Abra Brynne, Schulich School of Law

Seeing like an Agrarian Settler in a Colonial State: Generations of farming families have contributed to the establishment and expansion of agriculture across the Canadian landscape. An agrarian culture arose simultaneously, bolstered by immigrant stories of sod broken and used to build houses in a wilderness waiting for European agriculture to be sown, of incremental improvements on newly acquired property, leading to naturalization and Canadian citizenship.
James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State helps to make legible the ways in which humans and spaces are worked upon by the institutions of the state. In the case of Canada, the purposes of the settler colonial state of the late 19th century included populating the vast expanses of land acquired through treaty processes across much of the prairie provinces, and by fiat in the province of BC.
My session will explore the dual, mutually reinforcing structures that foster colonial aphasia, what Ann Laura Stoler describes as a political condition of knowing and not knowing simultaneously about the origins, structures and ongoing practices of settler colonialism. These structures are the laws of the settler state that enabled the creation and population of private farmland, and agrarian cultural norms that were promoted, first by the state, and then perpetuated by both farmers and the state. Together these two structures justify and undergird Indigenous Nations’ land dispossession across Canada. They also serve to disguise the reality of settler colonial violence of initial land dispossession that persists in blocking access to ancestral lands for many Indigenous people. My presentation will highlight some practices by farmers in so-called British Columbia, who are taking steps to enable the reconnection with land by Indigenous individuals and communities, disrupting private property and agrarian cultural norms.

Christy Kelly-Bisson, Coordinator of the Land and People Pillar of the Common Ground Research Network, Dalhousie University

Twelve generations of struggle for secure farmand tenure in the Canadian settler-colony: Canadian farmland is currently undergoing a process of consolidation around corporate farms and investment firms. The top four farmland owners in the Kitchi Sipi (Ottawa) Valley went from owning 4.3% of the total farmland base in 2000 to 6.4% in 2017 (Kelly-Bisson, 2026). Several rural municipalities in Saskatchewan experienced an even greater increase from 8.6% in 1994 to 21.0% in 2014 (Desmarais et al, 2025). Land consolidation in Canada is a phenomena experienced by every successive settler-colonial regime dating back to the foundation of la Nouvelle France in the 1600s. Consolidation occurs through different processes of displacement and disposession. It is driven by the need to secure increasingly larger land base to protect elite and regime interests. First Nations continue to face the worst and most violent forms of disposession and displacement through ongoing processes of colonization. Settler-colonialism, however, also involves an internal process of disposession and displacement of agrarian settlers to protect and advance the interests of the hegemonic regimes that control the territory. This presentation goes through twelve generations of struggles for secure farmland tenure in my Bisson ancestry. It does this to illustrate the long-standing problem farmland tenure insecurity. The story demonstrates that most settler farmers, despite the historical privileges of owning colonized land, eventually see their land tenure confiscated to serve the interests of colonial elites. It makes the case that most settlers cannot expect to achieve secure farmland tenure under any regime of settler-colonial private property and that decolonial land commoning is necessary to realize the goal of food sovereignty and land justice.

Sian Clarke Borden