Across Canadian universities, there is a growing recognition of specific political, economic, and social indicators that are referred to as settler colonial. This edited collection contributes to this relatively new field of scholarship, building out the parameters of Canada’s settler colonial present and moving beyond narrow interpretation of the concept of settler colonialism.

Indeed, settler colonialism is a pivotal concept used to understand Canadian governance and society. It describes both the ongoing systemic colonial relationship of the state with Indigenous peoples and the overall organization of state and society to maintain control over Indigenous lands and resources. It is pivotal in that it its use turns us away from a view of the Canadian state as an ex-colony of England, Britain, then the United Kingdom, which subsequently acquired and built its sovereignty, toward a view of the Canadian state as continuously colonial, from its first institutionalization in New France to its contemporary turn toward various forms of reconciliation. Settler colonialism in Canada finds its roots in legal fictions such as terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) outlined to underpin the underlying logic behind the Indian Residential School system as one instrument of colonialism.^[1] The TRC’s report describes the extension of this colonial logic throughout Canadian state and society.

This edited collection will introduce readers to the intricate web of settler colonialism in Canada. Each chapter is written by a post-secondary student in Canada. These students gathered at the virtual graduate student symposium Settler Colonialism in Canada: Reliving the Past, Opening New Paths hosted by the University of Regina in October 2022. Here the students presented drafts of the chapters included in this book. These chapters intersect with varied analyses of settler colonial Canada, relating to Indigenous identity, education, missionaries, immigration, incarceration and policing, restorative justice, white supremacy, monarchical representation, and disability. The complexities of these intersections will surely inspire further exploration and research.

Canada, the background of a settler colonial state

Canada is a long-established settler colonial nation state^[2], yet very few Canadians understand what this means historically or for present-day reconciliatory and decolonial efforts. Settler colonialism is an approach to colonial expansion and control founded on its historical imperial colonial premises of commercial penetration, claim to territory through settlement, and resource extractivism, and it is closely tied to capitalism and religious expansion. In addition, it has several distinguishing characteristics. For example, Wolff argues that the logic of elimination underpins settler states: this is a structural colonial approach (so, not an event) that eliminates or clears lands of Indigenous title by eliminating Indigenous peoples as self-governing peoples through legally supported theft, assimilation of individual members, and genocide^[3] These logics of elimination are intended to counter Indigenous claims to lands to be subsequently^[4] In addition to elimination, settler colonialism differs from imperial colonial projects in that Indigenous populations are ^[5] Thus, we could characterize settler colonial Canada as a nation state structured to exploit, marginalize, and assimilate^[6] and to exterminate Indigenous-specific populations, resource use, and inherent rights.^[7]

The processes of decolonization are summarily different for settler societies than imperial ones; however, they can be found to share some experiences with imperial-based decolonial and post-colonial strategies that are found to leave much of the imperialism intact.^[8] Decolonization is the dismantling of any (imperial or settler) colonial inequities and the resurgence of Indigenous-centred political, legal, and social structures. Increasingly, critiques of Canada’s decolonial and reconciliatory frameworks demonstrate inadequacies in these attempts.^[9] Much of the lack of success in decolonization comes from a settler colonialism that is insidious, difficult to detect and dismantle, and relatively under-studied in Canada. Additionally, reconciliation and decolonization jeopardize the very survival of the settler colonial enterprise, which is premised on the elimination of Indigenous peoples (or, at a minimum, Indigenous difference).

Other factors make the decolonization of settler states unique in comparison to that of imperial colonized societies. The liberal politics of recognition and reconciliation are common political barriers in Canada to decolonization.^[10] This is in part due to settler colonial narratives—or discourses that covertly promote the power relations of settler colonial domination—that ensure that the dynamics of the settler state and its society are protected at the expense of Indigenous peoples’ existence, difference, and self-determination.^[11] In settler society, Indigenous liberation strategies are often centred on Indigenous resurgence (of traditional knowledge and ways of being and doing) to loosen the inequalities and domination that follow from the colonial grip that settler colonialism enforces upon Indigenous peoples.^[12] While integral to the success of reconciliation and decolonization, such strategies in settler colonial  decolonization of oppressive forces that non-Indigenous racialized minority groups experience.^[13] The omission of such components to oppression and liberation renders reconciliatory and decolonial efforts ineffective.

Settler Colonialism in Canada: Reliving the Past, Opening New Paths focuses on responses from Indigenous peoples, racialized, otherwise minoritized, and/or settler post-secondary students across Canada to understand the insidious nature of oppression unique to settler colonialism. Canada has been created through the successive and often overlapping appropriation of lands by French, English, British, and Canadian governments and companies as well as Christian churches and their missionary orders, through settlement, displacement, and genocide. Indigenous peoples’ lands were never ceded regardless of some treaties, especially modern ones, that include language that points to some form of cession of rights. The signing of treaties under the duress caused by hunger, settler encroachment, and resulting poverty has not changed the fact that Indigenous rights are inalienable. The treaties that were signed, which make up the constitutional order of the country, and would give any non-Indigenous person the right to coexist on the land with the Indigenous peoples who have occupied it since time immemorial, have not been respected.

The upcoming chapters take up this concept of settler colonialism and extend it to various aspects of Canadian and Indigenous history and society, and especially on education, economy, justice, and identity. While some interpretations of settler colonialism limit the reach of the concept to legal realities or to land and resource appropriations, each of these essays demonstrates that each person who lives in Canada is affected by settler colonialism in various ways. Taken as a whole, they do not offer a complete overview of the aspects of human life colonialism shapes, nor of the scholarship. Indigenous perspectives are perhaps under-represented in the composition of this book, but it is to be seen as building on existing scholarship by Indigenous scholars (including one of the co-editors), much of which is present in the other aspects of the Settler Colonialism in Canada project.

Project Overview and Objectives

This edited collection results from the graduate student symposium Reliving the Past, Opening New Paths at the University of Regina, held virtually in October 2022. The symposium is part of a larger project called Settler Colonialism in Canada: Perspectives, Comparisons, Cases, which is run by Drs. Emily Grafton (University of Regina), David MacDonald (University of Guelph), and Jérôme Melançon (University of Regina), with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and additional partners.

The primary objective of Settler Colonialism in Canada: Perspectives, Comparisons, Cases as a broader project is to urgently address a significant knowledge gap in research and in Canadian post-secondary curricula. Currently, there is no comprehensive teaching resource on settler colonialism in Canada, and the field’s canon is heavily influenced by Australian scholarship.^[14] Settler Colonialism in Canada: Perspectives, Comparisons, Cases seeks to understand what contemporary settler colonialism looks like in Canada and what reconciliatory and decolonial strategies exist to resist and counter its effects. To facilitate responses, we hosted a series of outreach activities including virtual public talks, virtual workshops, and conferences for graduate students, scholars, and the public.

The overall goals of these outreach activities were to:

1. share existing knowledge in a growing field that is beginning to take a more concrete shape in Canada;
2. gather graduate students, Indigenous knowledge keepers, community leaders, and scholars to develop their ideas and analyses through an exchange of ideas and methods;
3. include graduate students and selected members of the public (including Indigenous knowledge keepers and community leaders) in these exchanges in order to ensure the relevance of the scholarship and effective knowledge mobilization; and
4. foster new and support existing networks that will allow participants to learn from one another and co-create innovative scholarship on the subject matter.

Two objectives were pursued to actualize the Reliving the Past, Opening New Paths component of this project. First, we aimed to make the project’s outcomes freely accessible in this open-access publishing format. We hope this resource is taken up by community members, students, and scholars alike. Second, we sought to offer new reflections by emerging scholars on settler colonialism in order to push the scholarship in new directions.

There were many steps undertaken to arrive at this book. First, we advertised the Reliving the Past, Opening New Paths symposium in summer 2022, and interested graduate students submitted abstracts as their application. We then followed seven review steps:

1. Selection of proposals;
2. For some: review of the proposal and reorientation to fit the project;
3. Paper development with mentorship and first comments from a faculty participant to the Settler Colonialism in Canada project outside of the editorial team;
4. Symposium paper presentation, mutual feedback, and discussion;
5. Further review of finished paper based on comments from all four co-editors;
6. Editing and copyediting;
7. Payment for the students’ work.

Those graduate students selected to present papers at the symposium were matched with a senior scholar (chosen through the larger project Settler Colonialism in Canada: Perspectives, Comparisons, Cases) well in advance of the symposium presentations. This mentorship opportunity allowed the authors, as emerging scholars, to rely on the experiences of the senior academics. In this manner, our attempt to clarify and better establish the field of settler colonial studies in Canada is based on a mentorship model of experience and insights to guide innovation and creativity. At the virtual symposium, the students presented drafts of their papers and received feedback from a closed audience made up of the other graduate students and senior mentoring scholars. This form of mentorship is also a form of peer review that aims to build and develop the text, rather than evaluate it.

Each final paper was submitted to the editorial team and went through a rigorous peer editing process. The process began with the lead editors, Drs Grafton and Melançon, who rotated the responsibility of first and second reading. The papers were then given to two graduate student co-editors, Alyssa Parker and Ibukun-Oluwa Fasunhan, for third and fourth readings, also on a rotating basis. In this way, the graduate student editors were mentored in the standards of academic publishing, in addition to bringing their own critical eye as readers. The papers were returned to the authors for revisions and, upon completion, copy editing was undertaken by the editorial team. At this time, each author received a $500 bursary in recognition of their contributions to the project and to support their thriving academic journeys. After all, professors on faculty can afford to publish without receiving royalties, given that they are paid for this work. Graduate students, like contract teachers, do so without pay.

Through this process, the chapters within this volume were peer reviewed. Rather than leave the selection of readers to chance and to the often arbitrary nature of editorial choice of readers, mentor readers were selected and invited based on their commitment to a wider projects, but also, as often as possible, on similarities in their situations within society (especially around gender and race) to offer a broader form of mentorship. The co-editors self-selected themselves as evaluatorsbased on their own expertise in the field. There was a determination not to publish a paper that was not of the quality we would expect from a scholarly journal and a commitment to work together to bring the papers up to that standard. In some cases, the papers arrived in that form and would likely have been published in an academic journal; in others, they benefitted from mentorship and ongoing work through a relationship that was meant to be cordial and friendly. This peer review process, thus, did not rest on the illusion of detachment and objectivity that comes with double-anonymized reviews (the term “double-blind” being ableist and, given that most often papers are read, metaphorically inept).^[15] Instead, it relied on bringing people into a relationship through mutual agreement,obligation, and care. It also implied an understanding that graduate students are increasingly expected and even required to publish if they hope to continue their academic journey, but rarely given the time or the financial support to do so as they are working other jobs, often facing the first decade of adulthood, learning how to do academic work, and attempting to complete their degrees. As a result, the publication of this book was pushed back to the fall of 2024 rather than early 2023. This offered  each participant a chance to complete their work, with  some – to our delight and excitement – completing their degrees and finding employment. We also sought short chapters, aiming for approximately 5,000 words, while leaving contributors free to write more if their arguments demanded it.

This final edited collection captures a range of responses to the symposium’s core research questions: (i) what does contemporary settler colonialism look like in Canada, and what reconciliatory and decolonial strategies exist to resist and counter its effects? And (ii) what historical processes, what policies have led to the current moment, and how are these processes and policies present today under new guises?

The Symposium

We hosted this event at the University of Regina, although the presenters, who attended virtually, were from across the country. The University of Regina is located in southern Saskatchewan in Treaty 4 territory. These are the territories of the nêhiyawak, Anishinapek, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda nations, and the homeland of the Métis / Michif nation.

In advance of the symposium, the organisers, Drs. Emily Grafton and Jérôme Melançon, led four expert talks on the meaning of the various relationships to the territory. These form a living land acknowledgement entitled Being Together: A Living Land Acknowledgement for oskana kâ-asastêki/Regina, which can be accessed through the University of Regina’s Open Education and Publishing Program. All participants were asked to view these talks ahead of the symposium.

To compartmentalise varied topics under discussions by the graduate students involved, the papers were divided into four sessions: ‘Origins and Geneses’, ‘Disappearances, Erasures, Confinements’, ‘Contemporary Figures’, ‘To Begin Undoing Colonialism’. The idea of origins and geneses of settler colonialism is inspired by political phenomenology and particularly from the work of Tran Duc Thao. While a phenomenon’s or a situation’s origins are tied to the weight of history, their genesis, or repeated geneses, are tied to human intentionality and the manner in which they and human interactions and relationships mutually affect each other. Bringing the two ideas together helps us see settler colonialism as historical and contemporary, continuous and changing, maintained through wide-scale structures and specific human activities, tied to collective tendencies and individual desires and needs. Knowledge and awareness of participating in colonial structures and practices is not necessary for us to do so, since they already shape our pasts, personalities, and subjectivities.

Focusing solely on origins might be misleading and make us miss the meaning of contemporary events by leaving aside the many structures and practices that have carried settler colonialism over time. Following the conception of settler colonialism presented above, we turn to confinement (or displacement, the process of forcibly removing Indigenous peoples from their lands), disappearance (the assimilative loss of Indigenous languages and cultures), and erasure (the deliberate removal of Indigenous presence, now and in the past). We do so in order to grasp many of the attitudes and mechanisms that allow for the elimination of Indigenous peoples from the territory claimed by Canada. This turn also means that we move away from the intentionality and practices of settlers, which are central to settler colonialism, toward their effects on Indigenous peoples, which are equally as central. Since settler colonialism consists in relationships, be they of domination, oppression, marginalization, and elimination, relationships must also be at the centre of its study. Similarly, in looking at contemporary figures of colonialism, contributors attempt to make sense of colonialism’s configurations, constructions, representations, and effects . In other words, the figures of colonialism are its many appearances: colonialism forms a whole but is never experienced as a whole. Instead, experience is only ever from particular and changing positions within the colonial order and always in connection to specific people and groups who symbolize the order or some of its positions.

Finally, if always too briefly, contributors turn to how we can begin to undo, undermine, dismantle, destroy, and replace colonialism. This idea of beginning is necessary for decolonial work to remain humble, to reject easy claims to victory (how many classrooms have truly been decolonized?), and to live through the defeats that will be part of this struggle. Given the long history of settler colonialism in the northern part of the continent, we cannot expect to change ways to coexist with each other and with nonhuman lives within one lifetime. While the papers and now chapters that fit within each of these sections focus on this part of the reflection on settler colonialism, each engages with all of them in some way, reproducing the overall.

Each session was facilitated by Emily Grafton, Jérôme Melançon, David MacDonald, Ibukun-Oluwa Fasunhan, and Alyssa Parker. These facilitators, along with audience members, asked follow-up questions. These question-and-answer sessions challenged the stances and preconceived notions in the drafted papers and opened new lines of curiosity to generate knowledge development. Thirteen graduate students presented draft papers, and ten of these papers were completed for this volume. Grafton and Melançon did, over the course of the project, invite some additional students to round out the volume and take up the space opened by these original symposium participants who were ultimately unable to submit.

We would like to mention those incredible contributions from paper presentations that were not submitted as a chapter to this volume: Keara Lighting’s “Unearthing Indigenous Ecologies in Environmental Management: A Case Study of Elk Island National Park,” Leonard Halladay’s “Everyday Queer Politics as Decolonial Praxis,” and Christian Labrecque’s “Ni Québec, ni Canada: An Anti Colonial Project.”

Overview of the Sections and Chapters

The chapters in this volume are organised according to symposium’s four theme d sections: ‘Origins and Geneses’, ‘Disappearances, Erasures, Confinements’, ‘Contemporary Figures’, and ‘To Begin Undoing Colonialism’.

To open this collection and ground “Origins and Geneses”, Janice Feng’s chapter on “Cultivating Disposition: The Education of Nature and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Nouvelle-France” examines the various interventions and educational designs employed by the early missionaries to subjugate the Indigenous people who were seen as being ‘savage’, ‘native’, in the 17th century Nouvelle-France. Drawing examples from the early missionary reports from the Jesuits and Ursuline, Feng argues that the aim of the Jesuits were to Christianize, cultivate and tame the fierce nature of indigenous people, while the Ursulines, according to Marie Guyart’s letters, did not see a need for forcefully constraining the girls, as their docile and malleable nature was a feature necessary for their subjugation and immersion in the French culture. These acts, Feng argues, were assimilationist in nature, even before the rise of residential schools.

Turning to the April 1768 correspondence sent by Quebec Gazette proprietors William Brown and Thomas Gilmore to their former employer William Dunlap to request that he purchase and send an enslaved person to them, so that they may be forced to work in their printing office, Emily Davidson focuses on the connections between settler colonialism and slavery. Her chapter, “Case Study on William Brown and Thomas Gilmore’s letter to William Dunlap, 1768: Connecting Territory Network Methodology to the History of Slavery in Canada,” is a close reading of a letter that provides a unique window into the mentality and modality of mid-eighteenth-century enslavers in the British Province of Quebec. She deploys Territory Network Methodology, whose basic premise is to reveal the complex network of land and place connected to a specific object. By “reading against the grain,” Davidson fills some of the spaces in history that have been silenced by accounts of white people. She argues that the enslavers’ “common sense” was formed through their interactions in multiple transatlantic places and that the enslaver worldview brings together the ownership of both people and land, relying on and recreating a different attitude toward Black people, always seen as individual, than toward Indigenous peoples.

Sherjan Maybanting extends this discourse on subjugation in his chapter “Canada’s Economic-Based Immigration as Settler Colonialism.” He explains the difference between colonialism and settler colonialism by focussing on Canada’s economic migration program, which claims to be non-discriminatory and how it has facilitated the continuation of Canada’s settler colonial agenda. He posits that while migration policies are the central phenomenon, rather than migration or migrants themselves, migrants have been used as pawns by settler colonial Canada to further Indigenous people’s subjugation.

Within the next section, “Disappearances, Erasures, and Confinement,” Kate Motluk’s chapter on “Abolition as a Tool of Decolonization: Contemporary Colonialism in Canadian Carceral Spaces” expands on the argument that the ideologies that brought residential schools to existence have not disappeared but have metamorphosed into child ‘welfare’ and incarceration systems, where Indigenous people are overrepresented. With a focus on carceral spaces (such as child welfare systems, long-term care facilities, psychiatric facilities, and immigration detention), Motluk details ways true decolonization can be achieved, which includes addressing the harms done to racialized groups and Indigenous peoples throughout the duration of colonialism. With these carceral spaces as places where past practices of settler colonialism morphed into those of contemporary colonialism, she concludes that these spaces must be ‘abolished’, as they are damaging to the well-being of those who the Canadian settler state has considered as the “other” (Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized groups).

Cleo Nguyen sheds further insight into the origins of settler colonialism in their chapter “An Argument for Police and Prison Abolition in Canada.” Nguyen examines ways law enforcement institutions such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have been complicit in the continuation of the violence against Indigenous peoples and marginalized communities. They argue that the Pass System that restricted Indigenous peoples to the reserves has since evolved into prisons (the “new reserves”) to include other racialized groups. Although Nguyen supports restorative justice as practiced by the Indigenous Peoples, they cement their discussion on policing, and ethical communities by supporting the need for the abolishment of the penal system.

In examining contemporary figures under settler colonialism in Canada, Kathleen Mah’s chapter on “The Freedom Fighters: A Case Study of Covid-19 and Settler Colonialism” delves into the parallels between the oppositional activities of the Freedom Fighters (anti-globalist, anti-mask, and/or anti-mandate protestors) and those of public health systems, especially in connection to eugenicist ideologies in the continuation of colonialism, to create the ideal ‘public’ for its policy during the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Mah sees the Freedom Fighters as a group that indirectly contemporizes settler colonialism ideologies through their actions, she notes that decolonization can only happen if everyone seeks “accountability and collective responsibility.”

In search for accountability and collective responsibility, Neil Kohlmann’s chapter on “Canada’s Grand March: How Canada Reaffirms Colonial Domination in its Celebration of Diversity” analyzes Act 2 Scene 2 of Verdi’s opera Aida, the “Grand March” played at Mary Simon’s installation ceremony as Governor General Canada on July 26, 2021. Kohlmann argues that the in-depth meaning or implications of the music, the “Grand March,” reveal a subconscious settler colonial mindset. This musical score celebrates an imperial triumph over captured prisoners, which according to Kohlman, reproduces settler colonial intent to ensure that Mary Simon’s installation as a “foreign monarch’s representative,” despite being an Indigenous person, serves the aims of a settler state rather than lead to its decolonization. Using musical terminologies, Kohlman argues that the current hegemonic political structure can only be dismantled if instances of Indigenous constitutionalism are recognized.

By comparing poetic, journalistic, legal, and scholarly narratives of the murder of Reena Virk, a fourteen year old girl of South Asian origin, Sanchari Sur patiently disentangles various strands of racialized and gendered violence in contemporary Canadian settler colonialism. Their chapter, “Storytelling as Double-Edged Resistance: Interrogating the Erasure of Race and the Hierarchy of Justice for Racialized Female Bodies in Canada through Soraya Peerbaye’s “Narrows”,” at once makes Peerbaye’s poem speak by finding the words at its origin, and gives depth to lives that are too often reduced to matters of culture and whose experiences of racialization and racism are erased. Picking up in essay form a major strand in Peerbaye’s poem and weaving it together with scholarship on race and colonialism in Canada, Sur makes explicit many of the ways in which colonialism reaches Indigenous and Brown people. They thus join in on the resistance of the poet and scholars in telling the story anew, arguing and showing that story and narrative can bring together the people Canada colonizes and recolonizes.

Kaitlyn Pothier and Kathryn Reinders further the discussion of settler colonial reproductions in their chapter on “Complex Erasures: Re/Production of Disability under Settler Colonialism.” The authors offer their findings from their work as research assistants for the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons of Disabilities project, which focuses on the often-overlooked intersections that contribute to the continuous disabilities of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. They explain that disability, according to the lived experiences of Indigenous people, transcends medical forms and social forms (physical and social barriers) and includes political forms (residential school policies, criminalization of Indigenous culture, the band system, and resource dispossession) that have received little to no attention. To bridge this disability gap, Pothier and Reinders shared their reflections which includes thinking about language critically, community action and knowledge, and the praxis of solidarity and allyship.

In an attempt to begin undoing colonialism, Callie Parisien’s chapter “Moving Beyond Racial Ideology and Re-Claiming Metis Identity” explores ways Indigenous Peoples advance settler colonial goals by judging each other based on an external appearance, which often leads to a denial of participation in Indigenous cultures and justifies race ideology. Identifying as Métis and using it as a framework to discuss indigeneity, she encourages Indigenous people to move beyond identity stereotypes.

Johanna Lewis’ “Pioneer Tales: Settler Sociality, Colonial Mythmaking, and the Narrativization of the Canadian Prairies” further engages with ideas such as “citizenship and nationhood, land and property, indigeneity and settlerness” that were formed on the Prairies in what they call “settler societies”. With the Old Timers’ Associations, Boys Scouts Movements, and extended families in early 20th century Saskatchewan as case studies, Lewis explains how these groups positioned themselves as active participants, offered ordinary people a stake in the mythology of cultivating the “empty” prairie landscape, exploited Indigenous practices, and integrated a pioneer mythos into children’s sense of themselves for generations, as the absence of Indigenous peoples from their narratives were absent. Being a descendant of white settlers, Lewis argues that the responsibility for effecting decolonial change rests with settler society, who ought not to leave this work to politicians and Indigenous affairs bureaucrats.

Question Period and Future Research

These symposium paper presentations generated robust and multifaceted conversation, adding depth to the collection’s discourse. A synopsis of the questions raised for the paper presentations during the symposium follows.

One such question, which significantly contributed to the discourse, was asked during Emily Davidson’s presentation. It concerned the underdeveloped subfields of Canadian slavery studies and settler colonial studies. Emily’s work examines how land is inextricable from the complex global networks of colonialism, imperialism and transatlantic slavery. The audience, with their insightful questions, played a crucial role in interrogating the differences between the French folks who carried on the slavery tradition and the British colonials who brought enslaved people with them as they infused an industrial approach to life.

The next question was asked during Sherjan Maybanting’s presentation. An audience member queried: “What would it look like if a part of decolonization was that Indigenous peoples were controlling immigration practices?” While this question generated several thoughts, it was followed with “What would it look like if the provincial government (with the exception of Quebec, which already does) controlled immigration practices?”

Keara Lighting’s paper on “Unearthing Indigenous Ecologies in Environmental Management: A Case Study of Elk Island National Park” raised the question of the warped settler notion of Indigenous knowledge. The audience queried how this knowledge could contribute answers to the environmental crisis resulting from industrial extraction industries in settler Canada.

Kathleen Mah’s presentation highlighted the protests organized by the far right to critique the government’s approach towards the COVID-19 pandemic. It also raised thought-provoking questions, such as: “Is there a way to get people on board with a vision for justice that doesn’t leave anyone behind?” and “How can we prevent tokenizing uses of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour by white supremacist movements?”

Later, during Kohlmann’s presentation, the discussion shifted to how cacophony contrapuntal analysis and the musical metaphor can be applied to understand the metaphor between thin and thick forms of sovereignty, particularly how it applies to the conception of self-government. Based on Reinders and Pothier’s presentation on different types of disability that exist within the Indigenous community in Canada, questions regarding cultural support for Indigenous people living in group homes were asked, as this constitutes a major form of support that is often misconstrued as something of less significance.

As this summary shows, the discussion that took place throughout the symposium deepened author engagement with their topics and analyses and raised questions that can only be partially addressed at the current stage of the authors’ work. Participants shared many resources, helping bridge fields of study they are extending to include considerations on settler colonialism and moving beyond the work that continues to happen within discipline-specific silos.

*

This electronic book will hopefully play the same role. Each chapter is a contribution to settler colonial studies, bringing methods, approaches, concepts, and knowledge that is proper to many disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of study. At the same time, each chapter brings settler colonial studies into a different field of study, sharing a conceptual framework and an approach to the state that is often left aside in academic research – but is central to militant discussions when goals, objectives, and tactics are up for deliberation. It is our hope that reading these essays will leave readers with new references, new ideas for reading, and more importantly, a renewed sense of the workings of settler colonialism, many of which still have to be unveiled and described so as to be dismantled.