The Student Encampment Movement is Part of a History of Militant Struggle Against Settler Colonialism

 

Since the mid-to-late nineteenth century, settler colonialism in Canada has been a social project of mobilizing masses of people to consolidate a society grounded on generalized commodity production and exchange: the capitalist system. The dispossession of Indigenous nations from our lands and the reduction of Indigenous people’s political power have been essential to the development and reproduction of a white-supremacist class society, grounded on the colonial divide between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Central to that project is what many Indigenous and settler-colonial studies scholars call the logic of elimination: the colonial acquisition of land through the attempted comprehensive destruction of Indigenous nations as sovereignties that compete with settler sovereignty, and of Indigenous societies as forms of social practice founded on radically egalitarian and democratic norms.

This logic of elimination has been instituted in a variety of ways – from the Canadian state to Palestine. These range from state-sanctioned genocidal violence, such as the deliberate withholding of food on the Prairies in the nineteenth century; to the systematic abandonment of Indigenous communities today, who are forced to drag rivers in search of their missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit (MMIWG2S+) kin; to the settler working-class violence and brutality that has claimed the lives of many, including Helen Betty Osborne and, more recently, Barbara Kentner. In all cases, it expresses the reality of a society created, reproduced, and structured around systematic violence and repression. Although no longer sustained through open war and military campaigns as in Israel, settler colonialism in Canada is a mediated form of domination that permeates all spheres of social life.

However, the historical process through which settler colonialism has evolved cannot be understood simply in terms of domination. It must be grasped equally as a result of Indigenous agency. While the logic of elimination on Turtle Island was virtually unfettered and aimed at the complete destruction of Indigenous nations for a century and a half of settler-colonial rule, over time Indigenous organizing has coerced the state and capital to reform the colonial relation. Above all, this history has been driven by the self-activity of Indigenous grassroots activists and organizations, which have been forced to struggle outside state-sanctioned and legally authorized forms of political activity. From the Kenora March of 1965, to the Occupation of Anicinabe Park and the Native People’s Caravan in the mid-’70s, down to the major resistance against the Canadian army at Kanehstà:ke in 1990 and the Wet’suwet’en Uprising of 2020, Indigenous peoples have organized autonomously in the form of occupations, camps, blockades, and travelling campaigns, among other tactics. In these ways, they have developed a coercive counter-power capable of enforcing their inherent rights as sovereign nations denied to them by the state – meeting colonial and capitalist power head on.  (more...)

The Student Encampment Movement is Part of a History of Militant Struggle Against Settler Colonialism