Economic rationalism within the concept of wealth and redistributive process relies on an economic framework that legitimizes land dispossession and is a Terra Nullius interpretation of reparative acts.

Discussion A brief critical synthesis of the words ‘land’, ‘wealth’ and ‘economics’ suggests that although all the conceptions are actually tightly and materially connected, the authors of economics textbooks have effectively decoupled the terms from each other. Therefore, the hypothesis and worldview describes an implicit erasure of Settler colonialism and of Indigenous people in economics; mainstream economics, in this case. The definition of land, derived from the economics textbooks, does not point to the historical reality of how land was owned by early (and contemporary) Settlers. For the surveyed authors, wealth is not explicitly derived from land, since it is assumed that accumulation and distribution is given. The definition of economics did at least focus on wealth (and economic growth) in the classical century of economic thought (Backhouse & Medema, 2009b), but the North American economics’ attention on wealth started to be delinked in Samuelson’s text in 1948 (Backhouse & Medema, 2009a). Based on the surveyed textbooks, the authors do not define economics as a study of wealth. Rather, the definition of economics mainly attracts questions around unlimited needs, scarce means, and the utilitarian choice-making character of the individualistic economic actor. Thus, there are layers of erasure between each term that ‘logically’ delink the whole study of economics in Canada from the land dispossessions. Settler Colonial Land Story For Barker and Lowman (2015, p. 33) the Settler narratives “are the means through which violent colonization is transformed into the story of heroic struggle and the inevitable establishment of an exceptionally successful, just, and distinct society”. The concepts of land used in Canadian economics textbooks are stories that invade and displace not just Indigenous stories, but Settler as well. The most common narrated story in the textbooks is that nature gave land to the early Settlers for free. Moreover, the textbook’s narrative explains that only the Settlers’ improvement of the land gave it any economic worth. This myth makes White European Settlers as subjects with agency, and nature (or the ‘wild’) as an object with no agency. This positivist perspective then implies that Indigenous people are ‘wild’, as part of the natural background. In other words, since the textbooks do not mention Indigenous people living on or using the land, they are then imagined as ‘savages’ without agency, or even life. In fact, we can infer that life and value can only be transferred through White Settler ownership. The belief that nature gave land to Settlers “obscures” the fact “that many settlers only survived because of the generosity, knowledge and skills of Indigenous communities” (Barker & Lowman, 2015, p. 34). The story given by the economics textbooks closely resembles the Terra Nullius ideology: the “notion of empty land and a dualism between uncivilized people and ‘unworked’/unimproved land” (Hoogeveen, 2015, p. 124). The land is therefore believed to be empty and unimproved if there is no human agency, which is only formed by economic agents guided by market mechanisms. As a consequence, these stories then influence actual state policies. For instance, there are examples of early paper bills of credit backed by colonial arrogations over Indigenous lands, and how its continuous circulation in the form of money reproduced the colonial expropriation of Native land and labor (Vimalassery, 2013). Additionally, based on the critical geographer Dawn Hoogeveen (2015), the mineral claim-staking regime in Northern Canada parallels the Settler colonial structure of dispossession of mineral staking across North American, and the world. In fact, mineral staking is due to the free-staking principle. Basically, the principle gives full right to mining prospectors and companies to claim a piece of land (whether private or Crown land) without informing the people who own or live on the land (Hoogeveen, 2015). As Hoogeven (2015, p. 123) claims, present “mineral tenure regimes are not innocent or neutral but premised on an erasure of Indigenous claims to land”—legitimized by the textbooks’ narrative on land. Finally, this illustration of land and property also follows John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690). Briefly, John Locke’s theory of property (‘law of nature’) goes as follows: at first, land was God’s gift equally given to the heirs of Adam as a common. Subsequently, land becomes the private property of the individuals who improve it. In other words, nature is privatized when humans add value to it through labour. “His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it was common and belonged equally to all her children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself” (Locke, 1690, Sect. 29). Additionally, Locke saw the ‘art of government’ as the provider of land for those who wish to properly improve it and produce surplus. Thus, since mainstream political economics regards Indigenous people as pertaining to a lower level of economic development, Locke’s idea of improvement and labour absolutely favours the European philosophy of property exclusivity. Unsurprisingly, as argued by several scholars (Tully, 1995; Hsueh, 2006), the Lockean perspective in political philosophy invalidates the discipline’s capacity to study aboriginal self-government and ecology. The interesting research of political scientist Vicki Hsueh (2006), interrogating the credibility of Locke’s thesis, suggests that John Locke’s direct financial stake in American slavery and Indigenous dispossession depicts a vested interest in his political ideas. In other words, for Hsueh (2006), there was a clear conflict of interest. As such, and by extension that all Settler economists benefit from similar conflicts of interest, I argue that mainstream economics cannot generate epistemologies to evaluate any Indigenous economic relations to land. The discipline devaluates their political economies and superimposes (European) Settler stories and structures over those of Indigenous nations. Settler Colonial Wealth Story: Canadian economics textbooks forgo the important relation between land and wealth, although wealth is clearly an original feature of land. The textbooks’ view on land only permits the market as the provider of improvement and economic value to land, generating surplus, and amounting to wealth accumulation. Moreover, since this wealth is extracted through a structure of white settler ownership of land, as I argued earlier, we can also ascertain that the wealth is therefore what history scholar Patrick Wolfe (American University of Beirut, 2013) calls “white man’s property”. In the Settler colonial context, Indigenous bodies obstruct the settlers’ access to land, and therefore access to wealth accumulation (Wolfe, 2006). Hence, the textbook’s disconnection erases the persistent land dispossession and appropriation, and wealth accumulation of Settler colonialism, in Canada. This post-accumulation/dispossession narrative is therefore a second layer in Canadian economics pedagogy that removes all Indigenous entitlement and sovereignty over wealth. With unceded/stolen land occupied and extracted by Settlers, all accumulated wealth is also unceded/stolen. In fact, as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012, p. 24) logically infer, “[i]f we took away land, there would be little wealth left to redistribute”—gain, “wealth is land, Native land” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 23). The free-entry regime is an example of how wealth is accumulated in Canada, and how the textbook’s story about wealth also informs Settler “systems”. The regime in question allows mining to supersede all private property interests, especially all aboriginal land rights. It also favours mining operations as “the best and highest use of Crown lands” and the “mineral tenures are appropriately granted on a first come first serve basis” (Hoogeveen, 2015, p. 128). Furthermore, mineral potential is considered as the most valuable resource, rendering any other resource interests as much less important (Campbell, 2004, cited in Hoogeveen, 2015, p.128). In terms of mineral staking in Canada, the free-entry system divides property into surface and sub-surface legal categories (where sub-surface rights supplants surface rights). It “is strictly for the purposes of any potential resource extraction or to raise money for capitalist mining interests” (Hoogeveen, 2015, p. 136). To increase wealth, the land and its sub-surface have to be expropriated by displacing Indigenous peoples. This is legitimized by classical economics axioms protecting property rights. The economist’s definition of wealth is thus not innocent or neutral as it propagates a Settler colonial story (ideology) of wealth in its pedagogy, and in praxis as well. Settler Colonial Economics Story Following the preceding layers of erasure of Settler colonialism in Canadian economics textbooks, I argue that the definition of economics is a third layer of erasure. The physiocrats of the 18th century were the first classical economists to consider land as the source of wealth. With respect to physiocracy, economic processes operate through the objective “Natural Law”, which is independent of human free will (Cleveland, 1999). Moreover, the classical physiocratic model regarded agriculture as the “supreme occupation” and “economic rent as derived from uncompensated work done by Nature” (Cleveland, 1999, p. 129). While this early perspective of classical economics viewed Nature (land) as the source of wealth, it could not consider the uncompensated labour of Indigenous people on the land. Later on, post-Physiocratic definitions of economics still considered wealth as the object of analysis, up until the 20th century. After the 1940s, the popular Robbinsonian definition of economics—losing the attention on wealth, and rather focusing on the individual economic actor and scarcity—took hold of the mainstream discipline, especially in North America (Backhouse & Medema, 2009a). Therefore, the movement away from an economics informed by land and by wealth, and ultimately informed by the ‘theory of choice’, can be interpreted as overlapping layers deepening and obfuscating a Settler colonial analysis. Beyond any doubt, these mainstream definitions of economics inform the management of land and wealth in Canada, without considering the ingrained Settler colonial power structures. In other words, I argue that the current definition of economics supersedes and invades any non-colonial relation to the land. Economics imperialism provides another valuable description of the invasive characteristics of neoclassical economics in the academic realm (Mäki, 2009; Allais, 2012; Fine & Milonakis, 2009) and within other public matters (Perry-Kessaris, 2011; Rushton, 1999). More specifically, I argue that the Robbinsonian definition of economics legitimizes the academic and social reach of economics imperialism. As such, the story of the profit maximizing and rational economic actor derived from the neoclassical definition creates legal institutions (or ‘systems’) in Canada that dispossess Indigenous people (e.g. the mineral claims-staking regime) and eliminate them as well (e.g. the Indian Act). Finally, the narrative in Canadian economics pedagogy is a complicit supplier of legitimacy and persistence for Settler colonial invasions that erase stories of dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands. The preceding conclusion is a logical derivative of the latter-elaborated three layers of definitions in economics: land, wealth, and economics. Actually, within the context of economics, I perceive the three words as stratified layers that work to erase the complexities and contradictions of Settler colonialism from mainstream economics analysis and State policies.