Settler governmentality in Canada and the Algonquins of Barriere Lake

Abstract

In September 2009, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared to the global media that Canada had ‘no history of colonialism’. Such expressions of the post-colonial Canadian imaginary are common, despite Canada’s dubious legacy of settler colonialism. This article uses Canada’s Access to Information Act to examine how mechanisms of security are mobilized against members of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake (ABL), whose persistent calls for sovereign control of their land and customary governance system have been translated by Canadian authorities into a security threat to settler society. Contributing to the literature on postcolonialism, as well as works on critical security studies and colonial governmentality, this article suggests that distinct rationalities underline colonial activities in settler states. The authors contend that the term ‘settler governmentality’ is more appropriate for settler states such as Canada, and they present the case study of the ABL to argue that (in)security governance of indigenous groups in Canada incorporates techniques that are necessarily grounded in a logic of elimination. The authors detail how an analysis of the interventions in the traditional governance of the ABL contributes to understanding recent security trends regarding ‘Aboriginal extremism’ and indigenous ‘hot spot’ areas in Canada, which are often framed as matters of ‘national security’.

Keywords

governmentality colonialism indigenous policing Indian Act

Introduction

The Algonquins of Barriere Lake (ABL) – Mitchikanibikok Inik¹ – are a small indigenous community located on a 59-acre reserve at Lac-Rapide in the Outaouais region of Quebec, Canada, north of Ottawa Their traditional territory, to which the ABL have never surrendered title, comprises several thousand square kilometres, including the area of La Verendrye Wildlife Reserve (Richardson, 1993). Their land is the site of profitable forestry, hydro-electric and tourist industries, yet the ABL have no access to the wealth derived from their lands. After years of lobbying and failed negotiations proved ineffective, the ABL took to blockading roads in the late 1980s (Borrows, 2005; Matchewan, 1989). Their blockades were successful. In 1991, they signed a historical – and unique – resource co-management framework known as the Trilateral Agreement (RCAP, 1996: 730–3). Yet, the Trilateral Agreement was never implemented. In 2008, frustrated with continued interference in their internal affairs and the government’s refusal to honour signed agreements, the ABL erected barricades on Highway 117. They were met with riot police.²

Violent standoffs between police and indigenous peoples in Canada are not new. Confrontations over land claims and treaty rights – as seen recently at Akwesasne, Oka, Ipperwash, Gustavson Lake, Burnt Church, Caledonia and Barriere Lake – have commanded a high level of attention in the media and national imaginary. When these confrontations arise, they are often framed in terms of identities and difference, where public anger is directed towards indigenous peoples by the settler majority and little attention is given to issues arising from colonial injustices or broken promises (West-Newman, 2004). Despite the frequency of these confrontations, Canadian officials (and Canadians in general) routinely circulate notions that Canada is a post-colonial nation of equal citizens. Exemplifying this erasure of colonial reality, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared to the global media at the 2009 G-20 Summit that Canada was a country to emulate because it had ‘no history of colonialism’ (Ljunggren, 2009). Dominant discourses – such as those expressed by Harper – function to erase colonial histories, often depicting a history of ‘discovery’ and settlement that excludes any mention of indigenous peoples (Mawani, 2007). Like settler-colonial states which circulate tropes of ‘historylessness’ (Veracini, 2007), these mythologies perpetuate dominant accounts of Canada as a ‘nation innocent of racism’ (Dua et al., 2005; Henry and Tator, 2002), likening it to a postcolonial, or non-colonial, entity despite the dubious legacy of settler colonialism.

In this article, we suggest that the term ‘settler governmentality’ reflects the particular rationalities of governance that animate Canada’s relationship with, and governance of, indigenous peoples. Barker (2009: 334) argues that Canada can ‘simultaneously remain colonial through creative adaptation and also be portrayed as “postcolonial” due to a lack of resemblance with earlier imperial and colonial forms’. While elements of settler society narrate discourses of a country with no colonial history, colonial relations continue. These relations have become normalized by the majority non-indigenous settler population who have maintained colonial predispositions of perceiving indigenous communities as sources of insecurity and anxiety. Borrowing from settler colonialism studies, we argue that the majority rule of settler society operates according to what Patrick Wolfe (2006) has described as a ‘logic of elimination’ that positions its security in relation to perceptions of indigeneity as insecurity. Coded as sources of threat, expressions of indigenous values, practices, knowledges and subjectivities must be eliminated through various mechanisms of security to ensure the prosperity of settler society.

We stress that settler post-colonialism is an experience articulated positively from the perspective of the settler majority, while drawing from postcolonial (non-hyphenated) studies to underline the continuities of colonial governance. To illustrate the relation between rationalities of settler governmentality and practices of colonialism, we build on a key distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism: whereas colonialism aims towards a permanent condition of management and exploitation, settler colonialism aspires to acquire (settle) land and establish an independent, post-colonial state (Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 2006). In pursuing an endgame that aims towards a negation of colonial status, settler governmentality implements techniques to eliminate indigenous life-worlds as a requirement of eliminating the conditions of colonial formation itself. We present the case study of the ABL to argue that (in)security governance of indigenous groups in a settler state (such as Canada) incorporates techniques that are necessarily grounded in a logic of elimination.

To illustrate this eliminatory rationality of settler governmentality, we detail how Canada employs a host of adaptable and flexible modes of governance interventions against indigenous populations. In discussing the situation facing the ABL, we detail how Canadian authorities have adapted techniques based on a desire for security – both for securing access to the traditional lands of the ABL (and negating the ABL’s sovereign claims to this land) and in responding to activities by the ABL that are associated with insecure behaviours and conduct. We use the case study of the ABL to contribute to postcolonial studies and the sociology of rule by underlining the importance of (in)security governance to settler practices in Canada. In particular, we demonstrate how rationalities of settler governmentality target characteristics of indigeneity in order to eliminate perceptions of insecurity. As a project mobilized through practices of colonial lawfare, we detail how Canadian authorities translated the ABL’s insistence on maintaining their system of customary governance and the persistence of community protests that called for the implementation of the Trilateral Agreement into threats to the settler-colonial project.

Using materials obtained through Canada’s Access to Information Act (ATIA), we discuss a multiyear effort by the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (INAC) to disrupt the traditional governance of the ABL.³ By stigmatizing the ABL community as backwards and mired in criminality – stigmas that match securitization efforts in the global south – INAC rationalized its interventions through reference to what they called a ‘governance imbroglio’. When these machinations were contested by the ABL, INAC looked at securing ‘peace in the forest’ by both deposing the current ABL leadership and replacing the entire system of customary governance using Section 74 of the Indian Act, which enables the Minister of Indian Affairs to depose traditional chiefs and implement an election designed and overseen by INAC. Finally, we detail how an analysis of the interventions in the traditional governance of the ABL contributes to understanding recent security trends regarding ‘Aboriginal extremism’ and indigenous ‘hot spot’ areas in Canada. Often framed by policing and security agencies as matters of ‘national security’, these indigenous threats emanate over land struggles, assertions of treaty rights and struggles for self-determination. We discuss how security responses to these movements demonstrate settler governmentality’s logic of elimination, which frames indigeneity as an existential threat to the post-colonial character and legitimacy of the settler state.

Our article is separated into three sections. First, we engage with contemporary debates in postcolonial theory and detail how settler governmentality offers a unique way of conceptualizing the relation of settler societies to literature on postcolonialism. Then, after a brief discussion of research practices using the ATIA as a tool for collecting what Guha (1983) called the government’s ‘prose of counterinsurgency’, we detail our case study of the ABL. This section details the interventions against the ABL and concludes by situating this case study within broader security practices that govern indigenous peoples in Canada. Finally, we conclude by underlining the place of (in)security governance techniques within the eliminatory project of settler governmentality.

Settler post-colonialism, lawfare and the prose of counterinsurgency

Transnationalized practices of (in)security governance are often described as a vector where Western states have defined the challenges and discourses of global security, often positioning the security of the West – both human and investment – against concerns about political instabilities from the postcolonial ‘most of the world’ (Chatterjee, 2004). This formulation of the West, however, ignores the particular postcolonial characteristics of settler-colonial states (like Canada). Within these formulations, settler states present a challenge in terms of how they should be categorized within a colonial and/or postcolonial/post-colonial divide. Distinctions between hyphenated post-colonialism and unhyphenated postcolonialism speak to the complexities demarcated by what Blunt and McEwan (2003: 3) call temporal aftermaths (periods of time after colonialism) and critical aftermaths (‘cultures, discourses, and critiques that lie beyond, but remain closely influenced by, colonialism’). While these definitions are clearly related (Sharp, 2009: 3–6), formal decolonization can provide a categorical break in which critical analysis can compare and contrast similarities and dissimilarities in ruling practices and ideologies. Yet, postcolonialism in the settler colony is different: decolonization has yet to happen. Mr Harper and Canada’s settler majority self-identify as post-colonial simply because of temporal location, believing that British (and French) colonialism ceased with Canada’s independence in 1867. While this independence from Britain meant a degree of political independence for the settler majority, it did not include self-determination for the colonized population. In Canada, indigenous peoples continue to be ruled under (and resist) what Gregory (2006) calls the ‘colonial present’.⁴

Settler colonialism is the term we believe most appropriate to describe the colonial realities – past and present – in Canada. However, we recognize that there are postcolonial experiences to consider as well. We use the term settler post-colonialism to refer specifically to the condition as defined by the majority settler imagination – underlining that, in settler states, post-colonialism is an effective reality experienced by the settler majority. Drawing as well from the critical analysis of postcolonial studies, where ‘post’ is positioned as against colonial power and practice (Sleman, 1991; Sidaway, 2002), we underline material and epistemological contestations of colonial legacies. Moreover, we underline that the active and ongoing resistance to settler colonialism disrupts the fantasies of settler post-colonialism: reinserting what Furniss (1999) calls ‘the burden of history’. The refusal of indigenous peoples to be ‘a vanishing race’ (Lawrence, 2004: 27–44) helps explain the ‘securitarian obsessions’ (Baumann, 2006) that rationalize security-governance projects directed against indigenous communities. Studies of settler colonialism can assist in addressing the place of settler states such as Canada in the discussion of security governance, particularly with regard to practices that emanate from the ‘unsettling anxieties’ (Veracini, 2010: 3) associated with the existence – and threat – of indigeneity in settler societies.

Therefore, while the majority population celebrates its identification with settler post-colonialism, colonial relations continue to exist in Canada. To underline the implications that colonial practices continue to have on indigenous communities, postcolonial theory can reveal the ‘extent that history has determined the configurations and power structures of the present’ (Young, 2001: 4). Organized through a particular set of governing rationalities, the genealogical character of settler colonialism in Canada is similar to that of other states (the United States, Australia, New Zealand) that belong to what Belich (2009: 23) has called the ‘Anglo-prone settler revolution’. These Anglo-colonies consolidated transformatory power through the majority rule of white settlers, propagated by strong images of property, civilization and liberalism (Blomley, 2003; Smith, 2009), and avoided ‘fragmenting into the independent nations of Spanish American reality and British Dominion mythology’ (Belich, 2009: 180). Legal and political legacies of settler control have a significant influence on contemporary negotiations with colonial authorities faced by indigenous communities today.

Canadian officials have a long history of using legal mechanisms to outlaw indigenous practices because of the perceptions of insecurity held by white communities towards the indigenous Other (Pettipas, 1994; Lawrence, 2004; Smith, 2009). During the procession of westward settlement that began in earnest during the early–mid 19th century, Canadian authorities mixed various legal complexes in an evolving process that consolidated jurisdiction over indigenous lands and peoples claimed under the Crown’s assertion of sovereignty (Ford, 2010; Knafla, 2005). Despite the well-documented histories of broken promises and and the racism informing these claims, popular debates regarding the place of indigenous peoples in Canada rarely account for the lasting consequences and contemporary legacies of colonialism (Moss, 2003; Monture-Angus, 1999).

Studies on colonial governmentality are useful for making sense of practices of (in)security governance practices because they focus on the governing rationalities of colonial regimes, along with their legacies in contemporary postcolonial analysis and debate (Scott, 1999; Legg, 2007; Prakash, 1999). Cued by David Scott (1995, 1999), the concept of colonial governmentality is used to describe emergent governing rationalities and practices that aim ‘to produce not so much extractive-effects on colonial bodies as governing-effects on colonial conduct’. Describing the ‘new authoritative game of justice’ that aims to discipline locals in order to transform them, Scott and other scholars (Kalpagam, 2000; Legg, 2007) have focused on India and other British colonies where indigenous peoples were the overwhelming majority population. Settler societies have been excluded from this framework. We employ the concept of settler governmentality to describe the unique rationalities that animate colonial transformations in settler states such as Canada because, through the process of mass settlement, colonial practices target an increasingly isolated minority population. Owing to the demographic majority of settler colonies, we contend that settler governmentality is the underlying framework for governing indigenous peoples within settler post-colonialism.

Colonial governmentality deployed practices of rule that were primarily aimed at managing majority indigenous populations in order to produce exploitable labour and governable subjects as part of the capitalist transformation of colonized space (Scott, 1999). Yet, Anglo-world settler societies were far less interested in extracting the surplus labour of indigenous peoples than they were in possessing indigenous lands (Wolfe, 1999). In Canada, Harris (2004: 173) illustrates how ‘capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labour’. While settler governmentality may also develop techniques of population management, these practices are secondary in that they are used to assist an overriding objective aiming to dispossess and repossess indigenous lands. Structured under an ‘alchemy of sovereignty’ (Borrows, 1999), Canada’s assertion of Crown authority over indigenous lands and peoples is motivated by a governing rationality that aims to eliminate competing sovereignties under its exclusive jurisdiction as a means to ‘shore up the legitimacy of settlement’ (Ford, 2010: 3). Governance techniques within these colonial parameters are rationalized precisely in relation to the objective of settlement – not the creation of an indigenous labouring class – and are twinned with romantic depictions of Canada’s settler post-colonial evolution as a ‘colony to nation’ (Lower, 1957). While removing indigenous barriers to accessing land, settler governmentality in Canada relies upon colonial tools of dispossession while simultaneously constructing its own post-colonial narrative to celebrate itself as a new nation that is free from the colonial past.

To explain how settler governmentality approaches the question of (in)security governance, we borrow from Wolfe, who notes that settler colonialism contains a ‘logic of elimination’ that ‘informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct – invasion is a structure not an event’ (Wolfe, 1999: 163; see also Wolfe, 2006). Settler governmentality aims to gradually eliminate indigenous peoples through techniques of containment and assimilation that aim not so much at the ‘transformation of society itself’ (Scott, 1999: 51), but rather at the creation of a new (European) settler society on top of the prior social organization and distinctive cultures of peoples on that land. This requires the elimination of autonomous indigeneity and sustains the desire for elimination and erasure. Although containment and assimilation represent seemingly divergent programmes for addressing the ‘Indian problem’, all strategies within these regimes of practice are premised on the eventual objective of eliminating indigeneity, through various measures and over differing periods of time.⁵ While the techniques of settler governmentality may also include managerial forms, they represent a management towards elimination, where traces of indigeneity – culture, language, self-determination, traditional behaviours and practices – are coded as security threats to the health and prosperity of the settler state.

What is shared between colonial and settler governmentalities is the centrality of European domination and the willingness to employ violence against sources of insecurity in the name of the new authoritative game of justice. Mbembé (2003: 27) has argued that late-modern colonialism differs in many ways from early-modern occupation, particularly in ‘its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical’ (sovereign control over life and death). Foucauldian postcolonial theory underlines the triangulation of sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical power, and demonstrates the complexities in which colonial authorities approach the question of government (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2007a). Within these topographies of domination, legal complexes provide a central function in coordinating the triangulated security mechanisms of colonial rule. From the standpoint of settler governmentality, law has a particular place in the ordering and securitization of settler-colonial spaces.

Jean and John Comaroff have suggested that the term lawfare best describes the deployment of legal complexes in colonial spaces (Comaroff, 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff, 2007b). Lawfare is a practice where authorities ‘resort to legal instruments, to the violence inherent in the law, to commit acts of political coercion, even erasure’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2007b: 144). While mythologies of law can hide inherent structural violence, uncovering how legal rationalities are encoded in the mythology of modern Western law can deepen our understanding of the ways in which settler post-colonialism connects to government and governmentality (Fitzpatrick, 1992). In settler societies, the deployment of lawfare against indigenous populations represents the principle method by which settler governmentality seeks to realize its project of elimination. This transpires initially through the imposition of a new authoritative game of justice on all subjects through a universalized legal regime – what Ford (2010) calls the imposition of settler sovereignty. Subsequently, lawfare methods are extended to ensure that those who continue to identify with traditional indigenous practices are targeted as threats, and thereby subjected to security measures. Canadian lawfare histories are an apt starting point for any attempt to highlight how settler governmentality balances sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical practices in order to eliminate indigeneity from settler society.

Settler governmentality involves a combination of rationalities and techniques to secure the normalization of settler post-colonialism. Smith (2009) has detailed how the years following Canadian confederation were instrumental establishing the ‘liberal surveillance complex’ that assumed enormous power over indigenous communities. For Smith (2009: 19), surveillance projects that provided constant accounting and monitoring of indigenous communities often provoked (and produced) insecurities, which then further justified ‘draconian forms of political control and scandalous appropriations of land and resources’. As a method of detailing the insecurities of colonial rule, Guha (1983: 58) has argued that scholars can glean these machinations from the ‘voice of committed colonialism’ that can be found in archival records. Revealing a ‘prose of counterinsurgency’, colonial archives offer a glimpse into the rationalities (and insecurities) of settler-colonial authorities, as well as offering a perspective – albeit highly mediated – on the strategies of refusal and resistance exercised by the colonized.

To examine practices of (in)security governance in Canada, we adapt Guha’s methodological insights by using the ATIA to access the contemporary ‘prose of counterinsurgency’ that relates to the INAC campaign to undermine the traditional governance of the ABL.⁶ As a method of accessing a ‘live archive’ (Larsen and Walby, 2012), the ATIA is a tool for collecting data that are otherwise not available to social scientists. Moreover, this data-collection tool speaks to the particular need to move beyond speech acts of politicians when it comes to indigenous–settler relations (Henderson and Wakeham, 2009). This is especially true in Canada, where a long legacy of colonialism has been accompanied by obfuscation and denial by political, religious and government actors and institutions. ATIA processes offer an opportunity to report on government activity as a history of the present.

While accessing data related to security issues has generally become increasingly difficult since 9/11 (Earl, 2009; Monaghan and Walby, 2012), research on the policing and regulation of indigenous peoples is compounded by a number of concerns, adding significant barriers to accessing timely and relevant material. Our ATIA requests focus on information circulated within INAC, particularly on internal documents that relate to the application of Section 74 of the Indian Act and materials about the ‘leadership crisis’ with the Algonquins of Barriere Lake. Materials detailed below include communications (letters and emails), briefing notes, reports, and presentations prepared for and by INAC’s minister and deputy minister, as well as ministerial decisions related to ABL governance issues. We also obtained ‘hot spot’ or ‘burst’ reports from INAC’s Emergency & Issue Management Directorate, which pertain to ‘activities that threaten public safety in relation to issues that relate to Aboriginal peoples in Canada’.⁷ While most of the documents were non-classified, we did receive a number of protected documents. These were accompanied by significant redactions.

We have substantiated our data analysis through interviews with several members of the ABL community. We conducted interviews with representatives from both factions of the leadership dispute, which we detail below. We have also interviewed spokespeople from INAC. In recent years, however, requests for interviews with government agents are taken only by communications specialists, not individuals directly involved in particular programmes. Despite its limitations, the ATIA provides a useful tool for bypassing communications spokespeople and official discourse, by taking steps to gather information that would otherwise remain sequestered from public scrutiny until transferred to the National Archives. Using the ATIA to access these documents enables us to analyse the timeline and regimes of practice behind the implementation of Section 74 of the Indian Act. As a data-collection tool, it allows us to go beyond speech acts and media representations in these conflictual issues and contextualize the mechanisms of security that target the ABL community within broader patterns of settler domination.

Settler governmentality and the Algonquins of Barriere Lake

Through the examination of government records, our case study of the ABL details how settler governmentality targets expressions of indigeneity as sources of insecurity to settler society. We have divided our discussion of the eliminatory techniques used against indigenous practices that challenge the legitimacy of settler society into three sections. First, we offer a brief overview of the ABL, their history of resistance to settler encroachment and how they continue to advance a conception of self-governance that represents a material and epistemological threat to the logic of settler governmentality. Second, we discuss how Canadian efforts to delegitimize and disrupt the traditional leadership of the ABL rationalized the security mechanisms deployed against them. These progressed from financial manipulation and legal manoeuvring, to deposing the customary chief, to the eventual replacement of the traditional leadership-selection process by forcing a dubious band election process under the Indian Act. Finally, we denote how localized disruptions created insecurity concerns that were then reinterpreted into broader Canadian policing strategies surrounding ‘Aboriginal extremism’. Now incorporated into discourses of counter-terrorism, the ABL were subject to a host of surveillance and policing strategies aimed at monitoring, isolating and neutralizing ‘extremist’ elements of resistance to INAC’s project of bringing ‘peace to the forest’.

ABL and the Trilateral Agreement

Algonquins of the Ottawa River Valley watershed have resisted encroachments on their land for centuries, their efforts dating back to at least 1613 when they denied the French access to the Canadian interior via the Ottawa River (Richardson, 1993). Despite guarantees to land and autonomy outlined in signed treaties, the ABL have been slowly displaced and dispossessed from their territory by ‘means of mounting restrictions and encroachments aimed at replacing their Indigenous system of land tenure and jurisdiction with the laws and regulations of settler society’ (Pasternak, 2009: 79). With large portions of their territory lost to logging, hydro-dam flooding and the creation of a provincial park to facilitate settler tourism, the community was confined to a small reserve known as Lac-Rapide in 1961. Although the ABL have managed to maintain their original language, culture and traditional system of government, loss of access to food and hunting rights has contributed to the community being one of the poorest in Canada.

In the light of these encroachments by settler society, the ABL began to engage in direct action in the late 1980s to assert sovereign authority over their territory and stop the logging industry’s clear-cutting and chemical spraying (Shenkier and Meredith, 1997; Borrows, 2005). ABL blockades and occupations, supplemented by fear emanating from the ‘Oka Crisis’, led to the signing of the Trilateral Agreement in 1991.⁸ The Trilateral Agreement is an integrated resource-management plan for 10,000 square kilometres of Algonquin territory. Signed by the ABL, Canada and the province of Quebec, it requires that the ABL have a decisive voice concerning activities on their land as well as derive benefits from the resources extracted and use of their land (Pasternak, 2009; RCAP, 1996: 735–74). The Trilateral Agreement is viewed as a landmark conservation strategy and an alternative to the comprehensive land claims process that effectively extinguishes Aboriginal title to the land (RCAP, 1996: 512–22).

Offering a myriad of complications and obfuscations, both levels of government have engaged in numerous protractions before abandoning the Trilateral Agreement altogether, suggesting that the ABL focus on a comprehensive land claims process that would extinguish their title and replace their traditional practices and governance with a heavily regulated model of ‘mini-municipalism’ (Abele and Prince, 2006). The original Comprehensive Land Claims Policy of 1987 specifies that, in return for a settlement agreement, an Aboriginal group must surrender all Aboriginal rights (RCAP, 1996: 516). Although the comprehensive land claims process has faced much opposition, little has been done to substantively modify this policy of extinguishment (Hurley and Wherrett, 1999; AANDC, 2012). Efforts to undermine the Trilateral Agreement demonstrate how settler governmentality refuses to recognize practices that militate against the eliminatory prescriptions of Canadian sovereignty and settlement.

ABL insistence that signed agreements be honoured, refusal to extinguish title, and assertion of sovereignty through direct action amid ongoing government strategies to undermine these agreements have produced the ABL as a source of insecurity. Like other assertions of indigenous self-determination, these actions rupture settler-colonial claims to indigenous territories as well as the status of Canada’s settler post-colonial identity (Alfred and Corntassel, 2005). Canadian authorities have responded to the ABL with various interventions to neutralize these perceived threats, principally by initiating a complex series of manoeuvres that aimed to remove the ABL’s customary governing council.⁹ In 1996, 2006 and 2008, the Canadian government either refused to recognize the traditional leadership selection process or imposed an outside chief and council. Documents prepared by INAC detail how its actions prompted protests, blockades and legal challenges. Tensions were raised when INAC placed the community’s finances under third-party management, which resulted in further protests, a camp-out on Parliament Hill and a legal battle. Although judicial decisions ruled in favour of the ABL’s traditional leadership (Paul, 2007), the prose of counterinsurgency contained in INAC documents reveal that the government viewed the ABL’s traditional leadership as a source of insecurity that necessitated efforts to delegitimize and disrupt its activities in order that it might be eliminated.

Delegitimization, disruptions and the Indian Act

Internal reports from the summer of 2007 detail how INAC perceived mounting insecurities associated with protests by the ABL and their allies that continued to voice three core demands: the implementation of the Trilateral Agreement, recognition and respect for the Customary Governance Code, and a rescindment of the third-party management. In a report from 13 June 2007, INAC acknowledges extreme public pressure from the ABL, which included demonstrations, blocking forestry roads and appeals to the Minister of Indian Affairs. As a technique to reaffirm the legitimacy of INAC’s techniques of (in)security governance, the department contracted Marc Perron, a special representative to the minister, to evaluate the situation and provide a set of recommendations. In a November 2007 letter to Minister Chuck Strahl, the community outlined its opposition to the Perron appointment on the grounds of the latter’s ‘disinclination to address the “legalistic issues”, including the Trilateral Agreement’ (Nottaway, 2007). Further, the community claimed Perron had a conflict of interest because of his role as a federal negotiator in a comprehensive land claim with the Attikamek Nation in northern Quebec, whose territorial claim overlaps with that of the ABL.

Despite objections from the ABL, Perron issued his final report to the minister in December 2007. As a self-interested advocate of the comprehensive land claims framework, Perron expressed dismay that the ABL’s customary government (along with two other Algonquin communities in Quebec) refused to engage in the comprehensive process. Perron recommended the government permanently step away from the Trilateral Agreement and that this ‘mythical “treaty”’¹⁰ should not be referenced in any future financial agreements. He wrote that INAC ‘should not contribute to perpetuating that utopia … which essentially feeds the population with illusions and strengthens those who promote it in their ideology’.¹¹ Perron’s report also absolved INAC of any blame regarding the community’s destitute condition. Despite the ABL’s claim that the forestry, hydro-electric and tourism industries accumulate approximately 100 million dollars per year from activities on their territory, Perron insisted the disastrous economic conditions were due to ‘a culture of dependency, negligence and flagrant irresponsibility’.¹² He further recommended both a return to court to secure legal recognition of the third-party manager so that the ABL would be obligated to accept external control of their finances, and that INAC’s participation in the negotiations be contingent on the cessation of blockades.

Perron’s report provided a long list of deficiencies in the community, where ‘cocaine is easier to buy than flour’.¹³ Depictions of widespread criminality in the ABL community are similar to the way in which, as Comaroff and Comaroff (2007b: 133) demonstrate, images of crime and lawlessness have ‘come to characterise the latest epoch in the sorry history of the global south’, reinforcing archetypes of underdevelopment, abjection and ethnic strife. Parroting a long tradition of settler stereotypes of indigenous communities in Canada (Francis, 1992), Perron describes the ABL as embodying a ‘culture of cultivating one’s own miserable condition’,¹⁴ at odds with the norms of settler society. Much of the backwardness is a result of traditional leadership, which he claims is directed by ‘a small group of ideologues and doctrinaires [who] prefer confrontation to dialogue, theory to development’.¹⁵ He blames the Customary Governance Code for perpetuating internal divisions and the crisis in the community, a sentiment echoed by INAC officials who blame the code for fuelling the situation.¹⁶ Perron advised that the best chance for ameliorating the situation rested with the complete replacement of the traditional leadership. His report concluded by recommending INAC face the situation by forming a working group to study all possible forms of intervention, ‘using all the instruments of the state’.¹⁷

In the ensuing weeks, INAC bypassed the traditional Council and recognized an opposing faction under the leadership of Casey Ratt. A departmental briefing note from 18 February 2008 stated that ‘the improvement of the situation in Barriere Lake depends on … a Council willing to work with the Department and its other partners in capacity building’. INAC documents warned that potential negative impacts of acknowledging the Ratt Council included the emergence of new tensions, including violence, legal action, media pressure and blockades. Yet, following the change of leadership, INAC documents note the Ratt Council was willing to be more cooperative and, in March 2009, an agreement was signed with Natural Resources Quebec on harmonization measures to permit logging on ABL territory.

Importantly, despite the appointment of the Ratt Council, INAC continued to plan for the imposition of Indian Act elections. Since Ratt claimed to have been selected through the customary selection process, INAC continued to view his leadership as granting symbolic legitimacy to the Customary Governance Code. What is important here for INAC is not the leadership itself, but the process by which the leadership is determined. INAC considered the traditional practices of the ABL to be flawed and backwards. They looked to eliminate these customary practices altogether. As INAC prepared to eliminate the ABL’s governance structure, secret documents revealed that the federal government prepared a new policy in 2008 to overhaul elections on reserves, indicating ‘a desire to challenge the selection of community leaders by “custom”’ (Curry, 2009). The documents revealed a concern about the way in which traditional leaders were selected and a desire to implement ‘mandatory rules for bands on how to conduct elections’ including ‘secret ballot elections and allowing all off-reserve members to vote’.

Following the logic of settler governmentality that seeks to eliminate indigeneity from the space of settler society, INAC used the leadership dispute as evidence of the need to replace the Customary Governance Code, which it perceived as a source of insecurity. To this end, INAC’s prose of counterinsurgency, as expressed in a secret document dated 3 March 2008, explains how the acknowledgement of the Ratt Council further justified the imposition of an electoral process that was designed and controlled by INAC. The document stated that questions about the legitimacy of the Ratt Council ‘confirm the whole problematic with the current selection code which contributes greatly to the governance imbroglio’. Section 74 of the Indian Act gives the Minister of Indian Affairs the power to unilaterally depose traditional chiefs and councils and force new elections under INAC rules (Horn, 1983).¹⁸ Notably, Indian Act elections were used in Akwesasne in 1898–9 (Mitchell, 1989) and at Six Nations in 1923–4 (Niezen, 2000; Woo, 2003) to depose customary governments. As at Barriere Lake, these instances were accompanied by multiple other interventions, such as the manipulation of the community’s finances, INAC support of a small opposition faction and the use of police power to implement the department’s policies. INAC’s preference is to work with those in communities who are willing to establish ‘practical working relationships’ with the department and work together to ‘keep the reserve “trouble makers” quiet’ (Horn, 1983: 39). In the case of the ABL, INAC reasoned that ‘taking no actions would perpetuate the governance imbroglio and the difficult socio-economic conditions within the community’. Following Perron’s recommendations for a complete overhaul of the traditional Elders’ Council, INAC imposed elections under Section 74 of the Indian Act under ministerial order in April, 2010.

The community at large opposed the proceedings and obstructed INAC’s efforts by using direct action tactics in the summer of 2010. To circumvent the protests and community support for the customary election process, INAC accepted nominations for the new leadership via mail. It received five valid written nominations – one for chief and four for councillors – and the electoral officer acclaimed the individuals concerned. This was sufficient to enable the establishment of a new council – again under the leadership of Casey Ratt. However, Ratt refused the nomination on the grounds that it violated the traditional Customary Governance Code.¹⁹ He also attributed the push for Section 74 elections to pressure from Quebec and the forestry industry to rapidly open the territory for logging owing to the threat of mill closures in surrounding towns.²⁰ An internal document from 29 January 2010 refers to forestry operations, stating that INAC can expect increased pressure from the Quebec government to hold elections as soon as possible. Ratt explained that his council had been offered large sums of money in exchange for ‘peace in the forest’ and assurances that blockades and disturbances would cease.²¹

Despite Ratt rejecting the nomination, INAC declared that a quorum of four councillors with no chief was in compliance with Indian Act electoral regulations.²² Following careful planning, INAC’s use of Section 74 ‘elections’ had succeeded in subverting the traditional practices that had been in place since time immemorial. In response to INAC’s interventions, ABL community spokesperson Norman Matchewan warned that ‘Section 74 is erasing our identity’.²³ After the Section 74 elections, the community reported that the new council had held consultations with Quebec and the forestry industry and signed agreements permitting logging. Matchewan described the involvement of INAC in the affairs of the ABL as follows: ‘Quebec is now using the leadership confusion created by the federal government’s interference in our internal affairs as an excuse not to implement the [Trilateral] [A]greement and to let forestry companies have their way on our land’.²⁴

Efforts to eliminate the traditional governance of the ABL provoked widespread community resistance. The ABL combined nonviolent direct action protests with a popular outreach campaign to publicize their treatment by successive governments and demand respect for their traditional practices and territories. In addition to demonstrating the extensive efforts that INAC was prepared to undertake to eliminate the traditional leadership of the ABL and undermine the spirit of the Trilateral Agreement, the case of the ABL demonstrates how contestations from one localized group can garner the attention of counter-terrorism agencies concerned with an increase in ‘Aboriginal extremism’. Below, we detail how the resistance of the ABL merged with other contemporary policing and surveillance efforts that target indigenous communities and, following the eliminatory logic of settler governmentality, became coded as security threats to the health of settler society.

‘Aboriginal extremism’ and the colonial present

Records gathered through the ATIA demonstrate that the public contestation of INAC and the Canadian government – particularly the use of protests and road blockades – meant that the actions of the ABL were increasingly interpreted by security agencies as potential sources of violence. This ensured coordination between security agencies and INAC. Internal reports indicate that INAC was prepared for blockades from the community and undertook efforts to coordinate security preparations. The minister was also briefed on several occasions about scenarios in memos dedicated to ‘road block/violence/protests’ that cited the potential for supporters of the traditional Council to engage in vandalism, highway blockades and protests at INAC offices in Maniwaki, Buckingham and Gatineau, as well as at Parliament Hill.

Throughout their public campaign, the ABL demanded the recognition of their traditional governance, the implementation of the Trilateral Agreement and the revocation of third-party management. As their resistance gained media attention and public support, the ABL became listed on a secret ‘hot spot’ list that was created by INAC to monitor sites of organized indigenous resistance. In the wake of several high-profile land reclamations and protests in Canada, INAC developed a ‘Hot Spot Reporting System’ to network security intelligence and enable rapid responses to conflicts over land claims.²⁵ Diabo and Pasternak (2011: 1–2) reveal that INAC was ‘given the lead role to spy on First Nations’ and to work with other government departments and security agencies to develop a ‘blueprint for security integration on First Nations issues’. The ‘hot spot’ summaries and other ‘burst’ reports and notifications were distributed through security intelligence networks, federal departments, and provincial and municipal police forces. These surveillance reports were prepared by INAC’s Emergency & Issue Management Directorate in order to ‘mitigate aboriginal occupations and protests’. The ABL were first mentioned in a series of weekly ‘hot spot’ summaries in July–September 2008 regarding ‘governance disputes’ after INAC recognized the Ratt Council. This was followed by a long series of ‘bursts’ from October 2008 to January 2009, when the community erected barricades on Highway 117 and faced riot police, violence and incarceration, actions that sparked further protests in Ottawa/Gatineau, Cantley and Montreal. The ABL continued to appear in ‘hot spot’ reports in 2009 for blockading logging trucks, as well as in 2011 when mining exploration began on their territory. In 2010, the ABL consistently appeared on notifications regarding protests in Ottawa and on the reserve against the imposition of Section 74 elections.

In recent years, Canadian authorities have used the term ‘extremism’ to categorize and frame threats to national security, blurring the boundaries between activism, protests and terrorism (Monaghan and Walby, 2012). Reports from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Canada’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), demonstrate this tendency to blur protests with national security threats when examining cases of ‘Aboriginal extremism’. In the case of surveillance reports on the ABL, this demonstrates how the prose of counterinsurgency is produced by officials in INAC and becomes explicitly tied to counter-terrorism efforts coordinated by national security agencies. On 3 April 2007, the RCMP gave a presentation entitled ‘Operational Response to Aboriginal Occupations and Protest’ to the CSIS. The presentation acknowledges ‘growing concern among high-level government officials and the policing community about the potential for unrest in Aboriginal communities, and an increasing sense of militancy among certain segments of the Aboriginal population’. The RCMP presentation also references ‘Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal extremists’ as escalating or agitating conflicts. Likewise, the CSIS reported that they believe Aboriginal extremists are increasingly willing to resort to direct action protests. The documents note sovereignty, land claims and environmental concerns as key issues, and barricades, roadblocks, sabotage and vandalism as tactics used. In listing the direct action tactics and underlining the potential for property destruction, the RCMP and the CSIS associate these protests with acts of violence and threats to national security that justify regimes of (in)security governance.

The conflation of protesting indigenous communities with extremism is part of the logic of settler governmentality that targets indigenous groups who are unwilling to relinquish their rights and recognize Canadian sovereignty over their territory. The classification of the ABL within the growing concern of ‘Aboriginal extremism’ demonstrates that security agencies – operating on the basis of national security and anti-terrorism policies – are increasingly classifying and profiling indigenous groups who openly contest the authority of the Canadian government. As a function of the settler post-colonial imagination, the reactivation of colonial lawfare – such as Section 74 of the Indian Act – is less an anachronism than a reminder of the continuity of settler governmentality. For the ABL, their opposition to the normalization of settler governmentality is rooted in the desire to implement the promises made in the Trilateral Agreement and maintain their culture and traditional governance structure. However, their insistence on maintaining their traditional practices and remaining outside the settler post-colonial fold has resulted in further marginalization, physical repression and the criminalization of many community members. As the community continues its long history of resilience, the ‘governance imbroglio’ will likely result in an acceleration of security and policing practices that aim to eliminate the ABL’s structures of customary governance and practices that are grounded in their cultural traditions, while providing more leverage for provincial and territorial governments to delegitimize the Trilateral Agreement and insist on policies that ensure colonial control of the lands desired by settler society.

Conclusions

(In)security-governance techniques directed at indigenous communities by Canadian settler society are driven by the eliminatory project of settler governmentality. For the majority population of settler society, indigenous grievances have frequently been framed as ‘special interests’ or ‘accommodations’ (see Flanagan, 2000); however, they are increasingly framed through the lens of (in)security. Many share opinions similar to those expressed by Prime Minister Harper, highlighted in our introduction, that mythologize the post-colonial character of Canadian society despite the frequency of confrontations between indigenous peoples and the settler majority. Viewed as a source of insecurity, the assertion of self-determination by indigenous peoples ruptures the stability of the settler post-colonial imaginary by threatening material interests (logging, mining, energy economies) as well as disrupting the immaterial qualities of the Canadian identity. As our case study of the ABL attests, responses to indigenous disruptions are mechanisms of security that adapt flexible modes of interventions based on an overall desire for securing access to indigenous lands and neutralizing behaviours and conduct that are viewed as hostile to the project of settlement and expansion.

The case study of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake demonstrates how settler governmentality uses discourses and practices of (in)security to rationalize interventions into indigenous governance. Contributing to research on settler colonialism, we stress that the colonial project of land appropriation and settlement is a continuous and evolving process. Wolfe (2006: 388) notes that ‘invasion is a structure not an event’, and we highlight how structural practices of settler govermentality aim to eliminate autonomous sources of indigeneity that challenge the facile identity of settler post-coloniality, as well as the material processes of indigenous dispossession. As indigenous communities such as the ABL continue to practice and identify with traditional cultures, their counter conduct is monitored through contemporary security infrastructures and translated as threats to the advancement, health and prosperity of settler society. Interpreted as resistance to the legitimacy of Canadian rule, traditional governance is delegitimized as politically and economically backwards and a source of insecurity to the settler population. After many centuries of gradual encroachment, the project of elimination was dramatically accelerated under the Indian Act, and further accelerated in recent years when the ABL presented a viable alternative to the comprehensive land claims process. Then, as a means of undermining the Trilateral Agreement, Canadian authorities undertook efforts to eliminate the Customary Governance Code of the ABL, all the while preparing to enhance policing and security measures, under the guise of national security, to enforce the eliminatory programmes of settler governmentality.

Using the ATIA, we argue that reports from government and security agencies can provide a ‘prose of counterinsurgency’ that expresses the rationalities and details the techniques of settler governmentality. Increasing concerns over ‘Aboriginal extremism’ that emerge from national security agencies demonstrate how indigenous self-assertions are framed through anti-terrorism networks that have proliferated in Canada and other Western states over the past decade. But, while the make-up of the Canadian and Quebec governments changes over time, the core settler governmental logic remains the same: undermine, expropriate, colonize. As an articulation of settler governmentality’s logic of elimination, the case study of the ABL demonstrates how contemporary forms of security governance are continuations of historical practices within a country whose settler majority sees itself as not having a colonial past. While simultaneously denying and continuing colonial lawfare practices through processes of (in)security governance, interventions against the ABL exhibit the embedded practices and epistemologies of settler governmentality that define the settler colonial present.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ajay Parasram, Sonny Dhoot, Kevin Walby, Shiri Pasternak, and the guest editors and reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Andrew Crosby is a Coordinator with the Ontario Public Interest Research Group – Carleton at Carleton University in Ottawa. He also works as the Operations Manager of the Leveller newspaper and is a member of the Media Co-op. Recent research and writing interests include policing of mega-events, poverty and social movements. He holds a master’s degree in political science from Carleton University.

Jeffrey Monaghan is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at Queen’s University, Kingston. He is a member of the Surveillance Studies Centre. His recent research on the policing of social movements has been published in Policing and Society, Current Sociology and Social Movement Studies. His doctoral research examines how Canadian security and surveillance practices are exported through bilateral security-cooperation agreements.

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