I read Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada while I was travelling last month. It’s an important book, and not just for my project. I’d heard of settler colonialism, of course, and after reading Paulette Regan’s Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada and walking through the Haldimand Tract as part of my MFA work, I began identifying myself as a settler—or, as Lowman and Barker spell it, capitalized, as a Settler. However, I’d never read any sustained discussions of settler colonialism—they always stayed marooned on my “to-read” list—and I wasn’t aware of the ramifications of calling myself a Settler. Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada has opened up new pathways of research for me, and I’m convinced that the way to describe my current work would involve using the term Settler. (By the way, because this book is important, this post is very long. If I had time, I’d make it shorter.)

The book’s first chapter, “Why Say Settler?,” begins with the issue of naming: “The words we use to name ourselves are important. How we conceive of ourselves collectively is a part of wider, more complicated discussions about who is included and who is excluded from our society” (1). Canadians, Lowman and Barker write, “like to think of ourselves as being open and accepting of difference,” as being “polite and respectful and peace loving.” (1). Such characterizations are lies by omission, they continue, “because we do not talk about our country being built on the attempted destruction of many other nations. We do not talk about the questionable legal and political basis of our country, our history of profiting from invasion and dispossession” (1). In fact, while the word “Canadian” is hard to define, for some people—they don’t say who, but they clearly mean First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples—it “refers to an invasive people, a nation that violently displaces others for its own wants and desires, a state that breaks treaties and uses police and starvation to clear the land” (1). “We need a name that can help us see ourselves for who we are, not just who we claim to be,” they continue. “For that we need a term that shifts the frame of reference away from our nation, our claimed territory, and onto our relationships with systems of power, land, and the peoples on whose territory our country exists” (1). That word is “Settler.”

“Settler” entered common use during the Idle No More protests in 2012 and 2013 (1). It is used “to refer to non-Indigenous peoples, communities, states, and governments” (2). “Settler,” Lowman and Barker argue, does a number of things. It “voices relationships to structures and processes in Canada today, to the histories of our peoples on this land, to Indigenous peoples, and to our own day-to-day choices and actions”; it “turns us toward uncomfortable realisations, difficult subjects, and potential complicity in systems of dispossession and violence”; it “represents a tool, a way of understanding and choosing to act differently,” a tool that can be used “to confront the fundamental problems and injustices in Canada today” (2). “Settler,” they write, “is analytical, personal, and uncomfortable. It can be an identity that we claim or deny, but that we inevitably live and embody. It is who we are, as a people, on these lands” (2)—and it’s a word they use to describe themselves. “This book is an examination of the Settler identity in Canada, an identity shared by many but claimed by few,” they write. “This Settler Canadian identity is entangled both historically and in the present with the process of settler colonization, the means through which our state and nation have wrested their land base from Indigenous peoples” (2).

“Our construction of ‘Settler’ as an identity mirrors the construction of ‘Indigenous’ in contemporary terms: a broad collective of peoples with commonalities through particular connections to land and place,” Lowman and Barker state (2). However, for settlers, “those connections are forged through violence and displacement of Indigenous communities and nations” (2). The term “settler” is getting increasing attention and use because of “a curious double vision in Canada today,” they suggest: 

We stand at a crossroads where there is at least some willingness to admit that colonization happened, that it had devastating impacts on Indigenous nations and communities, and that a colonial legacy persists into the present in the form of socio-economic inequality, racism, and discrimination, and political marginalization of Indigenous communities. However, colonialism continues: Indigenous nations are still losing their land base, facing infringement from resource extraction and mining companies, property developers, and the pressures of urbanization. These nations struggle for self-determination against governments seemingly bound to the notion that Indigenous peoples should be constantly monitored and managed. And Indigenous peoples face constant racism and violence: from the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), to discrimination by social services, to incidents of brutality at the hands of police, Indigenous people confront the reality every single day that colonialism is far from a legacy. (2-3)

In Canada today, “[t]here is simultaneously a deep refusal to see colonization as occurring in the present, and blindness to the realities of how the distinct kind of colonialism operating in Canada today targets Indigenous peoples, and continues to define the lives of Canadians” (3). And yet colonialism is foundational to this country: 

Canada, as a nation and a state, is dependant on the land taken from Indigenous nations, land that those nations still contest, and colonialism is about the need to secure those lands at all costs. This positions Canada and Canadians directly at odds with Indigenous peoples, who have not just prior, but competing claims to the land. And despite what most Canadians would like to think, those claims are valid. Canada essentially has no legal grounds for its own sovereignty, which is to say, no reason in law as to why Canadian territory should be Canada’s to govern. (3)

Because Canada has no legal grounds for its sovereignty, Indigenous resistance to Canadian colonialism causes great political concern in this country (3). “The colonial history and the ways the legacies of colonial institutions and practices continue to disadvantage Indigenous people are not contested or commonly understood in Canada today,” Lowman and Barker write (3). That’s despite the attention that’s been paid to the history and effects of residential schools, or the recognition of poverty and the lack of infrastructure in First Nations communities—many Canadians excuse the policies of their government or blame First Nations themselves, and “even when Indigenous peoples’ concerns are acknowledged as legitimate, there is very little public impetus to act” (3-4). 

While responses to Canadian colonialism are divided across the political spectrum, no mainstream political position understands it. Conservative commentators—they cite Tom Flanagan and Conrad Black—advance widely accepted positions that are “rooted in assertions of primitive Indigenous under-development, the inevitability of European conquest, and the fiction that Indigenous lands were empty and therefore free to be claimed by newcomers”—ideas that are “both false and deeply racist,” and which have been rejected by international organizations, such as the United Nations (4-5). The liberal or progressive approach, on the other hand, is based on an appreciation and recognition of “the complexity of Indigenous politics, economics, international relationships, kinship and social structures, technologies and traditional knowledges, and oral and written histories and cultures,” and argues that Indigenous people have been “key national contributors—part of what makes Canada such a distinct, successful, and special country,” while seeing the wrongs of the past as a stain on the country’s “honour”: this position identifies Indigenous peoples “as deserving of ‘recognition,’ appreciation, and special rights,” and “seems to confront the ignorance and racism of the conservative discourse” (6). However, both the conservative and liberal or progressive approaches “rely on the same assumption”: “Indigenous peoples pose a ‘problem’ to Canada, one to be managed, accounted for, and ultimately dealt with so that Canadians can get on with the business of being Canadian” (6).

According to Lowman and Barker, “[t]here is a large and growing body of literature that reveals the ongoing and overwhelming impact of colonial ideologies at work in Canadian society,” and they cite the work of Taiaiake Alfred as an example (6). “The denial and obfuscation of Canada’s colonial present, and the unwillingness to even consider the involvement of everyday Canadians in creating or perpetuating harm against Indigenous peoples is a problem, but it is also a feature of the particular kind of colonialism at work in Canada today,” they continue. “It is in trying to come to grips with the historical legacy and present-day impacts of this form of colonialism—settler colonialism—that the use of ‘settler’ as a term to refer to many non-Indigenous Canadians has gained traction” (7). In fact, the increasing use of the term “settler” “can only be understood through the rise of Indigenous resurgence” (7). 

At this point, Lowman and Barker provide a brief history of the relations between Indigenous people and Settlers in North America: 

Indigenous peoples have a long history of welcoming newcomers. Indigenous peoples moved around their own territories and into each other’s long before European imperial colonization. These new relationships were not accidental or haphazard and ranged from individual adoptions into Indigenous nations, to the incorporation of whole societies into political confederacies. . . . Protocols for acceptance or engagement with outsiders were extended to the odd arrivals from Europe who began to appear in what would become Canada in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. (9-10)

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 “set new terms for how colonists could legally interact with Indigenous nations,” in an effort “to curb expansion of the colonies without Crown control,” but it was ignored by “the emergent American state” (10). “In the Canadian colonies,” however,  “settlement and expansion remained restrained by the British Crown, now even warier than before about uncontrolled growth of settlement colonies” (10). The War of 1812 marked “the end of effective restraint upon settlement and the rapid rise of settler colonization as the predominant form of colonialism on the continent” (11). While the “British commercial empire carried on, in the form of fur traders who remained among the few Europeans to regularly move through the northern reaches of the continent,” the creation of a boundary between the British colonies and the United States “prompted increased and more energetic interest in expanding across the continent” (11). 

That expansion required land, and the Crown set out to get it. In British Columbia in the 1850s, “[t]he Crown made no pretence of acquiring these lands legally—no treaties were signed or even pursued—but simply annexed a swath of land bigger than most European states” (12). Elsewhere, the numbered treaties were “approached by the colonial governments and negotiators as land-purchase agreements”; they were “designed to provide certainty of title for mass settlement. The burgeoning Canadian government began openly targeting Indigenous peoples for posing a threat to settlement and sovereignty now that they were no longer needed to maintain a balance of power” (12). That demand for land is not something we can assign to the past; “the contemporary conflicts between Canadian society and Indigenous peoples . . . are evidence that the process of land theft and Indigenous dispossession has not ended yet” (13). For this reason, Lowman and Barker write, 

we depart from the conservative or liberal positions on Indigenous peoples: the is no “Indian problem” in Canada, and in fact there has never been one. In asserting the need to discuss and understand who and what Canadians really are, instead we have a Settler problem, and that problem is woven into the very fabric of Canadian society, culture, and everyday life. (13)

We have met the enemy, in other words, and he is us.

Lowman and Barker note that identity is complex, and suggest that they want to “position” their “work with respect to Settler identities to foreground issues of agency, responsibility, and accountability with respect to Indigenous nations that is in part pursued through how we identify”; the issue of identification, they continue, “parallels important work on ‘Indigenous’ as a lived and embodied identity, which has inspired much of this work” (13-14). They “also encourage people to identify with and as Settler people as part of a process of transformative change”—they “want to focus on identity as something lived and embodied, as something that can be mobilized to shape everything from states to systems of capital, for better or for worse” (14). There needs to be a conversation about the “we” who is doing the colonizing, they argue: 

There are terms that have been used as stand-ins—more or less accurate—for colonizers in this context. “White,” “newcomer,” “non-Aboriginal,” “non-Indigenous,” or simply “Canadian.” If we try these on, some are uncomfortable and the fit is poor. Some are too comfortable, and tell us little we do not already know. We are not homogenously “white,” many of our families have been on the lands called Canada for generations so we are not “new,” and describing us by what we are not says little about what we are. (14-15)

Their approach is to use the capitalized word “Settler”: “Like Indigenous, we are using Settler as an identity that connects a group of people with common practices, a group to which people have affinity, and can belong either through individual identification or recognition by the group (or some combination)” (15).

The first person they heard use the term was historian Paulette Regan—and I ought to reread Unsettling the Settler for this project—and that, they recall, “sparked us to rethink how we understood colonization in Canada” (15). “We develop the Settler identity as situated, process-based, and pervasive in Canada but also in the United States, Australia, and other settler societies world-wide,” they write. “Our focus is, then, on the community to which we most closely belong, that being Settler people whose identities intersect with Canadian national and state boundaries” (15). What do “situated,” “process-based,” and “pervasive” mean in this context? “When we say that the Settler identity is situated,” Lowman and Barker write, “we mean that Settler identity is based on location-specific relationships to the lands we occupy and in relation to Indigenous peoples” (15). By “process-based,” they continue, 

we acknowledge that Settler people do not strictly identity with one codifiable set of cultural practices, political or economic institutions, embodied expressions, or even particular languages or religions. Rather, Settler people come to identify through ways of doing things—particular processes—that bind them to the lands on which they intend to stay, ways whose expression changes over time while maintaining the same assumptions and end goals. (15)

This identity is also pervasive, even if it is refused or disavowed. “The Settler identity is often disavowed” because of “resistance and reluctance to acknowledging Canada’s colonial present” (15); such disavowal, they write, 

is a key part of the Settler identity and marks Settler people as benefitting from the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous peoples while at the same time vehemently denying complicity in the events and processes that make that happen. In this, Settler identity operates differently to Indigenous identity. Indigenous identity has been the subject of struggle for many years to articulate an empowering identity against attempts to eliminate Indigenous practices, communities, and people. Settler identity, rather, is denied even as people attach themselves to the processes of becoming and being Settler. (15-16)

“Settler Canadian identity . . . is reliant on the ongoing exercise of colonial power to provide attachment to and legitimacy on the land,” they continue, but while 

most Settler people in Canada participate in colonial domination, their involvement is not guaranteed. At least theoretically, there are many different ways to be a Settler. Those various ways of being are often foreclosed by powerful structures and systems, whether officially recognized powers of the capitalist state or more diffuse structures like whiteness and individualism. (16)

Lowman and Barker don’t expect “any individual Settler Canadian to successfully transcend these structures on their own,” but they argue that “individual choices and efforts building to collective action are required to create change” (16). Those choices and efforts are the focus of the book’s final chapter.

Individual action is important, but “[a]ll the same, systems and structures should never be abstracted from society,” Lowman and Barker contend:

All of these systems and structures are occupied and operated by people, and they function because of many people operating in concert, agreeing actively or passively on certain principles (such as who owns the land and as such who has the right to make decisions over what kind of society should exist on the land). No one—including us—can simply step outside of these structures and systems, but we can begin to become aware of our own surroundings, our own complicity, and to make choices about how and why we will struggle against them (or not). (16)

They position Indigenous and Settler as identities “always in relationship,” drawing from philsopher Anne Waters’s work on Indigenous linguistic traditions which suggests “a conceptual framework for how we can understand entities in relationship through ‘non-discrete, non-binary dualism’” (16). “Indigenous and Settler, as identities, function in this relational way,” they argue: 

What this means is that Indigenous and Settler identities exist in tension between each other, even as these identities interpenetrate each other, and with other identities that cannot be accounted for within the Indigenous-Settler construct. The groups are non-discrete in the sense that they overlap with each other and there are many people caught between Settler and Indigenous identities, and therefore subject to conflicting social treatment based on how they are subjectively perceived and/or claimed by other Settler or Indigenous people(s). They are also non-binary in a number of ways. First and most obvious, is the existence of people living on the lands of Indigenous nations, but not doing so as settler colonizers or in a way recognisable to the Settler identity, and most importantly, not in opposition to indigeneity. (16-17)

They suggest that this formulation is similar to Patrick Wolfe’s “heretical binarism” or the “Indigenous-colonizer” dichotomy of Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi, “but with a greater degree of flexibility and nuance” (17). Crucially, they continue, “Indigenous and Settler peoples are not defined by their distances and differences, but rather their relationships to each other and to the land” (17). Both identities are “extremely heterogenous and diverse,” and many people “have a foot in both worlds,” and these identities “do not account for all peoples living in Canada” (17). The notion that these identities are non-discrete acknowledges “that Indigenous and Settler peoples interact constantly with each other, and that all cultures and communities within those broad identity categories are impacted by the actions of the others” (17). “To say that Indigenous and Settler identities are non-binary is to take into account the complexity around these identities,” they contend. “Canada does not exist as a container, with Indigenous and Settler Canadians within, and the world without. There are many people who do not quite fit either category”: refugees, visitors, enslaved people and indentured workers (17-18). “All of this is to say that in non-binary relationships Indigenous and Settler identities are not exclusive or exclusionary,” they continue. “There remains a tremendous and changing variety of other peoples who will pass through these lands and come into contact with Indigenous and Settler communities, and all of them relate to both Indigenous and Settler peoples in multiple and dynamic ways” (18). However, for Lowman and Barker, Indigenous and Settler identities “coalesce around an observable, general, and crucial difference: relationship to the land. These relationships to the land have often brought Indigenous and Settler peoples into conflicts that have played out as “colonization, dispossession, and domination of Indigenous peoples by Settler colonizers,” but they are hopeful that “there are other possibilities, other ways that this flexible and malleable duality can play out” (18). 

“Settler” is not intended as an insult, they write (although, as they note later on, it is often taken as one): 

When we say Settler we recognize that being a Settler Canadian in the present is inherently bound up with the settler colonization of these lands. However, we also recognize that settler colonialism is collective in nature. We identify ourselves as Settler Canadians and understand that, in so doing, we are declaring that we benefit from and are complicit with settler colonialism and therefore are responsible, as individuals and in collectives, for its continued functioning. (18)

To recognize “that settler colonialism is a shared burden means that it is only through collective action that we can make the choice to be colonizers, or to be something else,” they continue. “This choice can only be made if we are honest about who we are, collectively, and how we mutually contribute to each other’s sense of belonging on the land” (18). Rather than pejorative or derogatory, Settler is “an interrogative identity”: 

When we say we are Settler people, we are recognizing that our stories are different, and when we ask others to identify as Settler people, we are likewise asking them: How do you come to be here? How do you claim belonging here? And, most importantly, can we belong in a way that doesn’t reproduce colonial dispossession and harm? (18-19)

Lowman and Barker hope that “by addressing individual complicity and responsibility” in their work, “Settler people will come to see opportunities for making positive and decolonizing change. When colonialism and oppression are understood only as powerful structures, it can be difficult to perceive how any one of us can make a difference, leading to apathy and cynical disengagement” (19). They “hope to provoke and energize”; they “want people to understand that things are how they are only because we do not collectively organize to challenge and change them” (19).

It is hard work for Settlers to understand what settler colonialism means. For one thing, Settlers and Indigenous people have “vastly different ontological frameworks and philosophies,” which means that Settlers “must grapple with things that we do not understand—perhaps things that we cannot understand—as part of challenging taken-for-granted colonial ‘truths’” (19-20). We need to take seriously “Indigenous peoples’ relationships to the land as alive,” and to realize that “the political, economic, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of those relationships all matter” (20). “In order to find new ways of living together respectfully on this land,” Lowman and Barker argue, 

Settler people need to take up the responsibility of learning about Indigenous ontologies. This means broad-based understandings of Indigenous worldviews, but also the understandings and worldviews of the specific peoples on whose lands Settlers live. This is how we can create respectful spaces of knowing, and as Settlers, learn how we might relate in non-dominating, non-colonial relationships. (20)

“Understanding the disjuncture between Indigenous and Settler worldviews is not easy,” they continue:

It is also not likely something that can happen alone. We continue to struggle with concepts and unpack ideas that challenge and change how we think after over a decade of work in this field as our primary preoccupation. Our work is informed by our experiences with and learning from Indigenous communities, and especially Indigenous scholars and academics who have made important inroads in challenging the innate colonial functions of universities and educational systems. . . . Our mentors have come from diverse traditions and backgrounds, from anthropologists to political scientists to historians, all under the broad umbrella of what is probably best described as critical Indigenous studies. We are heavily influenced by scholarship on Indigenous resurgence, especially as it has been articulated by Taiaiake Alfred, Jeff Corntassel, and Leanne Simpson, and before them, Vine Deloria, Jr., Patricia Monture, Leroy Little Bear, and many others. . . . We are also intellectually indebted to a wider community of Indigenous activists, practitioners, and community leaders who deserve respect and thanks for developing articulations of Indigenous thought alongside movements for social change.(20)

“This book is a holding of ourselves and each other to account not as subjects of empire or citizens of a state, but as communities and families,” they write, a process that is neither easy nor comfortable. However, they continue, by making moral and ethical arguments,

we are inherently asking Settler people to see that they are personally and collectively involved and responsible for indefensible acts of cruelty and greed, even if these acts occur at such a remove that most of us never perceive our connections to them. When we ask Settler people to understand Indigenous peoples’ resistance and resurgence movements, we are asking them to connect with movements fuelled by a great love of the land, but also a very valid anger towards the systems and people who have actively or passively targeted them for generations. This book, then, takes up difficult subjects and both reader and writer will be united in experiencing discomfort as well as a range of reactions and emotions. (21)

“ This is key to the project of engaging and challenging the colonial aspects of Canadian worldviews,” they suggest (21).

Because they are taking on difficult and uncomfortable subjects, Lowman and Barker note that the “unsettling reactions” the book may provoke could include “feelings of guilt, shame, anger and outrage, or fear and despair,” and that these “are important elements of the effort to create just and respectful futures on these lands” (21). That is part of the reason they have chosen 

to approach these issues simultaneously at the level of structures and individuals, and why we refuse to exempt ourselves from any of the critiques we make here. If we learn to see ourselves and our roles in the systems and structures of settler colonialism—to “identify” with the kinds of settler colonial thought and action we describe—then we create an incredible opportunity. (21-22)

“Our motivation to act and to write in this way comes from our understanding of our responsibilities to the Indigenous communities to whom we are accountable,” they continue. “First and foremost, we must take responsibility for ourselves as Settlers and for engaging in uncomfortable and difficult conversations and the wider Settler Canadian community. . . . The discomfort that results, though important, is not action, but it is required to perceive both the necessity and the possibility for positive change” (22). They don’t intend “to prescribe a simplistic antidote to the fundamental problems in Canada today that arise from ongoing settler colonialism and its disavowal” (23). Moreover, their book isn’t “a guide to being an ‘ally,’ nor is it a manual to help Canadians understand what Indigenous people ‘want’” (23). Instead, they write, “[i]n this book, we speak as and to Settler Canadians, and hope others will see their own lives and experiences reflected in the arguments we make and the stories we tell. And most importantly, we make space—even just a little—for thinking beyond this present colonial conflict, to a future defined by reciprocity, responsibility, and resititution” (23).

After that introductory chapter, Lowman and Barker move to explore what settler colonialism means in Canada. “Colonialism is such an important part of Canadian identity and yet it is so little understood,” they write. “It is not too bold to claim that colonialism more than any other force drove the creation and shape of Canada, and that it continues into the present” (24). Their second chapter explores “settler colonialism and its relationship to identity in Canada, including how it manifests in daily life, informing acts of appropriation and racism, and defining many strongly held national myths. The political identity of Canadians—as citizens, as a nation—is necessarily bound up with the spaces, systems, and stories built on stolen land” (24). “Settler colonialism is a way of thinking about power and migration that allows us to better understand the nature of contemporary Canadian society,” they contend (24). It rejects the “salt water thesis”: the claim that once overseas colonies like Canada, Australia, and South Africa “were freed from the control of European imperial powers” they had become decolonized, “even if imported populations remained in control of local governmental structures” (24). While Canada has not built or maintained formal overseas colonies nor remained a formal colony of an imperial power, its colonialism is directed internally, against an Indigenous population essentially captive within the borders of the state” (24). That’s the reason former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s claim that Canada has no history of colonialism met with such disbelief.

According to Lowman and Barker, anthropologist Patrick Wolfe argues that settler colonialism is “characterised by specific ways of thinking about heritage, belonging, race and difference, and power” (25). It is a form of colonialism “directed towards justifying and supporting settlement and its pre-emptive claim to sovereignty on the land itself, which requires enormous buy-in and receives nearly unquestioned public support” (25). Settler colonialism has three main pillars. First, as Wolfe suggests, is the idea that “invasion is a structure not an event”: “it continues to happen because the social, political, and economic structures built by the invading people endure,” structures which include “cultural norms and practices that develop into institutionalized laws and social taboos,” such as patrilineal descent (25). 

Second is the idea that “settlers come to stay”: political theorist Lorenzo Veracini “has developed a nuanced theory of settler colonial political belonging and narrative that differentiates settlers from other colonizers and imperial agents,” because the settlers come to stay and the others intend to return home at some point (25). “As a people, our occupancy is intended to be permanent,” Lowman and Barker point out, “and as such our claims to the land have to be beyond question. In order to stamp down the challenge from Indigenous nations to our right of occupancy, we often insist that history begins with our national inception—with explorers, pioneers, soldiers, and traders, not the incredible span of Indigenous histories” (25). That is absolutely true in Saskatchewan, where in many communities the arrival of settlers is considered the Year Zero, the beginning of everything. “[W]hen they move to new places, settlers carry their sovereignty with then and then after selecting a place to live, [they] justify asserting sovereignty—their power of governance over that territory—through narratives of progress and racial or cultural superiority,” Lowman and Barker write (26). In order to succeed, they must “deny Indigenous presence in (or at least the legitimate claim to) places targeted for settlement” (26). 

Finally, the end goal of settler colonialism is “transcending colonialism”: “Indigenous peoples are eliminated and the presence of this new people—the settler society—becomes so deeply established that it is naturalized, normalized, unquestioned and unchallenged” (26). “In order to obscure the violence of persistent invasion and dispossession,” they write, 

the histories of the new people are whitewashed. Sanitized emphasis on practices of benevolent or philanthropic colonialism involving peacemaking, treaties, and the giving of “gifts” (technologies, medicines, institutionalized education, etc.) is used to overwrite the realities of how the new nation was formed through warfare, terrorism, subjugation, and theft. (26)

These processes are all different, but they all “initiate and rely upon earlier ‘transfers’ of Indigenous land to settler colonial control,” including “necrocolonial transfer,” in which Indigenous people are killed through warfare, murder, starvation, or disease, and narrative transfers, “in which stories are told and retold until they are taken as truth and used to undermine Indigenous peoples’ claims to land” (26). “These transfers show how the development of settler societies and their associated social, economic, and political practices both require and facilitate the displacement, marginalization, and destruction of Indigenous peoples,” Lowman and Barker write. “Transfer of the land—claiming it as ‘ours’ and building laws to justify the claim—is exercised as a right by the new settler society. As Indigenous peoples are physically and conceptually displaced, settler society grows into the (perceived) open space created by their (perceived) absence” (27).

As settler colonies grow and root themselves in their new place, they “often come to see themselves as “different” or “special” and deserving of independence from the imperial core”: 

For settler colonization, this process, called an isopolitical shift, is a necessary precondition for people legally and politically detaching from originating political institutions and reinvesting in the new settler society and its associated political structures and authority—the same structures of invasion necessary to effect the transfer of lands from Indigenous peoples. (27-28)

Over time, “[a]s settler collectives exercise their sovereignty,” they develop narratives and stories “that construct that particular settlement territory as ‘special’—particularly beautiful or productive—and Settler people come to identify themselves through residency and belonging in this special locale,” differentiating themselves from their societies of origin “by intensely identifying and focusing on the aspects of their new homelands that are ‘unique’ and also by committing violent or displacing acts against Indigenous peoples who have competing claims to these unique, special places” (28). 

A set of “triangular relations” is developed, “premised on the perception of three subjectivities created by settler colonialism”: settler colonizers, Indigenous Others, and exogenous Others (enslaved people, imported labour, or marginalized immigrants) (28). “The goals of settler colonialism regarding each of the three perceived groups in this three-way relationship are different,” they continue. “Settler people are the primary beneficiaries of settler colonial structures designed to ensure that the intent to stay is supported by both material structures and also by discourses that reflect settler colonial ontological understandings of land and place” (28). This “trialectic” is “fluid and varied,” and there are “constant tensions around the ‘belonging’ of racialized groups” (28), but it means that the benefits of being a settler are distributed unevenly, depending on things such as nationality, class, gender, migration status (29). In any case, they continue,

[u]nder settler colonialism, all three categories are intended to eventually collapse down into one. What this means is, ultimately, all problematic Others will be managed out of existence. Exogenous Others will either be disciplined to fit into the dynamics of the settler collective as a whole . . . or they will be excluded permanently through legal dehumanization or actual removal from the settler state. . . . Meanwhile, Indigenous Others are not targeted for incorporation. Rather they and their competing claims to the land are targeted for elimination. (29-30)

That elimination is not always physical, but it always requires that Indigenous peoples no longer exist as peoples: 

Indigenous sovereignty, which cannot be assimilated into and under settler colonial sovereignty, cannot survive. Indigenous relationships to the land cannot be allowed to pre-empt and undermine colonial claims to the land. And Indigenous histories and creation stories cannot be allowed to compete with heroic origin stories of brave pioneers and frontier individualism. (30)

“It is not enough that Indigenous peoples no longer exist to challenge Settler sovereignty,” Lowman and Barker argue; “Indigenous peoples have to disappear in the past as well as the present or Settler societies like Canada would be exposed as illegal and unjust” (30). One example is the dynamiting of Mistaseni Rock in Saskatchewan, which was sacred to Cree peoples, because it was in the way of the Gardiner Dam project: “[s]oon after, all ‘official’ memory or records of the rock’s existence disappeared. . . . This is the logic of elimination in action: first, a physical erasure, then a conceptual forgetting” (30). 

“An exclusive monopoly on the narrative as well as physical landscape, were it to be achieved, would do several things at once,” Lowman and Barker write: 

It would put to rest any legal doubt about where Settler sovereignty comes from. By erasing competing prior histories and stories, Settler societies possess and maintain the only legitimate claims to their territories. It also frees Settler peoples of the moral and ethical conundrum of membership in a nation founded on genocide, racism, and dispossession. The end of the settler story is the clearing of the ground to begin a new story, one where colonialism is simply something that happened in the past, possibly regrettable but inevitable, and certainly not worth critiquing given the overwhelming benefits of our ‘great nation.’ This is a sort of inward-looking invisibility, where the violent force, racism, and destruction of land that accompany colonization are made invisible to the Settler society itself through long-term social processes and generation of powerful myths.( 30-31)

“Of course, the violence and illegitimacy of settler colonization is never invisible to Indigenous peoples,” they continue, “and that is why so long at Indigenous nations remain—and remain in resistance—the settler colonial story cannot be finished” (31).

According to Lowman and Barker, settler colonialism has “three intertwined goals: elimination, indigenization, and transcendence” (31). “Canadian structures of invasion come in three types: spaces, systems, and stories,” they write, and all three of these are ultimately about the land:

First, settler colonial spaces displace and replace Indigenous spaces. Spaces in this sense are social—they are the animate geographies of our everyday lives. Spaces are not predetermined but empowered by collective agreement that they exist. Settler colonial society ignores Indigenous spiritual spaces, for example, and asserts their own “secular” spaces premised on dividing up and owning land. (31)

When Settler Canadians buy a suburban tract house, for example, 

we are doing more than engaging in a private financial transaction: we are purchasing the idea of that land as ours—our own circumscribed space with attendant amenities like a backyard and privacy fences. Our purchase is a benefit of our placement on the inside of the structures of settler colonialism, and also a denial of Indigenous claims to those same lands. (32)

The second structure of invasion, systems, is more fluid. “[S]ettler colonial systems can be defined as the processes by which Canada runs and through which settler colonization is asserted and adapted over time”: examples include residential schools, public education, or political and legal systems “in which traditional Indigenous forms of justice are displaced” while Indigenous people are incarcerated at rates far beyond their percentage of the population (32-33). The third structure of invasion, stories, 

underpins the other two and is perhaps the most powerful and pervasive: the narratives that are the means through which violent colonization is transformed into the story of heroic struggle and the inevitable establishment of an exceptionally successful, just, and distinct society. These are the narratives that form the basis of the stories Settler Canadians tell ourselves and each other about who we are as a people. (33)

“What is important to understand here are the common ways that Settler people interact with these stories, forging a national identity that is welded to settler colonialism at its core,” they write: 

Such stories are key to defining our belonging in Canada, and the narratives that normalize Settler people on the land and exclude or eliminate Indigenous peoples and Indigenous presence on the land further the end goals of settler colonization. The narratives and the stories we tell are often attempts to justify our own histories and actions by retroactively re-writing the history of how we came to be on the land, and under what authority we, as a country, make our claim. We tell these stories because we want to feel good about ourselves and our pasts, which is understandable. However, these stories, and the exclusions or untruths they rest upon, refuse to acknowledge was was required to create colonial spaces of opportunity: disease, warfare, incarceration, forced relocation, abduction, and assimilation. And this obscures that many early settlers only survived because of the generosity, knowledge and skills of Indigenous communities, whose knowledge of both edible and medicinal plants and work as military allies and protectors were crucial to the survival of new settlements. (34-35)

These three processes have not ended. “Colonialism in Canada is not just a legacy of earlier times, but an ongoing ideology and practice that is critical to defining the sense of both nation and self,” Lowman and Barker argue. “Settler colonial structures combine to influence and involve nearly everything about life in Canada” (35). However powerful those spaces, systems, and stories are, though, “they only exist because of the actions and decisions of people—from elites to everyday actors. This should not be read as a blanket and inevitable condemnation of Settler Canadians. Rather, in understanding that we all bear some responsibility for settler colonization, this means that we [are] all capable of making a positive difference as well” (35). This is a crucial point for Lowman and Barker—resistance and change are possible:

Settler people are tied together by common histories and by participation and membership in various structures of invasion that we have described; they also share similar possibilities for relating to the land differently. . . . there are avenues through which Settler people could try to relate to land and place in ways that do not depend on settler colonialism and the displacement of Indigenous peoples. By contrast, settler colonizer is not an identity. It is someone who pursues a relatively narrow range of actions and social participation following the dictates of colonial institutions. A settler colonizer is always, by definition, a part of a group that seeks to transfer land from Indigenous peoples to their own control, exerting sovereignty over territory and wrapping particular narrative forms around this transfer. (38)

Despite those possibilities, however, 

in any practical sense in Canada today, almost all non-Indigenous people—with the notable exception of those excluded for being perceived as “exogenous”—are Settler people and are also settler colonizers. In Canada, the structures of invasion that have been built through five hundred years of colonial settlement are pervasive, and almost impossible to avoid. Almost everything we think about as being Canadian or associated with Canadian identity is caught up in the process of building, expanding, or maintaining the invasive structures of Canada. (39)

 The vast majority of people who live within the structures of invasion participate in them, benefit from them, and are complicit in colonial dispossession and elimination through them (39). 

“[B]eyond the well-documented drive to extract resources from Indigenous lands,” Lowman and Barker contend, “one of the most common ways that Settler Canadians perpetuate colonialism is through appropriation” (39). “Appropriation can be understood as the removal of an element of culture, a concept or idea, or a symbol or practice out of its original context,” they write, “and its redeployment in a new cultural or social context for the gratification or profit of the appropriating person or group” (39-40). “In Canada, the Settler identity is closely bound up with symbols, objects, and practices appropriated from Indigenous nations”: the inukshuk, the canoe, maple syrup, snowshoes, dream catchers, and so on (40): 

All of these are Indigenous inventions and technologies, all shared by multiple nations with different meanings and uses in many traditions, and yet they are all taken out of context and claimed by Canadians as part of a homogenizing national culture. These claims are accompanies by deep resistance to addressing the power imbalances that have allowed us to take these objects and techniques as our own while at the same time denying and contesting Indigenous claims of ownership on the grounds that no one can ‘own’ symbols of our heritage. (40)

I’m sure that’s true, but I’m not going to stop putting maple syrup on pancakes. Perhaps the point is to be aware of where these things come from? I’m not sure.

Appropriation goes beyond canoes and condiments; it also applies to ideas and concepts.  “Indigenous ways of knowing are myriad and complex, and have the potential to reveal a great deal about human-environmental relationships, social practices, and time and space,” Lowman and Barker write. “Some Settler Canadians perceive a value in Indigenous thought and, often without intending to ‘offend’ or cause harm, exert their power as part of a dominating society to take these concepts for themselves” (40). Here they seem to be referring mainly to “New Age and mystical movements which rely on Indigenous symbols such as the medicine wheel, knowledge of medicinal plants and herbs, and rituals and spiritual practices like the sweat lodge” (40), but I wonder what distinguishes those forms of appropriation from their own learning about Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, which they discuss later in the book. Perhaps this New Age appropriation is particularly harmful because it involves spiritual practices: it “has to be seen agains the historical backdrop of efforts by Settler peoples to wipe out Indigenous ways of knowing and spiritual practices” (40). “Appropriation relies on the belief that Indigenous peoples, as colonized and subjugated, do not have the power to refuse,” they continue (40). There are ethical ways to engage with Indigenous cultural symbols and objects, but they are rare (41). According to Lowman and Barker,

more than anything else, Canadians appropriate Indigenous symbols, objects, and knowledge because we feel that these things are already a part of our national identity. The settler colonial claim to the land comes along with a claim to all the parts of it. Indigenous cultures are seen not as the lived expressions of people but as things on the land, and therefore available to Settler Canadians to claim. In this way, appropriation is a method of building and differentiating a national identity. It is a part of the process through which Canadian society is created, set apart, and rooted in the landscape. Appropriated symbols and objects become a taking-on rather than a putting-down of roots. (41-42)

Related is the claim to having Indigenous ancestry (42). All of these appropriations reinforce  “the mutual contract of settler colonialism” (42). While I think Lowman and Barker are correct, I’ve also heard Elders suggest that using sage and sweetgrass is something that is available to Settlers as well, and I’ve seen how smudging before an activity can centre and focus the participants. Would that be contained within the rubric of appropriation? I don’t know. I need to read more about this issue.

Racism is another way Settlers participate in settler colonialism: 

Colonialism and racism are not coterminous, though one is often deployed in the service and context of the other. In Canada, settler colonialism involves the taking of land, power, and symbols, and the building of a new society in place of Indigenous nations. Race-based prejudice and discrimination are used to justify these colonial actions. (42)

Racism against Indigenous people can be structural, involving “institutions and processes that we take for granted in everyday Canadian life” which are “designed in a way that inherently marginalizes or mis-serves Indigenous people”—such as the educational system, social services, policing (42-43), but racism can be the result of individual actions as well (43-44). “What ties all of these acts together, from the institutional to the individual, is the dehumanization and oppression of Indigenous individuals and peoples,” they continue: 

These acts all rely on the belief that Indigenous peoples do not have the same right to life or to defend their cultures and homelands that we would expect for ourselves. As such their assertions of sovereignty or even just attempts to survive in a hostile society are met with contempt, violence, and degradation. (44)

We’ve all heard or seen many examples of such contempt and violence; they are not isolated actions, Lowman and Barker argue, but rather part of the fabric of settler colonialism.

Another aspect of settler colonialism are national myths that “explain how we came to be and justify our claims to belonging on the land. Particularly important to Canadian collective identities are narratives of multiculturalism, peacekeeping, socially progressive politics, and hard-earned prosperity” (44). The “peacemaker myth,” for example, is 

the story of Canada as founded in treaty-making and honourable dealing, where Indians welcomed French, British, and Canadian people as mutually beneficial partners, a story where no Canadian has the blood of Indigenous people on their hands. This is a story often told in direct contrast to the violence of American colonization. The peacemaker myth is tightly entangled with the perception of Canada as a multicultural mosaic. It is a story of a Canada that, while once troubled by racial strife, has achieved enlightenment, and now welcomes all people as equals, with the same rights and responsibilities, the same respect and dignity, regardless of where they may come from or how and why they have come to the lands we all now share. And it underpins the idea of Canada as an international leader. (45)

In actual fact, though, “Canada did . . . rely on violent tactics and displacements to dispossess Indigenous peoples,” and “Plains nations . . . were intentionally starved to make them more pliable in treaty negotiations” (45). (I think that comment is something of a misreading of James Daschuk’s work, which suggests that starvation, as a tactic, happened after the treaties were negotiated, but let it pass.) Such historical facts “should put paid the notion of Canada as a peacemaker nation,” particularly the fact that these acts “were known and discussed among Settler Canadians at the time that they were happening” (45)—for example, Dr. P.H. Bryce’s reports on residential schools, which led to the federal government terminating his employment (45-46). 

“What does it mean to say that Canada is a colonial nation or, as is increasingly common in academic research, a ‘settler state’?” Lowman and Barker ask, as a way of summarizing this chapter: 

Let us start with the historical recognition that Canada was forged by settler colonialism, and as a contemporary settler state maintains legal, political, and economic systems rooted in the settler colonial usurpation of Indigenous lands and the dispossession and disappearance of Indigenous peoples. More simply, Canada’s present laws, politics, economic systems, cultures, and social practices are all to some extent rooted in the ideologies, practices, and histories of settler colonization. (47)

“Settler Canadians and settler colonialism are two sides of the same coin: a process-based identity and the process that currently produces the identity,” they conclude. “The identity comes to shape the process too, and so all Settler identities have their specificities” (47). No matter how comforting its national myths, Settler Canada remains “a society based on violent dispossession of Indigenous nations that is unable—as of yet—to complete the Settler colonial trajectory and remains bent on appropriating, assimilating, or disappearing any aspects of Indigenous identity that threaten our claims to the land” (47).

In their third chapter, “It’s Always About the Land,” Lowman and Barker argue that

Land is at the root of any issue or conflict you would care to name involving Indigenous and Settler peoples in Canada. The land is what sustains Indigenous communities and identities. The land is what Settler people need in order to have a home and economic stability. The land is what colonialism seeks to turn into a commodity for power and profit. The land is what is contested, what is shared, what is danced, and what is discussed without words. (48)

The purpose of settler colonization is “to transfer land from Indigenous peoples to Settler control. Land, in this sense, refers to something akin to ‘place’: territories imbued with social meaning that form the basis of social life, sustaining political economies and informing cultural and community practices” (48). They recognize that “Indigenous and Settler people have attachments to land,” but those attachments, they argue, 

must be understood as having very different kinds of relationships with the places that they call home. Some of this is a function of settler colonialism, and some of it is not; we must disentangle the two from each other to discover what land means to the Settler identity, and how particular relationships to land contribute to producing and reproducing settler colonialism in Canada. (48-49)

That suggestion brings them back to the ontological tensions they discussed in the first chapter: 

We must think carefully and deeply about a settler colonial worldview, contrasted with Indigenous place-thought in order to emphasize that the ontological understanding of land and belonging—the basic ways that concepts like ‘home’ and ‘place’ are articulated and positioned in Indigenous and settler colonial philosophies and cultures—prevents simple political or economic solutions to settler colonial dispossession and displacement. (49)

In brief, non-Indigenous ways of thinking about place separate ontology and epistemology, whereas in Indigenous traditions, “ontology and epistemology are inseparable. The way of thinking about the land and the experience of relating to it are essentially the same” (49). Lowman and Barker cite Sarah Hunt’s call for us to embrace “‘the shifting relationality, complexity and circularity of Indigenous knowledge as productive and necessary’” (50)—I will need to read her essay on the ontologies of indigeneity. I certainly think it’s true that if our society possessed Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, we would not be in an extinction nor a climate crisis.

What Lowman and Barker are attempting to do in this chapter, they write, is “to bring Indigenous knowledges into conversation with what Mark Rifkin has called ‘settler common sense,’” a term that “refers to the way that the logics of settler colonial domination are woven through almost every aspect of contemporary Settler societies” (50). Their goal is “to expose and de-normalize that common sense” (50) by juxtaposing it to Indigenous ways of knowing. “As expressed in creation stories and oral histories, economic practices and systems, Indigenous nations are rooted in land and place,” they write:

This is not a myth or a metaphor, but an established fact and also an important and powerful way of understanding how Indigenous people understand themselves and their societies. It is essential that we appreciate just how complex these place-based relationships are, particularly if we do not understand the specific details. Indigenous relationships to the land are the sources of intricate systems of thought and vast stores of knowledge, dynamic and durable systems of governance, ecological and resource management systems, and cultural and spiritual traditions of incredible power and profound meaning. (50)

They draw from a number of sources that have informed their thinking: the writing of the late Lakota philosopher Vine Deloria, Jr., whose work has helped them understand the spiritual relationships between Indigenous peoples and sacred places (50-51); Leroy Little Bear, who “has articulated this relationship as centred on the need to maintain balance by consistently visiting and interacting with sacred sites in a ceremonial way, which ensures that both the land and people can continue on in a sustainable fashion” (51); Mohawk-Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts, who argues that “Indigenous identities and histories are shaped by ‘place-thought,’ the inseparable relationship between how Indigenous peoples understand and interact with the world as a living entity, with will and agency of its own, and how the living, intelligent elements of the world shape Indigenous thinking, culture, and social practice” (51); and Cree and Saulteaux writer Margaret Kovach, who suggests that 

land relationships are what link Indigenous people with the past, with collective Indigenous identities, and with kinship groups and communities. The land becomes the source of stories that children learn about values and cultural precepts; by the time they become adults, they transmit those same stories of the land to the next generation, linking generations of family across time through the same practice, in the same place. (51)

Kovach also argues that “it is particular relationships with land and specific places that differentiates Indigenous peoples from one another and also differentiates them from other groups in settler societies” (51). In practice, Lowman and Barker admit, “it can be difficult for those of us not trained in Indigenous worldviews and traditions to understand how these place-relationships inform the lives of Indigenous individuals and communities”; after all, Settlers also understand the importance of land in their own way (as homeland or property) (51). For that reason, they turn to Indigenous political theorists Taiaiake Alfred (Mohawk) and Jeff Corntassel (Cherokee), who argue “that being Indigenous means living a ‘place-based, oppositional’ identity, rooted in defending relationships to particular places against colonial imposition” (51). This statement “is a description of a social condition of being constantly in struggle,” and it “carries through the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities” (52).

Nevertheless, despite their research and reading, they admit that, as Settler Canadians,

we found it difficult to understand what is meant by a ‘place-based’ identity. During our time as researchers and students of Indigenous politics, geography, and history, we developed an intellectual understanding of the central role of land in Indigenous identity. But to understand the lived reality of having a place-based identity, constantly under assault, to be continuously striving against colonial dispossession to enact and reassert relationships to the land—as is the case for Indigenous peoples all across Canada today—was a different and more difficult process. . . . It was Nuu-Chah-Nulth scholar, storyteller, and leader Chaw-win-is who, over the course of many conversations, arguments, and shared experiences, taught us to know better. Each time we got carried away, Chaw-win-is told us firmly, ‘No, it’s not about that—it’s always about the land.’ Through storytelling and conversation, involvement in events and action, and nuanced analysis of colonialism at work on Turtle Island, Chaw-win-is helped us to learn . . . slowly. Land in the context of Indigenous cultures and colonial appropriation is far more than property or territory. It is the water, the air, the living things like plants and animals, the rocks and earth that have thoughts of their own, and the spirits that bind all of it—including people—together. When Chaw-win-is talked about the land, she was talking about everything that surrounded her people, made them into who they are, and was at risk if colonialism turned that land int property or territory. We also learned how deep, complex, and profound her relationship to the land is through hearing her share stories with her grandfather, as he told her where their people came from on the land, and then we heard her tell those same stories to her children so that they too could visit those places and know them. The land sustains her physically, culturally, and spiritually, and connects her to family and nation across generations. (52)

Perhaps it’s not surprising that learning about an ontology based in relationships to land required relationships to people:

Indigenous peoples have powerful, longstanding relationships to particular places, relationships which cannot be easily or simply articulated but have time and again proven profound, staggeringly complex, and critical to identity, nationhood, and survival. It is these relationships which settler colonization seeks to sever in order for colonizers to achieve undisputed claim to the land. Before understanding the role of settler colonialism on the land, we need to understand the ways that the Settler identity relates to land and place. (52-53)

Settler identity also involves relationships to land, but those relationships are categorically different from the relationships Indigenous peoples have to land:

A key component of the Settler identity is the intent to find a homeland and settle there, to stay long term, and to build a sense of belonging through social and political structures, such as citizenship in a state, or stories of personal and familial struggle and success. Settler identities are also forged in relationship to land: it is the location and basis for security, opportunity, and identity as a new people. (53)

Settlers might have roots in another place, but they don’t have another homeland to which they can return, and so they come to identify with the settler colonial society to which they belong (53). In other words, “Settler sovereignty is essentially ‘portable’ anywhere inside the Settler’s perceived domain” (53).

But what is the key difference between the ways that Indigenous and Settler identities understand place? One is integrated into the land, Lowman and Barker argue, and the other is imposed upon it:

There is a difference between a relationship with the land, in the case of Indigenous peoples, and a relationship to the land, in the case of settler societies. Indigenous societies include all elements of land and place as part of the community, from rocks, water, and air to plants and animals. This means that Indigenous peoples relate to land as part of an integrated network of personalities and powers, all of which gives rise to a dynamic social identity. Settler people, by contrast, relate to the land as the site on which their society is built. We create potent stories about the land—as sites of conquest, as hard-won property, or even as ‘natural’ places that inform our national identities, and can even form strong emotional and historical attachments to these places that become our home. but these investments still treat places as territories or objects, not as alive. (53)

“Indigenous and Settler conflicts over land have been discussed in some senses as a clash of sovereignties,” they continue. “However, we have shown that these ‘sovereignties’ are not at all alike. Indigenous sovereignties are bounded by sacred responsibilities to interact with particular places while Settler sovereignties are ‘carried with us’ until we decide to root them somewhere” (55). Moreover, “Indigenous peoples cooperate with the land as an extensive community of diverse beings in order to increase their collective capacity for sustainable and balanced co-existence” (56). The difference is in the kind of relationship Indigenous peoples and Settlers have with the land:

Indigenous relationships to land are balanced by what the people give to, and do for, the land, and how the land cares for and provides for the people. By contrast, Settler Canadian identities require the creation of social and cultural structures which need to be constantly rebuilt in a material sense as the land is adapted to the uses that Settler societies desire, and in a conceptual sense as Settler people generate histories and stories and political and legal systems that anchor them in place. These are human-centric relationships: they are about what the land can be made to give and how it can be made to give it. As such, it is directly at odds with the relationship between Indigenous peoples and their sacred places and home environments. (56)

“When Indigenous people assert that the land itself is important, beyond value as property or the source of resources for extraction, they are derided for being ‘mystical’ or ‘nostalgic’ or ‘essentialist,’ all of which are deflections to avoid actually taking seriously the challenging relationships with the land asserted in Indigenous identities,” Lowman and Barker write (57). That’s because 

Settler colonizers encounter the land through their own filters, including traditions of property and ownership, and human-centric understandings of sovereignty and relational responsibility. These complexes of tradition, expectation, perception, and interaction form what are called “imagined geographies,” which necessarily differ from the spatial perceptions and relationships of Indigenous peoples. Before settler colonial collectives construct obvious legal and political relationships that bind them to the land, they first construct narratives that justify their being on the land at all, and that begin the process of shifting their identity from rootedness in original homelands to the new settlement. (58-59)

I think this discussion of the different kinds of relationship that are possible with the land is central to understanding the differences between Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies and Settler ontologies and epistemologies. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, that Indigenous people here would have willingly destroyed the grassland that sustained them, the way that Settlers have done. Agriculture itself—at least, large-scale, industrial agriculture—might require a different way of relating to the land than other ways of living.

One of the most important and powerful and common Settler Canadian narratives is that of being forced out of a prior homeland, Lowman and Barker write (59). Such stories often ignore “the agency of Indigenous peoples in letting early settlers stay and helping them survive, or that the present bounty and opportunity of Canada are rooted in profits from lands unjustly taken from Indigenous nations” (59). Narratives of “victimization and escape from a prior homeland, and opportunity and redemption in the settlement colony, become a powerful narrative that displaces Indigenous peoples’ histories, and even stories of interaction between settlers and Indigenous communities” (59). Another common and important narrative that justifies settler colonial belonging on the land: terra nullius, the notion that the land was empty, or that it was “occupied in a fashion not worthy of respect or legal recognition,” which therefore gave colonizers the moral justification and legal basis on which to take the land and make it their own (60). Terra nullius “is a narrative and practice of erasure, but it is also a way of rooting and justifying settler colonial societies on the land” (60). The notion of the state itself affirms the legitimacy of Settler society: “Westphalian sovereignty, the political doctrine that, since the mid-1600s, has defined the nation state as the highest order of political territorial authority, should not be read in isolation from settler colonialism. The development of the modern state and the development of Settler Canadian society have been connected for centuries” (61). The Canadian Constitution also affirms Settler legitimacy. While Section 35 of the Constitution seems to recognize the legitimacy and importance of Indigenous peoples’ claims to land, it is “part of a much larger colonial legal tradition, which includes both treaty relationships and important decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada on ‘aboriginal title.’ Consider, first, that many treaties between Indigenous nations and the Crown do not exist in a form easily integrated into Canadian law,” such as the Two-Row Wampum or treaties signed between Indigenous nations but not directly with the Crown, such as the Dish With One Spoon treaty between the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe. They are not included within Section 35 (62). In addition, the relationship between what the courts call “aboriginal title” and the Crown’s claim to “underlying title” is unclear, with the Canadian government reserving the right “to simply ignore Indigenous claims if it is in the national interest (broadly defined) to do so” (62).“It is clear both in wording and in practice that Settler Canadian governments consider Indigenous belonging on the land at best a minor concern and at worst a major nuisance,” Lowman and Barker write. “The Constitution of Canada exists not to balance Indigenous and Settler relationships, but to ensure Settler Canadian sovereignty over the land, and subsume Indigenous belonging within that category” (62).

For Lowman and Barker, three things about Canada must change: 

First, Canadian sovereignty—constructed as absolute, invested in a state territory, and codified in the Constitution, common law, and regimes of property—cannot stand. In present form it simply has no legal or ethical basis and needs to be reformulated. Second, Settler Canadians must exist in a system that does not perpetuate narratives that marginalize Indigenous presence, generating contemporary excuses echoing the fiction of “empty land.” Third, the spaces that Settler people occupy cannot be based on the imagined geographies of settler colonialism, but instead should correspond to spaces of Indigenous political and social life on the land. That is the barest set of conditions that must be met in order for Settler people to find ways to belong on the land that do not rely on the structures of settler colonialism. (63)

Those things do need to change, but it’s hard to imagine how this “barest set of conditions” could become a reality, given the power of settler colonialism and the economic imperatives of Canada’s resource-based economy. There is an abyss between the goals Lowman and Barker describe and our current situation.

Nevertheless, our authors note that historical examples of respectful, cross-cultural relationships between communities of settlers and Indigenous nations do exist (63), such as the Two-Row Wampum or “Guswenta Treaty,” which codifies “a relationship of mutual respect” between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch settlers in what is now the state of New York (64). “However, for the majority of Settler history, these sorts of nuanced treaty relationships have not informed Settler belonging,” they acknowledge. “Instead, treaty has been used as a strategy to extinguish Indigenous peoples’ claims to land in order to extend the sovereign control of the Settler state” (64). Part of the problem is the way that Indigenous peoples and Settlers understand treaties: “in Indigenous perspectives treaties are long-term frameworks for equitable relationships rather than documents detailing land surrender or political alliance-making,” and “when treaties are not understood and embodied in this way, the result can be more than the violation of domestic or international law: breakdowns in respectful relationship can subvert Indigenous nationhood in a profound way” (65). The numbered treaties in Ontario and western Canada, for example, “constitute a case study in the extent to which government officials and treaty negotiators twisted treaties from their inception” (65). 

“‘We are all treaty people’ is a rallying call that has become increasingly popular of late in progressive political circles and among social justice advocates,” Lowman and Barker write: 

It is a positive step to see Settler Canadians developing awareness of treaties with Indigenous peoples, and understanding that the treaties signed by the state imply responsibilities for both Indigenous and Settler peoples. For far too long, treaties were considered by many Canadians to be at most a legal construct under which Indigenous people could make limited claims on the government. There is now some popular recognition that treaties also form the basis for Settler people to belong on the land in a more ethical and legitimate fashion. However, caution is necessary: the full meaning and import of “being a treaty person” is still too often ignored or misunderstood. (66)

This misunderstanding arises from the fact that “treaties in Indigenous contexts are living covenants,” and so claiming belonging as a treaty person 

means accepting and practicing a dynamic set of responsibilities that will be specific to a given treaty, on the territory of a given nation, determined in an open-ended fashion through dialogue with that host nation (or nations in the case of territories where more than one Indigenous nation overlap). This is not the same as developing a set of codified laws and procedures that give certainty or finality. . . . A respectful treaty person has to throw out what they think they know abut any given treaty and engage with the many potential other meanings beyond the “official” version. This includes the imperative to understand how the language of treaty—which can be encompassed in written documents that (imperfectly) represent Indigenous languages or concepts, in symbols like wampum belts, and in the oral histories and political traditions of Indigenous communities themselves—cannot simply be translated into English or French, and incorporated into common terminology without misrepresenting or oversimplifying the meaning of the treaty. Understanding must be relational. Treaties understood according to the Indigenous perspectives and respectful relationships raise fundamental questions about Canadian sovereignty, the authority of the state, and the meaning of citizenship, as well as official and popular narratives of Canadian history. Claiming an identity as a treaty person cannot be done without a deep critique of one’s own relationship with Settler Canadian society and present-day settler colonialism. (66-67)

Moreover, we are not all treaty people: in many parts of the country, there are no treaties (67). For these reasons, they write,

[c]laiming status as a treaty person cannot be a panacea for Settler Canadian uncertainty, discomfort, or guilt. The critical difference between treaties as respectful bases for co-existence, or colonial frameworks that justify Settler Canadian claims to land resides in which comes first. Either Indigenous relationships to land are centralized and Settler social structures must be developed respective of these place-relationships, or settler colonial structures of invasion such as constitutions and state boundaries are prioritized and Indigenous place-relationships are treated as a problem to be managed. This is, of course, the basis of Indigenous and Settler Canadian political conflicts, and the root of Indigenous struggles for sovereignty. (67-68)

This discussion of treaties confirms my sense that Treaty 4 is an appropriate subject for my research, as does their contention that the land is the centre of settler colonialism. However, their description of what it would mean to be a treaty person as a Settler is daunting—in fact, it sets the bar so high as to be nearly impossible. I think that’s partly a rhetorical strategy—they want Settlers to identify as Settlers and think that a too-easy understanding of being treaty people will enable an evasion of the difficulty of negotiating the Settler identity—but at the same time, it’s quite discouraging.

In the fourth chapter, “‘Settling’ Our Differences,” Lowman and Barker begin by acknowledging that 

Settler Canadians are a multi-ethnic people, encompassing vast disparities of wealth and economic opportunity, huge ranges of education and experience, and a massive variety of identifying with respect to gender, sexuality, and other overlapping markers of identity who, all the same, are complicit in settler colonialism and identify strongly with settler colonial national myths, understandings of public and private space, and systems of government and economy. (69)

This chapter, they write, focuses on those complexities and diversities and considers “how settler colonialism, as a flexible and durable ideology of relationship to the land, has adapted and continues to adapt to challenges and shifts in the social make-up of Canadian society” (70). “How we experience the world as Settler people is . . . shaped by our experiences of race and racism, wealth and social mobility, gender and sexuality, and many other very real differences,” they continue. “Understanding the diverse manifestations of the Settler identity as intersectional helps make sense of the varied and at times conflicting manifestations of Settler identity” (70). I’m sensing something of a contradiction here; earlier they suggested that “exogenous Others” were not necessarily Settlers, but now those racialized or marginalized groups seem to be included within the Settler identity.

“White supremacy has been a feature of Canada since its inception,” Lowman and Barker suggest (70), and therefore “[r]acialized groups have historically been and continue to be marginalized and oppressed in Canadian society” (71). “On one hand,” they write, 

Canadian hallmarks such as multiculturalism, anti-racism, and equality have repeatedly been co-opted to serve the settler colonial agenda. On the other, even radical anti-capitalist actions relying on direct action and raising fundamental questions about the political economy of Canada have not escaped settler colonialism. The risk of equating the struggles of Indigenous peoples against settler colonialism to struggles against racism or capitalist exploitation is pressing. (73)

Multiculturalism is inadequate to the task of dismantling settler colonialism. There is a paradox in the coexistence of official multiculturalism and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms alongside “an openly racist and race-based piece of legislation,” the Indian Act (74). Moreover, 

Multiculturalism in Canada has little to say about relationships to land and place. Culture is constructed as a set of practices, something that one does wherever one is, and rights as the freedoms and privileges of individuals, guaranteed by the state and protected by law. However, Indigenous peoples have very different notions of how rights function: collectively rather than individually, and with a far greater responsibility on responsibilities to one’s community, to the land, to ancestors and future generations. (75)

Considering Indigenous people within the notion of multiculturalism and the Charter treats their own systems of government as invalid, “and Indigenous sovereignty is subsumed under the state” (75). Therefore, 

“[m[ulticulturalism that does not recognize the difference between racism deployed against Indigenous people in order to dispossess them of the land, eliminate Indigenous identity, and disappear them as autonomous nations, and racism deployed against immigrants and minority populations in order to ‘discipline’ them and uphold white supremacy, risks reinforcing settler colonialism through a flattened, colonialism-blind notion of equality. (75)

In a similar way, focusing on capitalism cannot dismantle settler colonialism. While capitalism and settler colonialism are related, “settler colonialism also functions in the absence of capitalism,” such as in Soviet Siberia in the twentieth century (76). Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang point out that colonialism isn’t a symptom of capitalism; rather, capitalism and the state “are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects” (qtd. 77). Our focus, therefore, needs to be on settler colonialism.

Here, Lowman and Barker acknowledge that they “have painted a rather unflattering picture”:

Canada is a state founded on stolen land, predicated on the elimination of Indigenous peoples, and a nation steeped in racism, violence, and denial. Even social justice movements, from widely accepted multiculturalism to radical anti-capitalist campaigns, may fall into the trap of reinforcing this immoral, unethical society of domination and dispossession. Settler colonialism requires that Settler people, in exchange for many purported but often immaterial benefits, submit themselves to systems that commit genocide and erasure of Indigenous identities in their name, while also profoundly limiting the possible ways that Settler people can pursue their economic and political interests. Settler colonialism monopolizes the potential ways that Settler people can be Settler. If the cost of belonging is so high, it is awfully hard to see why anyone would want to be a member of Settler Canadian society. And yet, Settler society continues to grow and continues to be seen as natural and normal. (79)

How are people recruited into the settler colonial project, they ask? (79). 

First, though, before they answer that question, they remind readers that settler colonialism requires “the elimination of Indigenous identity and peoplehood,” the severing of the connections between Indigenous people and sovereignty and the land (79). And yet, despite all of the efforts of settler colonialism,

Indigenous peoples have found multiple, creative ways to maintain connections to land, to practice land-based cultures in urban environments, and to reaffirm urban spaces as Indigenous spaces. All of which is to say that historical attempts at assimilating Indigenous people through education, removal of status, relocation, and enforced socio-economic change have not been successful, though the toll these imposed systems have taken on Indigenous societies is enormous. (80-81)

Lowman and Barker use the term “aboriginalism” to refer to the ongoing assimilationist effort by the Canadian government “to circumscribe and define Indigenous peoples in a way acceptable to Settler Canadian society” (81). “Through aboriginalism,” they write,

“Canada’s aboriginal people” are given a pride of place within the colonial system, their competing relationships to land ended. This is effectively an ending of Indigenous ways of life and the triumph of settler colonialism. Severed from the land and subsumed in the state, Indigenous identity can be slowly assimilated and disappeared, a form of cultural genocide through governmental “recognition” that denies the most vital parts of Indigenous lifeways. (82)

That statement reminds me of Glen Coulthard’s contention (I read the introduction of Red Skin, White Masks during my MFA research) that recognition is not enough; that’s another book I need to read in a serious way.

Now they return to the question of how settler colonialism recruits people, focusing on “exogenous Others.” “Settler identity must be understood as an aspirational identity,” they write. “Canadians are proud and often very vocal about the benefits of being part of Canadian society” (83). “Established Settler Canadians manage difference with respect to exogenous Others by disciplining people in both official and informal ways, in order to ensure that newcomer or newly accepted communities buy into and reinforce the colonial systems of Settler Canadian society”: through citizenship tests, employment in resource industries, and the “model minority syndrome” (83). On the other hand “[s]ome of the most powerful challenges to established Settler Canadian systems of oppression have come from intersectional solidarity work between Indigenous peoples and marginalized immigrant communities and communities of colour,” such as the work of No One Is Illegal, which argues for migrant rights (84). “It is important to recognize that there are major perceived benefits to being Settler Canadian,” they contend, but it is important to note that there is a relationship between expecting advantages, or benefits, and actually possessing privilege in the settler colonial context (85). They cite sociologist Stuart Hall’s argument “that identities coalesce around layers of privilege—as people experience privileges, they come to identify with particular groups whose lives are typified by the same energy-saving devices and convenient insulators” (85-86). “When we say the ‘benefits’ of identifying as a Settler, we are talking about both real privileges but also aspects of being a Settler Canadian that are just assumed to be better than a ‘nasty, brutish and short’ existence in the wilderness,” Lowman and Barker write (86). One benefit is mobility: “This purported benefit inheres in the understanding that, theoretically, any Settler could move, could relocate to a different part of the country, without appealing for permission” (86-87). However, “[u]nstated in the benefit of Settler mobility is that Settler Canadians must also surrender attachments to other places of belonging” (87). “The second benefit of being Settler Canadian is the benefit of not knowing, or the ability to claim a soothing ignorance about, the negative impacts of settler colonialism and the moral turpitude rightfully due to its collaborators,” they continue (87-88). “When evidence of colonial harm is presented that cannot simply be ignored, Settler Canadians tend to reframe the discourse, admitting that the harm exists but transferring the cause—and responsibility—to other people, usually to the communities who are being harmed” (88). “Settler people avoid questioning the centrality of settler colonialism in our lives by refusing to even consider settler colonialism as an historical and ongoing project of dispossession and usurpation,” they write. “We also avoid talking about or pursuing in any great details other possible ways of relating to the land or to Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism structures all lives in Canada, not just Indigenous ones” (88-89). And yet, “Settler Canadians must come face to face with the fear of looking beyond the limits of settler colonialism, and consider what life could look like without it” (89). Only then can settler colonialism be dismantled.

In the book’s fifth chapter, “Fear, Complicity, and Productive Discomfort,” Lowman and Barker acknowledge that they have tended to focus on how settler colonialism enhances the lives of Settlers, but “there is both carrot and stick to Settler belonging in Canada”: “Scratch the surface of Settler Canadian identity, and there is a deep well of anxiety and even terror of what it might mean to be cut off from the structures of invasion that define us” (90). I’ve often wondered if that “deep well of anxiety” is the source of some of the racism Settlers in this country express. “Fear results when we have been unsettled, which is to say, when Settler people are discomforted in the process of confronting how much and how profoundly our lives are structured by colonialism,” they continue. “Being unsettled means confronting that colonialism is a real, active part of Settler Canadian life and also requires the imagination of something beyond the settler colonial situation” (90). When “we recognize our participation in settler colonialism,” we may fear the loss of “our simultaneously free and insulated existence”: 

The realisation and the associated need to respond in some way to the evidence of our colonial complicity shakes the Settler colonial identity to the core. It challenges the invisibility and taken-for-granted nature of settler colonialism, and disrupts settler colonial indigenization and normalization. With the recognition of Settler complicity with colonialism comes the revelation—sometimes sudden—of a potential moral or ethical imperative to challenge the structures of colonialism. (90-91)

“The fear that disciplines Settler people into continuing to support and collaborate with settler colonialism has two sources: external and internal,” they contend (91). External fear comes from a belief that if they don’t collaborate with settler colonialism, powerful institutions will take away their privileges (91). “Most Canadians will never experience this kind of fear because they do not seek to contradict the powerful elites or their vision of Canadian society”—they are afraid of reprisals (91). Internal fears involve “the existential fear that comes from the potential loss of belonging on the land, the return to ‘rootlessness,’ the nightmarish recollection of stories of being expelled or having to leave that lurk in the background of frontier and peacemaker narratives” (92). “[T]he recognition of complicity and personal benefit in a settler society based on the active oppression and dispossession of Others necessarily raises the uncertainty of what confronting colonialism might mean,” they contend (92), and that leads to a fear of “what an end to colonial privilege might mean for the Settler” (92). These fears can create a “strong, emotional, and defensive reaction” that “shuts down conversations of how relationships on the land could be different and what that might mean for everybody, not just Settler people” (92). In part, that’s because “Settler people have a deep unspoken fear of losing privileged positions within colonial hierarchies” (93), but it also 

stems from an inability to comprehend Indigenous relationships to the land, and in that incomprehension lies a fear of the unknown. Connections between Indigenous peoples and the land itself are a source of extraordinary power and incredible responsibility—to maintain balance, to respect the agency of all elements of a place, to care for sacred sites—which contradicts the short-sighted and environmentally extractive relationships that Settler Canadians have with the land. (93)

At the same time, they write, 

[e]xposure to our own settler complicity, and the overwhelming uncertainty of imagining life without our settler colonial benefits, provokes an unpleasant emotional reaction which can and frequently does manifest as fear—in this case, fear of being exposed and further illegitimated, or a fear of having to confront a painful disjuncture between our self-image and the evidence of our action. (94)

The point is that 

it is difficult to reconcile the cognitive dissonance between how we see ourselves and the harsh reality—we are discouraged from questioning too deeply the well-springs of our national pride. This emotional disciplining is the “stick” to the “carrot” of Settler benefits. Because Settlers react with fear to being confronted with their colonial complicity, Settler people act to restore the feeling of security and exceptionalism that comes with being Settler Canadian. (95)

All of this explains the obvious, I suppose—the angry response students sometimes have when I use the word “Settler” in class. 

However, Lowman and Barker argue that it’s possible to “focus on that moment of seeing the indefensibility of colonialism, the dishonesty of defining national narratives, the threat of being illegitimate on the land, and the fearful reaction it provokes” (95). That focus would be positive, or at least potentially so, but resolving the crisis sparked by a realization of our settler colonial identity often involves an immediate desire for a restoration of a state of comfort, a signal that the crisis is over (99). Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang write of “moves to innocence”—“Settler intellectualizations of our relationships to settler colonialism that free us from responsibility” (99)—but Lowman and Barker suggest that they are talking about something different, “moves to comfort” (99). “Rather than rationalizations,” they write, 

these are emotional shifts inspiring often irrational or illogical statements designed to dispel fear and unsettling and restore the comfort of not knowing even once ignorance is not possible. As well, many of these moves to comfort do not necessarily involve an attempt to claim innocence; if anything, several of them dwell in guilt and self-punishing confessional as a method of proving—if only to ourselves—that we are doing everything we can and therefore have nothing to feel bad about, really. In this, it is possible to group these moves to comfort . . . into two types: resolution and exception. Delving into the motivations and commonalities of these responses helps to clarify the often-unstated end goals of such actions. (99)

Seeking resolution is rooted in the ideas that settler colonialism can actually be finished and  that Settler Canadian society has all the answers; it ignores the fact “that Indigenous peoples might have their own answers for how to address their struggles—ones which may or may not involve Settler Canadians, or might actively displace them from positions of power—or that Settler Canadian society as such may in fact be the problem” (100). Indeed, the resolution to the critiques of Indigenous peoples “reinforces the absolute validity and universality of Settler spaces” (100). Seeking exception, on the other hand, means Settlers attempt “to escape from their complicity in settler colonial harms by positioning themselves as a special case” who ought to escape blame (100). Some responses are centred on feelings of guilt. “Guilt can be useful if it is part of a journey toward critical acceptance of responsibility, but not as an end goal in itself,” Lowman and Barker argue. “Guilt is not a motivating state, but it can be used as an opportunity to identify and move towards accountability and action” (101). However, Settlers can get stuck on guilt (101). I realize that this is true, but at the same time, I’m not sure how one is supposed to obviate feelings of guilt, which are, I would think, normal when one is acknowledging one’s complicity in a system that perpetuates horrible acts. 

Settlers use a variety of ways other than guilt to seek “to escape complicity in and responsibility for settler colonial processes” (103). One response, identified by Albert Memmi, is removal of oneself “from participation in colonialism, but more accurately from spaces where one might be implicated in settler colonialism,” although such withdrawal “is itself a privilege” (103). “Individual moves to ‘opt out’ of settler colonialism do nothing to address the systemic nature of settler colonization and its continuing operation,” Lowman and Barker write (104). Another is anger, which insists “on having the last word on the subject, achieving finality in the debate by shutting it down—that is, substituting the end for the means. Comfort is restored because the unsetting has stopped—both internally and externally—and therefore the discomforted person has been proven right (in their own mind) (104). Whatever the avoidance mechanism might be, 

[w]hen individuals experiencing fear as a result of encountering their own colonialism move to comfort themselves and alleviate the discomfort of fear . . . even those actions that involve accepting settler colonial responsibility or entanglement can contribute to settler colonial power by supporting its end goals of Settler indigenization and elimination. Ultimately the Settler who seeks comfort remains too embedded in colonial structures and practices to seriously challenge colonial power, and so are complicit with it through tacit endorsement and acceptance of Settler benefits. The feeling of being unsettled—experiencing fear and discomfort when confronted with one’s own colonial complicit, experiencing uncertainty over what to do in response to that fear—is something that runs counter to our expectations as Settler people that will will be insulated from or able to move away from threats to our legitimacy. (104-05)

Moves to comfort are, they continue, 

moves to re-establish a barrier or remove ourselves from proximity to our own colonial identities, to disavow ourselves as settler colonizers, sometimes paradoxically by admitting that we are colonizers, in the expectation of being contradicted by others. Our arrogance, our anger, our guilt and shame can all be used to rebuild the comfortable spaces of settler colonialism that we are used to residing in. But there is another way. (105)

That way involves facing the fact of discomfort: 

Settler people wanting to confront the colonialism pervasive in our lives and societies must accept that this process will be uncomfortable and unsettling. In fact, following discomfort, going further into situations and conversations that are unsettling, can be a useful strategy because it helps to identify points of contention in our lives where settler colonialism exerts pressure on us through our particular, personal vulnerabilities. (105)

“The experience of discomfort,” they continue, “can work as a compass, pointing away from settler colonial security” (106). We need to recognize “that good intentions are not necessarily matched by ‘happy feelings.’ Rather, well-intentioned Settler Canadians must be driven to seek discomfort or risk falling into complacency and self-congratulations for hard work already done, missing the vast struggle that remains before us” (106). It’s not easy to learn to stop expecting comfort and to face our fear “as a matter of finding the path we need to walk,” they acknowledge:

We must start by realizing that the instinct to pull away, or to preserve comfort, has been instilled in us, imposed on us through our upbringing, through the culture that we have been raised in, by the dreams we have inherited from our Settler Canadian narratives that tell us if we work hard we can expect a comfortable, privileged life. Learning to face fear of uncertainty, learning to dwell in discomfort from not being in control, is an ongoing project that requires the support and help of others, a great deal of critical reflection and the time and energy. (106-07)

Being uncertain and uncomfortable is part of grappling with a difficult problem: “Any time an answer to a complex problem seems too easy, or too obvious, it probably is. . . . there are no simple, comfortable, easy ways to confront settler colonialism. Any strategies making those promises are suspect” (107).

All of this is to say that “[c]olonialism cannot be easily expunged from our lives” (107). Even productive discomfort isn’t the answer: 

Simply getting used to feeling unsettled is not the same as engaging in active struggle against colonialism. There is no magic that removes us as Settler Canadians from our settler colonial relationships to the land and to each other; there is only the potential for transformative change through hard work. The first step in challenging settler colonialism and the colonizer that is part of our identities as Settler Canadians is the acceptance that this is not going to be comfortable, nor will it be easy. But what comes after that first step is . . . much bigger, broader and frankly, more exciting and empowering. (107)

What comes next is the topic of their sixth and last chapter, “Decolonization and Dangerous Freedom.” They begin with this acknowledgement: “To choose to identify as Settler Canadian today is as good as declaring, ‘I am aware that I am illegitimate on the land, and I know that I am complicit with and benefit from settler colonialism.’ This admission can result from a feeling of unsettlement, and provoke the same in others” (109). However, they continue,

Choosing to identify as a Settler and choosing how one will act on that identity are two different concerns. As Settler Canadians, we are part of a colonizing collective, and there is no simple place we can go, or declaration we can make, that will sever us from our unearned benefits and privileges, insulate us from our fears of change, or abstract us from destructive practices on the land. No matter how hard it may be to envision, it is possible to forge different relationships to the land that are not rooted in the displacement and genocide of Indigenous nations, nor in fooling ourselves with the comfortable oblivion of indigenization and transcendence. (109)

Because settler colonization is collective, they continue,

undoing settler colonialism will also necessarily be a collective effort. If we, as Settler-identifying people in the present, wish to be other than settler colonizers, we must undertake an archaeology of the future: an excavation of the possible. We have to challenge ourselves to imagine relationships differently and then figure out how to try and embody them. We cannot change who we are as Settler people alone, so we must work to create a broad base, to build communities—with our friends, our families, our colleagues—to undertake these efforts together. And this experimentation will run counter to everything that settler colonial Canadian society is premised on, which means it will be opposed. If we want to be different, we have to struggle to change. (109-10)

That struggle to change will mean great discomfort (110). Knowing about settler colonialism is important, but it is only a step, not a destination: self-education and self-reflection 

can become a distraction from struggle in that it allows people to feel that they are doing something revolutionary—because in identifying themselves with the problem, and learning about the extent of the challenge, their world shifts—while running the risk of substituting awareness for engagement and action. We need to create a critical mass of people not only willing to admit their complicity with settler colonialism but also willing to commit to doing something about it. 

That “something” is decolonization. (110)

Settler decolonization is the ultimate goal. It is more than anti-colonialism; it is “an ethic and guiding principle for collective struggle” that “is both the ending of colonialism and the act of becoming something other than colonial” (110-11). “[W]e use decolonization here to describe an intensely transformative process with the goal of regenerating Indigenous nationhood and place-relationships while dismantling structures of settler colonialism that oppose or seek to eliminate Indigenous peoples from the land,” Lowman and Barker write (111). The scope of the project of Indigenous decolonization is 

no less than a call to replace the totalizing, sovereign authority of the Canadian state with multiple, negotiated, and contingent Indigenous governance structures. It is also a call to shatter the hegemony of capitalism and established ideas of race and heritage that dictate how we understand belonging on the land. This is a revolutionary concept in the truest sense. (112)

Decolonization is “a call to fundamentally change how we generate political power and conceive of land” (112). It is ideally “embodied in the creation of social movements and communities that sustain themselves on the land, revitalize traditional trade and treaty networks, promote Indigenous cultural expression, and challenge narrow identity binaries, all of which can combine to make the structures of settler colonialism irrelevant and impotent” (112). “Decolonization is open ended and multiple, creating more and more different possibilities as it is pursued,” they continue (112). It is 

a transformative process, one that cannot be fully revealed or understood until it is practiced, and even then, it will comprise a shifting and moving set of goals, always responding to the needs of Indigenous communities and the ruthless re-applications of colonial power and domination. Decolonization with respect to Indigenous nations means the replacement of colonial authority as the lodestone of Settler society with responsibilities to Indigenous peoples as articulated through treaties, confederacies, alliances, and other political arrangements. In Canada, that means and end to settler colonial relationships to land, the dismantling of the spaces, systems and stories of invasion that root Settler people to the nation and state, and the simultaneous restoration of Indigenous ways of knowing and being on the land. (112)

Decolonization “involves actual social upheaval, restitution, and political and economic struggle” (112). 

“The decolonization struggle for Indigenous peoples takes the form of resurgence,” of “regeneration of Indigenous nationhood” (112), and that resurgence “demands and requires ‘a massive transformation’ based on revitalized Indigenous political systems based in land-relationships” (113). “Resurgence articulated like this is a necessary part of decolonization—it is, in fact, the heart of it—but it is clearly not for Settler people,” Lowman and Barker write. “Rather, Settler people need to find our own ways of building decolonizing practices, engaging in transformative struggle, and supporting the resurgence of Indigenous nationhood without claiming or pretending to possess a connection to the spiritual and material practices of Indigenous identity” (113). This will mean “a deep and transformative struggle” (114). Moreover, because decolonization “is a practice rather than a goal to be achieved,” it is a process that “will require different efforts and produce different outcomes for everyone” (114). Preparation and training is the first step: “Settler people need to start by knowing whose land they are on, knowing the histories of the treaties and agreements that predate the histories of colonialism and settlement, and knowing the land itself, understanding the features of places that make them unique” (114). “But,” they continue, 

in addition to histories, Settler decolonization is about moving forward. We need to ask: What is my hope for the future? What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of life do I want to live? How will my life (and my family’s lives) be made better through a difficult struggle? What am I willing to do to get there? These are big questions, but it is in asking the unsettling questions and the hope that comes with them that we find the possibilities for positive and transformative change. (114)

“This change must start with Settler people taking responsibility”—responsibility for their own learning, rather than asking Indigenous communities to take time out of the struggle for survival to teach them (114-15). Settle people “must take responsibility for cleaning up our own mess if we wish to put an end to our moral and ethical debt. In reality, that can be more complicated than it might seem. Figuring out how to struggle is a barrier to actually taking effective decolonizing action” (115). 

In addition, Settlers “have to overcome the ally fetish, the belief that we can declare ourselves exempt from settler colonialism through some relationships or personal actions in isolation from the rest of our involvement in settler colonialism”—and the way to do that is by “seeking through actions, words, and relationships to be a decolonizing Settler” (116). The question of what kind of action and support is one they don’t answer, because they cannot:

Settler people who would ally with Indigenous and decolonizing efforts answer it again and again as our abilities and capabilities change. We have to embrace an ethic of mutual aid that is open-ended and founded on the understanding that we will make mistakes and need to ask for guidance, but that the main thrust of how we conduct ourselves has to be based on our deep engagement with respectful relationships. It is important to support Indigenous resurgence and to work with Indigenous communities. For Settler Canadians, this is new ground, and we are likely to fail as often as we succeed. (116)

Such failures are often the result of Settler arrogance, the product of a failure “to continue the processes of self-critique and collective struggle” (116). “Settler colonialism is not monolithic,” Lowman and Barker argue:

[r]ather, it is the result of a multitude of acts, from exceptional power imposed by elites, to banal and everyday lived dynamics of average Settler peoples. If we can see settler colonial structures as dynamic and contested, we can also begin to see that Settler people can decolonize, participating in struggles against the domination and elimination of Indigenous nations. These same struggles are also necessary for Settler people to find their own liberation from the settler colonial structures that limit and control our lives. However, it should be clear that Settler decolonization is only meaningful if it is collective. (116-17)

The place where individual Settlers start may be “questioning and interrogating their own lives,” but in order to act they will have to “seek ways to link their own specific circumstances, abilities, and realities to larger movements and social mobilizations” (117).

“The key guiding principle for Settler Canadians is that decolonization is and must be ‘Always in Relationship.’” Lowman and Barker write. “Remember that Settler and Indigenous identities relate in complex and multiple ways, and we can only fully make sense of them in relationship to each other, to settler colonialism, and to the land” (117). “Decolonization has to be about changing relationships and making them healthy, supportive, and safe, not just in spite of colonial power, but actively against it,” they continue, an act that is inherently prefigurative, because “the pursuit of an end goal and the actual end goal are the same. That is to say, pursuing decolonizing relationship-building can be a form of ‘direct action’ against settler colonialism that prefigures whatever broad social and societal changes are being more widely envisioned” (117). Settlers engaged in decolonization will need to listen deeply, especially when people are telling us what we’ve done is wrong or that our assumptions are wrong or that what we value is wrong (117). “Actively pursuing different kinds of relationships starts with Settlers learning to think relationally,” they contend. “Thinking relationally may not come naturally, but an important first step is to begin trying to see the world as networked together, and to understand how various actions and decisions will impact on the world around us” (117-18). And at the centre of decolonization, if it is to support Indigenous resurgence, we need to place “the knowledge and needs of Indigenous nations” (118). “We must look at the web of relationships and try first to learn about what matters to Indigenous nations to whom we are obliged without waiting to be taught”; we must try “to figure out where to contribute our time, effort, or resources where they will be welcomed in support of Indigenous efforts”; we must 

organize in our own community, be it among friends, across the dinner table, with our church groups, work colleagues, or neighbours, to support Indigenous struggles more proactively and prefiguratively. This means looking for ways to be responsible, trying to avoid mistakes knowing it is likely impossible, framing our struggles towards better living on the land through obligations under treaty, or expectations of us as [a] person who intends to live on this land in a respectful way. It means looking for lessons, thinking deeply, and then trying in our own personal lives. (118)

All of this sounds more than difficult; to me, it sounds impossible. When I read this chapter, in fact, I felt crushed by the demands Lowman and Barker make on their readers (assuming their readers are interested in decolonization). Besides, the political winds are blowing in a very different direction. How can any of this be carried out?

Lowman and Barker suggest that one way is to work with others. Because these struggles are necessarily collective, they will require “building networks of people we can mutually rely on”—groups of people who can learn together, who can help us reflect on what we have done and see our successes and failures (118). “Then we need to reconstitute strategies, reconstruct relationships to people and places, and try—as Settler people—to be responsible for ourselves” (118). “Groups, self-consciously in struggle together, can be vital for providing sounding boards and caring critical perspectives on our very personal work,” they continue. “Further, we have to remember that the commitment that we make to be in decolonizing struggle brings with it no foreknowledge of resolution, and most certainly does not mean we always get to win. We may lose or make mistakes . . .  and many times we lose because we did not do the right thing” (118-19). Those failures will hurt, but as long as we continue trying, they are lessons rather than dead ends (119). “Working among Settler people and in Settler communities is important for Settler Canadian decolonization, but relationships with Indigenous communities is also needed,” they state. “Our Settler responsibilities lie with working for change in Settler society, but these efforts have to be constantly informed by the work of Indigenous communities and people” (119). However, we need to recognize that as Settlers we cannot automatically take positions of leadership and control: “It is how we respond to Indigenous agendas that will determin[e] our effectiveness in supporting decolonization and resurgence, which is not always a clear task” (119). The Guswenta Treaty, or Two-Row Wampum, is a model: the canoe and the ship are travelling side by side, neither controlling the other, but they are on the same river: need to develop relationships premised on boundaries and respect and trust (119). 

Respect, Lowman and Barker note, means accepting when offers of help have been refused (120):

we never get to own the struggles of someone else. We do not get to dictate where or how Indigenous peoples pursue resurgence. Our role is to mitigate the harm of ongoing colonialism, support Indigenous efforts, and dismantle colonial structures of invasion. The ability to displace colonialism from our lives as Settler people only becomes possible because of the fact that Indigenous peoples, struggles, literatures, and ways of thinking become centred in our ways of thinking and doing. (120)

Decolonization is a story, but not one Settler Canadians are used to telling: “[i]t is a story that is multiple, that is experimental, that has many failures but also inspirational successes, and the weight of clear-eyed ethical foundations” (120). It is a story that “inspires us the challenge the very idea of what the settler colonial story is, and as we tell these stories, we have to interrogate them,” asking questions about our role in colonization (here and elsewhere), how colonialism structures our lives, whether we can live the lives we want “without contributing to the oppression, displacement, and genocide of Indigenous peoples,” what our responsibilities are, whose land we live on and what their “traditional laws and practices” are (120). “Decolonization is attempting to find an answer that addresses all of these questions simultaneously, and the only way to find that answer is to try and live it. . . .  The way we struggle will inevitably shape who we are and who we can become” (120).

“We approach all of these difficult and serious questions with critical hope,” Lowman and Barker write. “Hope must be critical. It must be rooted in the recognition of possibility despite obstacles, not the belief that a path free of obstacles exists. Taking up the Settler identity and working to create decolonization in our own lives is no simple thing. Beyond the emotional barriers of fear and discomfort, we do not yet have a clear map, a plan, or a blueprint” (120). Decolonization means rejecting the notion of stories with triumphant, happy endings, along with “stories of nationalism and progress, peacemaker myths and terra nullius, and the notion that Canada, as it is, is all there is. The true struggle, though, is figuring out what kind of story we intend to live in its place” (120). “Stories make us who we are,” they suggest. “That is why it is so important to think about and talk about being Settler Canadians. We have to be aware of more than just what the stories are that we currently tell about ourselves, and how they shape our lives. We also need to think about how we are changing stories for the future, trying to pursue different ways of living” (120-21). 

Decolonization demands two things, they write: 

First, that we commit to no single method for confronting colonialism—this makes sense if we recognize that colonialism overlaps with many hierarchies of power, and so decolonization must be pursued on intersectional lines. Second, that decolonization is a transformative process, with no clear or homogenizing end goals, and in which it is the responsibility of individuals and communities of all kinds to figure out how they fit. This means that we have to accept that when Settler people pursue the transformative process of decolonization, it may mean our eventual elimination as Settler people. (121)

In other words, Settlers must conceptualize their own end: that is “the challenge that must lie at the core of Settler Canadian engagements with decolonization” (121). “Settler Canadians, aware of complicity with and benefit from settler colonialism, aware of illegitimate residency on the land, and aware of roles in the ongoing violent displacement and attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples, must accept that among the possible end-points of decolonization is one in which everything we know changes” (121). We need to acknowledge our fears of the unknown and understand them (121), but we also need to understand that decolonization offers 

a different story that does not follow the expected script of Canadian national exceptionalism, banal and friendly multiculturalism, and heroics at hockey. And as much as the story of decolonization must be about Indigenous nationhood, it is not only for Indigenous peoples. The story of decolonization is one that has room for many voices, one where many people can find ways to belong on the land without dominating, destroying, and displacing Indigenous societies. It is a story in which Settler people can become something more than merely colonizers, not by ignoring their status on the land, but by accepting, owning, and reshaping it. It is a story that may change the teller, it is a story that may change in the telling. It is not one story, but many. (121)

Lowman and Barker imagine a future 

in which Indigenous nationhood is resurgent and regenerated, and “Indigenous” as a collective identity falls by the wayside. All that remains are the many nations, the new and old confederacies and treaty territories. At that point, maybe “Settler” loses any meaning too. In this future, maybe there are just the individual terms by which each Indigenous nation or community refers to “people who come to stay.” (121-22)

That, I think, is what they mean by suggesting that Settlers need to accept that decolonization might mean the end of “Settler” as an identity.

“It is time to step into the ‘space of dangerous freedom,’” they write, using a term they learned about from Haudenosaunee geography. Traditionally, villages were built with a surrounding palisade wall, and a clearing between that wall and the forest. “No one could approach the village and cross the clearing without being seen,” they write. “Taiaiake Alfred has referred to this space as a metaphor for how we approach decolonization struggles, drawing parallels between committing to these struggles and stepping into ‘the clearing,’ the space between the village and the woods, between home, family, safety, and the dangerous space of freedom” (122). That space is free because it contains choices: approach the village, return to the forest, stay where we are and wait (122). All of those choices have consequences, and the unseen villagers have the power: 

This is a different situation than most Settler people are accustomed to, being the one in the open, observed and vulnerable. We can choose to stay in this uncomfortable, unsettled space—a space with no guarantees, where we will have to constantly learn and adapt—or we can go back to the woods. But that will be our choice, not one made for use by colonial elites and state authorities. (122)

The “space of dangerous freedom is more than a metaphor: 

We reflect on this practice in the decision to actively identify as a Settler person. When we write or speak in public, when we meet new people in Canada and abroad and they ask where we are from or how we identify, we centralize our relationships with the land, our entanglements with colonialism. Our being Settler Canadian. This is a small but significant effort that permeates our lives. Owning Settler Canadian as our real identity on these lands is our first step into the clearing. When we say Settler, it is a reminder to us to rethink our own positionality, to consider what the word means and what it implies for our relationships to the land. (122)

In fact, it is a declaration that “is a reminder for us, a m[e]mento that we carry. We say Settler in part because it helps prevent our thoughts from turning towards settler colonial normalization. It reminds us that we can be co-opted into settler colonialism at any point and that we remain constantly complicit. In the clearing, we are also visible to each other and ourselves” (123). Being in that clearing necessarily leads to engagement and action, to conversations and experiments about how we organize ourselves (123). “We hope to invite others into these conversations by making ourselves visible by saying Settler, Settler Canadian, and Settler people,” they write. “We see the impacts that speaking this word can bring—sometimes frightening, sometimes difficult, and sometimes very positive—and we believe it is worth the risk of engaging on those terms” (123). Their hope is that “claiming our Settler identities can be a part of working to address the many shortcomings of our people and re-establishing the trust of Indigenous nations and communities”—that identifying as Settler Canadian “can signal to others that we are ready and committed to honestly addressing settler colonialism in Canada. It is an indication that we are refusing one of the pillars of settler colonialism—the disavowal that props up invisibility and drives towards erasure and indigenization—and embracing honest self-reflection” (123).

“We say Settler because it’s a place from which we can determine how we live on these lands,” Lowman and Barker conclude:

We say Settler to signal that we’re ready to do the work. We say Settler because we believe ethical and exciting decolonial futures are possible. We say Settler because we have seen the identification shake how people feel about themselves and their belonging, and how it has been the start of decolonizing awareness and action. 

We say Settler because it is who we are. We say Settler because it is not everything we could be. (123)

I agree that Settler is who we are, and I would hope (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that it is not everything we could be. And while I think I’ve already been putting into practice some of the decolonization strategies Lowman and Barker enumerate, I do feel discouraged by the monumentality of the task—and by the demand that collective action is the only way forward. That demand leaves me wondering whether there’s a place for introverts (of course I’m introverted: how else could I sit at home and read and write these summaries all day?) in the decolonization movement. I’m not sure where I might fit in or what I might be able to contribute, and I’m also not sure that my larger project does much, if anything, towards decolonization as Lowman and Barker define it. It’s not a bad thing to have these questions, of course, and I’m going to keep thinking about them as I continue reading.

I am certain of one thing, though. I’ve been asked to participate in a panel highlighting Indigenous research in my faculty, even though I’m not Indigenous. I’m interested in treaties, and walking, as an embodied practice, is an Indigenous methodology, I’ve been told—although there are other theoretical frameworks I’d be more comfortable using, such as phenomenology—and so I belong there. I’ve never been comfortable with that idea, and this book has given me a way to formulate my discomfort: my research is Settler research, not Indigenous, and so participating in that panel would be taking space that isn’t mine. That’s one thing that has come out of reading this book. Another is the need to adjust my reading list. I’m going to have to take a close look at Lowman’s and Barker’s list of references, with a view to adding to (or changing) my reading list. That’s always an effect of reading scholarly work: it gives you so much more to read. Sometimes it feels that scholarship, like decolonization, is an open-ended process with no determinate ending. 

Works Cited

Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Daschuk, James. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life, University of Regina Press, 2013.

Lowman, Emma Battell, and Adam J. Barker. Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada, Fernwood, 2015.

Regan, Paulette. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada, University of British Columbia Press, 2011.