Some highlights from the latest Urban History Review 38, 2 (2010), with the special topic of ‘Encounters, Contests and Communities’.

Franca Iacovetta and Jordan Stanger-Ross, ‘Intro: Encounters, Contests, Communities: New Histories of Race and Ethnicity in the Canadian City’.

Penelope Edmonds, ‘Unpacking Settler Colonialism’s Urban Strategies: Indigenous Peoples in Victoria, BC, and the Transition to a Settler Colonial City’.

Abstract:

This article uses settler colonialism as a specific analytic frame through which to understand the historical forces in the formation of settler cities as urbanizing polities. Arguing that we must pay attention to the intertwined histories of immigration and colonization, the author traces the symbolic and economic functions and origins of the settler-colonial city to reveal its political imperatives, the expropriation of Indigenous land, and the dispossession, removal, sequestration, and transformation of Indigenous peoples. Taking as a case study the city of Victoria, BC, and its Lekwungen people throughout the nineteenth century, the author charts the shift from a mixed and fluid mercantilist society to an increasingly racialized and segregated settler-colonial polity. This transition reveals how bodies and urbanizing spaces are reordered and remade, and how Indigenous peoples come to be produced and marked by political categories borne of the racialized practices of an urbanizing settler colonialism, which complement the powerful forces of settler ethnogenesis and colonial modernity.

Victoria Freeman, ‘Toronto has no History! Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism and Historical Memory in Canada’s Largest City’.

Abstract:

In 1884, during a week-long commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Toronto’s incorporation in 1834, tens of thousands celebrated Toronto’s history and its relation to British colonialism and imperialism. The author’s analysis of the historical tableaux in the first day’s parade and speeches by Daniel Wilson, president of University College, and Chief Samson Green of the Tyendinaga Mohawks reveals divergent approaches to commemoration as “politics by other means”: on one hand, the erasure of the area’s Indigenous past and the celebration of its European future, on the other, an idealized view of the past of Indigenous–settler partnership that ignores the role of local settlers in the dispossession of the Mississaugas. The 1884 commemoration marks the transition from the founding of the settlement in 1793 to its incorporation in 1834 as the city’s “ founding moment” and marker of the assumed “indigeneity” of settler-immigrants. The deed acquired from the Mississaugas in the Toronto Purchase of 1787 is deemed irrelevant, while the 1834 Act of Incorporation becomes the symbolic deed to Toronto’s modernity.