Tracing the spirals of unsettlement: Euro-Canadian narratives of coming to grips with Indigenous sovereignty, title, and rights

Abstract

ABSTRACT In settler nations, pervasive national narratives combine with colonizing spatial technologies to constitute a dominant cultural pedagogy: a settler pedagogy that shores up historical-spatial imaginaries serving to rationalize, justify, and ultimately reproduce the on-going displacement of Indigenous peoples. This paper explores processes by which these entrenched imaginaries become unsettled for white settler subjects, through a narrative analysis of the stories 22 Euro-Canadian solidarity activists tell of coming to grips with their implication, privilege, and responsibilities in light of colonizing history and Indigenous sovereignty and territory. The paper traces the experiences, contexts, and critical turning points that prompt these actors to (re)imagine identity, history, land, nation, and home, sparking among them specific and at times competing cycles of reflection, action, and commitment. In elucidating these cycles of learning and unsettlement, and in noting their contradictions, interruptions, and (un)marked whiteness, this inquiry contributes to current conversations regarding the processes by which differently positioned settlers might enter pathways of personal and structural decolonization.