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.
