Excerpted from Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine, edited by Jeremy Wildeman and Muhanad Ayyash
Foreword by Veldon Coburn
You would be forgiven for believing that Canadians were genuinely alive to the insidiousness of one of history’s most destructive projects. For the most part, Canadians care little, if at all, about the ongoing devastation of settler colonialism. This might be surprising given the enormous strides that Indigenous peoples across Canada have made in the last decade to raise the profile of settler colonialism within the public consciousness. A Truth commission, as well as numerous high-profile inquiries, have thrust the subject into the broader public consciousness. The Idle No More movement, entailing countless demonstrations of resistance, has similarly registered with settler society and the settler state. Many allies in decolonization have come out of the shadows of public institutions, such as the media and formal public education systems, that were designed to produce their ignorance of our colonization. The publicity of Indigenous resistance in Canada—our public, “in-your-face” presence—made our subjugation and plight impossible to ignore. But the Canadian education in settler colonialism remains woefully deficient.
Perhaps nowhere in the world are the voraciously eliminatory impulses of settler colonialism more evident than in Palestine. Yet this odious project fails to register with the general Canadian public. Many of us from Indigenous nations within Canada recognize the breakneck pace of the very worst excesses of settler colonialism being visited upon our Palestinian brethren. We see the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, their communities razed, and their territory seized for Israeli settlement—often accompanied with violence by settler state authorities. We see the humanity of Palestinians suspended by terror and its unremitting threat of arbitrary exercise. As Indigenous peoples, we recognize our history in Palestine’s present.
I sit here, on my own Anishinaabe ancestral territory, reflecting on the Palestinian future. I cannot avoid the conclusion that Canada’s history of settler colonialism has formed a model for the political situation in Palestine. As an Algonquin, my nation is mere years away from concluding a modern treaty with the settler state in the Province of Ontario. An Agreement-in-Principle was ratified in 2016, a document that will likely evolve into the final treaty, but with few minor changes. When negotiations with the Crown began in the early 1990s, the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation territory in Ontario held unceded and unmodified title to 36,000 square kilometres. After thirty years of negotiations, we will be left with 1.3 per cent of our territory, a mere 475 square kilometres. This arrangement comes after several hundred years of colonial occupation of our territory and the unrestrained settlement of our land. In the mid-nineteenth century, our nation was broken up and forcibly displaced. Colonial authorities left us with a small parcel of land. As a citizen of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn, my reserve at Golden Lake, Ontario remains a mere 6.9 square kilometres. There is not much left, and, from my view, this could be the future for Palestinians.
This book arrives in a cultural moment that claims to be attuned to the atrocities of settler colonialism but in a politically myopic culture. While Canadians awake to the settler colonialism carried out by the state at home against Indigenous nations here, they are largely unaware that their government is deeply implicated in a contemporaneous process in Palestine. It is true that the tensions in Palestine receive very little public attention in Canada. But this outcome—the general ignorance of what has been unfolding in Palestine—is not the result of some innocent brand of Canadian inexperience. As we learn in this book, there are forces at work that sustain the hegemony of Israeli superiority in the Middle East. And, as the contributions demonstrate, actors from segments of Canadian civil society form part of the colonial scaffolding not just here at home, but also in support of Canada’s international partners undertaking their own colonizing endeavours. None of this should surprise keen observers of Indigenous colonial politics in Canada. But like our domestic disciplinary focus of study on Indigenous peoples, there are ardent denialists of Palestinian persecution at the hands of the settler state.
The contributions in this book contend with Canada’s naive popular culture and its haughty unworldliness. Canada’s sense of itself is not one of international strongman. Rather, Canadians cultivate and exude a smug sense of self-satisfaction of being champions for human rights and brokers of peace on the world stage. But Canada’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel should put the lie to this popular fiction. Awakening to its own violent origins—a birth marked with brutality against the people and political institutions of Indigenous nations—should give us pause to question Canada’s relationship to Israeli settler colonialism of Palestine. And this is the point of Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine. Canada is a settler colony at home, as well as abroad. Each chapter deftly moves the audience through a coherent argument that will leave the reader with no alternative conclusion.
Veldon Coburn
Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of Ottawa
