Understanding Settler Workers’ ‘Common Sense’ Responses to Indigenous Governance in the Western Canadian Wild Mushroom Industry

Given histories of settler violence towards Indigenous nations following acts of Indigenous refusal, work from settler scholars regarding what animates settler responses to Indigenous governance must come alongside our calls for the return of land and authority. This article explores the affective responses of settler workers in the western Canadian wild mushroom industry as it transitions from its long-time unregulated status under settler law to Indigenous regulatory control. I draw ethnographic insights from morel mushroom harvesters on the unceded Territories of Nadleh Whut’en, Stellat’en, and Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nations in British Columbia during the introduction of an Indigenous-led permitting programme in 2019. I argue that settler aversion to Indigenous regulation results from the challenge to their ‘settler common sense’, which is produced and performed within the mushroom camps that line forest highways during the harvest. On NSN Whut’en Territories, harvesters’ attachments to their common sense were weakened along two lines—their positions as precarious workers in a capitalist industry and their ambivalence to the Canadian state. I outline how Indigenous regulation leveraged these fissures, leading to the protection of local peoples and ecologies and hope for the most precarious of settler workers.