Bureaucratic Territory: First Nations, Private Property, and "Turn-Key" Colonialism in Canada (original) (raw)

Dispossession by municipalization: Property, pipelines, and divisions of power in settler colonial Canada

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2022

In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process that subverts Indigenous authority to the state, then delegates forms of state authority to Indigenous peoples, and concludes by asserting that delegated authority satisfies the terms of Indigenous selfdetermination. This article centers municipalization in two steps that connect it to how Canada divides power regarding foreign and domestic affairs. The first examines the history of municipalization and its evolution alongside changes in Canadian federalism. The second examines dispossession by municipalization to show how state divisions of power facilitate extraction of value from land. It uses a case where the federal government considered creating new, privatized reserves of Indigenous land explicitly to facilitate oil pipelines. Together, these support an argument that municipalization is not only a powerful language of critique, but critical to understanding the ongoing production of settler colonial space.

(MA Thesis) Beyond the new Dawes Act: A critique of the First Nations Property Ownership Act

This study offers a critique of the First Nations Property Ownership Act (FNPOA), a contemporary proposal to implement private property regimes on First Nations reserves in Canada. First, I examine the arguments used by proponents of the FNPOA to motivate support for this legislation. I demonstrate how, despite its similarity with past attempts to privatize First Nations reserve lands, the FNPOA represents a re-articulation of these older proposals as a type of recognition, where the implementation of fee simple property on reserves is cast as "restoring" pre-colonial property rights regimes. Second, I discuss how this legislation informs discussions within Geography and Indigenous Studies concerning Marx's theory of primitive accumulation. I argue the FNPOA would provide a number of mechanisms to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from reserve lands. Finally, I look at how conflicts over First Nations land and property rights provide an important site from which to analyze how both the formation of colonized subjects and the continued existence of Indigenous subjects are inseparable from relationships with land. Specifically, I argue the FNPOA points to the act of settler colonial subject formation as part of the continued Canadian project of genocide, whereby attempts to reconfigure Indigenous relationships with land must be understood as attempts to eliminate

Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada

Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada. In Brunn, M. J., Cockburn, P., Risager, B., & Thorup, M, (Eds.), Contested Property Claims: What Disagreement Tells Us About Ownership. Routledge., 2017

This chapter focuses on contemporary proposals to implement private property regimes on First Nations reserves. First, I examine the arguments used by proponents of the First Nations Property Ownership Act to motivate support for this legisla- tion, demonstrating how it represents a rearticulation of past proposals, albeit as a ‘restoration’ of precolonial property rights regimes. Second, I discuss how this legisla- tion informs contemporary discussions within academia concerning Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. Finally, I discuss how disputes over First Nations property rights demonstrate that both settler colonial subjection and continued assertions of Indigenous identity are inseparable from relationships with land.

Territorial authority, Indigenous utilities, and settler colonialism in British Columbia

Borderlands, 2021

Borders and bordering practices can be understood as both an act of sovereign authority and establishing the contemporary international system. The drawing of borders also simultaneously legitimizes the state's sovereign authority, creating a political community 'inside' borders through which modern politics takes place. These processes are especially pertinent for settler states such as Canada, whose sovereign authority over its recognized territory is contingent on the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. However, Indigenous nations reject Canadian claims of settler authority and legitimacy, instead continuing to uphold their own modes of governance and relationships to territory. This contestation of settler territoriality is practiced in various ways, with this article exploring how energy utility governance and infrastructure act as bordering practices-that is, as a productive means of manifesting and demonstrating territorial authority. Through the British Columbia Utilities Commission's Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry, we explore the contestation of territory through what we refer to as 'embedded bordering'. In doing so, we identify a tension between ongoing settler moves to dispossession alongside decolonial potential in the bordermaking practices of energy governance and infrastructure.

Property and Sovereignty: An Indian Reserve and a Canadian City

2017

Property rights, wrote Morris Cohen in 1927, are delegations of sovereign power. They are created by the state and operate to establish limits on its power. As such, the allocation of property rights is an exercise of sovereignty and a limited delegation of it. Sixty years later, Joseph Singer used Cohen’s conceptual framing in a critical review of developments in American Indian law. Where the US Supreme Court had the opportunity to label an American Indian interest as either a sovereign interest or a property interest, he argued, it invariably chose to the disadvantage of the Indians. Within Canada, Indigenous peoples have struggled to have their interests recognized as property rights, let alone as sovereign power. As John Borrows makes clear, Canadian courts have established Canada’s sovereignty as the jurisdictional bedrock on which Indigenous peoples must establish their property rights. This article uses the uses the concepts of property and sovereignty as revealed by Cohen a...

Minding the Gaps: Property, Geography, and Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Geoforum 44 (2012): 129-138., 2012

Indigenous peoples’ property rights are hotly debated in legal, policy, and academic circles across Canada. This article explores three such debates in which Indigenous peoples and lands are centrally implicated: debates over implementing fee simple ownership on Indigenous lands, over securing land rights through modern treaty making, and over matrimonial real property rights on Indian reserves. Each of these debates, we argue, revolves around a perceived “property gap”, a term we use to denote conflicting understandings of what property is (or should be), what it should accomplish, and a perceived absence or failure in property law. While such gaps are commonly identified as sites where Indigenous and Western ideas about property come into conflict, creating absences or discontinuities that need mending, they can also be understood as openings where taken-for-granted conceptions of property are “up for grabs”. The property debates examined here reflect ongoing struggles over geography, highlighting contention over who can legitimately claim “ownership” over certain spaces and who can control how lands are used and governed. More broadly, they reflect efforts to “locate” Indigenous peoples vis-á-vis the modern settler state of Canada. Rather than working to “fix” these property gaps through imposition of dominant Western property ideas and structures, we stress the need to explore a broader range of property options at these sites, including those shaped by Indigenous understandings of property and geography.

Indigenous Nationhood Claims and Contemporary Federalism in Canada and the United States

Policy and Society

Vibrant indigenous communities have not only survived in both the United States and Canada but have recently been advancing a variety of renewed political claims. Central among them are claims to nationhood status and treatment as sovereign governments rather than as racial or ethnic minority groups. While initially following parallel trajectories, these respective efforts have produced surprising and divergent results to date. Although the acceptance of robust indigenous self-government is much more a feature of Canadian public discourse, and robust aboriginal self-government has been affirmed in a few unique but high-profile cases, federally-recognised tribal governments in the United States in general exercise more substantive governmental powers. This article addresses this puzzle and attempts to explain the observed respective changes in terms of both the political status of indigenous groups and federalist political structures. Utilising a comparative approach closely examining the two cases regarding a number of key factors, the analysis presented here identifies the source of the divergence in "policy feedback" from three historical differences between the two post-colonial nations. Prior actions regarding recognition of inherent indigenous sovereignty, the forced breakup of tribal lands, and ties to the British Crown shaped the political channels through which tribal nationhood claims were promoted in the present. Contingently rather than deterministically, these political channels led to the distinctive outcomes in each nation.

Sovereign Authority and the Limits of Constitutional Democracy: the Case of Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Oñati Socio-legal Series

The victory of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in the Canadian federal election of 2015 brought with it hopes for meaningful change in the relationship between indigenous peoples and settler-Canadian society, with “reconciliation” a prominent feature of the new government’s discourse. But long on symbolism, the new government’s efforts have been markedly short on substance, and all good intentions seem unlikely to dislodge the more stubborn problems underpinning the relationship between indigenous peoples and the settler state that claims sovereignty over their lives. While many of the obstacles to be confronted involve familiar problems confronting institutional reform, deeper, more substantive barriers lie in the character of modern nation-formation and state sovereignty, and in contradictions that lie at the very heart of liberal constitutional democracies. La victoria del partido liberal de Justin Trudeau en las elecciones de Canadá de 2015 trajo consigo esperanzas de un cambio signif...