Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics

L13(a) - Indigenous Sovereignty, Agency of Land and Decoloniality

Date: Jun 4 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Jesse Mehravar (Western University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Dani Delaney (Queen's Univeristy)

Decolonizing Labour in Canada? Breaking Down Barriers for Indigenous Apprenticeships and Skilled Trades in the North: Gabrielle Slowey (York University)
Abstract: With the Canadian North experiencing increased extraction and skilled labor activities alongside a national skilled labor shortage, Indigenous peoples—who represent the fastest-growing demographic—are becoming critical to economic development. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognizes training and employment opportunities can improve the socio-economic conditions of Indigenous communities and foster economic reconciliation. This reconciliation is essential to ensure that Indigenous peoples benefit economically from developments within their traditional territories. However, current discussions and scholarly research often overlook the recruitment and retention challenges that Indigenous apprentices face across various industries, hindering their progression to successful careers in skilled trades. For instance, the Government of Nunavut’s "Nunavut 3000" initiative, or Igluliuqatigiingniq ("building houses together"), launched in October 2022, aims to construct 3,000 new housing units in Nunavut by 2030. A crucial component of this project is to develop a local labor force for this construction. Yet, challenges like the lack of qualified journeymen and the apprenticeship exam itself create barriers to completing this Inuit and northern labor force. This paper, based on research conducted in Nunavut and Northern Ontario, recounts Indigenous peoples' experiences in the trades and explores the structural barriers—such as apprenticeship exams—that uphold settler norms and impede Indigenous engagement and success. The paper initiates a dialogue towards understanding how economic reconciliation can occur or is currently unfolding.

Mapping Networks of Indigenous Digital Sovereignty and Infrastructural Relationality: Danika Jorgensen Skakum (University of Alberta)
Abstract: This paper outlines how Indigenous digital sovereignty can be understood through the lens of infrastructural relationality. Because Indigenous data has been appropriated by the settler state as a tool of colonization, data sovereignty often rises to the forefront of digital Indigenous sovereignty narratives. However, this paper demonstrates how the material infrastructure of digital networks—both the demands made of the land in the service of data transmission/storage and the consequences of jurisdictional complexity in transmitting and storing data—impacts Indigenous digital sovereignty in ways not yet fully understood or theorised. In a digital age increasingly governed by Big Tech, this paper reframes the conversation on Indigenous digital sovereignty beyond the state and traditional forms of governance, ultimately asking what sovereignty might look like for Indigenous nations now and in the future.

Making Home: Maintaining Indigenous Relationships: Joanne Heritz (Brock University), Liam Midzain-Gobin (Brock University), Mary Ellen Simon (Niagara Regional Native Centre)
Abstract: In this paper we present the concept of “making home” as expressed by the urban Indigenous community in Niagara Region, Ontario. The work comes out of a community-driven project co-developed by the urban Indigenous community, represented by the leadership of local organizations, and two researchers from Brock University. While housing access and affordability are critical issues facing many across Canada, homelessness, income, and employment factors place Indigenous Peoples as the most vulnerable demographic for housing insecurity. In Niagara, the 2021 Point-in-Time count found that just over 22 per cent of those experiencing homelessness identified as Indigenous, despite Indigenous Peoples comprise less than three per cent of Niagara’s population. We argue that such an acute crisis results not only from Indigenous Peoples not having a place to live, but also the ongoing realities of settler colonial dispossession. Community members expressed the need for somewhere to live that is safe and affordable, but also needing it to be a place where they can build and maintain relationships – between family, political communities, and with the non-human world. Drawing from their own words, we present this as being deeply rooted in the community’s vision of self-determination in urban spaces.

Affective Knowing and the Agency of Land: Felt Relations and Embodied Elations: Tyler Caux-Loohuizen (McGill University), Kelly Gordon (McGill)
Abstract: This paper relies on the insight that settler colonialism comprises an ongoing relational milieu, continually (re)constituted by and through particular ways of being and knowing in relation to land and life, to reaffirm the indispensably affective dimensions of diverse Indigenous land-based onto-epistemologies. When we speak of our embodied existences upon the land in disembodied (unfeeling) or abstract terms, I assert that we risk re-enacting colonial relations of separation and division that mirror the ways that settler colonial relations to knowledge often seek to divide between the knower, the known, and the land known through. Such processes, I argue, mischaracterize practices of deep relationality as mere philosophical frameworks, sterile conceptual toolkits to be learned, understood, acquired, and applied at an individual level, rather than lived through collective practices with real consequences for surrounding lifeworlds. Moreover, I posit that drawing out the affective consequentialities of knowing through and on the land in accountable ways offers us greater fluency in languages through which we might better foreground both land’s complex agency, and also the complex agencies of Indigenous peoples. Not unlike humour and gender (which I invoke as examples of dynamic means of communicating lived and felt meaning) I argue that thinking through the land in affective terms communicates meaning in ways that can only be grasped fully when felt or experienced. In conclusion, I suggest that refusing to ignore or erase the affective dimensions of living and thinking through the land constitutes a more effectively accountable and anti-colonial onto-epistemological paradigm.