To reject such tautological logic is to make visible the unbroken presence of resilient and resistant Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag that white settlers have dispossessed and tried to eliminate for 400 years.Ī recurring theme in the narration of Indigenous– settler relations is the evocation of Indigenous– settler societal unification through intermarriage. We further suggest that the importance of understanding the violence of white settler tautologies, past and present, is that they still help to justify historical and continuous genocidal occupation in Mi’kma’ki since European invasion began in 1604. We argue that white settler tautologies not only provide cyclical rationales to justify white settler nativism to claim originary European ownership of colonized Indigenous lands, but also violently declared evidence of white settler nativism in the name of white settler futurity through the re- interpretation of treaty and kin. This erases the histories of wilful, resistant, and complex Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag whose ongoing presence evokes an ongoing settler violence that settlers do not want to see. Settler tautologies such as written Biblical and visual art historical references to oxen and plough clearing lands and Acadian coastal dyke irrigation systems each advance the figure of a pacified, willing Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag subject. This article introduces the concept of the white settler tautology – something that seems true by the very nature of its repetition and logical irrefutability in white settler histories, stories, and laws – to analyze the naturalization of settler colonial topographies and ecologies of Mi’kma’ki (Mi’kmaq/Mi’gmag territory in Atlantic Canada). This thesis argues that although the agricultural policies the British hoped would “civilize” the Mi’kmaq fell short of their intended outcome, Mi’kmaw communities negotiated their pressures and possibilities, managing to use agricultural opportunities to alleviate difficult social and economic circumstances. They hoped that in doing so, the Mi’kmaq would become stationary instead of transient, and ultimately be “civilized.” Although the Mi’kmaq never became the agriculturalists the British envisioned, they did participate in sporadic farming activities and made active use of the British legal system to petition the government for various aids and rights. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, British colonizers in Nova Scotia, a portion of the territory known by its indigenous inhabitants as Mi’kma’ki, sought to reform Mi’kmaw people’s concepts and utilization of land through agricultural policies. This thesis examines Mi’kmaw-British relations in regards to agricultural policies in colonial Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century.
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