; and similar small holdings colonies for demobilized soldiers in Canada with a particular focus on provisions for the state to engage in compulsory acquisition of land for this purpose. My research shows in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, colonies and compulsory acquisition of land under the 1919 Act were part of a larger land reform movement (breaking up large estates) and represent progressive advances for traditional occupants – the crofters and tenant farmers – to have rights over their own lands. In Canada, on the other hand, domestic colonies for British soldiers served to displace indigenous peoples from their reserves already vastly diminished compared to traditional territories. The compulsory acquisition of land through surrenders from reserves compounded the problem. As such colonies in Canada had negative impacts on indigenous peoples as part of an ongoing settler colonization process. Thus I show that small holdings colonies particularly when combined with compulsory acquisition of land work in opposite directions normatively and materially in each country.