"We'll Sail Like Columbus": Race, Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and the Making of South Asian Diasporas in Canada

This dissertation is an interrogation of colonial and racial formations in the making of white settler states. Through an intersectional and transnational exploration of proximities between South Asians and Indigenous peoples in Canada, the dissertation unravels South Asian complicities in ongoing processes of colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands. Theorizing pernicious continuitiesoverlapping experiences of racism and colonialism between Indigenous peoples and South Asiansthe dissertation studies complexities, complicities, and incommensurabilities in the making of racialized diasporas. However, it argues that varying loci of power and privilege render these complicities ambiguous, entwined, and invisible. Deploying traces as a methodological tool to study settler colonial processes, the dissertation explores the intersections of colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Further, while anti-Native racism has its own genealogies in settler societies, these grammars of anti-Native racism function in relation to processes of casteism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and border making in the making of model South Asian diasporas.

The dissertation draws from varying theoretical frameworks and research in Vancouver, British Columbia and Fort McMurray, Alberta. It looks at three sites of resource extractionlogging and canneries in British Columbia in the 1970s-90s and tar sands in Alberta presentlyas spaces of simultaneous dispossession of Indigenous peoples and racialized, gendered, and casted labour formations. In addition, the dissertation also conceptualizes colonial intimacies to trace desires between differently racialized and colonized peoples within settler colonial states. It uses multiple qualitative methods, including interviews with community members, activists and academics; oral histories of South Asian migrants; ethnographic methods; archival research; and analysis of literary and visual texts, and events. It also employs storytelling, prose, and semi-autobiographical writing methods. Overall, the dissertation centres Indigenous calls for resurgence and decolonization in theorizing racialized diasporic formations in white settler states.