The ‘Missing’ Politics of Whiteness and Rightful Presence in the Settler Colonial City
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Delacey Tedesco,Jen Bagelman |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829817712075 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817712075
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2017, Vol. 45(3) 380 –402
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829817712075
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The ‘Missing’ Politics of
Whiteness and Rightful
Presence in the Settler
Colonial City
Delacey Tedesco
University of British Columbia – Okanagan, Canada
Jen Bagelman
University of Exeter, UK
Abstract
This article engages the global nexus of colonisation, racialisation, and urbanisation through the
settler colonial city of Kelowna, British Columbia (BC), Canada. Kelowna is known for its recent,
rapid urbanisation and for its ongoing, disproportionate ‘whiteness’, understood as a complex
political geography that enacts boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The white urban identity of
Kelowna defines Indigenous and temporary migrant communities as ‘missing’ or ‘out-of-place’, yet
these configurations of ‘missing’ are politically contested. This article examines how differential
processes of racialisation and urbanisation establish the whiteness of this settler-colonial city,
drawing attention to ways that ‘missing’ communities remake relations of ‘rightful presence’ in
the city, against dominant racialised, colonial, and urban narratives of their absence and processes
of their displacement. Finally, this article considers how a politics of ‘rightful presence’ needs
to be reconfigured in the settler-colonial city, which itself has no rightful presence on unceded
Indigenous land.
Keywords
settler-colonial city, urbanisation, colonisation, racialisation, rightful presence
Corresponding author:
Delacey Tedesco, Fixed-Term Lecturer (Communities, Culture, and Global Studies), University of British
Columbia – Okanagan, 1147 Research Road, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7, Canada.
Email: Delacey@shaw.ca
712075MIL0010.1177/0305829817712075Millennium: Journal of International StudiesTedesco and Bagelman
research-article2017
Conference Article
Tedesco and Bagelman 381
1. Kamilla Bahbahani, The Changing Face of Kelowna: Report on Ethnicity and Ethnic
Relations (Kelowna: Intercultural Society of the Central Okanagan [ISCO], 2008), 4–5.
Available at: http://gordongrisenthwaite.com/isco/docs/changing-face.pdf. Last accessed
February 1, 2013.
2. Okanagan Nation Alliance. Available at: www.syilx.org. Last accessed April 26, 2017.
3. This formulation references the feeling of threat that the arrival of black Jamaican labour-
ers and students generated in a vocal component in Kelowna and the subsequent efforts to
govern and constrain beyond legal and social norms. Luis Aguiar, Ann McKinnon, and Dixon
Sookraj, Repertoires of Racism: Reactions to Jamaicans in the Okanagan Valley, BC Studies
168, Winter (2010/2011): 65–79.
4. Alistair Waters, ‘Kelowna’s new look Bernard Avenue to have “themes”’, Kelowna Capital
News 09 May 2013. Available at: www.kelownacapnews.com/news/206850311.html. Last
accessed April 23, 2014.
5. Roger Knox, ‘Missing Mexican Migrant Workers a Mystery’. The Morning Star, 20 July
2015. Available at: http://www.vernonmorningstar.com/news/317590531.html. Last accessed
February 17, 2016.
Missing: the Settler Colonial City in World Politics
With a population of 120,000, Kelowna is the largest city in the Okanagan Valley. It is
located 400 km north-east from Vancouver, BC, well-connected by direct highways and an
international airport but clearly a step off the beaten path. Rapid urbanisation here has been
fueled primarily by people fleeing larger cities in search of a quieter, sunnier, healthier, and
more affordable life. Ten years ago, the University of British Columbia (UBC) opened a
satellite campus in Kelowna (UBC – Okanagan). Locally you may hear that this develop-
ment accelerated Kelowna’s growth; and if you work in academia, you may notice that
Kelowna is increasingly interpolated into scholarly literature as a site of critical investiga-
tion. However, outside real estate advertisements, tourist brochures, and a few academic
publications, Kelowna is still largely invisible in global terms: a parochial quasi-city,
appearing to most residents and visitors as safe, clean and noticeably homogenously white
for a city of its size.1 You may ask about the city’s name, and on learning that it is derived
from the Nsyilxcen word kiʔ law naʔ (grizzly bear), perhaps discover that Kelowna is
located on the unceded, transborder lands of the Indigenous Syilx people, the Okanagan
First Nation.2 Or, you might stop to buy cherries at a fruit stand and notice that the workers
around the back of the stand, sorting and stacking cherries, are noticeably not white;3 or
watch as a group of Spanish-speakers load onto a school bus at a big-box grocery store; and
so perhaps come to learn that temporary migrant workers from Jamaica, Mexico, and
Guatemala perform much of the agricultural labour that sustains Kelowna. However, one
can spend a few weeks here on holiday, or live in Kelowna for decades, and only be aware
of its dominant image as safe, prosperous, homogenous, welcoming, and white.
Local media articles both typify these differential emplacements and draw attention to
what is missing. The inclusion of Indigenous Syilx art into the revitalisation of Bernard
Avenue, in downtown Kelowna, is heralded as a new relationship with the Okanagan
Nation,4 yet the contemporary political and territorial claims of the Syilx people are
‘missing’ from public view. The disappearance of four Mexican farm workers is treated
as a matter of suspicion rather than concern5 – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP) news release circulates photos and personal information and speculates that the
disappeared may have crossed the border into the US – and the release is publicly criticised
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