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Beavers, Blockades, and Animal Capital In Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s A Short History of the Blockade and Sydney Hegele’s The Pump

https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v15i15-31

Abstract

This paper explores the beaver as a symbol and resource for Canadian national identity. It brings together the fields of animal studies, Indigenous critical theory, and critical political economy to read Sydney Hegele’s Ontario Gothic short story collection The Pump and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s lecture A Short History of the Blockade zeroing on the representation of beavers as staging criticisms of a settler colonial politics of extraction within Canadian history and national literary archetypes.

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Beavers, Blockades, and Animal Capital In Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s A Short History of the Blockade and Sydney Hegele’s The Pump. (2026). Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 15, 15-31. https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v15i15-31

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Author Biography

Ishaan Selby

Concordia University, Concordia University, Concordia University, Concordia University

Ishaan Selby is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University in the Department of English. He holds a PhD in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University. His research explores the intersections of capitalism, social difference, and animal life and has been published in English Studies in Canada, Ecocene, and an edited collection entitled Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene (Vernon Press, 2024). His first book project tentatively titled “Tooth and Claw: Animal Oppression, Racial Capitalism, and the Abolition of Policing” argues that policing is fundamental to the human-animal distinction in social formations where the dominant relationship to animal life is one of ownership and that humanization and animalization are central to the life-sorting operations of racial capitalism. He divides his time between Montréal and his home city of Toronto.

 

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