LAND/ TERRITORY

In the colonial-capitalist mindset, territory is linked to the idea of progress: the land is viewed as a resource that can be claimed and appropriated in order to achieve a sense of modernity. According to this extractivist view of the land, imperial governments enact legal titles to territory in order to control its use and police the communities that are in it. Governments and real estate developers use these legal titles to claim a monopoly over the land and extract its resources. However, by doing that, they uproot land stewardship laws, communities, and natural environments that came before them. In the making of so-called progress, the displacement of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons, and the degradation of the fauna, flora, and soil are framed as the necessary victims of this desired modernity.

The act of defining the meaning and value of the land is inherently political because it determines the very physical and symbolic existence of a community. Colonially-driven territorial policies erase laws and perspectives of land use that do not serve their expansionist mindset. In Canada, many land treaties were signed between the British Crown and Indigenous nations. However, British and French colonizers interpreted these treaties in ways that justified their settlement in North America for the purpose of economic expansion and capitalistic gains. In their perspective, land is an object of possession, a property that can be claimed by people; and treaties were interpreted as the surrender of Indigenous lands to the Crown and the complete transfer of land rights to Euro-Canadian governments. These treaties meant for settlers the permanence of European hold on Indigenous lands, and they had a lot of room for interpretation in difference to Indigenous people. If land agreements were negotiated for transitory occupation during the first waves of European settlements, which allowed the latter group to familiarize themselves with foreign territories, they became more rigid and exclusionary as the coexistence between Indigenous nations and early settlers was no longer needed. Land became a strategy of colonial policing that granted European settlers permanent venues of existence, and forcibly removed Indigenous communities. The permanent occupation of land was, in turn, reinforced by the laws that were designed to serve the interests of the colonizer.

From an Indigenous perspective, however, the land cannot be owned because it is a living entity on par with other living beings. It can sustain human activities, and in exchange, humans have stewardship responsibilities towards the land. In Canada, Indigenous nations signed treaties with European settlers in the spirit of sharing territorial duties and responsibilities as independent and sovereign nations. Treaties signified that Indigenous nations allowed European newcomers to inhabit their land, whose presence never undercut the continuity of Indigenous ancestral sovereignty over North America. In this sense, the Canadian government did not respect land treaties because it considered the land as surrendered, when, in fact, it was not. These radically different ideas of the land between Euro-Canadian settlers and Indigenous nations offer us a glimpse into the power imbalances that have structured Canadian society since its creation as a modern nation-state. Notwithstanding, the significance of territory is not limited to treaties, governmental policies, and development projects such as hydroelectricity and mining.

Territory is the rooting site of collective narratives of being and identity; it speaks to a way of living and distinct worldviews. This is why the colonization of North America was not only an affair of land appropriation but also of social and cultural genocide against Indigenous people. The Canadian colonial project actively sought to eradicate the presence of Indigenous people and their relationships to the land in the form of assimilation policies, including the Indian Act, the reservation system, and residential schools. While diseases and inter-tribal conflicts are considered to be the main reasons for the Native population’s demise during the early contact era, Indigenous nations were further divided with the creation of the Canadian Confederation in 1867, which ruptured the intergenerational transmission of their cultures and knowledge. Today, these strategies of erasure are still employed by the Canadian government for the appropriation of unceded territories and the extraction of their resources. This facet of Canadian history is a perfect example of why we cannot make sense of culture and identity without territory; and when that link is severed, the sense of belonging is undermined and concerned communities struggle with intergenerational trauma as they are rendered landless on their own territory.

Despite the considerable efforts of colonial governments to erase and displace, Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas have always risen against assimilation, whether via resistance tactics, reviving their ancestral traditions, or reinstating their right to their original territories in Canadian and international law. For instance, the Indians of Canada Pavilion (IOCP) during the World Fair of 1967 was an important launching site for the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in Canada thanks to the activism of Indigenous artists and progressive public servants of that time. The IOCP is a good example of how Indigenous nations appropriated the physical space of the World Fair to convey their own messages and worldviews, allowing them to reclaim agency over their ancestral territory. In short, Land has been at the centre of political and economic conflicts between nations because there is a clear human need for connectedness to territory. As the need for displaced communities to return ‘home’ is voiced and materializes into acts of reappropriation, we begin to witness shifts in power dynamics where previously marginalized communities re-establish that lost connection to the land. By keeping a connection to the land alive, one is capable of projecting oneself into the future.