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

Abstract

As an expression of the “right to go anywhere,” walking or hiking in settler states, particularly on recreational infrastructures such as the Trans Canada Trail, can be understood to support a form of white settler emplacement that is contingent on Indigenous displacement. These infrastructures and activities also contribute to assumptions of settler-state sovereignty over Indigenous lands common to the contemporary settler colonial project. In this article, I consider these conditions alongside arts-based methodologies I have developed from a critical white settler perspective to reveal, challenge, and subvert them. A discussion of my video, l i s t e n, demonstrates how one such methodology, unsettling depremacy, critically contends with specific interactions with place. I conclude by proposing walking unsettling depremacy as methodology in development that can be deployed to interfere with the ways white settler walking and its recreational infrastructures assert colonial claim.