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Land dispossession in settler colonies was rooted in the assertion of colonial sovereignty, which empowered settlers to re-territorialize Indigenous lands and create a regime of private ownership. This talk explores the land law doctrine of pre-emption, which was a key modality of Indigenous land dispossession in British Columbia and throughout North America. It examines the nature of power that the state bestowed upon individual settlers to perform property even before they were bona fide owners. This particular land law doctrine elucidates the relationships between legality and illegality, and law and violence, in the making of racial regimes of ownership. Moderated by Adam HajYahia.
The event is co-sponsored by Bard Architecture and the Center for Indigenous Studies.
Brenna Bhandar is Associate Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam First Nation). She is the author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (DUP: 2018), and co-editor (with Rafeef Ziadah) of Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought (Verso: 2020) and (with Alberto Toscano) Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Verso: 2022).
Land dispossession in settler colonies was rooted in the assertion of colonial sovereignty, which empowered settlers to re-territorialize Indigenous lands and create a regime of private ownership. This talk explores the land law doctrine of pre-emption, which was a key modality of Indigenous land dispossession in British Columbia and throughout North America. It examines the nature of power that the state bestowed upon individual settlers to perform property even before they were bona fide owners. This particular land law doctrine elucidates the relationships between legality and illegality, and law and violence, in the making of racial regimes of ownership. Moderated by Adam HajYahia.
The event is co-sponsored by Bard Architecture and the Center for Indigenous Studies.