Julie Tomiak

Research interests: Indigenous urbanism; Indigenous resurgence; infrastructures of care; Land Back; urban reserves; dispossession; settler colonialism; racial capitalism; neoliberalization

Julie Tomiak is an interdisciplinary researcher of mixed Anishinaabe and European descent who studies the political economy of Indigenous-settler relations, with a focus on Indigenous resurgence, reclamation, and cities. She is interested in histories and geographies of colonial and capitalist dispossession and Indigenous resistance, restitution, and Land Back.

In partnership with the Algonquin Nation Secretariat (ANS), Julie and co-investigator Justin Paulson are currently working on a SSHRC-funded Partnership Engage Grant project, “Anishinābe Algonquin land, dispossession, and restitution: Developing models and estimates of the value of timber extracted in the lower Dumoine watershed, 1870-1890”. The project seeks to highlight the impacts of the timber industry during the height of the valley’s lumber trade and create robust models of valuation that can be applied both to this region and to other areas. It contributes to a larger, long-term project with the aim to more fully map out the contours of dispossession of the families of the Dumoine Band in the Dumoine and Black River watersheds in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century, as well as the political economic history not only of the Kichi Sibi valley, but also of Canadian state formation and the growth of the Canadian economy.

With her colleagues Heather Dorries, Robert Henry, David Hugill and Tyler McCreary, Julie co-edited a collection of essays, entitled Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West, which engages Indigenous and settler colonial urbanisms from critical and community-based perspectives. Her papers have been published in scholarly journals, including Urban Geography, Journal of Historical Sociology, Geoforum, Antipode, Studies in Political Economy, and Canadian Journal of Urban Research.

Prior to joining Carleton University in 2019, Julie taught in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University for five years. From 2009-2014, she worked with the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) as a Senior Policy Analyst.

Recent courses:

INDG 2011 Critical Indigenous Studies

INDG 4001 Indigeneity in the City

INDG/ CDNS 2302 Land Water Capitalism

CDNS 5003 Selected Topics: Decolonizing the City

CDNS 6900 PhD Core Seminar

Cross-appointments (0%):

Institute of Political Economy

Department of Geography and Environmental Studies

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

School of Canadian Studies

Selected publications:

Dorries, Heather, Hugill, David and Tomiak, Julie. 2023. Le capitalisme racial et la production de villes coloniales de peuplement. Espaces et sociétés 190: 171-192. https://doi.org/10.3917/esp.190.0171

Tomiak, Julie. 2023. Land back / cities back. Urban geography 44 (2): 292-294. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2126610

Paulson, Justin and Julie Tomiak. 2022. Original and ongoing dispossessions: Settler capitalism and Indigenous resistance in British Columbia. Journal of Historical Sociology 35 (2): 154-169. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12365

Dorries, Heather, David Hugill and Julie Tomiak. 2022. Racial capitalism and the production of settler colonial cities. Geoforum 132: 263-270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.07.016

Dorries, Heather, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Tyler McCreary, and Julie Tomiak, eds. 2019. Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Tomiak, Julie, Tyler McCreary, David Hugill, Robert Henry, and Heather Dorries. 2019. Introduction: Settler City Limits. In Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West, eds. Dorries, Heather, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Tyler McCreary, and Julie Tomiak, 1-21. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Tomiak, Julie. 2019. Contested entitlement: Kapyong Barracks, Treaty One, and the settler colonial production of space in Winnipeg. In Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West, eds. Dorries, Heather, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Tyler McCreary, and Julie Tomiak, 95-117. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Barraclough, Laura, Nicholas Brown, David Hugill, Julie Tomiak, Kyle Mays & Natchee Blu Barnd. 2019. Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism. The AAG Review of Books 7 (2): 126-134. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2019.1579593

Tomiak, Julie. 2018. What about Cities? Containing Urban Self-Determination through the Indigenous Rights Framework (Policy Brief, Issue 13). Toronto: Yellowhead Institute. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2018/09/26/what-about-cities-urban-self-determination/

Tomiak, Julie. 2017. Contesting the settler city: Indigenous self-determination, new urban reserves, and the neoliberalization of colonialism. Antipode 49 (4): 928-945. https://doi-org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/10.1111/anti.12308

Tomiak, Julie. 2016. Navigating the contradictions of the shadow state: The Assembly of First Nations, state funding, and scales of Indigenous resistance. Studies in Political Economy 97 (3): 217-233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07078552.2016.1249130

Tomiak, Julie. 2016. Unsettling Ottawa: Settler colonialism, Indigenous resistance, and the politics of scale. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 25 (1): 8-21.