The Habits of Settlement: A Critical Phenomenology of Settlerness
Abstract
This thesis investigates the role of settlers in maintaining settlement in Canada. I problematize settler bodies to deliberate on their potential for performing decolonization. My discussion seeks to complicate theoretical approaches that position the onto-epistemological stance of the settler as their impediment to decolonizing action. Drawing from the fields of phenomenology and affect theory, I discuss habit formation in bodies. I use case studies that discuss settler-Indigenous land relations to ground these theories of habit. I look to Indigenous leaders, artists and scholars, who offer valuable insights into the habituations of settlement as an institutionalized arrangement and a mode of behaviour. I argue that settlement is a structure that emerges through settler bodies by way of their everyday being in the world. Performing settlement is therefore a habitual tendency for the settler who knows themselves in the world. A program for decolonization must address these habitual faculties beyond inducing an epistemological shift. I examine and confront settlers’ habitual tendencies to consider how they can shift their bodily habits and why they might want to take up the task of decolonization. I conclude with an initial framework for bringing settlers to the difficult work of confronting the legacy of colonialism and forging respectful treaty relations with Canada’s Indigenous sovereign partners.