Consumption: Yale D. Belanger, Alli Moncrieff, ‘Disrupting the small Alberta settler city: supervised consumption and the limits of belonging’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Consumption: Yale D. Belanger, Alli Moncrieff, ‘Disrupting the small Alberta settler city: supervised consumption and the limits of belonging’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

10Mar26

Abstract: This article examines the contested politics surrounding the supervised consumption site (SCS) in River City, highlighting how harm reduction spaces have become flashpoints of settler-colonial anxieties about Indigeneity, visibility, and urban governance. Despite clear life-saving benefits, local political and business elites framed the SCS as a threat to the city’s moral and economic order rather than a site of care, which underlines how settler colonial logics impose conditions on Indigenous urban presence, demanding sobriety, compliance, and invisibility, and how these demands undermine inclusion efforts. By analyzing elite discourse on the SCS, this article explains why harm reduction policies in settler-colonial urban settings must move beyond narrow health and expansive public safety frameworks and engage with the ethical and political realities of colonial histories.

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