Settler City Limits

Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West

Heather Dorries, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Tyler McCreary, Julie Tomiak, Heather Dorries, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Tyler McCreary, Julie Tomiak

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780887558436
• eBook ISBN: 9780887555879
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

While cities like Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Saskatoon, Rapid City, Edmonton, Missoula, Regina, and Tulsa are places where Indigenous marginalization has been most acute, they have also long been sites of Indigenous placemaking and resistance to settler colonialism.

Although such cities have been denigrated as "ordinary" or banal in the broader urban literature, they are exceptional sites to study Indigenous resurgence. T?he urban centres of the continental plains have featured Indigenous housing and food co-operatives, social service agencies, and schools. The American Indian Movement initially developed in Minneapolis in 1968, and Idle No More emerged in Saskatoon in 2013.

The editors and authors of Settler City Limits, both Indigenous and settler, address urban struggles involving Anishinaabek, Cree, Creek, Dakota, Flathead, Lakota, and Métis peoples. Collectively, these studies showcase how Indigenous people in the city resist ongoing processes of colonial dispossession and create spaces for themselves and their families.

Working at intersections of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, urban studies, geography, and sociology, this book examines how the historical and political conditions of settler colonialism have shaped urban development in the Canadian Prairies and American Plains. Settler City Limits frames cities as Indigenous spaces and places, both in terms of the historical geographies of the regions in which they are embedded, and with respect to ongoing struggles for land, life, and self-determination.

Part One

LIFE AND DEATH

CHAPTER ONE

“WELCOME TO WINNIPEG”

Making Settler Colonial Urban Space in “Canada’s Most Racist City”

HEATHER DORRIES

In January 2015, a Canadian English-language current affairs magazine, Maclean’s, published an article titled “Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s Racism Problem Is at Its Worst.”1 The article chronicles examples of racism experienced by Indigenous people in Winnipeg, opening with the following Facebook post written by Brad Badiuk: “Oh Goddd how long are aboriginal people going to use what happened as a crutch to suck more money out of Canadians? . . . They have contributed NOTHING to the development of Canada. Just standing with their hand out. Get to work, tear the treaties and shut the FK up already. Why am I on the hook for their cultural support?” The post, which resulted in Badiuk being placed on paid leave from his job as a high school teacher, is used to illustrate the kind of hateful attitude endured by Indigenous people in Winnipeg on a daily basis. The article goes on to catalogue a long list of racist incidents that have taken place in Winnipeg. The Maclean’s article prompted a flurry of responses, including a number of editorials, commentaries, and letters to the editor. Its writer, Nancy Macdonald, faced fierce criticism from those who felt her piece had unfairly characterized Winnipeg as a “racist city.” Not only was the article contested in both the local and national press, it also prompted Winnipeg mayor Brian Bowman to hold a press conference the day after the article was published in order to address the allegations of widespread racism it raised. Rather than denying the claims made by the article, the mayor acknowledged that racism is rampant in Winnipeg.

This chapter analyzes the Maclean’s article and the responses it triggered, as represented by twenty articles from the Winnipeg Free Press, two articles from the Winnipeg Sun, and one editorial from the Brandon Sun. While the intent of the Maclean’s article was to draw attention to the problem of racism in Winnipeg, in this chapter I use discourse analysis2 to examine how the article defined racism to construct the city as settler colonial space.

Macdonald’s article challenges common perceptions of Winnipeg as a friendly place populated by “smiling lefty premiers” and “pacifist Mennonite writers” and highlights the racism faced by Indigenous people, focusing on Winnipeg’s North End neighbourhood. The article lists a number of social and economic problems which, according to Macdonald, shape Indigenous life in the neighbourhood, including solvent abuse, low graduation rates, high suicide rates, high hospitalization rates resulting from violence, police harassment, and funding gaps for Indigenous children in state care. The article also devotes a significant amount of space to discussing the death of Tina Fontaine, a fifteen-year-old girl from Sagkeeng First Nation who went missing and was eventually found dead in the Red River, which flows through the centre of Winnipeg. While these problems are held up as indicative of Winnipeg’s racism problem, the article nevertheless paints a dark picture of the North End and its large population of Indigenous people.

Eve Tuck provides a powerful analysis of “damage-centered research,”3 which she defines as research that focuses on hardships experienced by Indigenous communities. She observes that studies of pain and loss are often mobilized in order to make important political gains, generating damage-centred research that places hurt and loss at the forefront of analysis. Such an approach makes it difficult for communities to think of themselves as other than broken and stunts possibilities for community growth. Tuck reminds us that “without the context of racism and colonization, all we’re left with is the damage, and this makes our stories vulnerable to pathologizing analyses.”4 Thus, damage-centred narratives serve to naturalize the effects of colonialism rather than effectively combating them. While Tuck’s criticism is directed toward scholars of education, I propose that it explains how the Maclean’s article discursively frames the conditions faced by Indigenous people.

In this chapter, I show how the article’s use of a damage-focused approach to explain racism serves to reinforce negative perceptions of Winnipeg’s North End. Moreover, I will argue that the article aids in the creation of settler colonial urban space by circulating a specific set of narratives about Indigenous people that naturalize Indigenous death and dispossession, and normalize the settler colonial logic of elimination. In particular, I will focus on the article’s discussion of the murder of Tina Fontaine and argue that the discussion of her death, although intended to bring attention to the problem of racism, provides an opportunity for demonstrations of settler colonial guilt, which are then mobilized to rescue the city from the label of “most racist city.” By showing how these discourses produce settler colonial space, the chapter contributes to an understanding of settler colonial urbanism as a set of discursive, material, and socio-economic practices that affirm the political and moral coherence of settler colonial society. Finally, I argue that in order to address anti-Indigenous racism, the problem of racism must be framed in a way that emphasizes the flourishing of Indigenous life rather than focusing on Indigenous death.

THEORIZING SETTLER COLONIAL SPACE

The Logic of Elimination

Settler colonialism is theoretically distinct from colonialism. While both are motivated by capital accumulation, settler colonialism is distinguished by the fact that the colonizing force does not leave but rather seeks to replace Indigenous society with settler colonial society. Thus, settler colonialism is not only motivated by the acquisition and exploitation of resources but also by the acquisition of territory for permanent settlement. Settler colonialism calculates the acquisition of territory according to a “logic of elimination,”5 which includes the physical and murderous removal of Indigenous peoples from their territories in order to meet requirements for land. According to Patrick Wolfe, this logic of elimination is the “organizing grammar” of settler colonialism that permeates all aspects of settler society and can be read in multiple forms of physical and structural violence. The constant violence of elimination renders colonialism an enduring structure rather than a singular (past) event.6 While this process of elimination is often marked by physical violence, settler colonialism includes more insidious forms of structural racism and violence that also serve to dispossess Indigenous peoples.7

Settler colonialism is enabled by an ideology of white supremacy that organizes the world into a racial hierarchy, producing a particular set of political, social, and economic conditions. Billie Allan and Janet Smylie explain that racism can take multiple forms, encompassing acts of discrimination, hostility, or antagonism toward a person based on their race.8 However, what might begin as the subtle mistreatment of one person or group often becomes institutionalized when those in power fail to address mistreatment, or when practices in institutional contexts are premised on racist assumptions. Thus, the term systemic racism is used to describe racism that is embedded in ...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• PART TWO
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• PART THREE
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• CHAPTER NINE
• PART FOUR
• CHAPTER TEN
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
• CHAPTER TWELVE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX