Wages of Settlement

• In Event: In Pieces: Allotments, Kuleana, and Alienated Indigenous Territories

Abstract

Indigenous resistance to colonization can intersect uncomfortably and often violently with a fight by workers to access Indigenous lands for extraction and jobs. Jobs have always been a literal frontier of settler colonial conflict because, simply put, colonization takes work. When immigrants began to settle through recruitment programs en mass in Canada, they benefited from a scale of colonial land seizure unknown anywhere else in the world at that time. The means by which to settle was the work – both required and provided – by companies like the railroads, the Hudson’s Bay, and land colonization enterprises. By the late nineteenth century, the market for wage labour on farms and in the central manufacturing regions was well underway as industrialization took hold; the emergence of capitalism was born through its deep reliance on colonial land policy. For this reason, the political economy of colonialism can be studied through a long history of intersecting class formation and colonial land policy in Canada. We might call this dynamic the wages of settlement. This paper explores the “paper worlds” of the Crown’s attempts to perfect its sovereignty through the factor of white wage labour and points to tension between anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles for liberation.

Author

• Shiri Pasternak, Toronto Metropolitan University