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The central imperative of this article is to examine why relations of solidarity and insurgency between Black peoples, Indigenous peoples, and people of colour (BIPOC) are impeded in settler colonial contexts when it may appear that non-white peoples should share common political impulses against white supremacy. My main claim is that impediments to solidarity are produced and fostered by relations of capital that are intrinsically varied in scope and operation because of shifting racial and colonial formations. More specifically, I argue that processes of dispossession, advanced through capitalist expansion and (re) organization, produce overlapping and relational violence (i.e., physical, economic, racialized, gendered, and territorial violence) that adversely affect relationship-building between and among BIPOC in the Canadian settler colonial context. I draw on critiques of settler colonialism and the work of Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard in order to develop a concept I refer to as "transversal modes of life," which provides a theoretical framework within which to track these processes and to delve into the following interrelated lines of inquiry:
1. to better understand the ways that colonial-capitalist relations emerge to create an array of complex, varied, and uneven structural divisions between and among BIPOC.
2. to build a politics of action predicated on plural modes of being and becoming that transcend these processes and generate place-based relations that respect and actively support what Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson refer to as "grounded normativity."1
In other words, transversal modes of life are both an analytical concept through which to understand how colonial-capitalist forces of power shape varied BIPOC relations in different ways and a form of politics driven by social change that seeks to transcend colonial-capital divisions and hierarchies. To be clear, I am not suggesting that racisms and colonialisms arise from capitalism alone but, rather, that within the settler colonial context, capitalist development is embedded in them and contributes to (re)producing recursive enactments of them.
Questions of solidarity between and among BIPOC are not new, and growing recent literature emphasizes contiguities of history, oppression, and co-resistance. For example, through an expansive framework of conquest, Tiffany Lethabo King states: "Black and Indigenous protest against conquistador ways of life have already been talking to one another in ways that exceed certain forms of humanist narrativity and...