Lessons from #Occupy in Canada: Contesting Space, Settler Consciousness and Erasures within the 99% (original) (raw)
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Settler Colonial Pseudo-Solidarity: Indigenous Peoples and the Occupy Movement in Canada
Political Science Undergraduate Review, 2017
As a reaction to neoliberalism, the Occupy movement in Canada presents a radical argument for a just economy. However, it does not engage in any meaningful way with decolonization. Through settler moves to innocence — equating the struggles of indigenous people within colonization with the plight of settlers — Occupy fails to support the cause of indigenous self-determination. Without both effectively centering decolonization within a social justice cause and including indigenous voices within decision-making processes, there can be no long-lasting solidarity created between progressive settlers and indigenous communities. Neoliberalism as a modern face of colonialism is a worthy target of social justice action, but the negation of settler history and treaties provide a roadblock to solidarity. The process of decolonization asks the settler to accept less, but the rhetoric of Occupy focuses on reclaiming wealth and resources that have been seized from their natural owners: working C...
Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America
2012
Indigenous struggles in Canada and the USA—the northern bloc of settler colonialism—have long been characterized by tactical occupations. It is often assumed that Indigenous peoples' concerns are congruent with those of ‘the 99%’: broad-based opposition to economic and political marginalization, strong sub-currents of environmentalism and direct democracy, and antipathy towards state violence. Indigenous people and groups have engaged with Occupy, but have also raised powerful critiques of the goals, philosophies and tactics of various Occupy movements. As a result, there have been changes within the praxes of Occupy, but also conflict and disintegration. Many concerns of Indigenous peoples remain unaddressed; legacies of historical colonization and the dynamics of contemporary settler colonialism are powerfully entrenched. The Occupy movements seek to claim the spaces created by state power and corporate wealth—specific sites such as Zuccotti Park or Wall Street, and general spaces of urban poverty and suburban collapse. Indigenous occupations, by contrast, seek to reclaim and reassert relationships to land and place submerged beneath the settler colonial world. These occupations question the validity of settler colonial nation states. Simultaneously, the nationalistic, racialized content of Occupy movements in North America does not just leave Indigenous peoples out; it situates Occupy within a settler colonial dynamic, participating in the transfer of land and power to the hands of the settler colonial majority. Settler colonialism provides a powerful lens through which to examine Settler—Indigenous dynamics around Occupy.
In the winter of 2012, the Canadian political scene was shaken by the emergence of ‘Idle No More', a collection of protests directed by and largely comprised of Indigenous peoples. Originally, a response to a variety of legislation that was being passed through the Canadian government at the time, Idle No More spread across the country and around the world. In this paper, I argue that, drawing from Indigenous nationhood movements that extend back through five centuries, Idle No More represents a renewed assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in opposition to settler colonisation. Through transgressive actions, Idle No More has brought online activism into alignment with embodied defences of land and place, challenging Canadian sovereignty and Settler identity in multiple and creative ways. However, settler colonial tendencies in Canadian politics have sought to reinscribe Idle No More within established, generic political binaries. This paper positions Idle No More as a ‘movement moment’ that reveals significant insights about Indigenous activism, conservative politics, leftist resistance, and persistent settler colonialism in Canada.
Accumulation of the primitive: the limits of liberalism and the politics of occupy Wall Street
Settler Colonial Studies, 2013
This article examines the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and its basic elision of Indigenous peoples as the first and already "occupied" peoples of this land; illuminating the so-called 99% as not simply united in their collective indignation, but also their settler status. Thus, by deploying the discursive trope and strategy of "occupation" as its central organizing principle, OWS reconstitutes (territorial) appropriation as the democratic manifest and fails to propose something distinct from or counter to the settler state. In so doing, the movement dissolves colonialism into capitalism by courting a limited and precarious equality predicated on (or more pointedly in exchange for) the "elimination of the Native". In contradistinction, critical Indigenous theories disrupt the colonial architecture that frames Indigenous/state relations in ways that not only mark the (Foucauldian) shift from sovereign to discursive forms of power, but also insist upon the conciliatory and accommodationist discourses of liberalism as equally, if not more, effective in reproducing settler hegemony.
Across the Barricades: Non-Indigenous Mobilization and Settler Colonialism in Canada
Canadian Political Science Review, 2014
Recently, a new body of scholarship on "settler colonialism" has emerged with the goal of analyzing the non-Native dimension of Indigenous-settler relations, in Canada and other settler states. This paper will identify two shortcomings of the new literature: first, a tendency to conflate mass-level non-Natives with the state itself; and second, an erroneous, primordial presentation of non-Native norms and identity. This paper examines two case studies of settler political mobilization in opposition to Indigenous peoples in the contexts of the Indigenous occupations at Ipperwash/Aazhoodena in the early-to mid-1990s, and Caledonia/Kanonhstaton in 2006. The cases reveal consistency in how the mobilization is framed by non-Native participantsas a defense of abstract procedural principles like equality before the law and public order. This normative framework does not resonate with settler colonial theory. They also illustrate the degree to which mass-level non-Natives are autonomous actors in the relationship. During both conflicts, local non-Natives often advanced divergent interests from those of the state, producing a tripartite political dynamic that is not anticipated in the literature.
Who are the 99%? Identity, inclusion and division in the UK Occupy movement
JOMEC Journal, 2014
This essay is based on qualitative research into how activists in the UK Occupy movement understand their social and political identities, and those of the movement as a whole. The study found that-in contrast to the suggestions of the mainstream media-Occupy activists had a reasonably well-developed political and economic vision, combining 'participatory democracy' with 'social justice'. In spite of the relative clarity of this vision, the essay argues that the Occupy movement's approach to strategy and communication was confused and ambiguous. This ambiguity is attributed to the fact Occupy activists seemed to lack a coherent sociopolitical identity that linked their political principles with their social identities and interests. This hindered the ability of the movement to achieve unity, and the willingness of activists to embrace a leadership role. These findings are discussed in relation to Donatella Della Porta's work on the 'tolerant identities' of today's social movement activists, as well as to Jodi Dean's arguments about the causes of the contemporary Left's 'melancholy'.
In settler nations, pervasive national narratives combine with colonizing spatial technologies to constitute a dominant cultural pedagogy: a settler pedagogy that shores up historical-spatial imaginaries serving to rationalize, justify, and ultimately reproduce the on-going displacement of Indigenous peoples. This paper explores processes by which these entrenched imaginaries become unsettled for white settler subjects, through a narrative analysis of the stories 22 Euro-Canadian solidarity activists tell of coming to grips with their implication, privilege, and responsibilities in light of colonizing history and Indigenous sovereignty and territory. The paper traces the experiences, contexts, and critical turning points that prompt these actors to (re)imagine identity, history, land, nation, and home, sparking among them specific and at times competing cycles of reflection, action, and commitment. In elucidating these cycles of learning and unsettlement, and in noting their contradictions, interruptions, and (un)marked whiteness, this inquiry contributes to current conversations regarding the processes by which differently positioned settlers might enter pathways of personal and structural decolonization.
The Occupier: Activist Selves in the 99 Percent
Emerging as part of the wider Occupy and squares movements phenomenon of 2011, Occupy London sought to embody an alternative mode of social and political organisation, with occupation camps acting as sites for experimenting with new worlds and ways of being. Fundamental to this was a resistance to 'activist' identities and selves, as an emphasis on the discourse of 'the 99 per cent' and radical inclusivity meant an aversion to experts and the subcultural modes that fostered them. Nevertheless the very doing of occupation, and accumulation of experience, contributed to the (re)emergence of self-conscious 'activists', and even a new category and personality: the Occupier. The presence of this privileged identity was a fundamental problem for Occupy's here-and-now democratic utopianism. This paper builds on my ethnographic fieldwork with Occupy London to consider this tension of identity within a self-consciously prefigurative site of social movement, where practices seek to produce radical futures in the present. It develops an account of how participants problematised the specialist role of the activist character, placing this in the context of the increased salience of this debate across the autonomous, direct action-oriented left (cf. Andrew X 1999), as well as the wider problematisation of the 'militant' elsewhere (cf. Thoburn 2010). The rejection of specialists and representative identities was connected to the privileging of the participation of 'ordinary' individuals speaking for no one but themselves. This paper addresses, but rejects, the concern that this reproduces the atomised and individuated subject-self of neoliberal capitalism, finding more useful the notion of singularities (Deleuze 1968, Hard and Negri 2000) who, as with Agamben's 'coming community', gather 'without any representable condition of belonging' (Agamben 1993). It engages with participants' narratives of 'becoming activists' and the primacy of the Occupier identity in emerging hierarchies, considering this as symptomatic of a downswing in Occupy London's prefigurative worlding project.
Nowhere land: The evicted space of Black tenants' rights in Montreal
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021
Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a wellorganized tenants' movement and the election of progressive governments spawned a series of legal and policy changes that strengthened tenants' rights in the city. During the same period, however, an emerging police, government and media discourse cast Black communities as criminal 'ghettos', and a variety of mechanisms, including new policies meant to protect tenants' rights, were used to evict criminalized Black tenants. Guided by recent work on property and Black geographies, respectively, this article examines how racial subjects are constituted in struggles over tenants' rights. The racial limits of tenants' rights in Montreal, it argues, are traceable to the socio-spatial relations of slavery and the intensifying criminalization of Black life in the 1980s, each of which nullified Black spatial belonging in the city. The tenant, the article concludes, is never just a tenant, but also a racial subject-a subject formed at the edges of blackness. In a terrain forged by slavery and its afterlives, the possibility of expansive tenants' rights presupposes a right systemically denied in advance for Black people in the Americas: the right to exist here in the first place.
Soundings, 2015
A highly individualist identity politics is clearly one of the mainstays of the culture of the new capitalism. But, asks Jacob Mukherjee, could this also be precisely what constitutes a barrier to the formation of a collective political subject in the first place? Do participants in the Occupy movement see themselves as part of a unified collective, or as, the leadership of an oppressed socio-political group or class? Or is it a movement that unites diverse political identities in the pursuit of broad common values? This essay is an attempt to answer these questions, and to reflect on the different ways in which UK Occupy participants understand themselves. Jodi Dean has written that: Now we appear to ourselves-we say "we", even as we argue over who we are and what we want […] Because of Occupy Wall Street, we have been able to imagine and enact a new subject that is collective, engaged, if, perhaps, also manic and distractible. [1]