Five hundred years. A vast geography. And an unfinished project to remake the world to match the desires of settler colonizers. How have settlers used violence and narrative to transform Turtle Island into “North America”? What does that say about our social systems, and what happens next?

Drawing on multiple disciplines, archival sources, pop culture, and personal experience, Making and Breaking Settler Space creates a model that shows how settler spaces have evolved. From the colonization of Turtle Island in the 1500s to problematic activist practices by would-be settler allies today, Adam Barker traces the trajectory of settler colonialism, drawing out details of its operation and unflinchingly identifying its weaknesses.

Making and Breaking Settler Space proposes an innovative, unified spatial theory of settler colonization in Canada and the United States. In doing so, it offers a framework within which settlers can pursue decolonial actions in solidarity with Indigenous communities.

Adam Barker is a Settler Canadian, born and raised in the territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe Peoples in what is presently Hamilton, Ontario. He is a researcher, educator, and activist on settler colonialism, racism, and decolonization. His passion for confronting colonialism and supporting Indigenous liberation was sparked by visits to Six Nations of the Grand River as part of the Indigenous Studies Program at McMaster University. Adam holds a PhD in human geography from the University of Leicester and an MA in Indigenous Governance from the University of Victoria.

Adam J. Barker's profile page

Barker’s work presents a strong synthesis of recent work in settler studies. It testifies to his comprehensive understanding, as a self-acknowledged settler, of the dynamics that have presided over the construction of ongoing and structural North American inequities between settler and indigenous peoples.

Choice

Making and Breaking Settler Space offers important points of conversation and contestation as we continue to figure out what it means to live together in this place, and how we should go about doing something about it.

BC Studies

"Barker takes readers on a critical thought journey through relationships between past, present, and future complexities of settler colonialism, space, place, and identity."

University of Toronto Quarterly.