“WE BUILT A LIFE FROM NOTHING” - WHITE SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE MYTH OF MERITOCRACY

OS128_hires “WE BUILT A LIFE FROM NOTHING” WHITE SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE MYTH OF MERITOCRACY BY SHEELAH McLEAN A s a young white girl growing up on the prairies, I recall THE MYTH OF WHITE SETTLER SUPERIORITYhearing stories of the hardships my grandparents endured when they first arrived in Canada. [...] The story that my family built a life from nothing works to various European countries worked to assimilate into the dominant make economic inequality between white settlers and Indigenous white culture in order to gain access to social and political power people seem natural and normal. [...] Subsequently, lack of success is then attributed to lack of and barley freely on the market and could travel throughout Canada intelligence and work ethic, low morals, and the inability to know without any regulation from the federal or provincial government. [...] a white settler and Canadian citizen my grandfather could vote in The myth that Canadian society is created on individual work elections, and was an important organizer for the CCF in his rural ethic ignores how racially dominant groups gain access to social and community. [...] 32 OS|OS FALL/WINTER 2018 The access my family had in the early 1900s to land, citizenship, dispossession of lands, racist and sexist Indian Act legislation, the public education, mobility rights, bank loans, and government relief violence of residential schools, the regulation of Indigenous bodies during famine secured their upward mobility and our middle-class through the Pass System (Williams,.