Settlers going postal: Miranda Leibel, Justin Leifso, ‘”The heart that pumps the blood through the veins and arteries of our national life”: Canadian postal services as settler-colonial infrastructure’, Political Geography, 109, 2024, #103063 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers going postal: Miranda Leibel, Justin Leifso, ‘”The heart that pumps the blood through the veins and arteries of our national life”: Canadian postal services as settler-colonial infrastructure’, Political Geography, 109, 2024, #103063

28Jan24

Abstract: Despite Robert M. Campbell’s assertion that “an examination of contemporary postal matters would reveal much about the Canadian state” (Campbell, 1994, p. 6), the interest in postal history from social scientists has been short-lived. In Canada, this loss of interest coincided with the efforts to privatize Canada Post through the late 1980s–1990s (e.g., Campbell, 1994). This work is an attempt to reignite political analysis of Canada’s postal system. Unlike previous analyses, however, we are most keenly interested in thinking with Indigenous and settler-colonial studies theorists about the role of postal services in the territorial project of settler-colonialism in Canada. We contend that the overarching omission of Canadian postal services from much of Canada’s political history results in the exclusion of two key roles played by the post office in Canadian state formation: the first, that postal networks were essential to the proliferation of communications across the ‘hinterlands’ of the expanding nation-state and colonial interests. The second, and perhaps less widely studied, role of postal services in Canada’s political history is that of territorialization and the production of distinctly Canadian space. We note that Canadian territorialization is specifically reinforced by the distinctly settler-colonial structures of Canadian colonization, which require an even more obvious physical demarcation of colonized territory and a colonial presence that extends beyond state administrators to encompass the public life of settlers more generally—and that the infrastructure of postal services provided a state mechanism through which to materialize territorial expansion and settler nationalism.

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