Content area
Full Text
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women's life and death. In it, I examine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder of Loretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public that denied an historic and political relationship between Indigenous women's death and settler governance. The paper argues that in spite of this denial, these deaths worked effectively to highlight the gendered, biopolitical life of settler sovereignty.
This article makes two very simple arguments: one about settler statecraft, and the other about settler imperative. First: Canada requires the death and so called "disappearance" of Indigenous women in order to secure its sovereignty.1 Two: that this sovereign death drive then requires that we think about the ways in which we imagine not only nations and states but what counts as governance itself. Underpinning these arguments is a crucial premise: in spite of the innocence of the story that Canada likes to tell about itself, that it is a place of immigrant and settler founding, that in this, it is a place that somehow escapes the ugliness of history, that it is a place that is not like the place below it, across that border. Canada is not like that place for many reasons2 but it is especially exceptional now, because it apologized, it stood in the face of its history, it "reconciles" the violence of the past with its present and so, presumably, with this acknowledgment of wrongdoing, may move on. These emotional gestures, registered at an institutionalized, state level are undermined by an extractive and simultaneously murderous state of affairs. And, in spite of those present-day discourses from Canadian political scientists and policy makers that imagine a process of equality through the space afforded to Indigenous political orders as the "third order of government", the evidence suggests that Canada is quite simply, a settler society whose multicultural, liberal and democratic structure and performance of governance seeks an ongoing "settling" of this land. The process of settlement is definitely contra equality. I will speak more of this evidence shortly. This settling thus is not innocent - it is dispossession, the taking of...