The racialized logics of settler colonial policing: Indigenous ‘communities of concern’ and critical infrastructure in Canada

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, critical infrastructure has become a central organizing node of national security policing. At the same time, ongoing Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism in Canada has highlighted the centrality of critical infrastructure as a network of dispossession, a focal point for insecurity governance practices, and a fixation of settler colonial policing efforts. Scrutinizing an internal police report released under Canada's Access to Information Act, this article examines how Indigenous communities have been framed as a primary threat to the country's critical infrastructure. This article contributes to recent scholarly work examining the evolution of critical infrastructure protection and resilience in the Canadian context, including the integration of private sector corporations as security peers within a reorganized national security environment. In particular, it emphasizes the racialized ideological formations of settler colonialism that code and surveil Indigenous communities who assert self-determination as a source of menace to the vital systems and networks that sustain the prosperity of settler society on stolen Indigenous land.