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.