The ‘Missing’ Politics of Whiteness and Rightful Presence in the Settler Colonial City

Missing: the Settler Colonial City in World Politics

With a population of 120,000, Kelowna is the largest city in the Okanagan Valley. It is located 400 km north-east from Vancouver, BC, well-connected by direct highways and an international airport but clearly a step off the beaten path. Rapid urbanisation here has been fueled primarily by people fleeing larger cities in search of a quieter, sunnier, healthier, and more affordable life. Ten years ago, the University of British Columbia (UBC) opened a satellite campus in Kelowna (UBC – Okanagan). Locally you may hear that this development accelerated Kelowna’s growth; and if you work in academia, you may notice that Kelowna is increasingly interpolated into scholarly literature as a site of critical investigation. However, outside real estate advertisements, tourist brochures, and a few academic publications, Kelowna is still largely invisible in global terms: a parochial quasi-city, appearing to most residents and visitors as safe, clean and noticeably homogenously white for a city of its size. ¹ You may ask about the city’s name, and on learning that it is derived from the Nsyilxcen word kiʔ law naʔ (grizzly bear), perhaps discover that Kelowna is located on the unceded, transborder lands of the Indigenous Syilx people, the Okanagan First Nation. ² Or, you might stop to buy cherries at a fruit stand and notice that the workers around the back of the stand, sorting and stacking cherries, are noticeably not white; ³ or watch as a group of Spanish-speakers load onto a school bus at a big-box grocery store; and so perhaps come to learn that temporary migrant workers from Jamaica, Mexico, and Guatemala perform much of the agricultural labour that sustains Kelowna. However, one can spend a few weeks here on holiday, or live in Kelowna for decades, and only be aware of its dominant image as safe, prosperous, homogenous, welcoming, and white.

Local media articles both typify these differential emplacements and draw attention to what is missing. The inclusion of Indigenous Syilx art into the revitalisation of Bernard Avenue, in downtown Kelowna, is heralded as a new relationship with the Okanagan Nation, ⁴ yet the contemporary political and territorial claims of the Syilx people are ‘missing’ from public view. The disappearance of four Mexican farm workers is treated as a matter of suspicion rather than concern ⁵ – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) news release circulates photos and personal information and speculates that the disappeared may have crossed the border into the US – and the release is publicly criticised by Radical Action for Migrants in Agriculture (RAMA) as criminalising. ⁶ However, the remaining 2,500 temporary migrant agricultural workers are predominantly ‘missing’ from the urban communities they sustain, and they are literally ‘missing’ for four months of every year. What emerges, when you look at Kelowna, is a pattern whereby dominant material and narrative practices render Indigenous Syilx communities and temporary migrant farm labourers as ‘missing’ or ‘out-of-place’, in spatial, temporal, and political terms, ⁷ despite their embodied presence. These narrow parameters of belonging in Kelowna might hover in the background most of the time, but the approaching sesquicentennial anniversary of Canada’s confederation on 1 July 2017 – already heavily promoted and funded as a celebration of ‘Canada 150’ – foregrounds how the practices that define some bodies or communities as ‘missing’ or ‘out-of-place’ intersect with ongoing efforts to define the possibilities and limits of politics in terms of the modern, Western nation-state. Confronting the dominant enactments of people and place in Kelowna, therefore, opens two overlapping questions: How does the settler colonial city work to materialise modern political geographies and subjectivities and make other configurations go missing? And how might the complexities of settler city decolonisation challenge the continued dominance of statist configurations of space, place, and people within ‘international’ politics?

Dominant settler colonial narratives of place in the Okanagan Valley produce Indigenous and minority communities as ‘missing’ through the emplaced effects of the interlocking global political logics of colonisation, racialisation, and urbanisation. ⁸ While these logics merge in Kelowna as a site-specific nexus of whiteness and the settler colonial city, ⁹ they cannot be disentangled from generalised problematics of modern politics located in the identities of citizen-subjects, structures of state sovereignty, and geopolitical constructions of international, global, or world politics. ¹⁰ Efforts to address these concerns, through claims for formal, government-granted rights and recognition, are present in Kelowna and across Canada, as are broader calls for transformation using subjective notions of shared belonging or reconciliation. ¹¹ These efforts align with statist constructs of the formal rights and responsibilities of citizens of territorial states and the affective attachments of unified national communities. ¹² Yet these political constructs of rights and responsibilities, or of welcome and belonging, are not simply inadequate to these complex political conditions; they are essential to the structural violence that produces certain bodies and communities in the Okanagan as politically present and others as politically missing. This violence is enacted by the geographical, social, economic, and political extension of the settler colonial nation-state, embodied in a classical liberal definition of citizen and materialised in the complex overlap of property and authority in its cities. Given these complex overlays, Veracini suggests that settler colonialism and decolonisation (defined by him as the removal of both settler communities and institutions of government) are ‘irreconcilable’. ¹³ In their intervention against decolonisation as metaphor, Tuck and Yang argue that ‘decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land … that is, all the land, and not just symbolically’. ¹⁴ They also highlight what is ‘irreconcilable within settler colonial relations [as well as] what is incommensurable between decolonization projects and other social justice projects’. ¹⁵ These reminders of simultaneous co-presence and irreconcilability in settler colonial cities challenge existing political geographies of a singular authority in a singular space at a particular time. Whatever else decolonisation might be in settler colonial cities – where Indigenous and settler residents will likely continue to cohabit land, in as-yet unknown relations – it will require more complicated configurations of political space, place, and time.

Therefore, settler-city decolonisation is not just a political problem but an aporetic problematique that offers crucial insights into both the pervasive efficacies of modern statism and its emplaced vulnerabilities. ¹⁶ We highlight these vulnerabilities using insights from Edkins ¹⁷ on the doubly missing in contemporary politics, and we push back against them using Squire and Darling’s ¹⁸ formulation of ‘rightful presence’ to disrupt both statist relations of ‘rights’ and ostensibly more progressive relations of ‘host/guest’. We offer three contributions to these insights. First, we engage them from a settler colonial urban context, where the language of guest/host and rightful presence carries different weight. Second, we demonstrate how statism works through settler colonial urbanisation to constrain the field of politics, by which we mean a dominant configuration of appropriate (in this case singular) political geographies and subjectivities. We trace how such determinative practices have a range of interlocked effects – from the prioritisation of modern sovereign politics over place- and time-specific Indigenous configurations of socio-political relations, to the prioritisation of a field of politics as statecraft over other modes and places of political enactments ¹⁹ – and we show how these effects are enacted in intimate, urban, everyday, banal landscapes. Third, we engage this problematique through an aporetic analysis, ²⁰ which enables us to theorise the inherent insecurity of any particular ‘field’ of politics. From this analytical perspective, we identify patterns of re-securitisation and points of vulnerability in the dominant configuration of political presence in Kelowna. We reread everyday landscapes and practices of emplaced presence in Kelowna as political enactments of rightful presence and speculatively dis/locate these enactments within the aporetic hiatus. This dis/location engages the political enactment ²¹ of bodies, communities, and places in Kelowna while refusing unity, authenticity, and ontological stability as necessary grounds for rightful political presence. ²² From the hiatus, we theorise the possibility of non-statist configurations of multi-temporal and multi-spatial politics in place. More importantly, we argue that the same logics that enable some bodies and communities in Kelowna to be perpetually ‘made missing’ enable places like Kelowna to be ‘made missing’ within studies of world politics. Therefore, we ultimately seek to stretch (spatially, temporally, and conceptually) from the seemingly isolated and parochial small city of Kelowna to the continual but vulnerable enactment of some fields of politics over others.

Locating Kelowna

Kelowna is situated at the mid-point of the 110 km long Okanagan Lake (Figure 1). Less than 200 years ago, this land was settled only by the Syilx people, who ranged from north to south on the lake and down the Okanagan River to where it drains into the Columbia River. With the decision to recognise the 49^th parallel as a state boundary, the Okanagan people became a transboundary nation, with seven tribes in the Okanagan Valley north of the border and an eighth tribe known as the Okanagan Confederacy in Washington State. ²³ A French missionary founded the first permanent European settlement in the area in 1859, and Kelowna was officially incorporated as a City under provincial legislation in 1905. Despite settlement, no treaties were ever signed; the land, unceded, was simply pre-empted by British Columbia. Beautiful and fertile, Kelowna developed as an orcharding settlement, attracting a narrow segment of British immigrant, particularly younger sons of wealthy families, drawn to the upper-middle class life of culture and leisure that orcharding enabled. ²⁴ Kelowna therefore fashioned itself on an idyllic imaginary: a city that would remain tied to rural life and whose growth might therefore avoid the social diseases of metropolises of the UK and United States. ²⁵ The population of Kelowna has doubled in the past 30 years and is set to double again in the next 30 years, leading to built forms and economic networks that are now more recognisably urban. Yet Kelowna remains known not only for its recent, rapid urbanisation, ²⁶ but also for its disproportionate, ‘shimmering whiteness’. ²⁷ And Kelowna remains a settlement on unceded Indigenous land, as proclaimed by the Okanagan Nation Alliance in 1987:

We are the unconquered aboriginal people of this land, our mother; The creator has given us our mother, to enjoy, to manage and to protect; we, the first inhabitants, have lived with our mother from time immemorial; our Okanagan governments have allowed us to share equally in the resources of our mother; we have never given up our rights to our mother, our mother’s resources, our governments and our religion; we will survive and continue to govern our mother and her resources for the good of all for all time. ²⁸

On the west side of the bridge that enables the crossing of Okanagan Lake, urban development and population growth has followed a similar trajectory. This development has occurred on land recently incorporated as the municipality of West Kelowna and on designated Westbank First Nation (WFN) reserve land, including Tsinstikeptum Reserves 9 and 10, which border on Okanagan Lake. ²⁹ The WFN is unique within the eight Okanagan Nations and within Canada for their self-governing agreement with the Federal Government. ³⁰ The trajectory of urbanisation on WFN land has followed the morphology of urban development in Kelowna and West Kelowna: strip malls and box stores strung along Highway 97, which runs north-south through the valley; gated communities and scenic golf courses combined into single developments. ³¹ While the extensive development of WFN land is highly visible, and generates cross-bridge travel for commerce and recreation, Kelowna has, until recently, rarely been recognised in terms of its colonial dis/location of and on Syilx land.

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Figure 1.

Kelowna, Okanagan Lake, and West Kelowna, looking south from Knox Mountain.

Kelowna and the Okanagan Valley have remained rooted to the orcharding past, both in economic terms and in the construction of the identity of the region. While the established narrative centres on British middle-class agricultural land-owners, ³² agricultural labour has always been drawn from minority, racialised communities, initially Syilx, and then a succession of immigrant groups. ³³ In the past 30 years, the orchards and ranches of the early settlement of the Valley transitioned to local and export food production and increasingly to wine production through conversion of orchards to vineyards. Since 2004, this transition has intensified through British Columbia’s involvement in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), which accounts for approximately 2,500 agricultural workers in the Okanagan region. ³⁴ Through the SAWP, migrant labourers, primarily from Mexico and the Caribbean, are granted work permits that tether them to particular employers, who are also required to provide their accommodation. ³⁵ Workers are granted entry for approximately eight months of each year and are required to return to their home countries for the remainder. They are not allowed to bring family members with them and are excluded from applying for permanent residency. ³⁶ They are precarious, and yet they frequently return to the same farm year after year. Even though much of the agricultural production of the region depends on this temporary/return labour, requirements for workers to be housed on-site rather than in the community mean they have minimal opportunity to participate in the communities they sustain. Meanwhile, Kelowna promotes itself as an agricultural community through its self-imaginary as a white Garden of Eden, ³⁷ a narrative that implicitly confirms its status as a settler colonial city.

Colonisation, Racialisation, and Urbanisation

There are important ‘intricacies of distinction’ between other forms of colonisation and settler colonialism. ³⁸ Where colonisation generally has proceeded through legal and political land claims and the control of population and resources, settler colonialism is distinguished as the convergence of ‘land acquisition and population replacement’, ³⁹ in which ‘land appropriation and [the] subordination of previously sovereign polities and societies’ proceeds through conquest and genocide. ⁴⁰ Tuck and Yang elaborate that ‘settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain’. ⁴¹ Settler colonialism therefore mobilises what Veracini labels an ‘anticipatory geography’, a view of the future of a newly defined place ‘based on the perceived possibility of ultimately transforming existing environmental conditions’. ⁴² The spread, through settler colonialism, of the modern geopolitical logics of state sovereignty across a newly envisioned ‘world’ is therefore a process that is doubly geographic: it is made possible through material practices of making space/place not once but over time; and through conceptual practices that extend modern political configurations into new contexts. ⁴³ The settler colony becomes a new place for enactments of belonging and nationalism and for boundaries that define how matter and thought will be tied to place, ⁴⁴ all continually and violently imposed on pre-existing places and peoples.

The legal/political structures of rightful sovereignty and the social and spatial imaginaries of new beginnings in new lands create the specific requirement for ‘empty’ space – empty of people, empty of polities, empty of meanings in place ⁴⁵ – such that belonging and being in place for settler colonists is predicated of overt and subterranean efforts to dismantle existing structures of belonging. The condition of possibility for the settler colonial venture is a perceived absence or emptiness of the land. In British Columbia, this ‘[e]mptiness was at the heart of the presumption of terra nullius on which the British built claims of sovereignty within European law’. ⁴⁶ Yet terra nullius is not an actually existing condition but a process of ‘emptying’ the landscape before filling it up. ⁴⁷ A vision of empty space is created literally through violent genocide; spatially through forced removals and segregations; temporally through placing Indigenous peoples in the past or out of time; and conceptually through strategies of racialised hierarchies and the spatial incompatible of ‘races’ at different hierarchical levels. These narratives of emptiness signal the centrality of land in the settler colonial venture, ⁴⁸ a relationship that is both fundamental and paradoxical: ‘[a] settled colony simultaneously presupposes and extinguishes terra nullius’ and not as a singular act but as a condition in which dispossession must be an ongoing process. ⁴⁹

Increasing attention is now being given to the specific ways in which Western urbanisation intersects with settler colonisation. ⁵⁰ The dominant modern narrative of urbanisation is of a transition, a form of linear progressive development, from rural to urban, and thus from nature to culture, tradition to modern. These transition narratives enact a modernist/urbanist project through which urbanisation has been perceived and practiced as a key part of state-building colonial projects. ⁵¹ Emerging from the Euclidean spatio-temporal configuration of modern politics, the dominant linear transition narrative of urbanisation holds that while forms of social, economic, and political organisation change, and even change our relationships to the landscape, ‘the land [itself] is geographically fixed’. ⁵² Thus, settler colonial cities become ‘crucial transition sites where Indigenous lands were rapidly converted into European property’. ⁵³ Further, the emplacement and ongoing development of settler colonial cities depend on practices of emptying that generate a marked absence of recognition for the place of Indigenous peoples in urban settings, including but not limited to spatial segregation as ‘out of place’ ⁵⁴ and temporal segregation as ‘out of time’. ⁵⁵

The geopolitical production of a nation-state organised into urban and rural spaces is paralleled by the socio-spatial organisation of bodies and communities who either could, or could not, be conceived of as present in these spaces. Settler colonialism is therefore as intimate ⁵⁶ as it is legal and political, enacting specific embodied practices of racialisation ⁵⁷ and aligning constructions of race with spatial distinctions between rural and urban, countryside and city. ⁵⁸ The transition narrative of urbanisation, after all, relies not only on rural/urban, nature/culture, and tradition/modern, but also on cognate boundaries such as savage and civilised, primitive and advanced. Thus categories of ‘race’ ‘found permanent residence in settler colonial … cityscapes, where racially coded legacies continue to generate contests over the ownership and belonging of space’. ⁵⁹ Writing specifically about the intersection of racialisation, urbanisation, and colonisation in Victoria and Vancouver, BC, Barman notes how ‘erasure of urban indigenous [sic] space speaks to colonial perspectives on race’…with ‘profound implications for the spatial entitlements of [I]ndigenous people in and around British Columbia’s urbanizing spaces’. ⁶⁰

Given Kelowna’s self-identification as a white oasis, a vision that shapes imaginaries of possible urban development into the present, the analytical frame of ‘whiteness’ is acutely relevant. ‘Whiteness’ has only recently been applied in colonial and settler colonial contexts, ⁶¹ yet it offers a powerful lens for tracing the racialisation of ‘white’ settlers, displaced Indigenous inhabitants, and migrant minorities. Whiteness is not a demographic predominance of visible biophysical traits, but a complex system of cultural, spatio-temporal, and political productions that define inter-subjective and communal boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. While it can consolidate into conditions of white supremacy, Shaw suggests that whiteness is not a necessary, monolithic ethnicity; rather, it ‘encapsulate[s] sets of context-specific processes or performances of particular, and often very subtle, forms of racialization’. ⁶² Arguing against whiteness as immutable, she draws attention to ‘strategies of whiteness’ ⁶³ as place-specific techniques that can shift over time, but that can align to constitute hierarchal relations and enact ongoing spatial, temporal, social displacements. These enactments of racialisation and spatialisation take place in settler colonial cities through the systematisation of forms of bodies (in Kelowna: white, British, middle-class) and forms of built community (stable, ordered, regular, and effectively monetised/capitalised) that remain visible and thus gain presence within systems of legal and political consideration and symbolic representation.

The techniques through which Western modernity erases coloniality ⁶⁴ are the same techniques that make it difficult to see the ‘Western’ settler city as a site of colonisation. Yet the nexus of colonisation and racialisation underlies the transition narratives of urbanisation and links them to the political structures of modern sovereignty. This nexus has continually rendered particular forms of being, ways of knowing, and possibilities of presence impossible: they are ‘made missing’. In settler-colonial urbanisation, these displacements have operated through the socio-spatial development of built forms and material metaphors of urban settings. The practice of making ‘missing’ is produced, concretely, through segregations within and displacements of Indigenous and migrant agricultural workers from urban space. Yet the practices of ‘making missing’ also emerge from knowledge creation and dissemination; through exclusions from spaces where community identity is defined and concerns articulated; and through imaginaries of segregated belonging. In places like Kelowna, the bodies or communities in question are still ‘present’ in material terms, despite this complex intersection of practices that seek to make them ‘missing’.

Locating the Politically Missing in Kelowna

To understand what it might mean to be ‘politically missing’, and to understand how such a condition might be produced and reproduced, we turn to Edkins’ category of ‘unmissed persons’. ⁶⁵ For Edkins, the search for missing people clarifies how Western political systems treat people as objects of governance and accounting rather than unique presences. Within this broader frame, she acknowledges a category of ‘unmissed persons’, which she describes as:

those who are not present to a Western imagination in the first place, those who are invisible to many scholars of international relations, with its focus on the world as seen from a particular perspective, as if that were the only one. These persons could be said to be “missing” in a different and arguably more important way than those I have been discussing so far. Their absence from our discussions is a more fundamental one, so fundamental that we don’t even realize they are missing from our parochial picture of the world. They are the missing missing, the doubly missing. ⁶⁶

This category of the doubly missing – the missing that participants in and scholars of Western politics do not think to look for – is clearly tied to the political geographies of modern settler colonial urbanisation, as developed earlier: an assumption of singular, universal space in which all that is apparent from a dominant perspective is all that is acknowledged as being politically present. Recognising that the politically missing have been rendered as such by processes of colonisation, hierarchical ordering, and segregation, she observes that ‘[w]e have not counted [as missing] those that are invisible to our (post)colonial gaze, or those whose appearance renders them invisible to our sight even when they are in plain view’. ⁶⁷ She extends this problem not only to broader political communities and structures, but to ‘we’ scholars that identify as ‘prosperous Europeans or North Americans’, for whom ‘the violences of empire, and questions of complicity there, are too distant to echo forcibly down the generations for many among us’. ⁶⁸ She recognises that empire has operated through processes that make missing colonial peoples as political subjects, yet in her attempt to make visible the doubly missing, she performs a central technique by which they are made politically missing: through the spatial designations of where colonisation has operated (the ‘post-colonial’ world of the East and the South) and where it has not (the settler colonial spaces of the Anglo Global North). In a slight gesture, she repeats the notion that the violences of empire have not affected North America, making settler colonialisation once again invisible to investigation as a political process. This practice of erasure intersects with parallel tendencies of statist configurations of politics to obscure urban politics, rendering the settler colonial city doubly missing.

Precisely because it is so easy to represent Kelowna as a modern, Western city, the violent processes of settler-colonial urbanisation that are literally built into this place are excluded from view. Kelowna is exemplary of the dominant narrative of settler-colonial cities that ‘depicts a transition from “Edenic” nature to improved settlement; from common to private entitlement’. ⁶⁹ Kelowna was incorporated to embody the spatialised relations of political authority that enabled the colonisation of Canada. The peculiar model of incorporation here, one that established ‘the city as a corporation without citizens’, ⁷⁰ was developed to turn settler communities into tools of colonial governance, and this municipal structure was institutionalised within the federalised government to ensure that urban political authority was understood as a delegation from the (provincial) state. Yet a curated exhibit commemorating Kelowna’s centennial suggests that there is a ‘dark side to the Oasis’: ⁷¹ the designation of some bodies (white, leisured, land owning) and some forms of built community (not just any city but the ‘right kind of city’, according to the Kelowna Board of Trade in 1905) as worthy of visibility, recognition, and support. The dark side – the settler colonial nexus of racialisation, colonisation, and urbanisation – is materialised at every turn, in plain sight, yet made invisible by its pervasive normalisation. A prominent example is encountered at the popular look-out at Knox Mountain, where the commemorative bronze plaques from Canada’s 125^th anniversary in 1967 (the concrete plinths visible in Figure 1) repeat the narrative of urban development. In their dismissive gestures towards ‘Indian’ linguistic and spiritual ties to the land (Figures 2–4), these plaques simultaneously enact their own dark side: They inscribe the landscape with material metaphors of settler colonial political geographies and political subjectivities. The dismissal of Syilx relationships to land, in favour of concepts of ownership over land within a modern construction of place in singular space, put both people and places in place, locatable with singular clarity. More recently, Kelowna’s completed downtown revitalisation project materially and metaphorically ‘makes place’ through aesthetic additions to the streetscape and public art portfolio: these reference Indigenous Syilx identity formed in relation to the Okanagan land, and settler urban identity forged in relation to the same land through agriculture. Yet despite these gestures, the violent displacements enacted by Kelowna as a settler colonial city escape its place-making narratives. This pattern of change and consistency over time suggests that the work of the settler colonial city is never finished: the construction of appropriate, recognisable bodies and communities is vulnerable and must be continually restated.

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Figure 2.

‘Kelowna’, Canada Centennial Commemorative Plaques, Knox Mountain, Kelowna, BC.

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Figure 3.

‘Benvoulin’, Canada Centennial Commemorative Plaques, Knox Mountain, Kelowna, BC.

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Figure 4.

‘Ogopogo’, Canada Centennial Commemorative Plaques, Knox Mountain, Kelowna, BC.

Further, these originary settler colonial logics reproduce multiple forms of being ‘made missing’, as noted by scholars based in the Okanagan:

Within the Okanagan Valley there is an ongoing, yet largely hidden, migrant struggle. … the hyper-visibility of mostly white residents and tourists enjoying locally produced food and wine lies in stark contrast to the largely invisible plight of both racialized migrant workers and Aboriginal people. ⁷²

The intersecting logics in Kelowna continually render ‘missing’ the bodies and communities of Indigenous Syilx and temporary migrant agricultural workers, while also rendering largely invisible the techniques employed. Dominant accounts of Kelowna emphasise a whitewashed, bourgeois colonial narrative of orcharding heritage and an idealised narrative of ‘proper’ urbanisation that together elide the specificity of land relations in agricultural production and enact the actual and figurative displacement of Indigenous and migrant communities. Thus when four Mexican migrant workers physically disappeared from their place of employment, the event disrupted the logics by which they had been rendered politically missing since their arrival in Kelowna. Once eventually found – safe with their families in Mexico – the event faded. Public debate over the physical and political presence of these four men has been replaced by public debate over the appropriate way of housing temporary migrant workers on the tightly regulated agricultural land within City boundaries. ⁷³ The City’s proposed policy ⁷⁴ – which limits the number of workers housed to 40 per farm unit and the form of housing itself to temporary structures without permanent foundations, removed from view of roadways and adjacent residential communities – builds into the landscape the temporary and obscured presence of the workers on whom the agricultural productivity of the city depends.

Observing that both Indigenous Syilx and migrant labourers in Kelowna have been ‘made missing’ does not mean that they have been treated, segregated, or excluded in the same ways, or with the same effects. As Tuck and Yang explain, ‘dispossessed people are brought onto seized Indigenous land through other colonial projects [and] this tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial forces’. ⁷⁵ Thus while it is crucial to note that ‘the Okanagan Valley’s agricultural economy is operating upon a foundation of land dispossessed from Indigenous people, as well as the superexploitation of migrant workers’, ⁷⁶ this does not entail a singular critical project or form of solidarity. However, this analysis does clarify how spatialised separations – Indigenous/settler colonial; urban/(rural) agricultural; State/(temporary) migrant – work to configure the concerns of the Indigenous Syilx people and the temporary migrant workers under the Seasonal Agricultural Work Program as unrelated, just as it configures both these communities as politically missing.

Dis/locating Rightful Presence in the Aporetic Hiatus

To disrupt the production of the politically missing in settler colonial cities such as Kelowna, we critically engage the analysis of rightful presence developed by Squire and Darling. ⁷⁷ For them, rightful presence offers a non-statist frame for engaging asylum-seekers, refugees, and other irregularised migrants in the UK through the City of Sanctuary movement. Squire and Darling make three critical interventions: that the host/guest configuration of sanctuary maintains the statist framing of who has primary right to belong in a territory; that this configuration offers insufficient attention to the geographies and histories of actual injustice that converge in site-specific ways; and that the ethical orientation of this configuration emphasises ‘justice to come’ rather than a political orientation to embodied justice in the present. They offer the notion of rightful presence as being ‘open to the politicality of those whose qualification as political beings is often refused, reduced, or questioned’; ⁷⁸ and they offer a way of seeing the ‘misplaced’ or ‘unexpected’ claiming of justice and rights as politically significant. ⁷⁹ A politics of rightful presence accepts ‘assertions or assumptions of presence as legitimate’ or ‘rightful’. ⁸⁰ Centrally, this includes ‘making present’ concrete injustices both past and present, near and far’, ⁸¹ against the ahistorical and aspatial tendency of the host/guest language of welcome. While the specific concerns of refugees in Kelowna reside outside the frame of this article, the analytical frame of ‘rightful presence’ offers a critical mode for ‘making present’ those who have been made ‘politically missing’ by the nexus of colonisation, racialisation, and urbanisation. The decolonial possibilities of rightful presence emerge from its critical orientation to the statist configurations of law, space/place, and authority that imbue the settler colonial nexus. ⁸² Rightful presence does not simply argue for ‘rights’ within this existing configuration. Instead, it challenges both the argumentational frames and logical structures that support the settler colonial project ⁸³ and the techniques this project uses to enact some bodies and communities as ‘missing’.

At the same time, there are important clarifications and questions to address before using this analytical frame in a settler colonial city like Kelowna, where the language of guest and host has different resonances and where the language of rightful presence is particularly fraught. First, Squire and Darling note the provenance of the language of host and guest within Derridean ethics of encounters with ‘the other’. This usage, and the broader context of ‘welcome’, is present in Kelowna in efforts to ‘welcome’ incoming temporary migrant workers and refugee families. ⁸⁴ However, this language is also present in Indigenous accounts of relations to land and to settlers. In the 1910 Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier, Chiefs of the Syilx (Okanagan), Secwépemc (Shuswap), and Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) nations of the British Columbia Interior describe early settlement, early settler promises, and the intimate violence of broken trust:

Soon they [English settlers] saw the country was good, and some of them made up their minds, to settle it…They told us they wanted only the use of these pieces of land for a few years, and then would hand them back to us in an improved condition…Thus they commenced to enter our “houses,” or live on our “ranches.” With us when a person enters our house he becomes our guest, and we must treat him hospitably as long as he shows no hostile intentions. At the same time we expect him to return to us equal treatment for what he receives. …What have we received for our good faith, friendliness, and patience? …They have taken possession of all the Indian country and claim it as their own…They say the Indians know nothing, and own nothing, yet their power and wealth has come from our belongings. The queen’s law which we believe guaranteed us our rights, the BC government has trampled underfoot. This is how our guests have treated us – the brothers we received hospitably in our house. ⁸⁵

In recent years, the language of guest, host, and welcome has taken on new life in practices of settler-identified residents and institutions to recognise that they are uninvited ‘guests’ on unceded Indigenous territory and to thank the generosity of their Syilx hosts. We cannot consider here whether, and how, this particular use of the guest/host relation differs from the Derridean formulation. However, Indigenous scholars across Canada argue that acknowledging ‘traditional territories’, Indigenous ‘hosts’, and one’s own status as a settler-identified ‘guest’ does not, alone, reconfigure relations of injustice. ⁸⁶ Second, the language of rightful presence is itself contestable, here, if used without explicit acknowledgement of the settler colonial relations of power that structure bodies and communities in this city. What further colonial injustices might be sustained if settler-identified residents and visitors take up the notion of ‘rightful presence’ as a means of avoiding, rather than engaging, the work of urban decolonisation? Settler colonial urbanisation has proceeded, after all, through practices that enabled some racialised bodies and communities to claim ‘rightful presence’ by structuring the conditions of possibility under which any presence might be considered a political right. Further, the practicalities of rightful presence here raise different questions and distinct challenges. Temporary agricultural workers from Mexico and Jamaica may assert their ‘rightful presence’ against the Canadian state that allows them to be here precariously and the urban agricultural economies of Kelowna that render them politically missing; but what might that rightful presence mean, in the precise context of being physically present only eight months of every year? If decolonisation must move beyond metaphor to new forms of co-existence on the land, on what basis might acts of rightful presence in the Okanagan Valley be configured, what new forms of political co/presence might emerge, and how can we theorise these complex political spatio-temporal configurations? ⁸⁷

Towards a Multi-spatial and Multi-temporal Politics of Rightful Presence in Kelowna

An aporetic analysis of the boundaries of the urbanisation/colonisation/modernisation nexus suggests that, despite their overtly and covertly violent perpetuation in places like Kelowna, securing these boundaries takes continual work. The vulnerability of the dominant constructions of spatialised modern political presence as appropriate bodies and communities is better understood when we consider how sovereignty has stretched itself through ‘imperfect geographies’ of settler colonial urbanisation: Settler colonial ventures ‘did not cover space evenly but composed a fabric that was full of holes, stitched together out of pieces, a tangle of strings’. ⁸⁸ Similarly, settler colonial cities might try to construct corporations without citizens, ⁸⁹ but cities have always been sites of threats to order, sites of the excess that cannot be contained by sovereignty or nationalism, ⁹⁰ sites where existing political structures of rights are challenged by other claims to presence. The concept of the hiatus – the gap or pause that Foucault terms ‘the hiatus within the “and”’ ⁹¹ – guides attention to the inevitable ruptures where these spatialised and materialised logical operations break down, and multiplicities and uncertainties emerge, at least for some moments. Dislocating the aporia and the hiatus, out of Derrida and Foucault and into the settler colonial city of Kelowna, opens a window onto enactments of multi-temporal and multi-spatial modes of emplacement. Attending to some such moments of disruption in Kelowna can help make clear their potential for alternative configurations of political presence, without making claims to permanent transformations of existing modes of colonial politics and without making claims to singular alternative accounts of rightful presence on this unceded land.

As a first example, we look again at the Bernard Avenue Revitalization Project and the prominent Gateway Banners by WFN artists Janine Lott and Jordon Coble (Figure 5). For Lott and Coble, the banners exceed the limited frames cast by the City of Kelowna and the Revitalization Project. ⁹² The banners represent the continued vitality of the Syilx people, despite the myriad violences and ongoing effects of colonisation, ⁹³ and they suggest the spatio-temporal openings that this Syilx articulation of community in place offers. The banners incorporate traditional cultural imagery, particularly the four food chiefs that have guided Syilx relations with the land, and non-traditional elements that represent contemporary Kelowna. They visualise the contemporary political claim of the Syilx:

The syilx [sic] organized themselves in order to protect and practice our rights. The right to live and survive as a syilx is where all our rights come from. Living our rights brought us to this time in our history. Freedom within our territory is a right coming out of having looked after the land for thousands of years without destroying it. …No guns, nor foreign laws on paper of other people, who destroyed their own land, can change that truth. ⁹⁴

By asserting the unceded connection between land, language, and people, these banners perform a non-statist land claim and suggest another frame for political presence; they assert a different configuration of the politics of emplaced body and community. In the central banner (Figure 6), Kelowna is seen from the territory of the Westbank First Nation. Two Syilx women look across the lake to the cityscape, identifiable as contemporary Kelowna by the presence of the iconic ‘Sails’ statue at the western end of Bernard Avenue. Instead of the bridge, there is a canoe with two paddlers in the lake. While a reference to the traditional crossing place used by the Syilx, it also replaces singular transitions narratives of settler colonial urbanisation with multiple co-operative spatialities and temporalities, sending ripples through the lake to both shores. It is not clear which direction the canoe is travelling, and it has not yet completed its passage; it is therefore marked as both movement and pause. This image makes no claim to singular or exclusive constitutions of place. Together, the banners not only unsettle claims that western settlement and urbanisation define the configuration of politics that determines rightful presence in this place; they also unsettle claims to rightful presence as derived from exclusive or singular political geographies.

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Figure 5.

Gateway Banners ‘The land is our culture’, Janine Lott and Jordan Coble. Bernard Avenue, Kelowna.

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Figure 6.

Gateway Banners ‘The land is our culture’, artists Janine Lott and Jordan Coble. Bernard Avenue, Kelowna.

The aporetic hiatus disrupts singular claims to space and politics, and a parallel focus on Indigenous and temporary migrant communities both dis/locates dominant spatial separations in Kelowna and amplifies the possibilities of multi-temporal and multi-spatial configurations of political presence. RAMA enacts such dis/locations: they support agricultural workers at their places of employment, including providing English lessons on farms; they draw attention to places of exclusion through action days at the Kelowna Farmer’s Market; and they collaborate to assert rightful presence through public welcomes at the Kelowna Airport and worker-community events in the city. ⁹⁵ Similar dis/locations of rightful presence emerge at Kiwo Market, ⁹⁶ where Sandra Martinez, a Mexican living in the South Okanagan, supports migrant workers – from providing them with fresh corn tortillas and other Mexican foods, to help translating official forms and sending money back to their family members in Mexico, to advocating against inappropriate work environments or accommodations. Given structural patterns of absence and return, customers visit Martinez year after year, whether in her original shop in Osoyoos or her recently opened storefront in Kelowna. Beyond the practical services offered by Kiwo Market, the market provides space itself, an opportunity to become visible, to become public within conditions of transnational mobility and precarity:

At the front of the store is a lounge area with couches and chairs around a table. ‘We decided we have to make a place where they can feel welcome,” said Martinez. … Despite not advertising, Martinez said she has about 100 people come through her store every day just by word of mouth. “On a rainy day, it’s packed in here. Two weeks ago, it was crazy. I probably had more than 500 people in here that day,” she said. ⁹⁷

Martinez supports other customers, including migrant workers from Guatamala and Jamaica, immigrants with permanent residency status, Canadian citizens, and restaurants. Similar to the forms of multi-spatiality and multi-temporality enacted by the Gateway Banners, Kiwo Market does not try to recreate some vision of ‘Mexican’ space in Kelowna, but generates complicated intersections of multiplying spaces and times in which bodies and communities might become present. These and other proliferating sites/sights make visible how both Syilx and temporary migrant workers are reconfiguring the landscape of Kelowna through their complex claims to rightful presence (Figure 7). Through everyday practices of being present and organised practices that draw attention to non-statist and transnational continuities and discontinuities of presence, multiple configurations of the politics of place in time emerge.

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Figure 7.

Sign on Edward Road (industrial zone), Kelowna, BC.

Unsettling Conclusions

The intersecting logics of colonisation, modernisation, and urbanisation produce Kelowna’s patterns of emplacement and displacement by coding particular forms of embodied humans and settled communities as appropriate, not only for modern urban life, but for political presence according to modern liberal structures of rights and recognition. These formulations rely on the Euclidean geometries of single bodies or community-bodies in space (only a single body can occupy a particular place at one time) and on the linear temporalities of modern constructions of time (different forms of body or community must be located on different gradations along the continuum of modern urbanisation/development). While inherently vulnerable, these logics remain operative, continually restated as regulative injunctions. Just as prior commemorations have marked Kelowna’s landscape, ‘Canada 150’ performs this task yet again, not just through the spectacle of the anniversary but also through banal repetitions in everyday sites (Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

Everyday banal landscapes of settler colonial political geographies.

If the aporetic analysis clarifies the boundary practices through which these intertwining logics enable certain bodies and communities, and certain possible configurations of politics itself, to be made missing, then the hiatus offers possibilities to continually stretch these practices of bounding and open multiple spaces and times for political emergence and enactment. These possibilities include, potentially, decolonisation of land and new forms of co-presence in this place, but by no means ensure it. Enactments of politically present bodies and communities are not necessarily compatible or commensurable; and indeed, such multi-temporal and multi-spatial enactments make clear the ongoing challenges that reside in boundary-defining terms such as ‘body’ or ‘community’. Yet these moments of hiatus in Kelowna hold in abeyance any particular determination of what politically relevant bodies or communities must be to be present, offering instead a window into the extension, multiplicity, convergence and divergence of possible embodiments and emplacements. Approaching Kelowna through the hiatus, we suggest, illuminates what is too-often made missing in its whitewashed narrative as a safe, welcoming oasis: the centrality of colonial legacies and the absenting of certain bodies. The hiatus offers a productive way of unsettling both the dominant settler colonial narratives about this particular place and the dominant political geographies that make this place go missing from critical engagements with world politics.