The following are speaking notes to an informal talk I gave in the UBC Anth Dept., October 9, 2024. Given time constraints the spoken version was condensed. Not all of what is printed here was shared. Some of this was previously posted on my other blogs.
I have always been wary of the analytic value of settler colonialism. It groups together a wide range of experiences divided by geography, time frame and particularity. That isn't inherently problematic - many social models do just that, generalize via abstraction from the specific to the universal. In doing so, however, the historical particularities of specific locales are lost. That, I contend, undermines effective social resolution of intractable problems. At the same time I find the discursive and rhetorical use of the concepts of 'settler' and 'settler colonialism' potentially useful, even if I find them analytically weak.
In People of the Saltwater, a book I wrote about my home community, I have scant use of the word colonial/ism and even less deployment of settler. Both terms tend to be used in a historical context, not in the current abstract ontologically encompassing manner.
The rhetorical utility of 'settler colonialism' lies in it's ability to draw a sharp line between right and wrong, good and bad. It lumps all those (new immigrant or old; white, asian, or black) who are not Indigenous into one category. It simplifies and it allows clarity in discourse. But its solution is muddled. How does one 'decolonize' a settler state? Send the settlers home? Adopt the settlers into the Indigenous world? Throw out the colonial state apparatus and replace it with 'the' Indigenous one?
Settler colonialism places the emphasis on displacement and repeopling. It ignores the historical moment in which an act of colonialism may have occurred. It posits the primary contradiction of struggle as between settler and displaced. It ignores the class formation within both the colonial state and the the society of the displaced. It is a recipe for perpetual conflict in which there is no practical resolution. It is, almost, a natural outgrowth of a state that deliberately constrains, marginalizes, and displaces one people in favour of another.
Even with the rhetorical utility of settler colonialism I am left staring at it's inability to bring us to any productive resolution. The idea of settler colonialism draws upon an experience in which the displaced feel the enmity of their displacers; but we need to act against this experience as it clouds our judgement.
When I think, for example, of the idea of settler colonialism in British Columbia I can recognize the trauma of colonial displacement and know it has had real effects. But was it because of settlement? Or was it something else? Yes newcomers came to laxyuup Gitxaała (where I am from), but they weren't initially overwhelming. They were disruptive, yes, but not due to their numbers. They disrupted with new technology, disease, and new economics. They were driven by an economic system based in capturing labour power and extracting value. The tactic may have been colonialism, but the underlying driving strategic force was capitalism, not settlement. Analytically this last point is important as it points toward a way to reconcile First Nations and British Columbians that is not reliant upon demonizing each other.
Settler Colonialism
Colonialism, the act of one state expanding it’s territorial and/or economic control over land beyond its own borders has been a core feature of the development of capitalist relations of production for some centuries now. The economic growth of European capitalism was tightly woven with colonization beyond Europe’s borders.1 The extraction of wealth from, and the undermining of productive capacity of, the colonies was instrumental to the development of capitalism from it’s early rough accumulationist roots to the rise of 19th century industrial production.
Settler colonialism, a component of the wider process of colonialism, is the taking of land and repopulating it with people from another land. In one sense a simple geographic and demographic displacement. This simple description ignores the specificity of the process of colonialism despite its abstract clarity. As capitalism spread globally the nature of settler forms of colonialism also changed. Asking ‘when’ and ‘where’ settler colonialism is as important as asking ‘what’ is settler colonialism.
In my own professional research one thing I study is the expansion of capitalist relations of production into the coastal region of British Columbia. The process in BC was quite different from the Maritimes, Central Canada, or the Prairie Provinces. Capitalism arrived in different forms and at different times. Such differences matter to how the ensuring society develops and creates its own unique histories.
As Canadians we know that the fact of the original colonizing nation (in our case France and Britain) has implications for the shape of Canadian society today. Conflicts and events through the process shape outcomes. The revolt of British colonies in North America in the late 1700s was in part due to the Crown issuing the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The Proclamation barred the colonies from entering treaties with First Nations, reserving that as a prerogative of the Crown. The revolt of the colonies resulted in a wave of refugees and the displacement of people who had already been refugees from Europe. The colonies were also opposed to the Crown acknowledging Quebec’s maintenance of the French and Catholicism after their defeat at Quebec City. This all played a role in shaping Canadian national and regional identities.
First Nations in Eastern Canada were active participants in these struggles. They variously aligned with different Imperial and Colonial governments. This moment of history was quite different than the moment within which First Nations societies in coastal BC became integrated into a global capitalist economy. While settlement was part of the model in eastern Canada and the US, settlement was originally illegal in BC.
From the period of about 1770 through 1830 coastal first nations engaged with maritime-based merchant capitalists in which First Nations retained control over the means and processes of production. In this moment the merchant capitalists weren’t interested in owning the land, instead Russian, Spanish, American and British traders sought furs produced by First Nations to trade in China and then to return to their respective homes to sell their Chinese goods at a profit.
Starting in the 1800s the development of industrial capitalism started to have effects in coastal BC where three core natural resources became a focus of global capitalism: minerals, fish, and timber. In these capital intensive industries (often financed through the Montreal finance markets and managed/owned by Anglo-Americans and British folk) First Nations became instrumental as labour, labour brokers, and business partners.
If it weren’t for the horrific consequences of European diseases BC may well have been a majority Indigenous population. In fact, until the early 20th century BC was a majority First Nations area. As the need for an industrial workforce expanded, refugees from the US, Europe, and Asia flowed in to fill the workforce gaps. Many of these newcomers were economic and political refugees fleeing poverty and disruption in their homelands. They came to BC with the hopes of a better life in mind. Each wave of newcomer can be tied to moments of political turmoil and economic impoverishment in the immigrant’s homeland. Many of whom would have preferred to stay where they were born but had little choice but to leave.
When examined in the specificity of the moment settler colonialism may describe an empirical movement of people. It may have discursive effect. It also ends up obscuring the dynamics and specificities of each case. In particular it obscures the social differentiation among so-called settlers.
In isolation ‘settler’ implies or denotes a purposefulness on the part of the settler that may not in fact exist. Political and economic refugees may have no choice but to flee. Indentured and enslaved ‘settler’s were robbed of their agency to choose. Even those who ostensibly chose to immigrate may have done so under conditions that left little effective choice. Many waves of settlement were in fact the outcome of people forced to flee turmoil, war, and prejudice in a homeland that may well have ejected them. In this context the act of settling is less a purpose and more an outcome. Yet the analytic framing of ‘settler colonialism’ assumes settlement as the driving purpose.
Those who were instrumental in setting the colonial agenda, those already in possession of capital and prestige in their homelands, might more aptly be called ‘settlers’ as they both had the choice and the means to make good on their choices. These are the people, the social class, who benefits from displacement and resettlement of people.
It wasn’t always this way.
Fifty years ago one finds a more nuanced class analysis of the situation of capitalist colonialization in BC, it is only hampered by its Maoist reliance upon cross-class nationalism.
Third Worldism and Red Power
First Nations political activism for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was dominated by lobbying and petitions led by traditional leadership allied with a rising economic elite who acted as modest capitalists and labour brokers. Even as coastal First Nations created the advocacy and workers’ bargaining association, the Native Brotherhood of BC, it built upon traditional leadership from the constituent communities. Red Power organizations that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s were linked to this history of activism, but also inspired by rising Third World national liberation struggles.
Red Power groups saw themselves as part of a global third world struggle for National Liberation rooted in working class struggle. Glen Coulthard has written about the Maoist Red Power groups in Vancouver.
Coulthard says:
“Maoism, it was believed at the time, advanced a reinvigorated, grassroots model of socialist internationalism that refused to capitulate to racial capitalism and its mechanisms of violent dissemination. … Red Power advocates drew profound inspiration from the decolonisation struggles of the Third World and, like many radicalised communities of colour during this period, molded and adapted the insights they gleeaned from these struggles abroad into their own critiques of capitalism, patriarchy, and internal colonialism at home.”
The Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP) was formed in 1967, says Coulthard “after a meeting called by Indigenous women in response to a controversial trial involving the rape and murder of a Native teenager … by three white men near Williams Lake BC.” NARP was formed as an explicitly direct action protest group to step in where “state-subsidized First Nation ogranisations of the day had failed or were failing to do in an urgent enough manner.”
Coulthard tells us Red Power advocates identified two important objectives: “defeating imperialism and internal colonialism.” This called for two tactical alignments: “solidarity and support for the ‘people’s wars’ of the Third World abroad and the convergence of decolonialisation with class struggle to weaken the stranglehold of colonialism at home.”
In their own words NARP boiled it down to this [emphasis added]:
“Due to the nature of the internal colony, our struggle must be sensitively attuned to the development of class contradiction in the imperialist nation in whose geo-political boundary we reside. It follows too that our struggle must be sensitive to the other struggles in the Third World, as the success of these struggles constitutes the major external condition for the development of class and national contradiction in the privileged sector of imperialism. Hence the necessity exists in our struggle for a dual strategy. One aspect of our strategy must be internationalist – aimed at influencing the working class in the oppressor nation in a direction which facilitates our struggle for self-determination. The other aspect of our strategy must be nationalist – aimed at educating and mobilizing our people around internal contradictions.”
Red Power activists saw themselves as part of a global class struggle, as members of an oppressed nationality and, as Native Indians (today we would say First Nations). Maoism, with its focus on third world peasant struggles, spoke to the ways colonialism, capitalism, and First Nations rights were entangled. With the rise of a new economic and political liberalism in the 1980s class struggle language disappeared and First Nations’ politics of struggle shifted toward tactical alliances with environmental activism on the one hand and the politics of recognition on the other. In both cases the ‘ontological’ uniqueness of being Indigenous came to foreground First Nations politics in community and university discourse. At the same time a rising intellectual movement in Euro-American universities, focussed on the multiplicity of subjective identities, the fragmentation of solidarity, and an increasing emphasis on the role of text as meaning making, created a conceptual framing that gave special prominence to notions of indigeneity.
It became a positive value to claim an Indigenous identity in a way being an oppressed nationality never seemed to be. At the same time settler became a moral category, a category infused with moral culpability that was positioned in an ontological sense of contribution and guilt.
Paired against the malevolent settler has emerged a stereotyped ideal of The Indigenous that has been applied way beyond its conceptualization more familiar in BC. Groups once self-identified as oppressed nationalities can now be found claiming to be Indigenous in ways that belie history and empirical reality. When categories shift from the analytic to moral, violence often follows as ethnonationalists justify their atrocities as morally just acts of resistance. Deploying settler in this frame balkanizes debate and silences reasoned conversation.
