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Abstract: British Columbia (BC), Canada is repeatedly identified as ‘ground zero’ for climate injustices. These impacts are seen internationally and experienced locally through increased severity and intensity of wildfires. What international audiences do not see, however, is the role that insurance plays in the aftermath of wildfires—particularly the ways that insurance widens pre-existing social and economic gaps as created by and through socio-legal subjectivities. How insurance continues to uphold property regimes in BC, recreating legal and political dynamics rooted within settler coloniality, is rendered invisible in media and the literature. While property is a precursor for property insurance and research has outlined how property in BC is based upon settler colonialism, research has not considered the impacts of wildfire in BC on property as upheld by insurance, nor trickle down impacts on communities. It is these unacknowledged interconnections between wildfire, insurance, property, and settler colonialism that this paper begins to address by laying a theoretical foundation that can serve for future place-based and empirical studies. By engaging Indigenous-led and anti-colonial frameworks of settler colonialism and property, I interrogate the emergence of insurance and property, and how socio-legal subjectivities operate on reserve land and remain central in defining who and how insurance can be accessed. In so doing, I suggest that property insurance widens pre-existing social and legal disparities as animated through settler coloniality by allowing some to ‘build back’ and remain ‘in place’ while others cannot.





Abstract: Singular understandings of racialized experiences are insufficient to advance our understanding of mental health disparities. Perceived racial misclassification (PRM), a perceived discrepancy between one’s socially assigned and self-assigned racial identity, is one such emergent culturally relevant stressor with significant health implications. Evidence suggests that Native American and Alaska Native (NA/AN) individuals experience the highest rates of PRM. Yet, there are no prior studies investigating psychosocial correlates of PRM within NA/AN communities. This exploratory study explored associations between PRM and NA/AN mental health and cultural factors including ethnic-racial identity, connectedness, and historical loss. Comparative analyses were conducted among a national sample of 110 NA/AN college students who were and were not experiencing PRM. Results: Sixty percent reported experiencing PRM. Significant mental health differences emerged between participants who reported PRM and participants who did not, such that the PRM group reported greater anxiety, somatic, and depressive symptoms. No differences were found between groups in well-being, historical loss, cultural connectedness, or ethnic-racial identity. These preliminary findings support the necessity of using multiple dimensions of race to further our understanding of mental health among racialized communities. Further, the results underscore the need for further research into PRM as a widely experienced and critically understudied culturally relevant stressor among NA/AN communities.