Settler Colonialism and the Policing of Idle No More

The impetus for the recent Idle No More events lies in a centuries old resistance as Indigenous nations and their lands suffered the impacts of exploration, invasion and colonization. Idle No More seeks to assert Indigenous inherent rights to sovereignty and reinstitute traditional laws and Nation to Nation Treaties by protecting the lands and waters from corporate destruction. Each day that Indigenous rights are not honored or fulfilled, inequality between Indigenous peoples and the settler society grows.

-Idle No More (2015 a).

Idle No More has emerged as a grassroots movement to assert indigenous self-determination. Since its inception in the Canadian prairies, the movement has been a poignant example of resistance to practices of settler colonialism. Given the prominence of Idle No More and the radical politics of decolonial resistance that the movement articulates, settler colonial authorities in Canada have interpreted the movement as both a criminal and a national security threat. This article is focused on the response to Idle No More from security and policing agencies in Canada. In detailing the extensive surveillance of the movement, we borrow from settler colonial studies to describe the policing of Idle No More as a continuation of colonial governance practices that target-with the objective of eliminating-indigenous movements that challenge the legitimacy of the settler state.

Studies on settler colonialism have underlined the distinction between colonial and settler colonial states ( Veracini 2013).Though settler colonialism and colonialism have shared and overlapping rationalities and practices, a key distinction is that colonialism aims towards a permanent condition of management and exploitation, whereas settler colonialism aspires to acquire (settle) land and establish an independent post-colonial state (Collins 2011; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006). Patrick Wolfe (2006) has detailed how these techniques are extensions of a "logic of elimination" that is not exclusive to indiscriminate violence, but part of a strategic violence that targets aspects of indigenous life that do not correspond (or that challenge) the imposition of settler society's post-colonial imaginary. It is precisely the myth of being a "post-colonial" society that characterizes settler colonial states (Veracini 2010), and we use the concept of settler governmentality to understand how policing and security agencies rationalize the extensive surveillance of Idle No More as though it had no colonial antecedents. As a contribution...