Pacification and Indigenous Struggles in Canada

Abstract

Front-line police operations are deeply entwined with less visible activities – or practices not commonly identified as policing – that are carried out by a wide range of participants as strategies of settler-colonial pacification operating through the organizing logics of security and liberal legalism. Using open source texts and records obtained through access to information requests, this article unmaps some of the contemporary strategies employed by Canadian institutions to pacify Indigenous resistance. As a contribution to the body of work seeking to develop the politics of anti-security, the analysis disrupts the binary categories that animate security logic by examining the public order policing approach of the Ontario Provincial Police, the framing of Indigenous resistance as a security threat, and the integral role of Indian Affairs in securing the settler-state.