Settler Colonialism in Canada: Perspectives, Comparisons, and Cases

Canada is a long-established settler colonial nation state; and yet very few Canadians understand what this means historically or for present-day reconciliatory and decolonial efforts. We could characterize settler colonial Canada as a nation state structured to exploit, marginalize, and assimilate Indigenous peoples (Green 1995), and to exterminate Indigenous specific populations, resource use, inherent rights, and overall livelihoods (Coulthard 2014). Decolonization is the dismantling of any (imperial or settler) colonial inequities and the resurgence of Indigenous-centred political, legal, and social constructs. Increasingly, critiques of Canada’s decolonial and reconciliatory frameworks demonstrate inadequacies in these attempts. Much of this is because settler colonialism is insidious, difficult to detect and dismantle, and relatively under-studied in Canada. Additionally, reconciliation and decolonization jeopardize the very survival of the settler colonial enterprise, which is premised on the elimination of Indigenous peoples (or, at a minimum, Indigenous difference). This project therefore focuses on responses from Indigenous peoples, racialized minorities, and settlers to understand in order to dismantle the insidious nature of oppression unique to settler colonialism.

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Joining in on the events

All events around the Settler Colonialism in Canada: Perspectives, Comparisons, Cases project will be hybrid or entirely online, and accessible through Zoom.

Since the talks are meant to be workshopped so that they can continue changing,
the events will not be recorded.

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Settler Colonialism in Canada: Perspectives, Comparisons, and Cases
A Hybrid Conference – Virtual Invitation September 23-25, 2022

While Canada has long been a settler colonial nation-state, there remains little scholarship on what this means, in particular for decolonization and reconciliation initiatives. Settler Colonialism in Canada: Perspectives, Comparisons, Cases intends to bring together existing interdisciplinary scholarship to develop their own new and innovative scholarship on this subject matter.

Settler colonialism is a concept used to describe Canadian governance and society. It refers both to the ongoing systemic colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples and the overall organization of state and society to maintain control over lands and resources. Settler colonialism in Canada finds its roots in legal fictions such as terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has outlined as the underlying logic behind the Indian Residential School system as one instrument of colonialism. The series of outreach activities we propose will engage with the many facets of the logics of this legal fiction in Canada’s social, political, legal, economic, and cultural structures.

Through a series of virtual and in-person conference activities, we aim to share the most up-to-date knowledge in this field as it pertains to Canada. We invite the public to join us virtually for a community and academic conference from September 23-25, 2022.

Zoom link: (no registration required).

Hybrid conference: September 23, 24, and 25, 2022
https://uregina-ca.zoom.us/j/96961073706?pwd=ejk5SDZDSFNKVXQyc21JTEUxcXFEZz09
Meeting ID: 969 6107 3706
Passcode: 988526

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Date & Time	Activity	Presenters
FRIDAY	SEPTEMBER 23
4:00-4:30 MDT	Welcome & opening prayer	Elder Alma Poitras Karen Clarke, Acquisitions Editor, UR Press
4:30-5:45	Panel 1	Jerome Melancon – Relying upon the Colonial Project: Francophone Communities in Minority Settings within the Bilingual Settler Colonial StateEmily Grafton – Resistance and Resurgence: Asserting Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Settler Colonial CanadaDavid MacDonald – Title TBD
6:00-8:00	Keynote 1	Keynote 1: A Dialogue with Jim Daschuk & Floyd Favel
SATURDAY	SEPTEMBER 24
9:00-9:15	Welcome
9:15-10:30	Panel 2	Paul Simard Smith – Political Illegitimacy and Structural Injustice in the Canadian Legal OrderHuma Haider – A Settler Twice Over in a Changing Canadian Landscape: The Importance of Knowledge, Acknowledgement and Respect to Indigenous-Settler Reconciliation Martha Jane Robbins – Treaty Land Sharing NetworkDon Jackson – Indian Residential Schools, Language Destruction, and the “Treaty Relationship” with Canada
10:30-10:45	Nutrition break
10:45- 12:00	Panel 3	Elaine Coburn & Enakshi Dua – Deconstructing Land Acknowledgements: Moving Beyond Settler InnocenceBevann Fox – Excerpts from Genocidal Love (2020, UR Press)Kristin Desjarlais-deKlerk – Decolonising the Spaces Intended to DecoloniseMalissa Bryan – Unsettled Arrivants: Imagining Black & Indigenous Solidarity Under Settler Colonialism
12:00-12:30	Lunch
12:30-1:45	Panel 4	Emily Eaton – Should Environmentalists Work to Phase Out Canada?Leo Baskatawang – Writing to Writings and the Right to Right EducationAyumi Goto – On the Merits of being an AssholeLiam Midzain-Gobin- Imperial Circulation, Implicatedness and Co-Conspiracy: Racialized Interruptions of Settler Colonialism in Canada
1:45 -2:00	Nutrition break
2:00 -3:15	Panel 5	Karine Duhamel – “I feel like my spirit knows violence”: Understanding Intergenerational Perspectives on Genocide related to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ PeopleDana Hickey – Title TBDRita Dhamoon – Bigger than Settler Colonialism: Sikh Responsibilities towards Political Sovereignty, Sikh Dreams for an Otherwise World
3:15-3:30	Nutrition break
3:30-4:45	Panel 6	Priscilla Settee – Owanihikewak (trappers) and the landJoyce Green – Rights and Responsibilities: Indigenous Realities, Indigenous PrioritiesRosemary Nagy – Settler Research: From a Place of Not Knowing
SUNDAY	SEPTEMBER 25
9:15-9:30	Welcome
9:00-10:15	Panel 7	Ajay Parasram – ‘The Shade of Brown Between Master and Slave’: Transnational Imperial Refraction and Settler ColonialismRebecca Major – Indigenous Exhaustion in Polite SocietyCory Snelgove – On ImplicationCarla Taunton & Leah Dector – Title TBD
10:15-10:30	Nutrition break
10:30-11:45	Panel 8	Jeff Denis – Treaty Partners? Indigenous and Settler Perspectives on Treaties as a Foundation for ReconciliationHeena Mistry – Dismantling Systemic Racism and Settler Colonialism in Canadian UniversitiesFazeela Jiwa – On Shitheads and Revolutionaries: Claiming Kin and SolidarityLori Campbell – Indigenous Dreams of an Abolitionist Educational Experience
11:45-1:00	Lunch with Keynote 2	Keynote 2: A dialogue with Alma & Evelyn Poitras – Title TBD
12:45-1:00	Thank you & Closing Prayer	Elder Alma Poitras

Virtual Schedule

As part of this conference series, we will add two shorter virtual conference workshops on October 1 and 7, details still to come.

Virtual conference workshop: October 1, 2022

https://uregina-ca.zoom.us/j/98729668966?pwd=bGZUZHVWQnUzVUVEbFpLMjV0ZkxCdz09

Meeting ID: 987 2966 8966
Passcode: 919809

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Virtual conference workshop: October 7, 2022

Join Zoom Meeting

https://uregina-ca.zoom.us/j/93643611161?pwd=emxXOHhPL0ZrcW8rdmx3SFlsTUNOUT09
Meeting ID: 936 4361 1161
Passcode: 391803

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Canadian Settler Colonialism: Reliving the Past, Opening New Paths
Virtual Graduate Student Symposium October 14, 2022

What does contemporary settler colonialism look like in Canada, and what reconciliatory and decolonial strategies exist to resist and counter its effects? What historical processes and policies have led to the current moment, and how are these processes and policies present today under new guises? 

This symposium aims to collect contributions toward a collective effort to chart how the history of settler colonialism is carried and lived in the present, and what acts of resistance and resurgence are being undertaken to unmake it. Combining academic disciplines and lived experience, its result will be an Open Educational Resource, free of use, made available online to everyone without registration through the University of Regina Open Textbooks program (https://opentextbooks.uregina.ca/).

This collection, focusing primarily on settler colonialism in Canada (with some comparative examples from other western settler states), will be a timely contribution to the fields of Indigenous studies, race studies, Canadian politics, and settler colonial studies. While the collection will focus on Canada as a settler state, we acknowledge and will recognize that borders are imposed and porous and that the territories, places, and personal and collective trajectories affected by settler colonialism are not contained in “Canada.”

Zoom link: (no registration required).

https://uregina-ca.zoom.us/j/91473168927?pwd=VGNzekowQU00dUNkREV4L1ZIL2hNdz09

Meeting ID: 914 7316 8927
Passcode: 626697

Virtual Schedule

Time	Activity	Presenters
8 am MDT	Welcome
8:15-9:30	Origins and Geneses.	Janice Feng, Cultivating Disposition: The Settler-Colonial Education of Nature and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Nouvelle-FranceEmily Davidson, Case Study on William Brown and Thomas Gilmore’s letter to William Dunlap, 1768: Connecting Territory Network Methodology to the History of Slavery in CanadaSherjan Maybanting, “Insidious Oppression”
9:30-10	Break
10-11:40	Disappearances, Erasures, Confinements.	Keara Lightning, Environmental Management and the Erasure of Indigenous EcologiesSanchari Sur, Interrogating Canada’s “Happy” Multiculturalism through the Subaltern Ghost in Soraya Peerbaye’s TellKate Motluk, Abolition as Decolonization: Contemporary Colonial Violence in Canadian Carceral SpacesCleo Nguyen, ““To Serve and Protect” (Settler-Colonialism): the “Raison d’etre” of Canada’s Law Enforcement””
11:40-12:40	Lunch break
12:40-14:20.	Contemporary Figures.	Kathleen E. Mah, COVID-19, Public Health, and ‘Freedom Fighters’: The Creation of Expendable Bodies and Modern Settler ColonialismNeil Kohlmann, Mediating Multiplicity: Settler-Colonial Cooption in Mary Simon’s Installation CeremonyKaitlyn Pothier and Kathryn Reinders, Settler Colonialism and Disability in an Indigenous ContextLeonard Halladay, Queerly Multicultural: Decolonial Possibilities in Canada’s Settler Colonial Present
14:20-14:45	Break
14:45-15:35	To Begin Undoing Colonialism.	Christian Labrecque, Ni Québec, ni Canada : projet anticolonial, methodology and resistanceJohanna Lewis, Pioneer Tales: Settler Sociality, Colonial Mythmaking, and the Narrativization of the Canadian Prairies
15:35	Concluding words