ABSTRACT
The grand aim of “nation building,” from the perspective of Europeans and North Americans greedy for land and resources, demanded the control and in fact removal of the Indigenous peoples who initially occupied the land. Law enforcement bodies—in varied guises—were thus developed to support the colonialist project of the state. In the Canadian context, similar displays of police power over Indigenous bodies are evident in the practice known as Starlight tours, by which Indigenous people are loaded into police cruisers, driven to remote areas and left to find their way back to the city—often without their coats, sometimes without shoes, and generally in sub-zero temperatures. The sort of police violence that often emerges out of the containment of Indigenous protests is an extension of historical forms intended to ensure the social order that defines the relative place of colonized and colonizer.
