Tag: settler decolonization

Natalie J.K. Baloy, “Spectacles and Spectres: Settler Colonial Spaces in Vancouver”

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.

Bethany Hughes, “Guesting on Indigenous Land: Plimoth Plantation, Land Acknowledgment, and Decolonial Praxis”

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.

Lynne Davis, 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”

“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.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554.

Chris Hiller, “Tracing the Spirals of Unsettlement: Euro-Canadian Narratives of Coming to Grips with Indigenous Sovereignty, Title, and Rights”

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.

Works Cited

Ermine, Willie. “The Ethical Space of Engagement.” Indigenous Law Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2007, pp. 193-203. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ilj/article/view/27669/20400.

Gehl, Lynn. “Ally Bill of Responsibilities.” http://www.lynngehl.com/uploads/5/0/0/4/5004954/ally_bill_of_responsibilities_poster.pdf.

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.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554.