Indigenous Infopolitics: Biopolitics as Resistance to White Paper Liberalism in Canada

This article argues for a reading of biopolitics as a mechanism of political empowerment under conditions in which the state perpetuates exclusion by paradoxically affirming the political equality of marginalized individuals or groups. After differentiating Michel Foucault's conceptualization of biopolitics from its conventional interpretation in Giorgio Agamben, I show how the Canadian state counterintuitively perpetuates Indigenous exclusion through an inclusive liberalism that re-affirms Indigenous persons as full and equal citizens. I then conclude the article by showing how a statistics or information-based discourse of population—an Indigenous infopolitics—has concomitantly become an indispensible means of Indigenous resistance in Canada today.