The enduring settler-colonial emergency: Indian Affairs and contemporary emergency management in Canada

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) has formalized and systematized how it produces knowledge about ‘civil unrest’ involving Indigenous peoples. These practices have been undertaken as part of a government-wide all-hazards emergency management framework that consolidates ‘traditional emergency management’ (e.g. natural disasters, accidents) with the domain of national security. Through this framework, INAC monitors rallies, demonstrations, and blockades, alongside floods and forest fires, under the auspices of emergency management. I argue that these practices are continuous with ‘colonial emergency’ – a liberal legal-political mechanism originating in martial law, which enables pre-emptive political and military interventions against anti-colonial movements and Indigenous resurgence. The contemporary emergency management paradigm of national security is a manifestation of the enduring ‘colonial emergency’ for the settler-colonial state.