'On Stolen Land' - 'Occupation is a Crime'
reflections on settler colonialism and indigenization
UBC is stolen land say pro-Gaza campers as they occupy an artificial turf field atop a parking lot. “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” This positioning rests on a conceptual framing in settler colonialism - a process with population replacement as the primary goal. While the phrase settler colonialism has been around for a long time it has taken renewed salience in the context of the UBC protest camp that sprang up in April, 2024. This story examines the conceptual framing of settler colonialism and its relations to ‘Red Power’ and First Nations’ self determination.
Settler Colonialism
Colonialism, the act of one state expanding it’s territorial and/or economic control over land beyond its own borders has been a core feature of the development of capitalist relations of production for some centuries now. The economic growth of European capitalism was tightly woven with colonization beyond Europe’s borders.1 The extraction of wealth from, and the undermining of productive capacity of, the colonies was instrumental to the development of capitalism from it’s early rough accumulationist roots to the rise of 19th century industrial production.
Settler colonialism, a component of the wider process of colonialism, is the taking of land and repopulating it with people from another land. In one sense a simple geographic and demographic displacement. This simple description ignores the specificity of the process of colonialism despite its abstract clarity. As capitalism spread globally the nature of settler forms of colonialism also changed. Asking ‘when’ and ‘where’ settler colonialism is as important as asking ‘what’ is settler colonialism.
In my own professional research one thing I study is the expansion of capitalist relations of production into the coastal region of British Columbia. The process in BC was quite different from the Maritimes, Central Canada, or the Prairie Provinces. Capitalism arrived in different forms and at different times. Such differences matter to how the ensuring society develops and creates its own unique histories.
As Canadians we know that the fact of the original colonizing nation (in our case France and Britain) has implications for the shape of Canadian society today. Conflicts and events through the process shape outcomes. The revolt of British colonies in North America in the late 1700s was in part due to the Crown issuing the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The Proclamation barred the colonies from entering treaties with First Nations, reserving that as a prerogative of the Crown. The revolt of the colonies resulted in a wave of refugees and the displacement of people who had already been refugees from Europe. The colonies were also opposed to the Crown acknowledging Quebec’s maintenance of the French and Catholicism after their defeat at Quebec City. This all played a role in shaping Canadian national and regional identities.
First Nations in Eastern Canada were active participants in these struggles. They variously aligned with different Imperial and Colonial governments. This moment of history was quite different than the moment within which First Nations societies in coastal BC became integrated into a global capitalist economy. While settlement was part of the model in eastern Canada and the US, settlement was originally illegal in BC.
From the period of about 1770 through 1830 coastal first nations engaged with maritime-based merchant capitalists in which First Nations retained control over the means and processes of production. In this moment the merchant capitalists weren’t interested in owning the land, instead Russian, Spanish, American and British traders sought furs produced by First Nations to trade in China and then to return to their respective homes to sell their Chinese goods at a profit.
Starting in the 1800s the development of industrial capitalism started to have effects in coastal BC where three core natural resources became a focus of global capitalism: minerals, fish, and timber. In these capital intensive industries (often financed through the Montreal finance markets and managed/owned by Anglo-Americans and British folk) First Nations became instrumental as labour, labour brokers, and business partners.
If it weren’t for the horrific consequences of European diseases BC may well have been a majority Indigenous population. In fact, until the early 20th century BC was a majority First Nations area. As the need for an industrial workforce expanded, refugees from the US, Europe, and Asia flowed in to fill the workforce gaps. Many of these newcomers were economic and political refugees fleeing poverty and disruption in their homelands. They came to BC with the hopes of a better life in mind. Each wave of newcomer can be tied to moments of political turmoil and economic impoverishment in the immigrant’s homeland. Many of whom would have preferred to stay were they were born but had little choice but to leave.
When examined in the specificity of the moment settler colonialism may describe an empirical movement of people. It may have discursive effect. It also ends up obscuring the dynamics and specificities of each case. In particular it obscures the social differentiation among so-called settlers.
In isolation ‘settler’ implies or denotes a purposefulness on the part of the settler that may not in fact exist. Political and economic refugees may have no choice but to flee. Indentured and enslaved ‘settler’s were robbed of their agency to choose. Even those who ostensibly chose to immigrate may have done so under conditions that left little effective choice. Many waves of settlement were in fact the outcome of people forced to flee turmoil, war, and prejudice in a homeland that may well have ejected them. In this context the act of settling is less a purpose and more an outcome. Yet the analytic framing of ‘settler colonialism’ assumes settlement as the driving purpose.
Those who were instrumental in setting the colonial agenda, those already in possession of capital and prestige in their homelands, might more aptly be called ‘settlers’ as they both had the choice and the means to make good on their choices. These are the people, the social class, who benefits from displacement and resettlement of people.
It wasn’t always this way. If one dials back to activist writings fifty years ago one finds a more nuanced class analysis of both the situation of capitalist colonialization in BC and also Palestine.
Third Worldism and Red Power
First Nations political activism for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was dominated by lobbying and petitions led by traditional leadership allied with a rising economic elite who acted as modest capitalists and labour brokers. Even as coastal First Nations created the advocacy and workers’ bargaining association, the Native Brotherhood of BC, it built upon traditional leadership from the constituent communities. Red Power organizations that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s were linked to this history of activism, but also inspired by rising Third World national liberation struggles.
Red Power groups saw themselves as part of a global third world struggle for National Liberation rooted in working class struggle. Glen Coulthard has written about the Maoist Red Power groups in Vancouver.
Coulthard says:
“Maoism, it was believed at the time, advanced a reinvigorated, grassroots model of socialist internationalism that refused to capitulate to racial capitalism and its mechanisms of violent dissemination. … Red Power advocates drew profound inspiration from the decolonisation struggles of the Third World and, like many radicalised communities of colour during this period, molded and adapted the insights they gleeaned from these struggles abroad into their own critiques of capitalism,patriarchy, and internal colonialism at home.”
The Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP) was formed in 1967, says Coulthard “after a meeting called by Indigenous women in response to a controversial trial involving the rape and murder of a Native teenager … by three white men near Williams Lake BC.” NARP was formed as an explicitly direct action protest group to step in where “state-subsidized First Nation ogranisations of the day had failed or were failing to do in an urgent enough manner.”
Coulthard tells us Red Power advocates identified two important objectives: “defeating imperialism and internal colonialism.” This called for two tactical alignments: “solidarity and support for the ‘people’s wars’ of the Third World abroad and the convergence of decolonialisation with class struggle to weaken the stranglehold of colonialism at home.”
In their own words NARP boiled it down to this [emphasis added]:
“Due to the nature of the internal colony, our struggle must be sensitively attuned to the development of class contradiction in the imperialist nation in whose geo-political boundary we reside. It follows too that our struggle must be sensitive to the other struggles in the Third World, as the success of these struggles constitutes the major external condition for the development of class and national contradiction in the privileged sector of imperialism. Hence the necessity exists in our struggle for a dual strategy. One aspect of our strategy must be internationalist – aimed at influencing the working class in the oppressor nation in a direction which facilitates our struggle for self-determination. The other aspect of our strategy must be nationalist – aimed at educating and mobilizing our people around internal contradictions.”
Red Power activists saw themselves as part of a global class struggle, as members of an oppressed nationality and, as Native Indians (today we would say First Nations). Maoism, with it’s focus on third world peasant struggles, spoke to the ways colonialism, capitalism, and First Nations rights were entangled. With the rise of a new economic and political liberalism in the 1980s class struggle language disappeared and First Nations’ politics of struggle shifted toward tactical alliances with environmental activism on the one hand and the politics of recognition on the other. In both cases the ‘ontological’ uniqueness of being Indigenous came to foreground First Nations politics in community and university discourse. At the same time a rising intellectual movement in Euro-American universities, focussed on the multiplicity of subjective identities, the fragmentation of solidarity, and an increasing emphasis on the role of text as meaning making, created a conceptual framing that gave special prominence to notions of indigeneity. At the same time it became a positive value to claim an Indigenous identity in a way being an oppressed nationality never seemed to be.
Indigenizing the National Liberation Struggle
At the May 15, 2024 UBC-V Senate meeting a delegation from the pro-Palestine protest camp was permitted to address Senate. The meeting had started late after being shifted online due to security concerns - protest campers had made it clear they would attend in person to demonstrate their point. For non-Senators to speak to Senate requires approval. One camper was granted the privilege, two ended up speaking.
The change from Red Power politics to Indigenous recognition was evident in the structure of the two presentations. Both claimed an Indigenous identity; the first as Metis and the second as Palestinian. In both presentations the speakers identified themselves by naming their genealogy with a particular focus on their identified Indigenous sides. Their enemy, against which they struggled, was not a social class or capitalism, but instead white supremacist anti-Indigenous colonialism.
The first speaker read a slightly modified version of UBC’s official apology for UBC’s involvement in the Indian Residential School System. They explained:
“I hope you recognize where these paragraphs originate as they are all UBC's words. UBC's official apology in 2018 for its complicity in residential schools. What has changed here is that I swapped some words. I swapped Indigenous for Palestine. I swapped Canada for Israel. I swapped residential school system for Zionism. I swapped parents for home. I swapped the Indian Act for Nakba.”
“I want you all to understand that my point here is not that this is a new issue that needs new reflection. You have already made perfectly clear where you stand when it comes to the genocide of indigenous peoples.”
Drawing upon the relation between residential schools and the displacement of Palestinians the speaker said:
“In May of 1948 my grandfather was sitting at a desk in Kamloops residential school. He was taken kilometres and kilometers away to the school by truck. At the same time, some of roughly 750,000 Palestinians were taken by truck kilometers and kilometers from their homelands into camps and villages that were meant to control and assimilate. … UBC you voice regret for remaining complicit in the genocide of my people, but you do not care when it is Palestinian people.”2
Further elaboration on the parallels between Canada and Israel followed.
The speaker closed by saying:
“There is no truth in reconciliation, your truth and reconciliation, costumes and set designs. There is no truth in reconciliation day with no Nakba day. We do not. We do not [give] our consent. I need you to know that you make these decisions and set up these events on behalf of this white supremacist institution and not in honour of those who call Turtle Island our mother. Free Palestine from Israel. Shame on you all.”
The second speaker began by acknowledging they were an uninvited guest on Indigenous lands. They identified themselves as an indigenous Palestinian:
“I'm a visitor on this land, it is not mine and I'm a student at an institution that has made no space for me. I would not cling on to my Canadian citizenship had it not been for the theft of my own land.
“I would also like to say … I'm not here to negotiate nor to hear both sides because frankly I have very little faith in being heard here today. I do not say this to sound like a positivist nor because I seek out a utopia out of reach. … To revolt is to not generate utopian visions but to imagine the world previously imagined, those by my own ancestors now kept in Israeli archives out of my own reach.”
“Liberalism is dogmatic. Every single one of you is a liberal. It mystifies phenomena and naturalizes the existing state of affairs as eternal, immutable and causeless. History to a liberal is a list of bullet points, events in a sequence with no underlying reason beyond that's how it happened to play out.”
The second speaker then went on to talk about some of their older relatives’ experiences of 1948 and concluded by drawing parallels with Indigeneity:
“Just as the ancestors and the stewards of this land continue to bear witness to your complacency and your empty promises of sympathy, I would like to call upon my own ancestors to bear witness to your purpose to your perpetuation of the very same cycle of violence they've been subjected to an ocean and a world away.”
“The dress I am wearing is called the thobe. Decorated by motifs symbolizing Palestinian land in history older than your university and the Israel state. The dress I am wearing was once purple, but since the Nakbe Palestinians began decorating black thobes instead. As we are in a constant state of grief. I had considered leaving this black dress of mine amongst you in the Senate hall, but you failed to give us the simple courtesy of talking in person.”
Capitalism, Colonialism - Refuges, Settlers
Global history is replete with examples of people treating each other poorly. When I consider the past hundred years of global capitalism against the past hundred decades of Tsimshian history it certainly seems we live in particularly hash times. Our global society has the means and capacity for everyone to live a healthy, happy, and fulfilled life free from fear or harm. Yet we can’t seem to manage it. While I won’t lay this at the foot of a problematic analytic framing, I will suggest that if we understood our past and present more accurately we might be more likely value all people as people. If we can’t manage that then calamity will certainly remain our constant companion.
In Tsimshian oral history there are recorded moments wherein the people ‘forget who they are’ and maltreat other beings around them. In those moments history tells us that the people faced repercussions - a landslide wiped out a village, a flood drowned all the people - in the aftermath only a handful of children might be left. It then fell to these children to rebuild the world and remember who they were and the obligations they held to the beings around them.
We are in one of those moments where we are forgetting who we are. Youth publicly disrespect elders. The people tease and malign their neighbours. Wars rage between villages. Pride governs relations. Perhaps we might look to our common pasts and remember we all have obligations of respect and reciprocity to all beings.
It is indeed an impossiblist dream to imagine a future where we can all live well together. It is a dream I nonetheless subscribe to. I look to my activist Red Power predecessors who saw a terrible world, but found hope in one’s capacity to build a future rooted in their homelands and as a key participant in the global working class struggle.
Eric R. Wolf’s 1982 classic, Europe and the People Without History, gives a detailed account of the interconnection between Europe, colonial expansion, and the globalization of capitalist relations of production. It is well worth the read.
During the same period about 800,000 middle-eastern Jews were displaced, about 2/3rds came to Israel while the rest were scattered to the four winds. My Father’s Paradise is the story of a Kurdish Jewish man’s removal from Iraq to ultimately settle in America as told by his son.