Asinabka in four transformation: how settler colonialism and racial capitalism sutured urbanization in Canada’s capital to the plunder of Algonquin territory

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to scholarship on settler colonial urbanism by examining the historical constitution of Canada’s National Capital Region at the intersection of racial capitalism and settler colonization. Its impetus arises from four years of solidarity work with Algonquin land defenders and accomplices struggling to reclaim Asinabka, an Algonquin sacred complex of islands and waterfalls in the Kitchissippi (Ottawa River) between the Canadian cities of Ottawa and Gatineau. Situating the current struggle within the 200 years of crisis and consolidation that produced the Ottawa Valley, we track the entwined histories of settler capitalists transforming Asinabka in response to the shifting demands of racial capitalism alongside the ceaseless effort by Algonquin people to exercise jurisdiction over the islands in the face of colonial incursion and theft. To do so, we read across 100 years of colonial archives in conjunction with settler historiographies of the lumber industry. We argue that while local in form, Asinabka’s transformations were constitutive of place- and race-making processes at a variety of scales and sites throughout Algonquin territory. We conclude by considering how traces of this history are recursively mobilized in the present to transform Asinabka into an investment property.