CC 204: Key Terms:

1. Subjectivity: refers to how people, places and things are constructed. In order to govern,
you must make the subject of governance knowable. Subjectivities are fluid.
Someone/something can hold multiple subjectivities.
2. Social constructionism: the view that ideas, structures, and reality are all constructed by
society. There is not any one objective reality, simply interpretations of events.
3. Imperialism: the expansion of a countrys influence through the use of its military or
diplomacy.
4. Colonialism: a system in which an invading country exploits a destination country for
things such as resources, land, and the use of the local people.
5. Settler colonialism: a form of colonialism in which the members of the invading country
also set up settlements in the destination country. The original peoples and their culture
must be eliminated.
6. Assimilation: policies that work to mould Indigenous peoples in the vision of settler
communities.
7. Cultural hegemony: the process by which a dominant culture maintains its dominant
position (this can also apply to people).
8. Whiteness theory: Indigenous people are Othered because they are not white.
9. External self-determination: whereby a state involves a defined territory, a permanent
population, and a government, as well as its ability to establish relationships with other
states
10. Internal self-determination: is resolved to support and preserve Indigenous cultural
differences within an existing state. Involves the preservation of culture and
representation in parliament.
11. Environmental racism: a form of discrimination against minority groups, and in the
Global South, practiced in and through the environment.
12. Brownfields: areas that have been used for dumps or unsafe business operations. They
are deemed to be appropriate locations for more of the same practices than are wealthier
and relatively cleaner neighbourhoods.
13. Blood quantum: a term used to define bloodlines relating to ancestry. These rules are
used in order to assess whether someone can claim status in some countries such as the
United States.
14. Aboriginal rights: collective rights which flow from Aboriginal peoples continued use
and occupation of certain areas.
15. Aboriginal title: the inherent Aboriginal rights to land or territory. Aboriginal rights are
inherently tied to the land and their access to it.
16. Comprehensive land claims: a political process through which Canada deals with those
Aboriginal groups who have not signed a treaty or other agreement.
17. Extinguishment: refers to the forfeiture of rights and titles to the land.
18. Certainty clauses: Agreeing to never assert or exercise rights or titles to the land.
19. Imposed law: a form of regulation that does not reflect the values and norms of those
who are made subject to it.
20. Reservation: a tract of land under the Indian Act and treaty agreements for the exclusive
use of an Indian band.
21. Traditional territory: the larger land base that an Indigenous group has occupied and
utilized for generations, before reserve borders were imposed.
22. Residential schools: a series of boarding schools set up by the Canadian government and
administered by churches. The objective of these schools was to assimilate Indigenous
children into mainstream Canadian society.
23. Cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other
elements that make a group of people distinct from other groups.
24. Intergenerational trauma: the transmission of historical oppression and its negative
consequences across generations.
25. Carcerality: refers to the carceral system; incarceration
26. Carceral time: doing time; lack of control over time; time passes by slowly as inmates
endure the prisons carceral space
27. Carceral space: the spatial dimensions of incarceration these spaces highlight the
divide between those incarcerated and free persons.
28. Genocidal Carceraity: refers to spaces enlisted toward the elimination of a targeted
group, either for the purposes of exterminating or transforming the group so that it no
longer persists.
29. Forced removal: terrorizing a target group to move beyond borders
30. Wasteland: the target group is forced into a space that cannot sustain life
31. Blockade: all goods and means of survival are prevented from entering the space
32. Cordon sanitaire: a sanitary line separates one group from another, undesirable group
33. Assimilative school: take a variety of forms and mobilizes the citizen-forming discipline
of the school to transform the child so that she or he no longer identifies with his or her
culture