Against the Current and into The Light: Performing History and Land In Coast Salish Territories and Vancouver's Stanley Park by Selena Couture

Abstract

Reviewed by: Against the Current and into The Light: Performing History and Land In Coast Salish Territories and Vancouver's Stanley Park by Selena Couture Julie Burelle AGAINST THE CURRENT AND INTO THE LIGHT: PERFORMING HISTORY AND LAND IN COAST SALISH TERRITORIES AND VANCOUVER'S STANLEY PARK. By Selena Couture. McGill-Queen's Native and Northern series, no. 95. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019; pp. 270. Against the Current and into the Light is Selena Couture's beautifully researched study of how Indigenous and settler performances have shaped narratives about the unceded land presently known as Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia. Couture's study focuses on Lumberman's Arch, one area of the 1,000 acre park, which is "the site of a village used by Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish people, known in as and in Skwxwú7mesh as Xwáyxway" (6), and also the site, prior to the park's inauguration in 1888, of important potlatch ceremonies before they were outlawed from 1885 to 1951. Despite colonial encroachment, Indigenous performances never stopped at that site and were used as a "mode of knowledge transfer, cultural continuity, and intercultural influence that connects people to place" (4). Over the course of four chapters, Couture examines some of these Indigenous place–based performances from the establishment of the city of Vancouver in 1886 through to the first decades of the twenty-first century, and engages in the process with settler performances that attempted to mark the park and city as white and settled. Couture lays out her theoretical framework in the first chapter. Drawing from Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard's concept of "grounded normativity" and from Michel de Certeau's reflection on urban spatial practices, Couture proposes the term "grounded practices" to illuminate how Indigenous performance–based practices are "deeply informed by what the land teaches through reciprocal relationship" (22). Couture notes that many place names in and around what is now Stanley Park are verbs constructed, much like performance, as "progressive, durative, and iterative acts that continue and are repeated throughout time" (34). She builds on her own experience learning —an act toward self-decolonization—and draws from the language itself (as encoding and embodying specific ways of knowing and being in the world) to propose the concept of "eddies of influence" as a capacious land-based metaphor to read Indigenous grounded practices that, in their resistance to settler forces, ultimately participate in reshaping them. Indeed, eddies are formations "where currents interact with an obstacle," and Couture notes that contains many words that describe this reciprocal and relational force. The second chapter proposes a critical examination of the City of Vancouver archives, leveraging the work of Diana Taylor to examine the role that its obstinate founder James Skitt Matthews played in marking Vancouver as a settled white space. Matthews, a prolific city historian/archivist for forty years, intervened in public life (and its archives) as the architect of several commemorative reenactments of Lord Stanley's dedication of Stanley Park in 1888. Couture suggests, drawing from Quandamooka scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson's concept of the white possessive, that this emphasis on reperforming this foundational event and on documenting it for posterity "was tied to the unstable nature of the European settlement on unceded land" and to a form of anxiety related to having no past on the land (60). Chapter 3 focuses on two performances that marked Vancouver's 1946 Diamond Jubilee. Couture, echoing Nicholas Blomley, describes the first performance, a pageant titled The Jubilee Show performed at Brockton Point, as a spectacle of settler "emplacement" and Indigenous "displacement" (103). Couture reads The Jubilee Show and its extensive documentation in the city's archives as an attempt to reinforce dominant colonial history through large-scale spectacle. In contrast, The Indian [End Page 255] Village Show, produced by the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC) and performed on the other side of town in Kitsilano Park (now Vanier Park), proposed a counter narrative. While there is less archival material about the NBBC's show, the existing documents reveal a careful negotiation between "satisfying the existing objectification of Indigenous cultures and accessing...