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This paper draws on archival research and theoretical work to articulate the specific histories, processes, and structures of primitive accumulation in British Columbia. Such processes of accumulation appear differently here than in the comparably more well‐theorized contexts of imperial colonialisms. As we highlight the agents and infrastructures of dispossession, our research also aims to foreground the importance of agents and infrastructures of resistance. Different dispossessions generate different antagonisms, and we argue that Indigenous subjects are situated antagonistically to capital not only as laborers partially or wholly subsumed into capitalist social relations, but as Indigenous peoples as such, whose Indigeneity has been 'in the way' of development from the 1850s onward. Private property requires before all else the deterritorialization of those whose relations with the land do not revolve around its commodification. Violence against Indigenous nations, and especially Indigenous women, is not incidental to capitalist development but is a prerequisite to capitalist subsumption in the settler‐colonial context. In requiring the death of either Indigeneity or the person, capital constitutes Indigenous struggle as an antagonist, interrupting both the subsumption of labor and the circulation of capital (even as such struggles may also self‐constitute themselves in a variety of ways). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In settler colonial contexts the historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples is foundational to understanding the production of urban space. What does it mean that cities in what is now known as Canada are Indigenous places and premised on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? What roles do new urban reserves play in subverting or reinforcing the colonial-capitalist sociospatial order? This paper examines these questions in relation to new urban reserves in Canada. Most common in the Prairie provinces, new urban reserves are satellite land holdings of First Nation communities located outside of the city. While the settler state narrowly confines new urban reserves to neoliberal agendas, First Nations are successfully advancing reserve creation to generate economic self-sufficiency, exercise self-determination, and subvert settler state boundaries. I argue that new urban reserves are contradictory spaces, as products and vehicles of settler-colonial state power and Indigenous resistance and place-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Ottawa is on unceded Algonquin territory and, as the centre of formal political power in what is now known as Canada, has represented an important site for local, regional, national and international Indigenous networks organizing to resist settler state agendas of dispossession and assimilation. Yet the city-region is rarely acknowledged as a deeply contested space where competing ideologies and imaginaries reproduce and disrupt settler colonial common sense and state power. Based on a critical interrogation of methodological settler colonialism, this paper proposes a decolonizing scalar lens to analyze Indigenous contestations that unsettle Ottawa. Through brief case studies of local community-building, the Algonquin land claims process, and Chief Theresa Spence's hunger strike on Victoria Island, it illustrates the contested, interconnected, and competing nature of scalar confi gurations and spatial ontologies and the role of "Ottawa" in settler colonialism and Indigenous resurgence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]