Under the conditions of settler colonialism in North America, which is an ongoing and structural project to acquire land, to maintain that land, and to eliminate who is on it, there has been a great violence, a dispossession, and, thankfully, there has been failure. It did not completely work. There are still Indians. Some still know this. Some will defend what they have left and will persist, robustly. In this failure there has been and we can infer will continue to be pushback on these logics of elimination. This failure to kill, to disappear entirely, is Indigenous life, in the face of what was to be bodily and structural death.
—AUDRA SIMPSON, lecture for Indigenous Governance Speakers Series, University of Victoria, 2012