Intervention – 'Addressing the Indigenous-Immigration “Parallax Gap”'

In Canada, geographies of immigration and settlement and colonial domination overlap. And yet, academic and policy discourses about immigration and settlement in Canada neither engage the colonial domination of Indigenous peoples nor their struggles for self determination. We contend that the separation of indigenous sovereignty and migration issues is productive; constitutive of the state, of national identity, citizenship, and of the narratives and categories that animate them. It is also economically productive in that it helps mask the ways in which the generation of wealth is premised on the perpetuation of colonial inequality. The following intervention is based on a round table discussion addressing colonial domination in the context of immigration and settlement held as part of a conference on immigration and settlement at Ryerson University. Our intervention explores some of the contradictions that emerge when Canadian geographies of immigration and settlement are brought together with those of colonial domination in order to provide a basis from which broader conversations and research agenda might develop.