Taking Up the Work: Settler Colonial Governance, Discretion, and Public Sector Workers

In this article, we bring together findings from our qualitative study of provincial public sector workers ( n = 32) on Treaty 6, 7, and 8 (Alberta) and unceded Coast Salish territories (British Columbia) in which we consider how these workers are socialized to reproduce settler colonial structures and resist them. Provincial public sector workers (PPSWs) do not simply represent the White settler colonial state but functionally are the system as they negotiate the violence of the relationship between the state and Indigenous Nations and communities in their day-to-day work. The provincial level that we spotlight has jurisdiction over what are known as “the helping sectors” of education, health, and child welfare. These sectors directly govern the most intimate parts of life, making the capacity to cause harm insidious. State interventions into the lives of systemically targeted families and communities are often authorized through notions that the public sector serves “the public good” and knows “what’s best.” We specifically interrogate the relationship between the exercise of discretionary power and the logics underscoring White settler colonial institutions like the public sector. Our contention is that discretionary power is core to how PPSWs as state actors learn to conduct their work and justify their authority to do that work, as well as how they learn to both enact and challenge the authority and jurisdiction of the state.