Contesting colonial beachheads: Settler colonial (in)security professionals and Indigenous peoples’ energy infrastructure

Abstract

In April 2020, the British Columbia Utilities Commission released the Final Report of its Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry. The Inquiry was tasked with determining the regulatory environment for Indigenous utility providers across the Canadian province. We analyse the Inquiry as a colonial encounter between Indigenous nations and the settler state, arguing that technical bodies like the Commission represent a sort of security professional working to depoliticize the reproduction of settler sovereignty, highlighting the operations of non-traditional security professionals in settler colonial contexts. Through the Inquiry, security comes through providing certainty for existing energy infrastructure and institutions as ‘colonial beachheads’, legitimizing the settler colonial political-economic order. However, the Inquiry also demonstrates that such processes offer opportunities for Indigenous nations to contest that order. Indeed, Indigenous nations used the Inquiry to both contest the legitimization of settler sovereignty and accumulation, and press for the capacity to build their own infrastructure and institutions, thereby enacting their decision-making authority. We explore this tension in the context of the contemporary reconciliation discourse, finding the Inquiry’s final recommendations represent an attempt to reify settler sovereignty, while also deepening settler insecurity through the possibilities opened for greater Indigenous self-determination.

Keywords

Colonial beachhead Indigenous peoples infrastructure insecurity security professional settler colonialism

Introduction

In April 2020, the British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC), an independent regulatory body for the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC), released the Final Report of its Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry (Inquiry or BCUC Inquiry hereafter). The Inquiry sought to determine the BCUC’s relationship to Indigenous electrical producers and providers (utilities), and was requested by the Provincial Government of British Columbia after a 2016 decision by the BCUC to deny an exemption for Beecher Bay (Scia’new) First Nation (SFN) to operate an electrical utility on its reserve territory. SFN had sought to operate its Spirit Bay utility without BCUC oversight, arguing it maintained its own jurisdiction. In denying the request, the BCUC claimed regulatory jurisdiction throughout BC, including on recognized First Nations¹ territory. The 2020 Inquiry shifted the emphasis: the panel leading the Inquiry no longer claimed the expansive regulatory authority outlined by the BCUC in 2016. Instead, in the context of an era of official reconciliation, the Inquiry put forward arguments and a list of recommendations which reaffirmed the BCUC’s regulatory authority in the immediate term while allowing for the potential for limited Indigenous self-regulation if the BCUC determined certain conditions had been met, such as the establishment of a dispute resolution process (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 42). Focusing on economic considerations, the Inquiry concluded that ‘public utility regulation should be aligned to provide Indigenous peoples with a meaningful opportunity to self-determine their approach to capitalizing’ on changes ongoing in the energy and electricity sector (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 30).² This shift arose in part from the Province’s 2019 passage of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP or Declaration hereafter) (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 40–41). Through the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), the Province enshrined the Declaration into provincial law, requiring that all other provincial laws conform to – and that public bodies act in accordance with – its principles.

Progress towards fulsome implementation of DRIPA, and hence UNDRIP, has been slow. While no party expected an overnight shift, the Inquiry’s Final Report reflects the entrenched nature of the Canadian settler colonial state. This colonial context is especially important to highlight in BC. Borrows describes Canadian sovereignty as being inscribed and upheld through ‘alchemy’, going back to ancient Greek thought to note that ‘political and legal ascendancy are conveyed to those who can conjure fictions that vindicate their claims of authority’ (Borrows, 1999: 559). For Borrows, and other Indigenous legal theorists, the Canadian state’s claim to sovereignty – as affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court – rests on an undated assertion of British sovereignty that is understood to ‘displace’ Indigenous nations’ by reason of European and Christian authority (see Borrows, 1999: 558–567). While not further justified, this sovereign authority was transferred to Canada upon independence. However, whereas in much of the rest of the country, the state defaults to legitimizing its sovereignty through an ‘incoherent’ reading of existing treaty relationships (Starblanket, 2019), much of BC remains untreatied, resulting in different Indigenous–settler relationalities.³ We briefly discuss these below. It is particularly important for our argument to note the contested nature of such assertions of sovereignty, including over those treatied territories. This results in a legitimacy gap, producing an underlying and ongoing ‘(in)security’ wherein settler governments then must continually (re)produce their own sovereignty (Crosby and Monaghan, 2012).

In this article we engage with this ongoing reproduction in two ways. First, we understand infrastructure itself to operate as a securitizing technology. Here we are following Curley’s (2021) analysis of infrastructure as a ‘colonial beachhead’. Rather than only capturing the opening of the colonial encounter, Curley recognizes that infrastructure also puts in place the conditions of colonial futurity. As a result, infrastructure operates as ‘a temporal encroachment on Indigenous lands and livelihoods, over time, to augment material and political difference that eventually overwhelms Indigenous nations and curtails certain possibilities’ (Curley, 2021: 388). Notably, Curley refers here to those possibilities of a decolonial futurity organized around Indigenous nationhood, authority and jurisdiction. Building from this, the second way we engage with this ongoing reproduction is through extending Strakosch’s (2019) argument that contemporary forms of colonization are to be found in ‘technical’ policymaking processes. We show how such processes represent security-affirming moves by settler state officials. In doing so, our analysis points to the way independent, non-governmental bodies become sites of colonial remaking and, critically, contestation, by securing state authority.

Bringing these together, we make the case for reading the BCUC Inquiry as a ‘security professional’ (Bigo, 2002). Our central argument is that the Inquiry has worked to secure the colonial beachheads of existing energy infrastructure. Further, by securing the material means of settler colonial accumulation, the Inquiry supported the reproduction of settler colonial sovereignty and the broader settler colonial political and economic order by managing the unease generated from challenges raised by First Nations. In reaffirming settler sovereignty, the Inquiry redefines the development of electric utility infrastructure from a domain marked by contestations over sovereignty between the settler state and First Nations to one which reifies the state’s legitimacy through a technical, regulatory exercise that circumscribes Indigenous national authority by reading First Nations as one of many ‘economic stakeholders’.

We undertake our analysis as two settler scholars, and do not seek to speak for Indigenous nations. Rather, we aim to better understand the operations of the settler state: how it reinscribes its own sovereignty and how this is contested. Our argument is made through a close reading of the Inquiry’s official documentation. This includes the Inquiry’s Final Report, written by the panel responsible for conducting the Inquiry, and the submissions by First Nations and their advocacy organizations. Before turning to our empirical material, however, we begin by outlining the settler colonial project’s relationship to the ‘paradox of (in)security’ (Stern, 2006): that of a permanent insecurity in the form of uncertainty and unease. We also articulate our understanding of how energy infrastructure works as a colonial beachhead enabling settler accumulation, with the process managed by technical officials as security professionals.

The infrastructure of settler (in)security

Research in critical security studies has delved into the paradox of (in)security, or how ‘when people attempt to protect themselves and to create a sense of security, they also produce danger, fear and harm’ (Stern, 2006: 187). That is, the pursuit of security for one group often comes at the expense of security for another, and may even generate new sources of insecurity for those seeking it. At the same time, the search for security has become an ‘operative logic’ of states driving their behaviour (Massumi, 2015). This holds for settler colonial states, which employ specific dynamics and logics that offer insight for the rest of the field. What are these dynamics? How do they relate to energy infrastructure and allow us to see the operations of security professionals? The story begins with Borrows’s alchemy, whereby settler claims to sovereignty are always made against existing Indigenous practice. As such, they must always be reconfirmed, and in this article we follow Glen Coulthard’s work on settler accumulation and dispossession (Coulthard, 2014), contending that the insecurity (described in the language of precarity) arises out of the internal contradictions of settler colonialism.

Critically, Coulthard extends Marx’s formulation of primitive accumulation as the violent processes of dispossession and enclosure which marked the transition to capitalism, to demonstrate how the initial act of dispossession must be perpetually reproduced and defended – especially in settler colonial contexts (see also Coulthard and Simpson, 2016). As such, Coulthard argues the process of primitive accumulation and the enclosure it entails should not be understood as limited to a specific historical period but rather ‘as an ongoing practice of dispossession that never ceases to structure capitalist and colonial social relations in the present’ (Coulthard, 2014: 152). In this materialist sense, by drawing on Marx and Franz Fanon to locate ‘the dispossession of land and territory at the heart of the settler colonial project’ (Balaton-Chrimes and Stead, 2017: 8), Coulthard shows how settler colonialism can be understood as an ongoing project of reproducing dispossession for the purpose of accumulation in perpetuity.

For this settler colonial project to be realized, however, indigeneity as an oppositional source of sovereignty must be circumscribed or eliminated (Wolfe, 2006). Aileen Moreton-Robinson refers to this as the ‘“certainty of tenure” politics’ which underpins ‘the possessive relationship between patriarchal whiteness and asset accumulation’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 68). In support of this project, Moreton-Robinson points out how the production of settler ‘fear’ at the loss of tenure is often ‘strategically deployed as a tool to mobilize public support’ (2015: 68) for state responses to Indigenous challenges. This could include the deployment of security forces to clear encampments of Indigenous land defenders, or the establishment of technical bodies and legalistic deliberation to determine title or jurisdiction, as we explore here. Critically, in both cases, settler colonialism (i.e. both the settler state and society) must engage in the self-referential act of perpetually legitimating and defending itself – an act in which its very negation is inherent. These confrontations evidence the paradox of (in)security both in the way they produce insecurity for Indigenous peoples in multiple ways, and demonstrate both the unrealizable nature of absolute security and the precarity that defines settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism is, therefore, made insecure through the state’s inability to resolve its internal contradictions: the ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2006) meets the continued presence and resistance of Indigenous nations and peoples, highlighting the unrealized ambition of settler colonial projects predicated on their erasure. For instance, in Canada, 2012’s Idle No More movement and the more recent Land Back movement, among other examples, have punctured the thin façade of the postcolonial imaginary by rejecting the idea prevalent in settler societies that the act of dispossession and replacement (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013) is both historically distant and irreversible (Veracini, 2010; Crosby and Monaghan, 2016). They show that the genocide pursued by settler states remains incomplete, and thus, Indigenous dispossession is not fully realized. This understanding of the insecurity of the settler colonial project as theorized both socially and materially offers us a point of departure.

Anthropological research on settlers also shows that insecurity arises from perceived instability. As Mackey (2016) explores, and we discuss further below, this insecurity rises up as a particular form of anxiety when direct challenges to settler entitlement are manifested. Examples such as the blockading of railways, construction of checkpoints and the delay of extractive projects facing protest offer direct challenges to the regime of capital accumulation through dispossession, and serve to highlight the unrealized settler project in both a material and imaginative sense. This understanding leads to two further insights. First, the settler colonial project is a security concern, both today and historically (Carleton, 2017),⁴ and overcoming an inherent and acutely felt insecurity is already an everyday settler concern. Second, much of the work of the settler colonial project is explicitly aimed at attempting to realize stability.⁵ Despite settler expectations (Mackey, 2016), such certainty has not been achieved. As a result, the settler colonial state continually changes its operations to realize its own security, or as we articulate it below, to manage its inherent unease and uncertainty.

How do we see this management occur? Here we turn to the SFN’s application to construct and control a utility. It provoked a response in the form of a technical body, the BCUC’s Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry, tasked with advising the settler colonial state on how it should proceed. We argue the establishment of this ad hoc technical body should be understood as an attempt to resolve the acute insecurity and unease generated from SFN’s challenge to the presumed universal authority of the Canadian state within its territorial, colonial borders. In other words, we argue the BCUC, acting through the Inquiry, acts as a security professional (Bigo, 2002) – a body deployed to define and manage the unease generated by a novel challenge to the settler colonial state. We further argue that this challenge was especially profound and unsettling to the settler state because it struck directly at a core component of its capacity to reproduce the conditions of Indigenous dispossession and the capital accumulation it enables: the control of utility infrastructure.

Energy utilities as colonial beachheads

Utility infrastructure in Canada, and the Global North more generally, is commonly thought of in banal terms, operating in the background of everyday life. However, this view belies the way infrastructure is deeply entangled in the (re)production of particular social and political economic orders. Indigenous and critical scholars have, in recent years, increasingly problematized the notion of infrastructure’s banality by excavating its historic and ongoing role in colonialism (see Cowen, 2020; Karuka, 2019; LaDuke and Cowen, 2020; Pasternak, 2017; Spice, 2018) and the (re)production of what Sarah Hunt refers to as ‘colonialscapes’ – the naturalization of ‘the relations of domination and dehumanization inherent in colonial relations’ (2014: 7).

Following this line of enquiry, we argue that British Columbian electricity infrastructure, and the technical, professional bodies that govern it, should be understood in terms of what Curley (2021) articulates as a ‘colonial beachhead’. A beachhead, in the military sense, refers to the temporary establishment of a forward line which clears and occupies space in such a way as to facilitate the landing of additional troops and equipment. Conceptualizing utility infrastructure as a colonial beachhead, Curley argues, allows us to see how infrastructure acts as a vehicle for the colonial state to remove Indigenous nations and people from their land, remaking social and political relations (2021). In this way, infrastructure both naturalizes dispossession and domination, and facilitates the inclusion of the land, resources and people into the circuits of capital. As Curley states, ‘infrastructures bind communities to modernization, urbanization, and capitalist circulations of wealth’ (2021: 388).

In British Columbia, utility-scale electricity projects have a history of operating as colonial beachheads. For instance, the hydroelectric dams built in the 1960s on the Peace and Columbia rivers, and the Site C Dam project currently under construction in the province, can be viewed as vehicles for dispossession and the remaking of territory to enable capital accumulation. These infrastructures are, in this sense, colonial ‘technologies of power that make territory and the biosphere accessible, legible, knowable, and utilizable’ to the settler state and capital (Parenti, 2016: 171). Indeed, the processes by which this occurs are evident in the case of BC Hydro’s Bennett Dam on Peace river, the construction of which flooded 350,000 acres in the 1960s (Loo, 2004, 2007). The flooded land had been home to the people of the Tsay Keh Dene and Kwadacha nations, whose ways of life and social relations were utterly transformed for the explicit purpose of powering urban areas and, critically, the technologies of fossil fuel, mineral and timber extraction. If we understand the Bennett Dam as a colonial beachhead, we not only see how it was a means of dispossessing First Nations of their lands, but also of their sovereignty by undermining their place-based relationships (see Coulthard, 2014; Coulthard and Simpson, 2016) in favour of capitalist property relations (Nichols, 2020). This reading aligns with discussions in critical security studies regarding the implication of developmental projects and critical infrastructure in the entrenchment and security of prevailing power and social relations (see Duffield, 2010; Jensen, 2010; Orjuela, 2010). Indeed, seeing utility infrastructure development as a colonial beachhead elucidates how such development contributes to the paradox of (in)security: it simultaneously produces both security (for settlers) and insecurity (for Indigenous nations) by transforming sociopolitical, cultural and economic relations.

In this way, the beachhead framework additionally serves to highlight how utility infrastructure is a site of contention. First, as mentioned above, it is important to recognize that colonial infrastructures have been consistently challenged by Indigenous peoples, calling into question the legitimacy and territorial authority of the settler colonial state (Estes, 2019; Simpson, 2014; Spice, 2018; Whetung, 2019). And, second, as Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen (2020) argue, infrastructure itself is not inherently colonial. LaDuke and Cowen agree that Wiindigo infrastructure – a reference to the Anishinaabe legend of a cannibalistic monster signifying the loss of reason to indulgence – has ‘carve[d] up Turtle Island, or North America, into preserves of settler jurisdiction, while entrenching and hardening the very means of settler economy and sociality into tangible material structures’ (2020: 244). But they also point to the fact that the transformation of infrastructure is both possible and required if new social relations and ways of life are to be realized. The SFN’s efforts to gain control of its own electricity utility can be interpreted as aiming at precisely this.⁶ Indeed, by seeing the SFN’s efforts as an attempt to create new social relations, we should expect the settler colonial state to defend its infrastructural beachhead so as to manage the acute insecurity and unease that a challenge to its territorial authority evokes.

Security professionals and the unease of uncertainty

The beachhead framework allows us to understand one way in which settler colonialism simultaneously builds and reifies social and political-economic orders. However, the project remains unrealized, producing insecurity as anxiety, and opening space for decolonial futurities. Who then is responsible for the project’s fulfilment? ‘Those working to uphold settler orders’ remains too broad for a meaningful analysis here. Governments are undoubtably high on any list of those bearing responsibility, but what we argue here is that technical bodies such as the BCUC (and in this case, the Inquiry and associated panellists) also represent important actors because of their role in extending, affirming and legitimizing settler state sovereignty. Rather than building settler orders, we are suggesting that technical actors are responsible for their management. Crucially, they do so by operating as what Bigo (2002: 63) calls security professionals, who are those technical ‘professionals in charge of the management of risk and fear’.

Analysing through the realm of immigration, Bigo (2002: 67) begins from the understanding of our current society as based in risk, with the state being framed as a body that must be protected. How is it that security professionals become responsible for managing this unease? For Bigo, this has to do with the roles given to them by governments: first, security agencies are ‘invested with the office of defining and prioritizing threats’ to the state (Bigo, 2002: 74), and second with identifying and implementing interventions. As such, they are imbued with authority and maintain ‘institutional knowledge’ and technological capabilities, which they mobilize in making ‘truth claims’ in a Foucauldian sense (Bigo, 2002: 74–76). In this way, actors within security agencies – those ‘security professionals’ – become ‘managers of unease’ (Bigo, 2002: 73) through an understanding that they are best positioned to define, identify and resolve threats to the safety and security of the body politic using specific technical knowledge, standards and practices to achieve their aims (Frowd, 2017: 348).

While Bigo analyses security professionals in the area of immigration, we see alignments between his conceptualization of the state and body politic as being under threat and our own understanding of the insecurity of settler colonialism. Controlling immigration may be a more immaterial practice than the deeply material construction of infrastructure, but a central part of the project of security in each is the building and maintaining of a ‘we’ of the body politic.⁷ Indeed, both respond to a specific ‘unease’: for Bigo it is that of the identity of the body politic; for us, the always-incomplete process of Indigenous dispossession produces a settler insecurity over the uncertainty of settler possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Ongoing Indigenous assertions of authority and self-determination, then, represent a direct threat to be managed.

Indeed, this unease manifests as a powerful form of fear that motivates settler citizens and the state into action to resolve the situation (Mackey, 2016; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). That is, settler citizens demand, and settler states are expected to provide, certainty in the face of the threat of Indigenous authority. As Mackey’s (2014: 241; see also 2016) ethnographic work shows,

colonization and settler nation-building has entailed the repetitive embedding and realizing of settler assertions of certainty and entitlement, and the repeated denial of Indigenous personhood and sovereignty, all embedded in the interpretation of early moments of colonial/settler assumptions of sovereignty over territory.

When Indigenous nations assert their own authority, either through laying claim to specific tracts of land, or through forms of refusal (Simpson, 2014), this creates uncertainty within settlers by ‘disrupt[ing] longstanding “settled expectations” of entitlement’ to these lands and authority (Mackey, 2014: 239). These threats must then be confronted, and this is where security professionals step in to manage the paradox. Some cases are managed through direct confrontation, such as by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Bell and Schreiner, 2018; Crosby and Monaghan, 2012, 2016). We see this in the recent invasions of Wet’suwet’en territory, for example, where an Indigenous assertion of authority over territory was met with direct, violent confrontation.

Police forces can clearly be seen as security professionals. However, in other cases, more managerial interventions can effectively reduce the threat of Indigenous authority and affirm settler sovereignty. This is especially the case when the threat is to be managed preemptively, rather than responded to. Technical processes and policymaking are effective tools for settler governments in such cases in two ways. First, settler interpretations of sovereignty can be materialized directly. One example is the implementing of property regimes, based on logics of white possessiveness (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) and underlying assumptions of Crown authority (Mackey, 2014). Looking back to Curley (2021: 389), infrastructure helps these processes along by enabling the ‘material and legal transformations of land’ that can manage settler unease. Regulatory bodies act as security professionals when they implement these relations. Second, inquiries like that of the BCUC operate as mechanisms through which truth claims are affirmed. By offering findings, and using those to make governance recommendations, arms-length bodies can seemingly legitimize settler insecurity.

We are not suggesting every government or regulatory body acts as a security professional; rather, we remain focused on those actors who identify, define and manage threats to the state and body politic. What our analysis shows, however, is that these actors can be found in areas not typically captured in the traditional realms of security. By combining settler colonial studies and critical security studies, and centring sovereignty and its ongoing reproduction, we show how those technical bodies that affirm settler state sovereignty in the face of Indigenous claims act, consciously or otherwise, as security professionals. We illustrate this now by turning to the BCUC Inquiry, showing how the technical body seeks to provide settler colonial certainty by reproducing Indigenous dispossession through energy infrastructure and governance.

Defining threats and managing unease

The settler colonial project then, is one of unease: despite being unrealized, it must proceed as though the legal and political-economic orders it has constructed are firmly ensconced. This creates an inherent insecurity, whereby processes of accumulation through the imposition of capitalist property regimes must be continually reinforced. This section explores some of the ways that this work of reinforcing is undertaken as a technical exercise. Drawing on the Inquiry’s documentation, we argue the BCUC operates as a security professional and explore the outcomes of this. We show how the Inquiry, rather than establishing the property rights regimes, worked to shore up existing settler colonial legal and political-economic orders. That is, through technical processes we see the affirmation and reinforcement of these orders, rather than their creation anew. We illustrate this by turning to the initial role of security professionals as experts: to define and identify threats, and devise interventions to neutralize them. As we show, despite being given its mandate, the Inquiry itself does a considerable amount of work to define the issue at hand as being that of ‘economic reconciliation’, with appropriate interventions determined to provide a kind of short-term stability understood as certainty. This reading of reconciliation runs counter to many of the First Nations interventions, which sought broader visions of self-determination and reconciliation.

Economic self-determination

The BCUC operates as an economic regulator. It is, in its own words,

an independent agency of the government of the Province of British Columbia and its role is to ensure that British Columbians receive safe, reliable energy services at a fair price, while allowing utilities the opportunity to earn a fair return on their investments. (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 14)

The BCUC’s concerns with regard to governance issues, then, is largely confined to the setting of rates for consumers and grid security. This self-understanding is important because, as the Inquiry’s Final Report notes, it helps to partially account for the divergent approaches taken to the Inquiry by the BCUC and many First Nations (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 12).

One of the core responsibilities of a security professional is to define and identify threats based on its own existing knowledge and expertise. In this case, the Inquiry’s self-understanding as an economic regulator frames its interpretation and engagement. We see this quite clearly in the earlier Draft Report, in which the Inquiry sought to look past questions of jurisdiction and reconciliation (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 14). The Final Report offers a different approach, noting that with the passage of DRIPA, it must consider reconciliation as an aim, and also speak to questions of jurisdiction. In both cases, however, we see a reversion to defining the issue as an economic concern. This is not to say economic considerations are not important to First Nations – the initial purpose of the application, after all, was to establish a utility to provide energy for a housing development. Moreover, in thinking of settler colonialism as in part a project of accumulation (Coulthard, 2014) or settler possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), we are in some respects already thinking economically. However, the First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC)⁸ and First Nations intervenors point to broader visions of reconciliation and governance that cannot be separated from economic considerations. This means not only access to the revenue that utilities bring in, but also the opportunity they pose for the development of their own governance systems to oversee the utility itself as well as its complaint mechanisms and relationships with the land.

Importantly, it is from this perspective that First Nations invoked the DRIPA and the associated Draft Principles that the province has put in place to guide its engagement with Indigenous peoples (Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, 2018). Despite this, and while noting that it is taking policy direction from the Draft Principles outlined by the government, the panel worked to define reconciliation in economic terms. In doing so, it prioritized the profitability of existing energy infrastructure – those ‘beachheads’ we discussed above. In identifying ‘economic reconciliation’ as its imperative, the Inquiry centred the need to develop a ‘supportive climate for economic partnership and resources development’ (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 6). The future envisioned by the panel, then, sees reconciliation as being realized by engaging with First Nations as economic stakeholders within the prevailing political economic order, not sovereign actors. This serves to reproduce the liberal notion of ‘the economy’ as independent and separate from the political and social. Such a schematic allows for the pursuit of a circumscribed and contradictory ‘economic reconciliation’ that leaves the political and social configuration of capitalism and settler colonialism untouched. Thus, by deploying such a narrow definition of reconciliation, the panel limited the ‘threat’ of Indigenous utilities largely to one of market share. In doing so, the calls of First Nations for recommendations affirming an extensive vision of self-determination and land rights were redefined or ignored.

Providing ‘certainty’

If the definitional work of the panel was realized through the defining of ‘economic reconciliation’, what of the planned intervention? How is the threat to be managed in concrete terms? Looking at the Final Report, while the BCUC retains its core function as regulatory body, the panel also notes its responsibility to ‘put forth meaningful recommendations that could be implemented in the short term to enhance the aims of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples so that the broader aims of reconciliation and the DRIPA can be achieved’ (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 15). Without seeking to impugn the intentions of the panellists, we want to pick up on this short-term focus, and in particular on the way it reflects other areas in the Final Report that collectively reflect the type of language around the need for ‘certainty’ often mobilized by colonial actors when describing the importance of moving ahead with development and removing Indigenous claims to territory.

This colonial vision of ‘certainty’ is one that stretches back a long time in BC, and is similar to other efforts across the British Empire. For our purposes here, the calls for certainty stem from early on in the process of colonization. We discussed Mackey’s work above, however Harris (2002) provides the most fulsome account of the territorial organization of what would become the Province of BC by studying the formation of ‘reserves’ for First Nations. His account points to the ways that government efforts to create legal frameworks for settler land tenure came after calls from settlers to remove the ‘uncertainty’ of a legal void. This was to be done through the incorporation of Indigenous lands into settler colonial property relations. These rhetorics continue to circulate today and remain important motivators of government action as they relate to land and title (Schmidt, 2018), with the justifications largely remaining that land will not be most effectively used if uncertainty remains because capital will not invest without certainty (Pasternak, 2015). We see this occurring through the BCUC’s work from the panel as well. Expanding on the passage briefly quoted above, the panel refers to its engagement with DRIPA in the following way:

The Panel is aware that the DRIPA mandate is complicated and fraught with issues created by over a century of colonization. These are complex matters that have heightened importance when dealing with traditional lands beyond the reserve. This does not mean that the Panel has not considered potential reconciliation measures in relation to these lands as argued by many Indigenous participants. The Panel considers it important to put forth meaningful recommendations that could be implemented in the short term to enhance the aims of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples so that the broader aims of reconciliation and the DRIPA can be achieved. (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 15)

In the passage the panel identifies reconciliation as a long-term process, noting its core importance, but simultaneously moves to focus its current attention on short-term fixes. Indeed, throughout the report, there is little in the way of any sort of planning for the longer-term beyond a more inclusive approach to incorporating Indigenous peoples in the ‘structure and make-up’ of the broader Commission (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 15). By prioritizing short-term solutions, the panel’s work ultimately overlooks what changes it might bring in immediately to have longer-term impacts. Without wanting to assume intention on the part of the panellists, that they overlooked the potential to begin the work of longer-term change only further entrenches a colonial status quo. Closing off avenues for meaningful longer-term change by moving that to the realm of the provincial government’s Executive branch (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 16) creates a specific form of certainty: the stability of an unchanged system.

One of the ways that Indigenous claims produce ‘uncertainty’ for settlers and settler-led development in the context of the Inquiry is by asserting authority over what are referred to as ‘Traditional Territories’. These are Crown Lands, assumed to be held by the settler government but claimed by First Nations as their own. Importantly, they are not ‘reserve’ land, which is dealt with separately by the panel. Given the untreatied nature of much of the province, this Crown Land represents quite a large percentage of the land, making it critical for the Inquiry to consider. This is recognized by the panel, who heard from First Nations that the existing approach in the Draft Report – to offer only changes to on-reserve land or that which has been successfully negotiated into First Nations control – is insufficient. Offering comments on the Draft Report from the Inquiry, the FNLC writes that

this recommendation, while positive, does not go far enough in recognizing First Nations’ rights within their territories as articulated in UNDRIP, nor does it align with the SCC’s jurisprudence on Title. The Panel itself states in the Draft Report that a territorial approach would advance economic opportunity, reconciliation, energy security, self-determination. Yet, it shies away from making a recommendation with regards to [traditional] territory due to the complexity of the issues related to territorial overlap between Nations and potential impact on existing utilities and ratepayers [. . .]. The Panel does not shy away from complexity in other scenarios, such as an exempt First Nation/utility contracting with BCUC to regulate all or parts of its operation. To fall back on colonial constructs such as reserve boundaries simply because there is difficult work involved is not consistent with the newly passed BC Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. (First Nations Leadership Council, 2020: 3)

Moreover, the FNLC adds that by seeking to separate the question of ‘off-reserve’ lands, the Inquiry is not living up to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s expectations for reconciliation, and instead recommends that ‘First Nations rebuilding their governance structures, either individually or through partnerships, tribal councils or other collective structures be given the opportunity to self-regulate across their [traditional] territory’ (First Nations Leadership Council, 2020: 3).

Other submissions by First Nations forwarded a similar argument and justification to that of the FNLC: both the UNDRIP as well as Supreme Court decisions recognize that Indigenous authority extends beyond reserve boundaries (Beecher Bay and Adams Lake First Nation, 2019; Collective First Nations, 2020: 2). Moreover, it was argued that for reconciliation to be meaningful, steps to change existing systems and relationships must be taken today as these will lay the foundation for the future (Collective First Nations, 2020). In its Final Report, however, the panel effectively moved past these questions, instead articulating the need for an ‘incremental’ solution to the question of jurisdiction, and citing the ‘complexities’ involved in the issue, recommending that the modern treaty process continue to be used to clarify Indigenous land rights (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 71).

In looking to short-term solutions for providing ‘certainty’, the panel ultimately falls back to a modern treaty process that works to affirm settler control over land. Unlike processes that aim to build a shared future, or affirm Indigenous authority and governance, the modern treaty process works to incorporate Indigenous peoples into settler property regimes (Blomley, 2015; Wood and Rossiter, 2011), using mechanisms that are subject to settler control and seek to recreate Indigenous nations in the settler image (Nadasdy, 2017). For the panel, then, managing unease becomes a process of affirming existing mechanisms and authorities through which the province asserts its own power. Despite the importance of DRIPA, and the need for systemic transformation as advanced by First Nations, the panel reaffirms the importance of the colonial status quo. The work, if it is to be done, must be undertaken by the provincial government. This is to the detriment of longer-term visions of reconciliation, which rather than reaffirming settler certainty, would envision Indigenous nations as more-than-economic actors – notably actors who maintain their own sovereign authority. Instead, we see the management of existing settler political-economic orders to ensure a future for settler coloniality.

Affirming the beachheads of existing infrastructure

What form does this colonial status quo take? How was the panel proposing to secure settler futurity? The colonial status quo also includes existing infrastructure, the continued importance of which was considered at length by the panel. Recalling our earlier discussion, this existing infrastructure represents what Curley (2021) calls a ‘colonial beachhead’, as it is nearly always owned by non-Indigenous utility companies and extends settler authority into Indigenous territory. This has a number of impacts. On the one hand, maintaining these beachheads supports the ongoing, territorial expanse of settler colonialism and settler governance. This undermines Indigenous relationships with land, but also the rest of non-human creation such as animals and waters. Indeed, infrastructure such as the Bennett Dam and Site C have destroyed, and continue to destroy, Indigenous lands, displacing the nations whose territory they impact, but also breaking governance systems that rely on land and territory for their survival. Further, as the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) found with regards to the work camps associated with oil and gas infrastructure, these beachheads also bring violence into Indigenous communities in forms that constitute ongoing genocide. Despite this, it was a core concern of the panel that existing infrastructure be protected.

This concern manifested itself in a way similar to the discussion about certainty above, where the panel focused on managing the unease of corporations such as BC Hydro and FortisBC, both of which have extensive portfolios of infrastructure they were seeking to insulate from competition. Part of the argument of the existing utilities has to do with the potential for redundancy to lead to higher costs for consumers (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 67–68). Referring to this potential concern, the panel noted that

in all contexts, including in the case of Traditional Territories, there are incumbent public utilities, with existing assets, that those utilities operate for the benefit of all British Columbians, including Indigenous peoples. Our recommendations must also take into account these public utilities, their assets and their customers. We also respect the rights of Indigenous peoples to economic self-determination and self-governance, as laid out in the Articles of UNDRIP we have previously discussed, and seek to reconcile these interests and create mutual benefits for all. This is the evaluation framework that we apply in this report. (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 30; emphasis added)

The move to attempt to balance the interests of existing utilities and First Nations was, notably, contested by First Nations: they argued

that in the case of potential impact to existing utilities, a framework should balance economic impact to the existing utility with any First Nations reconciliation and economic self-determination, but that all else being equal (e.g. environmental impact) the Indigenous utility’s claim should prevail. (British Columbia Utilities Commission, 2020: 69)

This was a direct call for the prioritizing of Indigenous people’s self-determination against an ongoing reliance on colonial infrastructure. Indeed, where the panel and incumbent utilities framed the issue as one of economic considerations, First Nations sought to also connect it to questions of governance and relationships with non-human creation. As the Westbank First Nation noted in its comments on the Draft Report, the panel had not included Article 25 of the Declaration in its consideration (Westbank First Nation, 2020: 1–2). Unlike economic focuses that took up much of the discussion, Article 25 specifically identifies the right of Indigenous peoples to ‘maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources’ (United Nations, 2007).

From a settler perspective, this opens the scope of what is to be considered. If we consider Indigenous approaches to governance, however, this distinctive relationship is constitutive of Indigenous nationhood (Coulthard, 2014; Coulthard and Simpson, 2016), and further reflects Indigenous interpretations of security (De Leon, 2020; Greaves, 2016). It also helps relieve the insecurity imposed on Indigenous nations from settler sovereignty’s claim to authority over nature. It is in this sense that ‘working with First Nations to develop resources in their territories by their own standards and laws’, an imperative identified by the Collective First Nations (2019: 6), also then requires consideration of the impacts of existing utilities on those governance systems rooted in Indigenous relationships to land. The impacts of existing infrastructure then become clear: First Nations understand them as colonial beachheads. Ensuring the continuity of profitability for the existing infrastructure not only undermines the economic possibilities for First Nations, but as the nations asserted, it further affirms settler possession. By seeking to create certainty for existing utilities, then, the Inquiry is recentring colonial political economic orders which reproduce an untenable dualism between humans and non-human creation.

In the end, the recommendations discussed above, effectively passing on the question of development on traditional territory to the government and modern treaty system, are perhaps the most important of those relating to existing infrastructure. Also pertinent is the recommendation that Indigenous nations engage with existing utilities to jointly collaborate or find solutions together. While we see collaboration as a legitimate normative commitment, and one that could lead towards meaningful reconciliation, because the panel sought to provide certainty through an emphasis on stability and a lack of change, it leaves colonial relations intact. As such, existing infrastructures remain as colonial beachheads, and the differential in power between the two parties means that collaboration is likely to favour the settler Crown and private corporations.

Indigenous utilities as vehicles for indigenous self-determination

In analysing the BCUC’s Inquiry, we have noted the ways in which it ultimately moved to identify Indigenous authority as a threat to settler coloniality, and sought to intervene and manage the threat by affirming existing property regimes and settler-Indigenous power relations by way of truth claims. In this way the Inquiry has undertaken the work of a security professional. Such claims have not gone uncontested though, and while the BCUC remains an actor as a regulatory body, it also exists as a sort of platform as the host of the Inquiry. As an actor, the BCUC works to maintain those ‘colonial constructs’ identified by First Nations; however, as a platform the BCUC opens space for Indigenous nations to articulate their own visions of sovereignty, decolonization and self-determination. What we want to suggest by identifying this paradox is not therefore that the BCUC should be taken as inherently colonial or decolonial in and of itself. Rather, as a space it also exists as a site of contestation. Though not as obvious as a blockade or other protest, the engagement illustrates attempts at concrete steps being taken by Indigenous nations towards building their vision of a shared future.

In contrast to the panel’s vision of Indigenous actors as economic stakeholders, those Indigenous nations and organizations that participated in the Inquiry consistently reaffirmed a vision of Indigenous engagement that was premised on coequal sovereignty for Indigenous nations. The general position taken by First Nations interveners across the province is represented well in this excerpt from the FNLC’s 2019 submission to the Inquiry:

The FNLC takes the firm position that First Nations in BC have jurisdiction over energy generation, transmission, and distribution in our territories. This sovereign authority and jurisdiction is undermined by BCUC regulation of Indigenous utilities. (First Nations Leadership Council, 2019: 5)

Recall that the primary question to be determined by the panel was that of whether the BCUC was the appropriate regulatory body to provide oversight of Indigenous utilities. First Nations interveners nearly uniformly agreed that while oversight is necessary and important, this should be done by Indigenous communities, and through channels if not established by themselves, at least through those processes determined by themselves in accordance with their own governance traditions. For them, the question touches on First Nations’ inherent rights to self-determination, claiming that such regulation by the BCUC was inappropriate and would undermine nations’ own authority. First Nations are asserting their authority to move past the sorts of recognition-based frameworks critiqued by Coulthard (2014) and others as retaining colonial relations of power.

To an extent, the panel recognized this, and shifted positions from their Draft Recommendations to the Final Report, ultimately landing on Indigenous nations’ not being subject to BCUC regulation on their own territories, provided that certain criteria are satisfied. However, still in the Final Report we see the sort of reliance on settler legal frameworks and recognition outlined above. The position of First Nations is much broader, however, and against the panel’s interpretation above, they see DRIPA’s acknowledgement of Article 26 of UNDRIP as holding greater weight:

Even though UNDRIP may not be implemented through legislation such that it is ‘legally binding’ in Canada, it is still relevant and the Commission should consider and apply it in its report. As the Supreme Court of Canada noted in Baker, [this should take place] even where an international instrument is not specifically implemented in domestic legislation. (Beecher Bay First Nation, 2019: 5)

Here SFN is relying on the Baker decision, which notes that regarding statutes and regulatory policy, ‘in so far as possible, therefore, interpretations that reflect these values and principles are preferred’ (Sullivan cited in Supreme Court of Canada, 1999 at para 70). For First Nations, instead of being brought into the colonial construct of settler law and sovereignty, Indigenous utilities should rely on the decisionmaking and governance processes of nations themselves to most fully accord with their inherent jurisdiction and authority. This authority extends to encompass traditional territories and nations’ activities on them, instead of being limited only to those areas recognized by the federal and provincial governments.

Returning to our earlier discussion, one of the ways security professionals operate is through the making of truth claims, effectively claiming a monopoly over defining, identifying and planning interventions to deal with a threat. We see the Inquiry doing this in its redefinition of reconciliation, and focus on mutual benefits above. However, in doing so they also open space for their own contestation. Indeed, in picking up on the arguments of First Nations there appears to be a divergence over the question of certainty: while the BCUC through the panel is seeking to manage settler unease, this then presents a further problem of additional unease for Indigenous nations themselves. In seeking to regulate this (settler) unease by creating certainty, the BCUC effectively reifies insecurity for First Nations.

First Nations are making this clear through their arguments to the Inquiry, and instead seeking to use it to affirm their own rights over development on their own terms. In some respects, First Nations themselves were able to assert their own truth claims to contest those put forward by the BCUC in its Draft Final Report – truth claims that pushed back on, rather than reified, settler authority. The extent to which First Nations’ authority is rendered concrete remains to be seen, as the provincial government is moving slowly to realize their promises of UNDRIP implementation. In thinking through Curley’s framework of colonial beachheads, however, we are left thinking that First Nations appear to be seeking to build their own, decolonizing beachheads in the form of energy infrastructure. These would be developed by First Nations, and not only follow First Nations legal and political-economic orders, but also help develop them. Perhaps unwittingly, then, while seeking to create certainty, the Inquiry opened a space, creating a platform for the contestation of settler authority.

Conclusion

Our analysis of the BCUC Inquiry shows how in settler colonial contexts, security professionals operate outside of the bounds of the ‘security’ sector. Reflecting the paradox of (in)security (Stern, 2006), the settler colonial project is one in which insecurity is immanent. We see this in our case as an incomplete and contested act of dispossession and enclosure, with settler colonialism perpetually engaging with the potential for its own negation as it seeks to produce security for the processes of capital accumulation it serves. To secure capital accumulation, security professionals reinforce settler colonial political-economic orders. In the case of the BCUC Inquiry, this was done by ensuring ‘certainty’ for settler energy utilities in the form of a property rights regime offering continuity for the colonial beachheads of existing energy infrastructure. Such beachheads serve both as a means of dispossession and a critical component of transforming social relations and landscapes in such a way as to incorporate them into circuits of capital. However, such truth claims open space for their own counter-claims. In a period where reconciliation remains a stated priority of governments, First Nations have been able to use the Inquiry’s calls for certainty to assert their own rights to self-determination. These competing claims reflect the situation in other settler colonial contexts, and resolving them remains one of the persistent issues at the heart of Indigenous peoples’ decolonization efforts.

Approaching the interconnection between settler colonialism and security this way offers some interesting avenues for research to explore. By bringing together Curley’s concept of the beachhead with the critical security studies literature concerning the security professional, we have been able to identify and examine the dual, even contradictory, nature of the Inquiry itself and that of colonial security professionals more generally. Although deployed to manage acute settler unease and uncertainty, the form of the technical body also serves as a site of contention where the authority of the settler state and the body itself can be challenged. Moreover, it offers an initial analysis of how the material technologies of colonialism are enmeshed with the subjective and discursive. Analysing these connections can allow us to better understand how the settler colonial project is further reproduced, or indeed potentially undermined if Indigenous counter-truths are legitimized.

Moreover, our analysis highlights the ways that infrastructure may be used by First Nations in BC to implement their own self-determination, and which is in line with their own (broader) interpretations of security. Rejecting the further development of Wiindigo infrastructure (LaDuke and Cowen, 2020) and the reification of colonialscapes (Hunt, 2014), First Nations in BC are seeking to use existing systems and legal authorities through DRIPA to build their own utilities and enable the flourishing of their own political and economic orders. That is, without suggesting that this straightforwardly offers emancipation, we do see it as opening opportunity: because the state has to work to justify and secure the status quo, the possibility of otherwise is opened.

We want to suggest there exists decolonial potential for infrastructural transformation in this possibility of otherwise. It was, of course, the SFN’s application to control its own utility, Spirit Bay, which set the Inquiry in motion. SFN was not only challenging contemporary colonial understandings of territorial authority, but also sought to secure development on its terms. It did so in the context of an energy transition and sought specifically to construct and control an electrical utility with renewable energy at its core, making the environment fundamental to the application. From this view, infrastructural transformation can be thought of not only in terms of a sociotechnical transition, although it is of course that as well, but also as a shift in the referent of security: from the settler state and capital accumulation to the well-being of Indigenous peoples and nations and sustainable ecological relations. From Wiindigo infrastructure that upholds and reproduces colonial social relations and colonial futurity, to decolonial infrastructure.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Franziska Müller and Johanna Tunn for organizing a stimulating panel at the 2022 British International Studies Association conference where an early draft of this article was presented, Eleanor MacDonald for helpful comments on an early draft, the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and insightful comments, and the journal’s editorial team for their support in the publication process. The final text is stronger for all their feedback, while all errors are the authors’ own.

Funding

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

ORCID iDs

Liam Midzain-Gobin

Joshua K McEvoy

Notes

Liam Midzain-Gobin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University. A settler scholar, his research focuses on the ongoing reproduction of settler colonialism, Indigenous governance and decolonization. His work has been published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Critical Studies on Security, Borderlands and elsewhere. Email: lmidzaingobin@brocku.ca.

Joshua K. McEvoy is a PhD Candidate in Political Studies at Queen’s University. His research interests include the political economy of the environment and climate change, and social transformation. His dissertation focuses on just transition in Canada. Joshua is a settler scholar living on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. Email: joshua.mcevoy@queensu.ca.

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