It may be common among Canadian academics and some policymakers to identify non-Indigenous citizens of Canada as “settlers” — European-descended people who colonized the country — but most Canadians don’t see themselves that way, according to a new Leger Marketing poll.

The pollsters found that 47 per cent of Canadians disagree with the term “settler” as a descriptor. Thirty per cent didn’t know about the term, leading the researchers to note that it’s “reasonably safe to conclude that the 30 per cent … simply don’t understand the notion of settler colonialism.”