Front-line police operations are deeply entwined with less visible activities – or practices not commonly identified as policing – that are carried out by a wide range of participants as strategies of settler-colonial pacification operating through the organizing logics of security and liberal legalism. Using open source texts and records obtained through access to information requests, this article unmaps some of the contemporary strategies employed by Canadian institutions to pacify Indigenous resistance. As a contribution to the body of work seeking to develop the politics of anti-security, the analysis disrupts the binary categories that animate security logic by examining the public order policing approach of the Ontario Provincial Police, the framing of Indigenous resistance as a security threat, and the integral role of Indian Affairs in securing the settler-state. http://www.socialiststudies.com/index.php/sss/article/download/23505/17390

Since the early 2000s, the department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) has formalized and systematized how it produces knowledge about ‘civil unrest’ involving Indigenous peoples. These practices have been undertaken as part of a government-wide all-hazards emergency management framework that consolidates ‘traditional emergency management’ (e.g. natural disasters, accidents) with the domain of national security. Through this framework, INAC monitors rallies, demonstrations, and blockades, alongside floods and forest fires, under the auspices of emergency management. I argue that these practices are continuous with ‘colonial emergency’ – a liberal legal-political mechanism originating in martial law, which enables pre-emptive political and military interventions against anti-colonial movements and Indigenous resurgence. The contemporary emergency management paradigm of national security is a manifestation of the enduring ‘colonial emergency’ for the settler-colonial state.

This paper examines the inquest into the deaths by suicide of two Manitoba Indigenous female youth while imprisoned in the Manitoba Youth Centre in Winnipeg, Canada. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inquest as a discursive space that relies primarily on expert knowledge from law and psychiatry. It studies the inquest's recommendations for preventing future deaths under similar circumstances. Utilizing Heidi Rimke's conceptualization of psychocentrism, this analysis examines how suicide discourse in this inquest reduces various manifestations of violence to racial defects and places responsibility on the deceased girls for their inability to have coped with the tortuous conditions of imprisonment. I argue that contemporary understandings of Indigenous suicide in custody systematically erase histories of colonial violence and erroneously reduce suicide to an issue of individual pathology that can be identified and treated through medicalization, psychiatrization and criminalization.

Talk delivered to British Columbia Legislative Interns, on June 22, 2017. Broad overview of the history of the Canadian state's relationship with Indigenous people of Turtle Island, highlighting the question of settler responsibility to working towards decolonization.

According to Statistics Canada, in 2016/2017 Indigenous peoples accounted for 28% of admissions to provincial/territorial prisons and 27% for federal prisons, while representing only 4.1% of the Canadian adult population. The majority of analyses drawn from these statistics continue to follow a similar line of interpretation. They begin by pointing out a pattern between the racial make-up of Canadian society and its prison population. Conclusions are then drawn between ‘over-representation’ and racialization in Canada’s prisons and tacit or overt condemnation of this system is offered. The predominant lack of acknowledgement or engagement, however, with the histories and contemporary relations of colonialism is not simply a matter of unintended ignorance or passive forgetfulness. These analyses reinforce dominant national narratives; (mis)represent Canadian governing practices and policies as fair and just embodiments of the democratic will of the people; and suspend the state’s culpability in creating and maintaining a criminal in-justice system that produces such an abhorrently racialized demographic. I counter these narratives by rooting my analysis of the Canadian prison system in its colonial legacy and ongoing settler-colonial project, which is undercut by a certain set of logics that require the obfuscation of Indigenous presence(s). This informs my contention that, contrary to popular belief, the prison system is in fact not broken, but continues to perform the exact function it was designed to perform in the first place: the ongoing dispossession of indigenous bodies and lands, as well as a suppression of their claims to sovereignty. Overall, I am to situate the state, rather than indigeneity, in its criminality, by showing how the universalism of Canada’s sovereign ideal is constituted by the particularism in the presumptions it makes about its Self, a Self that depends on an impossible singularity.