Accumulation by repossession: Capitalist settler colonialism in Coast Salish territory

Abstract

Several Coast Salish First Nations are actively involved in land reclamation and redevelopment in the greater Vancouver region (Canada). Through their for-profit development corporations, entities like Nch’ḵay̕ Development Corporation (Squamish Nation) and the joint-venture Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Development Corporation have become key players in the lucrative Vancouver property market in partnership with other public and private land developers. Situating multibillion-dollar holdings like the Jericho and Sen̕áḵw projects that further highest-and-best-use appraisal within the context of the area’s settler colonial history, we argue that land repossession and its associated development was made possible through settler colonial forms like corporate decisions, legal judgements and political frameworks that rendered land ready for disposal. Repossession thus created options for new types of reintegration into capitalist spheres, primarily as residential real estate projects, independent from specific configurations of land tenure as fee simple or reserve land. Advancing the concept of ‘accumulation by repossession,’ a recursive moment associated with dispossession, we describe how First Nations peoples are regaining land title and political-economic control at the same time as their development corporations are promoting urban capital accumulation through privatized profit-making. Land ‘improvement’, speculation, and the creation of private real property have driven Indigenous dispossession in Coast Salish territory just as they now shape repossession.