From dispossession of lands to dislocation of Turtle islanders : the Turtle Island perspective of ongoing capitalist colonization in Canada

Canada's sociopolitical economy in part results from the interrelation of capitalism with assimilative policies to eradicate Indigenous Nations. Using a Turtle Island perspective, this paper explores the beginning of commercial (political-economic) relations between Indigenous Nations and the colonizers. Turtle Island nations had complete sovereignty upon contact; they retained the authority to govern their communities during the fur trade from the early 17th to the middle of the 19th centuries, until the industrial revolution. In the majority of what is known today as Canada, the ‘signing' of the Numbered Treaties by the original inhabitants of Turtle Island created the historical belief that the lands had been surrendered. Capitalist colonization refers to the quantifiable sociopolitical and economic gains of the Canadian government stemming from the creation of Canada through Confederation. We examine the history of Indigenous Nations' dispossession beginning in the last third of the 19th century for the purpose of agricultural and industrial development. Dramatic transformations of Indigenous economies occurred in the period of fur trade mercantilism, and these transformations paved the way to depriving Indigenous Nations of their mean of production and sustainable evolution. The removal of Indigenous sovereignty over economy, health, education, kinship, and child rearing ways has had a detrimental impact on the health of Turtle Island, its original inhabitants, and the following seven generations.