Critical Race Theory: A Multicultural Disrupter

Abstract

The field of sociology has largely ignored critical race theory (CRT) as a relevant theoretical and pedagogical framework for the study of white supremacy and Indigenous and Black race relations in Canada. In the United States, CRT has long been a theoretical framework tethered to and contextualizing the underpinnings of systemic racism and white supremacy as the cornerstone of structural oppression in American legal society. The initial focus of this work was to study the operationalization of the myriad ways in which race and racial power were constructed and represented in American law and society and the attendant ways in which Black civil rights under American law could never be achieved through the application of legal jurisprudence. CRT’s theoretical milieu has expanded beyond legal research to examine the sphere of racist structural oppression as systemically embedded in immigration, housing, education, employment, healthcare, and child welfare systems. The writing of this article has been an intentional active disruption to the claims that multiculturalism has the answers to race relations in an ever-changing Canadian society. While there are six main tenets of CRT, this article specifically focuses on three core tenets of CRT which argue that (1) racism is an ever-present dynamic of life in Canada; (2) racial subordination remains endemically tied to the political, cultural, and social milieu of white supremacy impacting the lives of Indigenous and Black peoples in Canada; and (3) racism has contributed to all historical and contemporary manifestations of structural oppression related to land theft and anti-Black racism. As such, CRT has much to contribute to race-radical research, pedagogy, and praxis when it comes to understanding race relations in a Canadian society grappling with an ever-changing multicultural narrative.

1. Introduction

One of the tenets of CRT is that race is not a biological phenomenon, but rather that race is socially constructed and “race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient” (Delgado et al. 2012, p. 6). CRT recognizes that racism is coded in law and by extension embedded in social structures and public policy, and that systemic racism is responsible for reproducing racial inequality (George 2020). This emphasis means that CRT is not a fixed or unchanging social theory. Rather, CRT is malleable and transformative, and within CRT subgroups have formed to elucidate the expansive terrain that explicates the critical importance of the concept. Given that CRT developed within an American framework, much of the early inception of the study focused on the racial Black–white divide and dynamics in American society. However, subgroups have developed such as disability critical race studies (DisCrit), which examines the intersection of race and disability, QueerCrit, which emerged from critical legal scholars who were interested in racial justice for sexual minorities (Misawa 2012; see also Delgado and Stefancic 2001; Misawa 2010; Valdes 1995). Ladson-Billings’ (1998, 2000, 2003) scholarly work and research has examined the intersection of CRT and education, arguing that qualitative research in the fields of education and social science should consider teachers’ expectations of student perceptions, curriculum design, environments, and race (Misawa 2012). Critical race feminism (CRF) focuses on the dynamic relationship between race and gender. Consequently, within this subgroup, Chicana and Latina women have developed a research framework that focuses on how other racial groups such as Asians, Native Americans, and other racialized women experience structural oppression in American society. Although CRT relies on counter-storytelling and narrative in the process of transforming the relationship between law and racial power, the emergence of these subgroups challenges us to ask whose knowledge counts and whose is discounted (Yosso 2005).

CRT is an outgrowth of critical legal studies (CLS), a field where scholars question the role of the traditional legal system in legitimizing oppressive social structures (Yosso 2005, p. 71), and feminist theorizing. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) contributed to the field of CRT when she published an article titled Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. In this article, Crenshaw introduced the concept of “intersectionality” to elucidate that women located within multiple social categories (i.e., race, class, gender, disability, sexuality) could experience multiple layers of oppression simultaneously. Given that subordination does not occur along a single categorical axis, Crenshaw argues that “this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification, and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise privileged members of the group” (p. 140). As such, Black women can experience racial and gender oppression, and these forms of oppression can be experienced at the same time, resulting in multiple oppression. These categories then should not be viewed as mutually exclusive but rather a dynamic set of interrelated and interconnected forms of oppression. Crenshaw’s work revolutionized how racial logic was understood in legal jurisprudence, especially when examining how social categories specifically shaped Black women’s experiences of structural oppression.

In addressing the relevance of CRT to the sociological study of race relations and race consciousness in Canada, the writing of this article has been an intentional active disruption to the claims that multiculturalism has the answers to race relations in an ever-changing Canadian society. Below I outline the theoretical tenets of CRT and discuss the ways CRT is a useful analytical tool for addressing “land back” movements and anti-Black racism. I will critique CRT’s distractors and discuss how CRT has much to contribute to race-radical research, pedagogy, and praxis when understanding race relations in a Canadian society grappling with an ever-changing multicultural narrative. Finally, the aim of this article is also cautionary. Given CRT’s theoretical inception in the United States, I want to caution against the use of US theories as the dominant framework for thinking about race relations in Canada. The reason for this is two-fold. First, US theories of CRT, which have expanded to education, healthcare, and sexuality studies, have not examined Indigenous relations, white supremacy, and nation-state formation in this context. Second, American CRT theorists, while examining the interdisciplinary and eclectic parameters of the law, racism, and white supremacy in US society have stopped short of naming the specificity of anti-Black racism as relational to citizenship, immigration, and migrant labour in their analysis. Here is where my work departs, less so in a theoretical way and more in terms of critical race methodology. Although these latter relationalities are beyond the scope of this chapter, they are worth noting regarding the theoretical application of CRT for understanding multicultural race relations.

2. The Emergence of CRT

Critical race theory (CRT) was established in response to the American civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s and the call for a critical examination of race in legal proceedings (Romero 2008). In 1970, civil rights lawyer and scholar Derrick Bell wrote a casebook titled Race, Racism, and American Law, which broadly argued that racial progress mainly occurred when it aligned with the interests of white people (Cobb 2021). He later coined the term “interest convergence” (Bell 1980; see also Milner et al. 2013), explicating the idea that judicial remedies for racial equality and civil rights for Black people will never be achieved if that remedy “threatens the superior societal status of middle and upper class [w]hites” (p. 523). Widely considered the person who created CRT, one could argue that this early casebook could be read as a primer for his ground-breaking work on CRT. Beginning in 1989, along with Bell, the critical legal scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), Richard Delgado (1989), Patricia Williams (1991), and Mari Matsuda (1991) began publishing in legal journals that focused on race, law, and power (Cobb 2021), reinforcing the idea that the social construction of invented racial classifications and hierarchies was not only evident in legal jurisprudence but in all aspects of American life where structural oppression was systemic and systematically embedded. In 1991, Bell wrote an article in the Connecticut Law Review entitled Racial Realism, where he argued that the law and specifically the courts are an extension of preserving the status quo and cannot serve as a refuge for Black people seeking racial equality; rather, he postulated that a new movement called racial realism could be the legal and social mechanism through which Black people could have their voices heard (Bell 1991, p. 364). However, in this work, Bell’s trajectory and hope for racial justice for Black people is met with despair because he argues that Black people in America will never truly achieve racial justice through a legal system entrenched in racism. Arguably a bleak outlook at the time, given our current sociopolitical climate, one wonders if the recent backlash against CRT in America and a burgeoning movement here in Canada is eerily reminiscent of Bell’s early musings. Later in this chapter, I will address recent debates and pushback against equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

Within the American lexicon of legal jurisprudence, CRT has mainly focused on (1) understanding how white supremacy has been created and maintained in America and (2) examining the relationship between that social structure, the law, and the concept and application of “equal protection” under the law. Given that racism was being examined as systemically embedded within legal dispositions and jurisprudence, CRT scholars considered racism to be institutionally grounded in the laws and rules of American society that disenfranchised Black people. In this way, racism is not solely based on individual biases and prejudices but is the result of complex dynamics that are not an assault on white people themselves but rather an assault on the socially constructed and constantly reinforced power of white identification, norms, and interests (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995). Understanding whiteness as a social and institutional passport with a set of beliefs, assumptions, and practices that place and normalize white people at the center or core of everyday life (Gillborn 2015, p. 278) is rooted in the dynamic operationalization of white supremacy culture. The early focus of CRT, mainly conceptualizing racial Black–white dynamics, resulted in critiques that articulated that women and other racialized people who experienced immigrant, sexual, disability, gendered, and classist forms of oppression were excluded from the analysis given the leanings towards this binary. This resulted in articulations that argued oppression in law and society needed to move beyond this binary and towards grounding racial analyses materially by understanding racism as systemic and rooted in differences in power between races (Bonilla-Silva 2015).

3. Theoretical Tenets of CRT

In their seminal book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Delgado et al. (2012) offer an informative tableau of the tenets, criteria, and logic of CRT. Their theoretical insights create a blueprint for establishing what CRT is and its applicability to studying social phenomena:

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationships among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

(p. 3)

Further, Romero (2008, p. 24) outlines how CRT has provided sociologists with a conceptual framework and methodology for the study of race in the various fields of sociology such as crime and deviance, education, intersectionality, immigration, and social justice and activism. CRT views racism as a normal part of everyday life and Foster (2021) contends that “the majority of modern racism remains hidden beneath a veneer of normality, and it is only the more crude and obvious forms of racism that are seen as problematic by most people”. Given this, we see here that CRT has applicability for expanding methodological frameworks that examine the entanglement of racism and structural oppression as embedded in several social institutions. There is no ‘escape’ then from racism or no neutrality of racial dynamics in social institutions that have been the bedrock of civil libertarian rights for some (white people) at the expense and denial of others (Indigenous, Black, and racialized people). Sociologists studying social relationality and the political economy of governance ought to have examined how these institutions have been ensconced in liberal–capitalist ideologies of whiteness and white supremacy.

Lawrence et al. (1993) describe CRT as more than a set of abstract ideas or principles but as a theory that is more of a genre and a movement (pp. 3–4). The intellectual agenda of the movement was an outgrowth from critical legal scholars who felt the limiting confines of the social theory or law ignored and did not make room for an analysis of race and racism in their work. Although CRT provided a blueprint to collectively build a full account of the legal construction of race and racism in America (Lawrence et al. 1993, p. 4), the roots of CRT were firmly promulgated in the education field as well (see, Cabrera 2018; Capper 2015). The preeminent focus of CRT emerged from personal narratives, poetry, fiction, and revisionist histories to call attention to centering race in liberatory scholarship. Lawrence et al. (1993, p. 6) defined six main tenets of the theory:

• Critical race theory recognizes that racism is endemic to American (and Canadian) life; traditional interests and values are vessels of racial subordination.
• Critical race theory expresses skepticism toward dominant legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy; the social construction of race presents an equal opportunity of race as an immutable characteristic devoid of social meaning and tells an ahistorical, abstracted story of racial inequality as a series of randomly occurring, intentional, and individualized acts.
• Critical race theory challenges ahistoricism and insists on a contextual and historical analysis of the law; racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines, including differences in income, imprisonment, health, housing, education, political representation, and military service.
• Critical race theory insists on recognition of the experiential knowledge of people of color and their communities of origin in analyzing law and society; the lived experience of racism informs the critical reflection upon active political practice toward the elimination of racism.
• Critical race theory is interdisciplinary and eclectic; it borrows from several traditions, including liberalism, law and society, feminism, Marxism, post-structuralism, critical legal theory, pragmatism, and nationalism. Eclecticism allows CRT to incorporate aspects of a methodology or theory that effectively enables the narratives of marginalized people and advances the cause of racial justice while maintaining a critical posture.
• Critical race theory works toward the end of eliminating racial oppression as part of the broader goal of ending all forms of oppression; racial oppression is experienced by many in tandem with oppression on the grounds of gender, class, or sexual orientation.

Conceptualizing the construction of race in sociology is not new (see Hatch 2007; Golash-Boza 2016; Christian et al. 2019). Critical race scholars in the field of sociology have asked questions about the workings of systemic and institutional policies and practices that have impacted and granulated social inequity for some time (Yosso and Solórzano 2005). However, utilizing CRT as an analytical framework in sociological theory has a more central focus on the place where racism intersects with other forms of structural oppression:

Critical race theory (CRT) is a framework that can be used to theorize and examine the ways in which race and racism implicitly and explicitly impact on the social structures, practices, and discourses that affect people of color. Important to this critical framework is a challenge to the dominant ideology, which supports deficit notions about communities of color while assuming “neutrality” and “objectivity”. Utilizing the experiences of people of color, CRT in sociology also theorizes and examines that place where racism intersects with other forms of subordination such as sexism, classism, nativism, monolingualism, and heterosexism. CRT in sociology is conceived as a social justice project that attempts to link theory with practice, scholarship with teaching, and the academy with the community. CRT acknowledges that social institutions operate in contradictory ways, with their potential to oppress and marginalize coexisting with their potential to emancipate and empower. CRT in sociology is transdisciplinary and draws on many other schools of progressive scholarship.

(Yosso and Solórzano 2005, pp. 121–22)

By using this framework for developing a critical race consciousness or genealogy of CRT (see Yosso and Solórzano 2005), my goal is to expand and apply this framework to examine the unique history of racism that has impacted Indigenous and Black peoples in Canada. However, next, I examine why there has been such fervent response and backlash to CRT and the implications of that backlash in furthering radical race consciousness in Canada.

4. CRT in Canada: A Long Overdue Call

In Canada, Carol Aylward’s seminal book Canadian Critical Race Theory: Racism and the Law (Aylward 1999) is the only text to examine civil rights law and Canadian racial issues. Although Aylward pays scant attention to whiteness theories (Delgado and Stefancic 1999) and the culture of white supremacy in her book, the text reveals a call for the removal of ‘color blindness’ in Canadian legal proceedings by focusing primarily on the impact of racism for Black clients in legal proceedings. Aylward makes a strong argument for the adoption of CRT and race consciousness praxis as a tool for lawyers to expound and understand the history of racism in Canada, a history which is often invisibilized in the jurisprudence and application of the law. Aylward herself was embattled in her own racial discrimination case, when in 2001 as a professor of law and director of the Law Programme for Indigenous Blacks and Mi’kmaq at Dalhousie Law School, she was embroiled in her own human rights complaint alleging that the dean of her school and several law professors manipulated appointments and tenure on racist grounds (Makin 2001). Her personal experience of racism informed her writing and brings into focus one of the elements of CRT, which is counter-storytelling (Solórzano and Yosso 2002). Bringing to the forefront the epistemologies of racialized people as a dominant methodology in expressing racial oppression, counter-storytelling is a critical race methodology that provides a space to “talk back” and challenge the dominant race neutrality presumed in law.

In the “unspoken constitutional order of multicultural societies”, counter-storytelling about racism and white supremacy has been positioned as deficit-based anti-multicultural rhetoric seeking to destroy a well-oiled and well-established ‘Canadianness’, where the narrative of multiculturalism has been the foundation of a Canada designed as a country where complex differences can co-exist, and where whenever there is discord, “multiculturalism” can provide a palpable solution. However, this is a foundation built on sand, where the complexities of racial differences in this country have come to the fore and our current political and social climate is grappling with influential American populism and racial capitalism. As a nation, “race talk” has vaulted its way into the canons of progressive pundits, who instead of leaning into equity-seeking policy practices have pivoted to denouncing the virtues of equity and inclusion or opted for performative diversity and implicit bias training as band-aid solutions for a society deeply flawed and entrenched in racism. Canadian exceptionalism is also tied to this discourse. It is the idea that in legal discourse, Canadian exceptionalism provides a sometimes elusive and sanitized version of Canadian history that claims Canada’s legal system, particularly its penal system, is void of racial violence in the form of slave patrols, segregation, and lynching and is, therefore, not racist or less racist (Evans 2021).

We are called then, to shift the focus and reframe race relations into a new paradigm—a way to contextualize unequal and inequitable race relations through the lens of CRT and to think of the attendant ways in which CRT can inform praxis and relationality, rather than explain the reproduction of racism. The goal is to demonstrate the empirical and theoretical utility of CRT (see Christian et al. 2019) and to adopt an understanding of CRT that enhances key sociological questions about how relationships of racism in Canada are constructed and maintained by white supremacy and racial capitalism. This knowledge is foregrounded then by the deliberate, intentional acknowledgement that the legacy of colonialism and slavery and contemporary iterations of racial capitalism are defining features of Canadian society for Indigenous and Black peoples.

5. From Land Theft to Land Back: History to Present

Land back movements are social, political, and cultural activist movements that advocate for Indigenous self-governance, economic control, and political authority over treaty territories. Land back movements promote the return to land ownership of traditional and unceded Indigenous land, and these movements are also connected to other campaigns such as Idle No More and Black Lives Matter that address structural racism (Pieratos et al. 2021). Given that racism is an organizing feature of society, there cannot be any objective neutrality in the application of law and legal representation regarding land back movements for Indigenous peoples in Canada, a country still yet to reckon with white supremacy and colonialism. CRT is a useful analytical concept to better understand Canadian race relations, since “CRT is intended as an inquiry into the ways institutions uphold racial violence” (Journal of Critical Race Theory 2021), and the law has sanctioned ongoing acts of racism that have contributed to contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines. Canada’s entire legal system has been built on a value and structural system of oppression that has dispossessed and sought to annihilate Indigenous peoples. The colonial systems of control began with the 1876 Indian Act, which imposed a system of racist governance against Indigenous people and has resulted in a litany of social, political, and cultural dispossession. This included the conquest of Indigenous land, the introduction of patriarchal systems of heteronormative cohabitation and marital standards, the loss of kinship and status for Indigenous women who married non-Indigenous men, the creation of residential schools, the 1960s scoop, and cultural genocide. The more current impacts of anti-Indigenous racism include a lack of attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and transgendered, two-spirit, and gender-diverse people (MMIWG2S+), the lack of implementation of recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Report, and disproportionate incarceration rates impacting Indigenous communities. This list, while not inclusive of all the dynamic relations between Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian government, is a list that exacts how white settler colonialism has reframed Indigenous relations as unequal relations buoyed by historical and contemporary indexes of power and privilege umbilically tied together in an inimical web of power, privilege, and government practices. In other words, when we extract one element of this unequal relationship, we see that land dispossession is a racial capitalist–extractivist issue and a racial justice issue that challenges the notion of a multicultural Canada curated on a ‘broomstick of meritocracy’, which emphasizes relational equality nestled together in a multicultural rhetoric of living together amidst complex differences.

Canada is a country veiled in white supremacy and racial capitalist endeavours. Land possession, a Eurocentric stronghold, has always begun with land dispossession. The profitability of land for capitalist gains started with the theft of Indigenous land and white settler occupation. Although land theft was and continues to be a global phenomenon, in Canada, this ecosystem of white settler capitalism was enacted with Numbered Treaties signed between 1871 and 1921 via the legal jurisprudence of terra nullius (legally deeming land to be unoccupied and uninhabited), thereby granting land to colonial interests and resulting in the expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their land. When “peaceful” clearing of the land could not be achieved, the Canadian government resorted to genocide, forced removal, the introduction of disease, and starvation. The economic stage had been set, and by the end of the nineteenth century the land belonged to the Crown and Indigenous peoples had no legal protections for their land. Iterations of land theft also included Canadian government military occupation and the denigration and prohibition of traditional spiritual practices, languages, dress, knowledge, and customs (CJPME 2014). The ongoing impact of white settler colonialism (Barker 2009; Preston 2013, 2017; Fung 2021) and racial capitalism (Melamed 2015; Pasternak 2020; Bledsoe et al. 2022; Dorries et al. 2022) on Indigenous peoples has been long documented. The entanglement of white settler colonialism can be most acutely understood by examining the tension surrounding the Athabasca tar sands that boast bitumen deposits, a heavy and dense form of petroleum, in northeastern Alberta, Canada. Beginning in 1870 when petroleum was discovered in the Athabasca region, and with the additional discovery of gold in the Klondike region, the Canadian settler state and oil industry stakeholders have entered into fraught contentions and negotiations with Indigenous peoples over the tar sands (Preston 2013). Motivated by resource extraction, unregulated settlement, and an ideology that “nature exists to be used by humans, to be re-imagined as commodity and as clearly distinct from and thus not directly interconnected to human life” (Preston 2017, p. 372), extractivism is deeply connected to land alienation and economic growth (Tran 2020). The concept of extractivism derives from the extractivismo discourse, which centers lands and communities directly affected by extractive projects such as the process of extracting raw materials (metals, minerals, oil, gas, water, fish, forestry, hydroelectricity, and industrial forms of agriculture) by extractive industries (Lowrey and Rogers 2022). The logic of extractivism, however, is rooted in the ‘legal’ acquisition of Indigenous land by the Canadian government’s position that neoliberalism has normalized a free market economy where white settler claims to Indigenous lands in the name of individualism, private property, and capital power is state-sanctioned (Preston 2017) and legally mitigated. Countering Greer’s (2019) notion that extractivism is a predominant form of intrusion, more poignantly it can be argued that racial extractivism is a form of violence and ongoing colonialism, simultaneously operationalizing corporate interests while dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land. In fact, in the Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper (Yellowhead Institute 2019) report reviewing over 100 cases of land injunctions, court orders researchers found that 76 percent of injunctions filed against First Nations by corporations were granted, 81 percent of injunctions filed against corporations by First Nations were denied, and 82 percent of injunctions filed against the government by First Nations were denied (Tran 2020). The court siding with corporations indicates that “colonial relations of power are no longer reproduced primarily through overtly coercive means but rather through the asymmetrical exchange of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation” (Coulthard 2014, p. 15 as cited in Samson 2016). The power differentials between Indigenous communities’ access and means to legal representation to defend their land claims pale in comparison to the “resource-desiring machine” of corporate capitalists:

The realization of this settler fantasy of an “empire in extent of resources” required more than just the ideational reconceptualization of the land as resources or the production of knowledge of materials’ chemical composition, physical properties, industrial applications, and economic value. To govern the land as a territory replete with resources belonging to a settler nation requires a set of legal, political, and economic structures of control—structures that are themselves founded upon acts of dispossession and the extinguishment of existing claims to the land and existing forms of legal and political organization.

(2014; Rasmussen and Lund 2018, McKittrick 2006, p. 99 as cited in Simpson 2019, p. 7)

The “empire in extent of resources” is in reference to Senator John Schultz’s 1888 Report of the Senate Select Committee on Resources of the Mackenzie Basin, where he espoused the virtues of making Canada a great nation replete with untapped resources and the settler state’s claims to these territories (Simpson 2019). Referring to the extensive stock of petroleum in the Athabasca and Mackenzie Valley, Shultz went as far as stating that “this great petroleum field will assume an enormous value in the near future and will rank among the chief assets comprised in the Crown domain of the Dominion.” (Schultz 1888, A1–14 as cited in Simpson 2019, p. 6). This “resource reserve” replete with veiled ideologies of “legal” land acquisition rationalized settler colonial violence and racial extractive manifestations (Preston 2017) as enacted by the law.

The carving up of Canada by land surveyors began long before the Dominion of Canada assumed colonial jurisdiction over the Northwest Territories and Rupert’s Land by British law (Simpson 2019). As surveyors moved through this land, they measured and mapped out extensive grids demarcating sections that could be sold as a commodity (see Rück 2024). Therefore, the dynamics of land theft were inextricably interwoven with the dynamics of racial extractivism, white supremacy, and legal jurisprudence. White settlers began with violations of informal Indigenous land theft that materialized into formal state-sanctioned legal agreements (treaties) dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their land. Considering that one of the tenets of CRT is to challenge ahistoricism and contextualize how the law has subjugated and legally denied rights to groups along racial lines, from the start treaties were weaponized against Indigenous peoples:

Moreover, whereas Indigenous peoples of the Athabasca region believed Treaty 8 to be an agreement to protect their lands and livelihood, the state interpreted the agreement as the extinguishment of Indigenous nations’ claims to their territories, thereby lawfully permitting the cession of Indigenous lands to the Government of Canada… From the perspective of the prime minister and the settler state, treaties were a mechanism that could facilitate lawful dispossession, and thereby forward the project of securing resources, while also circumventing violent conflict by procuring the agreement of Indigenous peoples to “extinguish” their rights to the land peacefully.

(Simpson 2019, p. 9)

The law became a tool for ongoing settler colonialism, as well as a mechanism for extractive industries to profit from Indigenous land theft with little to no recourse for Indigenous communities. What began under the guise of surveyorship was more accurately a strategic racial capitalist endeavor that used military and security forces to protect corporate interests, resulting in genocidal violence and abuses, the displacement of people, gender-based violence and discrimination against women, cheap labor, human rights violations, and the criminalization of environmental defenders (Lowrey and Rogers 2022). Further, the inculcation of whiteness within these colonial processes cannot be understated. White settler colonialism is further complicated when we unpack the dynamics of who benefits from Indigenous land theft:

Whiteness has unequivocally controlled and dominated the laws and boundaries of who was permitted to settle on dispossessed Indigenous territories, and this guaranteed an overwhelming majority of prosperous settlers of British and European stock.

(Fung 2021, p. 117)

In addition, CRT recognizes that racism is endemic to Canadian life; therefore, the violence enacted on Indigenous communities must be analyzed within the context of racism and racialization, “as part of a longer effort to track the intimate relationship between the production of racialized difference and capital accumulation” (Dorries et al. 2022). This intimate relationship of land theft should be understood as converging with the material conditions of Indigenous peoples’ lives and the sociopolitical governance of white supremacy and racial capitalism. By erasing the existence of Indigenous peoples from their land and naturalizing the white settler nation state’s claimed territories under Canadian jurisdiction (Preston 2017), instead of armed conflict, forced assimilation supported by the law was the preferred strategy adopted by Canadian colonizers (Comack 2018). This process of ‘settling’ the land was ‘legally’ constituted via the 1876 Indian Act, which officially banned Indigenous peoples from land ownership and denied their right “to participate even minimally in the political life of Canada” (CJPME 2014). The advancement of this ‘legal’ method of land theft was another iteration of white settler colonialism as relationally ‘intimate’ to racial extractivism and economic growth. As this settler colonialism advanced, so did the notion of using the law to supplant Indigenous self-determination, thereby creating the “racist erasure of Indigenous law and jurisdiction” (Yellowhead Institute 2019).

6. Contemporary Iterations of Land Dispossession

The law as a legal enterprise for land acquisition has been normalized and seen as an inevitable consequence of present-day lifestyles (Spady 2020). The intergenerational violence that Indigenous peoples have experienced in so-called Canada and on Turtle Island has been politically ‘white-washed’, producing border economies and cheap migrant labor, all in the name of economic growth. To put the violence of land theft and resource extractivism further into context, contemporary iterations of land dispossession have also taken shape via Canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes, an “inherited background field (of settler colonialism) within which market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations converge” (Coulthard 2014, p. 14 as cited in Stasiulis 2020). Every year agri-business economies boom in Southern Ontario as truckloads of temporary migrant workers from the global South arrive to “work the land” in the name of contributing to the Canadian state’s “resource-desiring machine.” Stasiulis (2020) explores how the “disposability and hyper-commodification” of low-wage migrant programs are interconnected with settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination,” to eliminate Indigenous peoples from their land (see Wolfe 2006, Coulthard 2014, and Day 2015 as cited in Stasiulis 2020, p. 24) while simultaneously enabling racialized migrant populations from the global South to provide cheap, flexible, and precarious labour for Canadian economic growth (24). In addition to this technology of disposability operating in parallel processes targeting Indigenous and migrant workers, CRT illuminates how this relationship of racism in Canada has been constructed and maintained by white supremacy and racial capitalism via legal projects supported by provincial and territorial jurisdictional policies and practices that exploit migrant workers and render Indigenous peoples invisible. Using CRT to contextualize the intersection of land theft and white settler capitalism illuminates the attendant ways in which the law has been used as a vessel of racial subordination by the Canadian state’s legal support of resource-extractive industries that promote and exploit the pigeon-holing of racialized migrant workers for economic growth. CRT acknowledges that racism is endemic to Canadian life; thus, we can deduce that given Canada’s long history of racist labour market demands (Block and Galabuzi 2011; Sharma 2002) and the undesirability for migrant workers to become permanent residents, white supremacy has fueled racial inequality and positioned extractivist resource industries as neutral and objective opportunities for those who “want to work” on land that is “free enterprise.” This immutable characteristic of meritocracy is related to the tenet of CRT that challenges dominant legal claims of neutrality and dominant ideologies. To that end, this tenet of CRT posits the notion that “free enterprise” is racially motivated and exploitative, and that racial capitalism is driven by racial inequality. Therefore, within the dominant Canadian multicultural narrative, any acts of racism are presented as an abstract story of racial inequality or an individualized act. Further, the concept of meritocracy has created a false promise of multicultural social cohesion, where some Canadians (citizens) both born in Canada or naturalized have been welcomed into the citizenship cult of belonging, only to engage in collective amnesia regarding Indigenous land dispossession. This novelty of collective amnesia suggests that dispossession is “a unique historical process, one in which property (land) is generated under conditions that require divestment and alienation from those who appear, only retroactively, as its original owners” (Nichols 2018). To be blunt, if there were no original landowners, there could be no land dispossession. Examining land theft within the context of CRT challenges colonial ahistoricism, which insists on a narrative of multiculturalism where land theft as an economic enterprise has been invisibilized as a formidable cornerstone of economic development and growth in Canada. In the next section, I discuss how land theft directly correlates with anti-Black racism as a form of Canadian state-sanctioned systemic racism and how CRT as a sociological framework can aid us in our understanding of Black and Indigenous race relations in Canada.

7. CRT, Anti-Indigenous and Anti-Black Racism

The global system of white supremacy birthed the fraternal rather than identical twin oppressions of anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism. At the expense of rendering Black bodies obsolete, slavery processes that operated for over 200 years in Canada were racial capitalist processes. The colonial conquistadors who alienated Indigenous peoples from their land were the same folks who extracted Black people for exploitative labour, mostly from the western coast of Africa, in the name of capitalism. A sociological adaptation of CRT foregrounds a dialect specific to understanding anti-Black racism as another form of racial extractivism. In other words, the movement and commodification of Black people’s bodies across the Atlantic to land stolen from Indigenous people demonstrate that this racially extractive process was solidified through white supremacist and capitalist endeavors, intertwining land theft from Indigenous peoples with transnational anti-Black racism (see Busey and Coleman-King 2023). More specifically, anti-Black racism as a global phenomenon has been shaped by white settler colonialism (Leroy 2016; Liu et al. 2023; Winant 2008). This form of structural oppression interlocked with class, gender, and sexuality exacted racial oppression, colonial conditions, and capitalist exploitation that incorporated Black people through empire building (Patterson and Kelley 2000, p. 18 as cited in Busey and Coleman-King 2023). CRT, thus, is a formidable theory for interrogating racist structures of coloniality, modernity, and white supremacy that continue to operate globally to suppress Black humanity and humanness in general (Busey and Coleman-King 2023). When we interrogate the concept of humanism as a definitive marker of civility and a criterion for determining which bodies are fit for nation state building, we illuminate Sylvia Wynter’s (1984) analysis that the raced body is not human and humanism was “a noisy assault on Europe’s idea of itself as synonymous with humanism […] and the anticolonial movement had initiated a radical critique of the heart of European self-consciousness by demonstrating just how deeply its celebrated concept of Man depended upon the systemic degradation of non-European men and women” (Scott 2000, p. 120). Ongoing settler colonialism reminds us that “the eviction of Indigenous peoples from the realm of humanity is a settler ritual that must be repeatedly enacted to consolidate white settler society” (see Sherene Razack 2015 as cited in Latty et al. 2016, p. 141). When Indigenous peoples are evicted from humanity, they are evicted from inclusion, protection, and rights under the law (Latty et al. 2016).

As an ontological project, race relations in Canada is a multicultural quagmire where a carefully orchestrated narrative of multiculturalism has positioned Canada as a country that has yet to reckon with or be accountable for its complicity in slavery, while at the same time espousing a politics of recognition via the Truth and Reconciliation 94 Calls to Action, of which only 13 have been completed, and none of which were completed in 2023 (Jewell and Mosby 2023). The persistent narrative that multiculturalism represents post-colonial progress is a preoccupation and a distraction to the reality that “[w]hite settler supremacy’s creation and implementation of an unnatural social hierarchy continues to be the cause of inequality and tension and an ideological barrier to peace” (Fung 2021, p. 122). For Black people, the counter-narrative (another CRT tenet) to this disruption is evidenced by the extensive documentation of anti-Black racism in Canada (DasGupta et al. 2020; Maynard 2017; Mianda 2020; Mullings et al. 2016; Jean-Pierre and James 2020; Kumsa et al. 2014), and more specifically in healthcare (Douglas et al. 2022; Kalifa et al. 2022; Williams and Kaniki 2023), education (Cameron and Jefferies 2021; Lopez and Jean-Marie 2021), the labor market (Basra 2021; Block and Galabuzi 2011; Block et al. 2019; Galabuzi 2001; Teelucksingh and Galabuzi 2007), and the criminal justice system (Crichlow and Lauricella 2018; Mensah et al. 2021; Reece 2020; Wortley and Owusu-Bempah 2022). The race-relational dynamics of structural and systemic oppression in these systems indicate another intimate relationship between white supremacy, power, and privilege. Moreover, this literature demonstrates that the centrality of racism as demonstrated in CRT tenets as an organizing feature of Canadian society continues to mark Black bodies as being in need of surveillance and social control.

The last three tenets of CRT are also illuminated via this literature. First, there has been a recognition that the situated knowledge of Black people and their experiences of anti-Black racism informs the activity and political practice toward the elimination of racism. It was only in 2020 that social movements led by Black Lives Matter activists pushed the Canadian government to recognize and name systemic racism as structurally embedded in all Canadian institutions. There have been calls for remedies and actions in the literature, and action-oriented mobilization has acutely taken place with the national and global response to George Floyd’s murder and the call for social, political, and cultural accountability to systemic anti-Black racism. The above literature also demonstrates CRT’s interdisciplinary and eclectic framework, given that aspects of Black feminist theory and misogynoir are present in several of the analyses of anti-Black racism. The last tenet of CRT addresses a specific call toward eliminating racial oppression as part of the broader goal of ending all forms of oppression. Much of this literature has grappled with and clearly stated that until Canada reckons with and is accountable for its continued role in the perpetuation of anti-Blackness in sociopolitical systems, there can be no real substantive change or transformative justice for Black people in Canada. In the ethos of multiculturalism as a cultural and political post-racial signifier that has come to be the trademark and hallmark of race relations in Canada, CRT challenges the Canadian state to move beyond its denial and invisibilization of anti-Blackness, name it as a politically engaged and continued systemic project of structural oppression, and work towards accountability and repair for Black people in Canada.

As we have advanced a framework of CRT in Canada that is constitutive of examining the fluidity of white supremacy, land theft, and anti-Blackness, King (2015) reminds us that we often associate the settler with Indigenous genocide and the master with slavery but “the settler and the master are one and the same” (King 2015, as cited in Patel et al. 2015, p. 64). Further, the violence of white settler relations has unsettled what constitutes a settler, and the disruption of Indigenous self-determination is also a disruption of Black diasporic belonging and existence in colonial Canada (King 2019). Within the realm of race relations in Canada, we have to ask deeper questions that emerge out of challenging the relationship between law, racial power, and multiculturalism. For example, “how do we make sense of intergroup and intragroup relations in a multicultural Canada that has created a social hierarchy along color lines” (see Fung 2021) and has created “projects based on a politics of equivalence” (King et al. 2020) for different racialized people who have settled on Canadian land? How are we to contextualize the colonial trauma that was enacted towards Japanese people held in internment camps in British Columbia during WWII or the impacts of the Chinese Head Tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, which culminated in racist anti-Chinese policies? How has legal jurisprudence impacted race relations among these groups in a multicultural Canada? Given that the unmaking of the ‘Indian’ relied on racist tropes and constructions of Indigenous peoples as foreigners in their own land, how do we engage in processes of ‘land back’ as occupiers of this land? What is our responsibility in pushing this agenda forward and being co-conspirators with Indigenous communities? Further, for those of us uninvited, racialized people who have been settled or perhaps chosen to settle on this land, how do we navigate and negotiate the spatiality of race and place and the material reality of participating in a political economy that continues to dispossess Indigenous communities? Regarding anti-Blackness, how do we respond to these questions while bearing in mind that the specificity of anti-Blackness for Black Canadians who are “non-Canadian, always other, always elsewhere, recent, unfamiliar, and impossible” (McKittrick 2006, p. 99 as cited in Fung 2021) rests in unstable positionalities, some as full citizens but not quite visible as full settlers? (see Fung 2021). As we continue to traverse the political landscape of multiculturalism, the answers to these questions rest in embracing CRT as a theoretical framework, as well as an action-oriented methodological paradigm.

8. CRT Backlash: A Distraction Marked by Denial and Ignorance

The danger of a single story is that it takes a life of its own when it travels unabated and without critical inquiry. A single story gains currency from a lack of critical analysis and an ignorance of the impactful reality of systemic racism in our society. The backlash against CRT and more specifically the implementation of anti-CRT legislation “prohibits learning about racism, thus highlighting the mutually reinforcing relationship between systemic racism and the production of ignorance” (Richmond et al. 2024, p. 240). A single story is also the tale of white supremacy, power, and the law. In the US, and with an ever-increasing presence in Canada, CRT has been described as a dangerous academic theory, an attack on white people, and a form of educational indoctrination. Those opposed to CRT are often people who have never felt the sting of racial oppression and who have socially, politically, and culturally benefited from unearned social class and racial privilege (i.e., white people). The opposition to CRT is not merely a right-wing or conservative preoccupation or phenomenon, rather it speaks to colonial narratives of erasure, denial, conquest, and legal subjugation by power-brokered elites in America and Canada. Attacks on CRT have also called into question the validity and premise of explicating equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in social institutions. Gillborn (2015) explains that “[b]y focusing on racist inequity, and challenging a colorblind narrative that sees only millions of individuals engaged in meritocratic competition, critical race theory (CRT) is itself accused of racism” (p. 277). These accusations are veiled in a cloak of whiteness, where CRT itself comes to be viewed as a tool of oppression against a white society already immersed in the myth of reverse racism and anti-immigrant sentiments. A lack of critical consciousness as evidenced by white adjacency has also been noted (Vargas and Saetermoe 2023). Internationally, during a commons debate on Black History Month, UK MP Kemi Badenoch, the Women and Equalities Minister, said that white children should not be taught about “white privilege and their inherited racial guilt”. She went on further to state that “[a]ny school which teaches these elements of political race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law” (Murray 2020). Such views demonstrate the lack of understanding about CRT and how iterations of racial harm show up via lateral violence.

In 2019, the New York Times launched the “1619 Project”, a public discourse project that reframed American history by centering the achievements and contributions of African Americans through a series of essays that marked the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people of African descent being forcibly brought to America (Hannah-Jones et al. 2019 as cited in Richmond et al. 2024). The project brought significant attention to police brutality against Black Americans. A year later the world was metaphorically on fire, bolstered by an unprecedented health pandemic and the death of Black Americans Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Sandra Bland by the police. For the first time in history, we witnessed a global uprising, reckoning, and demand for police accountability for brutality against Black people. In Canada, we were not immune to these calls for action. Police brutality against Indigenous and Black people is not new. Police brutality against Indigenous communities (Cunneen and Tauri 2018; Dhillon 2015; McKay 2021; Puplampu 2023; Van Camp 2022) and Black communities (Ayoyo 2018; Maynard 2020; Thompson 2020; Waldron 2021; Wortley et al. 2020) has been well-documented yet simultaneously invisibilized in a multicultural Canada. In fact, amidst cries for justice and at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, politicians in Canada such as Doug Ford, former RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanche all struggled with accepting that systemic racism existed in Canada.

Somehow, the story must begin somewhere. While history is no stranger to denials of oppression at the expense of racialized, marginalized, and disenfranchised people, the backlash against CRT in America began with one man’s political prowess, supported by a then president’s ignorance and obtuse reasoning that to engage with CRT and America’s reckoning of racism was undeniably unpatriotic. In September 2020, white supremacist Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and political pundit, appeared on the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight (FOX NEWS 2020) to discuss the ‘dangers’ of CRT, referring to the theory as an “existential threat” that was being “weaponized” against “core American values” (Alexander et al. n.d., p. 9). Speaking directly to then President Trump, he said:

I’d like to make it explicit. The president and the white house—it’s within their authority and power to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical race theory training from the federal government. And I call on the president to immediately issue this executive order—to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology at its root (2 September 2020).

Within days of this broadcast, members of Trump’s team contacted Rufo for help in drafting an executive order to denounce CRT, and on 22 September 2020 the then president issued Executive Order 13950, followed by a memo six days later from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directing the heads of federal agencies to investigate any trainings that specifically included CRT (Alexander et al. n.d., p. 9). Governed by the US legal system, legislation to ban it has been enacted, and since 2020, 44 states have explored anti-CRT legislation and 18 states have passed restrictions against its use in academic and political institutions (Ray and Gibbons 2021). Misdirected and misguided by mainstream rhetoric and intensified by a “collection of cultural and political fears” (López et al. 2021, p. 4), the backlash against CRT in America quickly began to take shape as “[r]allies have been organized, school board meetings disrupted, executive orders issued, and legislation introduced to remove or exclude CRT from school curriculum” (López et al. 2021, p. 3). Pushing an agenda of white supremacy disguised as patriotism, anti-CRT cries have become another iteration of systemic and institutionalized racism supported by legal jurisprudence.

In Canada, emboldened by US populism, which uses broad strokes to conflate the study and impact of racism in our society with the study of a sociolegal theory of racism in our society, anti-CRT detractors fail to discern that CRT’s primary purpose is to raise consciousness, amplify the experiences of racism, and examine structural inequality and inequity in society. Even though there is concerted evidence that points to the inequities and barriers faced by racialized people in Canada (see Gintova 2023), CRT in Canada has been referred to as generating “animosity, division, and ultimately hate” (Blueprintforcanada.ca n.d.). The same website explicitly states, “[w]e categorically reject those ideological narratives which seek only to undermine the social fabric of Canadian society” (Blueprintforcanada.ca n.d.). Other examples include a story in the Waterloo Region Record where some parents told school board trustees in the region that they were concerned their children could “internalize shame and guilt because they’re white” and an article in the Toronto Star where it was reported that trustees and members of Durham Catholic School Board had concerns about the language of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘colonialism’ being used in their new anti-racism policy (James and Shah 2022). These pushbacks demonstrate that not only is the premise of CRT grossly misunderstood but the functionality of CRT as a theory to examine ongoing colonialism and the history of racial harm enacted against Indigenous and Black people is less important than protecting white narratives, white fragility, and white privilege. Further, CRT is a call for historical accuracy regarding colonial processes that were instrumental in nation state formation and by extension how the working of white supremacy has maintained structures of inequality and inequity. This call is one of accountability and action, not one of anti-whiteness. Unfortunately, CRT detractors are often white people who have denied the legitimacy of their unearned privilege and whose own complicity in perpetuating systemic racism is protected by multiculturalism and meritocracy, as well as “political fears related to race, racism, and the prospect of an increasing number of citizens from marginalized groups participating in the democratic process” (López et al. 2021, p. 4).

9. A Brief Note on Limitations

As a theoretical framework and methodology, CRT has been nested within and moved beyond the confines of sociology. As mentioned above, CRT is malleable and transformative, making it relational to several disciplines. Although beyond the scope of this paper, there are limitations and permutations of CRT that need to be acknowledged. Busey and Coleman-King (2023) have noted that CRT is not a complete or exhaustive theory. Their work highlights the importance of understanding CRT within the frame of diaspora and transnational studies, noting that there is no monolith of Blackness. To that end, the future directions for CRT should also be examined within a Caribbean and African context, as well as for Indigenous populations in Australia or New Zealand and other countries reckoning with deep histories of colonialism for their Indigenous peoples. Given that one of the cornerstones of CRT is intersectionality, the future directions should also grapple with an Indigenous or Black feminist lens that centers on gendered racism (Busey and Coleman-King 2023). Regarding the political economy of labor, the tenets of CRT would prove useful for examining labor market configurations concerning gendered, language, and access. Moreover, in terms of social justice activism and abolition, the future directions for CRT should explicate queer, trans, and disability justice, given that abolition is a politics of personhood, autonomy, collective care, and collaboration. Conceivably, these musings are less likely limitations and more likely congruent with invocations for Indigenous and Black futurities of resistance and liberation, as discussed below.

10. Conclusions: Making Sense of CRT in Canada’s Ever-Changing Multicultural Context

As a multicultural disrupter, CRT centers on epistemological underpinnings that acknowledge that Canada is a society that has been racialized in whiteness. Further, CRT recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. Within sociological frameworks focusing on studies of inter- or intragroup race relations, CRT demonstrates how contestations of race, space, and the law are mitigated through the legal procedures of land theft, resource extraction, racial capitalism, and anti-Blackness. Understanding race relations in a Canadian society grappling with an ever-changing multicultural narrative situates CRT as a sociological and intellectual project and a politically active social justice framework. CRT disrupts the notion that multiculturalism is the answer to an ever-changing sociopolitical Canadian society that is still wedded to the idea of a multicultural mosaic. This metaphorical tapestry obfuscates ongoing colonial processes of violence and harm that continue to plague Indigenous and Black communities. We need not look any further than mass incarceration processes that have impacted Indigenous and Black peoples at consistent and staggering rates (Reece 2020). Further, multiculturalism has made room and embraced the concept of inclusion as a catch-all, politically optical endeavour of post-coloniality. We see this repeatedly played out on the national stage when the Canadian nation-state seeks to ‘include’ Indigenous representation or arms-length decision-making in the political arena. Referring to the sunrise ceremony at the beginning of the Deaths of Aboriginal Youth inquest, Latty et al. (2016) summarize how Canada’s multicultural preoccupation with inclusion has become a political tactic:

Without diminishing the significance that this traditional ceremony holds for Indigenous peoples, we complicate the state’s incorporation of Indigenous traditions into legal proceedings by reflecting on the manner in which ongoing settler colonialism interferes with Indigenous peoples’ ability to engage in land-based systems and structures such as ceremony.

(p. 139)

These inclusions are further distractions to working towards a politics of accountability, action, and reconciliation. Further, these acts of inclusion can be read as perfunctory gestures or breadcrumbs designed to construct national narratives of post-coloniality with little to no real substantive legal redress. In re-thinking and re-imagining Canadian race relations, these inclusions cannot address how the law cannot be an effective mechanism for equality and equity for Indigenous and Black peoples deemed less than human when settler silencing naturalizes colonialism (see MacDonald 2021; Townsend and Townsend 2020) and curates the performative positioning of inclusivity by the Canadian nation-state.

I return here to one of Fleras’ (2024) queries in this collection that seeks to explicate how Indigenous relations as fundamentally unequal relations emphasize the “importance of understanding how these relationships of inequality are constructed, expressed, and sustained within contexts of power and privilege and how these relationships are challenged and transformed by way of government practices, institutional reform, ideological shifts, and minority resistance.” The writing of this article has also been a call for us to locate ourselves within a ‘container of care’ for how scholars, artists, activists, advocates, and settled members of communities locate ourselves within struggles for liberation and resistance. Given that the law as a colonial tool of oppression cannot dismantle the master’s house, for those of us who are uninvited occupiers of Indigenous land, we need to interrogate our individual and collective responsibility for how we accountably live on the land. Further, do we have a relationship with the land and how do we conceptualize this relationship amidst the myriad complexities and notions of ‘freedom’ for those of us who have been deemed ‘selectively free’ by a Canadian nation-state that perpetuates ongoing white supremacy and settler colonialism? Forwarding King’s (2019) assertion of decoloniality as an active practice, Fung (2021) writes that “Tiffany Lethabo King has already noted, ‘The field of white settler colonialism has yet to reckon with the ways that it erases Indigenous knowledge and forms of Indigenous politics of decolonization that require the end of the US and Canada nation-states, as well as the end of [w]hiteness and the versions of the human that sustain them’” (p. 120); perhaps in answering these questions, this is where our disruptions of dominant multicultural narratives must begin.