Walking Unsettling Depremacy: A Preliminary Proposition for Questioning the Right to Go Anywhere

Introduction: I am Walking

It’s 2013 and I’m walking in the boreal forest on the rocky terrain of the Precambrian (Canadian) shield in southeastern Manitoba. I’m about a 90-minute drive from where I live in Winnipeg, Treaty One territory, which I understand as being the unceded territory of the Cree, Oji-Cree, Anishinabewaki, Dene, Dakota, and Métis Nations. I’m walking near McGillivray Falls on the Centennial Trail, which is part of the Trans Canada Trail (TCT). TCT signs mark the trailhead while smaller directional signs, mostly atop stakes embedded into the granite of the shield, guide the way. As I walk, I wonder whose territory I am in. I think about how my footfalls echo those of countless hikers who have followed these signs. I think about how they interact and are in dissonance with the footfalls of the Indigenous peoples of this territory, who no doubt walked these woods and cared for this land for millennia, long before colonial invasion and long before the concept of the TCT; individuals and communities whose contemporary presence belies the forces of colonial erasure. I wonder again whose territory I am walking in. What the proper protocols for visiting might be? How I, as a white settler, might be a respectful though uninvited guest in these territories instead of re-walking colonial claim as a recreational pursuit. Reflecting back, I now know that this is Treaty Three territory, the lands of the Anishinabewaki and Métis Nations, but not as a result of TCT signage then or now.

In the years before and since I took that walk, I have encountered sections of the TCT across Canada from Vancouver Island to Nova Scotia. In the winter, I have skied and snow-shoed on sections of the TCT in central and eastern Manitoba, and in the summer, I have hiked, ambled, and picnicked on these and other TCT trails across the country. I can see the TCT’s City of Winnipeg trail section from my window as I write, and every morning I walk my dog there, tracking along the scrubby banks of the Red River where there are often small encampments of people living rough. As I do all of these activities, I remain engaged with the questions summoned as I hiked the Centennial Trail—questions that relate to everyday activities such as walking and recreational infrastructures such as the TCT, and that have larger implications as well: How can dominantly positioned settlers be in Indigenous lands in ways that challenge assumptions of unfettered access and colonial claim inherent in walking as recreation and so many other activities within settler states? How can we/they mobilize walking in ways that activate the intergenerational responsibilities of being in relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty? These questions do not spring unbidden from my encounters with the TCT. Rather, they arise from the broader inquiries of my research/artwork/research-creation, which contend with the myriad of systems, habits, narratives, and beliefs that are embedded in the settler state and its dominant consciousness, and are conditioned by colonialism and white supremacy. In what follows, I parse some of the methodologies I use to grapple with these specific questions, and with those that more broadly address white settlers’ relationships with place in Indigenous territories that are both invaded and unceded.

This article is based on approaches to research-creation that inextricably link academic scholarship with artistic practice and privilege working “practicetheoretically” (Loveless, 2015, p. 53) in terms of both knowledge production and transmission. In keeping with these facets of research-creation, I will discuss one of my recent artworks as a theoretical text along with more conventional forms of scholarship. In walking terms, this text is a bit of a meander that demonstrates the not-always-linear manner in which research-creation practices draw together threads of inquiry and oscillate between textual research, creative production, theoretical analysis, and critical reflection. I begin by articulating the underpinnings of Critical White Settler Projects (CWSPs) and unsettling depremacy, ¹ which, as I will discuss in more detail shortly, are concepts I have developed for critiquing, subverting, and working outside of settler colonial constructs from a critical white settler perspective. Moving on, I examine the ways the TCT’s infrastructural and operational systems reiterate colonial claim, and follow this with a discussion of the ways walking can both echo this possessive attitude and disturb it. A close reading of particular aspects of my video, l i s t e n, that incorporates the concept of “critical listening positionality” (Robinson, 2020, p. 9), offers an example of how unsettling depremacy, as a white settler positionality–based methodology, can be used in contending with place. I conclude by introducing walking unsettling depremacy, a flexible framework through which white settlers might ethically apply walking, and refusals to walk, in ways that veer off the well-trodden paths of entitlement to, emplacement within, and sovereignty over Indigenous lands—paths that are intrinsic to both the TCT and recreational walking. I will emphasize that walking unsettling depremacy is offered here as a preliminary methodology, rather than one that is fully formed and definitive.

Methodological Underpinnings: On Parallel Obligations and Projects and Being in Indigenous Sovereignty

As an interdisciplinary scholar and intermedia artist, my work focuses on theorizing, developing, articulating, and activating arts-based methodologies through which non-Indigenous people, and particularly white settlers, can contribute to the goals of decolonial and anti-racist movements. ² I have been using and honing these approaches in my solo and collaborative artistic work for over 15 years. Bringing my artistic praxis together with my scholarship through research-creation, I have more recently framed them as CWSPs that are activated through methodologies of unsettling depremacy. I devised the term unsettling depremacy to connote methods that account for and interrupt white supremacy and colonial logics as concomitant and interconnected forces of oppression operating within settler states. Referencing “settlement” as an act of invasion, my use of the word “unsettling” signals a disturbance of the very crux of settler colonialism—that is, the occupation of Indigenous lands and the systems, structures, and beliefs that go with it. By invoking “unsettling” as a verb, the term points to the imperative of activation, while as an adjective the word suggests the necessary discomfort that comes with making change to dominant orders. Using it in the present participle form—unsettling as opposed to unsettle—implies that the activation is both current and ongoing. As an inversion of “supremacy,” “depremacy” suggests a deliberate decentering of whiteness—an attitude that challenges existing power relations and assumptions of white settler authority. Each word invokes a particular practice, so that the term should not be read as a directive—that we should be disturbing depremacy. Rather, it is intended to have a dual function that unsettles settler colonialism and generates the opposite of supremacy. In other words, it invokes the enactment of both unsettlement and depremacy.

The way I have formulated CWSPs and their deployment through unsettling depremacy responds to the imperative for non-Indigenous people (Black people, People of Colour (BPOC) and white settlers) to do our/their part to shift colonial norms rather than ceding this responsibility to Indigenous peoples who, as a result, are continually burdened with a deeply disproportionate share of this labor. As many scholars have pointed out, a commitment to this among the mainstream or dominant populations of settler states is long overdue. Calling for non-Indigenous Canadians to embrace this responsibility, settler scholar Ian Mosby (2017) asserts that such an undertaking will “require work . . . [and] sacrifice,” which necessitates that “Canadians . . . start giving things up that they take for granted” (n.p.). As is increasingly evident, it is incumbent upon differently situated non-Indigenous subjects to find productive, ethical ways to contribute to Indigenous-led decolonial struggles (Ahmed, 2004; Battell Lowman & Barker, 2016; Byrd, 2011; Regan, 2010; L. Simpson, 2008). Aligning with appeals for non-Indigenous engagement, CWSP and unsettling depremacy are intended to function in parallel and in conversation with Indigenous methods, complementing, as opposed to appropriating or overshadowing them, with the aim of contributing to both specific and overarching goals of decolonization.

As I have articulated elsewhere, ³ CWSP and by extensions unsettling depremacy can be understood as functioning in conversation with Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou Māori scholar and educator Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (2013) 25 Indigenous Projects, which demonstrate Indigenous-driven decolonizing methods. This paralleling of Tuhiwai Smith’s Indigenous Projects draws on the work of settler Australian scholar and activist Clare Land. In her book, Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles, Land notes the ways her research methods speak to Land (2015) projects of “intervention, reading, reframing and restoring,” but seek to contribute to these projects from her white settler perspective (pp. 20–30). Although some of Smith’s Indigenous Projects, such as those that Land identifies, are translatable to working from white settler perspectives, many, such as claiming, celebrating, survival, and Indigenizing, may not be. In other cases, a parallel activation of Indigenous Projects may differ enough that their translation to a format suitable to white settler contributions benefits from distinct terminologies and strategies that take into account the limitations and ethical ramifications of working from dominant positions. The development of specific methodologies or “projects” can also be valuable in highlighting obligations that more appropriately fall to differently situated non-Indigenous people. As I have stated, in line with my positionality, this text focuses primarily on obligations particular to white settlers, although the methodologies and strategies I discuss have the potential to be adapted for use from a range of perspectives.

These obligations can be understood in terms of what Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson refers to as intergenerational responsibilities. Foregrounding inherent complicity that is evidenced in the benefits accrued by dominant settlers through our/their relationships to historical and ongoing forms of Indigenous dispossession, Robinson (2016) suggests there are intergenerational responsibilities attached to the position of being “intergenerational perpetrators” (p. 63). Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg scholar and poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2008) characterizes these obligations another way, stating that “settler society must . . . choose to change their ways, to decolonize their relationship with the land and Indigenous nations and to join in building sustainable future based upon mutual recognition, justice and respect” (p. 14). Moreover, she makes the distinction that Indigenous peoples must undertake projects such as resurgence “without the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory or the opinions of Canadians” (p. 17). Robinson and Simpson’s assertions underscore the need for distinct “projects” that stimulate white settlers to work toward decolonial paradigms. With this in mind, I have extended Land’s premise of contributing to Tuhiwai Smith’s Indigenous Projects by developing CWSPs that are intended to contribute to the goals of Indigenous-led decolonial movements, and do so through practices of unsettling depremacy that are specific to the roles and intergenerational responsibilities of white settlers.

In considering these parallel and complementary white settler projects and methods, it is absolutely vital to note the “critical” component of CWSP because, without criticality, white settler “projects” simply replicate the dominating forces of settler whiteness that already permeate the (white) “settler imaginary,” and with it, dominant settler societies (Bell, 2011, p. 11). The stance of criticality, particularly through unsettling depremacy, reflects a vigilant attitude that includes understanding one’s complicity with what one is critiquing or disturbing, ceding the centrality and authority of settler whiteness, working relationally and listening with non-extractive and non-appropriative attention, or—as feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (2004) suggests—enacting a double turn that involves looking critically inward and openly outward while remaining implicated.

While both Simpson and Robinson’s statements highlight the way relationality is imbricated into intergenerational responsibilities and obligations, Simpson, in particular, places both responsibilities and relationality in the context of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty. As I have discussed here and elsewhere (see Note 3), the positionality-based methodologies I have developed are contingent upon the condition of being in relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty. Settler Australian scholar Fiona Nicoll (2004) refers to this as “being in Indigenous sovereignty,” suggesting that settler Australians are living in Indigenous sovereignty, whether or not this is something they or their governments recognize or abide by (Nicoll, 2004, p. 19). In other words, Indigenous sovereignty has not been ceded through the ongoing process and systems of colonial invasion including agreements such as treaties. Moreover, while under Section 35 of the Constitution Act (1982) the Canadian government recognizes the inherent right of self-government (in spirit if not in reality), as Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) maintains, Indigenous nations do not require recognition from colonial governments such as Canada to establish and maintain sovereignty. This concept of being in Indigenous sovereignty which, as I have said, is intrinsic to my methodologies is thus an engagement with the fact of Indigenous sovereignty in political, cultural, geographical, and economic terms. Importantly, being in Indigenous sovereignty is not a practice of assuming settler Indigeneity. Instead, as white settler scholar and curator Decter (2021) and I have noted,

An ethic of being in Indigenous sovereignty prioritizes all aspects of Indigenous self-determination while denaturalizing colonial claim and authority. Rather than activating a co-option of Indigenous knowledges and frameworks . . . it is a respectful understanding of the pre-existing rights and distinct knowledges and relationships with place tied to historical and ongoing Indigenous presence. (p. 127)

Aligning with scholars such as Coulthard, Nicoll, Robinson, and Simpson, CWSPs, and unsettling depremacy as their galvanizing methodology, are predicated upon Indigenous sovereignty as a given and are aimed at stimulating the intergenerational responsibilities pursuant to who one is where one is as a subject-in-relation to that context. In this sense, unsettling depremacy is a parallel, relational, positionality-based, and situated methodology through which white settlers can work toward subverting deeply entrenched assumptions of “settler entitlement and certainty” (Mackey, 2016, p. 38) that are implicit in colonial relationships with and on the land, particularly as they relate to the quotidian practices of daily life. More specifically, it has potential in addressing the questions evoked by my encounters with the TCT, and the broader implications of walking and the trail itself.

The TCT: Unbroken Lines and Connective Tissues

Coinciding with the nationalistic fanfare marking the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, in 2017 the TCT celebrated the completion of its national network of recreational trails. Much like the transcontinental railway, completed not long after Confederation, the TCT speaks to Canadians through rhetoric (and practices) that merge geographical continuity with national belonging and feelings of unity. Aided by settler colonial policies of Indigenous dispossession enacted to extend the occupation of Indigenous lands by European settlers westward to the coast, the railway’s transcontinental reach was pivotal in consolidating Canada’s sovereignty in geographical, political, and, importantly, in aspirational terms (Daschuk, 2013). ⁴ Not to diminish the impacts of the brutal and deliberate manner in which the west was “cleared” to make way for the railway as an enabler of the Canadian state, ⁵ the expressions of colonial yearning that surrounded its westward push were powerfully influential in establishing “fantasies of [settler] entitlement” that persist to this day (Mackey, 2016, p. 18). As historian George Stanley put it, “Bonds of Steel as well as of sentiment were needed to hold the new Confederation together. Without the railways there would be and could be no Canada” (quoted in Marsh, 2009, n.p., emphasis added). Close to 150 years later, the TCT performs a contemporary echo of the railway’s affirmation of national belonging and colonial possessiveness instilling tacit and overt “pedagogies of patriotism” (Mackey, 2002, p. 59) into mainstream Canadian consciousness. Described as having been “made by Canada” (The Great Trail, 2018), the TCT bolsters an overarching national identity that associates “Canadian-ness” with inherent connection to and propriety over the land. Moreover, as a self-described “iconic project” whose trails form an unbroken line linking Canadians from “coast to coast to coast” (TCT Strategic Plan, 2018–2022), the TCT promotes a contemporary cohesiveness of colonial claim that parallels rhetorical assertions attached to the railway. In short, the TCT is taking its place as an icon of national unity much like the railway did in its time. As tacit and overt forms of public pedagogy, icons play powerful roles in influencing perceptions of the history, the present, and the identities of nations and, in this way, help to form the stories and habits that shape their societies. As a 21st-century icon, the TCT is no exception.

The TCT’s infrastructural and operational frameworks, both on-line and on the ground, mirror its persuasive public face and similarly align with the systems and structures of the settler colonial state. Citizen groups are enlisted to mark and “claim” the land through localized initiatives that identify, develop, and name particular sections of the trail. Linking one section to the next to ultimately form a continuous path across urban streets and green spaces, as well as rural and “wilderness” areas, the TCT restates colonial occupation and exemplifies the settler state and society’s desire for implicit and explicit control of, and entitlement to, Indigenous lands. On-line descriptions of the 432 trail sections reiterate this assertion, weaving familiar narratives of breathtaking scenery, historical sites, recreation activities, and tourist features along with accounts of a plethora of flora and fauna. Yet, fewer than 15 mention Indigenous territories or peoples and many of these do so in a cursory manner. As an integral element of the trail system’s infrastructure imbuing it with colonial visions of land, landscape, and history as “narration[s] of truth” (A. Simpson, 2016, p. 444), these didactic offerings help to shape deeply lopsided celebratory national mythologies that occlude Indigenous presence. This is replicated on the ground where there is strong anecdotal evidence showing that on-trail signage reiterates these glaring omissions. Moreover, with, according to their materials, fewer than 10 of the trail sections having been created in consultation or collaboration with local Indigenous nations, indications are that the community groups who have built the trails have done so with little or no regard for Indigenous sovereignty, territory, knowledge, or presence. Once completed, people are invited to enjoy recreational pursuits on the trails, largely with similar disregard, as I will discuss later in this text.

Ultimately, the TCT’s operational and infrastructural frameworks converge with its rhetorical foundations to discursively map the unceded territories of sovereign Indigenous nations into a single “Canadian” landscape. It thus acts as a vernacular spatialization of the Canadian state’s—and white setter society’s—presumption of “exclusive authority” (Bird & Corntassel, 2017, p. 196) over, and unfettered access to, the lands now known as Canada. In other words, the TCT system implicitly enacts a continuing and participatory territorial dis/possession. ⁶ In this way, through colonial cartography and the activation of recreational pursuits, the TCT, like many Canadian icons, subtly serves settler colonial goals of erasing the distinct territories and sovereignties of Indigenous nations, tacitly proclaiming a consolidation of the lands it charts as wholly “Canadian.”

Walking Colonial Claim < > Walking Otherwise

In light of growing awareness surrounding the intergenerational impacts and contemporary manifestations of settler colonialism, and appeals for all citizens in settler states to contribute to decolonial change issued by Indigenous and co-agitator scholars, activists, artists, and communities as well as through initiatives such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action, the narratives and practices of possession and omission tangled within the TCT represent a troubling pattern. They also present a compelling opportunity to examine and reimagine entrenched colonially inflected stories of and relationships to place through a decolonial lens toward decolonial futures. Truly decolonial paradigms require substantive change that centralizes Indigenous sovereignty, land rights, knowledges, and futurity and includes repatriation and reparations (Coulthard, 2014; Memmi, 2013; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Yet, without diminishing these pivotal features, decolonization is also theorized as a wide-ranging and ongoing process of transformation that requires the interruption of political, social, cultural, economic, and psychological elements of colonial power through the active participation of all those residing in settler states (Battell Lowman & Barker, 2016; L. Simpson, 2008; Smith, 2013). Within this framework, impelling majority settler society to effectively contend with and contribute to decolonial change is understood to be contingent upon a significant “reshaping of settler consciousness” (Davis et al., 2017, p. 399), including, and perhaps most importantly, erroneous beliefs attached to notions of land, place, emplacement, and sovereignty. The TRC Call to Action 45:i addresses this directly by appealing for the “repudiat[ion of] concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands . . .” (TRC, 2015, p. 5). This falls in line with Aleut scholar Eve Tuck and settler scholar Marcia McKenzie (2014) who, in their articulation of critical place inquiry, argue for place to be considered through a lens that emphasizes the relevance of Indigenous histories, contemporary presence, situated knowledge, and sovereignty; attends to the ways Indigenous existence has been undermined by settler colonial systems and beliefs associated with place; and adopts a stance of decolonial practice. Moreover, they characterize place(s) “as sites of presence, futurity, imagination, power and knowing” that are processual, temporal, relational, and aspirational, and as such have significant impact on the ways lives are lived (p. xiv). Given this, forging the mutually respectful relations necessary for sustainable decolonial futures requires understandings of place that foreground contemporary Indigenous presence and sovereignty in the context of our everyday movements and spaces as Canadians. And this brings me back to the TCT.

The TCT has entered a protracted process of rebranding since I first began to research it in 2014, which included, until the spring of 2021, a glacial shift of its name from the TCT to The Great Trail. ⁷ The name is not the only way the trail has gestured toward recasting itself. The website now includes an “Indigenous Land Acknowledgement,” which is described as incorporating “recognition and respect . . . crucial to the establishment and maintenance of healthy and reciprocal relationships . . . contribute[ing] to reconciliation, a process to which TCT is committed” (The Great Trail, 2021). The statement goes on to assert that this acknowledgment is “only the beginning of the process that is needed to cultivate strong relations with First Nation, Inuit and Métis peoples” (The Great Trail, 2021). Along with the land acknowledgments on this page, there is a bullet point list titled “to demonstrate our commitment,” which includes the establishment of an Indigenous Advisory Committee, support for trail development by Indigenous leaders, and an appeal for trail builders to form partnerships with local Indigenous communities (The Great Trail, 2021). As I have suggested, the TCT is inherently entangled with colonial claims of exclusive (Canadian) sovereignty through its rhetorical components, and in the way it has been conceived, constructed, and used. While the TCT’s new initiatives are long overdue and encouraging, the extent to which they will generate real and substantial change to its structures, stories, and usage remains to be seen. At present and, I would argue, in the foreseeable future, this recreational and aspirational infrastructure continues to call for settlers to recreate on unceded Indigenous lands without undertaking the difficult work of significantly altering our/their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors or, as Mosby (2017) suggests, without giving up things we/they take for granted. In other words, for white settlers in particular, walking on the trails as a form of recreation continues to enable a passive form of colonial possessiveness that also marks the majority of our/their everyday lives.

Walking itself can be implicated in this substantiation of colonial norms. As a commonplace embodied cultural behavior, it inherently reiterates dominant assumptions and narratives and, in so doing, transfers conventional thinking through generations (Taylor, 2003, 2016). Moreover, as a manifestation of the body in motion, it is also an extension of the sociopolitical topographies of place (Lepecki, 2006). Waitt et al. (2009) suggest that outdoor recreational activities such as walking and hiking in wilderness settings are predicated upon assumptions of unfettered access to Indigenous lands and, as such, perform settler colonial ideations while undermining Indigenous presence and sovereignty. This characterization is echoed by geographer Bruce Erickson (2013) who argues that the powerful links between Canadian identity and notions of wilderness that are often embedded in forms of outdoor recreation reinforce the certainty of settler emplacement within, and rights to, Indigenous land. This sense of entitlement is no less evident in the TCT’s urban settings, which, as sites of historical and contemporary Indigenous dispossession, are also deeply implicated in replicating assumptions of white settler possession and futurity (Hugill, 2017). In the context of the TCT, walking or hiking, as a predominant mode of recreation in urban and wilderness settings alike, can be seen as supporting a form of white settler placing that Tuck and McKenzie (2014) argue is contingent on Indigenous displacement.

While walking can implicitly imprint white settler emplacement onto urban, rural, and wilderness terrains, it can also be strategically deployed as an “aesthetic action” (Martin & Robinson, 2016, p. 3) or activist tactic to destabilize entrenched belief systems and create new meanings and narratives. This potential opens a pathway for walking to be performed in a manner that both interrupts the certainty of settler entitlement and reinforces Indigenous sovereignty. Spiritually, pedagogically, politically, and artistically motivated walks undertaken by Indigenous individuals, groups, and communities play a significant role in this regard. For example, in 2003, Wikwemikong Nation Elder Josephine Mandamin co-initiated annual Water Walks to raise awareness about pollution in the Great Lakes. Over the first 5 years, all of the Great Lakes were circumvented through Water Walks, and, while carrying out these and subsequent yearly walks around the shores of other bodies of water, this initiative inspired similar walks in many communities. ⁸ In another example, the Nishiyuu Walkers, a group of Cree youth and one Elder-guide, walked from the community of Great Whale in Northern Quebec to Parliament Hill in the winter of 2012/2013 to highlight issues effecting Indigenous communities. ⁹ In contrast to the practices of walking invoked on the TCT that assert settler presence and “Canadian” sovereignty, unity, and identity, these walks are predicated on Indigenous presence, protocols, and knowledges, and generate walking to honor and care for Indigenous land and communities through embodiment, responsibility, and sovereignty actualized via presence across space. As settler scholars Springgay and Truman (2018) point out, in parallel with such Indigenous-led initiatives, “walking-with” is a method that can be implemented by variously situated non-Indigenous subjects as an “accountable . . . form of solidarity, unlearning and critical engagement with situated knowledges” that is “explicit about political positions and . . . which reveal[s] our entanglements with settler colonialism” (p. 11). One such example of walking-with or, to be more precise, running-with is Japanese Canadian performance artist Ayumi Goto’s 2013 project, sonorous shadows of Nishiyuu. In this durational project, Goto ran the equivalent of the 1,568 kilometers covered by the Nishiyuu Walkers in increments of 10 to 20 kilometers per day between Canada Day and Thanksgiving in whatever territory she traveled through over that time period. Accompanied by the music of Cree/Métis musician and media artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle emanating from speakers strapped to her waist, ¹⁰ Goto simultaneously honors the Nishiyuu Walkers and foregrounds Indigenous presence and knowledge, while challenging the spatial and racial constituents of Canadian nation-building, and interrupting assumptions of settler whiteness embedded in the mapping and controlling of place.

l i s t e n: Enlisting Critical Postionalities and Refusals to Foreground the More-Than-Human

The colonial implications associated with walking and the TCT extend well beyond their confines. Although the research-creation project I began to develop in 2014 that addresses colonial, and potentially decolonial facets of walking by intervening into the rhetoric, narratives and practices intrinsic to the TCT has not yet launched, other projects and artworks have grown up around the core of its inquiries into place and settler emplacement within Indigenous territories impacted by ongoing colonization. The most recent of these is l i s t e n, a video that applies unsettling depremacy through critical positionality and measured refusal. Rather than undertaking an exhaustive discussion of l i s t e n, I use it here to point to the ways unsettling depremacy can be employed to contend with specific interactions with place, and to signal its potential as a critical walking methodology.

I created l i s t e n for the Canadian Association for Theater Research’s (CATR) 2020 conference, which was one of many that pivoted from in-person to virtual platforms in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, this piece was made in response to a call for creative contributions issued by the conveners of the CATR working group, Moving Together to Reclaim and Resist (MTRR), of which I am a member. The MTRR working group evolved from the CATR’s Walking Our Way Here seminars in which Indigenous and variously situated non-Indigenous performance studies scholars and performance practitioners consider non-colonial and decolonial practices of resistance, co-resistance, and imagining otherwise through critically informed walking practices that include place-responsive interactive performance. On the form of back to the original “in the form of” of the MTRR working group, which was in 2020, the conveners called for members to create embodied land acknowledgments that address the territories in which they are based on the form of short audio pieces to be shared on the conference’s virtual platform. Through the merging of walking and speaking, the call invited critical-creative articulations of the practice of the land acknowledgment in light of both its importance as a practice of respect and the contested space it has come to inhabit. ¹¹ Working through the methodological lens of unsettling depremacy, my impulse was to question the power dynamics enmeshed in both of these embodied practices. The result was l i s t e n, a video in which I neither walk nor speak. ¹²

Through the provisional aesthetic of a handheld iPhone camera, l i s t e n depicts the fleeting moments of spring breakup on the Whitemouth River in the territory of the Anishinabewaki, Dakota, and Métis Nations on Treaty One lands adjacent to Treaty Three. It is made up of five side-by-side vertical screen sections separated by thin black vertical bars. Each section reflects a different view of the river as the setting sun shines through leafless trees on the opposite riverbank. Shifting with my breath and the subtle movements of my body as I try to remain still, the shots undulate slightly so that the horizon lines of each section match up only sporadically. Chunks of ice can be seen floating downstream, backlit in the waning light. They slosh, groan, and scrape along the shore. Overhanging branches rattle against the ice as it passes, and every now and then, a bird calls out. Taken together, the five audio and video tracks are both mesmerizing and intentionally difficult to apprehend in unison. For the most part, it is not possible to connect the sounds one is hearing with the images to which they correspond. Moreover, one cannot discern the individual audio tracks and therefore hears them as a cohesive, though sometimes cacophonous, soundscape. In contrast, each of the vertical sections draws the eye, making it challenging to watch them as a whole. As a result, one can watch the video repeatedly and see it very differently each time. While this work is clearly a “listening” embodied from my perspective, and as such, I have certainly directed its creation, the audio and the video are minimally edited. The piece is then more a document of the land over a brief sliver of time than a narrative I heavily crafted. in the piece being more of a document of the land over a brief sliver of time than a narrative I have heavily crafted. That said, I fully recognize that it was created through the lens of my intentions as an artist and academic, and through my perspective as a white settler, even if one that is critical.

In reading l i s t e n as an exercise in unsettling depremacy, it is crucial to consider it in the relation to the prompt to which it responded—the call for embodied land acknowledgments. In it, I acknowledge the land through an act of stillness instead of the embodied propulsion of walking as is customary for the MTRR working group. Rather than foregrounding my voice as is done in conventional land acknowledgments, I privileged the voice/s of the land—the more-than-human—by listening. Using video instead of audio allowed me to posit listening in an expansive manner that includes all forms of perception. In this sense, this piece offers a brief interlude unencumbered by recitation or my body’s intentional movement—an extended moment in which the land speaks first and speaks back, in which the land speaks, for itself, what is to be acknowledged. While I strive for stillness, the land moves for itself. The river flows with no regard for the listener, endlessly in motion evoking a continuum of temporal and territorial interconnectedness that binds cohabitants together in ways that are often fundamentally discordant. My stillness and silence deploy unsettling depremacy as a refusal, which, I suggest, decenters the authority of settler whiteness as well as Western assumptions that situate the human subject as dominant over the land, water, animals, and other more-than-human forms of life.

In part, this video is a manifestation of listening through what Dylan Robinson (2020) refers to in his book, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, as a “critical listening positionality” (p. 9). He contrasts this with settler colonial listening positionalities that “can generally be understood as . . . unmarked structures of certainty that guide normative perception and may enact epistemic violence . . .” (Robinson, 2020, p. 10). Elaborating on critical listening positionality, Robinson (2020) notes,

As part of our listening positionality, we each carry listening privilege, listening biases, and listening ability that are never wholly positive or negative . . . Critical listening positionality . . . seeks to prompt questions regarding how we might become better attuned to the particular filters of race, class, gender, and ability that actively select and frame the moment of contact between listening body and listened-to sound. (pp. 10–11)

In other words, a critical listening positionality is a cultivated posture in which the normative is accounted for, or marked, so that one is “better able to listen otherwise” (p. 11). Much like unsettling depremacy, when working from a white settler perspective, a critical listening positionality necessitates being self-reflexive while (or reciprocally) looking outward in non-extractive ways. As such, it requires an unflinching reckoning with the intersectional dimensions of one’s place in the world on micro- and macro levels, as well as a commitment to examining the ways these factors converge with historical, cultural, and political facets of the “product” one is encountering and the context in which one is doing so. Critical listening positionality echoes unsettling depremacy further in that it is inherently relational, relying as it does on moments of contact that occur at the intersection of communication and reception. In l i s t e n, I occupy a dual position of communicating and receiving, and my critical listening positionality is implicated in both. It is this twinned perspective that propelled me to be still and to pay my attention to, and privilege, the voice/s of the land as opposed to walking and talking.

Fostering a critical listening positionality guards against “reducing alterity to the same” (Robinson, 2020, p. 248) through the recognition that whatever is being communicated will be perceived differently depending on one’s experiences and intersectional subject position/s. As a listener in l i s t e n, adopting a critical listening positionality meant that I brought with me understandings of the complicities inherent in my white settler subjecthood and the ways this places me in relation to Indigenous dispossession, to white supremacy and to the colonial claiming of Indigenous land through cartography, rhetoric, embodiment, and aspiration, as well as to Indigenous presence, cultures, and knowledges. ¹³ All of this informs the way I understand my particular relationships to the land—to unceded Indigenous lands—as a white settler. This, in turn, conditions how I listen to the land, and the limits of what I am able to hear from my perspective. My critical listening positionality guards against sameness from a listening perspective. However, as Robinson points out, critical listening positionality is not only a factor for the listener to consider. The reduction of alterity can also be invoked by the maker in the creation of artworks and other cultural production through assumptions about both knowledges and audiences. As such, a critical listening positionality is vital for the maker, particularly when working with decolonial practice. It can be harnessed to help ensure that an understanding of one’s relationship to the knowledges intersecting with the work and the alterity of one’s potential audience inform decisions in the making itself, as was the case in the conception and production of l i s t e n. Moreover, it aids in critically informing the authorial perspective with respect to the conditions of one’s position and context, and discerning the limitations and the registers of accountability that follow. ¹⁴ When the larger implications and entanglements of “unmarked rituals” (Robinson, 2020, p. 53) are addressed through methodologies that incorporate critical listening positionalities, the constituents of their mobilization (knowledges, communication, reception, affect, etc.) are less likely to be reduced to sameness and they can effectively be interrupted from a range of positionalities resulting in a spectrum of artistic and activist offerings.

Engaging a critical listening positionality through unsettling depremacy stimulates the intergenerational responsibilities associated with white settlers in particular, including obligations to reveal and intervene in unmarked rituals such as walking. l i s t e n is a manifestation of unsettling depremacy in which I responded to a prompt for a critically embodied land acknowledgment as a way of intervening in the presumption of mobility and the authority of settler colonial whiteness invoked by, among other things, white settler walking both on and off the TCT. It is a response to walking that exercises unsettling depremacy in the form of stillness. However, this is not to say that the answer to the problems of white settler walking as colonial claim and entitlement lies in an outright refusal of motion; a refusal to go anywhere is not the same as a refusal of “the right to go anywhere” (Waitt et al., 2009, p. 45, emphasis added). My stillness certainly does not address all of the problems summoned by the rhetoric, infrastructures and operations of the TCT, the many implications of white settler walking or for that matter the complexities of land acknowledgments. Moreover, while my stillness (and silence) in l i s t e n may subvert assumptions of settler mobility and the privilege of the white settler voice, as a white settler I must also contend with the ways in which my daily morning walks, my adventures on the TCT and my largely unfettered movements throughout the lands we call Canada, still implicitly stake a colonial claim. ¹⁵ What l i s t e n can do is demonstrate one way of using unsettling depremacy—in this case to address the particularities of the call for contributions that resulted in its creation.

Walking Unsettling Depremacy: A Preliminary Proposition in Lieu of Conclusion

As with listening or land acknowledgments, there is no one answer to being critical about walking and to unlearning white settler walking as colonial claim. This brings me to the preliminary proposition of walking unsettling depremacy. As I propose it, walking unsettling depremacy is a parallel, flexible, place-responsive, inquiry-driven, positionality-based methodology that foregrounds ongoing and deliberate unsettlement and the decentering of colonial whiteness within the context of walking practices. It may involve considered movement, intentional stillness, permissions, protocols, or any number of other methods, and can be applied to individual or collaborative practices. Regardless of the strategies used, it is grounded by ethics of criticality with respect to positionality and relationality, and is predicated on activating white settler intergenerational responsibilities of being in relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty. In other words, walking unsettling depremacy is a methodology white settlers can call upon to undertake ethical embodied interactions with place that respond with care and rigor to the specifics of location, relations, and context to, as TRC Call to Action 45:i suggests, repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands.

I have introduced walking unsetttling depremacy here as a methodology in development rather than a definitive methodological model and I have done so strategically. Taking on a share of the labor in disturbing settler colonial whiteness involves a commitment to determining how any given methodology intersects with one’s positionality, situation, relations, and intentions as well as ascertaining both its potential and limitations given these factors. Introducing walking unsetttling depremacy in its preliminary state highlights the imperative for those who are interested in deploying it to do the work necessary to adopt and adapt it in ethical ways pursuant to who they are, where they are, what they intend to do, and with whom. As such, what I have presented here is not a how-to guide for mobilizing walking unsettling depremacy. By fleshing out theoretical and methodological underpinnings and touching on examples, this text offers an invitation—a how-might-you/we/they, through your/our/their critical walking positionality, work with walking unsettling depremacy in ethical and accountable ways.