Settler colonialism is gendered: Sarah Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa, ‘(Re)Making Native Space: Locating Gendered Geographies of Law, Territoriality, and Dispossession in the Colonial Archive’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is gendered: Sarah Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa, ‘(Re)Making Native Space: Locating Gendered Geographies of Law, Territoriality, and Dispossession in the Colonial Archive’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025

18Jul25

Abstract: Revisiting Cole Harris’s Making Native Space, this article responds to Harris’s assertion that settler attitudes toward Indigenous people were not gendered but that, rather, it was the civilization–savagery paradigm that conditioned Indigenous dispossession. Revisiting the same colonial archive of British Columbia through the dual lenses of legal geography and Indigenous feminism, the article examines available evidence about Indigenous women’s role in land governance in British Columbia. Although fragmented and partial, due to the historical and colonial devaluation of Indigenous women’s knowledge, evidence is available on the specific forms of land governance throughout northern, interior, and coastal regions of British Columbia, forming what might be considered property relations in colonial terms. Through a rereading of the archive with knowledge of Indigenous gender and legal relations, it is argued that settlers were able to suppress the legal nature of women’s land governance practices through colonial understandings of Indigenous women as racial and gendered subjects who were already always deterritorialized, incapable of forming territorial expressions of authority. The suppression of Indigenous women’s authority is continued in settler colonial paradigms that separate traditional ecological knowledge from realms of law or governance and that deny gender as a structural component of settler colonialism. Key Words: colonial archives, deterritorialization, gendered dispossession, Indigenous legal geography, settler colonialism.

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