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This study examines the framing of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) within the context of Canadian political discourse. Through a qualitative content analysis of parliamentary speeches spanning from 2006 to 2022, it investigates how TFWs and the TFWP have been framed by members of three federal political parties: Conservatives, Liberals and the NDP. With an aim to understand influences on framing strategies, the analysis considers significant events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and a change in government. The findings highlight the significance of party ideology in shaping perspectives on TFWs and the TFWP, with all three parties recognizing the necessity of this group and program in achieving Canada’s economic goals. At the same time, despite their increasing significance in the economy, the study highlights the conditional inclusion of TFWs in Canada. Policymakers adapt their frames based on perceived contribution of these workers and their alignment with Canadian interests. This research illuminates the crucial role of framing in shaping policy outcomes regarding TFWs and the TFWP.

My dissertation analyzes the relationship between public health and settler colonialism, employing age and ability as key categories of analysis. I argue that settler colonialism and public health were constitutive of one another. Public health policy weaves together notions about land, race, labour, age, and ability, to structure and stratify societies. Public health relied on white supremacist tropes to justify the state's attempts to subjugate and dispossess the Anishinaabeg in Northern Ontario. The idea of a "public" was critical and contested in the intersection of policy and the emerging social science of public health. Settler standards of public imagined a "public" that was white, male, middle-class, and adult, with a body that could be made healthy through individual effort. Settler ideas about Indigenous Peoples shaped the "public" as a racialized and age-stratified concept in Canadian public health and health policy. In this dissertation, I seek to highlight how material and symbolic age, and material and symbolic children, figured in settler-colonial processes of state formation in the context of public health policies. I examine how bureaucrats and institutions in the public and voluntary sectors constructed and portrayed Indigenous and settler health, measuring each against a middle-class standard of "public" health. To do this, I set forth four interconnected arguments. First, settler colonialism and settler public health policy were mutually constitutive. Second, disability existed alongside and entangled with age as a key framing for settler public health policies. Third, these public health policies drew from a bifurcated notion of the "public," resulting in policies focused on protection and surveillance based on racialized lines. Finally, these framings of disability, age, and the "public" had clear material impacts in Northern Ontario's settler-colonial context, enabling settlement while dispossessing Indigenous Peoples.

This dissertation compares the work and life of secondary public-school teachers in Ontario with different labour contracts during a time of crisis. The COVID public health crisis along with neoliberalism, the defunding of public education, and a climate crisis have all influenced governmental policies and the labour process of public secondary teachers in Ontario. The influences that different contracts can have on the labour process of teachers, how they feel towards their union, and the impacts on their individual health and household wellbeing before and during the first year of the COVID pandemic is the focus of this dissertation. To help explore these contexts and the influences on the life and labour of public secondary teachers in Ontario with different contracts, I have used research from studies in Labour Process Theory, precarious work, and educational labour to inform my analysis. Along with those areas of discourse, I have also used insights from research into Critical Realism and Thematic Analysis to think through and discuss the differences between the teachers I interviewed and connect their experiences with work, their union, and their individual health and household well-being to larger systems, structures, and histories. The interviews conducted revealed three points of interest: that precarious labour contracts can function as a disciplinary device, that larger contexts outside the contract shaped how the contract was experienced, and that teachers’ unions can act as a source of solidarity and security during a crisis and when there are certain associations with its purpose. This exploratory research aims to open up future areas of research into educational labour and differences between the experiences of educators with different contracts.

In the last decade, considerable attention has been paid to the category of craft. Within the disciplines, particularly in sociology and art theory, scholars like Richard Sennett, Susan Luckman, and Glenn Adamson have attempted to define, theorize and delineate the history of craft and its influence in contemporary capitalist culture. Popularly, books and television shows feature the work of makers and craftspeople, their popularity compounded by online crafting communities like Etsy. For all of this attention, considerably less has been paid to the labour that creates the craft products to begin with. This dissertation interrogates the category of craft from a critical labour studies perspective, first by analyzing its labour process, and, second, by amplifying the voices of workers in these industries in order to reflect the conditions they face, their attitudes about craft, and their reflections on class and organizing. In order to accomplish both, the dissertation reports on participant interviews and critically examines cultural artifacts concerning so-called making (typically understood as amateur or semi-professional small-scale production) and craft industrialism (used to define scalable industries that use craft branding and terminology). Its key case studies are making/makerspaces and craft brewing in the Cascadia region of North America, although it also visits the roasteries, bike shops, and bakeries that make up some of the other primary sites of the artisanal economy. This dissertation makes four primary contributions to the critical study of craft. First, it reorients the common approaches to craft, which either prioritize craft objects or individual maker activity. By redirecting attention to the social process of production, it avoids the object-orientation of many approaches as well as the maker-as-virtuoso narratives of popular accounts. By focusing on the social dynamics of craft, the dissertation transcends the singular craftsperson to make its second contribution: the reconceptualization of skill as social category rather than individual attribute. This social approach to skill paves the way toward the dissertation's third contribution: a dialectical consideration of the craftworker as distinct from but intrinsically related to the craftsperson. Analysis of cultural artifacts and discussions with workers highlighted the dependency of craftsmanship and support work. Finally, the dissertation distills maker and worker attitudes into a set of observations regarding the maker movement's narratives of emancipation through self-directed work as well as the potential of solidarity in craft industries.

It is only in the last few decades that Canadian trade unions have expressed labour solidarity with Indigenous peoples by bringing their attention to the distinct concerns of Indigenous workers in the workplace and beyond it. Trade unions have taken important steps to express support for their Indigenous members and their communities, yet little is understood about Indigenous peoples’ experiences in the capitalist labour market shaped by land dispossession, the ongoing manifestations of settler-colonial oppression, and the systemic economic marginalization by Canadian institutions and employers. It is pertinent to identify what unions are doing to support them and where they can strengthen labour solidarity so that they can develop critical sites of resistance against colonial-capitalist power. A closer analysis is needed to understand Indigenous peoples’ relationships to unions, relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous working people, and the challenges for unions to build united struggles with Indigenous peoples. This study examines the spaces of union engagement with Indigenous workers and their communities amongst the challenges presented by the reality of ongoing colonial oppression in Canada. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to examine the roles that trade unions have had with Indigenous peoples in the paid labour market and recent initiatives that they have taken to meet the needs of Indigenous workers and unionists, and 2) to analyze the ways trade unionists understand and approach Indigenous peoples’ concerns and anti-colonial struggles within the broader confines of settler-colonial capitalism, and to determine the challenges to transforming their practices of solidarity with Indigenous peoples. This study draws upon semi-structured, indepth interviews with 22 Indigenous and non-Indigenous key informants who are elected trade union officials, staff, and rank-and-file unionists. The study’s findings reveal emerging activism of Indigenous workers within their workplaces, unions, and beyond, and the complexities between Indigenous peoples’ relationships with paid labour, unions, and struggles for selfdetermination. I argue that unions are turning their attention to support the distinct needs of Indigenous workers and to support anti-colonial struggles, but they are limited to redressing the effects of settler-colonial capitalism. They face difficulty engaging in solidarity due to the structural limitations of settler-colonial capitalism. By reflecting on participant insights into these challenges, this study proposes an anti-colonial framework for unionists to transform their practices of labour solidarity.

Agriculture is at the centre of society’s most pressing sustainability challenges, including food insecurity, climate change, ecological degradation, and social inequity. Organic agriculture, when practiced according to an ethic grounded in ecology, health, fairness, and care, has been proposed as a remedy to these challenges. Building on a movement for an alternative to socially and ecologically exploitative food production, organic agriculture is now a multi-billion-dollar industry with established legal and regulatory frameworks around the world. While this growth could be seen as a success, empirical research has called into question the extent to which organic agriculture and market-oriented third-party certifications can foster sustainability transitions and has found that performance is often context dependent (e.g. depending on which practices are adopted). There remain significant gaps in knowledge about how organic agriculture is practiced in jurisdictions around the world relative to the sustainability-related principles on which it was founded, especially the principle of fairness. To address these gaps, I developed a mixed-method assessment grounded in a critical realist methodological approach to evaluate the contributions of organic agriculture to socio-ecological sustainability in Canada. I utilized both qualitative and quantitative methods—drawing from interviews with farmers, inspectors and organic policymakers, analysis of census data for farms across Canada, surveys of vegetable farmers in British Columbia and organic policy documents—to investigate how organic agriculture is shaped and enacted by organic community members at multiple scales. My analysis of organic standards in North America, along with census and survey data in Canada, provide strong evidence for higher levels of adoption of ecologically sustainable management in organic agriculture relative to all other farms. Yet, despite explicit attention to the principle of fairness in organic standards and among organic community actors, I found little evidence that organic agriculture in Canada is correlated with improved working conditions for farmworkers in practice. Across Mexico, the US and Canada, no organic standards contain any requirements related to social sustainability. At the same time, standards governance and community-led efforts toward integrating the principle of fairness into certification show potential to advance a more just and sustainable agriculture.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent government responses resulted in a shift in the identity of the essential worker that now included low wage essential workers. Using a critical discourse analysis methodology written news media texts were analyzed revealing various discursive strategies were utilized to construct the new essential worker identity. Findings revealed a fluid, complex identity that was politicized to advance other issues. The need to re-frame the definition of the essential worker was discussed along with the implications on the attainment of occupational rights for low wage essential workers.

Historians have generally interpreted the conscription crisis of 1917 as reflective of contending nationalist perspectives in Canada. In contrast this study examines the pivotal role of the labour led anti-conscription movement which developed in British Columbia and throughout Canada in World War One to oppose the threat poses by conscription and other war time acts of repression by the Borden government. A careful study of primary sources and newspapers of the era show that this movement of resistance to conscription also included others threated by conscription: conscientious objectors, Indigenous nations, farmers, and pacifist social gospel activists. The resistance movement had the effect of changing Federal government policy on conscription during the war and changing the political environment after the war and acted as a catalyst in helping to spark the post-war labour revolt.

A part of the labour movement for ninety-five years, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) worked to better the conditions of garment workers across North America. Although they saw gains for workers in the garment industry over fifty years of progress, in the last forty years of the ILGWU’s history, the union faced a dramatic decline. Large membership losses and a weakening of negotiating power in the industry left the ILGWU a shell of their former self. What happened to this union? This declension did not begin with rapid membership decline, but a steady drop in members was a symptom of missed opportunities and misunderstandings on the part of union leadership of the increasingly diverse needs of garment workers across North America. Using the ILGWU in Montréal and New York City from the 1960s to the 1980s, this dissertation highlights the intrinsic difficulties of with transnational unionization efforts in the late 20th century. The ILGWU’s could not maintain a collective identity for garment worker across North America. Shifting identities made it difficult for the union to maintain their membership and motivate nonunionized workers to join the organization. The decline of this powerful and important labour organization offers critical insights into women’s history and labour activism at the end of the 20th century and reveals new elements of the history of capitalism, especially as it relates to ethnicity and gender.

This research explores how racialized sensibility emerged through the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Vancouver and links the riots in Vancouver to the riots in Bellingham earlier in the same year. It uses mixed methods to collect data on portraits, photographs, images, editorials, and documents, employing archival ethnography to read documents along and against the grain (Stoler, 2002; 2012) to make sense of the time period and the sensibilities that underpinned the riots. Archival ethnography helps bring to light the accounts, conversations, and dialogues of colonial agents and actors, and to interpret missing data in the archive. Missing data in the archive consists of historical documents that are overlooked, misinterpreted, or destroyed. My thesis also accounts for gaps, silences, and erasures in the archive by applying critical fabulation to rearrange and reconstruct intersecting viewpoints (see Hartman, 1997; 2008; 2019). To provide a thicker analysis of archival documents, this research interprets olfactory and auditory senses as integral to the making of these riots (see Simmel, 1908/2002; see Campt, 2017; see Lee, 2010; see Mawani, 2009; see Russell, 2019; see also Blaikie, 2002). It is only through the process of combining mixed-methods, theory, and practice that the missing data in the archive can be reimagined and written as part of the historical narrative.

This dissertation brings together multiple discourses, including surveillance studies, autonomist Marxism and posthumanism, as the groundwork for a novel discussion of contemporary visual art— in particular surveillance art, that is, art that addresses and problematizes the omnipresent digital monitoring now part of everyday life. Because in this dissertation contemporary art is defined as necessarily political, aesthetic (in the Kantian sense) and responsive to conditions of current history and society, I use Marxist theory to identify the particular features of contemporary capitalism that this art is responding to. I first characterize post-Fordist capitalism, focusing on the increasing reliance on extracting network value from what Maurizio Lazzarato called immaterial labour. I discuss Marx’s theories of formal and real subsumption vis-a-vis their impacts on production, technology and subjectivity, and conclude that we need a new term that adequately emphasizes the novel imbrication of technology and subjectivity. In particular, I claim that surveillance capitalism, rising from military technologies and research, characterizes capitalist valorization under hypersubsumption. I then look at the impact of surveillance on labour and subjectivity, with a particular focus on unwaged immaterial activities. Do these activities count as work? To answer that, I propose looking at a combination of Marx’s concept of unproductive labour with a modified type of constant capital. I conclude that the effects of hypersubsumption on labour, consumption and production have produced a new type of capitalist subjectivity: coerced posthumanism, which I contrast with Marx’s authentic species-being. In order glimpse a post-capitalist species-being, I articulate a theory of contemporary art by bringing together Jacques Rancière’s dissensus with Peter Osborne’s notion of contemporary art; both theorists show how contemporary art is necessarily political— what’s more, it is oriented towards an open future. I then apply their ideas to particular artists who have responded to capitalist surveillance by creating ‘artveillance’ (art about surveillance). I evaluate the political effectiveness of three categories of artveillance as experiments in post-capitalist sensoriums.

In Canadian Great War historiography, the late-war and post-WWI revolt has remained a conspicuous subject for exploring regional and class conflict. This dissertation examines the revolt with a new analytical perspective centred on patriotism and profiteering. The first section of this study constructs a cultural framework called Great War culture. Based on the limitations of the state, it became necessary to militarize socialization so that a major war effort could be undertaken. Through this process, Canada experienced a war-centric cultural shift, whereby social and political belonging became premised on patriotic identity. The term “profiteering” emerged as part of the war-centric lexicon to designate those who were disregarding patriotic sensibilities and selfishly exploiting the war for profit. The second section of this dissertation examines three major interpretations of Great War profiteering between 1914 and 1918: war profiteering, food profiteering, and alien profiteering. It provides an understanding of each controversy through the perspective of federal politicians and state officials; leaders in the labour, farmers’, and veterans’ movements; and ordinary patriots in English Canada. It argues that Borden’s administration failed to curb patriotic outrage and disillusionment, setting the stage for explosive post-war militancy and unrest. The final section examines how workers, farmers, and veterans drew upon the legitimacy of the Great War as a struggle for democracy to challenge the terms of post-war reconstruction. As this section explores, patriots undertook this revolt by using direct action involving violence and industrial militancy. They also used political action to challenge party politics, which some believed to be a root cause of the profiteering evil.

Precarious faculty, once used by higher education institutions as auxiliary labour, now dominate post-secondary campuses. With as much as half of post-secondary institutions’ courses now taught by contract academic faculty, post-secondary institutions have systematically come to rely on hiring precarious contract faculty for their respective departmental teaching capacity. As an emerging and significant trend in higher education, this study aims to examine the precarious faculty experience through autoethnographic methods that reflects on my personal experience as a precarious faculty member working at four different higher education institutions in British Columbia from 2016-2018: the Private Online University, City College, the Teaching University, and the Institute. Using Tierney’s (1997) Organizational Culture Theory, coupled with theories of organizational socialization and the role of models and mentorship, I compare my personal experiences of being hired and onboarded at the four different institutions in which I worked as a precarious faculty member. I focus on three themes: the faculty interview process, being evaluated as a precarious faculty member, and resources that I was given (or not). A literature review precedes each personal autoethnographic account; I then proceed to compare and contrast my personal experiences with that of the literature as a way to examine the ways in which my experiences working as a precarious faculty member are consistent with, and divergent from the literature. To conclude, I suggest that there is a lack of standard processes and practices when it comes to hiring precarious faculty. Additionally, I suggest that one’s career stage plays a significant role during hiring. I also suggest that good student evaluations of teaching lead to reappointment for precarious faculty. In terms of performance evaluations, I stress the importance of communication and suggest that precarious faculty are evaluated (sometimes) both formally, and informally. Finally, in terms of resources, I echo the literature that office space is a place of power, and that professional development is a two-way street. I conclude that more personal stories—like mine—are required to better understand what it’s like to be a precarious faculty member in higher education.

This dissertation honours and pays tribute to Sudbury residents and many others for whom labour strikes played a significant role in shaping their lives. Set in the context of a public history theatrical experiment, this study investigates local and community memories pertaining to Sudbury mining strikes in the postwar period from 1958 through to 2010. Archival research and oral history interviews were conducted on major labour strikes in this era and that research was used to script, rehearse, and stage a theatrical play. Interviews with audience members and performers were also conducted at all stages of the process. This process allows the dissertation to consider the perspectives of both performers and audience members, each enacting their roles as producers and consumers of public history. The dissertation also assesses the value of this form of history making, as it relates to the formation of historical consciousness, both then and now, of individuals within the Sudbury community. This study argues that public history as theatre has the potential to provide an effective and affecting means to nurture critical, reflexive historical consciousness both on and off the stage.

This thesis explores the experiences of Black women who are in tenured, tenure-stream, and non-tenured faculty positions and presents how Black women negotiate their intersectional identities in the academy. The study documents their self-identifications and struggles with the academy in terms of power relations in their respective universities, including racial and sexual discrimination. In addition, the study explores the career paths of Black women faculty from contract faculty to full professor. Methodologically, the study uses Black Feminist theorizing along with autoethnography in order to explore the nature of the experiences of Black Canadian women faculty within the academy. I interviewed 13 self-identified Black women across Canadian universities, including myself as the fourteenth key informant. This study reveals a complex and rich text of how Black women see themselves in the university, their experiences with multiple and overlapping oppressions and how this affects their careers, and finally, their contributions to the academy and their visions of success.

Predicated on a narrative of mutuality and cooperation, what has come to be known as the Canadian fur trade has long been positioned as exceptional in its relationships between colonizers and Indigenous peoples. In this framing the fur trade in what would become Canada is represented as having experienced little of the colonial violence that manifested in other colonial encounters and has been constructed as devoid of the unfreedom of chattel slavery. In fact, this characterization is untrue. Located within the French and British empires, the Canadian fur trade reflected the violences of its empires. From the seventeenth, and well into the nineteenth centuries chattel slavery existed in the fur trade as it did in the empires of which it was a part. Here, as elsewhere, complex webs of family/business relationships carried the violence of empire to and between its colonies. The creation and maintenance of these webs offered spaces where women as well as men could participate in the success of their family/businesses, but also in the transmission of colonial violence. One example of this is the Wedderburn Colvile family, their involvement in both West Indian plantation slavery and in the Hudson’s Bay Company, and in the interventions of one of its members, Jean Wedderburn Douglas, Lady Selkirk in what has become known as the fur trade wars. A closer look at the Wedderburn Colvile family and their interests in the Northern North American fur trade offers insights into how colonial violence and changes in the laws relating to chattel slavery impacted the fur trade, as the effects of these changes traveled along family/business webs of networks of relationship. This research draws on primary sources gleaned from archives and libraries in Scotland, England, the West Indies, the United States and Canada. It brings together a wide range of secondary literature to argue that, just as in other parts of empire, colonial violence, including chattel slavery, connected through webs of family/business relationships, existed in the Canadian fur trade. At the same time, this project argues, the erasure of that story is something we are only now beginning to address.

This dissertation examines the process by which a singular Ukrainian Canadian identity was constructed and entrenched throughout the twentieth century. It details how one of Canada’s largest and best organized diasporic communities, utilizing changing notions of cultural pluralism and the politics of the Cold War, crafted an increasingly nationalist, anti-communist version of identity that eradicated previously popular articulations of what it meant to be a Ukrainian in Canada. The traditional historiography posits that the community defined itself on its own terms, relying on individualized acts of agency and migrant resilience to entrench a version of Ukrainian-ness that was a democratic, bottom-up reflection of the collective. This project offers an alternative perspective by focusing on the battle over community narratives between communists, represented by the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) and then the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), and the nationalists, organized under the umbrella of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC). I show how, with the help of state officials, the nationalists overpowered their ideological enemies on the left, concreting their identity as hegemonic. Through this process of coherence, they further bound specific aspects of their own ideology, perceived as innocuous, apolitical, and simply common sense, into mainstream political consciousness. Beyond a simple community study, this dissertation is also a case study about the building of anti-communist hegemony in Canada. Chapter One examines the role of state surveillance and political policing to show how state officials collaborated with the UCC to weaken the domestic left. Chapter Two analyzes the rise and fall of a government bureaucracy that acculturated the nationalists so as to embed them in Canada’s structures of power and bolster their anti-communism. Chapter Three looks more closely at acts of anti-communist violence, which seriously deterred participation in the AUUC. The state’s refusal to condemn the violence also telegraphed its preferences and helped define Canada’s social, political, and judicial boundaries. Chapter Four focuses on the nationalists’ appropriation of cultural pluralism to further entrench their version of Ukrainian identity. Lastly, Chapter Five explores commemoration, where competing visions for certain cultural figures were articulated and, eventually, nationalist narratives were set.

« L’heure des pétitions est passée, il faut des actes » présente une histoire vue d’en bas des sans-travail québécois au cours de l’entre-deux-guerres (1919-1939). L’objectif de cette thèse est de démontrer la contribution de l’action collective des sans-emploi à la politisation du problème du chômage au Québec durant les années 1920 et 1930. Cette période est un événement matrice pour l’histoire du chômage au Québec et au Canada. Le chômage, qui est déjà un phénomène important au cours du processus d’industrialisation au XIXe siècle, atteint au cours de la Grande Dépression des proportions jusqu’alors inégalées. Ce problème, qui jusqu’à la Première Guerre mondiale est encore largement considéré comme relevant d’une éthique du travail déficiente, de l’imprévoyance des individus, ou encore la conséquence des cycles saisonniers de l’économie, se présente de plus en plus comme un phénomène politique et systémique remettant en cause l’organisation de la société québécoise et canadienne. Dans ce changement de paradigme, l’action collective des sans-travail joue un rôle déterminant. Grâce à celle-ci, le chômage prend la forme d’un problème à la fois collectif, social et politique, qui ultimement remet en question la relation entre la démocratie et le capitalisme. L’étude du répertoire d’action collective des sans-travail québécois permet de mieux comprendre leur rôle dans l’histoire du chômage. Leurs protestations prennent racine dans une économie morale qui annonce une redéfinition de la citoyenneté fondée sur la formulation de nouvelles attentes envers l’État. Considérant que le chômage est indépendant de leur volonté, les sans-emploi estiment alors avoir le droit à une assistance contre le chômage. Bien que les manifestations de sans-travail ne soient pas un phénomène nouveau dans l’histoire québécoise, au cours des années 1920 et 1930, celles-ci apparaissent de moins en moins marginales. Prenant racine à Montréal dans le contexte de la Révolte ouvrière, elles s’étendent à plusieurs autres villes de la province au cours de la Grande Dépression. Perçus comme une menace à la paix sociale, dans un moment fortement marqué par l’anticommunisme, ces mouvements forcent les pouvoirs publics à intervenir. Encore peu étudiées à ce jour, ces manifestations, jumelées à celles qui se déroulent ailleurs au Canada, expliquent pourquoi le chômage devient, pour la première fois, un problème politique d’importance et débattu au sein de la sphère publique.

This thesis examines the role of Chinese in Canadian history by looking beyond the popular railway narrative that reinforces a stereotype of docile cheap labour and a reductive lens of racism. The research will look at what brought Chinese sojourners to Canada and the economic and legislation restraints and discriminatory labour practices by the government and employers. It will look at how Chinese people began to resist the prohibitive social, economic, and political policies through protests, Chinese unions, and collaborative efforts of Chinese and white Canadians. The railway narrative rendered Chinese women invisible within Canadian history as it focuses on the racial discrimination of Chinese men. The research will show Chinese women were impacted economically and socially by their lack of visibility within society due to gender and cultural discrimination by both white and Chinese communities. Finally, without acknowledgement and education the perpetuation of racial stereotypes will continue.

Using Community-Engaged research and an intersectional approach, this dissertation examines and interprets the ways two different Indigenous communities – The Tla’amin of British Columbia and the Mi’kmaq of Pictou, Nova Scotia –responded to the challenges and opportunities associated with settler colonialism, the creation of Indian Reserves, and the establishment of a capitalist wage labour economy in Indigenous territories. It primarily situates this discussion within the context of colonial efforts to geographically anchor Indigenous families in specific places while they struggled to retain meaningful connections with their broader territories. This dissertation provides critical analysis of the utility of using ‘settler colonialism’ as a catch-all to explain the various types of colonialism that impacted Indigenous people in Canada. Various types of colonialism contributed to a process where Atlantic Mi’kmaw and Pacific Coast Salish people with complex understandings of their territories and resources based on seasonal procurement and kinship systems, became geographically anchored on reserves as part of Indian Bands in the late nineteenth century. Within this confusing and often contradictory colonial world, the Tla’amin and the Mi’kmaq built adaptive and flexible economies that emphasized multiple occupations and relied on labour inputs from women and men to function. I argue that these new markets for Indigenous labour and commodities played an as of yet underappreciated role in the historical understanding of Indigenous motivations for securing specific reserve lands during the colonial survey of Indigenous lands in Canada. This dissertation adds to a growing body of literature that celebrates and historicizes Indigenous contributions to the labour history of Canada, and does so in ways that express how Indigenous people developed dynamic and responsive economies within emerging settler colonial economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.