Special Events

R13 - Keynote Address: Shiri Pasternak - The State, the Company, and the Police: Who Invaded Wet’suwet’en Lands?

Date: May 31 | Time: 01:30pm to 03:00pm | Location: Lecture Hall – ACW 109 HYBRID / hybride

Sponsor / Commanditaire : CPSA Reconciliation Committee & CPSA 2023 Programme Committee

Participant: Shiri Pasternak (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Email address: shiri.pasternak@torontomu.ca
Twitter: @shiripasternak
OPEN EVENT - COMMUNITY MEMBER PASS
ÉVÉNEMENT OUVERT AU PUBLIC - LAISSEZ-PASSER COMMUNAUTAIRE

Bio: Shiri Pasternak is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University and co-founder and former Research Director for the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led think tank based in the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of the award-winning book Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which is about the Algonquins' rejection of the federal land claim policy from the perspective of Indigenous law and jurisdiction. Her research continues to focus on injunctions, land and specific claims policies, colonial fiscal policy and the political economy of colonization.

Abstract: What is the particular mix of Canadian sovereignty and corporate power? Three highly militarized police operations have been deployed since 2019 to remove Wet’suwet’en people from their lands along a natural gas pipeline route under construction in northern British Columbia by Coastal GasLink (CGL). Despite abundant media coverage, hiding in plain sight is a story that has not yet been told about how governments, police, public banks, private capital, the land claims commission, the courts, and the environmental assessment office undermined and denied Wet’suwet’en constitutional and Indigenous legal rights.

Working with thousands of pages of unreleased access to information requests, unpublished legal proceedings, and interviews with key figures, this lecture explores the political artefact of the “company state” and its relevance to theorizing advanced settler colonial capitalism.