Abstract
Unsettling colonialism: Commentary 1
I first met Cole Harris as an undergraduate student at UBC, almost a quarter of a century ago. He was magnetic. Cole had a particular way of entering a room – he would make his way to the lectern or seminar table, set down his papers, and then peer over his reading glasses and down his long nose, surveying the room, with a hint of a smile peeking through his very serious frown. This would last longer than you might think. It was intimidating and warm at once, a kind of initiation ritual that immediately quieted the room and opened our hearts to whatever would follow. As a lecturer he was, it will surprise no one, both lyrical and pointed, deeply knowledgeable, a gifted storyteller, and a pleasure to listen to. As a seminar instructor he was restrained, leaving ample room for students to flop and flounder with their half-formed thoughts. I remember feeling like I didn’t quite get it and Cole seemed to like it that way – he was (and remains) not a man for tidy resolution or easy answers. His passion for understanding the history of Canada was infectious, and it played no small part in my own intellectual path.
What a pleasure, then, to be invited to sit down and assemble some thoughts about Cole’s recent book, A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada. It is an authoritative work, collecting and contextualizing lightly edited and abridged writings from across his entire career. The goal was not to simply republish his greatest hits but rather to tease out lines of argument within them and consider the broader intellectual contribution they collectively make. It is, in other words, not just a book but a conversation with a life’s work. As such, even those who are amply familiar with Harris’s writing will find much to chew on. An abridged 1971 article on Petite Nation, a region of Quebec not far from where I currently live, was a downright riveting read for me, in part because it illuminated dynamics that still shape that region and deepened my understanding of this place, and in part because it is yet another example of how brilliant a scholar Cole Harris is: deeply researched, sympathetic to his subjects, attuned to specificity, and always willing to rethink (he notes in the preface to the chapter that some of his original conclusions were wrong). Ditto the chapters from his earlier work in Acadia. There is a passage in the introduction that retells the history of early colonial settlement in Canada so succinctly and yet in such compelling detail that I felt I understood that history in a new way.
Where I found myself puzzling, and ultimately in disagreement with Harris, is around the primary argument he seeks to develop in the book’s introduction and conclusion – that the settler colonial project in Canada was fundamentally bounded by geography and specifically by the Canadian Shield, the rocky terrain of BC, and the aridity and cold of the northern prairies. There is an important difference, he argues, between the kinds of relations that developed between settlers and Indigenous peoples in regions with productive farmlands and forests, and those that emerged in the barren hinterlands of so much of the country, where a large and lasting immigrant population never managed to establish itself. This is not controversial, I agree with him on the empirical facts, and on the stubborn geographical reality that very little of Canada is arable. But if I am reading him correctly, Cole seems to go so far as to argue that settler colonialism itself only really happened in these southern margins, and that the rest of the country was either subject to a different colonial formation or not really colonized at all (unfortunately he does not elaborate on this corollary to his argument); either way it remained more “Indigenous.” Here, again, at the level of population he is right (demography is a key aspect of his argument), and it’s true that, in the Far North, for example, colonization became most intensive after World War II, never resulted in the creation of reserves, and most northern Indigenous peoples do remain “where their ancestors [have] always lived” (10). These differences matter. But what are the analytical and political implications of arguing that settler colonialism only really happened in the parts of the country that were intensively settled by immigrants, and of suggesting that Indigeneity itself persisted only in areas north of these regions? What does this argument open up, and what does it occlude?
One thing it does do, that is consistent with Harris’s important 2004 paper “How Did Colonialism Dispossess?” is insist on the specificity of what was happening on the ground. In that paper he argued that painting all colonies with the same theoretical brush overlooks important differences between histories and places. He developed this argument in relation to a version of colonial theory and colonial studies that he rightly claimed was neither sensitive to the specificity of settler colonies nor sufficiently attuned to what was happening on the ground; it lent too much credence to imperial imaginative geographies and thus misrepresented and misunderstood the material processes of colonization itself. Since then, a vibrant literature has emerged theorizing settler colonialism specifically and more and more writing has focused on settler colonial formations in Canada (e.g., Coulthard, 2014; Daigle, 2016, 2019; De Leeuw and Hunt, 2018; Dorries et al., 2019; A. Simpson, 2014, 2016; L. Simpson, 2017; Holmes et al., 2015; Hugill, 2017; Pasternak, 2017; Todd, 2018; Tomiak, 2017; Veracini, 2000; Wolfe, 1999, 2006). With these writings in mind, you would be hard pressed to locate any part of Canada, even the more remote and “Indigenous” in Harris’ terms, that has not been deeply shaped by the settler colonial project. Remoteness did not guarantee Indigenous control over their lands, nor did it protect against residential schooling, missionaries, the Indian Act, police violence, the vagaries of industrial capital, or the insidious reach of white supremacy. Harris acknowledges all this, but he would argue, I think, that only intensively settled lands were subject to settler colonialism specifically. This seems to me to be an overly literal definition, one that severely limits attention to the structural and relational dimensions of settler colonial formations. After all, exploiting, controlling, and repositioning northern bodies, lands, and resources has been part of southern colonial policy (and has generated southern Canadian wealth) since at least the fur trade. How to account for this analytically? It also runs counter to an understanding of settler colonialism that is almost axiomatic at this point in many disciplinary corners; that is, following Wolfe (1999, 2006), that settler colonialism is an ongoing structure, not an event, aimed at control over land and resources. It is a deeply malleable and relational formation and it never really ended.
While settler colonialism was contained to the south, Harris argues, Indigenous peoples in the more northern and remote parts of Canada were able to remain Indigenous because they remained on the land; they were “buffeted,” as he notes, by many pressures, but ultimately prevailed and are now “speaking back” to settler Canada in increasingly powerful ways. Indigeneity, he writes, “rather than resources, is the principal yield of the Canadian Shield and the rest of the sparsely inhabited North” (284). This line of argument makes me wary. Certainly, fostering, protecting, and renewing relations with the land is a cornerstone of many Indigenous intellectuals’ scholarship and activism, and northern Indigenous peoples do emphasize the centrality of the land to their well-being and survival (see, e.g., McGregor et al., 2010; Wildcat et al., 2014). But there is a fine line between acknowledging the centrality of land and land relations to specific Indigenous peoples and equating Indigeneity itself with land and wilderness – a habit of thought that traces itself directly to imperial conquest and lives on in contemporary settler fantasies. This imaginary helps maintain the lie that cities themselves are not Indigenous lands (see Dorries, 2022 for controversy over a brownfield development proposed on unceded Anishnaabe lands in the heart of Ottawa) and reinforces the colonial notion that Indigenous peoples are somehow out of place or less Indigenous when they live in cities or live ‘modern’ lives. It also draws a false line between south and north, urban and rural – Harris argues that settlers have been forced to listen to the “speaking back” of Indigenous peoples because “wherever there are settlers there is always land not far away to the north, where the population is largely or entirely Indigenous… [and so] Canadians have little choice but to listen” (281). Setting aside the question of whether there is actually much listening going on (as I write there are increasingly militarized efforts to shut down land defenders at logging and pipeline sites across BC) there is a geographical determinism in this statement that jars against both demographic reality (there are more Indigenous peoples living in cities in Canada today than not) and the dynamism of urban Indigenous political movements. Idle No More started with a Round Dance in a shopping mall in Saskatoon; urban First Nations were central to a months-long standoff against the expansion of the TransMountain pipeline in Vancouver. Indigenous peoples resist dispossession and injustice wherever they are, not just to the north of the city, and often in solidarity with struggles that span cities, reserves and remote communities (in 2020, for example, Haudenosaunee in Ontario and Quebec organized rolling railway blockades in support of Mi’kmaq fishers in Nova Scotia).
Part of the reason Harris and I see things differently is that we are reading different things and inclined to develop arguments from fundamentally different places. Harris is an historical geographer whose intellectual debts, he notes, are largely to historians. His arguments about the more general patterns of settler colonialism in Canada emerge not from an immersion in settler colonial studies, Indigenous studies, or contemporary conflicts over land and resources but rather from decades in the archive and from his vast knowledge of a particular body of historical scholarship. Historians, he notes, are constitutionally suspicious of both theory and generality. His goal in this book is to venture some conclusions about the patterns of settler colonialism not by starting with theory but by deduction from the empirical materials at hand. While I agree with Cole that a sweeping application of settler colonial theory to entire regions is analytically dubious (see also Bernauer, 2022) and, to the extent that it skips over or bends the details of lands, lives, and histories, even sloppy, I don’t actually believe we can understand settler colonialism, historically or in the present, without critical theory, broadly defined. It is an essential tool both for questioning the epistemological frames that make things make sense (and make some things unknowable) and for drawing analytical connections between geographically and historically dispersed processes. Given that the traditional territories of every single Indigenous group in Canada are impacted in some way by industrial development, moreover (from hydro dams and mines to fish farms and pipelines), to say nothing of the mounting impacts of climate change, it seems to me that whatever conceptual framework is brought to bear on settler colonialism, it must in some way reckon with the devastating impacts of extractivism on Indigenous lands and the structures that authorize it.
Wherever readers land on these points, this book is immensely valuable and makes an important contribution to the broader project of understanding settler colonialism in Canada. Harris’ grasp of the historical geographies of early settlement is unrivalled. This would be impressive as an edited collection of the works of many scholars; the fact that it is just a selection of the works of one person is astonishing. He revolutionized historical geography by finally turning empirical attention to Indigenous peoples and lands, and by attempting to unpack the lasting effects of dispossession on the creation of the country. His work has had a powerful impact well beyond the discipline (and the academy) and this collection gathers in one place some of the pivotal pieces in that overall project. Harris also forces readers to take a long, hard, and sympathetic look at settlers. This will be uncomfortable for some, but generic condemnations and disavowals of settler colonialism will not deliver us to a more just future or relieve us of the inherited privileges it has handed so many of us. These are our histories, our ancestors. We need to face them more fully. Harris also challenges us to be more specific and careful about how we use theory in our work, and to take our time discerning the story we want to tell with the materials at hand. What a gift to those who are, as we speak, taking the study of settler colonialism in new directions.