Stolen City reveals how settler colonialism, as a mode of racial capitalism, has made and remade Winnipeg over the past 150 years, tracing the emergence of a ruling alliance that has installed successive development visions to guarantee its hold on regional wealth and power. Drawing on a rich local tradition of grassroots counter-planning, Stolen City uncovers the persistence of revolutionary visions for the city and the concrete ways that oppression is shaped by resistance. It gives particular attention to an ascendant post-industrial vision for Winnipeg’s city centre that has renewed colonial "legacies" of dispossession and racism over the past forty years. In doing so, it moves beyond the common tendency to break apart histories of conquest from studies of urban history or present-day urban dynamics.
“A sweeping and magnificent spatial history of a city founded in the midst of imperial economic crisis—a crisis resolved through western expansion. Owen Toews intricately weaves theories of racial capitalism into Indian policy from the nineteenth century to contemporary urban development in Winnipeg. This book is a must read for anyone trying to understand the ways that colonization produces spaces that are shaped and then reshaped by hierarchies of difference, rooted in a never-ending struggle to turn Indigenous land into property.” —Shiri Pasternak, author of Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State
