When monuments fall: anticolonial disruptions and decolonial urban practices (2022) Plenary Commentary

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this commentary on Laura Pulido’s plenary, “Cultural Memory, White Innocence, and United States Territory”, we reflect on the significance of colonial monuments and their toppling in the Canadian context. Thinking through the 2022 toppling of the John “Gassy Jack” Deighton monument, we consider how this act disrupts the settler colonial city and spatial and ideological manifestations of cultural memory. Reading settler texts on Deighton’s “founding” of the Gastown neighborhood through a feminist and anticolonial lens, we insist that the monument erased gendered histories of Indigenous genocide and upheld a particular cultural memory of white settler innocence. Engaging with Squamish cultural memory and the poetry of Toyts-ten-aat Cease Wyss, we consider what it would mean to center decolonial spatial practices and Squamish geographies. Lastly, we explore the complicated politics surrounding the toppling of the Gassy Jack statue, torn down without Squamish consultation, revealing distinctions between anticolonial and decolonial spatial practices.