Indigenous Infopolitics: Biopolitics as Resistance to White Paper Liberalism in Canada (Theory and Event) (original) (raw)

The Politics of Indigenous Peoples and of Canadian Colonialism (POLI 263)

As a discipline, Political Science often falls back into a longstanding habit of seeing and of researching the world "like a state." A consequence of this has been that the discipline-similar to other academic fields-has functioned as a ideological apparatus of colonial and imperial processes. Despite this, a Political Science that centres on the decolonizing demands of Indigenous peoples and is informed by the insights of Indigenous/Native Studies, has the potential to contribute to conversations and political programmes that refuse their implication in the ongoing processes of colonialism. In this introductory course to the subfield of Indigenous Politics, we will survey the politics of Indigenous peoples living within the territories presently claimed by Canada-while remaining fully cognizant that the constructed nature of this scope doesn't actually reflect the web of Indigenous relationships that supersede state borders. Key insights will be drawn from an historically-informed approach to contemporary Indigenous politics; noting that Canadian colonialism is reproduced through co-constitutive regimes of racialization, sexism and heterosexism, capitalism, ableism, etc. Further, attention will be paid to the ways in which both the enduring reality of Indigenous peoples' political authority and the colonial project are differentially experienced and undertaken at different times and in different places.

Indigenous cultural rights and identity politics in Canada

Revue d'études constitutionnelles, 2013

This paper explores how the recognition and protection of Indigenous cultural practices became one of the central ways in which courts use the Constitution Act, 1982 to recognize and protect Indigenous rights. It considers the Court’s 1996 ‘distinctive culture test’ as a response to issues about cultural identity and citizenship raised in the Canadian politics and scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas serious challenges and risks can develop when judges attempt to assess the cultures of Indigenous people, these challenges are a conventional part of co-existence in diverse societies to which there are effective responses. These challenges ought to be viewed as ones that public institutions are obligated to address in order to develop just and fair relations between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. That they have not done so effectively is uncontested, but that they don’t have the capacity to do so, I argue, is mistaken and can be misleading in seeking a solution to pr...

2013. Pacification of Indigenous Struggles in Canada. Socialist Studies. 9(2):57-77.

Socialist Studies, 2013

Front-line police operations are deeply entwined with less visible activities – or practices not commonly identified as policing – that are carried out by a wide range of participants as strategies of settler-colonial pacification operating through the organizing logics of security and liberal legalism. Using open source texts and records obtained through access to information requests, this article unmaps some of the contemporary strategies employed by Canadian institutions to pacify Indigenous resistance. As a contribution to the body of work seeking to develop the politics of anti-security, the analysis disrupts the binary categories that animate security logic by examining the public order policing approach of the Ontario Provincial Police, the framing of Indigenous resistance as a security threat, and the integral role of Indian Affairs in securing the settler-state. http://www.socialiststudies.com/index.php/sss/article/download/23505/17390

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.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES: CAUGHT IN A PERPETUAL HUMAN RIGHTS PRISON

This paper argues that liberal democratic theorists like Habermas and James can support increased political recognition and inclusion within Canadian democracy. However, such theories fall short of supporting full Indigenous emancipation or addressing the immorality of including Indigenous peoples within the polity of Canada in the first place and in fact they are destructive to Indigenous peoplehood rights because Indigenous rights are interpreted and understood as akin to individual human rights which can be unilaterally diminished by the state.