Summary and Review

colonialism: the practice of controlling a territory, or another nation, and populating it with settlers in an exploitative manner. In this regard, colonisation is also closely correlated with the practice of ‘settler-colonialism.’

colonisation: the establishment of a colony to expand a nation state or territory. Establishing a colony might involve both the establishment of control over a territory and the Indigenous peoples who previously resided in that area. It may also involve the colonisation of minds through the imposition of Western European ideals, religion, language, and social practices onto the people who were living there before colonisation. The term “colonisation” is closely related to the term “colonialism.”

doctrine of discovery: an edict given by the Catholic church to Western European nations to discover, colonise, and spread the Christian message. It gave countries like England, France, Spain, and Portugal the god-given right to conquer and colonise new lands that were uninhabited by Christians.

ethnic: a categorisation of a group of people who share a national, cultural, religious, or language commonality. Such categorisations could be either an external labelling or one that is self-defined by the group. A concept of ethnicity can also overlap with a concept of race because ethnic categorisation may also use skin colour, hair texture, and other physical characteristics to describe membership in an imagined ethnic community.

indian: Indigenous peoples in Canada were originally referred to as “Indians” by Western explorers because they were looking for a western passage to the East Indies. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, he incorrectly thought he had discovered a new passage to the imagined territory of the Indies (i.e., China, Japan, and India). The inhabitants were hence thought to be “Indians.”

institutional racism: a practice of racism where the racism can be understood as “racism without racists.” It does not require the presence of racist subjects or beliefs; it is the racism practiced by an institution or a governing body. The bias that is produced exists because of the invention and application of a rule or a policy. The racist outcome would not be the product of an individual’s racist ideation.

intersectionality: the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, gender, age and the multiplicative effect on victimisation. Developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989.

nationhood: the idea that the world is divided into distinct territorial entities, or nations, comprised of peoples with inherent ethnic, cultural, and even biological characteristics. Such nations are almost always territorially based where a specific land or geography is claimed. The imagined community and territory are often based on an ancient or long-established history and identity allowing the group to claim a primordial right to sovereignty and territorial occupation.

ontology: the philosophical examination of being. As an invention of Western thought, the concept is often referred to as a “theory of being” and paired with the term “epistemology” that refers to the sister concept of a “theory of knowledge” or how something is known. In this regard, ontology refers to the study of the “thing in itself” and not how it may be represented or interpreted.

overt racism: a form of discriminatory racism that may be expressed as a clear and unambiguous act of racialisation. A subject or victim of such racism can experience overt racism as a direct and personal injury and/or emotional injury. It is often an encounter between two persons where racial bias is experienced by one party in a very personal and subjective manner.

phenotypical: the observable properties of an organic organism. Phenotype is often understood as the product of both genotype, which refers to the genes of an organism, and the environment surrounding it. In the context of race and racialisation, it might refer to human traits like skin colour, height, weight, or eye colour.

racialisation: racialisation employs the word “race” as a verb to demonstrate that race is a human action or activity and not a biological or scientific certainty. In so doing, the term helps demonstrate that “race” is a man-made or invented category. Racialisation is an everyday happening where “race” is something that we do to somebody else or to ourselves. As a verb, we can understand it to be a common mental shortcut where we might use a person’s physical appearance as a stand-in or as a marker of their intelligence, their thinking, or their potential actions. We racialise other people and sometimes we racialise ourselves in this moment of comparison and othering. Some might also understand racialisation as a form of race-based stereotyping.

racialised: the process by which groups of people are designated as being part of a “race” and subjected to differential or unequal treatment on that basis.

racial profiling: the use of race—by the criminal justice system—as the basis for criminal suspicion. This term is often associated with policing. It can be understood as describing race-based policing, or race-biased policing, where police use racial appearance as a deciding factor in who to select for stopping, questioning, searching, detaining, and arrest. Outside of this reference to policing, it can also be used to describe an intentional and deliberate consideration of race that negatively impacts racial minorities in the form of increased contact with public and/or private authorities. That is, it might manifest itself as a) the activity of selecting or examining a racial minority at a rate of selection that is higher and incommensurate with their demographic representation and/or b) attributing racial and stereotypical characteristics to a subject in a manner that is illogical and/or not based on empirical examination.

scientific racism: the positivist use of science to prove the existence of race as a scientific category. It exploits science and scientific method as a pathway to promote the existence of race and it attempts to use natural and evolutionary science to falsely demonstrate that different “races” of human beings have evolved over centuries and now populate our world. Contemporary scientific research has shown that race is a faulty construct because DNA examination proves there are no “racial” differences in the genetic samples taken from people adapted to the different climates and continents of the world. For example, a person with Western European ancestry might have more genetic similarity with someone with east Asian ancestry than they do with someone with Scandinavian ancestry.

settler-colonialism: a form of colonisation where newcomers resettle a territory that is already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. The resettlement erases and reterritorialises the land in such a way that the land becomes both foreign and inaccessible to the indigenous first inhabitants.

somatic: the physical or corporeal body. It is often used to refer to the experience and expression of physical or bodily symptoms. It can also refer to the somatic nervous system (i.e., the central nervous system) that resides primarily in a human body cavity as opposed to the peripheral nervous system that resides primarily in limbs and extremities.

sovereignty: the notion of authority, supremacy, and control over a territory and/or a population. It is derived from the concept of the “sovereign” who is a supreme ruler or monarch. Independence, autonomy, self-determination, and freedom from external control are implied by the use of the term.

sun dance: an indigenous and traditional dance that celebrates the earth and the sun. The dance ceremony is performed with songs and dances that have been passed from one generation to another. Sun dance was prohibited by the Indian Act of 1895 in Canada.

systematic racism: bias or difference experienced as an effect of social structures. It may not even be immediately recognised as racism. It is a form of multi-dimensional disparity or racial inequality that reveals itself in education, incarceration, and health (e.g., where there is less chance of Indigenous or Black students achieving their high school education, more chance of incarceration, and lower average life expectancies).

terra nullius: the concept of “land belonging to nobody,” a territory without a master, or uninhabited land. It was a legal concept used to justify settlements in the new world.

unceded: the historical fact that many Indigenous peoples did not surrender their lands to the Crown, nor to settler-colonial forces in Canada. Much of the territories that make up the nation of Canada resides on land that was never surrendered in a process of treaty-making. For example, it is estimated that much of the province of British Columbia resides on unceded territory—as much as 95% of the province resides on unceded First Nations land—that was never treatied or legally signed away to the Crown.