Reflections through land and property on settler-Indigenous urban relations

Abstract

Indigenous lands have been turned into homes and sources of capital accumulation in western settler cities. Land has been subjugated into property. Indigenous urbanism creates spaces that are invited by settlers, in some cases, and in others, they are invented by Indigenous peoples and seen as threatening to settler colonial socio-spatiality. Our commentary argues that the settler colonial state has an obligation to use its capitalist tools to return land, and its proceeds, to Indigenous nations, and to better manage the co-existing systems of Indigenous and settler land use. We do this with the help of examples from urban areas across Canada. Economic reparations will depend on reversing some of the extraordinary intergenerational transfer of wealth to settlers from Indigenous lands turned private property.

Introduction

Settlers in countries like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States have made Indigenous lands into their urban home and source of capital, and the resulting “disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence” (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 5). Fundamentally, as Heather Dorries (2022: 311) puts it,

colonization does not simply concern the acquisition of territory, it also participates in the creation of property itself and possession must be regarded as an effect of dispossession. In the context of settler colonialism, property cannot be separated from the violence of conquest.

Settler colonialism, the subjugation of land into property, capital accumulation through property privatization, and its regulation and paramount protection through settler state institutions set a challenging stage for transformative decolonization.

Indigenous urbanism is a concept referring to the adjustment of our cities so that Indigenous approaches to the production of urban space gain greater priority and currency (Nejad et al., 2019). As an analytic approach, Dorries (2023: 110) argues that Indigenous urbanism focuses on “how Indigenous peoples make urban space in ways that acknowledge the force of colonialism, but does not define Indigeneity or urbanity only in relation to colonialism.” Concepts developed by Faranak Miraftab (2004, 2009) to discuss spaces of citizenship practice are adapted in our commentary to examine, in settler terms, the efforts of Indigenous peoples to liberate themselves from oppression and dispossession in cities. Specifically, we use Miraftab’s (2004, 2009) concepts of “invited spaces,” sanctioned and legitimized by state authorities, and “invented spaces,” that confront the status quo to normalize different, or restore pre-existing, practices. By drawing on examples of “invited spaces” (i.e., permissible, and even supported by settler state institutions and whitestream society; seen as adding value or capital to urban places) and “invented spaces” (i.e., material, spatial, and symbolic re-appropriations, or actions of resistance; typically seen as valueless or threatening to settler socio-spatiality) our commentary discusses the interaction of settler colonial capitalism with Indigenous self-determination as well as Indigenous spatial production unbound from property in Canada. As practices of Indigenous urbanism “function to normalize certain kinds of relations, in concert with or against capitalism and colonialism” (Dorries, 2023: 115), understanding why some are invited, others not, and the reasons why this distinction must be fluid and not rigid, will extend existing literature. We argue that the settler state has an obligation to better manage the co-existing systems of Indigenous and settler land use—both the invented and invited spaces of Indigenous urbanism—and to use its capitalist tools to return land, and its proceeds, to Indigenous nations.

Settler colonial capitalism and Indigeneity

David Newhouse (2000) likens capitalism to the adaptive and unremitting “Borg” familiar to fans of the Star Trek television franchise, which will inevitably absorb Indigenous societies into its totality. Contemporary Indigenous societies have undoubtedly become enmeshed with capitalism (Austin-Broos, 2009). Practicing self-determination would therefore seem inseparable from people’s abilities to achieve viable livelihoods within this dominant mode of production. From this position, and the exercise of agency within it, Newhouse (2000: 154, emphasis in original) notes that what Indigenous peoples can do “is mediate the worst effects of capitalism through the continued use of our values and the transformation of these values into institutional actions. The world that we used to live in no longer exists.”

Yet Indigenous authors have unsettled this narrative, arguing that a politicized resurgence of Indigenous cultural practices, territorial law, and land- and relationship-centred ethics must directly confront the colonizing power of state, capital, and settler institutions rather than align with and attempt to carve out benefits from this structure (Alfred, 2009; Alfred and Corntassel, 2005; Corntassel, 2012; Corntassel and Bryce, 2012; Coulthard, 2008, 2014; Daigle, 2016; Simpson, 2014, 2017; Wolfe, 2006). Resurgence, as a concept, represents a commitment among many Indigenous people to practice distinctive cultural values through political thought and action, sustainable economic practices, solidarity and mutual support among diverse and widespread communities. It also includes actions of resistance against the multiplicity of power structures affixing Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination to the recognition of piecemeal rights within a largely unaltered colonial legal apparatus. Taiaiake Alfred (2009) contends, for example, that a resurgence of Indigenous orders of law, governance and economic organization that ground people’s livelihoods in their territories is essential for self-determining people and nations. Self-determination begins with an individual’s freedom to choose their own interests, affiliations, and destiny, while collective self-determination is possible through the inheritance and practice of cultural knowledge and values, creating a principled backdrop for group dialogue and decision-making (Alfred, 2009). Hirini Matunga (2013: 19) emphasizes the enduring relationships between ancestors, the lands and places of the ancestors, and the people and communities descended from the ancestors, held together by the inheritance of worldviews, beliefs, and value systems.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates a Nishinaabeg understanding of precolonial Indigenous society near what is now the city of Peterborough, Canada, explaining that every person was embodied in an inalienable degree of self-determination to “figure out their gifts and their responsibilities through ceremony and reflection and self-actualization” (Simpson, 2017: 4). Self-actualization was fulfilled through intimate relationships with the land and all human and non-human life, while systems of governance arose from the cyclical, interconnected needs of all lifeforms that share resources in a territory. “[O]ur knowledge system, the education system, the economic system, and the political system of the Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg were designed to promote more life” (Simpson, 2017: 3).

Urbanization across Canada has accompanied, and been enabled by, the dispossession and enclosure of Indigenous land and upheaval of Indigenous peoples from their home territories (Coulthard, 2014; Edmonds, 2010; Harris, 2004; Tomiak, 2017). For example, the Métis of Red River in what is now the city of Winnipeg were denied title over their land after the creation of the province of Manitoba. They were instead offered a scrip system of parcel allotment which extinguished their Aboriginal rights, allowed land speculators to purchase scrip from Métis individuals at low cost, and ultimately displaced families, many of whom relocated to the margins of prairie towns, cities, and crown land such as tracts allotted for road construction (Laliberte, 2013). The scrip system was also implemented across what became the other two prairie provinces of Canada, Saskatchewan and Alberta, with similar dispossessory results.

First Nations were forcibly enclosed on reserves to allow for the colonization of Indigenous territory and the extraction of wealth from Indigenous land. For a century and a half, Canada’s attempted consolidation of territorial sovereignty through jurisdictional authority and private and crown property has relied on the Indian Act (Canada, 1985) and what Patrick Wolfe (2006) calls “elimination” or “replacement” policies: isolation on reserves; dissolution of traditional governance structures; state regulation and gendered erasure of women’s Indian status and band membership if, for example, they married a non-status man; criminalization of ceremony; restriction of traditional economies and denial of agricultural technologies; the violent indoctrination of Indigenous children into western knowledge and value systems through Canada’s genocidal residential schools; and the systematic removal of Indigenous children from their families during and since the “Sixties Scoop” (Warnock, 2004). These policies have wrought immense intergenerational harm onto Indigenous peoples in ways that must be understood as instrumental to the expansion and enforcement of state jurisdiction and the proliferation of private property across Canada.

An examination of spatial production must therefore critique the Canadian state’s and settler society’s co-dependent entanglements with capitalism, the power and structural necessities of which continually reify property relations under authorities of legal jurisdiction that dispossess Indigenous peoples of territorial sovereignty and self-determination (Pasternak, 2014, 2015; Tomiak, 2017). Robert Nichols (2018: 5) describes dispossession as “a unique historical process, one in which property is generated under conditions that require its divestment and alienation from those who appear, only retrospectively, as its original owners,” referring to “not only the forcible transfer of property but transformation into property, albeit in a manner that is structurally negated for some, that is, ‘the dispossessed’.” The growth and development of Canadian cities as densely populated and propertied socio-spatial landscapes has relied on and contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous territory.

Indigenous spaces compatible with property

Over roughly the past decade, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh (MST) First Nations, whose unceded traditional territory includes the city of Vancouver, have re-possessed around 90 acres of contiguous land, known as the Jericho Lands, purchased from the federal and provincial governments in that city’s upscale neighbourhood of West Point Grey. Working with the City of Vancouver, the land has been planned and the area re-zoned to enable the development of thousands of new units of high-density housing along with public spaces, community services, and environmental features that make it one of the most significant real estate developments in the city’s history (City of Vancouver, 2024).

The MST First Nations have worked to embed their processes, practices, worldviews and objectives into this new development and to reflect their cultures throughout the development area. Roughly a third of the new homes are projected to be affordable or social housing units, aligning with settler state objectives to urgently develop more (affordable) housing to help alleviate Vancouver’s rent inflation crisis. This initiative serves as an example of creating an invited space of Indigenous urbanism that is permitted and welcomed as “authentic” and “proper” (Miraftab, 2004: 4) by the settler society, circulating billions of dollars through the property market in Vancouver for decades to come. For the MST it will create important economic opportunity, training and employment, and community wealth to serve a variety of the First Nations’ needs. It will attach positive cultural and symbolic capital to Indigenous nations in an urban setting (Bourdieu, 2005; Nejad et al., 2020) and enact economic inclusion without disruption to settler colonial capitalism and its system of private property (Van Der Haegen, 2024).

Another example of invited spaces of Indigenous urbanism that align with the propertied settler city are the nearly 100 new urban reserves created mostly in Saskatchewan and Manitoba over the past 40+ years. First Nations acquire land parcels on the real estate market, on a willing buyer-willing seller basis, and then apply to the federal government to acquire reserve status on the land. The financial resources to purchase the land have in most instances come from land entitlement framework agreements made between the federal, provincial, and First Nation governments to settle outstanding debts of land owed to Indigenous nations by the settler state. The federal government expects a municipal services agreement to be reached between the First Nation and the municipality before it approves the conversion of the land to reserve status. That agreement itemizes municipal services that will be extended to the urban reserve and their cost and payment to the municipality from the First Nation in place of property taxes. Compatibility between land use on the reserve parcel and the municipality’s official plan and zoning bylaw, as well as a joint dispute resolution process are also articulated in the agreement.

Urban reserves, which are mostly commercial properties (Tomiak, 2017)—such as office buildings, retail spaces, gas stations—generate financial wealth for the First Nation to serve the needs of their members, and economic opportunities for members living in the city. They project positive Indigenous cultural capital in the city and strengthen relations with settler governments and communities. Though the urban properties are held by First Nations mostly as community and not individual holdings, as with the Jericho Lands example, urban reserves do not challenge or remarkably transform the socio-spatial order of colonial capitalist cities (Barry, 2019; Fawcett et al., 2024; Tomiak, 2017). We turn our attention now to the “invented spaces” (Miraftab, 2004, 2009) of Indigenous urbanism, which do unsettle the propertied landscape.

Indigenous spaces unbound from property

Rapid Indigenous urbanization since the 1950s has many causal factors that are intricately connected to the outcomes of settler colonial policies. Indian Act (Canada, 1985) legislation and federal policy entrenched conditions of poverty on reserves to accelerate the disintegration of Indigenous society and integration into the “multicultural” Canadian polity (Cairns, 2000). When people chose or were forced to leave their reserve communities and relocate to cities, which was an implicit goal of Canada’s assimilationist agenda (Belanger and Lindstrom, 2016; Coulthard, 2014; Stanger-Ross, 2008), they were determined by the state to have relinquished their Indigenous cultures, their Indian status, and therefore their Aboriginal rights (Newhouse and Peters, 2003).

Urban policies akin to “municipal colonialism” aimed to keep Indigenous people contained on reserves and peripheral to cities, which were perceived by their predominantly white inhabitants as “settler” places (Edmonds, 2010; Harris, 2002; Stanger-Ross, 2008). Indigenous people who moved into cities have struggled to survive amid hostile material conditions in antagonistic social environments while carrying the psychological, spiritual, and physical traumas inflicted by settler colonial and state violence. Yale Belanger and Gabrielle Lindstrom’s (2016) analysis of urban homelessness among Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) people in southern Alberta reveals how individuals’ decisions to leave their reserve communities for cities are largely an outcome of state violence, control, and the subsequent fracturing of relationships and connections between people and their land, territory, kin, and cultural knowledge and identities. The authors contour the complex reality of participants’ “lived space” (Lefebvre, 1991) self-described as somewhere between their home reserves (which often represent feelings of loss and disconnection), and cities (in which they share struggles of poverty, precarity, violence, and myriad exclusions).

In this sense, the lived space that Belanger and Lindstrom’s participants experience and embody represents a “spiritual homelessness” — a state of deprivation and “in-betweenness” resulting from the colonizing fragmentation of land into bounded property and the severing of relational connections through which Creation is rendered meaningful:

Now trapped in a liminal space characterized by the trauma associated with territorial dispossession and colonialism’s psychological wounds, the participants helplessly watch as interpersonal relationships crumble based on choice of residential site (or a lack of choice thereof). Colonialism thus emerges as not an historic footnote but an active process that continues to influence Niitsitapi society’s unravelling. (Belanger and Lindstrom, 2016: 178)

Yet, despite their systemic exposure to conditions of precarity and exclusion, Niitsitapi people who experience urban homelessness continue to see themselves as connected to their home territories through stories and ancestral memory of place, creating invented spaces of Indigeneity in the settler city to the extent possible under conditions of structural violence (Mohammed et al., 2017). Furthermore, participants expressed some sense of comfort and belonging amongst a community of people who not only share similar cultural, ancestral, and place identities, but who are also fellow survivors of settler colonial violence and its dispossessive structure.

The socio-spatial presence and agency of urban Indigenous people in the invented spaces of the city has largely been constructed (and embattled) by settler society and whitestream institutions as disruptive, threatening, and ultimately unsettling to the possessive individualism and economic fixity, certainty, and stability of liberal property geographies (Blatman-Thomas, 2019; Mackey, 2014; Shaw, 2007; Tedesco and Bagelman, 2017). An example of one such invented space occurred in 2018 when the “Justice for our Stolen Children” encampment was created on the province of Saskatchewan’s legislature grounds in the city of Regina, which is also Indigenous traditional and treaty territory. After the violent deaths of two Indigenous youth—Tina Fontaine in Winnipeg and Colten Boushie in Saskatchewan—and the acquittals in both cases of the men accused of their murders, Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous allies assembled at the camp to prompt reform to the child welfare and justice systems. These two lives lost, and their context of impunity, had become emblematic of the systemic racism affecting the lives of Indigenous peoples. The camp remained in place for 197 days, growing from two to 15 tipis. The settler government became concerned that upcoming Canada Day celebrations on the legislature grounds, a signature public space of the city, would be disrupted by the presence of the people camped there. In their invented space, they were portrayed as “defiant” and “extreme” (Miraftab, 2004: 4). Invoking municipal bylaw violations (e.g., prohibition on overnight camping) the Regina Police Service was called upon to break up the camp on its 111th day. The tipis were dismantled and six people were arrested. The camp was quickly re-established at the site and grew larger; the message of resistance and resurgence from this invented space more resonant than before (Walker and Nejad, 2022).

A powerful example of Indigenous urbanism in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, was conceived but not implemented, demonstrating the challenge of overcoming dominant capitalist property relations. Taking shape in the plan for Asinabka, this invented space prioritized healing sacred land from industrial exploitation by re-naturalization, removing a dam from a waterfall and building an Indigenous gathering lodge (Sylvestre and Castleden, 2022). Asinabka refers to an area that includes a section of the Ottawa River at the Chaudière Falls including four islands, a spiritual space of great importance for meeting, economy, and politics in Algonquin territory before the arrival of settlers. It was appropriated by settlers in the early 1800s to create a lumber mill harnessing the power of the now dammed theretofore sacred Falls (Sylvestre and Castleden, 2022). The Asinabka plan was led by the prominent Algonquin Elder William Commanda and acclaimed Indigenous architect Douglas Cardinal and was the product of years of collaboration with Algonquin communities throughout the territory, intent on re-appropriating the site and its jurisdiction (Sylvestre and Castleden, 2022). The plan was never implemented, however, and “[a]fter nearly three decades of struggle to reclaim Asinabka, settler capital won out, and a high-density real estate development now colonizes the site” (Sylvestre and Castleden, 2022: 414).

Both the “Justice for our Stolen Children” camp and the Asinabka site plan examples show how the invented spaces of Indigenous urbanism, combining materiality, relations to traditional territory unbound from capital accumulation, and resurgent cultural practices are seen as threatening to settler socio-spatiality, and without value. Indigenous urbanism must be understood “in ways that exceed the colonial relation” (Dorries, 2023: 110). The invented and invited spaces of Indigenous urbanism are both products of self-determination, whether they reproduce settler colonial capitalism or not, and will both need to thrive in a future state where Indigenous and settler co-existence is achieved, owing to an equal and non-discriminatory status being accorded to both systems of law and custom relating to land (Porter, 2013; Wensing and Kelly, 2024: 287). The rigid distinction reproduced by settler society between what is considered authentic and proper versus defiant and extreme needs to be broken down under the weight of responsibility to support both systems of law and custom. Returning to Indigenous urbanism as an analytic, “Indigeneity and urbanity” need to be seen “as a set of mutually constituted practices” that do “not view space as inherently Indigenous or inherently colonial, but instead as continually contested” (Dorries, 2023: 115). When Indigenous urbanism is practiced in ways that confront colonial norms, it is important to understand “the possibilities for Indigenous life” that exceed those “typically prescribed by settler-colonial urbanism” (Dorries, 2023: 110) and the right/responsibility of Indigenous nations to work toward their attainment.

Urban Indigenous people and communities have not simply adjusted to life in Canadian cities on settler terms; they have laboured to adapt and create institutions, spaces, and networks to support their cultural identities, their shared needs, and their collective ambitions (Peters, 2005; Walker, 2008). Through their lived spaces, they have forged relational connections to navigate, resist, and transcend settler geographies and their many boundaries (Gyepi-Garbrah et al., 2014; Lobo, 2018). Self-governance and cultural density (Andersen, 2013)—that is, the proliferation of Indigenous spaces, organizations, networks, relationships, and practices of self-determination—are important to shaping “Pimatisiwin” in the city (Settee, 2013), a Nehiyawak (Cree) concept meaning the good life or pursuit of the good life. Indigenous urbanism is fundamental to “unsettling” colonial urbanism, leading cities to adapt so that they are positively cast Indigenous places where urban co-existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples thrives amid power relations that account for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination at the urban scale, as within broader territories (Heritz, 2018; Porter and Barry, 2016; Tomiak, 2016).

Pursuing a good life and living well together do not mean only that Indigenous peoples gain more opportunities to participate in local labour markets and mainstream institutions, though these would significantly help to alleviate some conditions of precarity under capitalism. Indigenous urbanism is also not restricted to symbolic and visual representations in placemaking such as public art, the (re)naming of streets and buildings to reflect Indigenous history, people, and stories, and the many celebratory cultural events that take place in cities. These invited spaces are important building blocks for reclaiming identity and ceremony, connecting people and community to place, and supporting cross-cultural understanding, but they are typically supported by settler institutions because they are relatively easy adjustments that produce cultural capital without disrupting circuits of accumulation in cities. A broader and necessarily politicized framing of Indigenous urbanism also encapsulates ideas and strategies for urban change that would alter the materiality of cities and jurisdiction in the production of urban space to support culturally grounded, emancipatory, and regenerative conceptions of the good life (see Dorries, 2023 on Indigenous urbanism as a powerful analytic).

Indigenous people live under and alongside dominant settler and state apparatuses, but some also envision and work toward the realization of worlds and futurities beyond the confines and injustices of the settler state and its rule of law, jurisdiction, property regimes, and the liberal market economy (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Indigenous resurgence, or culturally rooted practices that seek to reclaim place, land, and relational responsibilities, represent individual and collective commitments among Indigenous peoples to refuse, when incommensurable with Indigeneity, the many and multi-scalar boundaries of settler colonial capitalism. Resurgence is not, however, simply the rejection of systems of oppression; it is also (principally) the regeneration and reconstitution of Indigenous nationhood, law, kinship, languages, cultural values, and territorial obligations in the lived spaces of daily life. Resurgence carries radically transformative potential to decolonize the socio-spatial organization of cities and elevate Indigenous urbanism.

While settler society’s capitalist orientation produces spaces of unevenness and exploitation, many Indigenous people not only resist these processes but also continue to enact alternative relations based on dignity, reciprocity, and kinship. Everyday interactions, structured by relationality and reciprocity, continue to produce distinct Indigenous forms of community and urban space. (Tomiak et al., 2019: 7)

Conclusion

Indigenous urbanism creates spaces that are invited by settlers, in some cases, and in others, they are invented by Indigenous peoples and seen as threatening to settler colonial socio-spatiality. The Jericho Lands being developed by the MST First Nations in Vancouver and urban reserves in Prairie cities and towns are invited spaces of Indigenous urbanism, with land uses and socio-spatial functions that are generally compatible with settler colonial urbanism and the capitalist property market. Whereas these invited spaces translate relatively seamlessly into propertied urban geographies, the invented spaces of Indigenous urbanism, such as those created by the urban homeless in southern Alberta, the Justice for our Stolen Children camp, and the Asinabka site plan discussed in this commentary, do not. The invented spaces are constituted in ways that evoke Dorries’ (2022: 315) important work on urban planning without the preoccupation of property:

Planning without property would be an approach to planning that would dispense with the assumptions upon which the ownership model of private property is founded. As a set of practices, this mode of planning would be focused on identifying, making, and strengthening the human and more-than-human relationships the flourishing of life requires.

The settler colonial city has created an enormous transfer of wealth from Indigenous nations to settler society over generations (Dorries et al., 2022), something that Elvin Wyly (2024) has recently referred to as [settler] “property supremacy.” This requires urgent attention and the development of mechanisms to transfer some portion of capital gains on property back to Indigenous nations on whose traditional territories and homelands those gains are made (Walker, 2024). The colonial settler state must find ways to use its capitalist market mechanisms to counteract the intergenerational exclusion of Indigenous nations from the proceeds of property generated on treaty and unceded lands. The possibility today of coexisting settler and Indigenous land uses, in the context of Indigenous urbanism, was ruptured generations ago by “elimination” or “replacement” policies directed at First Nations (Wolfe, 2006), and at Métis through the scrip system and denial of collective land title and governance (Laliberte, 2013). Returning land, and some portion of settler proceeds of land and resources, to Indigenous nations is necessary for economic reparations, and the co-existence of future generations of Indigenous and settler peoples will depend on getting this right.

Treaties affirm Indigenous peoples’ collective rights and valued responsibilities to maintain reciprocal relations with all of Creation, centred on the vitality and responsible sharing of land and resources, and should ideally have provided a covenant of respect for the mutual sovereignties of Indigenous nations and the settler crown. The extent to which self-determining Indigenous nations subsequently reproduce the capitalist market mechanisms with the land is their decision to make. Upon the balanced surface of power relations intended by treaties and protected in international law, where Indigenous and settler institutions are equally viable and legitimate parties to decision-making, and Indigenous and settler systems of land rights, interests, uses and tenure co-exist, it will become irrelevant to talk about whether spaces are invited or invented (Barry, 2012; Porter, 2013; Wensing and Kelly, 2024).