I read Horatio Clare’s book The Light in the Dark: A Winter’s Journal a couple of weeks ago. It’s a memoir of a winter in Yorkshire, living with seasonal affective disorder, and I loved Clare’s prose. I ordered Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S. Bach because I liked The Light in the Dark so much. I knew nothing about this short book—I hadn’t noticed the subtitle—and when it arrived, I was happy that it tells the story of a walk.
In 1705, J.S. Bach, then an 18-year-old organist at the Neue Kirche in Armstadt, a town in Thuringia, in southern Germany, walked 230 miles almost directly north to the free imperial city of Lübeck, on the River Elbe, where he intended to study with Dieterich Buxtehude, the organist and musical director of that city’s Marienkirche. Bach obtained four weeks leave from his employers at the Neue Kirche, but in the end, he spent three months working with Buxtehude, one of the most important composers and musicians then in Germany. Lübeck, too, had a far more active music scene than provincial Armstadt, and young Bach was nothing if not ambitious. He hoped that the time he spent with Buxtehude would transform his career, and according to Clare, it did.
More than 300 years later, Clare, accompanied some of the time by a BBC radio producer and sound engineer, walked the route historians think Bach took on his journey. Clare describes Bach’s journey, and his own, as pilgrimages:
The expedition was a pilgrimage of a sort, a pilgrimage for his art of a kind that was common in European culture then: the wandering scholar and the itinerant musician were both familiar figures, and cherished in Germany, where the need of young craftsmen to travel in order to learn from older masters was understood and respected. Perhaps every long-distance walk is a pilgrimage, whether the walker is a believer or not. The reconnection with ourselves through immersion in the world is inevitably therapeutic, and the deeper pleasure comes from a counterpoint: the similarity of each day in their greater rhythms and the diversity of each moment. Our walk is a pilgrimage, too. In following what we know and can guess of his footsteps, we hope to draw as close to that young man as it is possible to do across three centuries. It will change us in some of the same degrees it changed him; we will be fitter, more springy, our eyes refreshed, our horizons expanded and our internal landscapes renewed. Despite the years between us we will see and feel much of the same world that Bach did; under the same horizons we will encounter the same paths, trees, plants, birds and animals. We will be crossing one of the most fascinating and perhaps the most significant of modern European states. (18)
Of course, the intervening centuries have changed much: there are fewer birds now, and much of Thuringia’s forests have been cut down, but Clare’s journey does engage with the same landscapes, and his account moves back and forth between what Bach would have encountered then and what Clare finds now.
The five-part BBC documentary about Clare’s walk is available here; I haven’t listened to it yet, but I intend to, motivated by this book, which I enjoyed very much. Clare isn’t a Bach historian or biographer, but he knows a great deal about baroque music, and Bach’s music in particular, partly because he got through a bout of depression when he was at university with the help of Bach’s cello suites. I was amazed by Clare’s wide-ranging intellect and realized how many gaps exist in my own education—about Bach, yes, but about so many other things as well. I’m not young any more—I’m at least a decade older than Clare—but my time isn’t up yet, and I can continue learning, perhaps by planning projects like Clare’s. And, perhaps, if I continue to write, my prose will improve, becoming more like his. Something of His Art isn’t quite as beautifully written as The Light in the Dark, but it’s close, and close is just fine. I hadn’t thought that 2021 would begin with the discovery of a new favourite author, but I’m happy that it has.
Works Cited
Clare, Horatio. Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S. Bach, Little Toller, 2018.
———. The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal, Elliott and Thompson, 2018.
I was drawn to Sandy Grande’s essay “Refusing the Settler Society of the Spectacle” for the same reasons I was interested in Natalie Baloy’s “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver”: both promise an application of Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle to issues around settler colonialism, and Debord’s book is a touchstone of psychogeography and especially Phil Smith’s mythogeography. Grande is thinking about Debord’s idea of spectacle, but she also sees Michel Foucault’s understanding of surveillance in terms of spectacle as well, drawing (I think) on Jonathan Crary’s essay “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory” (which she cites), and she sets out to use both of these to examine the relationship between spectacle and settler colonialism. “I am particularly interested in the role that spectacle plays in the solidification of the settler state and the consolidation of whiteness, particularly as intensified under neoliberalism,” she writes (1014). She is also interested in “the implications for the nonindigenous settler subject” of settler colonialism; she quotes Albert Memmi’s discussion of “the benevolent colonizer”—that is, “the self-effacing colonizer who refuses the ideology of colonialism but still lives within its confines,” a group that Grande suggests would today be considered white allies (1014)—who, according to Memmi, “can never attain the good, for his only choice is not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness” (Memmi 43). Grande contends that “the spectacular portrayal of Indigenous peoples generally and of the #NoDAPL prayer camps more specifically, serves as a site in which to explore the contours of this ‘uneasiness’” (1014).
Grande describes The Society of the Spectacle as a “cautionary text” in which Debord “laments the displacement of ‘authentic’ social relations with their false representations under advanced capitalism” (1015). Debord’s argument—which I have not read, and need to read—“remains remarkably prescient,” Grande states, because “[u]nder neoliberalism, the speed, scope, and power of spectacle has only intensified, reconfiguring the very character of life as not only conditioned by consumerism and commercialization but largely replaced by, exchanged for, and even rejected in favor of its more spectacular simulations” (1015). Everything is for sale, everything is commodified and put on display, including sex, love, intimacy, and marriage (1015). However Grande’s central concern is “how the culture industry (re) produces exhibitions of self and other” that work “to consolidate whiteness and secure settler futurity” (1015). Here Grande refers to the intellectual genealogy of the term futurity, which she traces back to John L. O’Sullivan’s treatise on manifest destiny “as an exclusively settler construct that is incommensurable with Indigeneity” (1015).
I don’t know what she means, so I start looking. In “The Great Nation of Futurity,” John O’Sullivan describes the United States as “destined to be the great nation of futurity” because “the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal,” a “self-evident dictate of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man’s rights as man” (O’Sullivan 426). “How many nations have had their decline and fall, because the equal rights of the minority were trampled on by the despotism of the majority; or the interests of the many sacrificed to the aristocracy of the few; or the rights and interests of all given up to the monarchy of one?” O’Sullivan asks (426). The irony of the first clause in that sentence is powerful, if one considers it in the light of settler colonialism, but O’Sullivan’s belief in American equality is absolutely serious. “America is destined for better deeds,” he continues. “It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes” (427). Given that O’Sullivan was writing during the bloody removals of Indigenous peoples from areas east of the Mississippi to what became Oklahoma, removals known as the “Trail of Tears,” his blindness to the bloodiness of colonialism in his country is breathtaking, but it’s no more surprising, perhaps, than the blindnesses of settler Canadians to their own country’s ongoing colonial behaviour.
For O’Sullivan, the past has little interest; it’s the “far-reaching, the boundless future,” which “will be the era of American greatness,” that draws his attention (427). “In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True,” he writes (427). The divine and democratic political principles of the United States will be made concrete in “the glorious destiny” (427). “Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement,” O’Sullivan writes:
Equality of rights it the cynosure of our union of States, the grand exemplar of the correlative equality of individuals; and while truth sheds its effulgence, we cannot retrograde, without dissolving the one and subverting the other. We must onward to the fulfilment of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All of this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man—the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of the beasts of the field. Who, then, can doubt that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity? (429-30)
The divine mission of the United States guarantees its destiny, its role as the great nation of the future. That seems to be the way O’Sullivan is using the word “futurity” here—as “The quality, state, or fact of being future,” “the future; a future time” (O.E.D.)—rather than the more complex definition provided by Ben Anderson, who suggests that futurity is the anticipation of the future in the present (777-78). If Grande’s sense of futurity is established by a genealogy that begins with O’Sullivan’s text, then she must be thinking of futurity in the same way. I’ve spent time tracing the source of that genealogy, because denying settler futurity is a key tenet of settler-colonial discourse, and it’s important to understand the different ways the phrase “settler futurity” might be interpreted. For Grande, settler futurity is “incommensurable with Indigeneity,” perhaps because it necessarily involves, as Patrick Wolfe suggests, the genocidal process of the logic of elimination, or the replacement of Indigenous peoples by settlers. To be a settler is to participate in that logic of elimination. I wonder if there’s any way for a settler to step outside of that logic, or if, as Memmi suggests, that is an impossibility.
Grande states that “insofar as spectacle is contingent upon the radical reification of self, an overvaluing of the present, and rupturing of relationality, it becomes the perfect theater for producing anchorless (neoliberal) subjects whose every desire is increasingly structured by capital” (1015-16). Her emphasis on relationality here is important, because it shows how her argument is rooted in Indigenous epistemologies or cosmologies. “As it forecloses relationality by normalizing disconnection,” spectacle “effects an erasure of Indigenous peoples who continue to define themselves through relationship—to land, to history, to waters, to all our relations” (1016). She suggests that the water protectors at Standing Rock “were only rendered visible through spectacle,” and that before they were attacked by police using armoured vehicles and water cannons, “the Lakota peoples hardly existed, virtually erased from public consciousness,” and that even independent media (which I assume were critical of the state’s response to the water protectors) “deployed spectacle as a means of drawing attention” (1016). “The nonspectacular reality was that the majority of the time at the Oceti Sakowin encampment was spent in prayer, cooking, training, eating, laughing, building, teaching, working, washing, cleaning, singing, listening, reading, and tending,” she writes (1016). The spectacle of Standing Rock required the Lakota to act as “stand-ins for the ‘shame’ of America,” she continues (1016). That must be their function as spectacle. In reality, though, Standing Rock “has long served as a site of collective, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist Indigenous resistance,” with the Lakota on the front lines “protecting against the forces of US imperialism” (1016). That long and multilayered history of “the architecture of settler violence is lost “to the compressed space of spectacular time” (1016).
Next, Grande shifts to defining her terms. I’m going to focus on her definition of spectacle, because that’s the term I’m most curious about. She quotes Debord’s definition of spectacle as the “social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (1019). Through the passive consumption of spectacles, she states, we are separated from the production of our own lives (she cites Steven Best and Douglas Kellner on this point) (1019). Spectacle annihilates historical knowledge, because it is focused on what is new, and it is a form of non-coercive power (she cites Crary here). “Debord’s central thesis or provocation is that life in a ‘commodity-saturated, mass-mediated, image-dominated and corporate-constructed world’ engenders an increasingly isolated, alienated, and passive citizenry that unwittingly relents to a groupthink of market consciousness disguised as individual agency,” she continues, citing Richard L. Kaplan (1019). Kaplan’s analysis, she writes, “illuminates the inherent paradox of spectacle; despite (or because of) its intention to [elicit] emotion and (re)action, spectacle produces alienation and passivity” (1019). Because the spectacle is “both dialectical and self-perpetuating,” the individual and social ennui it produces “searches for relief from the deadening effect and, in so doing, activates the production of ever more spectacular imagery, generating an endless and alienating cycle of (simulated) life in search of the ‘real’” (1019). That search for what is perceived as “authentic” as an antidote to postmodernity is related to settler colonialism, since “Indian-ness” has always served “as a favored foil (antidote) for whiteness” (1019-20). “How does the expressed desire for the imagined Indian serve the propertied interests of whiteness, which is to say settler statecraft?” Grande asks (1020). Her exploration of “expressions of Indian-as-spectacle” is an attempt at answering that question (1020).
That exploration begins with a discussion of reality television shows about life on the “frontier” or in the “wild” as evidence of “settler-desire for the imperialist fantasy of ‘pre-modernist’ times,” a desire which appeases “settler supremacy” (1020). Indigenous peoples are eliminated from view in those programs, which is central to “a deep-[seated] need to continually perform the fabled journey from savage to civilized over and over again; settler-subjects playong out fantasies of the colonial encounter as theater” (1020). Grande cites Lakota scholar Phil Deloria’s discussion of “how the oscillation between settler desire and repulsion for Indian-ness has manifested through the long-standing practice of ‘playing Indian,’” which goes back to the 1773 Boston Tea Party (1020-21). She quotes British media theorist Nick Couldry on the way that “every system of cruelty requires its own theatre” (qtd. 1021). She applies Couldry’s reasoning to settler colonialism:
(a) Settler colonialism is a system of cruelty.
(b) The “truths” of which are unacceptable to democratic society if stated openly.
(c) Those truths must be “translated into ritual that enacts, as ‘play,’ an acceptable version of the values and compulsions on which that cruelty depends.” (Couldry, qtd. 1021)
Reality television is an example of a theater of cruelty where “the rituals of everyday life under settler colonialism are ‘enacted as play’” in order to legitimate is practices and institutions (1021). According to Grande, “mediated performances that erase or perpetuate gross caricatures of Native peoples have systemic impact” that damages Indigenous peoples (1021). She writes, “as mediated, spectacularized versions of ‘the Indian’ dominate the collective consciousness of settler society, it functions to erase the lived experience of Indigenous peoples: hypervisibility = invisibility. In other words, spectacle facilitates ‘imperialist nostalgia’ and the passive consumption of Indigenous performance at the expense of actual Indigenous voices and histories” (1022). Thus Standing Rock protestors became hypervisible while Lakota people remained invisible (1022).
“While Indigenous peoples have long lived the material realities of US imperialism,” Grande continues, “settlers are only recently beginning to contemplate the impact of authoritarian rule and capitalist accumulation” (1023). Television programs that feature the lives of the wealthy present spectacles of wealth rather than lived experience, mitigating and normalizing social and economic inequality (1023). This phenomenon explains the rise of Donald Trump as a political figure (1024). Because he shares little with his base, “the presentation of his own whiteness has to be so spectacular” (1024). Meanwhile, the “intensification of cruelty under neoliberalism” has drawn “the liberal subject (i.e., ‘benevolent colonizer’) into its theater, raising the bar for even more spectacular productions of American exceptionalism, which is to say settler supremacy” (1024). So Trump’s rallies normalize white nationalism and the far right (1025).
Grande quotes Memmi’s suggestion that “colonization can only disfigure the colonizer” (qtd. 1025; 147) and that settler subjects ends up with an impossible choice: to either live in guilt, shame and anguish at the way they benefit from injustice, or to choose to confirm the colonial system (1025). For Grande, “therein lies the essence of settler ‘uneasiness’” (1025). “The apparent hopelessness of the setter problem raises important questions about the structure and potential of social movements, coalition building, and the possibility of transformation,” she contends (1025).
Grande suggests that Standing Rock presents a vision for an Indigenous future, but that to realize that vision, “it is up to all of us to see and work past the glimmer of spectacle, to resist the cult of the immediate, and to do the more deliberative work of history, earnestly connecting past with present” (1025). Doing this work “requires a collective refusal to participate in the theater of cruelty and choose instead to dismantle the settler consciousness that enables it. Such efforts entail working beyond and below the surface, keeping an eye toward the processes by which relations of mutuality are either abandoned or eroded by relations of capital—to in effect, decolonize” (1025). This definition of decolonization is not the same as the one presented by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, on which many writers and scholars seem to rely. Indigenous peoples are important in that struggle “because they represent the most enduring and resilient entities that present a competing moral vision to the settler order” (1026). “Settlers desiring to be accomplices in the decolonial project need to assume the stance of advocate (not spectator) for Indigenous rights,” Grande continues, and for the transformation of settler consciousness (1026). The alternatives to neoliberal capitalism are Indigenous, she suggests, citing Glen Coulthard, because Indigenous struggles are “built on history and ancestral knowledge” and “the responsibility to uphold relations of mutuality” (1026). “Attention to these teachings requires resistance and refusal of the fast, quick, sleek, and spectacular in favor of the steady, tried, consistent, and intergenerational,” and a replacement of individualism with relationship (1026). She quotes Debord: “the spectacle is ‘the reigning method of social organization of a paralyzed history, of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical time,’” and this “‘false consciousness of time’” must be refused (1026). To refract social justice movements “through an Indigenous lens compels us to be attentive to both the larger ontological and epistemic underpinnings of settler colonialism; to discern the relationship between our struggles and others; to disrupt complicity and ignite a refusal of the false promises of capitalism,” Grande writes. The agenda for the anti-capitalist resistance was set long ago: “It is about land and defense of land. Land is our collective past, our present, and our future. This is our one demand” (1027).
Grande’s essay suggests the ways that Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle might be useful for my research, and I should read it sooner rather than later. However, I was surprised at being reminded about Alberto Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, a book I read in 2019 but had forgotten about. It is central to my research, and I need to return to it, particularly for the paper I’m working on right now. Memmi’s book might be the key to that paper’s argument, and yet had I not read Grande’s essay, I would have forgotten that key existed.
Works Cited
Anderson, Ben. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 34, no. 6, 2010, pp. 777-98.
Baloy, Natalie J.K., “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2016, pp. 209-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101.
Grande, Sandy. “Refusing the Settler Society of the Spectacle.” Handbook of Indigenous Education, edited by Elizabeth Ann McKinley and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Springer, 2019, pp. 1013-29.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized, expanded edition, Beacon, 1991.
I came to anthropologist Natalie J.K. Baloy’s essay, “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver,” through Michelle Daigle’s essay, “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy,” and given the importance of notions of spectacle (drawn from French theorist and psychogeographer Guy Debord) in the literature on walking, and particularly in Phil Smith’s mythogeography, I knew I was going to have to read it. (I’m also going to be reading Sandy Grande’s book chapter, “Refusing the Settler Society of the Spectacle,” for the same reason. At the outset of her paper, Baloy explains her methodology and the results of her research, which took place in Vancouver, B.C.:
Based on participant observation and interviews with non-Indigenous research participants, I argue in this article that their ideas of Indigenous alterity—racial, cultural, and political difference—shape and are shaped by processes that render Indigeneity spectacular and/or spectral in the city. Vancouver is a place haunted by an unjust past of dispossession and displacement, an unequal present of marginality and disconnection, and an uncertain future of recognition and reclamation. It is also a place decorated with totem poles and Northwest Coast art, regularly featuring Indigenous art and performance in place promotion and high-profile events like the 2010 Winter Olympics. Indigeneity in Vancouver is simultaneously pushed to the margins and front and centre, hidden from view and in plain sight. (210)
“Spectacle and spectrality operate as primary regimes of (in)visibility in settler coloniality,” Baloy continues, noting that both words come from a common Latin root, spectare, meaning to look at or to see (210). “Using these concepts,” she writes, “I examine what is made visible by colonial ghosts and concealed by spectacles,” with a view to illustrating “how conditions of spectacle and spectrality sustain settler colonial logics” (210). When I was reading for my comprehensive examinations, I was interested in ghostly or spectral presences, and I’m happy that Baloy is going to discuss them along with her discussion of spectacle. I’m also happy that her endnotes direct me towards Avery Gordon’s 2008 book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, which might present an important way of thinking about such presences.
Baloy explains her motivation in studying settlers: she aims “to decentre and denaturalize the settler subject and to demonstrate that colonialism structures contemporary realities for all settler state inhabitants, albeit in different ways” and to locate herself, as a white anthropologist, within her critical analysis, thereby pointing out “how other settlers are implicated—through complicity, complacency, ignorance, and privilege, and a range of practices to counteract these relations—in settler colonialism” (210). She acknowledges critiques of that kind of research—the argument that “a focus on settlers can serve to reify settler dominance and drown out voices of Indigenous peoples and scholars” (210)—but, she suggests, by “interrogating settler normativity,” she is “working against settler anthropology’s fixation with Indigenous cultures at the expense of critical and self-reflexive settler analysis” (210). “I hope my analysis enacts a critical corrective within my own discipline; complements Indigenous voices and stories, rather than substitute or displace them; and brings a much-needed ethnographic perspective to theorizing about settler colonialism,” she writes (211).
The most important part of Baloy’s essay for me might be her explication of her theoretical framework. She begins her discussion of spectacle by quoting the words of anthropologist Leslie Robertson: “Non-Aboriginal people of every age group discuss their perceptions of Indigenous people through spectacle and ceremony, contexts where they are culturally visible. Spectacle provides a frame through which non-Indigenous people imagine Native Americans” (qtd. 211). Spectacle in this context has several key features. “First, spectacles privilege sight above all other senses, attracting spectators to watch, observe, and look,” she writes. For that reason, “[s]ights and events must also achieve a particular scale or visually impressive quality to be characterized as spectacles” (211). Spectacles also involve a watching or observing audience. She quotes Debord: spectacle is a “social relationship . . . mediated by images” (qtd. 212). The spectators of spectacle participate in a passive way: they watch (212). This way of experiencing Indigeneity “enables non-Indigenous peoples to assume/embody a passive subjectivity in settler colonial processes” (212). Settlers tend to observe spectacles as cultural occasions, rather than political ones, and so their tendency to perceive themselves as cultural observers rather than political actors is reinforced, even though Indigenous art and performance “often cannot be isolated from historical context and socio-political issues related to land, decolonization, and sovereignty” (212). Baloy draws a distinction between spectators and witnesses; the latter seem to be actively engaged in an event, rather than being disengaged consumers (212). “What are the different ethical positions and social and political implications of acting as a spectator rather than a witness or actor in settler colonialism?” she asks (212).
Baloy cites Stuart Hall’s suggestion that “popular representations often spectacularize racial and cultural Others,” and that’s true of the way that Indigenous spectacles “come to stand in for and shape direct encounters with Indigenous people, playing a significant role in knowledge production,” she contends (212). In addition, “spectators often understand spectacles as distinct from everyday life even as they inform and constitute it. Spectacular sites and events offer discreet moments to see, watch, and observe something apart from the ordinary,” even though spectacles “can also come to comprise the ordinary and populate the everyday” (212). In Vancouver, “paying critical attention to Indigenous spectacles opens significant lines of inquiry”:
How do spectacles distract from and/or illuminate historical injustices and material inequalities? How does familiarity with Indigenous spectacle become synonymous with or different from intimate knowledge of Indigenous history, politics, and sociocultural life? How does the banality of spectacle in the city limit or make possible Indigenous recognition and colonial reckoning? (212)
I don’t know a whole lot about Guy Debord or The Society of the Spectacle, but I know from my reading of Phil Smith’s work that Debord’s notion of “the Spectacle” is different from spectacles as events, and I find myself wondering whether Baloy’s use of Debord—the thing that brought me to her essay—makes sense. Of course, I would have to read Debord carefully before I could develop an argument along those lines.
Next, Baloy discusses spectrality. “The shadows of Indigenous spectacle are the spectres of settler colonialism,” she writes. “Spectrality is a state or condition of haunting; spectre is another word for ghost or apparition. Indigenous alterity and the unfinished business of settler colonialism produce spectral effects that shape settlers’ spatio-temporal imaginaries of the city. Always present but often hidden or repressed, the unjust past, unequal present, and uncertain future haunt the everyday” (212). Spectrality, as “a settler colonial regime of (in)visibility,” presents insights “into non-Indigenous people’s experiences of Indigenous visiblity/erasure, presence/absence, and marginality/reinscription in settler society” (212). For many settlers, “Indigenous alterity functions almost holographically: apparent and visible in some contexts, erased or minimized in others” (213). One dimension of that holographic quality is revenance: “Indigeneity can seem to disappear and return, thereby haunting contemporary social relations or disrupting linear narratives of settlement” (231).
Baloy is interested in thinking about “how the city is haunted by the unfinished business of colonialism and the ongoing production of alterity” (213). She uses Avery Gordon’s language, suggesting that “we should be ‘hospitable’ to spectres that haunt city spaces rather than exorcise or ignore them” (213). Her focus here is on “‘ghosts’ of settler colonialism present in the city today” (213). Thinking about that form of haunting can be “a form of unmapping” and “a strategy to dislodge naturalized racialization and spatialization processes to reveal settler mythologies underpinning them” (213). That kind of project “involves contesting erasures and refusing to take absence for granted” (213). Making space for “the erased and marginalized—the ghosted—opens opportunities to experience the uncanny” and to make visible “what has been repressed or concealed but never fully disappeared” (213).
Along with spatial insights, “spectral analysis encourages examination of time and temporality” (213). She cites Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Hamlet in Spectres of Marx as an example. Do ghosts belong in the past, the present, or the future? Does Indigeneity belong in the past, the present, or the future? “Spectrality can function to make the past alive in the present or animate a yet-unseen future, or switch time around,” Baloy suggests (213). “Indigeneity can be uncanny—both present and absent—and revenant, re-presenting in the present,” she continues. “For settlers, when familiar places become haunted by unfamiliar stories, spectrality can operate as a potentially generative process, creating new meanings and senses of time and place” (213).
Baloy then compares spectrality to spectacle. “While spectators recognize spectacles as distinct temporal moments and spatial sites, spectrality is difficult to delimit temporarily,” she writes. “Although a feeling of haunting can be fleeting, ghosts often linger and can continue to haunt even after they have been acknowledged or exercised. If their presence is a reminder or signal of something amiss or previously repressed, even if this is righted or otherwise addressed, ghosts can leave a mark—traces and residues of injustice and trauma” (213-14). For instance, colonial policies “leave tangible traces on the built environment and contemporary materialities,” but they also “haunt in more subtle ways, shaping affective knowledges and personal encounters” (214). “Spectrality produces a ‘structure of feeling,’” she continues, citing Raymond Williams, and her interest is in the way that “everyday settler coloniality” is produced and experienced “in the interstices of surreal spectrality and hyper-real spectacle” (214).
The specific illustrations of Baloy’s paper are Stanley Park’s totem poles and the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. “Although the park’s totem poles are a significant site of visible Indigeneity for non-Indigenous residents,” she suggests, “this visibility is in fact premised on the invisibility of local Coast Salish connections to place” (215). For instance, Indigenous, mixed-race, and settler people were evicted from the park between its opening in 1888 and the death of the last resident in 1958 (215). Before settlers arrived, Coast Salish people relied on the resources of the peninsula where the park is located now, and seven village sites have been identified, the largest of which, Xwayxway, had particular spiritual importance (215). The “natural” space of the park has been “carefully produced . . . through imperial imposition, using colonial techniques of mapping and law,” a transformation that “ambivalently acknowledged and ignored Indigenous spaces” (216). While the residents were being displaced, city officials were also “supporting efforts to erect the park’s famous totem poles,” so that the poles were a “colonial strategy of erasure” that replaced the park’s living Indigenous presence with spectacle (216). “When interpreted critically against a history of colonialism and contemporary discourses of multiculturalism and tolerance,” Baloy writes, “the spectacle of the totem poles becomes animated with the ghosts of an unjust past and spectres of a re-Indigenized landscape” (216). The totem poles are part of a romanticized settler fascination with a particular form of Indigeneity (216). For that reason, “the totem pole display in Stanley Park reflects its settler colonial construction and meaning more than Indigenous peoples and the original cultural meanings embedded in the poles” (217).
In 2010, Coast Salish Elders proposed renaming the park Xwayxway. The federal government did not support the idea. “While the art and display of the totem poles and the Klahowya Villiage were uncontroversial and even celebrated, redress and re-emplacement of local Coast Salish Indigeneity presented a form of incommensurable alterity too uncomfortable and challenging to accommodate,” Baloy writes. “The familiar became unfamiliar, producing uncanny and anxious a/effects” (218). As evidence of those affects, she reproduces a conversation with a construction worker who complained that the proposed name was hard to pronounce. For Baloy, that conversation is evidence of “the deeper anxiety the name change evoked: that Indigenous people will simply rename this land just because they can, and in doing so, will repossess lands he (and others) considered long ago settled” (219). Re-Indigenizing the park in this way “feels threatening and/or nonsensical in part because the proposal seems like it ‘comes out of nowhere’ rather than out of a history of colonialism,” and the spectre “of what he thought was past or elsewhere—Indigenous claims to land and the business of colonization—returns to trouble the here and now and the future” (219).
Familiar and unthreatening cultural spectacles can bolster such resentments, Baloy argues. “Spectatorship is comfortable while political reckoning is not,” she writes. “For many, the renaming controversy required reimagining mental maps of the city to make room for previously unconsidered possibilities of Indigenous places” (219). Even those sympathetic to First Nations issues felt concerned, anxious, and uneasy, revealing the tension between their desires “to respect Indigenous connections to land and the unsettled (and unsettling) nature of their claims” (219). Complex Indigenous geographies have been replaced “with a socio-spatial imaginary empty of Indigenous people and history yet full of their colourful artwork” (220). “Remembering, renaming, and remapping can create new opportunities to encounter and animate the ghosted, marginalized, and erased—if they are not simply reburied only to return again and again,” Baloy states (220).
Baloy now turns to her second example, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Many of her research participants identified that location “as a site of visible Indigeneity” while also avoiding it: “visibility is made invisible through aversion” (220). At the same time, the “exceptionalism of the Downtown Eastside as a representational and material space of poverty, addiction, sex work, and crime has become an ordinary dimension of settler colonial sociality: a spectacle of suffering that occasionally haunts the city,” and this dialectic “shapes residents’ lives and impressions of them formed by people who drive through or avoid their streets” (221). Sex workers “are hyper-visible on the streets through processes of racialization, precarity, and harassment by police and others,” yet they are also “invisible through discourses that ignore the intersections of colonialism, race, and class that (re)produce their precarity and ignore their expressions of agency and resistance” (221). Baloy writes about her 2012 participation in the February 14th Annual Memorial March that commemorates the lives and deaths of missing and murdered women on the Downtown Eastside. Every year, during the march, “a group of women periodically stop to smudge where women’s bodies have been found—in alleys, outside of bars, in parking lots” (222). They read their names aloud. For Baloy, “[r]einscribing these disappeared women on the colonized landscape claims space for them and brings them into view,” a haunting act and a “realization that there is no place to stop for the women disappeared or found elsewhere. Their ‘seething presence’ is felt in their absence” (222).
Instead of situating the neighbourhood’s Indigenous presence “in broader historical/political perspective,” Baloy suggests that “non-Indigenous spectators observe Indigeneity as a taken-for-granted part of the neighbourhood’s ‘culture of poverty’ on display” (223). A focus on a culture of poverty is, for Baloy, an “interpretive gaze” that “ignores, displaces, and/or distracts from the politics of poverty and race in the neighbourhood” (223). Settlers “have long imagined Indigenous people as out of place in the city—owing to a history of forced displacement from cities and romantic ideas of Indigenous culture perpetuated by ethnographers,” and according to that imagination, Indigenous people in the city “are constructed as dysfunctional, therefore ‘belonging’ in the dysfunctional parts of town” (223). This “teleological reading of culture and ‘cultures of poverty’ collapses urban dysfunction and Indigeneity in harmful ways” and “ignores dispossession of local Indigenous peoples as part of urban development,” as well as the ways that the Indigenous experience of colonialism contributes “to Indigenous movement between cities and reserves” (223). Structural legacies of colonial injustice are ignored “in favour of exotic stories of addiction, sex work, crime, and violence,” and these “[r]epresentational spectacles . . . disappear resistance and social change advanced by neighbourhood residents” (223). “For many non-residents, the neighbourhood is produced through these imaginaries and looking relations: a sight/site to behold but not inhabit or engage or question critically” (223). As spectators, they “look but do not understand or relate to the lives of the people there. They remain removed as settler-spectators with the privilege of looking and looking away” (224). They observe without being implicated (224).
Indigenous women in the neighbourhood do “join together with their allies to resist spectacular images and narratives of their neighbourhood and demand recognition on their own terms,” Baloy writes. In the annual march, “[t]hey return year after year to challenge media spectacles of drugs, sex, and violence and enact their own politics of representation, bringing to the centre what is systematically pushed to the margins” (225). “The march brings pain and mourning out into the open,” she writes, “but in ways that differ from the open suffering visible on the street” (225). While spectacular in scale, the march is not intended to entertain observers; instead, “[i]t is both a memorial and a call to action around circumstances that continue to haunt” (225). “Unlike the Downtown Eastside media spectacle or drive-by spectatorship the march commands, again and again, attention to the shadows and margins,” Baloy states (225). She concludes her discussion of the Downtown Eastside with several questions: “In the Downtown Eastside, how can non-Indigenous people sustain an engagement beyond looking relations or abandonment?”—or, I think, beyond looking or looking away (226). “What are the educational, material, and affective resources required for ethical relations and socio-political accountability in this context?” (226). What are the roles of resistance and representation “in transforming those relations?” (226). “How can the circumscribed conditions of spectacular and spectral Indigeneity in the neighbourhood and Vancouver be disrupted or reimagined?” (226). The dialectic between looking and looking away “does not provide a solid foundation for reckoning but perhaps acknowledging this dynamic does allow us to ask critical questions to imagine otherwise” (226).
Baloy ends her article with accounts of events that made the Indigenous presence in Vancouver visible, although many settlers residing in the city still don’t know about that presence (227). The totem poles in Stanley Park, or the Downtown Eastside,
illustrate well the settler colonial conditions of spectacle and spectrality—regimes of (in)visibility that circumscribe Indigeneity in Vancouver. Spectacle facilitates passive settler observation of Indigenous performance and suffering rather than encouraging recognition of Indigenous peoples’ voices, realities, spaces, and sovereignty. Under the spectacular/spectral regime of (in)visibility, Indigeneity is holographic and shape-shifting: now you see it, now you don’t. These conditions limit other possible ways of being-together in difference and relation, enabling settlers to disengage altogether. (227)
“The spectral colonial past and uncertain future make space and time feel uncanny and ‘out of joint’ in the city,” a “structure of feeling” that “involves anxious affects that must be addressed and accounted for” (227).
More importantly, settlers need to understand that even if colonialism haunts the present for them, “it was there all along for Indigenous peoples” (227). The conditions that flatten, shift, reimagine, and elide the “complex Indigenous spatio-temporality” in Vancouver need to be denaturalized in order “to demonstrate how they are produced, sustained, and constitutive of everyday life in settler colonial place and also to encourage all of us to look—and feel—differently” (228). “This need not be a spectacular gesture, nor motivated by a desire to simply rid our homes of ghosts,” she concludes. “Instead, it will come through the hard but important work of dismantling spectacular and spectral settler colonial conditions to reorient ourselves relationally to each other and the Indigenous land we all live on” (228).
Baloy’s essay leaves me wondering about the spectral and spectacular imaginaries at work in the city where I live. Are there examples of Indigenous spectacle here that compare to the totem poles in Stanley Park? Are there examples of spectral or disavowed Indigenous presence? The second question is probably easier to think about than the first, since this city tends to lack spectacle of any kind. And Baloy’s essay brings me back to the issues of haunting that I considered while I was reading for my comprehensive examinations. I ought to read Gordon’s book on haunting, for instance. That’s the problem with this work, as I’ve noted before; everything one reads leads to more things one could read, an endless array of rabbit holes into which one could fall.
Works Cited
Baloy, Natalie J.K., “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2016, pp. 209-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101.
Daigle, Michelle. “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsetting Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy.” EPD: Society and Space, vol. 37, no. 4, 2019, pp. 703-21.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Grande, Sandy. “Refusing the Settler Society of the Spectacle.” Handbook of Indigenous Education, edited by Elizabeth Ann McKinley and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Springer, 2018, pp. 1013-29.
Choctaw theatre scholar Bethany Hughes’s essay, “Guesting on Indigenous Land: Plimoth Plantation, Land Acknowledgment, and Decolonial Practice,” is something I turned up searching the university library’s database for writing about land acknowledgments. “This essay thinks toward how we as scholars, artists, educators, and humans can live better on Indigenous land by overriding our entrainment to be customers, discoverers, and inhabitants of so-called ghost towns,” Hughes begins (E-23). We can come to a better understanding of Indigeneity, “learn from encounters with Indigenous peoples and spaces,” and implement practices “to better relate to the land and peoples around us” through “the concept of guesting,” which Hughes opposes to discovering, “which reduces the discovered to a kind of possession, and customer-ing, which commodifies and dehumanizes” (E-23). Instead, she writes, “guesting is focused not on attaining or accreting, but on relationships, humility, and reciprocal nurturance” (E-23). It is “an active and intentional practice of presence with the goal of honoring and supporting the Indigenous people and spaces that always already undergird, surround, and shape your life and work” (E-23). She notes that the content and structure of her essay “contribute to the decolonial praxis” she advocates by manipulating temporality and positionality in order to “unsettle Western preferences for intellect over embodiment, distance over proximity, and product over process” (E-23). This essay, she continues,
is for those wanting to develop a practice that purposefully unmakes the colonial systems that have separated, dehumanized, and denied resources to millions. It is for those who want to better know the land on which you teach and write and create theatre. It is for those who seek to work with and not demand from Indigenous communities. It is for those who guide students into spaces with often unacknowledged history. It is for those who wish to no longer live as customers. (E-23)
Those desires reflect the ethical demands settlers who wish to decolonize place upon themselves, I think, and for that reason this essay could be important in my research.
The relationship of Indigenous peoples to land, nationhood, colonization, the past, language, oppression, and sovereignty is complex, Hughes suggests. She cites Daniel Heath Justice’s definition of Indigeneity: Indigenous refers to “those who belong to a place,” and Indigeneity “affirms the spiritual, political, territorial, linguistic, and cultural distinctions of those people whose connections to this hemisphere predate the arrival of intentional colonizing settlers and conscripted and enslaved populations” (qtd. in E-24). “Indigeneity is irreducible to land title or legal jurisdiction or phenotype or the number of language speakers,” Hughes writes. “Indigeneity is multiple and capacious” (E-24). However, the term isn’t available to everyone; while all people have a relationship to land, not all people are Indigenous. To belong to the land is one thing; to say the land belongs to us is something else. The latter is the thinking of the colonizer; the former is Indigenous thinking.
Next, Hughes makes a distinction between ghosting and guesting. “If ghosting is that which returns to a space (physical/metaphysical), guesting is the intentional act of coming to a space (physical/metaphysical),” she writes (E-24). Guesting relies on five things: “impermanence, dependence, relationship, precedence, and reciprocity” (E-24). Guesting is not permanent; guests are not “resident owners” but rather come to a place that is already owned and that existed prior to their arrival (E-24). Guests are under the authority of their hosts; they are dependent upon them, and that dependency requires relationship with someone who is real and alive (E-24). That relationship also exists before the guests’ arrival (E-24). “Guesting well demands healthy relationships that invite respect, reciprocity, generosity, listening, conflict resolution, boundaries, and joy,” she continues. “Guesting is practicing reciprocity in the interest of generously supporting your host. It implies obligations for the guest” (E-24). From an Indigenous perspective, hosts include the land, water, animals, and “more-than-human presences” (E-24). Gestures of gratitude are insufficient for guesting; rather, it “requires thoughtful, intentional, holistic practices in thought, speech, and action. Guesting well takes time” (E-24).
Hughes now shifts to a trip to Plimoth Plantation, a living-history museum, that took place during the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in Boston in August 2018. She describes that excursion in detail. From the point when the visitors arrive, the reality of Wampanoag presence is clear at Plimoth Plantation; they are not ghosts who return, but rather they are “the people to whom the Pilgrims came” (E-25). The tour guide who greets the visitors is Wampanoag, and the Indigenous historical interpreters at Plimoth Plantation “do not have to ‘stay in character,’” unlike other employees, who are assigned the identity of a specific historical figure and must interact with visitors as that character (E-26). The “flexible temporality” that results “is matched in the performance of historical Wampanoag life”; the interpreters (all Indigenous, but not all Wampanoag) “constantly shift from past to present, from self to historical other, from nation to nation,” thereby embodying “the impermancy of guesting well in the fluidity of their interactions and acts of representation” (E-26-E-27).
A sign at the entrance at the site attempts to teach guests to behave in respectful ways (E-27). That sign “is a model for actively engaging in improving a situation without relying upon the labor, intellectual and emotional, of the people experiencing harm. The sign is a neutral, physical, and authoritative object that guests encounter” (E-27). It is “both an invitation and path for guests to practice guesting well; it is also evidence of listening well to the hosts—the Indigenous peoples who care for the land” (E-27). My first impulse was to wonder how effective a sign would be in encouraging appropriate guesting behaviour, but Hughes states that the sign “has reduced the number of stereotypical tropes interpreters have to deal with by as much as 90 percent” (E-27).
Hughes now turns to four steps in guesting well: acknowledging one’s hosts, listening to one’s hosts, building relationships, and practicing reciprocity. “Know who your hosts are—which is to say, know where you are,” she writes. “One way you can begin knowing where you are and identifying your hosts is through performing a ‘land acknowledgment’” (E-28). A land acknowledgment is “a public declaration of guesting—most often uninvited guesting” (E-29). She makes suggestions about ways to come up with an appropriate land acknowledgment, including contacting local or regional Indigenous organizations or First Nations and “developing relationships to increase the accuracy and specificity of your land acknowledgment” (E-29). It’s important to recognize that “the complex history of Native peoples and land means that there can be many different nations connected to specific areas,” and because of that complexity, “developing relationships with local Native communities and community members is essential to recognizing your hosts” (E-29).
Listening to one’s hosts is also important. Paying attention to the website for Plimoth Plantation, which asks visitors not to show up in “Native” costume, or to the sign, which “invites guests to a kind of engagement that maximizes the quality of their experience,” are examples of such listening (E-29). “Listening well sometimes means unlearning,” Hughes writes, “sometimes means asking questions, and sometimes means trying out new ways of interacting,” and it “requires time and focus” (E-29).
Hughes offers suggestions about building relationships. She advocates introducing oneself to local communities, nations, or organizations “without asking anything from them” (E-29). “Ask if you can attend their events,” she writes. “Follow their lead for attendance and participation. Invite them to your events. Tell them about who you are and who your people are. Listen to them when they tell you about their community” (E-29). Building trust takes time, she notes. Ask for the community’s friendship, but don’t be discouraged when friendship isn’t instantaneous. It takes time to “display consistency, care, and concern” (E-29).
Finally, Hughes gives examples of practicing reciprocity. “Think carefully after listening to your hosts,” she writes. “What are their stated needs? Identify your areas of strength, the resources from which you can draw. Talk to your hosts about how those resources might be used to support their goals, to fill their needs. Get consent before beginning a project that is supposed to benefit your hosts. Let your hosts know what your needs are” (E-30). Building trust takes time and requires following through on commitments (E-30). Give back to those who act as hosts, but take their needs into account when doing so.
Hughes’s conclusion raises several questions:
How might we actively create physical reminders that graciously invite better guesting from our students, our audience members, our patrons, and our interlocutors? How might our actions take away the burden of teaching these important skills from the populations that poor guesting most drains or exploits? How can we model guesting well and build a praxis of guesting into our productions, our classes, our departments, and our scholarships? How can we refute with our lives the received narrative that we discovered empty space, that Native Americans are merely historical phenomenon in America, and that we can pay for the right to be where we are? How can we guest well? (E-30)
Those are excellent questions, and they address Hughes’s audience—whom I take to be primarily settlers—where they are, enmeshed in ongoing colonial histories they benefit from but did not create. Those questions make me wonder whether walking on the land could be seen as part of a practice of guesting, as a way of building relationships with the land. I think it might be—I’ve argued as much before—but a lot of what I’ve been reading over the past week has made me question whether that notion is a delusion. And I find it interesting to see concrete suggestions about steps forward, instead of vague calls to action that focus on end goals rather than the processes necessary to achieve those goals. If praxis refers to things one does, those calls to action are unlikely to lead to praxis. Hughes’s suggestions about guesting are unlikely to cause earth-shattering changes, but they are a place to begin, and I think that starting points are what’s required right now. One could object that Hughes’s suggestions are prescriptive or elementary, but that’s perhaps the downside of specificity, and I prefer those drawbacks to those that come with grand pronouncements. Maybe that’s just the way my mind works.
Work Cited
Hughes, Bethany. “Guesting on Indigenous Land: Plimoth Plantation, Land Acknowledgment, and Decolonial Praxis.” Theatre Topics, vol. 29, no. 1, 2019, pp. E-23-E-30. https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.219.0013.
“Complicated Pathways: Settler Canadians Learning to Re/Frame Themselves and Their Relationships with Indigenous Peoples,” a collaboration between Lynne Davis, Chris Hiller, Cherylanne James, Kristen Lloyd, Tessa Nasca, and Sara Taylor, is another article my friend Matthew Anderson suggested I read. The paper begins with the release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools and, in particular, its 94 “Calls to Action” and the federal government’s stated intention to implement them. “It is too tempting to think we have entered a unique moment in the history of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada,” the authors write, but they recollect the attempts to develop partnerships and “agreements based on mutual understandings” between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the past, which “were swept away by the structures, processes, values, greed and actions of the settler colonial state, its industrial capitalist economic imperatives and its well-indoctrinated citizens” (398-99). They note that the term “reconciliation” has been extensively critiqued, and that Haudenosaunee scholar Taiaiake Alfred has advocated for “restitution” as first step towards changing the status quo in Canada. Many Canadians happily adopt the position of “helper,” they note, citing the efforts at resettling Syrian refugees in 2015 as an example, but “[l]ess comfortable—if not unthinkable—is the entanglement of Canadians in colonial violence, the removal of Indigenous people from ancestral homelands and the perpetuation of cultural genocide” (399). They note that many Canadians see no connection between themselves and the events that took place in residential schools (399).
“What will help shift the consciousness of contemporary Canadians to a new story, where Canadians recognize and acknowledge themselves as occupiers of Indigenous homelands, perpetrators of cultural genocide and sustainers of settler colonial practices in the present?” the authors ask (399). How can settler Canadians become unsettled in their daily lives, where Indigenous peoples may be invisible? (399). Providing education and information is not enough, as decades of research indicates, because “Canadians have a deep emotional and cultural investment in the status quo and are the beneficiaries of past and present injustices, particularly with respect to the occupation of Indigenous lands which settlers consider to be their own” (399). Decolonization, they continue, citing Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, requires the return of land, and “[i]f Canadians are to move toward concrete conversations about land, there is an important foundation to be laid” which “will require a significant re-shaping of settler consciousness and the deep attachments that construct Canadian identities” (399).
“Insights from anti-racist, anti-oppressive pedagogical practices point to the emotionality of learning in which one’s own investments and identities are called into question and the need to embrace a ‘pedagogy of discomfort,’” the authors state (400). The literature on such pedagogical practices “points to the complexity of changing the consciousness of Canadians so that they hear and understand the voices of Indigenous peoples” (400). “The literatures on alliance building and solidarities emphasize the importance of learning and self-education as a critical part of the relationship process,” they continue (400).
This paper addresses these complex challenges “by reporting on a project that has documented many initiatives and events underway which are aimed at changing the way in which Canadians think about historical and contemporary Indigenous-non-Indigenous relationships” (400). That project, which began in 2014, came out of an undergraduate course at Trent University, and it addressed the unsettling questions involved “in trying to think through what it means to take up historic and generational responsibilities in intervening in the narratives that sustain settler colonial mechanisms” (400). That project involved a website that documented “initiatives being undertaken that attempt to reshape settler historic consciousness and transform Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations” (400-01). At the time of writing, that website listed over 200 projects. It was being updated and expanded every year by students in the course that initiated the project.
The project’s working definition of “transformation of settler consciousness” is grounded in the writing of scholars Patrick Wolfe, Paulette Regan, and Susan Dion (401). It is “firmly rooted” in Wolfe’s argument that settler colonialism is an ongoing process. It uses Regan’s contention that “settler consciousness” is “the narratives, practices, and collective Canadian identity that are based solidly in a foundation of national historical myths” which “pervade all spheres of society” (401). And it draws from Dion’s description of “the school system as a place of historical erasure, where counter-narratives are denied space, and countless stories are silenced” (401). Regan points out that it is easier “for settlers to live in denial than to unlearn ‘truths’ and engage with counter-narratives—an inherently uncomfortable and unsettling process,” and from that understanding the group set out to discover “how to create conditions in which individuals choose to engage and act, instead of deny” (401). The research also drew on Davis’s book, Alliances: Re/envisiooning Indigenous-non-Indigenous Relationships, which “demonstrates the complexity of Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations in contemporary Canada” and “the dangers that can arise from even the best intentioned deeds when they are not rooted in a critical, self-reflexive consciousness and understanding of history, and how instead they can perpetuate and deepen paternalistic colonial relationships, often causing more harm than good” (401-02).
Based in this work, then, the group understands transforming settler consciousness in the following ways:
Creating narratives, processes and practices that hold settlers accountable to their responsibilities and beneficiaries of colonization, both historic and ongoing.
Naming and upsetting the status quo, and challenging the power dynamics that perpetuate settler colonialism.
Building just and decolonized relationships with Indigenous peoples, the land, and all beings.
Engaging in an ongoing, complex and dynamic process grounded in a lifetime commitment, which occurs at the level of the individual, family, community, and nation. (402)
They realize that changing consciousness is not synonymous with or sufficient for decolonization; it must be paired with action or settlers may never move beyond guilt and shame, but they contend that transforming settler consciousness is “an uncomfortable but necessary first step in a lifelong and urgent journey of dismantling colonial systems and structures” (402).
The research the group conducted focused on online sources and media coverage, and they used a WordPress blog to present the research. The four-month timeframe for the project was a problem, and they found that it was impossible to develop “an exhaustive collection in nits initial development” (403). Some types of initiatives were excluded; the research was limited to work happening inside Canada, “despite our acknowledgement of borders as colonial constructs, and the fact that the work of the documented initiatives often transcended them” (403). Keeping the website up-to-date is an ongoing challenge. By May 2015, they had catalogued over 200 projects in 16 main categories, although some initiatives didn’t fit neatly into those divisions and had to be included in more than one category. They also note that “the language and understanding of ‘settler’ as advanced in settler colonial studies” is rarely used outside of a small number of academics and activist groups, and so the projects they included were rooted in other discourses (405). However, “the framing of initiatives” evolved rapidly, with the term “reconciliation,” for instance, becoming more important after the release of the TRC’s final report (406).
Their analysis of these initiatives noted a number of tensions. Few of the projects they included used the terms “settler” or “colonization,” which are “deeply discomforting and at times defensively dismissed” (406). When that language is not used, however, “critical insights about the nature and workings of settler colonial society are lost, and liberal discourses based in notions of equality and social justice persist” (406). That framing might engage more people in events or issues, but “it does not position non-Indigenous Canadians as beneficiaries of colonization” or “imply specific responsibilities and commitments on the part of non-Indigenous Canadians to challenge or undo current colonizing practices or structures,” limiting their transformative potential (406). On the other hand, some projects demonstrated a mastery of “the art of using decolonial rhetoric” without a similar mastery of substantive action (406). Another tension the study revealed was “knowing how big a role Indigenous peoples should play in settler education and in striking a balance between, on the one hand, learning from Indigenous peoples, knowledge and pedagogies, and on the other, settlers taking responsibility for their own education and unlearning of dominant narratives and histories” (407). A third tension involved knowing how to raise critical questions about initiatives without undermining their value (407).
The research also generated concerns about the projects the group documented. The focus and goals of many initiatives “were not implemented to address the needs of Indigenous peoples, or to offer the support that Indigenous communities are actually seeking” (407). The failure of many initiatives to consider colonialism as an ongoing process, particularly government and corporate cultural competency training programs, did not address “the underlying issues and contemporary ramifications” (407). Few of the projects addressed “questions of land reclamation, reparations, Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction, or Canadian sovereignty on stolen Indigenous lands”; instead, most “focused on liberal goals of ‘raising awareness’ or imparting information,” suggesting that awareness is the “end game” of decolonization (408). Projects focused on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, for instance, failed to grasp “Indigenous understandings of the larger settler colonial context in which MMIW is embedded” and thus “do not challenge settler positionalities in any fundamental way” (408). Most initiatives involved settler “moves to innocence” because they asked participants to do nothing more than listen (408). Such projects “may succeed in making settlers feel good about themselves while failing to promote substantive change” (408).
The research raised important questions. How do we move beyond easy or superficial changes? Will straightforward changes in understanding and consciousness “have the power to facilitate greater, more substantive shifts in the future?” (408-09). How can a “movement toward the next stage of thought and action in the transformation process, in which the realities of settler colonialism and consciousness are understood plainly, and the land and Indigenous sovereignty are central to discussions of reconciliation,” be fostered (409)? In addition, what would constitute a challenge to settler colonial positionality? Is “the centring of Indigenous perspectives and leadership, and the related decentering of settler narratives,” in themselves unsettling or transformational (409)? How, the authors ask, “do we get to the stage where settlers are both engaging with and centering Indigenous knowledge and narratives (learning) while simultaneously deconstructing settler identities (unlearning), and actively challenging settler colonial practices of Indigenous displacement and settler encroachment?” (409).
Alliances and coalitions are sites of learning and transformation, particularly for settlers, the authors continue; projects that bring “settler Canadians into contact with Indigenous spiritual ceremonies, protocols, and cultural practices,” for example, can open “their eyes and minds to other ways of being in the universe” (409). “Such contact,” they write, “brings challenges to the Canadian narratives that undergird Canadian historical consciousness” (409). They refer to Davis’s research into what members of a social-justice group had learned and how their perspectives had shifted over time. Conversations were important in this learning, but that observation raises the question of which voices end up with enough credibility to make changes happen. In addition, “despite providing deep analyses and insightful critiques of Canadian society, participants did not talk about themselves as beneficiaries of Indigenous dispossession from their homelands” (410). That’s because of the power settler colonial narratives have to naturalize settlers on the land while making Indigenous peoples invisible (410).
“When taken together, the large number of diverse initiatives collected on the Transforming Relations website offers the suggestion of momentum for change,” but “we cannot lose sight of the need to ‘unsettle’ the settler colonial logic, narratives and practices embedded in everyday write,” the authors state (410). More research is necessary “to explore the dynamic interplay of forces that impact the complex layers of settler consciousness transformation,” particularly research that is focused on “the simultaneous processes of learning and unlearning that are engaged in any ongoing journey of decolonization and change” (410). There are theoretical resources that explore “the challenges of transforming settler consciousness and disrupting settler colonialism,” including work by Margaret Heffernan, Paulette Regan, and Megan Boler and Michalinos Zembylas, but the authors seem to be suggesting that there is a gap between that theory and the actual practice of change. I’m not surprised, though, given the big ambitions of the theory and the practical difficulties of convincing people to leave settled positions of comfort for unsettled positions of discomfort. If one is offered a discursive or ideological position in which one’s futurity is denied—and that’s what I see in arguments like those of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, which condemn notions of settler futurity—one is likely to be unwilling to accept that positioning.
The final point the authors raise about transforming settler consciousness is “that it requires ‘engaging in an ongoing, complex, and dynamic process grounded in a lifetime commitment, which occurs at the level of the individual, family, community, and nation’” (they are quoting themselves here) (411). “Each of the initiatives documented on the Transforming Relations website represent[s] entry points to different stages in this unfolding process, not panaceas for transformation in and of themselves,” they write. “Our analysis showed that most of these initiatives represent early ‘learning’ stages, and that a disconnect exists between these and later stages that actually confront settler positionalities and privilege” (411). More research and analysis of the projects their work documents is needed. Nevertheless, the study of the transformation of settler consciousness “is unfolding through different disciplines through the study of the complex psychological and sociological demands involved in shifting the way the beneficiaries of colonization come to see their place in relation to Indigenous peoples” (411). What are the conditions “that help settlers turn toward, and acknowledge, their own implication in the settler colonial project” (411)? What kind of pedagogy can bring about change instead of “denial or paralyzing guilt” (411)? The momentum represented by the projects documented on the Transforming Relations website needs to be “strategically analyzed” and “future efforts” will need to “seek to understand the conditions that allow the move from simply acknowledging, to meaningfully transforming settler consciousness, in a way that furthers processes of decolonization and supports Indigenous resurgence and nationhood” (411).
The Transforming Relations project is interesting; the website is still live, although it doesn’t seem to have been updated recently, and the questions the authors raise about settler decolonization are important ones. They are the questions I’ve been grappling with, although I’m a little less sanguine about the possibilities for the kinds of change they are calling on settlers to embrace. I wonder what the kind of pedagogy the authors ask about in their conclusion might look like, for instance. I noticed a tremendous level of shame and guilt in my students last semester whenever we discussed Indigenous issues, and that’s simply not sustainable. Yes, settlers have benefitted from Indigenous dispossession, but at the same time, people need to be offered something other than a negative conception of themselves or they will refuse to engage. I don’t know how settlers could be offered a positive conception of themselves, given the realities of ongoing colonization, and I don’t know how substantive change—the repatriation of land that Tuck and Wang call for—can take place given the realities of settler occupation of land. Is decolonization, in the end, a zero-sum game, where one side wins while the other loses? If so, what could convince a majority of settlers to participate? I don’t have answers to these questions; I don’t know how to move from the theory of settler decolonization to its practice. I wonder if anyone does. I will have to keep reading to find out.
Works Cited
Davis, Lynne, Chris Hiller, Cherylanne James, Kristen Lloyd, Tessa Nasca, and Sara Taylor. “Complicated Pathways: Settler Canadians Learning to Re/Frame Themselves and Their Relationships with Indigenous Peoples.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, 2017, pp. 398-414. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1243086.
Chris Hiller’s article, “Tracing the Spirals of Unsettlement: Euro-Canadian Narratives of Coming to Grips with Indigenous Sovereignty, Title, and Rights,” is yet another text that my friend Matthew Anderson suggested I read. “The challenge of bridging the chasm that persists between Indigenous peoples and newcomers to their territories in Canada raises pressing questions about learning and decolonization in contexts of settler colonialism—questions that revolve around the settler colonial imaginary and how to disrupt it,” Hiller begins (415). A range of decolonization strategies have resulted from attempts at disrupting “this resilient and entrenched imaginary,” he continues, “from disrupting colonizing discourses within classrooms and in broader society, to challenging foundational settler mythologies and narratives, to highlighting vested state interests in Indigenous dispossession, to interrogating settler colonial power relations” (415). (A footnote suggests several texts by Indigenous and settler writers and scholars that describe these efforts at disruption.) In this study, Hiller draws upon her dissertation, which looked at “the experiences and trajectories of learning of 22 Euro-Canadians—white settlers—who have demonstrated long-term commitments to supporting Indigenous struggles over land, rights, and sovereignty” (415).
Hiller’s narrative inquiry study uses Cree scholar Willie Ermine’s discussion of “the ethical space of engagement”—an article that one of my supervisors gave me and which I left behind in my office on campus when the pandemic began—to look for “common trajectories of learning that appear when reading across the interviews and considering them collectively in light of scholarship in the areas of de/colonization, pedagogy, and Indigenous land” (416). By exploring “what these white settler activists have to say about the experiences, contexts, processes, and conditions that give rise to their own decolonization,” Hiller intends “to theorize the contours of an unsettled and unsettling spatial consciousness: a form of critical praxis that seeks to disrupt settler colonial pedagogies and practices that undergird the subjugation of Indigenous peoples and the continued theft and destruction of their lands” (416).
The attitudes of some settler Canadians are changing, Hiller notes, and yet a recent Environics survey “reveals a continuity of entrenched colonizing assumptions and attitudes among non-Indigenous Canadians,” including a finding that 60% of respondents do not see themselves as benefitting from the discriminatory treatment Indigenous peoples experience (416). “These enduring attitudes represent one manifestation of what many describe as the ‘colonial present’ in Canada: an ever-evolving and shifting continuity of practices that displace Indigenous peoples, both symbolically and materially, in order to reiteratively emplace non-Indigenous people—most notably white settlers—as the supposed owners, occupiers, and arbiters of the land,” she writes (416). Those practices are reflected by the federal government’s attempt to avoid ratifying the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples; in its “continued refusal to honour Treaties as nation-to-nation agreements,” which can be seen in the existence of “hundreds of outstanding specific claims related to centuries-old breaches of those early agreements”; and in the demands that First Nations “extinguish” their Aboriginal title to their territories in modern treaty negotiations (417). It is also reflected in the legislation that aims to establish “‘certainty’ regarding (Crown) title and jurisdiction” and to offload “federal fiduciary responsibilities” (417). In its most concrete form, she continues, “the operation of present-day machineries of colonization is evident in on-the-ground struggles in Indigenous communities” (417). “The common denominator underlying all of these symbolic and material practices—indeed, the raison d’être of settleer colonialism itself—remains the imperative to clear, claim, settle, and assert jurisdiction and sovereignty over Indigenous lands,” she writes, quoting the suggestion of philosopher James Tully (someone I should read) that this appropriation of land and resources is “‘the territorial foundation of the dominant society itself’” (qtd. 417). Colonization is not something that happened in the past; it continues in the present, and it is and always has been about the land (417).
Many scholars have tracked “the reproduction of this on-going colonial present”—“the ways in which settler identities, spaces, sense of home and place, and constructions of land and nation are brought into being, secured, and enforced through an interplay of settler colonial spatial technologies: an evolving set of mechanisms and practices that function to clear the land discursively, materially and violently of its Indigenous occupants/owners in order to make way for (white) settlement and development”—in order “to theorize its disruption” (417). These discursive and material practices generate the settler imagination, and the “imagined yet never fully accomplished possession of Indigenous lands runs to the very heart of settler identities, cultures, and social and political formations” (417). Therefore, “Indigenous assertions of sovereignty, territory, and rights and relations to land figure as threats to an already-threatened national identity, unity, space, industrial capitalist economy, and sense of legitimacy,” prompting “a range of recuperative efforts on the part of individual settlers, settler communities, and the settler nation state” (417-18). Those efforts—which include discursive, symbolic, and physical violent responses to Indigenous assertions of rights and identity—remain “the constitutive heart of settler colonialism” and serve “as the disavowed lynchpin of dominant cultural pedagogies in Canada” (418).
“Given the ways in which colonizing responses to Indigenous sovereignty and rights and relations to land are so deeply woven into the fabric of settler societies and cultures, any meaningful re-cognition of these relations—one that acknowledges and addresses on-going histories of Indigenous dispossession and settler dominance—will profoundly rock the very foundations of such settler societies, cultures, and identities,” Hiller writes (418). Ideas of unsettling settlers, of living in discomfort,
thus pose quandaries that run far deeper than mere questions of political or educational strategy: given the social, cultural, political, and discursive practices and environments that work so diligently to obscure, deny, and erase the realities of Indigenous sovereignty, territory, and rights and relation to land in settler states, how do non-Indigenous people—and particularly those positioned as hegemonic subjects within such states—come to perceive, and come to grips with, these foundation-rocking realities of our existence? Further, by what processes do settlers come to act in recognition of these realities, and what implications do such forms of recognition have for the ways in which we imagine and actively emplace ourselves here, on Indigenous lands? (418)
The latter question is the one I’m particularly interested in: what are settlers to do in the face of the reality that we live on Indigenous land? What response are we called upon to make? What might settler decolonization—or perhaps decolonization from a settler perspective—mean?
Hiller interviewed 22 settlers who had been active in supporting Indigenous struggles—what form that activity took is not clear—and used narrative analysis to explore their stories and the ways that “each narrator draws upon and contests dominant constructions of settler identity, belonging, land, and nation” (418). She is particularly interested in what her reseasrch participants “identify as critical turning points—pivotal moments that spark or mark their shift into a decolonizing praxis in relation to Indigenous sovereignty and rights”—along with “the discourses, cultural repertoires, metaphors, and symbols that they draw upon in their narratives and activist practices” (418). All of her participants lived in southern Ontario “and thus negotiated home and place as settlers living on Indigenous lands that were supposedly ‘ceded’ by Indigenous nations through the Upper Canada Treaties prior to Confederation” (418-19). The demographics of her participants suggest that their stories “articulate a standpoint of social, political, economic, and spatial dominance in Canada” (419). While many scholars “caution against projects that recenter non-Indigenous interests and identities in general and stoke a self-serving preoccupation with settler perspectives and emotions in particular,” Hiller suggests, in her defence, that she approaches her participants’ stories “not as narratives of redemption, but as imperfect and unfinished yet critical resources for envisaging and working through the trap that dominantly positioned settlers find ourselves in under settler colonialism” (419). Her participants told stories “that featured the shattering of cherished illusions and deeply held assumptions that seemed tied to a racially unmarked position of social and spatial dominance; some went so far as to articulate an explicit process of coming to consciousness of the constitutive relationship between Indigenous dispossession, regimes of property, and white privilege” (419). To “unsettle the on-going reproduction of settler privilege,” Hiller writes, we must look at “those who remain the ‘intended beneficiaries’ of colonization, both past and present—settlers of European descent” (419).
Hiller looks at the stories told by her research participants through Ermine’s “elaboration of ethical space” (420). Ermine begins with a thought experiment, in which Indigenous and Western “thought worlds” collide in ways “that undergird Western domination and Indigenous subjugation” (420). (So far, that sounds less like a thought experiment and more like history.) The space “afforded by the contrast of these autonomous thought worlds,” according to Ermine, is “a liminal space of possibility” in which settlers “come to encounter the fissures, contradictions, and inconsistencies within Western culture, society, and knowledge” (420). In addition, in the spaces where those thought worlds clash, “the Western gaze is met by an Indigenous counter-gaze” which, like a mirror, shows settlers something about “our own colonizing mindsets, practices, and societies” (420). “Ermine suggests that for non-Indigenous people to enter an ethical space of engagement with Indigenous peoples, we must actively seek out this return gaze, approaching what we are able to perceive of Indigenous knowledges, cultures, and lived material realities as critical resources for turning to see anew our own culture and to pull at deeply enfolded assumptions and power relations,” Hiller writes (420-21).
For Hiller, the stories of her research participants in that space of encounter are “a series of forays into spaces born of colliding thought worlds” (421). The activists she interviewed entered that space for many reasons, but an identification with social justice is one overarching factor she identifies in their stories (421). More importantly, “each tells a story that pivots around specific moments of catching a glimpse in Ermine’s mirror. Such glimpses are necessarily partial, in large part due to the constraining weight of what Ermine describes as the ‘undercurrent’ of the Western thought world” (421). Nevertheless, her participants “speak of seeing past the overbearing weight of that undercurrent just for a moment, and catching sight of something else in that mirror: a glimpse of a fellow suffering human being; the specificity of a marginalized human community; a brief sighting of disavowed atrocities; an instance of inspirational resistance; the imagined basis of a common struggle” (421-22). For me, that moment was the realization that all of the stories I had been told about the justification for settlers living in the Haldimand Tract were untrue. Some of Hiller’s research participants had similarly indirect glimpses, but others had “deeply personal or embodied experiences” or even “startlingly visceral encounters that involve direct engagements with Indigenous people themselves, moments in which these non-Indigenous actors are called to account for who they are and how they emplace themselves” (422). In my case, learning about the ongoing history of the Haldimand Tract left me unable to respond to the challenges I imagined experiencing. I realized I had no defence, no way to justify my past presence on the Haldimand Tract or my present existence in Treaty 4 territory.
The encounters Hiller’s research participants talked about “disallow false separations of the colonial past from the colonial present” and “refuse the alibi of good intentions, demanding instead a deep interrogation and a public accounting of our personal implication in the on-going history of colonization” (422). They represent “momentary interruptions of on-going settler colonial relations: fissures that reveal unsettling truths about the violence at the heart of settler narratives, identities, and spaces” (422). Those interruptions, those glances in the mirror, cause us to lose our bearings and provoke “a range of unsettling emotions: anger, fear, threat, betrayal, guilt, shame” (422). And those momentary interruptions offer us a choice: we can either “avert our eyes long enough for these emotions to wane and for shape-shifting narratives to do their recuperative work, bridging across those unsettling contradictions” or, “if the encounter affects us in a way that is sufficiently personal, if the jar is powerful enough with sufficient affective weight, or if it is repeated, it may remain with us, embedding within us what one participant described as a ‘niggling question’ about Indigenous peoples, about this place, and about our relationship to both” (422). “In such moments,” Hiller continues, “we turn back to face the culture, society, and thought world that has formed us as well as the violence that we witness, a turning that sparks a cycle of reflection and action that draws us into decolonizing practices and new relations of responsibility” (422).
The stories Hiller’s research participants told her were all unique; each articulated “a specific set of positionalities, political frameworks, and commitments,” and drew upon “particular experiences and histories” and “engagements with Indigenous peoples, cultures, and realities within a specific context of colonization,” and as a result “each is shaped by corresponding and at times conflicting Indigenous demands for decolonization” (423). To understand those stories, Hiller turns to Ermine’s notion of the ethical space of engagement:
Here, I visualize the space opened up by intersecting thought worlds as that constituted by two overlapping circles: a space literally hemmed in by two sets of shifting boundaries that serve both to mark its outer limits. In this in-between space, each narrative appears as a series of choices regarding how a specific narrator orients within that space: choices about which direction to turn, and which curving edge of intersecting boundaries to face. (423)
Hiller’s analysis reveals
two distinct but interconnected and at times competing trajectories of decolonization: there is an upward spiral, focused outward, that entails non-Indigenous people witnessing and confronting historic and on-going colonial practices that dispossess and displace Indigenous peoples; there is also a downward spiral, focused inward, in which non-Indigenous people pull apart our own base assumptions, entrenched colonial mindsets, and deeply held investments in white settler privilege. (423)
That second spiral seems to resemble the process that Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang criticize as a “focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land” (Tuck and Yang 19). According to Tuck and Yang, “the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change” (19). However, they continue, “Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism” (19). That may be true, but much has to happen before stolen land is returned, including changes in the assumptions and investments of settlers. Hiller addresses this point later on.
For Hiller, the upward spirals “describe cycles of reflection and action that ‘piece together the evidence’ regarding the machinations of settler colonialism and the specific ways that Indigenous dispossession and displacement are enacted and perpetuated in the present” (423). The narratives that Hiller considers as part of this category “are marked by convergences of anti-colonial knowledge and insight: spiraling ‘ah-hah’ realizations that settler colonialism is ‘all about the land’ and ‘it’s still going on’” (423-24). She imagines these spirals as cycling upward because
they represent cumulative shifts in settler consciousness: moments when white settlers find themselves ‘pushed over the edge’ and into action in solidarity with Indigenous peoples by virtue of ‘knowing too much’ about the injustices inherent to settler states; moments when their cumulative awareness forces them to choose sides in Indigenous struggles against various forms of settler encroachment, leaving them no option of turning back. (424)
In contrast, the downward spirals, “cycles of reflection and action that arise from a turn inward,” “trace participants’ experiences of grappling with what the gaze they encounter in the mirror has to tell them about who they are, particularly in relation to the land under their feet” (424). “Rather than upward-moving and cumulative,” Hiller writes, “I imagine these spirals of learning as iterative and downward-moving: they represent concerted and on-going efforts to clear out the undercurrent of racist and colonizing assumptions in order to move outside of the confining ‘cages of our mental worlds’” (she quotes Ermine here) (424-25). These stories can involve working through difficult emotions, which can include the “inculcated fears and the sense of threat that arises for many settlers in the fact of Indigenous peoples’ assertions to rights and relations to land” (425), and the guilt many settlers feel, which must be both challenged and used “as a form of critical intelligence regarding our deepest investments, both in settler colonial mindsets and privilege and in our own desires for an ethical place to stand” (425). These stories are also about “spiritual unsettlement,” of “being spiritually undone in relation to Indigenous peoples and their relations to land (425). They also involve “grappling with Indigenous difference” in a variety of ways, including by learning to pay attention “to intersecting sacred boundaries,” including Treaty relationships and the connections between humans and non-humans (425).
“Of course, any non-Indigenous engagement with Indigenous difference must also be read in relation to the continuity of Western imperialist and neocolonialist impulses to imagine, define, contain, impose, control, regulate, and police constructions of Indigenous difference,” Hiller writes, and as a result many of her research participants avoid engaging with Indigenous ceremonies, knowledges, and languages in order to avoid appropriation (425). For Hiller, though, this decision “also risks re-colonizing the space of engagement that Ermine describes” (426). She notes that Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen suggests that engaging in the gap between Indigenous and Western epistemes is “a means of reflexively turning back on ourselves as settlers,” and that “coming to a place of humility as well as responsibility in relation to Indigenous worldviews” is important (426). We need to pay attention “not only to the insights Indigenous epistemes might offer us, but also listen to hear what such epistemes might demand of us” (426). Unfortunately Hiller doesn’t cite Kuokkanen here, but I wonder if those ideas are discussed in her book, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift, which I have yet to read (although I have a copy on my shelf).
The stories Hiller’s research participants told about engaging with Indigenous difference “gesture towards the ways in which processes of unsettling settler imaginaries are intricately tied up with and dependent upon Indigenous decolonization movements and resurgent cultural practices” (426). In addition, those stories “point to humility in the face of incommensurable epistemes—combined with a willingness to acknowledge and respect the implications of a worldview which one cannot fully conceive—as a critical star[t]ing point for non-Indigenous engagements with Indigenous sovereignty, title, and rights and relations to land” (426). In addition, and perhaps most profoundly, “narratives in this direction involve the unearthing and pulling apart of deep-seated investments in white settler privilege” (426).
These two forms of experience, which Hiller describes as “two cycles of praxis—the upward, anticolonial cycle and the downward, decolonizing cycle” (426), are deeply connected. The stories told by her research participants include elements of both trajectories, “often operating simultaneously and feeding into one another” (426). However, it is important to see them as distinct, to acknowledge the ways they can “compete, complicate, or even stall each other out” (426). That interplay echoes the work of Indigenous scholars, Hiller suggests, who both critique “the tendency of settler decolonization efforts to reify settler identities and interests without concretely supporting ‘the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’” (she cites Tuck and Wang here), and who challenge settlers who set out to act in solidarity to ask questions about “their identities, investments, and assumptions” (here she cites Lynn Gehl’s “Ally Bill of Responsibilities”) (426-27). “Indeed, the ethical space of engagement that Ermine imagines requires that these two trajectories of praxis—each representing processes entailing specific social, political, and personal dimensions and demands for accountability—be held in dynamic balance,” Hiller contends, because doing otherwise risks “stagnating consciousness development and reiterating settler colonial relations of power” (427). One critique that could be made about walking performance and settler decolonization is that it is too much focused on “deeply interrogating . . . identities, investments, and assumptions” (427), and that it ignores tangible, concrete action. A similar critique might be made of any artistic practice, though, which is one reason that people interested in settler decolonization or in working in anticolonial ways (to use Hiller’s distinction between those terms) are often pushed towards forms of social aesthetics or social practice.
Listening to Indigenous peoples—“their experiences, analyses, and aspirations”—is central to both “spirals of praxis,” according to Hiller (427). “Often, these processes of listening occur within, precipitate, or result from relationship-building with Indigenous peoples,” she states (427). Such relationships “help to disrupt colonialist assumptions and categories—both overtly racist and romanticizing—that essentialize and elide the multiplicity of difference among peoples, communities, and nations” (427). Relationships can also be the “site of unsettling moments of learning, and at times provide the conditions that sustain the process of unsettlement” (427). Relationships make “the abstractions of colonizing histories and realities” concrete (427). “It is personal relationships—with communities, with individuals—that provoke a deep sense of responsibility and accountability, demanding a cyclical return to analyze and dismantle colonizing structures,” Hiller writes (427). In fact, she points out that there is a substantial literature on ally formation which demonstrates “the role that relationships play in sparking, provoking, and sustaining processes of decolonizing settler consciousness” (428).
The learning processes Hiller’s research participants describe “point to the ways in which processes of settler decolonization are complicated by reversions: moments when learning is interrupted, diverted, or stalled out; moments when we, as settler subjects, seek to re-settle our privileged identities, positions, and claims to space and place” (428). Such reversions occur in many ways, but they “represent paternalistic re-impositions not only of agenda and process, but of analysis, values, and ways of knowing and being. In these moments, we as settlers risk returning unchanged from spaces of engagement with Indigenous peoples, with our colonizing imaginaries left intact—or worse, further buttressed and entrenched” (428). Trying to be a good settler—one of the exceptional few who “get it”—is an example of what Tuck and Yang describe as “settler moves to innocence” (qtd. 428). Hiller even suggests that moments of awkward laughter settlers share when they acknowledge “inadmissible knowledges and subjectivities” are “a cushioning distance from the full weight of the ‘difficult knowledges’ of which we speak and from a full realization of the violence that lurks beneath that thin veneer of our national and personal identities and claims to space and place” (428).
“Thus, despite occasional shifts in perspective and commitments that appear to be relatively enduring, the processes of coming to consciousness that I map here are iterative, inherently incomplete, and marked by disjuncture: they are cycles of awareness and unawareness, unsettlement and re-settlement, recognition and misrecognition, knowing and unknowing,” Hiller writes. “Shifts happen through repetition across time and space, and insights must often be re-learned or at times unlearned” (429). Several of Hiller’s research participants stated that the process was a “life-long learning curve” (429).
The recursive, iterative nature of the learning process suggests the difficulty of unsettling “settled expectations” (430). “Participants speak of facing inculcated fears of losing (white) privilege tied to their own settled expectations in relation to access to land, and of struggling against the lulling pull of complacency in the face of on-going colonial violence directed at racialized others,” Hiller writes. “Many of these narratives also constitute attempts to work through the mire of white settler guilt, and to articulate a specifically located set of responsibilities in relation to undoing settler colonialism and its corollary, white supremacy” (430). Whiteness plays out in the stories Hillier’s research participants tell in different ways. For instance, several participants noted that the act of supporting Indigenous struggles “demands a certain level of privilege tied to race and class: for not everyone is afforded the luxury of the time, resources, and distance from everyday struggles for survival that is necessary to become or to act consistently as an ally” (431). Hiller cites Celia Haig-Brown’s observation that “one of the defining features of white settler privilege is the choice about whether and how to engage in anti-colonial struggle . . . as well as the ability to engage without having to face violent consequences” (431). For Hiller, the stories of her research participants offer unique contributions “to our collective understanding of the contexts and processes underlying white settler dominance, its reproduction, and its disruption,” and the most valuable stories might be the ones “that elucidate the inevitable missteps in processes of decolonization that so often precipitate our most powerful moments of un/learning” (431).
The settler imaginary, Hiller concludes, “is born of a pervasive amnesia that depends upon and reifies an erasure of the presence, imprint, and very humanity of Indigenous peoples,” and this imaginary allows settlers to “envision ourselves as naturally occupying and belonging to the spaces and places of Indigenous peoples” (431-32). Her research, she states, “represents an empirical effort to consider how, in the context of a settler colonial present that continues to be ‘all about Indigenous land,’ white settlers begin to perceive, grapple with, and actively recognize and support the foundation-rocking realities of Indigenous sovereignty, territory, and rights and relations to land” (432). That process, she continues, is “complex, iterative, disjointed, and just plain messy” (432). She calls for more research into “the conditions, contexts, and practices that instigate, sustain, or interrupt” that process (432). In addition, she suggests that her research “makes plain the responsibilities of settlers in relation to personal and structural decolonization”; in other words, both “spirals of praxis,” the “cycles of reflection and action” must operate “in tandem and simultaneously” (432). “It is through commitments to these practices over time that we as non-Indigenous people occupying Indigenous lands might prepare ourselves to enter the decolonized space that Ermine describes,” Hiller concludes (432).
Hiller’s essay is important; I wish I had known about it when I was working on my MFA—I think it had been published at that point—but at least I’ve read it now. Her insights into the stories her research participants told her are applicable to the practices of settler artists or writers who are interested in decolonizing work, and they indicate potential strengths and weaknesses of such practices. I particularly like her recognition that processes of decolonization are repetitive and iterative. No process moves in a simple straight line. Her bibliography is also useful. It broadens my thinking, beyond the specifics of land acknowledgments, and that’s important. I might need to scan through the journal where this article was published, Settler Colonial Studies, to find other work on this topic. That’s a lot of work, it’s true, but sometimes keyword searches in a library database don’t capture all the material that’s available. If only I could find a quicker way to read and take notes on articles like this one that’s as thorough as writing a summary. How do others manage to read carefully and, more importantly, retain what they’ve read? I wish my mind worked that way.
Hiller, Chris. “Tracing the Spirals of Unsettlement: Euro-Canadian Narratives of Coming to Grips with Indigenous Sovereignty, Title, and Rights.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, 2017, pp. 415-40. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241209.
Kuokkanen, Rauna. Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift, University of British Columbia Press, 2007.
Michelle Daigle’s “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy” is another article from the list I got from my friend Matthew Anderson. Daigle is Cree, a member of Constance Lake First Nation in northern Ontario’s Treaty 9 territory, and a professor of geography at the University of Toronto. My summary of Daigle’s argument is long, but I think it’s an important discussion, and I don’t want to miss or ignore any of its details.
Daigle begins by locating herself on the Indigenous lands where she has lived in Canada and the United States, and describes her return to this country in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. She describes media coverage of TRC meetings as “sensationalized accounts of Indigenous peoples’ suffering coupled with white settler Canadians’ hollow displays of recognizing and mourning ‘past’ state violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples through the residential school system” (704). Those “narratives of Indigenous suffering and trauma,” while long familiar to her, “readily assaulted my everyday interactions with renewed zealousness” (704). That experience “was further magnified as visual media depicted one imager after the other of white Canadians shedding tears over this ‘past’ violence and images of Indigenous peoples forgiving and embracing politicians,” images which Daigle dismisses as “spectacles of reconciliation” and “a spectacle of settler sorrow coupled with a state-led production of good-feeling reconciliation” (704). Those spectacles made her angry and resentful. “I did not know when I would be subjected to trauma-based stories and images as I picked up the Sunday paper or turned on the radio as I drove to work,” she writes. “I was angry because my own family, friends, and mentors’ experiences had become blunted sensationalized accounts of violence, abuse, and trauma that were consumed by the white settler gaze” (704). She was also angry because the stories survivors told were often determined to be “uncredible and unreliable” by the TRC’s “colonial and racist forms of evidence gathering and evaluation” (704). “Meanwhile,” she continues,
the state’s fetishization of Indigenous suffering tied to the history of residential schools masked the ongoing truths of the colonial present, including state violence inflicted on land and water protectors, the ongoing apprehension of Indigenous children through the child welfare system and heteropatriarchal violence against Indigenous women, queer, Two-Spirit and trans individuals. (704)
Indigenous erasure was reproduced in Canada “through unrelenting performances of recognition and remorse” that wore Daigle out (704).
TRC events, Daigle continues, “had become confessional spaces of white guilt that were shaped by an ask-the-Indian dynamic whereby white people take up the majority of the space by asking Indigenous peoples what they could do to ‘achieve’ reconciliation and be a reconciled settler” (705). “Responsibility was oftentimes put on Indigenous peoples to do the emotional and time-consuming work of mitigating white guilt and creating a forgiving space to move forward,” she writes, while the colonial basis of Canada’s dependence on the extraction of natural resources—the focus of Daigle’s research as a geographer—was ignored (705). “I was bombarded by well-intentioned white Canadians who wanted to know specific steps and courses of action they could take to reconcile their relationship with Indigenous peoples,” she notes, and she was pressed by non-Indigenous faculty who had “suddenly jumped on the reconciliation bandwagon” to join their research projects. She was also asked by faculty, staff, and students about how to incorporate local Indigenous content in their courses. “I did not know most of these people,” she writes, “and often wondered why they were contacting a Cree visitor who was new to these Indigenous territories while they had lived there for many years” (705). She decided that “approaching an Indigenous academic—specifically an Indigenous woman—was likely less intimidating, unsettling, and definitely less time consuming than building relationships with the community on whose lands we found ourselves on,” and that “the unified Indian subject was becoming reified as Indigenous political and legal pluralities were quickly overlooked in settlers’ rush to reconcile” (705). For Daigle, “the time and emotional labor of doing this work for complete strangers was not sustainable in the long run and would inevitably take time away from the community-based relationships and work” that were important to her (705).
At the same time, Daigle’s grandmother, mother, and five siblings were seeking reparations for the years they had spent at St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario, a difficult, time-consuming, and hostile process. The federal government fought the St. Anne’s survivors every step of the way. As well, resistance was building “against resource extraction in Mushkegowuk territory as a number of communities were issued impact benefit agreements for mining developments, and as increasing rates of birth deformities, miscarriages, and infertility were correlated to the rising levels of methylmercury in our territory” (706). Her relatives in places like Thunder Bay were experiencing “white supremacist violence inflicted by schools and police officers,” and the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and Site C dam projects were approved despite Indigenous opposition. It was clear, Daigle writes, that “despite grand apologies and promises, the economic and political sovereignty of the colonial state trumped responsibilities to diverse Indigenous nations across the country” (706).
“Despite the myriad and interconnected sites of colonial violence on Indigenous lands and bodies,” Daigle writes,
the Canadian government and many Canadians proclaim that they have entered a new era of reconciliation that is restoring ethical and responsible relations with Indigenous peoples. Building on critiques of reconciliation led by Indigenous scholars, I argue that this is an era marked by the spectacle of reconciliation—a public, large-scale and visually striking performance of Indigenous suffering and trauma alongside white settler mourning and recognition—which secures, legitimates, and effectively reproduces white supremacy and settler futurity in Canada. (706)
Daigle draws on essays by Sandy Grande and Natalie J.K. Baloy which use Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle to argue that the spectacle of Indigeneity “is colonially framed through trauma or multicultural discourses, erasing the complexity of Indigeneity that is lived everyday through multiple embodied experiences across diverse landscapes” (706). Because of such spectacles, “settlers’ understandings of and encounters with Indigenous peoples become shaped through spectacular images rather than through direct experiences and relationships” (706-07). Spectacles “produce a false consciousness of time and space by reinscribing teleological narratives of colonialism and by restricting colonial relations and violence to the space of residential schools,” she writes (707). Moreover, “the language of renewing Indigenous-state relations and of reconciliation (rather than conciliation) ideologically imply that diplomatic and respectful relationships between the colonial government and Indigenous peoples once existed and can be returned to” (707).
The spectacle of reconciliation spatially limits colonial violence to isolated residential schools, thereby “erasing its various manifestations through, for example, the mass genocide of Indigenous peoples through warfare and the illegal theft of land” (707). Those erasures, Daigle continues, happen in the colonial present as “‘the archive of images’” (she cites Baloy here) “that make up settler colonial spectacles become centered and severed from the larger terrain of colonial violence that Indigenous peoples and lands continue to be subjected to” (707). Thus, “white settlers’ spectacular performances of apologies, land acknowledgments, and multicultural celebrations of Indigenous culture and art become crucial in reifying geographies of nation purity on a large scale” (707). Thus, “‘spectator-settlers’” (Daigle cites Baloy again—an article I need to read, clearly) “do not merely assume a passive role of spectator of voyeur, but take on active roles in a spectacular performative politics that depoliticizes Indigenous-settler relations, rather than activating political agencies that are accountable to Indigenous peoples on whose lands they live and work on” (707). These spectacular performances also legitimate and reproduce colonial hegemony in Canada (707). For instance, while the visibility of colonial violence in residential schools has threatened Canada’s “global reputation as a benevolent and peaceful nation,” the solution to that problem has been “the endless performance of sympathy and remorse coupled with the production of good feelings of reconciliation” as “part of the remedy and ostensible realization of justice for ‘past’ wrongs” (707).
Daigle draws on the work of Tanana Athabascan scholar Dana Million to argue that “responsibilities to Indigenous peoples are further severed as spectacles reify discourses of a unified wounded Indian subject that was codified and naturalized under the Indian Act, erasing Indigenous political and legal pluralities across space” (707) and reframing them through narratives of trauma and suffering (708). For that reason, “non-Indigenous people continue to have ruptured understandings of Indigeneity and what it means to embody responsible relations with Indigenous peoples, not to mention what it means to activate responsible relations with Indigenous peoples who experience colonial power in differential ways through, for example, heteropatriarchal violence” (708). The “erasure of responsibilities to Indigenous peoples occurs on a large scale,” Daigle argues (708).
Here Daigle turns to consider universities as crucial sites of settler colonial relations “as well as an intrinsic part of the settler colonial state,” hoping that her critiques “might come into dialog with those mounted against recognition-based strategies taking shape across post-secondary institutions in other settler colonial contexts” (708). She writes, “white settler futurities, including university futurities, remain unchallenged despite of good-feeling and albeit good intentioned reconciliation mandates” (709). The colonial power relations between “Indigenous and settler administrators, faculty, students, and staff on university campuses” cannot be “severed from the larger terrain of Indigenous land and bodily dispossession that universities continue to be complicit in on and off campus” (709). Her intention is “to trace how universities figure into present colonial capitalist relations on Indigenous territories” and “to contribute to ongoing dialogues on geographies of responsibility by further nuancing conceptualizations of social and spatial difference as they pertain to Indigenous peoples’ calls for responsibility and relational accountability along the lines of white settler/property and Indigenous/land and bodily dispossession” (709). Daigle asks what responsibility means “when one is occupying stolen Indigenous lands or is connected to such dispossession through the uneven power geometries of global colonial-capitalist development, as unsettling as that might be” (709-10). That’s one of the questions my own research asks.
At this point, Daigle returns to the spectacle of residential schools and The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, which was opened with an apology that situated colonial violence in the past rather than something that is ongoing and contemporary (710). That apology “marked an exceptional performance of recognition and remorsefulness,” part of “a larger architecture of performative acts that are increasingly visible on the UBC campus since the onset of the TRC” (710). She links that performance to the land acknowledgments that had become common on the UBC campus and elsewhere:
Many land acknowledgments on the UBC campus, and other university campuses, continue to be respectful and meaningful as the people undertaking them—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—do so in a manner which activates the relational accountability that is embedded in this legal and political practice, by calling up one’s kinship relations and, in UBC’s case, how those come into relationship (or should) with Musqueam people, lands, and waters. Furthermore, in such instances, land acknowledgments are proceeded by events, workshops, and seminars that critically and constructively take up settler colonialism, and center Indigenous peoples and knowledge in relation to the land. (711)
However, most land acknowledgments do not meet that standard. They are, Daigle writes, “hollow gestures of lip service as routine-like territorial acknowledgments are quickly forgotten and brushed aside to resume business as usual, according to well-established colonial and racialized power asymmetries” (711). Daigle’s reference to land acknowledgments as a “legal and political practice” (711) suggests that she sees this practice as rooted in Indigenous diplomacy, which is a contested notion, as Lila Asher, Joe Curnow, and Amil Davis suggest.
Daigle wants people to think about “why this political and legal practice is important for Indigenous peoples in the region, and the personal responsibility they are expected to take on in making a land acknowledgment as a visitor on Indigenous territories” (711). She complains that settlers making such acknowledgments are more invested in pronouncing names correctly—getting their lines correct—“than actually learning about the place where they live and work, with all of the complexities of historical and ongoing colonial dispossession and violence, elaborate and sophisticated Indigenous kinship networks, and the legal orders and authorities that have cared for that place for millennia” (711). “In many instances, territorial acknowledgments merely become acts of multicultural recognition of Indigenous territories, void of any real political and legal change in structural relations between Indigenous hosts, faculty, students, and staff, and educational institutions and settlers working at such institutions,” she continues. “Indeed, such performances further propagate the myth that Canadians are reconciling their relationship and that everything is okay” (711). What might those changes in structural relations look like, though? There is a vagueness in this paragraph that bothers me; I would like to know what kind of legal and political changes between, say, settler faculty and Indigenous students that Daigle considers necessary, changes that land acknowledgments do not (and, I would argue, with Daigle, cannot possibly) make happen.
For Daigle, land acknowledgments are therefore part of the “plethora of performative politics” on Canadian university campuses, and they have caused “many Indigenous faculty, students, and staff and, most importantly, the original caretakers of those territories, to ask what follows such performances of recognition and remorse, or what should be put in action instead of hollow gestures and performances” (711). “In the case of land acknowledgments, for example, what are the responsibilities of individuals within universities, beyond simply performing routine acknowledgments, or, as an implication of adopting this practice? Or, best yet, what responsibilities should they be taking on as a means of having the privilege to adopt this political and legal practice in the first place?” (711). These are excellent questions, and I hope Daigle gives us some sense of what the answers to them might be.
Daigle notes that some universities require students to take an Indigenous studies course, and that others are including Indigenous content in their curricula (711). “Ironically, such mandates, while often hollow in creating transformative change run deep in the responsibility that is placed on Indigenous faculty, students, and staff, as well as local Elders and community members who take on the brunt of the time and labor, including emotional labor, to implement reconciliatory initiatives,” she contends. “That is, Indigenous peoples are routinely identified as the subjects on campus who are responsible for creating a space that is deserving of their presence while simultaneously educating their colleagues about colonization and Indigeneity (not to mention, at times, attending to their white fragility in doing so)” (712). In other words, “the rush to decolonize and Indigenize reifies colonial power asymmetries across Canadian university campuses” (712). There is a lack of institutional and interpersonal support for the Indigenous people who undertake this work, and “Indigenous self-determination is denied as mandates are set without proper consultation and consent while the onus of implementation is placed on Indigenous peoples as they are routinely asked to lend their time and expertise to carry out hollow mandates for Indigenous content” (712).
For Daigle, following Eve Tuck, Canadian educational institutions need to begin this process by acknowledging how they “have not only played a role in assimilating Indigenous peoples but have and continue to indoctrinate Canadians with colonial and racialized discourses of Indigenous peoples and places” (712). She suggests that “it is precisely these types of settler colonial legacies and continuities that must be centered in courses rather than centring local Indigenous culture in ways that do not fundamentally change colonial power, and perpetuate the illusion that feel-good curriculum content on culture somehow equates being ‘reconciled’” (712). Courses should instead “compel students to think about how they benefit from the structures of settler colonialism and white surpremacy,” she continues, citing a talk given by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson at the University of Alberta (712). “Indigenous content should perhaps be reframed as content on colonialism that centers Indigenous activism and scholarship, to activate responsibilities to Indigenous places and peoples,” Daigle writes (712-13). Administrators need to spend money on all of this, particularly since Canadian universities “stand to fiscally benefit from the new pots of money that will be made available through calls for reconciliation”—I’m not sure those “pots of money” have actually materialized—and as administrators capitalize on the banner of reconciliation to promote the university’s reputation, credibility, and research which ostensibly seeks to reconcile settler Canadians’ relationship with Indigenous peoples” (713). That spending will need to include hiring Indigenous faculty to design and teach courses on colonialism (713). Indigenous Elders need to be appropriately compensated—a serious lack at my university—and “non-Indigenous administrators, faculty, and staff should be educated and trained on why these mandates are important, so they too can be responsible for explaining and defending this to students and colleagues” (713). Anti-colonial course content needs to be “implemented through a range of courses in a critical and constructive manner,” and “course content and pedagogy must center the experiences of Indigenous and other racialized students rather than re-centering whiteness in the classroom as the normative starting point” (713). All of these recommendations are sound, and yet it’s hard for me to imagine how financially stressed universities are going to be able to implement them, particularly since the “pots of money” for reconciliation appear to have not materialized.
“My intention in reiterating these recommendations is not to provide a prescriptive formula, nor is my intention to argue for a reframing of reconciliation,” Daigle concludes. Instead, she notes that “Indigenous self-determination lies in the autonomy to remain unreconciled” (714). Her recommendations are, she suggests, just a starting point. “A move from hollow performances to the aforementioned systemic changes is a good start,” she continues, but those changes would “remain inadequate if universities are to truly reckon with their role in reproducing colonial dispossession and violence in the present” (714). What Daigle wants to see happen, then, is a complete rethinking of what universities are and do, including a refusal to take donations from resource-extraction companies “that continue to violate Indigenous jurisdiction and inflict egregious physical and sexual violence on Indigenous peoples around the globe” (714). But Daigle is not just calling for an institutional revolution. “On a more interpersonal scale, many white settler faculty, students, and staff continue to engage in performances of recognition yet quickly flee, retreat, or become defensive when they are asked to sit with what it means to be more responsible and accountable to Indigenous peoples given that they are occupying stolen lands,” she writes. “Indeed, the mere mention of Indigenous demands for land restitution threatens the very foundation of colonial hegemony which the university and many of those who benefit from this institution continue to be heavily invested in” (714-15). Her understanding of the responsibilities that are owed to Indigenous peoples, then, is “not a performance or feel-good mandate, but relations of responsibility and accountability based on Indigenous law that Indigenous peoples continue to embody, regenerate, and demand for radical and transformative change” (715).
If I understand Daigle’s conclusion, she is demanding the kinds of changes that would constitute decolonization. The goals she outlines might be necessary, and I do appreciate their concrete nature, but I’m not sure that they are reachable, given the financial pressures universities experience. On a personal level, even after years of research, I’m still not sure what it might mean for me “to sit with what it means to be more responsible and accountable to Indigenous peoples” given that I am “occupying stolen lands,” or how those lands could be restored to Indigenous peoples without leaving me homeless. Daigle might dismiss such questions as defensiveness, but there are more than 30 million settlers in Canada, and we aren’t going to leave: most of us have no where else to go. So while I appreciate Daigle’s concrete proposals for changing universities, those changes would require broader social and economic changes that seem impossible. That’s the problem with utopian solutions to problems: as the etymology of utopia suggests—it’s a combination of two Greek words, ou (meaning not) and topia (meaning place)—utopias don’t actually exist. I don’t mean to disparage Daigle’s article—it’s important and worth reading—but while I would support the general thrust of her ambitions, I still find myself confused about how, in practical terms, to get there from here. One thing I’m certain of, though: my walking practice, or any notions of embodied territorial acknowledgments, would be dismissed by Daigle as performances that are hollow and therefore pointless.
Works Cited
Asher, Lila, Joe Curnow, and Amil Davis. “The Limits of Settlers’ Territorial Acknowledgments.” Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 48, no. 3, 2018, pp. 316-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1468211.
Daigle, Michelle. “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy.” EPD: Society and Space, vol. 37, no. 4, 2019, pp. 703-21.
My research into territorial acknowledgments continues with “The limits of Settlers’ Territorial Acknowledgments,” a short essay by Lila Asher, Joe Curnow, and Amil Davis—another in the list Matthew Anderson gave me. In this article, Asher, Curnow, and Davis trace the development of territorial acknowledgements made at meetings of Fossil Free UofT, an environmentalist group at the University of Toronto. The purpose of this case study, they write, is to trace “how student activists engaged with the practice to see what pedagogical outcomes the territorial acknowledgments generated” (316). They want to ask whether such acknowledgements are “a tool for decolonial solidarity,” or whether they are “the kind of move to innocence that Indigenous scholars and activists have warned against” (316). What “pedagogical work” do such acknowledgments “accomplish in settler spaces”? (317). Their conclusion is that “while the territorial acknowledgments successfully worked against the daily erasure of Indigenous people on Turtle Island and unsettled settler participants in the group, they failed as a decolonial pedagogy” because they “often served as a move to innocence, via containment and using decolonization as a metaphor, and did not lead to relationships of solidarity or decolonial action such as the rematriation of Indigenous land, language, and lifeways” (317). Territorial acknowledgments, the authors contend, are at best “a tiny part of decolonial solidarity pedagogy, and must be part of a broader decolonial praxis” (317).
According to Asher, Curnow, and Davis, territorial acknowledgments have arisen within a broader political moment defined by “Indigenous resurgence movements” like Idle No More and the Standing Rock protests, which have “gained traction and visibility internationally” (317). Such movements, they note have been accompanied by “a wealth of Indigenous scholarship laying out a vision for decolonial processes” (317). That scholarship asserts that “paths to decolonization . . . do not lie in getting colonial institutions to recognize Indigenous rights”—and here they cite the work of Jeff Corntassel and Glen Coulthard—“but in reclaiming land, traditional governance, language, cultural practices, and autonomy” (317). The authors suggest that another part of the context of territorial acknowledgments in Canada is the release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which called upon settler institutions “to reflect on their colonial foundations” (317). “Within this context, territorial acknowledgments have become one of the practices that have scaled, becoming common in educational institutions and public events,” they write, “as a way of demonstrating support for reconciliation or as expressions of anticolonial solidarity,” while at the same time “they have also been critiqued by Indigenous people for the ways they have been institutionalized” (317). For instance, the blogger Onkwehonwe Rising argues that territorial acknowledgments are an appropriation of Indigenous diplomatic practices of recognizing kinship and alliance; those practices are then applied by settlers in a very different context of recognizing whose stolen land they occupy (317). “By taking what has been, in some nations, a diplomatic protocol, gutting it of its ontological and relational context, and repurposing it to legitimate settlers’ continued presence on stolen land, we effectively colonize territorial acknowledgments,” Asher, Curnow, and Davis write (318).
For that reason, the authors ask what people learn from territorial acknowledgments and whether they serve any decolonial purpose. They suggest that such acknowledgments “are often practiced because of a vague interest in supporting Indigenous groups, or even pressure to be politically correct” (318). Settlers who read such acknowledgments at public events often “have little understanding of the details of local Indigenous history or of the development of the territorial acknowledgment practice,” and as a result, the practice ends up being reduced “to a mundane ‘box-ticking’ exercise, easily ignored and void of learning opportunities” (318). I hear echoes of Chelsea Vowel’s argument in that sentence, and indeed the authors cite her blog post.
However, despite these critiques, territorial acknowledgments continue to be practiced by settler-descendants. The rationales for this practice “are often rooted in ideas of teaching and learning” (318). It is suggested that they unsettle ideas of terra nullius—“the myth that settlers found empty land available to them, rather than a richly populated continent with diverse, vibrant, place-based cultures”—and thereby “combat erasure and force settlers to grapple with our positionality” (318). “Activists assume territorial acknowledgments to be educative, a tool through which settlers become aware of Indigenous claims to land and begin to engage in solidarity practices,” the authors suggest, and for that reason, territorial acknowledgments are “fundamentally pedagogical interventions” (318). They draw upon a definition of pedagogy “as necessarily relational, intentional, and ethical” formulated by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández and Alexandra Arráiz Matute to argue that the territorial acknowledgments they have studied—the ones offered at Fossil Free UofT meetings—are intended “to interrupt the ubiquity of settler coloniality,” to “‘push against’ dominant ideas of settler colonialism which secure settler futurities” (318). Such acknowledgments are therefore intended “as a decolonial solidarity pedagogy which would raise awareness among participants and foment different relationships to knowledge, land, and Indigenous peoples” (318-19).
However, because territorial acknowledgments in such spaces often “lack the relationality, intentionality, and ethic that underpins the pedagogical relationship,” their ability “to serve decolonial solidarity visions is, at best, uneven” (319). That’s because solidarity, according to Gaztambide-Fernández, “entails combining concrete actions, embedded in specific and local relationships of accountability, with critical reflection,” and because it also “requires an ontological shift, a move towards a way of being founded on interdependency” (319). Such an ontological shift “draws on Indigenous conceptions of relationality” and decenters “Eurowestern ontologies” (319). “Therefore,” the authors contend, “a decolonial solidarity praxis requires the development of both relationships of accountability and an understanding of relationality” (319).
According to Asher, Curnow, and Davis, it’s difficult to initiate decolonial processes because “settlers are often hesitant to acknowledge our own complicity in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples” and therefore often fall back on narratives “that erase Indigenous presence” or use “a variety of ‘moves to innocence’ to try to claim legitimacy for our occupation and achieve absolution” (319). From the literature on territorial acknowledgments, it’s not clear whether they “are productive in disrupting these avoidance mechanisms and pushing settlers towards decolonial solidarity,” although such acknowledgments have not been systematically examined (319). That lack of systematic examination is the absence this article sets out to address.
The research this paper addresses was a participatory action research project, designed in partnership with members of Fossil Free UofT and conducted over several years. That partnership, the authors write, “is important because the questions and results are constantly made accountable to the movement as we ensure relational accountability and reliability through our experiences and our networks” (319-20). I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it suggests that their research design set out to incorporate Indigenous concepts of relationality, derived from scholars such as Shawn Wilson, whose work they cite here. “Our positionality as participants in the group and also as researchers meant that we were not only deeply embedded in the practices of Fossil Free UofT, bringing an insider perspective, but also meant that your research process was actively part of the group and its political struggles,” they state (320). Indeed, the various members of the research team “initiated the longer territorial acknowledgments” and one was chair of “the equity committee that drove them” (320). Thus, while the article may seem critical of the practice of territorial acknowledgments, it is “a reflection on our own attempted interventions as we strive to do solidarity more substantively and to shift the group toward land rematriation and climate justice” (320). Its criticism, then, is self-criticism.
The authors determined, by reviewing their video of Fossil Free UofT meetings, that there were three phases of acknowledgments: none at all (in the fall of 2014), scripted acknowledgments of 20 seconds or less (in the spring of 2015), and “longer pedagogical interventions” that ranged between two and 17 minutes in length (in the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016). Their intention in this article is to “trace the development of the group’s territorial acknowledgments, examining what they accomplished and where they fell short of the group’s aspirations” (321).
The authors also note that “settler” is a rather blunt term, and that scholarship on the term suggests that it erases the differences between recent arrivals to Canada and those who were born here, but they also note the importance of Patrick Wolfe’s argument against “moves to avoid the settler-native binary” because “all non-Indigenous peoples are implicated in settler colonialism” through their presence on Indigenous lands (321). Their use of the term “settler” is thus aware of “the processes of racialization and historical specificities that complicate settler positionality, and thus the complicated ways in which each of us perform territorial acknowledgments” (321).
Despite such terminological complexities, the authors found that “settlers of colour and White settlers of all genders struggled with how to participate in decolonial solidarity” (321). “We saw people learning, developing new identities, epistemologies, concepts, and practices,” they write,” but instead of focusing on those individual learning processes, they want to ask “whether the developing territorial acknowledgments practiced within Fossil Free UofT had any pedagogical impact for the group as a whole” (321). Their conclusion is that while such acknowledgments “challenged the erasure of Indigenous peoples and were unsettling for settlers, they ultimately fell short of decolonial pedagogy” (321).
Their first point is that territorial acknowledgments “successfully interrupted, to some extent, the everyday erasure of Indigenous peoples in Fossil Free UofT” (321). They cite Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s argument that not recognizing territory is a political choice, and the argument of Eve Tuck and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández that erasing Indigenous peoples is a “key component of settler colonialism, allowing settlers to take their place and take their land” (322). Such an erasure is normalized by school curriculum, which excludes Indigenous people and Indigenous thought (322). “In this context, the awareness fostered by Fossil Free UofT’s territorial acknowledgment practice” can be seen as an accomplishment, “even if the effects of the practice remain in question” (322). However, even as they combatted the erasure of Indigenous peoples, the group’s territorial acknowledgments “became normalized and rote” (322). As a result, members of the group advocated for acknowledgments that were more engaged and that would “invoke more substantial learning opportunities” (322), and “the expectations for territorial acknowledgments changed from reading the short script to adding on a different educational component” (323). Even the group members who were reluctant “to engage with solidarity practices” were clearly prompted to think about such practices through the territorial acknowledgments (323). During the two years of engaging in territorial acknowledgments, “the group moved from rarely talking about colonialism to developing nuanced arguments on either side of the question of solidarity work that consistently engaged with content relevant to Indigenous peoples” (324).
Second, the settlers in the group became “unsettled” (324). The authors cite Emma Battel-Lowman and Adam Barker’s suggestion that “decolonial solidarity is an uncomfortable process” for settlers, because it forces us to “come to recognize the histories and contemporary power relations that structure our lives” (324). The acknowledgments “made settler speakers uncomfortable,” they write, and that discomfort could be seen in the “awkwardness in the conversations,” in the “bids to avoid the implications of settler colonialism,” and in the “shame and embarrassment about mispronunciation” of the names of Indigenous peoples and about “a lack of familiarity with Indigenous issues” (324). The authors noted that this discomfort was also expressed through two different types of avoidance behaviours: “awkward silence, where it seemed that people did not know what to say in response to the content; and derailment, where speakers brought up non-relevant content as a way of shifting the discussion away from its focus on settler colonialism” (325). Awkward silence were “the most common response to the invitation to participate in the territorial acknowledgment discussion,” and few group members engaged in the acknowledgments, leaving the same group of people to fill the silences (325-26). “While these avoidance mechanisms detracted from the pedagogical potential of the territorial acknowledgment, we argue that they show territorial acknowledgments do accomplish one of their goals, which is to make settlers uncomfortable about their position on the land and denaturalize settler claims to space,” the authors continue. “We argue discomfort has educative value in that it made people aware, on a regular basis, of their precarious claim to space on Turtle Island, as well as their awareness of their ignorance about Indigenous people and settler colonial histories” (326). They suggest, citing Chelsea Vowel, that such discomfort “is what is productive about territorial acknowledgments, and that discomfort is what makes people recognize their positionality and precarity” (326). That discomfort inspired some members of the group to learn more about Indigenous issues—by practicing how to pronounce correctly the names of the Indigenous nations included in the acknowledgments, for instance—although other group members clearly did not engage in such learning and tended to avoid the feelings of discomfort “rather than embrace responsibility” (326).
While the acknowledgments may have been pedagogically productive, Asher, Curnow, and Davis continue, “they continues to be problematic because they departed from anything like a territorial acknowledgment rooted in Indigenous protocols” (326). In other words, the group’s acknowledgments were extracted from their “relational context and origin as diplomatic protocol” and turned into broader discussions of colonialism and social justice, a shift which “recentered Eurowestern ways of knowing and being, drawing on frameworks such as critical social analysis and informational presentations that are familiar to settler university students, rather than remaining grounded in relationality” (326-27). The author’s cite Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s argument about decolonization becoming a metaphor or synonym for social justice, and suggest that instead of “forcing us to grapple with our positionality and responsibility in land rematriation, we often were dealing with questions of Indigenous struggles in the abstract, or with other social justice issues entirely” (327). The territorial acknowledgements the group practiced “were a hybrid, or perhaps a completely appropriated practice where our worldviews dominated,” and they “reinscribed Eurowestern ways of being based on knowledge sharing, rather than staying true to Indigenous conceptions of relationality, land, and nation, even when they did teach about Indigenous struggles and solidarity” (327). “Though we were recognizing Indigenous territory,” the authors continue, “we never implicated ourselves, as settlers and guests, within the relations of settler colonialism, or engaged with our different responsibilities” (327). They criticize the use of the term “descendant of settlers,” for instance, which was used by one member of the group, because it relegates “settler colonial violence to the past” and attempts “to escape personal implication” (327). They also criticize the conflation of the terms “settler” and “non-Indigenous,” which turn the term “settler” into “an empty signifier” (327).
In addition, the authors criticize the group’s “inattention to how processes of racialization shifted individual members’ relationships to the territorial acknowledgments, the land, and the peoples we were recognizing,” an inattention that “demonstrates a significant gap in our decolonial pedagogies” (327). For instance, statements like “we’re all treaty people,” they argue, gloss over the way that people of colour are “differently positioned” in such relationships (328). As the territorial acknowledgments that developed “took the shape of decolonization as a metaphor,” they “became bids to include broad social justice content without effectively moving us toward decolonial frameworks that reckoned with the disparate positionalities within the group, and without attending to the ways that the social justice content people brought in around racialization, capitalism, and gender were imbricated with settler colonialism” (328).
According to Asher, Curnow, and Davis, “[d]espite the learning that territorial acknowledgments generated within the group by combatting erasure and unsettling settlers, settler discomfort quickly capped the potential of the practice to aid in decolonial work,” and the acknowledgments “became a way of insulating individual participants and the group as a whole from having to deal with our complicity in the colonial systems that we had begun to understand” (328). In other words, the acknowledgments became moves to innocence that made the settlers in the group feel comfortable (328). Those acknowledgments “were easily completed and contained in a way which marked us as good and enabled us to move on with the meeting without disruption” (328). “Moves to contain territorial acknowledgments and Indigenous content to a narrow portion of the agenda kept these topics from having a larger impact on our work, instead allowing many of us to feel as though we had done enough for the day,” they continue (328). Thus the acknowledgments became “a box-ticking exercise—a way to get the task of being a good ally over with” (329). Thus, as moves to innocence, the acknowledgments “undermined the decolonial pedagogical possibilities of territorial acknowledgments within Fossil Free UofT” (329).
“Our work never engaged difficult conversations about what it might mean for the fossil fuel divestment campaign and each of us to wrestle with the colonial present,” the authors state (329). Nor did the acknowledgments address “contemporary land restitution”: “Our discussions remained abstracted from work on sovereignty, language, and land, instead discussing topical, but random content, like the work of Indigenous graffiti artists, without informing our work or being anchored in substantive decolonial solidarity praxis” (329). The acknowledgements tended to be performative, in other words, and they tended to assume that knowing about settler colonialism marked those present in the room “as good and responsible”—as distinct from others who were neither, it seems (329). “The ways that territorial acknowledgments were contained to small and discrete interventions also demonstrates the moves to innocence, and the check-boxes that Indigenous intellectuals warned against,” the authors continue (329). Instead, the acknowledgments “were contained and were understood as extra; they were not considered part of the real work, rather, they were a statement to get through and move on from” (330).
In their conclusion, Asher, Curnow, and Davis argue that “[n]o matter how detailed and considerate a territorial acknowledgment spoken in a settler space is, it can never be more than a move to innocence if it is not combined with concrete actions embedded in relationships of solidarity” that “prefigure a cooperative, anti-oppressive dynamic between settlers and Indigenous people” (330). “Settlers must come to understand a worldview based on interdependency and relationality rather than exploitation and dispossession, and must actively support Indigenous people in their goals of reclaiming land and autonomy,” they write, and territorial acknowledgments fall short of those desired outcomes. The group’s discussions, they continue, “never gave us the tools for deeper engagement with questions of land restitution, sovereignty, or relational accountability, and instead served as a settler project embedded within the politics of distraction” (330). Therefore, territorial acknowledgments “were not an adequate substitute for solidarity praxis,” and they “may have even prevented us from pursuing more meaningful work” (330). “Rather than point us toward decolonial solidarity pedagogies and strategies for the environmental movement, we believe this analysis of territorial acknowledgments reveals the broader challenges of mobilizing reconciliation frameworks in the absence of meaningful recognition of sovereignty and land restitution,” they state (330). Indeed, the authors’ faith in the pedagogical potential of territorial acknowledgments “made them serve as moves to innocence” (331).
“We’re aware that this paper could be read as our own move to innocence, where we gain ‘professional kudos’ for our reflexivity,” Asher, Curnow, and Davis continue (331). Nevertheless, they state, the paper “is not an exercise for us in self-righteous judgment of our colleagues” (331). Instead, it is an attempt at exploring the limitations of territorial acknowledgments. “As people who were unsatisfied with the mainstream environmentalist approach and attempting to be accountable to Indigenous activists’ requests that we do territorial acknowledgments, our practice evolved as a way of mobilizing the relationality, the intentions, and the ethics that are fundamental to solidarity—and yet we were ineffective at accomplishing our goals,” they write. “Through this analysis we have shown that the territorial acknowledgments did not enable us to do deeper work, and often served as a substitute for real engagement. For us, this signals that we need to find other ways of mobilizing pedagogies of decolonial solidarity, ones which center relationships and are not as easily contained as territorial acknowledgments” (331).
Awareness, the authors conclude, citing Eve Tuck, does not necessarily enable change, and if awareness is the goal of territorial acknowledgments, then they are bound to fail to create substantive change. “Although some members of the group felt strongly that we should be building relationships of solidarity with Indigenous land defenders and tying land rights more strongly into our campaign asks, we continually failed to integrate these aims into our campaign,” they confess (331). The awareness generated by territorial acknowledgments did not lead to change. “The theory of change underpinning decolonial solidarity must be different and deeper than mere bids to raise awareness in the hopes that someday people will be willing to change,” they write. “Decolonization has to be about a renewed relationship to people, land, and ways of knowing, and the territorial acknowledgments in Fossil Free UofT did very little to lay the necessary preconditions for those shifts” (331).
This article is important, and I think the argument about the limitations of territorial acknowledgments is an important one. I’m reminded of the meme I saw last winter, as the RCMP tactical unit was mobilizing against Wet’suwet’en land defenders: a member of the tactical unit was saying “we acknowledge that this paramilitary action takes place on the territory of the Wet’suwet’en people.” And yet, even if awareness doesn’t lead to the kinds of change that the authors call for, it’s not nothing. In addition, I would be interested to see concrete examples of the kind of “renewed relationship to people, land, and ways of knowing” (331) the authors wanted to see among the settlers in the group they studied—perhaps concrete examples from some other group that did something more than utter territorial acknowledgments before their meetings—rather than aspirational statements about the kind of change they wanted to see in their group. I think that the kinds of epistemological and ontological changes they are calling for are a lot harder to put into practice, that it’s easier to call for such changes than it is to make them happen, and so I’m not surprised that a student group working to get their university to divest from the fossil fuel industry—a very difficult task, both legally and politically, as I learned when I was part of a group urging my university to divest from South Africa when I was an undergraduate student during the anti-apartheid era of the 1980s—was unable to simultaneously work towards the restitution of land to Indigenous peoples or to foreground Indigenous sovereignty at the same time. The kinds of changes they wanted to see happen, in fact, would likely be impossible in a group of disparate students who meet every couple of weeks; I think a wholesale ontological and epistemological shift for all of the members of such a group would take a much higher level of engagement. No wonder territorial acknowledgments were unable to help the group reach the goals the authors wanted them to reach. What actions could enable the group to reach those goals? I wish I knew.
In addition, I’m not sure what land restitution or “rematriation” would look like at the level of a group of students at the University of Toronto. What land would they be advocating be “rematriated”? To what First Nation? What would happen to the current possessor of that land? Yes, I know that according to the worldview the authors advocate be adopted by settlers, “possession” is the wrong word to use, but nevertheless, in legal terms, it’s the word one would have to use—and yes, I realize that our legal system is a settler-colonial construct, and yet the validity of Indigenous legal systems has yet to be recognized in this country. Does, for instance, the University of Toronto own land it would happily return to the Mississaugas at New Credit or the Haudenosaunee at the Six Nations of the Grand River? Would that institution’s board of governors ever entertain the notion of giving land away rather than selling it and adding the proceeds to its already massive endowment? Would a student group be able to convince the board to take such a step? I have trouble imagining such a thing.
The repatriation or “rematriation” of Indigenous land and life is, as Tuck and Wang suggest, the goal of decolonial activity, but the granular details of how that restitution of land would take place are never clear. The actions that could be taken—purchasing and then donating land, for instance—are beyond the capacity of the group of students Asher, Curnow, and Davis write about, and giving away valuable assets, like land, to First Nations is beyond the imagination of settler institutions like universities or our provincial and federal governments. After all, those governments could, with the stroke of a pen, return Crown land to First Nations. I have trouble understanding how that imagination can be changed—how it could be decolonized—and without that change, I don’t understand how decolonization could happen. It would take an incredible amount of pressure from First Nations to get that kind of decolonization to take place, and while I can see how settler solidarity would figure in that kind of struggle, we are a long way from that kind of decolonization, which would actually repatriate Indigenous land. In the mean time, settlers would no doubt prefer to pretend that we don’t live on someone else’s land—to believe lies that make us comfortable, rather than dwell in unsettled discomfort. Is anyone surprised by people opting for comfort instead of its opposite?
In other words, how do we get to decolonization from the place we’re at right now? The path forward is not clear to me, and while aspirational goals are fine in theory, arguments that use the word “praxis” ought to consider what such a praxis would look like. There’s no doubt that territorial acknowledgments are insufficient, but what might be considered adequate? The answer to that question is not explained in this article, or in most of the work on settler-colonial theory I’ve read so far, with the exception of Eva Mackey’s book Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land, and Settler Decolonization, which describes a project undertaken by a group of settlers to buy a farm in New York and return it to the Seneca. And yet the answer to the question of how decolonization would work, of what practical steps one might undertake towards that goal, is central to the project of decolonization. I’m left dissatisfied and frustrated—can you tell?—and feeling that I ought to be doing something without knowing what that something might be.
Work Cited
Asher, Lila, Joe Curnow, and Amil Davis. “The Limits of Settlers’ Territorial Acknowledgments.” Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 48, no. 3, 2018, pp. 316-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1468211.
Battel-Lowman, Emma, and Adam Barker. Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada,Fernwood, 2015.
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. “Decolonization and the Pedagogy of Solidarity.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, vol. 1, no.1, 2012, pp. 41-67.
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén, and Alexandra Arráiz-Matute. “Pushing Against: Relationality, Intentionality, and the Ethical Imperative of Pedagogy.” Problematizing Public Pedagogy, edited by J. Burdick, J.A. Sandlin, and M.P. O’Malley, Routledge, 2013.
My second reading on territory and treaty acknowledgements—another on the list I got from Matthew Anderson—a blog post by Métis writer (and lawyer) Chelsea Vowel, who blogs under the name âpihtawikosisân, the Cree word for “Métis.” Vowel is way ahead of settler-descendant writers on this topic, and her short discussion is important and valuable.
Vowel begins by noting that “Territorial acknowledgments have become fairly common in urban, progressive spaces in Canada,” and she notes that she had been hearing them for over 15 years at the time she was writing (âpihtawikosisân). She wants to ask several questions about these acknowledgments:
First, what is the purpose of these acknowledgments? Both what those making the territorial acknowledgments say they intend, as well as what Indigenous peoples think may be the purpose. Second, what can we learn about the way these acknowledgments are delivered? Are there best practices? Third, in what spaces do these acknowledgments happen and more importantly, where are they not found? Finally, what can exist beyond territorial acknowledgments? (âpihtawikosisân)
When these acknowledgements first began, Vowel continues, “they were fairly powerful statements of presence, somewhat shocking, perhaps even unwelcome in settler spaces. They provoked discomfort and centered Indigenous priority on these lands” (âpihtawikosisân). She disagrees with Bob Joseph’s suggestion that these acknowledgements can be a way of honouring traditional Indigenous territory protocols, however; such a suggestion, she argues, is dangerous. Another purpose is to make spaces which feel unsafe for Indigenous peoples, like settler-dominated universities, less alienating. “As a newer practice in such environments, territorial acknowledgments continue to have the power to disrupt and discomfit settler colonialism,” she states (âpihtawikosisân).
“It should also be emphasized that these territorial acknowledgments flow from the work of Indigenous peoples themselves, who are resisting invisibilization,” Vowel continues. “When they are crafted, they are usually done so in consultation with local Indigenous peoples” (âpihtawikosisân). At the same time, Indigenous critiques of territory acknowledgments are strongest in places like Vancouver, where such acknowledgments have existed for a long time, although Indigenous critiques can also exist where territory acknowledgments are relatively new.
“I believe territorial acknowledgments can have numerous purposes, and in fact can be repurposed, so merely examining the stated intentions of these invocations is insufficient,” Vowel writes. “What may start out as radical push-back against the denial of Indigenous priority and continued presence, may end up repurposed as ‘box-ticking’ inclusion without commitment to any sort of real change” (âpihtawikosisân). That is “the inevitable progression,” she suggests, “a situation of familiarity breeding contempt (or at least apathy)” (âpihtawikosisân).
The way these acknowledgments are delivered matters: “Are they formulaic recitations that barely penetrate the consciousness of the speaker and those listening? Are they something that must be ‘gotten through’ before the meeting or speech can begin? Can we escape dilution through repetition?” (âpihtawikosisân). In other words, she continues, “What do territorial acknowledgments mean for people who have heard them ad nauseum?” (âpihtawikosisân). “On the other hand,” she continues, “rituals and repetition are not necessarily bad things. Establishing a practice of acknowledgment can be part of wider attempts to address settler colonialism and build better relationships with Indigenous peoples” (âpihtawikosisân). Settler-descendants who offer territory acknowledgments need to think about what treaties mean and what the term “ceded territories” means (âpihtawikosisân). Territory acknowledgments are an opportunity to elevate Indigenous governance and jurisdiction (âpihtawikosisân). In addition, people need to do their own research, rather than relying on standardized institutional acknowledgments; the point is to participate in a “deeper engagement with the purpose and impact of territorial acknowledgments” (âpihtawikosisân).
Vowel suggests that territory acknowledgments are more commonplace in western Canada than elsewhere, and that they tend to be absent in rural spaces “where there is arguably the most tangible Indigenous presence” (âpihtawikosisân). “Yet these would be the spaces in which territorial acknowledgments have the potential to be most powerful; the settler rural/First Nations divide is huge and plays out in deeply problematic (and all too often violent) ways,” she writes (âpihtawikosisân). Those two solitudes “exist on lands that supply the bulk of resources extracted” to support urban areas, “meaning they also experience the effects of resource extraction in ways urban residents do not” (âpihtawikosisân). However, settler and First Nations communities are “accustomed to working in isolation” from each other, rather than being unified in response to the effects of resource extraction on the land and on local communities (âpihtawikosisân). Ignoring the First Nations presence in rural areas “is normalized, deeply ingrained, and central to rural settler governance,” Vowel states (âpihtawikosisân).
“This brings me back to the question of . . . why are people acknowledging territory in the first place?” Vowel asks:
When mostly urban institutions and circles are making these acknowledgments, who are they thinking of? Urban Indigenous populations? Rural and remote First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities? Is there a feeling of reaching out to or desiring partnerships with these communities? What of the non-Indigenous communities also found in rural and remote spaces? Are they implicated in urban-based territorial acknowledgments, or are they as ignored by their urban counterparts as they in turn ignore local Indigenous communities? (âpihtawikosisân)
Those are excellent questions, but they need to be considered within the context of the social and political divisions between urban and rural settlers, divisions which are reflected in, to take one example, the differences in voting habits between urban settlers and their rural counterparts.
“If we think of territorial acknowledgments as sites of potential disruption, they can be transformative acts that to some extent undo Indigenous erasure,” Vowel writes:
I believe this is true as long as these acknowledgments discomfit both those speaking and hearing the words. The fact of Indigenous presence should force non-Indigenous peoples to confront their own place on these lands. I would like to see territorial acknowledgments happening in spaces where they are currently absent, particularly in rural and remote areas and within the governance structures of settlers. (âpihtawikosisân)
At the same time, “territorial acknowledgments can become stripped of their disruptive power through repetition,” she continues. “The purpose cannot merely be to inform an ignorant public that Indigenous peoples exist, and that Canada has a history of colonialism” (âpihtawikosisân). Indigenous protocols could perhaps be a guide to moving territory acknowledgments into “the space beyond the acknowledgment” (âpihtawikosisân). “Stopping at territorial acknowledgments is unacceptable,” she contends (âpihtawikosisân).
For instance, if settlers start considering themselves to be guests on Indigenous lands, then they would need to learn about their obligations as guests, according to the First Nations on whose land they are staying. “What are the Indigenous protocols involved in being a guest, what are your responsibilities?” Vowel asks. “What responsibilities do your hosts have towards you, and are you making space for those responsibilities to be exercised?” (âpihtawikosisân). “What I am saying is that all Indigenous nations have specific expectations of guests, and of hosts, and so far non-Indigenous peoples have not been very good at finding out what those are,” she continues:
I think this needs to be the next step. It requires having actual conversations with Indigenous communities, saying things like “we want to be better guests, how to we do that according to your laws and hey by the way, what ARE your laws” and being prepared to hear the answers, even those that are uncomfortable like “give us the land back.” (âpihtawikosisân)
“Moving beyond territorial acknowledgments means asking hard questions about what needs to be done once we’re ‘aware of Indigenous presence,’” she concludes. “It requires that we remain uncomfortable, and it means making concrete, disruptive change. How can you be in good relationship with Indigenous peoples, with non-human beings, with the land and water? No ideas? Well, it’s a good idea that Indigenous peoples are still here, because our legal orders address all of those questions. So why aren’t you asking us?” (âpihtawikosisân).
The questions Vowel raises in this post are important and powerful, and in ways they lead back to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s demand for concrete actions beyond settler consciousness raising. But are settler-descendants ready for “concrete, disruptive change”? Are they ready to be uncomfortable, to be discomfited, to be unsettled? I’m not convinced that they are, even if that is what the situation requires, and it might be that change will happen only at a speed which allows settlers to avoid discomfort. If that’s the case, that change may never reach the kind of place where they will begin to, for instance, ask Indigenous peoples about being in a good relationship with the land and the water, and take the answers seriously. And yet, if we’re to avoid ecological catastrophe, we might need to listen to Indigenous thinking about such relationships. I’m not sure what steps one might take to encourage people to embrace discomfort. There’s a lot to think about in this post, and I’m glad I took the time to reread and take notes on Vowel’s short essay.
As I slowly begin working on yet another paper about walking in Saskatchewan—slowly because my brain is still on its Christmas vacation—I find myself thinking about the kind of verbal land and treaty acknowledgments that are made by, for instance, universities at official events. I need to know more about such acknowledgments, and my starting point for this research is a list of articles compiled by my friend Matthew Anderson. I decided to tackle “Canadian University Acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands, Treaties, and Peoples” by Rima Wilkes, Aaron Duong, Linc Kesler, and Howard Ramos first. This 2017 article is based on research from 2015 and 2016, and while land and treaty acknowledgments, as well as responses to them, have changed a lot in the ensuing five years, but this paper is a good place to start.
“Canadian University Acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands, Treaties, and Peoples” begins by noting that “Many Canadian institutions, ranging from governments to school boards, now make some kind of public acknowledgement of Indigenous peoples, lands, and treaties” (90). These began before the publication of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015, although the publication of the TRC’s final report led to universities “introducing or reaffirming their commitment to a public acknowledgment and recognition of Indigenous lands, treaties, and peoples” (90). The purpose of their essay, according to the authors, is to describe “the content of acknowledgment as practiced at universities, tying it to treaty and colonial-Indigenous relationships” with the intention of stimulating discussion “on the role of universities vis-à-vis the practice of acknowledgement” (90). There are “five general types of acknowledgment: of land/unceded territory and peoples (seen largely in British Columbia), of treaties and political relationships (found among Prairie institutions), of multiculturalism and heterogeneity (typified by Ontario schools), of no practice (seen mostly in Quebec and some religious schools), and of people and territory (and openness to doing more; throughout the Atlantic)” (91). Different treaty relationships—or none at all—exist in different parts of Canada, and one of the goals of the paper is to examine “the extent to which the nature of these treaties and the accompanying colonial relationship upon which they are based shapes how universities engage in practices of acknowledgment and reconciliation” (93).
“Acknowledgment in and of itself is a complicated term, at times referring to a recognition of truth or existence and at other times implying gratitude or appreciation,” the authors contend. “At is core, it might be stated that acknowledgment refers to a recognition and appreciation of another’s right to self-determining autonomy and existence” (91). Yet recognition “is an inherently challenging political project,” particularly in settler-colonial states like Canada, which “have long used recognition as a means of defining Indigeneity and therefore setting the terms of who is entitled to Indigenous peoples’ land” (91). Indigenous resistance to this state of affairs has led to acknowledgment and recognition spreading “to subnational spheres, such as cities, as well as to institutions such as universities” (91). In universities, the practice of land and treaty acknowledgment developed
from the actions of three groups: faculty and students at Aboriginal and Indigenous studies departments and centers, who recognized visiting guests and speakers from other nations and territories as well as the territory and nation that they were on; activism from movements such as Idle No More; and the influence of large-scale political events and dialogues such as the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and the 2008 to 2015 Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (92)
“It is therefore important to note that the current practice stems from the work of Indigenous activists and that it has spread as a result of this work,” the authors conclude (92).
The authors looked at the web sites of 98 universities in Canada, searching for such acknowledgments, and contacted representatives of those universities to confirm what they had found on the web sites and to ask whether they had missed any acknowledgment practices. This work took place in the spring and summer of 2015, but a year later, when they followed up on their initial research, they found that many universities told them that their acknowledgment practices were now different, “indicating the pace and rapid nature of change on this practice” (94). The authors conclude “that acknowledgment as a practice at universities has been led by Indigenous faculty, students, and centers” (95). “The vast majority of people we contacted expressed enthusiasm for the need for the project,” they note (95).
Acknowledgments in British Columbia reflect the fact that the institutions involved exist on unceded territory, which was sometimes called “traditional territory” in the acknowledgments (95, 112). In the prairie provinces, though, “the focus of acknowledgment changes to peoples and treaties” (112). In Ontario, acknowledgments “have the most diverse content and often prioritize cultural values and traits over treaties or unresolved land claims,” leading the authors to describe those acknowledgments as forms of multiculturalism or “heterogeneity” (112). “That Ontario universities are more diverse and also made specific references to culture likely reflects the fact that they are situated on territories represented in a mix of numbered and land purchase agreements,” they suggest (114). Universities in Quebec tended to have no acknowledgment practices when the research was undertaken, although some institutions, such as Concordia University, indicated that they were in the process of developing an acknowledgment (114). “The lack of acknowledgment is likely linked to the competing nationalisms of the province, which has struggled to build an independent Quebec state and Indigenous people deal with double colonization from Quebec as well as Canada,” the authors write. “This might also be traced to the fact that recognition of Indigenous territory would conflict with narratives about Quebec as a distinct society, and for sovereigntists, as a distinct state” (114). In the Atlantic provinces, “official protocols of acknowledgement” were generally not in place, although acknowledgments were sometimes offered on an ad hoc basis (114). As in Quebec, some institutions noted that they were working on more formal processes of acknowledgment (115).
“Overall, the typologies of acknowledgment documented in our analysis reflect the ongoing treaty and colonial relationship between the Canadian state and Indigenous peoples,” the authors conclude (116). No university was acknowledging urban Indigenous or nonstatus peoples, they note, “mirroring the lack of recognition of these groups by the federal government” (116). For that reason, “in their current form, university acknowledgment, if primarily referencing treaties and treaty relationships, could be on pace to maintain colonization rather than lead to full reconciliation,” opening them to critiques by writers such as Glen Coulthard and Jeff Corntassel of pursuing rights within the current political system (116). Thus, the authors continue, two considerations need to be taken into account. “First, acknowledgment as a practice is fluid and likely to change over time,” they write. “Second, meaning making and positionality around acknowledgment need to be considered. The meaning of Indigenous peoples acknowledging treaties and colonial relations as well as each other is different than when non-Indigenous people do it” (116). For some non-Indigenous people, it’s possible that “engaging in acknowledgment could be ‘unsettling’ insofar as there is an implied ‘what next’ to acknowledging either unceded territory, residential schools, or a treaty relationship,” they suggest, referring to the work of Paulette Regan and Jeffrey S. Denis in connection to the term “unsettling” (117). Until land is returned to Indigenous peoples or treaties renegotiated “or abrogated entirely,” however, the consciousness raising involved in such “unsettling” will not disrupt settler colonialism, they continue, citing Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s article “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (117). “For these reasons, it is important for universities and other institutions to critically question what is meant by acknowledgement and who is doing it,” they state (117). This work should not be left to Indigenous studies departments or Indigenous faculty and students, the authors conclude, because “everyone is responsible for reconciliation” (117).
This article provides a snapshot of land and treaty acknowledgments, and thinking about those practices, from a relatively early point in their evolution. It will be interesting to keep reading to see how those practices—and more importantly the ways people think about them—have changed since 2015. I would predict that many discussions of such acknowledgments will return to Tuck and Wang’s call for the “repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (21), and their argument that practices that do not directly lead to such repatriation—such as settler consciousness-raising—are utterly inadequate (19). They write, “the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism” (19). No doubt that is true, and if land and treaty acknowledgments are understood as an end in themselves, rather than as a starting point towards decolonization, then they would indeed be useless gestures. Surely there can be a movement from critical consciousness to action, and if land and treaty acknowledgments can play a role in that movement, they will have some value. We will have to see whether those acknowledgments can play a role in that movement; that is one of the things my current research is intended to discover.
Works Cited
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization; Indigeneity, Education, and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.
Wilkes, Rima, Aaron Duong, Linc Kesler, Howard Ramos. “Canadian University Acknowledgment of Indigenous Lands, Treaties, and Peoples.” Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, vol. 54, no. 1, 2017, 89-120.
