The Humber is a Haunting: Settler Deathscapes, Indigenous Spectres, and the Memorialisation of a Canadian Heritage River

Abstract

AbstractThis paper argues that state‐sponsored memorialisation is a critical enterprise in creating and maintaining a national cultural identity that softens or erases the ongoing process of death‐making and dispossession wrought by settlers on the land and Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the work of Toronto‐based Cree scholar Karyn Recollet, I further argue that this death‐making is not a given. Indigenous peoples assert their presence and relationships to the Humber River and its adjacent lifeforces alongside and in opposition to official memorialising projects. The 20thanniversary of the Humber River’s designation as a Canada Heritage River in 2019, the first in the era of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, begs the question as to the role memorial and commemoration ceremonies play in the coalescence of a particular settler colonial story/myth that stabilises geographies as “memorial spaces” while simultaneously narrating Indigenous peoples through erasure, assimilation, and as historical ghosts.