Sheelah mclean biography of abraham

“WE BUILT A LIFE FROM NOTHING” WHITE SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE MYTH OF MERITOCRACY BY SHEELAH McLEAN A s a young white girl growing up on the prairies, I recall hearing stories of the hardships my grandparents endured when they irst arrived in Canada.

One narrative that stands out as particularly important was that my grandparents immigrated to Canada with very little money or goods. It was not until many years later that I came to understand these stories as narratives that reproduced the idea that our collective family wealth and status as white settlers was earned through ingenuity.

These family stories are national texts that position white settlers as having earned our social and political status in society through intelligence and hard work alone, erasing the colonial policies that enforced differential access to resources, such as land.

The story that my family built a life fro