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settler-colonial violence
DCHP-3 (Mar 2023)
Spelling variants:settler colonial violence
n. — Colonialism, Indigenous resistance
the systemic violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples and their cultures by settlers.
Type: 4. Culturally Significant — Settler-colonial violence is predominantly a systemic problem, but individual incidents of physical violence (e.g. a bar fight) may also be provoked by the underlying cultural Eurocentrism, or even White supremacist beliefs, that underlies the systemic phenomenon.
A particularly egregious example of the confluence of both systemic and individual settler-colonial violence (as well as misogyny) upon Indigenous people are the disappearances and murders of hundreds of Indigenous women and girls (see MMIWG).
Settler colonials, especially those of European ancestry, have been exposing Indigenous peoples and their cultures to systemic violence for centuries, but the term settler-colonial violence only began to gain traction in the mainstream Canadian lexicon in the wake of renewed Indigenous political activism in the 2010s (see Idle No More). This activism led to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose 2015 publication led to widespread knowledge of the abuses of Indigenous children by those working in and for Canada's Residential Schools throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It also led to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, whose 2019 published report "Reclaiming Power and Place" states that the colonial violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls in Canada "amounts to genocide" (see MMIWG Report 2019: 4).
A particularly egregious example of the confluence of both systemic and individual settler-colonial violence (as well as misogyny) upon Indigenous people are the disappearances and murders of hundreds of Indigenous women and girls (see MMIWG).
Settler colonials, especially those of European ancestry, have been exposing Indigenous peoples and their cultures to systemic violence for centuries, but the term settler-colonial violence only began to gain traction in the mainstream Canadian lexicon in the wake of renewed Indigenous political activism in the 2010s (see Idle No More). This activism led to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose 2015 publication led to widespread knowledge of the abuses of Indigenous children by those working in and for Canada's Residential Schools throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It also led to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, whose 2019 published report "Reclaiming Power and Place" states that the colonial violence perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls in Canada "amounts to genocide" (see MMIWG Report 2019: 4).
See: Idle No More,Truth and Reconciliation Commission,Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
Because settler-colonial violence is an ongoing problem, the term cannot be classified as a Memorial Term (Type 6).
Quotations
2018
P4W is not an "exciting development opportunity." It is not just a "heritage building." It is a site of gender violence and settler colonial violence, and it should be publicly acknowledged as such. As residents of Kingston, we need to ask ourselves: Who do we want to become as a community? Are we willing to pave over the memory of generations of incarcerated women for development? Or are we willing to face a messy and difficult history, in conversation with the women whose lives and deaths were shaped by that history, in order to co-create a more just and equitable future?
2018
Solutions to anti-Indigenous racism and anti-blackness in Canada suffer from a type of politeness that refuse to flip the lens back on to those who benefit most from settler colonial violence.
2019
Nevertheless what they're saying is that the information and testimony that they have collected provides serious reasons to believe that you know what's been experienced by missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is part of a broader pattern of settler colonial violence in this country that is legitimately identifiable as genocide.
2020
TC Energy's attempts to build the $4.7-billion Coastal GasLink pipeline in unceded Wet'suwet'en territories is another example of settler-colonial violence and inadequate consultation processes that uphold resource extraction.
2022
But this is the first one where census-takers have openly expressed an aim to use the data to "dismantle all forms of colonial and settler colonial violence."
"Historically, data collection and evidence have been abused, misused and exploited in ways that harmed communities," reads the official census guidelines, before adding that this time around, they'll be explicitly using census data to "disrupt all structures of oppression" and centre "Indigeneity and Black lives" in the school system.
2025
I argue that modern notions of both the ‘sovereign’ and the ‘human’ that arise in Canadian law, and that functioned to produce and legitimate Vega Jimenez’ death, are constitutive of and through settler-colonial violence. I conceptualize Canadian migration law and the colonial inquest as a mechanisms of biopower that function to reproduce settler-colonial sovereignty by integrating migrant deaths into the life of the white settler population.
References
- MMIWG Report • Link
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