Covid and settler colonialism: Renisa Mawani, ‘A Historical Account of the Pandemic: Health, Colonialism and Racism in Canada’, in Impacts of COVID-19 in Racialized Communities, Royal Society of Canada, 2021, pp. 56-61 | settler colonial studies blog

Covid and settler colonialism: Renisa Mawani, ‘A Historical Account of the Pandemic: Health, Colonialism and Racism in Canada’, in Impacts of COVID-19 in Racialized Communities, Royal Society of Canada, 2021, pp. 56-61

25May21

Abstract: In this paper, I situate the Covid-19 pandemic within a longer historical context in Canada. I argue that settler colonial state has produced the conditions in which certain (white) lives are valued, protected, and nourished while other lives (Indigenous/ Chinese) are left to die. I make this argument by focusing on two examples: the role of the Indian Act and the enactment of Canadian Immigration legislation. While the former has produced unliveable conditions for Indigenous peoples on and off reserves, the latter has suggested that certain migrants – particularly the Chinese – were “foreign” and diseased. The racial inequalities that have surfaced in the current pandemic, I suggest, requires us to consider the long histories of racial violence in Canada, the ways in which certain bodies have been made vulnerable to disease, while others have been blamed for its proliferation, all in the interests of white (re)settlement.

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