Social Reproduction in the Settler Colonial Context

Settler colonialism is distinguished from other forms of colonialism by settlers claims to – and often violent assertions of – a regenerative capacity and right (Veracini 2010): that is, the right to socially reproduce a society in the settlers’ image. Unlike exogenous, or external, forms of colonialism, it is ‘rooted in the elimination of Indigenous peoples, polities, and relationships from and with the land’ (Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel 2014) in the service of establishing the political, economic, social and ecological conditions for producing and reproducing capitalist relations. Living through the ongoing settler colonial processes that are making and remaking Canada, social reproduction offers a rich theoretical framework for thinking through the ongoing gendered and racialized processes of asserting this ‘regenerative “right”. Indeed, as Indigenous feminists have long argued (Anderson 2003, Maracle 2008, Kuokkanen 2011, Simpson 2016), Indigenous women’s bodies, their reproductive capacities and labours, and Indigenous kin and caring relations are at the frontline of colonial dispossession and decolonizing resistance in Canada. Residential schools, wherein Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and communities and brought to church and state-run institutions notorious for abuse, are a devastating example of this. Applying the framework of social reproduction, which centres the paid and unpaid labours of lifemaking, helps to locate this gendered site of colonial violence, not as a “side-effect” of settler colonialism, but rather as integral to it. As I have written about elsewhere, a social reproduction framework, likewise, helps to reveal lifemaking as a potent site of decolonizing resistance (Hall 2015, 2022). However, as scholars of social reproduction have cautioned (Mezzadri 2019), the framework of social reproduction has often been engaged with the Global North as an unspoken norm, and, as such, has the potential to invisibilize variegated forms of caring labours and, indeed, engagements with capital itself. In the northern Canadian context, for example, Indigenous communities engage with social reproduction, not just in relation to capital, but in relation to land-based subsistence economies (Coulthard 2014). Furthermore, Indigenous labours of lifemaking are performed through distinct gendered ontologies (Nahanni 1992) and place-based relations that lose specificity when grafted upon imported political economic typologies. Thus, in this paper, I propose to ask, how might theorists of social reproduction learn from and build analysis through engagement with place-based Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous feminisms? And how might these grounded engagements reveal multi-scalar processes of dispossession and resistance?