Settler colonialism’s container technologies: photographing crates in the Canadian Arctic (1926–1953)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wooden crates are a recurring subject in the visual archive of settler colonialism in Canada’s Arctic, appearing on the shores of eastern Baffin Island throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Reading some of the hundreds of photographs that appear in the holdings of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, this essay charts the symbolic and political work that crates performed in the settler colonial imaginary. It draws on David L. Eng’s call to examine the ‘colonial object relations’ that have split Indigenous subjects into ‘good and bad objects’ in the liberal imaginary to propose that wooden crates are symptomatic of settler colonialism’s unconscious drive to make and unmake Inuit subjects into citizens in response to the demands of national and transnational political events. Tracing the intersection of crates, photography and ballot boxes in the archive, the essay examines the settler colonial state’s attempts at imposing and consolidating power, but also points to the practices of continuity and resistance enacted by Inuit subjects.