Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography: Stories and Ways of Being (Qualitative Research in Sport and Physical Activity) [1 ed.] 0367672340, 9780367672348

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Proem
1 Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically: “The Stories That Will Make a Difference Aren’t the Easy Ones”
2 Situating the Author, Interrogating Canada: (Un)sett(l)ing the Stage
3 Anti-Colonial Autoethnography
4 Outdoor Recreation, the Wilderness Ideal, and Complicating Settler Mobility
5 Pedagogies of White Settler Masculinity: (Un)Becoming(?) Settlers
6 O Canada? (Be)longing, (Un)certainty, and White Settler Inheritance
7 (Autoethnographic) Futures: “Something as Yet Unimagined”
Index

Citation preview

Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography

This book offers a brief history of how autoethnography has been employed in studies of sport and physical (in)activity to date and makes an explicit call for anti-colonial approaches – challenging scholars of physical culture to interrogate and write against the colonial assumptions at work in so many physical cultural and academic spaces. It presents examples of autoethnographic work that interrogate physical cultural practices as both produced by, and generative of, settler-colonial logics and structures, including research into outdoor recreation, youth sport experiences, and sport spectatorship. It situates this work in the context of key paradigmatic issues in social scientific research, including ontology, epistemology, axiology, ethics, and praxis, and looks ahead at the shape that social relations might take beyond settler colonialism. Drawing on cutting-edge research and presenting innovative theoretical perspectives, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in physical cultural studies, sport studies, outdoor studies, sociology, cultural studies, or qualitative research methods in the social sciences. Jason Laurendeau is Associate Professor with the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. His research interests include settler colonialism, gender, risk, childhood, research methodology generally, and autoethnography in particular.

Qualitative Research in Sport and Physical Activity Series Editors: Michael D. Giardina Florida State University, USA Brett Smith University of Birmingham, UK

From ethnography and narrative inquiry to participatory action research and digital methods, feminist and poststructural theory to new materialism and onto-epistemologies, serious conversations about the practices, politics and philosophies of qualitative inquiry have never been stronger or more abundant in the field of sport, exercise and health. At the same time, the growth of new critical methodologies has opened up interdisciplinary space for sustained engagement with provocative questions over evidence, knowledge, and research practices. The Qualitative Research in Sport and Physical Activity series is the first of its kind within the field that has as its mandate the necessary advancement of qualitative methodologies and their intersection with theory and practice. Books in the series will develop new and innovative methodologies, serve as ‘how-to’ guides for conducting research, and present empirical research findings. It will serve the growing number of students and academics who promote and utilize qualitative inquiry in university courses, research, and applied practice. Also available in this series: Digital Qualitative Research in Sport and Physical Activity Edited by Andrea Bundon Creative Nonfiction in Sport and Exercise Research Edited by Francesca Cavallerio Motherhood and Sport Collective Stories of Identity and Difference Edited by Lucy Spowart and Kerry R . McGannon Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography Stories and Ways of Being Jason Laurendeau www.routledge.com/sport/series/QRSPA

Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography

Stories and Ways of Being

Jason Laurendeau

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Jason Laurendeau The right of Jason Laurendeau to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Laurendeau, Jason, author. Title: Sport, physical activity, and anti-colonial autoethnography : stories and ways of being / Jason Laurendeau. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, N.Y. : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Qualitative research in sport and physical activity | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book offers a brief history of how autoethnography has been employed in studies of sport and physical (in) activity to date and makes an explicit call for anti-colonial approaches challenging scholars of physical culture to interrogate and write against the colonial assumptions at work in so many physical cultural and academic spaces. It presents examples of autoethnographic work that interrogate physical cultural practices as both produced by, and generative of, settler colonial logics and structures, including research into outdoor recreation, youth sport experiences, and sport spectatorship. It situates this work in the context of key paradigmatic issues in social scientific research, including ontology, epistemology, axiology, ethics and praxis, and looks ahead at the shape that social relations might take beyond settler-colonialism. Drawing on cuttingedge research and presenting innovative theoretical perspectives, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in physical cultural studies, sport studies, outdoor studies, sociology, cultural studies, or qualitative research methods in the social sciences”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022047106 | ISBN 9780367672348 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367672492 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003130451 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sports— Sociological aspects. | Physical education and training— Sociological aspects. | Settler colonialism. | Ethnology— Biographical methods. Classification: LCC GV706.5 .L38 2023 | DDC 306.4/83 — dc23/eng/20221213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047106 ISBN: 978 - 0 -367- 67234 - 8 (hbk) ISBN: 978 - 0 -367- 67249-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978 -1- 003-13045-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451 Typeset in Goudy by codeMantra

For Matthew, Quinn, Avery, and Levi

Contents

1

Acknowledgements

ix

Proem

2

Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically: “The Stories That Will Make a Difference Aren’t the Easy Ones”

6

2

Situating the Author, Interrogating Canada: (Un)sett(l)ing the Stage

26

3

Anti-Colonial Autoethnography

48

4

Outdoor Recreation, the Wilderness Ideal, and Complicating Settler Mobility

65

5

Pedagogies of White Settler Masculinity: (Un)Becoming(?) Settlers

86

6

O Canada? (Be)longing, (Un)certainty, and White Settler Inheritance

104

7

(Autoethnographic) Futures: “Something as Yet Unimagined”

133

Index

147

Acknowledgements

Scholarship is too often thought of as a product of an individual – their mind, their labour, their insight. But it is always relational work, whether it is acknowledged as such or not. I would suggest that this is especially true in autoethnography, criticisms of this method as solipsistic notwithstanding. In terms of the work that appears in these pages, it simply could not have happened without the insight, generosity, and encouragement of many people. While I take full responsibility for any shortcomings in the work, any value therein is thanks in no small part to valued readers and supporters. Several folks read significant chunks of earlier drafts of the work and provided invaluable feedback and encouragement. I asked an enormous amount of JohnReid Hresko and he stepped up with “compassionate accountability” to highlight when I was taking the too-easy path. Nik Dean moved from the role of former student to that of trusted reader, helping me see what was working autoethnographically and where I needed to think more deeply. Tanner Layton read early drafts of several chapters and put them in conversation with his own thinking and writing in deeply generative ways. Jordan Koch and Mike Auksi read a full draft of the manuscript when I desperately needed thoughtful and insightful readers to do so. Nathan Fawaz read a full draft of the book with more generosity, insight, and nuance that I could have asked or imagined, supporting me especially in the most (intellectually and emotionally) difficult dimensions of the work. Many generous readers provided focused feedback on particular sections of the work, again pushing me to deepen my thinking and sharpen my writing. My sincere gratitude to Chen Chen, Amanda DeLisio, Alex Giancarlo, Dallas Hunt, Charli Kerns, Rob Kossuth, Kevin McGeough, Sam McKegney, Joshua Newman, Waubgeshig Rice, Jamieson Ryan, Smokii Sumac, and Jennifer Wigglesworth for their time, insight, and generosity. Thanks to Richard Van Camp for challenging me to write with my heart, not (just) my head. For numerous stimulating intellectual conversations foundational to this work, my thanks to Suzanne Lenon, Michelle Helstein, Judy Davidson, Kristine Alexander, Julie Young, Kara Granzow, Davina McLeod, Mary Louise Adams, Ashley Pollock, and Chris Miller.

x Acknowledgements

Much gratitude to Carole Young, Angie Hahn, Kaja Pedersen, and Hallie Parenteau for timely reminders along the way of the importance of this work both personally and professionally. My deepest appreciation to Smokii Sumac and Kegedonce Press for their permission to reproduce a section of Sumac’s poetry in Chapter 6. My thanks as well to Michael Giardina, the person who first asked the question that cracked open this project: “do you think there’s a book there?” His mentorship and editorial guidance (with Brett Smith) shaped the early stages of this project, in particular, in key ways. Thanks to Simon Whitmore, Rebecca Connor, and the whole Routledge team for their support, encouragement, and patience with my questions, missed due dates, and investments. Last, but most definitely not least, Carly Adams. For more than 15 years, we have been having conversations about life, work, love, and politics that have shaped not only this book but also the way I think about the world and what is important in it. You supported me in so many ways through this process – as an editor, a co-parent, a sounding board, a gut-check, and many more – that words cannot convey the depth of your influence on this work and on me as a human.

What if no one sided with colonialism? (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson)

We can transform everything. (Chelsea Vowel)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-1

Proem

Dear Avery, My sweet, fierce, little one. What have I done? What am I doing? What kind of world am I helping to build for you? With you? What kind of father am I being? What kind of person? You know how you see me working a lot in the mornings when you and I are up before Quinn and Mom? Do you know why that is, my love? It is because this world that we live in is a mess. It is sick, sweetheart. [Nope. You’re going to have to come back to that.] It is working as it is designed to work, love, and that’s not good. And it makes me sad. And angry. Not the kind of angry you see when you don’t listen… the kind that simmers and sucks the life right out of me. Do you know what’s worse? I’ve helped make that mess. I’m still helping make that mess even as I try to figure out a way not to, a way to help build a different world. Because the one we’re in, it doesn’t work. Actually, it works too well. But it works in ways that hurt people. It hurts some of your friends. It hurts people you’ve met. It hurts people we’ll never meet. And it hurts us. You asked me the other day what my book was about, and I didn’t have a good answer for you, my love. It’s about that hurt, and it’s about how I hope we can help make it better. As an author I admire puts it, “we can transform everything” (Vowel, 2022, p. 200). We have to. I love you, (letter first written November 15, 2021) Dad Dear 2009 Jay, Hi! This is your 2021 self, checking in with a bit of a heads up. I don’t want to give away too much of what awaits you in the next dozen years or so (see every time-travel-related book or movie you’ve ever encountered), but I do have a few things to tell you. You can think of this as my love letter to you, ok? Ready? So, you’ve discovered autoethnography. That’s great for you, and I know that you’re enjoying the process. You’ve probably already started telling people how much it rocks your world that you never encountered even the idea of autoethnography in grad school, that it was this moment of recognition, that you’re reinventing yourself as a scholar, and that it is taking you years to figure out how to do

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-2

Proem 3

autoethnography. (I mean, hello?? Could people stop telling you that you need to “show more” and freaking show you how to show more? amirite??) But here’s my missive from the future (ooo… creepy). You’re behind. Like, way, way, behind. Not in terms of autoethnography, though you’ve got some catching up to do there as well. What you’re going to realize in a few years, though, is that where you’re really behind is in terms of knowing yourself. (Kind of ironic, isn’t it? Autoethnography is often – somewhat lazily, imho – critiqued as being only about the author’s self, a kind of solipsistic navel-gazing that benefits no one.) I mean, you know yourself in some ways, and I get that it’s a process, but you have A LOT to learn. To be clear, I have a lot to learn too! I’m not writing to you because I’ve got this figured out or anything; I’m writing because the work never stops, you don’t get to arrive at any point of completion. What I’m really saying here is that after you learn the basics of the craft of autoethnography, you’re going to have a lot of work to better understand what you think is really important to write about autoethnographically. You think you’re pretty checked in, right? A “critical scholar,” you like to call yourself. Ok, cool. Take a second, pat yourself on the back, whatever. But for all of the critical work you do around gender and risk, you are going to realize in the coming years that you’re missing some really important stuff. Some stuff that will come to dominate your thinking, reading, and writing. You’re going to realize that you’ve got some ableist bullshit to unpack, for instance. You’re going to head to a conference soon, and there you’ll meet a scholar who will completely shift your perspective, starting almost right away. You’ll think, at first, that you can be a great mentor to them (their pronouns are they/them – you’ll be more ready for this conversation by then), but actually, they’re going to be mentoring you right from the get-go. Know what will really fuck with you will come somewhere around 2014 or 2015? (I’m curious as to exactly when this is gonna’ happen, actually, ‘cause I keep telling the story to people. So do me a favour and shoot me a note when you get there, ok?) You will realize that all of your research, and all of your teaching, and, really, your whole life, is super, profoundly, unreflexively, white. You’re not ready for that realization yet, I get that. But it will stretch your brain, I assure you. You know how liberating it was to “find” autoethnography? Like there was this whole body of work that just made you go “I had no idea you could do this!”? Remember that? Well, this will be different. This will be more like “Oh, shit. What the actual fuck have I been doing?” It will not be fun. And it will stay pretty un-fun for a long time. (TBH, it’s still not fun, ‘cause there’s no real escape from it. You just pull back more layers, and more layers, and more layers, and with each layer you find more white bullshit.) But it’s fucking important. I’m not gonna’ baby you here… you’re a big fucking part of a big fucking problem, even – and maybe especially – when you think you’re “fighting the man” or whatever. To be clear, I still am. I haven’t got this figured out. It’s so big, I don’t know that there’s such a thing as figuring it out. But I’m working at it.

4 Proem

Now don’t go getting all hurt here. I know your ego is damned fragile, and that you need to feel like you’re on top of things (or at least look like you are) all the time. (That’s part of the problem, actually, and I don’t have an answer for you, ‘cause that’s still me.) But if (when) you make this process about you and your feelings, you’re actually just recentring your own white settler bullshit. So, you might be wondering, then, why the letter. Well, I just want you to pay attention. Pay attention, and hopefully you’ll be ready to have your world rocked when the opportunity presents itself. Pay attention, and maybe you’ll be ready to not get caught up in your own ego-driven response to those moments and instead interrogate your emotional response and unpack it as part of the problem itself. Pay attention, and you might find a way not to be complicit in this bullshit… Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you; there’s no way not to be complicit, there’s no way to think your way to innocence here. In fact, your desire to be or become innocent is one of the biggest things you’re going to need to deal with. But you’ve got a bit of time to wrap your head around that one. Ok – I’m out. Other shit to do. But you’ve got this. You’ve got this. Actually, you don’t, but you’re not quite ready for that just yet either. But you’ll get through it. More importantly, it’s not about you getting through it. It’s about Leanne Simpson’s deceptively simple question: “What if no one sided with colonialism?” (Simpson, 2017, p. 177). It’s about how this question both challenges your understanding of your complicity in all of this and invites you to imaginatively engage with other futures. So, get ready to do some work. With love, Jay (letter first written October 22, 2021) Dear reader, I’m not going to fuck around here, and I make no apologies for that. I feel this sense of urgency – often manifesting itself as anger – that fuels my writing at the moment, and don’t want to tamp it down, to sanitize it, to make it “easily digestible,” or make it “flow,” or, sometimes, make it “coherent.” I’m being a bit flippant – I get that. But my point, really, is that I want what you have in your hands or on your device to feel like it came from somewhere, from a human who is thinking through some important questions and doesn’t have the answers, but still thinks that the process is worth investing in. A human who is conflicted, who talks to himself, who swears a lot, who can’t figure out what to do, but is desperate to do so. A human who woke up during his PhD feeling like an elephant was sitting on his chest – the weight of professional expectation. A human who now wakes up feeling the weight not of professional expectation but of a dumpster fire of a world, one in which the Canadian federal government repeatedly appeals Human Rights Tribunal decisions awarding financial damages to Indigenous kids stolen from their homes and to their families, as just one example. So sometimes, I’ll write to you – or me, or whoever – like this and not give a shit about making connections to other scholarly work (even the important

Proem 5

stuff), ‘cause that’s not what I’m trying to do right at that moment. Other times, I’ll let my “academic” voice (what the fuck does that even mean?!) take the stage in order to point to some of the foundational work – especially that of BIPOC scholars – that has informed my thinking and writing. But the point – the only point – is what the fuck do we do about this fucked up world and our complicity in it? That’s it. I don’t give a shit, really, if either of us understands performance ethnography, narrative, or even postcolonial theory in any abstract sense. I give every shit, however, that we (try to) understand the world in which we find ourselves, the one we reproduce through what we do and don’t read, write, and put into the world. The one that renders many of our lives profoundly comfortable – even when we face struggles – while rendering others expendable. While, in fact, ensuring that expendability. The one that so many people are working to refuse, reimagine, reconstitute. We – you and me, reader – we should be doing that work too. Maybe you already are doing this work. Maybe you’re doing it from a very different structural location than I occupy. In any case, there is work to do. In love and solidarity, Jay (letter first written October 22, 2021)

References Simpson, L. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vowel, C. (2022). Buffalo is the new buffalo. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Chapter 1

Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically “The Stories That Will Make a Difference Aren’t the Easy Ones”

Stories bring worlds into being… Dutta (2018, p. 94)

Proem – June 24, 2021 Seated fairly comfortably in a double kayak I share with our now 12-year-old, I take in the morning light illuminating the contours of Dogtooth Lake in Rushing River Provincial Park, just east of Kenora in Northern Ontario. I breathe deeply, revelling in both the beauty of this place – one of our favourite spots to camp – and the fact that I haven’t checked my email in almost two weeks. I watch Quinn’s lithe shape and smooth paddling stroke, taking fatherly pleasure in his coordination and athleticism. Two nights ago, on our first paddle here after setting up our campsite, he and I took in a breathtaking sunset and had a stunning encounter with a beaver swimming from one island to another. This morning, I take our focus/conversation in a different direction. “Q, you mentioned earlier that you wondered what people would say was positive about residential schools… Do you want an answer to that?” Quinn looks over his left shoulder as he continues paddling. “Yeah… what could be positive about that?” “Nothing,” 1 I rush to answer, my jaw clenching. I pause, reminding myself to take it slowly. “But…,” I begin again, “some people want the conversation to focus on the ‘positives’ as well as the ‘negatives.’ That’s what that Catholic priest I mentioned was talking about in his sermon.2 And that’s what people like former Senator Lynn Beyak have gone on about for years.”3 I sit up straighter, wondering if I’ve lost Quinn with this sidenote, deciding to get back to the heart of the matter. “Ok, so if someone did want to claim that there were benefits of residential schooling, they might point out that the children were taught English in these schools, for example.” I stop for a moment, hoping that Quinn might pick up my line of thought. “But to do that,” he tentatively weighs in, “they didn’t let them speak their own languages….”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-3

Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically  7

“Right!” My chest swells with the knowledge that he’s been paying attention to our earlier conversations. “They separated these children from their families – in many cases from their own siblings attending the same schools – to do so. And they assumed that teaching Indigenous kids English was what was good for them.” I stop short of explicitly naming this as genocide but feel that Quinn’s almost old enough for this particular layer to the conversation. I feel his energy shift slightly. “Dad? …What about this place?” Unsure of where he’s going, I sit in the silence for a moment. “We’re camping here, and it’s beautiful, but is it worth it?” My face flushes. I search for a thread to grab onto in this direction, but don’t come up with one. Here, Quinn is picking up on earlier conversations about provincial and national parks as colonial institutions predicated on land dispossession. Importantly, he’s bringing the analysis directly into the present and focusing on our complicity in ongoing colonial violence.4 “That’s such an important question, love,” I wade in. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that in recent years, and I still don’t have a great answer for you.” We paddle together for a few more strokes before I go on: “Our challenge, I think, is maybe to do the things that we love doing – like camping, hiking, kayaking – but think really carefully about where and how we do them….” Have you done that, though? You started writing about this very idea five years ago, and yet here we are, still camping (mostly) in provincial parks as we make our way to Ontario, for example. “…and it’s also about what we’re doing in other parts of our lives to challenge settler colonialism,” I add as a somewhat weak post-script. Quinn, seemingly picking up some steam, refuses to let it lie. “I mean, we’re settlers enjoying a park that’s part of the problem, right?” I inhale deeply. “Right,” I offer, unsatisfied with my own answers. Seeing a different entry point, I ask “Is that the first time you’ve used that term out loud? Settlers?” “Yeah, I guess so,” he offers. A smile reaches towards my eyes. “And… how did it feel?” “Ok,” he says, tentatively. “It’s important,” I offer, wanting to encourage his obvious efforts. “In the course I was teaching this past semester, several students claimed that they weren’t settlers, that maybe their ancestors were, but they weren’t. I tried to remind them that being a settler doesn’t mean that they, personally, ‘settled’ the land. It’s not a group to which we simply belong or don’t; it’s not about when we arrived here, or when our ancestors did.” Unsure if this is landing, I figure I might as well finish the thought. “Instead, it’s about how we are in a system of power relations – whether and how we benefit from settler colonialism in our lives. And you and I, love – as well as the vast majority of people in our lives – benefit enormously from settler colonialism. That’s what makes your questions so important.”

8  Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically

The silence that follows my last point feels full of possibility. It doesn’t feel like the silence that tells me he’s checked out of a conversation; instead, it feels like a silence in which both he and I are both wondering where to go with this conversation, what to do. We are both, as Leey’qsun scholar Rachel Flowers puts it, “thinking through the term settler as a set of responsibilities and action” (2015, p. 33).5 As I write the first draft of this proem, I am once again thinking through these responsibilities and actions. I write on “Canada Day” (July 1), but not just any Canada Day. As evidence of more than a thousand unmarked graves near former residential school sites (almost certainly the tip of the proverbial iceberg) has garnered significant public attention both in Canada and internationally, we seem to be reckoning with these questions in 2021 in ways I’ve not witnessed in my lifetime. This “we” needs a bit of unpacking, as it often does. Here, I mean that the mainstream Canadian media and public seem to be engaging with these questions in a more sustained way than I’ve witnessed. It is vital to note, however, that many scholars, activists, and folks living under colonial rule have long been doing this work and thinking about these questions at much deeper levels. Somehow, this moment of reckoning is making me angry. Angry that we needed “scientific” evidence of these graves to kickstart this conversation when Indigenous peoples and advocates have long been telling us about these horrors. Angry that the federal government failed to respond to the specific Call to Action to fund searches for such graves in the wake of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).6 Angry that the conversation itself is re-traumatizing Indigenous peoples, families, and communities. And angry that, even with the renewed vigour evident in this conversation, too little of the coverage is devoted to how settler colonialism lives on in the present. Moreover, all of the handwringing and flaglowering that followed the news of these unmarked graves will ring rather hollow and performative in the months to come as settler colonialism continues its violent project, perhaps most visible in the armed RCMP invasion of an encampment of land defenders on Wet’suwet’en lands in November (the third such invasion in recent years – see Simmons, 2022). Yet again, there is a danger, even as various communities cancel Canada Day celebrations and encourage “a time for reflection,” that this will be too neatly encapsulated as our “regrettable” past rather than as the very foundation and key organizing principle of this so-called nation and its central institutions.

Introduction “The truth about stories,” Thomas King suggests, “is that that’s all we are” (2003, p. 2). “Stories are wondrous things,” he elaborates… and “they are dangerous… So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories you are told” (King, 2003, pp. 9–10; also see Whitinui, 2014). As I hint at in the proem above, the stories I’ve been told are dangerous ones indeed, as I take up in Chapters 4 and 5, especially. More importantly, the stories I have told

Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically  9

are dangerous as well. And maybe most difficult of all, the stories I tell now – including the stories in the proem to the book and the proem to this chapter – are also dangerous. Wondrous, perhaps. But there is danger there too. The (a) danger in the proem to the book lies in the metaphorization of illness in my letter to Avery. Not only does such metaphorization undercut the realities of (living with) illness (Sontag, 1978), but it also fails to convey the contours of settler colonialism. This is not a system failing to work properly; rather, it’s a system working perfectly according to its violent structural logics: it is “not a bug, or a failure, but part of the design of this place called Canada” (Maynard & Simpson, 2022, p. 62). I return to the dangers of these stories most directly in Chapters 6 and 7. Building on King’s point, Cherokee Nation/ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ scholar Daniel Heath Justice asserts that “the stories that will make a difference aren’t the easy ones,” adding: “If they don’t challenge us, confound us, make us uncomfortable or uncertain or humble, then I’m not sure what they offer us in the long run, because to my mind it’s the difficult stories that offer hope of something better” (Justice, 2018, p. 102, emphasis added). Though Justice writes here of a different kind of story than those I tell in these pages, the central point holds: it is only by writing into a space of discomfort, of writing that discomfort into being, that we might bring these other stories to light. In crafting these stories, I write into my own discomfort, conceptualizing that process as generative. As Dutta notes, “stories bring worlds into being” (2018, p. 94), so it is vital that we ask ourselves what kinds of worlds we’re building. And yet, I’ve started this chapter with a (deceptively) easy story. I wrote it, first, as the proem for the whole book, thinking that it invited readers into a story that mattered and did some valuable signposting. As an early reader pointed out, however, it’s not, as written above, a story that will “challenge [me], confound [me], make [me] uncomfortable or uncertain or humble” (to return to Justice’s words). Instead, it’s a story about the embodied connections between a father and son and about fatherly pride, with only hints at uncertainty, moments of hesitation. It is, in other words, a story about “good white people” (Slater, 2019). A story with which I must be careful. A story to which I must return. It is also a story that points towards my interest in anti-colonial autoethnography in particular. The anti- is vital, as I take up in Chapter 3, as it calls for sustained interrogations of ideas that are foundational to at-homeness in and under settler colonialism. Moreover, as Sara Ahmed notes, “to be against something is, after all, to be in an intimate relation with that which one is against” (2004, p. 10). Anti-, in other words, is a fundamentally relational position, one that reminds us of our own entanglements in and with the very thing we oppose. The story from the proem above – as well as most others I tell in these pages – illustrates my “intimate relation” with settler colonialism. My focus in this manuscript, in other words, is not on settler colonialism per se, but on my own “entanglements” with and opposition to it; this is where I see the potential of anti-colonial autoethnography.

10  Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically

On Centring Whiteness While I take Justice’s point about difficult stories to heart, I am also wary of the politics of writing an anti-colonial project in which whiteness is centred. Following Granzow and Dean (2016), I ask myself whether my scholarship can “do more than expose the anxieties of settlers” (p. 89). Granzow and Dean offer a cogent articulation of the concerns that shape my project: our task is… a matter of addressing and challenging the injustices of colonial conquest writ large, and hence a matter of bringing the various changing and unstable practices of colonial knowledge production into the visible present to emphasize their ongoing presence (or reenactment) as something other than spectral, as something that has not “passed.” This would include addressing the practices that produce the Settler as well as those that produce the Other—as it is in part this dichotomy which formalizes the distinction... that grants settlers this comfortable sense of distance from the violence that concerns us. (2016, p. 89) One of my aims in these pages, then, is to bring these “changing and unstable practices of colonial knowledge production into the visible present” in order to interrogate both the particular phenomena about which I write and the process of thinking and writing about them, conceptualizing both as part of the present set of practices and institutions that reproduce settler colonialism and work towards settler futurity (more on that below). In addition to addressing the concerns highlighted by Granzow and Dean, I must also attend to Sara Ahmed’s (2004) important critique of what she calls “whiteness studies.” Ahmed points out a number of “anxieties” about whiteness studies, not the least of which is that “whiteness studies will sustain whiteness at the centre of intellectual inquiry, however haunted by absence, lack and emptiness” (2004, p. 2). More specifically, Ahmed situates whiteness studies within a “politics of declaration” in which people and institutions identify themselves as part of a problem (of racism, in this instance), which then gets marshalled as evidence that they are not part of the problem (i.e., they cannot be racists because they are aware of the problems of racism): “putting whiteness into speech, as an object to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action, and nor does it necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action that we could describe as anti-racist” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 3). The potential for autoethnography to work towards anti-colonial ends, as I explain in greater detail in Chapters 3–7, lies not in its declarations but in its capacity to help us understand our social worlds anew, to imagine different forms of relationality and the worlds potentially rendered possible in and by such forms. This does not, in any way, exempt me from Ahmed’s critique. Rather, Ahmed’s critique calls me to be attentive to the “risks” that accompany work centring whiteness, returning to them throughout

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the work, asking whether they are “necessary risk[s]” in terms of the political stakes, possibilities, and pitfalls (Ahmed, 2004, p. 2). I return to this point most directly in Chapter 7.

Autoethnographic Method and Methodology in Sport Studies Before developing the idea of anti-colonial autoethnography in greater depth, I set the stage by considering how autoethnography has been marshalled in sports studies over the past two and a half decades (e.g., Allen-Collinson, 2012; Anderson & Austin, 2012; Bunds, 2014; Chawansky, 2015; Clift, 2014; Chen, 2021; Denison & Rinehart, 2000; Forde, 2015; Giles & Williams, 2007; Pavlidis, 2013; Popovic, 2010, 2012; Sparkes, 1996). I do not intend this section to constitute a comprehensive account of autoethnographic work in sport sociology. Rather, I put select autoethnographic texts in conversation with each other to illustrate the key methodological tenets underpinning this body (these bodies) of work in order to help clarify the intervention I offer in the pages that follow. In recent years, scholars of sport and physical culture have employed autoethnography with increasing frequency, drawing on their own (auto) experiences, shaped as they are by culture (ethno), as an analytic (graphy) approach or strategy (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015). Animated by a rising interest in interpretive autobiography and autobiographical narratives, early interventions (e.g., Sparkes, 1996; Sparkes & Silvennoinen, 1999) paralleled a fledgling turn towards writing as a method of inquiry more broadly (see Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Two of the earliest meditations on writing as method in the field of sport studies can be found in: (1) Denison and Rinehart’s (2000) special issue of the Sociology of Sport Journal, titled “Imagining Sociological Narratives” and (2) Denison and Markula’s Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research (2003), which extended this conversation in sport sociology. As autoethnography has matured as a research methodology writ large (see, e.g., Bochner & Ellis, 2016; Denzin, 2018; Ellis, 2009; Holman Jones & Harris, 2018), it is not surprising to see sport scholars deploy it with greater frequency and regularity. However, and despite its now rather common-place location (see, e.g., Bunds, 2018; Dean, 2019; Delia, 2017; Laurendeau, 2011; McMahon & McGannon, 2017; Newman, 2011; Peers, 2015; Sparkes, 2012; Walton-Fisette, 2017), few sport scholars have engaged in a sustained interrogation of its paradigmatic underpinnings (e.g., ontology, epistemology, and axiology). Recently, however, Sparkes offers important and compelling “reflections on how as an evaluative self [he goes] about judging autoethnography in its different guises and the ways in which [he calls] upon various criteria to do so as part of a non-linear, complex, and messy process of embodied engagement” (2020, p. 290). Sparkes considers key paradigmatic questions as he reflects on his “evaluative self” as a seasoned autoethnographer often asked to review autoethnographic work submitted for publication.

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It is fitting that Sparkes, in particular, offers these reflections on autoethnographic work in sport studies, as his 1996 article “The Fatal Flaw: A Narrative of the Fragile Body-Self” in the flagship journal Qualitative Inquiry marks one of the earliest and most influential articulations of the import of autoethnographic methods in studies of sport, leisure, and physical culture. In this oft-cited work, Sparkes wades into a consideration of the “reflexive projects of the self and [the] various body projects” that unfold in athletes’ lives with a particular focus on “epiphanous moments in the lives of elite sport persons who become ill, get injured, and/or acquire a physical disability” (Sparkes, 1996, pp. 464–465). While this substantive area of study was already of interest to sport scholars, Sparkes notes that “realist” social science accounts of such phenomena result in “peculiarly disembodied account[s] of these intense bodily experiences” (465). As such, he looks to the work of those who have written about their “bodily experiences of sport as feeling and emotional insiders rather than detached (but interested) outsiders” (466) in order to ask a series of provocative questions – worth quoting at length – that would go on to inform a great deal of scholarly work in the ensuing decades: how are we to communicate (write) the subjectivity of such moments so that the world of lived experience is made directly accessible to the reader? How are we to write the body-self and produce narratives that draw the readers in, engage them, and provoke their feelings so that, as Denzin (1989b) hopes, they experience, or could experience, the events being described? How might we, following Shilling and Mellor (1994), develop embodied narratives that acknowledge the enabling properties that stem from an individual having a body, while also recognizing the constraints that follow from the fact of the individual (including the author) being a body? Furthermore, how might we write about biographical disruptions and interrupted body projects in ways that are themselves as disruptive, fragmented, and emotionally charged as the events they describe? How might we write so that we shrink the distance between the experiencing subjects and their accounts of lived experience? How might we write about body-self and time-space relationships in ways that fuse the personal and the societal in autobiographical forms of inquiry? Finally, how might we write so that the warping tyranny of dualisms such as subjectivity/objectivity, masculine/feminine, temporarily able-bodied/disabled, young/old, and so on are dissolved? (466) Here, Sparkes clears a path for much of the work that would be taken up by sport scholars in the years to come. Sparkes’ work has explicitly informed my own autoethnographic approach; this influence is perhaps most evident in my work on negotiating my aging (and increasingly, injured) body in sport, as in the following scene describing a moment with a physiotherapist: ‘Let’s see what kind of release it wants’, Jared says, almost to himself. I ponder the fact that this is the first of my (many) physiotherapists who has suggested

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that my knee might have an opinion. ‘Oh yeah, it wants this one’. I wait for the release, wondering what it will feel like. ‘There’, he says. ‘That should do it’. What should do it? He hasn’t done anything yet. Jared walks slowly back around to my feet, and repeats the demonstration he did not three minutes ago. This time, my left leg isn’t a solid block of wood, as if there is no knee joint. This time, my left leg responds just the way my right one does… [Later, ] he stands again at my head, and places one hand on either side of my skull, making me think of the Vulcan mind meld. What an intriguing connection to spark there. As if Dr Spock is in the room with us, repeatedly stating in his usual monotone delivery: ‘This is not logical’. Jared stays at my head for some time, and then mumbles ‘No, not today’ before moving on. A few moments later, he says ‘We’re all done for today’ quite nonchalantly. I sit up. Whatthefuckwasthatallabout? Howthehelldidyoudothat? WhatamIsupposedtodonow? WhoAREyou? Whydoesitfeellikepuddingispouringoutofmylegs? Howcanyoucallyourselfaphysio? Isthisallsomekindofpracticaljoke? Whatwasthatbusinesswithmyhead? …‘What did you just do?’ I ask, trying to sound simply curious. Jared pauses, inhales, and says ‘Well, you have a Western brain, so I’ll explain it in Western language …’ Laurendeau (2019, pp. 246, 252) Notably, not long after Sparkes’ intervention, Denison and Rinehart co-edited a special issue of the Sociology of Sport Journal dedicated to “sociological narratives,” including autoethnography. In their introduction to the special issue, the co-editors index a “desire to experiment with form and function” in social science research, highlighting their commitment “to making fictional and other types of storied representation an accepted form of scholarship” (Denison & Rinehart, 2000, pp. 1–2). From this starting point, they offer a special issue that helps “frame” narrative work in the field of sport studies, numerous non-fictional pieces “grounded in everyday, concrete, and specific events” as well as “several fictional exemplars of the narrative imagination” (Denison & Rinehart, 2000, p. 3). This special issue – as well as Denison and Rinehart’s framing thereof – points to a key tension and potential underlying much autoethnographic work. The distinction here between “everyday, concrete, specific events” on one hand and “narrative imagination” on the other is perhaps of heuristic value, but also draws on a binary between “fact” and “fiction” that is worth interrogating. One of the potentials of autoethnographic work, as noted above, is to trouble the “tyranny of dualisms” (Sparkes, 1996, p. 466), including the dualism of fact and fiction. Autoethnography, that is, holds space for thinking through how distinctions such as this are mobilized to construct certain kinds of knowledge as “legitimate” or “scientific” and dismiss others as “stories,” for instance (e.g., Ellis, 1995). Autoethnographically refusing this dualism might allow us to look at how fact and fiction are interwoven/cleaved, related. It might give us room, as I take up

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in Chapter 2, to interrogate the fictions that both underpin and are central to the workings of the settler state, not least in and through the facts we encounter in school curricula, for instance. My point here is not about the “truthiness” of what we write about, but the ways in which we are always – as both humans and autoethnographers – weaving fact and fiction together, turning facts into fictions and fictions into facts, as we “re-word, recycle, retell and remake our past and future according to the narrative conventions compelled by the present” (Henson, 2017, p. 222). As I take up in Chapter 3, I see in anti-colonial autoethnography the potential not to critique all fact or fiction but to recognize their inseparability and this inseparability as generative of certain realities.7 In staking out new directions for sport scholars to consider, Denison and Rinehart highlight the sense(s) in which accounts that attend to both analytic rigour and artistic crafting have “the power to illustrate, illuminate, inspire, and mobilize readers to think and act creatively and reflexively” (Denison & Rinehart, 2000, p. 4). Moreover, in taking licence to “play in the space between fact and fiction, past and possibility,” autoethnographers might engage with the messiness, contingencies, and illusions of our social worlds, understanding ourselves and each other as “[t]ime travellers living in a world of our own making” (Henson, 2017, pp. 222–223). Autoethnographers might write of worlds made, worlds brought into being, as well as the pasts and possibilities that haunt the “facts” of the “everyday, concrete, specific events” that we story (Tuck & Ree, 2013). Consider, as an exemplar, the autoethnographic work of Danielle Peers. Peers’ (2012, 2015) interrogations of disability provide accessible yet theoretically sophisticated considerations of their own multi-dimensional and unfolding body projects, engaging and provoking not only readers’ intellectual understandings of disability but also their embodied and emotive responses. Peers’ articulation of the “(de)composition of a recovering Paralympian,” for instance, opens with “the interrogation”: It is dark here. I am alone, or at least, I feel alone. It feels like years since I have been here: since they have been asking me the same questions; since they have been trying to figure out who, exactly, I am. Am I the innocent victim? The hostile witness? The suspect? The criminal – cheat? I am finally broken down. I give up. I am ready to confess the truth … I am just not sure which truth to tell. (2012, p. 175) From the very first words of the article, Peers draws readers into their embodied experience of disability. Moreover, this interrogation scene both invites and impels readers to understand the interconnectedness of individual lives and social contexts not only in the lives of the author, but in their own lives as readers as well: The light is in my eyes and I am tired. I cannot tell who it is this time: is it The reporter? The classifier? The doctor? Is it you, reader? The achingly

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familiar questions cut off my line of thought. The interrogation begins: ‘what did you do to yourself?’ I pause, stumbling on how to start. The voice sighs, turning impatient at what it can only read as belligerence. I know they are expecting an origin narrative: a traumatic story with sirens and scars; a firm date etched onto my body and into my mind. ‘When did you become disabled? How did it happen? What is your disability, anyways? Is there a cure?’ I start as close to the beginning as my mind can reach. ‘There was an accident’, I begin, ‘It was about a 120 years ago …’ (175) Peers bookends this interrogation scene with another, one that echoes the first but differs in vital ways. The final words of the article powerfully flip some key scripts: I can almost make out who it is, this time. Is it another normate? Is it a fellow crip? It is it you, again, reader? The interrogation begins: ‘What did you do to yourself?’ I have composed myself as a disabled person, a Paralympian, a supercrip. ‘When did you become disabled?’ Most recently? Just now. ‘How did it happen?’ Through your questions, my answers, these stories, your gaze. ‘What’s your disability, anyways?’ Disability itself. ‘Are they working on a cure?’ We are. Are you? (187) These interrogation scenes – and Peers’ autoethnographic work more generally – brilliantly illustrate several key tenets of autoethnographic work in sport studies. Their words create social worlds and draw readers into them, calling readers to think about as well as feel the contours of the embodied experiences about which they write. Moreover, their work goes a long way towards dissolving “the tyranny of dualisms” towards which Sparkes pointed a decade and a half earlier. Further, having taught this piece in numerous undergraduate and graduate courses, I can attest that it responds to Denison and Rinehart’s call for work that serves to “illuminate, inspire, and mobilize readers to think and act creatively and reflexively.” That’s a bit abstract, isn’t it?? Peers’ work is the reason you wrote about injury and your own ableist bullshit. And almost a decade on from its publication, you’ve lost track of how many times you’ve taught Peers’ article and how many times you’ve gotten choked up reading it with a class. In a very different vein, Davidson (2009), too, develops “embodied narratives that acknowledge the enabling properties that stem from an individual having

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a body, while also recognizing the constraints that follow from the fact of the individual (including the author) being a body” (Sparkes, 466). Writing about her experiences playing hockey “during the first North American OutGames/Western Cup gay and lesbian athletic tournament held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in April 2007” (2009, p. 337), Davidson interrogates the complexities of public displays of same-sex desire. She, too, highlights the sense in which autoethnographic methods can be mobilized as a form of resistance to dominant academic publishing norms: There are many ways to tell a research story. The hegemonic forms in the social sciences are scientific tales and realist tales, where an analytic truth is structurally secured through a strong hypothesis, which is then tested through objective, valid, and reliable methods. In this article, I explicitly work against this kind of knowledge production. Instead, working autoethnographically, I (re)construct a narrative to explore how coded lesbian erotic signs are produced and consumed. Davidson (2009, p. 339) Davidson goes on to narrate a particular moment (as well as many leading up to and following it) in which fans of the “Booby Orrs” publicly bared their breasts in celebration of the Booby Orrs finally scoring a goal in the hockey tournament. Moreover, Davidson complicates this moment, theorizing it in the context of several touchstone moments of public displays of (partial) nudity at sporting events in North America. In so doing, Davidson highlights both the sense in which the flashing incident at the OutGames was transgressive of dominant heteronormative sporting logics and how it has a “potentially dangerous legacy,” one in which the transgressiveness of the moment is complicated – if not completely overshadowed – by “the remobilization of other powerfully delimiting discourses—including class/status privilege and sexual objectification” (Davidson, 2009, p. 347). Davidson’s work points back towards King’s (2003) admonishment that the stories we tell and are told need to be handled with great care. She beautifully articulates how a moment like this flashing incident can be simultaneously a story of liberation and erotic transgression and one of objectification and disempowerment.8 Finally, Nikolas Dean stories his experience with a traumatic head injury sustained in a lacrosse game, drawing on a symbolic interactionist framework to “make sense of the (re)negotiation of [his] athletic identity [after] the formidable impacts of sustaining a sport-related concussion” (2019, p. 22). His aims in so doing are to help readers understand the lived experience of sustaining a concussion, “provide a ‘voice’ to the lived experience” of sport-related concussion, and offer “a place for refuge and comfort for other athletes going through similar situations” (2019, pp. 22, 28). Dean refuses a tidy, linear, even coherent narrative of his experiences, writing instead a somewhat “messy” and “jumbled” account, aiming to capture in the form of the writing some of the off-kilter confusion of his experiences with concussion. Dean takes readers on a journey through not

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only his experiences but also his emotional roller-coaster as he struggles to “just act normal” while losing his sense of self as both an athlete and a student and trying to paper over these losses with alcohol and other efforts at escaping what he experiences as the confines of his injury and the recovery process. As noted above, this is an intentionally selective discussion of autoethnography in sport sociology. My aim is not to catalogue the excellent autoethnographic work that has been undertaken by sport scholars, but to draw attention to a selection of texts that provide some signposts of the work in this broad field. In particular, these examples highlight the ways in which autoethnography draws us into the lived experiences of these authors, inviting (or challenging) us to understand both their experiences and the sociological worlds that both shape these experiences and are potentially reshaped by these authors as social actors. Autoethnography, in other words, is not simply a recounting of past events, but also always an imagining of future possibilities, an act of world-making, whether or not the authors frame their work as such. These examples also point towards the breadth and complexity (substantively, theoretically, and methodologically) of this growing body of scholarship. In Chapter 3, I return to these complexities in a discussion of the ontological, epistemological, and axiological underpinnings of autoethnographic work. Before doing so, however, I provide additional foundation for the work in the coming chapters.

An Archive of Thinking Too often, in my view, the texts with which we engage as students and scholars are rather tidy, written as if the thinker has always perfectly understood the subject matter. These erasures of process, of uncertainty, of provisionality even, seem to me to constitute a kind of epistemic violence. They erase, in other words, the process by which we come to understand things anew. Such erasures, arguably, produce a “too cared-for over-sanitized text” and in that sense index a particular kind of epistemological carelessness (Fawaz, personal communication, January 15, 2022). In these pages, I write against this general ethos, preserving evidence of my own (mis)understandings at various stages of my thinking about (the intersections of) autoethnography, settler colonialism, and physical culture. I do not do so in order to suggest that I have arrived; I will, no doubt, return to these pages and shake my head, as I have metaphorically shaken it in these pages when considering my earlier work. Perversely, I hope that this headshaking comes about, as it will surely be an indicator that I have and will continue learn(ed/ing). The point, at this stage, is to emphasize the process by which I have interrogated (and “we” might interrogate – more on “we” to come) the key questions around which this work is oriented. I see this work, in other words, situated within what Murray calls an “injunction to incompletion” (2018, p. 268). This injunction is important both for me and for readers; if we are to take seriously the challenges of dismantling settler colonialism and its attendant violences, we need to commit not to a search for the “right answers” but to the ongoing process of interrogating

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lines of thought and action. As such, I intend this “archive” to signal to readers the importance and value of such a process, as messy and unsettling as it has been and continues to be.

Organization of the Book Following from the proem and introductory chapter, the work unfolds as follows. In broad terms, the book is divided into two sections. In the first section (Chapters 1–3), I engage in a good deal of expositional work as I develop a call for anti-colonial autoethnography and lay the groundwork for my own approach thereto, providing autoethnographic tethers along the way. In Chapter 2, I provide important background that underpins the work in these pages; I situate both myself and the work, considering both the context in which my stories unfold (Canada as a settler state) and my own relationship to settler colonialism. Moreover, I outline the basic contours of discourses of decolonization, indigenization, and reconciliation, as these constitute important touchstones in both academia and broader political conversations in Canada in the wake of the TRC. In Chapter 3, I outline the paradigmatic underpinnings of autoethnography, considering ontology, epistemology, and especially axiology. Moreover, I focus on the idea of “decolonizing autoethnography” and “autoethnography as decolonization,” highlighting the value of autoethnographic interrogations of home, liminality, and fragmentedness. I do so in order to set the stage for a call for anti-colonial autoethnographic work in sport studies. In the second section, I engage in my own anti-colonial autoethnographic practice along a number of lines. In Chapter 4, I read my history of and connection to outdoor culture with an eye towards interrogating my complicity in historical and ongoing settler-colonial violence that has rendered my love of “the mountains” both possible and ostensibly unproblematic. In so doing, I unsettle (my) understandings of the connections between land, embodiment, masculinities, and able-bodiedness, exploring how settler attachment to the mountains is predicated on and serves to perpetuate, a(n ongoing) history of land dispossession. I also, however, consider a “different temporal horizon” through a discussion of settler futurity as it relates to outdoor recreation, complicating settler mobility in the process. In Chapter 5, I take up fragments of my childhood, youth, and young adulthood, interrogating various pedagogies of white settler masculinity that shaped the early years of my life. I examine a number of moments that illustrate the quotidian colonial violence that constituted some of the earliest pedagogies I encountered growing up in occupied territories. In doing so, I aim to probe the ways in which the givenness of settler colonialism shaped my encounters with sport and physical culture as a youth, and simultaneously, how my failure to recognize that process ensured that I would leave that logic untroubled and uninterrogated for many years to come. Finally, I consider whether and how we might unbecome settlers, not as a move towards innocence but in the sense of imagining not living in and under settler colonialism.

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In Chapter 6, I interrogate my ambivalence around the singing of the Canadian national anthem prior to sporting events, drawing on these experiences and affects to consider the emotional economy at work in such ritualistic moments. More specifically, I story this form of nation-making and my own increasingly troubled sense of national belonging as I struggle to put my anti-colonial politics into practice in the context of sport spectatorship both on my own and perhaps especially with my children. Additionally, I consider the ways in which the ­anthem – and my experiences with it – points to a kind of inheritance, one I seek to disavow and reimagine. In Chapter 7, I turn my attention (back) to the future, delving into the potential of autoethnographies of sport and recreation to shed light on the (re)production of the settler state, but more importantly how they might help us imagine “elsewheres” as we labour in support of those who have long been working to dismantle these systems of violence and oppression (McGuire-Adams et al., 2022; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Thus, in Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography, I offer a sustained and developed consideration of the potential of autoethnography to contribute to critical studies of physical cultural practices, to work that can hold perceiving, “knowing,” and feeling together in relation to and tension with one another. More specifically, and locating the text within anti-colonial discourse and praxis, I make an explicit call for anti-colonial approaches to autoethnography, challenging scholars of physical culture to interrogate and write against the (settler-)colonial assumptions at work in so many of the physical cultural (and academic) spaces in which we undertake our scholarly activities. The focus here on anti-colonial discourse and praxis stems from the political import of thinking and writing towards “the proactive, political struggle of colonized peoples against the ideology and practice of colonialism” (Hart, Straka & Rowe, 2017, p. 333). Importantly, anti-colonialism can… involve all parties of this colonial relationship. It can thus include the support and actions of people of the colonizer group. For example, Settlers can work in anti-colonial ways by educating members of their own group, challenging overt and covert colonial oppression, and supporting Indigenous peoples in acts of self-determination. Anticolonial members of both groups challenge the power and operations of colonialism in political, economic, cultural institutions (Ashcroft et al., 2000), and social systems. Hart, Straka & Rowe (2017, p. 333) Thus, anti-colonialism is foundational to the approach outlined in this text, as I explain in Chapter 3 in particular. Moreover, I articulate in the book a call for researchers of sport and physical movement to interrogate and undercut the workings of settler colonialism in their scholarship and activism. I return, here, to the notion that “stories are wonderous things [and] they are dangerous” (King, 2003, pp. 9–10). There are many stories that most Canadians are told (and tell) about ourselves and the country. We are, ostensibly, an open,

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tolerant, multicultural society that fosters equality and opportunity for all. “Explorers” came to these lands, met those already here in “peace and friendship,” and, over time, helped and supported those first inhabitants by “modernizing” the political, spiritual, educational, legal architecture of a young nation. And yet, any careful consideration of our histories reveals otherwise, troubling this narrative, and pointing to the ways particular stories have been told – and others rendered unthinkable – as part of the white settler mythologizing of the nation (King, 2003; Razack, 2002). “Mythologies or national stories,” Razack explains, “are about a nation’s origins and history. They enable citizens to think of themselves as part of a community, defining who belongs and who does not belong to the nation” (Razack, 2002, p. 2). The stories that trouble these mythologies are not comfortable ones to live with – they ask and demand that settlers reckon with them rather than leaving them in the shadows (shadows created, I will note, by the settler state and settler complicity). So, to (white) settler readers, in particular, I urge you to be open to your own discomfort, your own ambivalence, as you engage with my stories (and my discomfort, ambivalence, and pain) and, perhaps, your own. While many autoethnographies justifiably aim to provide “refuge and comfort for [others] going through similar situations” (Dean, 2019), my goal here is, to a large extent, the obverse of this; I aim to interrogate and disrupt a place of refuge and comfort that many settlers find and create in and through their physical cultural experiences, to unsettle those experiences, to interrogate the comfort itself (Tuck & Ree, 2013). The aim in all of this is not simply to invite discomfort for fellow settlers. Rather, my aim in undertaking this work and encouraging other sport scholars to the same is to interrupt – perhaps even refuse – settler comfort in order to work towards action. If settler colonialism is to be dismantled, a vital first step is for those most privileged by it (and to whom those privileges are often least evident) to become deeply uncomfortable, to see, name, and interrogate our own entanglements with this system of state-sanctioned terrorism. This is the hope that animates my work in these pages.

Coda – November 17, 2021, 6:47 am I return to the book’s proem and the letter I wrote to Avery, my now five-year-old watching cartoons and eating oatmeal in the living room. After asking if she’d like me to read her something, I pause her show and share that short letter with her, watching her smile at “Dear Avery” and listening to her respond to the questions I pose in the letter. Finishing the letter, I gently prod: “Do you have any questions, love?” “No,” she offers, tentatively. “Do you like it?” “Yeah,” she says, clearly. “But what does that mean?” Good question, my love. Good question…

Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically  21

Notes 1 I want to be clear here not to undermine the testimony of residential school survivors who remember some of their experiences (including those with sport) and/or some of the residential school staff in positive terms. My claim here is about residential schooling as a system, not about the individual encounters with that system, about which I have no place making claims. 2 See Beattie (2021). 3 See Tasker (2021). 4 As in my past autoethnographic work (e.g., Laurendeau 2014, 2019), I use italics in these vignettes as “analytic memos written at various points of this project… to employ polyvocality and show readers the process of working on/with/through ideas” at every stage of a research project (Laurendeau, 2014, p. 11). Further, I will note that I refuse both a chronological approach to autoethnography, and an explicit articulation of my ‘procedures’ as part of an “ethics of messiness and multiplicity” – an acknowledgment of the messiness of bodies, emotions, experiences, and, not least, the research process itself (Avner et al., 2014, p. 61). Perhaps some readers will find this messiness unsettling. 5 I note, at this early stage, my approach to, and ambivalence about, locating scholars as I do in these pages. Initially, I identified most/all authors as I do here, according to either the specific identifier (Leey’qsun, in the case of Flowers), or as “settler” scholars. As one reviewer of an earlier article pointed out, however, the risk here is that this “renders non-Indigenous identities as unproblematically settler, while Indigenous categories are presented as homogenous. Where is the diversity that is inevitably present in all or both?” Moreover, it hearkens to a kind of essentialism that I wish to refuse in my work. At the same time, these identities are sometimes invoked – including by these very authors – precisely because they do a certain kind of work for a certain kind of audience. All of this leaves me wondering whether there is “more power in marshalling an identity – and a history, it’s a history – or in refusing the specificity itself” (Granzow, personal communication, October 28, 2019). Ultimately, I do both in the pages that follow. At times, I draw on the author’s self-identification, even while understanding that this may shift for different audiences and over time. At others, I provide no such identification, whether because I couldn’t find the author’s own lead to follow, or to refuse the essentializing and reification of the identification itself. Or, often, both. Overall, it seems to me, the result is a somewhat messy, uneven, and perhaps even contradictory politics of identification. And perhaps this is generative when we are dealing with the messy, uneven, and contradictory realm of settler-Indigenous relations. 6 The TRC was formed as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, finalized in 2006. The work of the TRC spanned between 2008 and 2015 and involved the testimony of over 6,000 witnesses. The final report of the TRC, released in December 2015, included six volumes (almost 4,000 pages in total), the first of which opens as follows: For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015).

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Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically  23 Denison, J., & Markula, P. (2003). Moving writing: Crafting movement in sport research. New York: Peter Lang. Denison, J., & Rinehart, R. (2000). Introduction: Imagining sociological narratives. Sociology of Sport Journal, 17(1), 1–4. Denzin, N. (2018). Performance autoethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Dutta, M. (2018). Autoethnography as decolonization, decolonizing autoethnography: Resisting to build our homes. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 94–96. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617735637. Ellis, C. (1995). Final negotations: A story of love, and chronic illness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Ellis, C. (2009). Revision: Autoethnographic reflections on life and work. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Flowers, R. (2015). Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(2), 32–49. Forde, S. D. (2015). Fear and loathing in Lesotho: An autoethnographic analysis of sport for development and peace. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 50(8), 958– 973. DOI: 10.1177/1012690213501916. Giles, A., & Williams, D. (2007). Are we afraid of ourselves? Self-narrative research in leisure studies. World Leisure Journal, 49(4), 189–198. DOI: 10.1080/04419057.2007.9674511. Granzow, K., & Dean, A. (2016). Ghosts and their analysts: Writing and reading towards something like justice for murdered or missing Indigenous women. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(1), 83–94. DOI: 10.1177/1532708615625690. Hart, M., Straka, S., & Rowe, G. (2017). Working across contexts: Practical considerations of doing indigenist/anti-colonial research. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(5), 332–342. DOI: 10.1177/1077800416659084. Henson, D. (2017). Fragments and fictions: An autoethnography of past and possibility. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(3), 222–224. DOI: 10.1177/1077800416640307. Holman Jones, S., & Harris, A. (2018). Queering autoethnography. New York: Routledge. Justice, D. (2018). Why Indigenous literatures matter. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press. King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, Inc. Laurendeau, J. (2011). “If you’re reading this, it’s because I’ve died”: Masculinity and relational risk in BASE jumping. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28(4), 404–420. DOI: 10.1123/ ssj.28.4.404. Laurendeau, J. (2014). “Just tape it up for me, ok?”: Masculinities, injury, and embodied emotion. Emotion, Space & Society, 12(1), 11–17. DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2013.03.010. Laurendeau, J. (2019). “You don’t need any of that stuff”: (Re)Stor(y)ing my(nd/) body. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise & Health, 11(2), 246–257. DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2018.1433227. Maynard, R., & Simpson, L. (2022). Rehearsals for living. Toronto: Alfred A Knopf Canada. McGuire-Adams, T., Joseph, J., Peers, D., Eales, L., Bridel, W., Chen, C., Hamdon, E., & Kingsley, B. (2022). Awakening to elsewheres: Collectively restorying embodied experiences of (be)longing. Sociology of Sport Journal. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2021-0124 McMahon, J., & McGannon, K. (2017). Re-immersing into elite swimming culture: A meta-autoethnography by a former elite swimmer. Sociology of Sport Journal, 34(3), 223– 234. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2016-0134.

24  Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically Murray, L. (2018). Settler and Indigenous stories of Kingston/Ka’tarohkwi: A case study in critical heritage pedagogy. Journal of Canadian Studies, 35(1), 249–279. Newman, J. (2011). (Un)comfortable in my own skin: Articulation, reflexivity, and the duality of self. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 11(6), 545–557. DOI: 10.1177/1532708611426110. Pavlidis, A. (2013). Writing resistance in roller derby. Making the case for auto/ethnographic writing in feminist leisure research. Journal of Leisure Research, 45(5), 661–676. DOI: 10.18666/jlr-2013-v45-i5-4368. Peers, D. (2012). Interrogating disability: The (de)composition of a recovering Paralympian. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 4(2), 175–188. DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2012.685101. Peers, D. (2015). From inhalation to inspiration: A genealogical auto-ethnography of a supercrip. In S. Tremain (Ed.), Foucault and the government of disability (2nd ed.) (pp. 331–349). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Popovic, M. (2010). A voice in the rink: Playing with our histories and evoking autoethnography. Journal of Sport History, 37(2), 235–255. Popovic, M. (2012). Moksha rose from the heart: A prosaic and poetic embodiment of yoga autoethnography. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 12(1), 30–42. DOI: 10.1177/1532708611430484. Razack, S. (2002). When place becomes race. In S. Razack (Ed.), Race, space, and the law (pp. 1–20). Toronto: Between the Lines. Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.) (pp. 959–978). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Simmons, M. (May 12, 2022). RCMP were planning raids while in talks with Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs about meeting. The Narwhal. https://thenarwhal.ca/ rcmp-wetsuweten-meeting/. Slater, L. (2019). Anxieties of belonging in settler colonialism: Australia, race and place. New York: Routledge. Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sparkes, A. (1996). The fatal flaw: A narrative of the fragile body-self. Qualitative Inquiry, 2(4), 463–494. Sparkes, A. (2012). Fathers and sons: In bits and pieces. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(2), 174–185. DOI: 10.1177/1077800411429095. Sparkes, A. (2020). Autoethnography: Accept, revise, reject? An evaluative self reflects. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 12(2), 289–302. DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2020.1732453. Sparkes, A., & Silvennoinen, M. (1999). Talking bodies: Men’s narratives of the body and sport. Jyvaskyla: SoPhi Academic Press. Tasker, J. (January 25, 2021). Lynn Beyak, the senator who defended residential schools, is resigning. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/beyak-retirement-1.5886435. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). (2015). Canada’s residential schools: The history, part 1 origins to 1939. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd. https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Volume_1_History_ Part_1_English_Web.pdf. Tuck, E., & Ree, C. (2013). A glossary of haunting. In S. Holman Jones, T. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 639–658). New York: Routledge.

Writing Sport and Physical Activity Autoethnographically  25 Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Walton-Fisette, J. (2017). Enduring or stubbornness? What it takes to be a “runner” with physical limitations. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 41(4), 275–289. DOI: 10.1177/0193723517707698. Whitinui, P. (2014). Indigenous autoethnography: Exploring, engaging, and experiencing “self” as a narrative method of inquiry. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 43(4), 456–487. DOI: 10.1177/0891241613508148.

Chapter 2

Situating the Author, Interrogating Canada (Un)sett(l)ing the Stage

Proem – November 6, 2021 As Quinn stands up from the hard plastic chair, he looks down at me, eyebrow raised. “Dad?,” he queries. The intensity – even desperation – of his gaze is too much for me right now. “It’s okay, love,” I offer (too) quickly, fleetingly meeting his eyes. What the fuck am I doing? Why, when I’ve spent 48 years of my life standing for the anthem, do I suddenly have a visceral response to doing so? How do I plan to explain this to Quinn? To Ave? To Carly? And what the hell is this supposed to accomplish? “You go ahead… I’ll explain in a minute.” “Uh…” he looks to me, then to the Canadian flag hanging from the rafters, then back to me, still seated, toque covering my head. I open my mouth slightly, not sure of what to offer him right now. My chest flutters and my cheeks flush as I realize that I am drawing attention, now, not only to myself but to him as well. “It’s ok, love,” I say, and he turns back towards the flag. The familiar anthem begins, pulling at me from behind my belly button. What now? Dear reader, Hi, again. How are you doing? Anxious to get to the heart of the matter? Me too! Before we can do that, though, we’ve got a bit more work to do, starting with some questions: Do you know who you are? Where you’re from? The histories of which you are a part? Do you know how your family came to be on the lands you now occupy? Are you, like me, a white settler? If so, what does that mean to you, look like in your life? What are your inheritances, and where did they come from? Are you a racialized settler, negotiating both your own occupation of these lands as well as the violences of white supremacy? If so, in what ways do you benefit from settler colonialism even as you encounter everyday and systemic racism? Are you someone who has been displaced from their homelands not by choice but by force? What kinds of entanglements do you have with settler colonialism?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-4

Situating the Author, Interrogating Canada  27

Seriously. Those are not rhetorical questions. Take a minute… really consider them. As you do, I invite you to consider how they land in your body… Do you notice anything shifting, growing, or settling in your body as you sit with these questions? These are big questions, to be sure, but they’re also the foundation of the work in these pages. The proem above hints at some of those questions in the context of my life. I’m trying, in other words, to ground the expositional work autoethnographically, as one early reader put it. In another sense, though, I’m foreshadowing some of the arguments I’ll develop in Chapter 6, in particular. So, consider this kind of an amuse-bouche for your brain and heart, so not much of an amuse-bouche at all, truth be told. Anyway, here’s the deal… Before turning to my call for anti-colonial autoethnography, I need to give you a sense of where I’m writing from. I mean, where I’m writing from geographically, sure. (More on that in a moment.) But where I’m writing from, more to the point, in terms of my relationship to the particular contours of settler colonialism on the lands I occupy. I’m no innocent here. I’m in this up to my eyeballs, as it were. Are you? In hopeful uncertainty, Jay

Situating Myself In this autoethnographic work, I follow Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Simpson, who writes: “My body and my life are part of my research, and I use this knowledge to critique and analyze” (2017, p. 31). I do so cognizant that there is some danger in borrowing too liberally from Indigenous scholars. I do not mean here to suggest that I am engaged in the project that Simpson describes (how could I be?!); instead, I cite Simpson rather than a settler autoethnographer as part of my citational politics, in which we might see “citations as academic bricks through which we create houses. When citational practices become habits, bricks form walls. I think as feminists we can opt to create a crisis around citation, even just a hesitation, a wondering, that might help us not to follow the well-trodden citational paths” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 148). I draw on my own embodied and lived experiences in order to interrogate how systems of power – and the ways those systems of power live in our bodies, minds, and emotional lives – systematically hinder our capacities to appreciate the connections between our own experiences and those of others past, present, and future (Finney, 2014; Thorpe, 2012). A key dimension of my current work is to consider my own positioning as a cisgender heterosexual nondisabled white man. I want to pause here to interrogate this “positioning.” As with the term “settler,” these identity categories point not to some biological categorization, but to the idea that structures of domination – systems of power and privilege – produce our identities. As just one example, I am “nondisabled” not because I have no (obvious) physical impairments but because

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the social structures around me are built to accommodate (and normalize) my particular bodily (in)capacities. My rapidly deteriorating vision, for example, is not a significant barrier to my full functioning at home, work, or play. I am nondisabled, then, in the sense that the world is built with me in mind (Clare, 2017). The question, then, is not what I am (e.g., a white cisgender man, a settler), but what my identities – as understood by both myself and others – repeatedly afford. The question is what they make possible in my life, such as being understood as “belonging” in certain social spaces, understood as being able to speak “objectively” or “authoritatively” about social issues, and much more. Not only – but perhaps especially – in terms of my autoethnographic work (e.g., Laurendeau 2011, 2014, 2019, 2020), it is vital to situate myself and interrogate how both my experiences and my understandings of them shape and are shaped by my social location. In terms of the work in this particular monograph, it is especially important that I interrogate my relationship to settler colonialism and (continue) to think through what that relationship makes (un)available analytically as well as my intellectual and political responsibilities. Here, I heed Macoun’s argument that “white settler researchers should approach critical encounters with and through our complicity in ongoing white colonialism, and that this involves attempting to appreciate our own political and epistemological limits” (2016, p. 87). I employ the common term “settler” above, and this is language for which I have often reached in recent years. I grew up in Treaty 71 territory (Calgary, specifically) and have lived, studied, and worked on the lands of many nations, including those part of the Blackfoot Confederacy as well as Coast Salish, Ktunaxa, Tsuu T’ina, Tsleil-Waututh, Metis, Anishinaabe, and Mi’kma’ki peoples. Moreover, many of my family’s roots can be traced back through the early days of what is now known as Quebec (and further back, to France). Without question, my whole life has been structured by the benefits of colonial institutions and practices, though for most of my life I have, like many settlers, been ignorant of these privileges. That ignorance is one of the key analytic objects in this monograph, as I take up below. Leey’qsun scholar Rachel Flowers cautions that the term settler is often employed “without a critical understanding of its meaning and the relationships embedded within it, rendering it an empty signifier” (Flowers, 2015, p. 33). “The main problem,” Flowers elaborates, “is the reduction of a set of privileges and practices to fit within a binary of Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities rather than thinking through the term ‘settler’ as a set of responsibilities and action” (Flowers, 2015, p. 33). It seems to me that the central aim of my work in these pages is to do precisely this: to use my experiences with various physical cultural practices (e.g., recreational camping and hiking; sport spectatorship; the Calgary Stampede) to think through my settler positioning not as a static location, but as a complex, layered, and dynamic set of relational responsibilities. On this point, Coulthard (2014) highlights the value of the language “colonizer.” As Justice (2018) notes, this language “returns us to a discussion of colonialism that attends specifically to

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structures of power,… an understanding that there are many ways of being in relation to this land” (p. 12). Simultaneously, it serves as an acknowledgement that I benefit from settler colonialism in an ongoing way, even as I critique it. You wrote most of the previous two paragraphs years ago and suggested that calling yourself a “colonizer” would be productive. But do you really do so? You still (as of now – August 2022) use “settler” in your email signature, for instance. More importantly, has doing so – or having written about doing so – actually changed the way you negotiate the world or your privilege in any meaningful way? What does it mean, in other words, to centre your complicity beyond simply writing about centring your complicity and/or acknowledging it before moving on? The unresolved conversation with Quinn in the proem, for instance, points to the uncertainty you still have about how to live the politics that underpin this work. You’re going to have to come back to that in these pages… To return to the language of “settlers” for a moment, I will draw on KoleszarGreen’s discussion of the value of thinking through the term “guest.” KoleszarGreen contrasts “guest” with “settler” in ways that resonate with Coulthard’s arguments: …a settler is an individual who states that they are on stolen land. They might know whose ‘traditional territory’ they are on, and they might wish to be a good ally, but usually a settler’s intentions stop there! A Guest, on the other hand, understands through a reflexive process that as a Guest they have responsibilities to learn about rematriation of the land [and] the history and current story of the land that they are Guests on! They politicize that understanding. Finally, they listen to and learn protocols which do not appropriate but unsettle the privilege of ignorance. (2018, p. 174) Koleszar-Green suggests that settlers are aware of the violences of settler colonialism but have yet to take seriously the responsibilities that come with being a guest. As such, she suggests that those who think of themselves as settlers would be well served to work towards identifying as guests in the politicized way she describes. I’ve often resisted the language of “guest” in the sense that I am an uninvited guest on Blackfoot lands and have no immediate intention of leaving. But in the terms that Koleszar-Green elaborates, guest is something towards which I might aspire, not as an identity but as a form of relationality. At the end of the day, however, the function of our word choices may be more important than the words themselves. What do our terminology choices prompt us to do? How do they help us move through our process? How do they impact our relationships with Indigenous Peoples? And how do they ultimately help bring us to live in Indigenous sovereignty in deeper ways? Carlson-Manathara (2021, p. 36)

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With the above-named form of relationality in mind, it is imperative that I take seriously my complicity in the very systems I critique in this work. It is not enough to simply do critical scholarly work. As Macoun notes, this can, in fact, be a move to side-step complicity: “Assuming one’s criticality can be a way of not admitting one’s complicity. I think complicity is a starting point. We are implicated in the worlds that we critique; being critical does not suspend any such implication” (2016, p. 86). Again, that is evident in the proem of Chapter 1. That conversation in the kayak with Quinn – to which I return in Chapter 7 – reveals my own unresolved implication in all of this even as I engage in critical scholarship. In the proems of both Chapters 1 and 2, in other words, I am struggling to be critical while embodying the “good (if conflicted) settler father” (Hresko, personal communication; see Slater, 2019). It is important, however, to distance complicity from shame. “Settler shame,” as Kizuk theorizes, “desperately seeks resolution, preferring to re-establish the self as good, or worthy of pride, rather than respond to other-oriented concerns of justice” (2020, p. 162). Settler shame, in other words, does little or nothing to undercut settler colonialism and its attendant violences; it “does not, and perhaps cannot, confront racism or settler colonialism” (Kizuk, 2020, p. 164; also see Ahmed, 2004). It is not enough, then, to simply note that “I benefit from settler colonialism in an ongoing way, even as I critique it.” If settler colonialism is irredeemable – and it very much is, as I take up below – then it is not enough to simply understand my own entanglements with it; I must hold space for those who have long been doing the work to reimagine our social and political worlds, and I must do more of that work myself. I draw on what Macoun calls a “lens of complicity,” one that “leaves us with both a political responsibility and a critical intellectual imperative to understand and contest systems of domination in which we are enmeshed, their operations and their effects through deliberate respectful engagements” (Macoun, 2016, p. 98). I need, in other words, to think through my investments in those very benefits. Not only do I benefit – materially, psychically, interpersonally – from settler-colonial institutions, practices, and systems; but I desire the comforts and privileges that these systems confer. As Slater argues, “settler colonialism, or white possessive logic, is a training of the heart. Or to be more scholarly, a logic that organizes desire. Settler colonialism is a thinly disguised autocrat” (2020, p. 3). Doing anti-colonial work, in other words, does not somehow release me from that complicity; it does not come with any claim to innocence: We declare ourselves innocent when we assume that we educated white progressives are fundamentally different from other non-Indigenous people, the solution to a problem that lies in the hearts and minds of others rather than in our own institutions, knowledges, and practices. We declare ourselves innocent when we acknowledge a racist colonial past but assume a separation between this past and our racist colonial present. We declare ourselves

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innocent when we see ourselves as agents of progressive futurity and not also of colonial institutions and racial power. Macoun (2016, p. 86) My work in these pages, then, is not and must not be “the project of recuperating individual and collective white virtue,” which, Macoun insists, is not simply the “preserve of conservatives, nationalists, or obvious colonial apologists” (2016, p. 86). In other words, as I story my own complicity, I need to fundamentally (and repeatedly) refuse the kind of progress narrative that suggests the “eventual completion and conclusion [of the colonial project] through benevolent white acts” (p. 86). This is precisely the kind of narrative that invades the proem to Chapter 1; one I interrogate and write against in Chapters 6 and 7, especially. I must refuse, in other words, the process Macoun calls “colonizing white innocence”: [the] construction of whites as non-problematic and not implicated in either historical or contemporary violence. This construction preserves and sustains white virtue through legitimising and eliding white investments in maintaining power relationships generated by ongoing colonising racist violence. It can thus be understood as simultaneously enabling and erasing ongoing colonial violence. Macoun (2016, p. 89) To refuse to move towards white innocence, I must, as Macoun argues, wrestle with the conflicts and contradictions of the space(s) I inhabit “to try and understand them and how they perpetuate [colonial violence], and to think about strategies for keeping these conflicts visible in the face of ongoing white attempts to erase, suppress or even to transcend them” (2016, p. 87, emphasis added). It is with this process in mind that I write at some length about my positionality, that I commit to keeping visible and interrogating the process of my coming to understand these ideas and problematics in more depth and with more nuance, and, not least, that I actively refuse the implication that if only I (and other “progressive” white settlers) can understand these “conflicts we are engaged in,” we can think our way beyond the colonial project. Put differently, there is no point of arrival in this work (Wise, 2005); rather, it is a starting point, a commitment not only to thinking differently about our histories and presents but also to acting differently in the social world without needing to know what shape decolonization might take (Tuck & Yang, 2012) or what place I may (or may not!) have in futures that I have little or no right to imagine. My aim in taking the approach outlined above is to participate in the project of “unmapping,” which is “intended to undermine the idea of white settler innocence… and to uncover the ideologies and practices of conquest and domination” (Razack, 2002, p. 5). Moreover, as settler colonialism works in conjunction with multiple systems of alterity in the production of ideas about the nation and who is welcome therein, I engage in intersectional analyses in an effort to “disrupt the

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continuance of settler colonialism in colonial nation states” (McGuire-Adams & Giles, 2018, p. 209). With this work, I aim to take seriously the opportunities upon which Flowers expands and I encourage other sport scholars and autoethnographers to do the same: settlers have an opportunity to listen, learn, and act in relation to colonial difference alongside assertions of Indigenous sovereignty and nationhood… Settler responses to calls for solidarity ought to oppose rather than perpetuate structures of domination and the settler position of privilege, recognizing that those calls offer opportunities and preconditions for ethical engagement based on respect, while keeping in mind that solidarity is not a temporal event but a “long-term commitment to structural change.” Flowers (2015, pp. 34–35) Hi again, dear reader, Earlier, I asked whether you know the histories of which you are a part. It’s worth asking again, if for no other reason than I thought I knew. Do you really know the histories of where you call home? Did you learn about them in school? Did you learn a white-washed version like I did? Perhaps you’re positioned differently than I am. It is a clear sign of my privilege that I didn’t have to think carefully about these histories, that they didn’t seem relevant in my life. Have you made a point of challenging the learning you’ve encountered in your life? Of seeking out the voices too often ignored, silenced, or relegated to the footnotes? Can I tell you a story? (Yeah? Cool.) Here I am, teaching “Sociology of Canadian Society” in 2000. We’ve been talking about residential schools for a while, and a student I read as a young white man stands up and says “Can we stop talking about this? It’s been over for like a hundred years!” Now, you might think this story is about this young guy and his lack of awareness. But it’s actually about me and my failures in this moment. My response to him was this: “First of all, the last residential school closed four years ago. And second, the effects of residential schooling reverberate for generations after the time spent in these schools.” The best answer I had at the time, and not terrible in some respects (I mean, I also learned about the creation of Nunavut from a student during the course, so I clearly still had some work to do!). But where I failed was in not understanding that this is not about a single practice in the past and its reverberations into the present and future. It is about an array of practices and structures that have shaped lives in the past, very much in the present, and all towards very particular futures. Anyway, my point is this… I thought I knew about my country, but I really didn’t; I had only just scratched the surface. More than twenty years on from that moment, I still have much to learn. And unlearn.

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How much do you have to learn? What do you need to unlearn? What has your (un)learning made (un)thinkable in your life? How has it helped shape your life chances? How has it helped shape the life chances of those, as Belcourt (2020, p. 142) puts it, “living in the crosshairs of settler governance”? In solidarity, Jay (letter first composed November 22, 2021)

The “Larger Invention We Call Canada” In autoethnography (and cultural studies more generally), context matters. My personal stories – whether of attending university, playing youth sport, rock climbing, or anything else – only have autoethnographic value insofar as they are situated within, and work to interrogate, the cultural contexts within which they unfold(ed). The most basic context for the stories I take up in these pages is what Wynn (2012) terms “the larger invention we call Canada.” In this section, I offer a brief account of the broad contours of the Canadian context for readers, both those unfamiliar with Canadian histories and politics and, perhaps more importantly, for those who, like me, grew up thinking they knew Canada (or the particular settler state of their youth). In what follows, I want to clearly mark a differentiation between a brief history of these lands (which is not my project here) and a brief history of Canada as a political project (which is). A history of the political project that is Canada begins in the late fifteenth century, with British and French colonial powers eager to take advantage of the vast expanses of lands they saw as ripe for exploration and development. That these lands were already inhabited was of little consequence to these colonizers; according to a settler-colonial logic, the riches represented by these lands were not being adequately developed, and their “modern” technologies and sensibilities were needed for this development to occur. As Sarah Carter argues, however, this period is too often flattened historically either as “discovery” or “invasion.” By contrast, she suggests that there “was an exchange that involved the intermingling of peoples, knowledge, technologies, diseases, plants, and animals, and that produced remarkable changes in both cultures” (1999, p. 33). Over the course of the coming centuries, these colonial powers contested one another for political and economic supremacy on these lands, drawing often on the expertise and labour of local Indigenous peoples, whether in learning how to survive harsh winters or which plants and animals were good for eating, or in the service of military battles with one another. This period of mutual transformation lasted “until the end of the Seven Year’s War in 1763, when Britain assumed full control [and] King George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763,” which codified Indigenous rights and entitlements and laid the groundwork for treaty-making processes that would follow in the nineteenth century (Reid-Hresko & Warren, 2021, p. 2). As Prete notes, however, the “Royal Proclamation of 1763 [was] amongst the first acts to legislate for and on behalf of Indigenous Peoples without their input or consent” (2020,

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p. 121). Moreover, it marked the onset of a shift towards an explicit assimilatory framework enshrined in numerous pieces of legislation that positioned Indigenous peoples as wards of the state. In the words of Apooyak’ii (Dr. Tiffany Prete), in the aftermath of the 1763 Proclamation, Indigenous Peoples’ …sovereignty would be eroded with each passing act, until we arrived at one of the most oppressive pieces of legislation, An Act to Amend and Consolidate the Laws Respecting Indians (Indian Act, 1876). More commonly referred to as the Indian Act, this act legislated every aspect of Indigenous Peoples’ lives …The Indian Act also set a precedent for the manner in which Indigenous Peoples would be thought about and treated. The intention behind the Act was to “civilize” the Indigenous Peoples and to assimilate them into the wider Euro-Western population. (2020, p. 121) My aim here is not to elucidate the specific contours of any or all of these specific pieces of legislation, though they have and continue to define and constrain the lives, identities, kinship networks, governance structures, and other key elements of Indigenous peoples, nations, and communities (e.g., the Indian Act is still a key overarching legislative document). Rather, I nod to this period of forced assimilation as but a brief acknowledgement of how these policies and their attendant practices constitute part of the network of settler-colonial rule. In recent decades, the work that Indigenous peoples and communities have long undertaken resisting colonial rule has gradually shifted the national conversation (and engendered much pushback from colonial apologists). It is important to note that the resistance itself is nothing new, as Ladner and Simpson (2010) explain: Indigenous peoples and their nations have been resisting and struggling against colonialism since the very beginning. The ancestors not only fought, blockaded, protested and mobilized against these forces on every Indigenous territory on Turtle Island, they also engaged in countless acts of hidden resistance and kitchen table resistance aimed at ensuring their children and grandchildren could live as Indigenous peoples. (p. 8, emphasis in original) Ladner and Simpson highlight here not only what the settler state would recognize as resistance (though it is more often called “rebellion” in national discourse) but also what Daigle calls the “everyday relational geographies of Indigenous resurgence” (2016, p. 266). In other words, in the face of orchestrated and genocidal policies and practices at multiple levels and across time and space, simply continuing to exist, continuing to practice and share language, ceremony, belief systems, as well as other spiritual and political activities, constitutes a vital form of resistance itself.

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What is new, arguably, is the broader conversation in politics, the media, and other discursive arenas in Canadian society, much of which has been sparked by some of the more public kinds of activism in which Indigenous peoples across these lands have engaged. Perhaps the most well-known historical example of this resistance took place in the summer preceding my Grade 12 year, when Kanien’kehaka peoples on lands claimed by Quebec and their allies across Turtle Island engaged in direct action to protest the extension of a golf course into sacred burial grounds (what the press would too easily call “contested” lands). As Ladner and Simpson (2010) explain: The summer of 1990 brough some strong medicine to Turtle Island. For many Canadians, “Oka” was the first time they encountered Indigenous anger, resistance and standoff, and the resistance was quickly dubbed both the “Oka Crisis” and the “Oka Crises” by the mainstream media. But to the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) people of Kanehsata:ke, who were living up to their responsibilities to take care of their lands, this was neither a “crisis” at Oka, nor was it about the non-Native town of “Oka.” This was about 400 years of colonial injustice… This was about 400 years of resistance… It was not a beginning. Nor was this the end. This was the culmination of many, many years of Onhkwehonwe resistance resulting in a decision to put up barricades in defense of, and to bring attention to, Haudenosaunee land ethics, treaty responsibilities and governance. (p. 1) Here, Ladner and Simpson highlight both the importance of understanding these events in historical context and the ways in which mainstream media framings shaped (and continue to shape) understandings of these events, Canadian history, and the settler state itself. They continue: Although the mainstream media focused on the white town of “Oka” and the “warriors,” the Kanien’kehaka resistance was envisioned and carried out by Kanien’kehaka people from Kanehsatka:ke, Kahnawa:ke and Akwesasne… True, it was a critical act of resistance, but it was also a vision of reclamation, revitalization and restoration of Haudenosaunee lands, treaties, political traditions and responsibilities. (pp. 1–2) Ladner and Simpson draw our attention to the notion that this vital act of resistance was not simply against something (e.g., the settler state and racial capitalism), but was an act of upholding the “traditions and responsibilities” of these communities “as [they] have always done” (L. Simpson, 2017). The events described above prompted much handwringing on the national stage and led to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (now mostly forgotten by settlers and gathering political dust). Further, recent decades have been

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marked by an increasing number of legal, political, and discursive challenges to historical and contemporary acts of genocide on the part of the Canadian government and state agents2 as well as other instantiations of government efforts to ostensibly address these same injustices. Most notable among the latter is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2008–2015), whose work forefronted Indigenous voices in efforts towards healing the traumas inflicted by the Indian Residential School system mentioned by Apooyak’ii (Prete) above. Apooyak’ii’s work is vital, however, in pointing out that residential schools themselves were only one (horrific) part of a broader network of approaches to assimilating Indigenous children under the guise of education while attacking Indigenous kinship networks, knowledge systems, as well as the physical and spiritual health of Indigenous peoples and communities. Moreover, though popular Canadian discourse would suggest otherwise, it is imperative to note that while “residential schools” themselves are no longer in operation, the logic underlying them lives on (see Talaga, 2017). In other words, even at this moment of much national handwringing about the horrors of our collective “past,” the violences of colonial systems live on in current policy and practice not only in education (Harris, 2002) but also in child welfare (e.g., Lindstrom & Choate, 2016), social work (e.g., Fortier & Wong, 2019), the criminal (in)justice system (e.g., Crosby & Monaghan, 2016), and many more institutional spaces. It is in this sense that Audra Simpson refers not to settler states but to “still settling” states (2017, p. 20). Towards what end, though, are still settling states doing all of this work? Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang assert: Within settler colonialism, the most important concern is land/water/air/ subterranean earth (land, for shorthand…) Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. (2012, p. 5) Moreover, they continue, “This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation” (p. 5), an important reminder that settler colonialism is not a past event but rather is woven into our very structures and practices, including those in colonial educational institutions such as ours (Harris, 2002; Simpson, 2014; Wolfe, 2006). One important feature of contemporary “Canada” is “our” (settlers and the settler state) collective relationship to histories of colonization. In 2008, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology for the residential school system in the House of Commons. Drawing on the work of Eva Mackey, Lisa Slater argues that this supposedly watershed moment “does not require Canadians to account for how the processes of land theft and cultural genocide are foundational to the modern nation state. Making the broader colonial process into something

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‘containable’ and ‘apologizable’” (Slater, 2019, n. 11, p. 25). The containability to which Mackey and Slater refer is evident in numerous ways, not least when 16 months after his formal apology, Harper asserted on the international stage that Canada has “no history of colonialism” (Simpson, 2016, p. 439). The audacity of that statement bears little remark here. What is interesting, it seems to me, is to think through the ways in which that is an intelligible claim for a sitting Prime Minister to make. What does it reveal, in other words, about “our” collective understanding of and orientation towards the historical relations – or, as Dallas Hunt (2018) puts it, “non-relations” – between settlers and Indigenous peoples? As Audra Simpson argues: it is the presumed eventful-ness of colonialism that settler governance now needs, in order to be able to say ‘it is over’ we are done with that, ‘we’ can now move on and thus, it never happened. Settler colonialism appears in its non-appearance as a sturdy, structuring logic but also a shifting and impossible assemblage is what makes this Prime Minister and so many others, able to treat something as a thing, as an event and then deny it ever happened, as it happens before your very eyes. (2016, pp. 439–440) It is this “sturdy, structuring logic” coupled with the “shifting and impossible assemblage” that makes the settler-colonial project such a difficult one to theorize and disentangle. This is also, however, what makes it imperative that we think carefully about how it is woven into our lives. To return to the question of land, Mann argues that the “settler state and those it represents still insist that but for minor adjustments, the land question is closed. They propose, in its stead, a sincere apology and a promise not to do it again: ‘We will be just in our time. That is all we can do’” (Mann, 2020, p. 439). Further, he theorizes that Canadians experience – and cultivate – a kind of historical amnesia and simultaneously engage in a refusal to acknowledge the ways in which historical antecedents accumulate privileges to structure the very present in which we are to be “just.” “This does not,” Mann argues, “require a disavowal of history, but a particular posture of distance from it, even while acknowledging it” (Mann, 2020, p. 438). It is this posture of distance that we see, for instance, in contemporary discussions of the violences of settler colonialism. In the summer of 2021, for instance, Canada made international news with repeated “discoveries” of hundreds of unmarked graves near the sites of former residential schools, as I note in the proem of Chapter 1. While this provoked considerable national discussion, it was also a profoundly colonial response to colonial violence. First, that this constituted “news” was itself only possible through a kind of selective ignorance, as Indigenous leaders have long been testifying that many of the children forced to attend residential schools never made it home and were buried in unmarked graves. In fact, the fourth volume of the final report of the TRC is entitled “Canada’s residential schools: Missing children and unmarked burials” (https://publications.

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gc.ca/collections/collection_2015/trc/IR4-9-4-2015-eng.pdf). In other words, ground-penetrating radar was not the first evidence of these unmarked graves; it was simply the first evidence that could not be conveniently ignored by insisting on Eurowestern notions of evidence. Second, Canada’s (performative) handwringing retraumatized those who survived the horrors of residential school as well as those living in the wake of the intergenerational traumas perpetuated by this system, asking that they relive that trauma for and through mediated accounts written largely for the benefit of settlers. Third, and most directly relevant to the current topic, this national conversation has done little or nothing to disrupt the idea that colonial violence is a thing of the past. Few non-Indigenous commentators have connected these findings with contemporary policy and practice, a discursive move that leaves intact the notion that “we” can be “just in our time.” This is part, I suggest, of the “‘settler-colonial present,’ a present that purport[s] newness, that own[s] time” (A. Simpson, 2017, p. 21). “Settler time,” Simpson explains, “is revealed as the fiction of the presumed neutrality of time itself, demonstrating the dominance of the present by some over others, and the unequal power to define what matters, who matters, what pasts are alive and when they die” (A. Simpson, 2017, p. 22). This settler-colonial present functions in many ways, not least through “agreements” such as the numbered Treaties (though it is important to note that these treaties do not cover all lands claimed by Canada). Nevermind that Canada’s treaty commissioners selected pro-treaty translators and that negotiators for Canada repeatedly emphasized the benefits of treaties while failing to mention or dramatically downplaying the costs – including and especially the so-called “surrender clause” (Krasowski, 2019); never mind that Indigenous nations and leaders understood treaties not as ceding title to anything but as initiations of ongoing sets of relational responsibilities all parties were to assume in relation to one another (Krasowski, 2019; Treaty 7 Elders et al., 1996); these are still taken by the settler state and settler society as contractual and rather finalized arrangements to which all parties consented: The long view of history, that in settler-colonial contexts is actually always short, invokes a fundamental hegemony of interpretation such as viewing the ‘signing’ of agreements as full and robust consent, and consent as justice. In such political configurations, there are no further matters to be discussed. Time starts anew; the matter is done. (A. Simpson, 2017, p. 20) My words above might make “the past” seem to be the object of interest, but as Mann notes, “the stakes are less about the past than about potentially irreconcilable foundations for the future” (2020, p. 439). Mann’s argument is that Canadian political and legal decisions are less about reckoning with the past than in settling it, starting anew as if settlers and Indigenous peoples can and should somehow settle their accounts and move on as if present inequities have little to do with the pasts being settled. These decisions, then, “are supposed to represent a closure of

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the questions of the past, fixing a common present as the foundation for a common future in which responsibility is clearly distributed between ‘us’” (Mann, 2020, p. 439). As Audra Simpson provocatively and insightfully puts it: This is the political language game and largely state-driven performance art that attempts to move elements of history forward in order to ‘move on’ from the past, to transition out of one period of history into another, better one. This dramaturgical solution appears as macro (and philosophical) antidote to the so-called problems of the past – ‘historical injustice’, the error of bad moral judgement and action, before. (2017, pp. 23–24)

“Decolonization,” “Indigenization,” and “Reconciliation” In a Facebook post from April 8, 2018, I asked for some advice/resources: “Hivemind: Working on ‘decolonizing’ my Soci stats courses for next year… Sources/ ideas/data sets welcome! I’d love some data on how politically engaged Indigenous youth are, for example! [But also some readings on stats as a tool of Whiteness, of course.]” While this post generated some important insights and suggestions, I was called in by a dear friend who noted that I needed “to be mindful about word ‘decolonizing’ without material relation to land,” suggesting that I engage with Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s piece “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” My post, as well as the response(s) to it, points to the kinds of conversations underway in academia and on lands claimed by Canada more broadly. In the first instance, much work has been underway in academia (and many other institutional spaces) – particularly since the final report of the TRC was released in 2015 – to address the legacies of settler colonialism. In the hallways, classrooms, and boardrooms of university and college campuses, as well as the pages of academic publications, much lip service is paid to “equity, diversity and inclusion” generally, and “decolonization,” “indigenization,” and “reconciliation” (terms that often appear on the national stage as well) more specifically. In the second instance, these terms are often deployed without a critical interrogation of the ideas themselves or the ways in which they have too often been mobilized (including by me) as what Sara Ahmed calls “nonperformatives,” things “said [or done] as a way of not doing something, …as a way of obscuring what is not being done” (2012, p. 207, emphasis added). Decolonization is, arguably, the most loaded of these terms. Perhaps somewhat intuitively, folks with an interest in challenging colonization – challenging settler colonialism in particular – might be tempted to work towards decolonization, aiming, perhaps, at undoing some of the colonial violence that has and continues to unfold(ed) in our dominant institutions, not least in academia (see Chapter 5). As Tuck and Yang note, however, the metaphorization of decolonization – its

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mobilization without sustained engagement with the material politics of land dispossession and more – presents real dangers: “When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (2012, p. 3). This is what I was doing in the approach I was taking to my stats course. Though I was undertaking this work from a justice perspective and with a particular focus on interrogating whiteness and settler colonialism, Tuck and Yang point out that “[d]ecolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks,” highlighting that the “easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation” (p. 3). This is the appropriation in which I was engaged, and on which I was (appropriately, insightfully, even lovingly) challenged. With their intervention, Tuck and Yang aim to “remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization – what is unsettling and what should be unsettling” (3). In other words, the metaphorization of decolonization is too easy, too comfortable, too settled, and too often gets “in the way of more meaningful potential alliances” (p. 3). In stark contrast, they note, “decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (p. 21). Tuck and Yang interrogate what they call “settler moves to innocence” which, they theorize, “ultimately represent settler fantasies of easier paths to reconciliation” (p. 4). Again, my Facebook call for suggestions is instructive here. My post felt (and still feels, if I’m honest) like a progressive move, a way to take a course (social statistics) that is too often dry, technical, and seemingly apolitical, and weave into it important conversations about the ways statistics have been and continue to be weaponized in and by the settler state. While this was/is important work it was/is also comfortable work. In thinking about this approach to my course and asking my (mostly white settler) Facebook friends to think about it with me, I challenged no one to think about the politics of returning stolen land, about “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.” Does everything we do as academics need to be about this repatriation? No. That is not, in my reading, Tuck and Yang’s point. But the metaphorization of decolonization constitutes a move to innocence and serves to undercut the harder work that needs to be done. What Tuck and Yang call for, instead, is an “ethic of incommensurability”: An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework. (p. 35)

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It is with this ethic of incommensurability in mind that I work in these pages to unsettle my own innocence and interrogate my own desire to know what will be the consequences of decolonization for me and my loved ones (see Chapters 4, 6, and 7, especially). Indigenization – representing “a move to expand the academy’s still-narrow conceptions of knowledge, to include Indigenous perspectives in transformative ways” (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018, p. 218) – continues to have purchase as an idea towards which academic institutions should aspire. Where things start to get rather murky, however, is in the how… the particular shape that this process might take. Too often, indigenization is operationalized by university administrators as a particular version of inclusion, ostensibly achieved by hiring more Indigenous scholars and staff and recruiting more Indigenous students (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018). As numerous observers have noted, however, simply including more bodies – bodies seen to stand for, even be diversity – leaves the dominant systems and structures themselves intact. Indeed, Sara Ahmed has persuasively argued that this kind of inclusion acts as a “non-performative,” actively concealing the deeper, more difficult structural work that is not being undertaken by these institutions: if “diversity is something that is added to an organization, like color, then it confirms the whiteness of what is already in place” (2012, p. 33). Indeed, not only does this kind of inclusion do little to question or change the underlying (colonialist, gendered, ableist, transphobic, etc.) logics and practices of academia, it subjects these “diverse” students, faculty, and staff to institutional cultures that continue to be sites of ontological and epistemological violence. In other words, which bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing are centred, and which are erased, ignored, or trivialized, reveals much about the Eurowestern foundations of academia, foundations that continue to be reproduced through curricula, course readings, research funding structures, administrative policies and processes, and much more. Moreover, it leaves uninterrogated and untroubled the dominant understandings of knowledge and knowledge production that instantiate much of that violence: “when indigenization is understood as a means to ‘include’ Indigenous people better in the academy, it also tends to assume that the academy is a natural, or at least neutral, place in which human knowledge is already adequately represented” (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018, p. 220). This is not to suggest that indigenization processes can only unfold in these ways; Gaudry and Lorenz describe two approaches to indigenization (“reconciliation indigenization” and “decolonial indigenization”) that go further towards interrogating and unsettling the colonial underpinnings of academic institutions. At the far end of what they call a spectrum of conceptualizations of indigenization, “the university is fundamentally transformed by deep engagement with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous intellectuals, and Indigenous knowledge systems for all who attend” (2018, p. 218). They lament, however, that “when it comes to institutional practice, …academic institutions have only started the implementation of the least transformative of these visions” (“Indigenous inclusion” – p. 219, emphasis added). In other words, while universities might (seem to) aspire towards

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something more transformative, their on-the-ground decisions and initiatives generally suggest attempts “to merely increase the number of Indigenous people on campus without broader changes” (p. 219). Finally, reconciliation is a term often marshalled in national, provincial, and more localized conversations in the wake of the TRC; indeed, the term itself is embedded in the work of the TRC – the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Once again, it might seem, at first blush, like an idea worthy of aspiration. Given our histories of settler/Indigenous relations, why would we not want to aspire towards reconciliation? Numerous scholars have taken up this question, pointing to the limitations, even dangers, of discourses of reconciliation. As a starting point, we must situate any discussion of reconciliation within what Coulthard calls a new “modus operandi of colonial power” (2014, p. 5). Coulthard argues that over the past 50 years or so, there has been a shift in Canada “from a more or less unconcealed structure of domination to a form of colonial governmentality that works through the medium of state recognition and accommodation” (pp. 15–16). Discourses of reconciliation in Canada, then, are part of the politics of recognition that function to reproduce settler rule. Building on the work of Frantz Fanon, Coulthard argues that: …in situations where colonial rule does not depend solely on the exercise of state violence, its reproduction instead rests on the ability to entice Indigenous peoples to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society. (p. 25) The politics of recognition, then, work to ensure that all discussions start from the premise that the settler state is legitimate and that we should look to settler state policies and structures to address any grievances or inequities. Further, we might consider the term reconciliation itself as a kind of rhetorical gaslighting, as it points towards fostering positive relations again; it “refers to the repair of a previously existing harmonious relationship” (Garneau, 2016, p. 30). The problem, Garneau explains, with choosing “the term ‘reconciliation’ over ‘conciliation’ is that it presses into our minds a false understanding of our past and constricts our collective sense of the future” (p. 30). Corntassel (2012, p. 91), for instance, argues that reconciliation is one of three themes (along with “rights” and “resources” – beyond the scope of this manuscript) “invoked by colonial entities to divert attention away from deep decolonizing movements and push us towards a state agenda of co-optation and assimilation.” In other words, the framework of reconciliation both centres and works towards the reproduction of the settler state; it “merely reinscrib[es] the status quo” (p. 91). Alicia Elliot (2019), too, points towards the ways in which reconciliation discourse has been mobilized by the settler state as part of a branding process following the work and Calls to Action of the TRC. Elliot provocatively highlights reconciliation©, gesturing to the ways the term has been folded into mainstream political (and institutional) discourse

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while leaving intact dominant institutions and processes. It is in this sense that Corntassel refers to reconciliation processes as the “politics of distraction” and Audra Simpson calls reconciliation an “impossible but therapeutic fallacy” (2017, p. 23). The “therapeutic” refers to the sense in which it is therapeutic for settlers and the settler state, allowing “us” to signal our commitments to “working with” Indigenous peoples and communities without having to reimagine our dominant political (or professional) institutions and practices or to give up any of the wealth and privilege accumulated through dispossession and colonial violence. As Kizuk puts it (drawing on the work of Paulette Regan), the “politics of reconciliation operates to cover over colonial violence, both past and present, with the belief that Canada—and settler Canadians—are a ‘constant good work in progress’” (2020, p. 165). Daigle, meanwhile, suggests that settler Canada is in an era “marked by the spectacle of reconciliation – a public, large-scale, and visually striking performance of Indigenous suffering and trauma alongside white settler mourning and recognition – which secures, legitimates, and effectively reproduces white supremacy and settler futurity in Canada” (2019, p. 706, emphasis in original). Ahmed (2014) makes a related point, arguing that public proclamations of national shame (such as Harper’s 2008 apology) acknowledge the pain and suffering of others (in this case, Indigenous peoples) and at the same time call the nation into being, assert a particular kind of nationhood, a particular we-ness. She provocatively asserts: Those who witness the past injustice through feeling ‘national shame’ are aligned with each other as ‘well-meaning individuals’; if you feel shame, you are ‘in’ the nation, a nation that means well. Shame ‘makes’ the nation in the witnessing of past injustice, a witnessing that involves feeling shame, as it exposes the failure of the nation to live up to its ideals. But this exposure is temporary, and becomes the ground for a narrative of national recovery. By witnessing what is shameful about the past, the nation can ‘live up to’ the ideals that secure its identity or being in the present. Ahmed (2014, p. 109, emphasis in original) Mann suggests that in the settler state, hearkening to reconciliation is done in the spirit of a contract, as “settler liberalism (or liberal settlerism) has at present almost no capacity to imagine a form of solidarity outside or other than that constituted by a social contract” (2020, p. 441). Importantly, Mann stresses, this contractual orientation is one that produces a particular set of social relations as well as a particular relationship between the past, present, and future: “a contract that is intended to be permanent—like a treaty or a constitution—is supposed to mark the end of the past and the beginning of the present” (2020, p. 438).

Concluding Remarks In 2000, I travelled outside of North America for the first time. Before departing, I went to Mountain Equipment Co-op (now called Mountain Equipment Company), purchased a small Canadian flag patch,3 and proudly sewed it onto

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my backpack. Many other travellers sported similar flags; this was (and is) a way of recognizing fellow Canadians on backpacking adventures. (Interestingly, a number of U.S. backpackers also sported Canadian flags, not wanting to be associated with U.S. foreign policy; this tells us something about the purchase that our myths of Canadian benevolence and peacemaking have at an international level.) This illustrates the attachment I had (and have) to Canada – that I consider it home. But as my refusal to stand for the national anthem demonstrates, it has become a more complicated home, a home that no longer feels quite so comfortable. A home that should feel more uncomfortable still, as I take up on Chapter 6. It is towards this idea of home that I turn my attention in the next chapter. Having provided some context about my social location in Chapter 2, I turn, in Chapter 3, to a more in-depth consideration of the paradigmatic underpinnings of autoethnography and a call for anti-colonial autoethnographic interrogations of our encounters with sport and physical culture and how these interrogations can help us carefully consider our complicated entanglements with the idea of home.

Notes 1 Though I invoke Treaty 7 here, I do so with some trepidation. In one direction, Treaties are, quite literally, foundational to the nation state in which I was raised, and, as such, are important to consider. In another, Treaties are the site of much (intentional?) misunderstanding in the contemporary politics of settler colonialism on these lands, and the Treaty processes themselves point to deep, systemic processes of colonial dispossession. For more on the so-called “numbered Treaties,” see Krasowski, 2019. For more on Treaty 7, see Treaty 7 Elders et al., 1996. 2 As just one example, consider the extended process in which a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government “aimed to provide compensation to First Nations children and their families harmed by an underfunded child welfare system and establish long-term reform”; after years of legal decisions and political negotiations, this suit resulted in a $20 billion settlement towards both compensation of those affected and long-term reform (Major, 2022). 3 These patches are still available for purchase at MEC: https://www.mec.ca/en/ product/4003-774/Canadian-Flag-1-x-2?colour=NOC02.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of anti-racism. ­Borderlands, 3(2). Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh ­University Press. Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Situating the Author, Interrogating Canada  45 Belcourt, B. (2020). A history of my brief body. Toronto: Hamish Hamilton. Carlson-Manathara, E. (2021). Settler Colonialism and resistance. In E. CarlsonManathara & G. Rowe (Eds.), Living in Indigenous sovereignty (pp. 28–59). Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing. Carter, S. (1999). Aboriginal peoples and colonizers of Western Canada to 1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Clare, E. (2017). Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Corntassel, J. (2012). Re-envisioning resurgence: Indigenous pathways to decolonization and sustainable self-determination. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 86–101. Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crosby, A., & Monaghan, J. (2016). Settler colonialism and the policing of Idle No More. Social Justice, 43(2), 37–57. Daigle, M. (2016). Awawanenitakik: The spatial politics of recognition and relational geographies of Indigenous self-determination. The Canadian Geographer, 60(2), 259–269. Daigle, M. (2019). The spectacle of reconciliation: On (the) unsettling responsibilities to Indigenous peoples in the academy. Society and Space, 37(4), 703–721. DOI: 10.1111/cag.12260. Elliot, A. (2019). A mind spread out on the ground. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Finney, C. (2014). Black faces, white spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the great outdoors. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Flowers, R. (2015). Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(2), 32–49. Fortier, C., & Wong, E. (2019). The settler colonialism of social work and the social work of settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies, 9(4), 437–456. DOI: 10.1080/ 2201473X.2018.1519962. Garneau, D. (2016). Imaginary spaces of conciliation and reconciliation: Art, curation, and healing. In D. Robinson & K. Martin (Eds.), Arts of Engagement: Taking aesthetic action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (pp. 21–41). Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Gaudry, A., & Lorenz, D. (2018). Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: Navigating the different visions for indigenizing the Canadian academy. AlterNative, 14(3), 218–227. DOI: 10.1177/1177180118785382. Harris, H. (2002). Coyote goes to school: The paradox of Indigenous higher education. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 26(2), 187–196. Hunt, D. (2018). “In search of our better selves”: Totem transfer narratives and Indigenous futurities. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42(1), 71–90. DOI: 10.17953/ aicrj.42.1.hunt. Justice, D. (2018). Why Indigenous literatures matter. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Kizuk, S. (2020). Settler shame: A critique of the role of shame in settler-Indigenous relationships in Canada. Hypatia, 35, 161–177. DOI: 10.1017/hyp.2019.8. Koleszar-Green, R. (2018). What is a guest? What is a settler? Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 10(2), 166–177. Krasowski, S. (2019). No surrender: The land remains Indigenous. Regina: University of Regina Press.

46  Situating the Author, Interrogating Canada Ladner, K., & Simpson, L. (2010). Introduction. In L. Simpson & K. Ladner (Eds.) This is an honour song: Twenty years after the barricades. Winnipeg: ARP Books. Laurendeau, J. (2011). “If you’re reading this, it’s because I’ve died”: Masculinity and relational risk in BASE jumping. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28(4), 404–420. DOI: 10.1123/ ssj.28.4.404. Laurendeau, J. (2014). “Just tape it up for me, ok?”: Masculinities, injury, and embodied emotion. Emotion, Space & Society, 12(1), 11–17. DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2013.03.010. Laurendeau, J. (2019). “You don’t need any of that stuff”: (Re)Stor(y)ing my(nd/)body. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise & Health, 11(2), 246–257. DOI: 10.1080/ 2159676X.2018.1433227. Laurendeau, J. (2020). “The stories that will make a difference aren’t the easy ones”: Outdoor recreation, the wilderness ideal, and complicating settler mobility. Sociology of Sport Journal, 37(2), 85–95. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2019-0128. Lindstrom, G., & Choate, P. (2016). Nistawatsiman: Rethinking assessment of Aboriginal parents for child welfare following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. First Peoples Child & Family Review, 11(2), 45–59. Major, D. (July 4, 2022). Federal government, AFN reach $20B final settlement on First Nations child welfare agreement. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ final-settlement-first-nation-child-welfare-agreement-1.6509956. Macoun, A. (2016). Colonising white innocence: Complicity and critical encounters. In S. Maddison, T. Clark, & R. de Costa (Eds.), The limits of settler colonial reconciliation: Non-indigenous people and the responsibility to engage (pp. 85–102). Singapore: Springer. Mann, G. (2020). Settler colonialism’s anti-social contract. The Canadian Geographer, 64(3), 433–444. DOI: 10.1111/cag.12645. McGuire-Adams, T., & Giles, A. (2018). Anishinaabekweg Dibaajimowinan (stories) of decolonization through running. Sociology of Sport Journal, 35(3), 207–215. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2017-0052. Prete, T. (2020). How integrating Aboriginal perspectives into the classroom affects students attitudes towards Aboriginal People. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 15(2), 120–134. DOI: 10.20355/jcie29387. Razack, S. (2002). When place becomes race. In S. Razack (Ed.), Race, space, and the law (pp. 1–20). Toronto: Between the Lines. Reid-Hresko, J., & Warren, J. (2021). “A lot of what we ride is their land”: White settler Canadian understandings of mountain biking, Indigeneity, and recreational colonialism. Sociology of Sport Journal, 39(1), 108–117. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2020-0161. Simpson, A. (2016). Whither settler colonialism? Settler Colonial Studies, 6(4), 438–445. DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2015.1124427. Simpson, A. (2017). The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: Cases from indigenous North America and Australia. Postcolonial Studies, 20(1), 18–33. DOI: 10.1080/ 13688790.2017.1334283. Simpson, L. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simpson, L. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25. Simpson, L. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press. Slater, L. (2019). Anxieties of belonging in settler colonialism: Australia, race and place. New York: Routledge.

Situating the Author, Interrogating Canada  47 Slater, L. (2020). A politics of uncertainty: Good white people, emotions, and political responsibility. Continuum, 34(6), 816–827. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2020.1842122. Talaga, T. (2017). Seven fallen feathers: Racism, death, and hard truths in a northern city. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Thorpe, J. (2012). Temagami’s tangled wild. Vancouver: UBC Press. Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council, Hildebrandt, W., Carter, S., & First Rider, D. (1996). The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Wise, T. (2005). White like me. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240. Wynn, G. (2012). Foreword. In J. Thorpe (Ed.), Temagami’s tangled wild. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Chapter 3

Anti-Colonial Autoethnography

In sport and physical culture studies, autoethnography has been deployed to highlight how, in a world affected by imperialism, colonialism, Euro-white supremacy, and other macro-level geopolitical events, researchers can often hold multiple identities in tension and face complex questions regarding their ethics, methods, and praxis. (Chen, 2021, p. 747)

As noted in Chapter 1, sport scholars have increasingly drawn on autoethnography in their interrogations of physical cultural practices and spaces of various kinds, shedding important light on the embodied experiences of these undertakings as well as the workings of power. In Chapter 3, I delve into the (as yet under-realized) potential of autoethnographies of physical culture to contribute to an anti-colonial movement, taking up the challenge and potential of Chen’s words in the epigraph, considering the “complex questions [of] ethics, methods, and praxis” in autoethnography. I do this both to situate autoethnography paradigmatically for readers and to call for scholars of sport and physical culture to “draw connections between violences ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’… and radically imagine how our praxis can actively refuse the colonial trajectory designed by the settler state” (Chen, 2021, p. 745). It is here, I argue, that autoethnographic work has much to offer, both in terms of substantive and theoretical considerations of sport and physical culture and in terms of reflexive considerations of our own physical–cultural practices as well as our research about them. Autoethnography, as I explained in Chapter 1, is about writing the self in social context. As Manning and Adams put it, it is “a research method that foregrounds the researcher’s personal experience (auto) as it is embedded within, and informed by, cultural identities and con/texts (ethno) and as it is expressed through writing, performance, or other creative means (graphy)” (2015, p. 188). It blends the sensibilities, that is, of analytic scholarship with creative arts-based work. As such, autoethnographers attend to “the epistemic (claims to knowledge) and the aesthetic (practices of imaginative, creative, and artistic craft) characteristics of autoethnographic texts” (Adams, Holman Jones & Ellis, 2015, p. 23, emphasis in original). The point of autoethnography is to convey understanding of the social

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-5

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world, but that understanding is storied in ways intended to invite readers into the experience to help them feel the understanding (Ellis, 2004). In this chapter, I take up and foreground the key questions of ontology and epistemology, pointing, in particular, to the epistemological foundations of autoethnography, situating it, in part, as a response to various “crises” (e.g., of representation) in qualitative research more broadly. In addition, I attend to related issues of voice, ethics, and praxis. I move on to consider the question of axiology, which, I argue, has received far too little attention in methodological discussions in sport scholarship. Dear 2007 Jay, Just a quick note to encourage you on the journey I know you’re wondering about right now. I’ve just come back from my first time attending “ICQI” – the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry – and here’s all I will say: I bawled. Seriously, like, bawled. I went to a session on fatherhood that was absolutely beautiful and heart-wrenching, and literally, the first three offerings in the Q & A (mine included) came from people who were sobbing. And here I am, crying for the first time at a conference, and you know what happens? Carolyn Ellis, whose work you’re just starting to idolize but who doesn’t know me at all, reaches over to comfort me by rubbing my shoulder! It was fucking amazing! I have never before seen love centred at an academic conference. Anyway, I know you’ve just encountered autoethnography, and you’re trying to wrap your head around it after being trained as a pretty postpositivist ethnographer, but trust me when I say you’ll enjoy the ride. In wonder, 2011 Jay (letter first composed October 22, 2021) As noted in Chapter 1, autoethnography is one of a number of approaches that fall under the broader umbrella of “narrative.” Narrative approaches, as Denison and Rinehart elaborated more than two decades ago, “contribute to our understanding of social life while also being artistically shaped and satisfying. This,” they note, “is a tough task and requires a high level of skill and dedication both to the craft of writing and the analytical skills of a scholar” (2000, p. 3). Even framing autoethnography as one among many narrative approaches, however, might seem to suggest that there is a shared understanding of what autoethnography is – its paradigmatic underpinnings. This is not a particularly helpful or accurate heuristic, as autoethnography can take many forms, and, indeed, be rooted in rather different paradigmatic assumptions.

Paradigmatic Underpinnings Paradigmatically, much autoethnography “stands in stark contrast to traditional social scientific studies in the sense that terms such as ‘objectivity,’ ‘researcher neutrality,’ and ‘stable meaning’ are eschewed in favor of the researcher’s

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careful and thoughtful interpretation of lived experience and the research process” (­Manning  & Adams, 2015, p. 190). Adams, Holman Jones, and Ellis explain that autoethnography arose out of a crisis of representation “that considered the limits of scientific knowledge, particularly what can be discovered, understood, and explained about identities, lives, beliefs, relationships, and behaviours through the use of empirical or experimental methods” (2015, p. 22). As such, autoethnography emerged from an interest in refusing to artificially separate researchers from the social worlds of which they are a part. Autoethnographers opt, instead, to explicitly name and leverage the “personal-cultural entanglements” that would be seen as detrimental within a framework of “scientific” scholarship (Adams et al., 2015, p. 22). “The final adjudicator,” Chandrashekar notes, “is the reader, who is invited to experience viscerally those facets that may not be part of their lifeworlds, that which they may have experienced differently, or that with which they may be acutely familiar” (2018, p. 73). Manning and Adams note, however, that autoethnographers take different approaches to the craft, reflecting paradigmatic variation within autoethnography. They outline what they call the “four common orientations” (2015, p. 191) that inform and underpin the body of work that we find under the now somewhat broad umbrella of autoethnography. “Social-scientific” or “analytic” autoethnography tends to be rooted in post-­ positivist ontological and epistemological assumptions, especially that social worlds are knowable, if somewhat imperfectly, and that analysts should aspire to know and represent those worlds with as much objectivity, rigour, and structure as possible (Manning & Adams, 2015). This is a reflexive extension on traditional ethnography with the aim of leveraging one’s deep insider status to better understand the social worlds in which one is enmeshed (Sparkes, 2020). Analytic autoethnography is a somewhat uncommon approach and bears little mention in this chapter as it simply does not align, paradigmatically, with much of the work upon which I draw and for which I call in this monograph. At the other end of the continuum that Manning and Adams describe is “creative-artistic autoethnography” which emphasizes “aesthetics, evocative and vulnerable stories, and the use of different forms or media” in sharing the work (Manning & Adams, 2015, p. 193). “Interpretive-humanistic autoethnography,” by contrast, foregrounds “thick description” with the aim of helping readers understand and appreciate the nuances of particular social experiences and locations (Manning & Adams, 2015). Consider Evers’ discussion of the “sensual world of men who surf,” for instance. In this work, Evers aims to convey the sensuality, the affect, of surfing not (only) through distanced, abstract accounts, but (also) through thick, descriptive, embodied storying of his own experiences in the “field”: My legs are straining as I make my way down the bush track. Cicadas screech approval, and there is intermittent thumping as a kangaroo bounds, frightened, off among the trees. The tone of the crashing waves [echoes] down the valley. I cannot see clearly, as it is an hour or so before dawn. I woke with

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sticks falling from gum trees onto my tent. An offshore wind whispers, “Get out there.” … A long walk over hot sand ensues. The headland turns into cliffs, so there is a 40-min scramble. Eventually, the hidden stretch of beach is exposed. Then I see it rise with the sun. Tired muscles quiver with excitement. Sunburnt eyes watch a swell build 50 meters offshore. My heart races as the wave stands up and pitches out in perfect A-frame symmetry. (Evers, 2006, pp. 229–230) Evers’ narrative speaks to me, evokes in me the excitement he stories. Though I have never surfed and am likely never to do so, I feel the anticipation, the draw of the waves, the sensuality of the experience. Dean’s (2019) autoethnographic account of dealing with a traumatic head injury, discussed in Chapter 1, is similarly evocative and descriptive, inviting readers into the confusion and frustration of both the concussion experience itself and the isolation that accompanied much of his recovery process. As a final example of this common orientation to autoethnography, my first foray into the field aimed to evoke in and for readers some of the intense emotions that accompanied my brief time as a BASE jumper. Describing the lead-up to my first jump, I delve into the fear and exhilaration of the moment not by telling readers about it, but by endeavouring to show it as I describe climbing over the railing to position myself for the jump: …I don’t notice a single car crossing the bridge. There are hundreds, no doubt, but I am not aware of even one. I am so focused on the railing, and on what I have to do, that everything else disappears. My heart is like a jackhammer in my chest! …I ease one leg up and over, (unnecessarily) pinching the railing between my legs, terrified of what might happen if my grip loosens… Mouth parched, I take my time getting a good grip with both hands, shifting first one hand then the other in the tiniest of movements. My legs bounce a little, almost imperceptibly, much as they did at the point of exhaustion when I used to rock climb. As I look down (which I had just been instructed NOT to do), the edges of the canyon compress inward and the bridge shifts slightly in my vision. (Laurendeau, 2011, pp. 405–406) These interpretive autoethnographies aim to capture in the form of the writing some of the affect of the experiences under consideration, inviting readers to feel as well as think about the cultural practices storied. Finally, “critical autoethnographies” draw on “personal experience to identify harmful abuses of power, structures that cultivate and perpetuate oppression, instances of inequality, and unjust cultural values and practices” (Manning & Adams, 2015, p. 193). Peers’ critical disability autoethnographic work is a case-inpoint here as it challenges the common-sense idea that disability is a characteristic

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of particular bodies (or minds), highlighting instead the ways in which disability is produced through a constellation of institutions, practices, and structures that construct a narrow range of capacities as “normal.” Peers’ work beautifully illustrates the sense in which “critical autoethnographies are based upon love, working for the emancipation of all who find themselves oppressed, subjugated, and tyrannized” (Herrmann, 2022, p. 75). Such autoethnographies, Herrmann notes, “are written from a space not of self-righteousness but of righteous anger at injustice” (Herrmann, 2022, p. 75). These different “types” of autoethnography should be thought of not as separate from one another, but as representing different sets of commitments and assumptions along the continuum that Manning and Adams describe. Notably, many of the autoethnographies considered in these pages attend to both the evocativeness and thick description of “interpretive-humanistic” work and the focus on interrogating power structures that characterize “critical” autoethnographies. In my BASE jumping autoethnography, for instance, it is not simply that I wanted to bring readers into the experience of jumping from a bridge, cliff, or antenna as I did. I certainly wanted to convey the sensory and emotive aspects of doing so, but just as importantly aimed to delve into the “layering, the potential internal contradiction, within all practices that construct masculinities” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 852). Similarly, though Peers’ (2012, 2015) autoethnographic work is clearly critical in orientation, it, too, draws readers into the experiences of Paralympic sport through thick description and evocative writing. Adams et al. offer a different framework for thinking about the variations in autoethnographic approach, identifying realism, impressionism, expressionism, and conceptualism as different “forms of autoethnographic representation” (2015, pp. 83–89). The aim in realist work, they stress, is the creation of “verisimilitude, the feeling or illusion of reality” (p. 85). Impressionistic work, on the other hand, foregrounds “the fragmented, uncertain, mundane, and mosaic qualities of cultural experiences” (p. 86). Under expressionism, autoethnographers highlight their own emotions and subjectivities, aiming to bring readers into their internal and subjective social lives as much as possible. “In conceptualist autoethnographies,” meanwhile, “personal stories become the mechanism for conveying and critiquing cultural experiences, breaking silences, and reclaiming voices” (p. 88). Conceptualist autoethnography bears particular mention here, as critical autoethnographies often subscribe to this representational approach. Again, this is not to suggest that autoethnographies fall neatly into one of these categories or another. Rather, autoethnographers employ different crafting choices to align their projects not only with their paradigmatic assumptions but also with their intended audiences and (e/a)ffects. A key paradigmatic question is that of ontology – a researcher’s assumptions about the nature of social reality and its apprehensibility (see Wilson, 2008). Is there a single social reality out there or are there multiple? Is reality “real” (as analytic autoethnographers might suggest) or is it an illusory reality that is both an outcome and producer of underlying power relations (an assumption more in line

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with critical autoethnography)? Or perhaps realities (plural) are conceptualized as the products of particular co-constructed realities, an assumption informing much of the work falling under the interpretive-humanistic umbrella. Following from the ontological question is the question of epistemology: “What is the nature of the relationship between the knower or would-be knower and what can be known?” (Guba & Lincoln, 1994, p. 108). Many analytic autoethnographers, for instance, would suggest that the autoethnographer’s job is to consider their own experiences as data, much like they would any other kind of data to be analysed as objectively as possible. Most critical autoethnographers, meanwhile, reject the notion of objectivity, instead understanding all analyses as inextricably shaped by both researchers’ values and interests as well as the systems of power within which both they and academia generally are enmeshed (Wilson, 2008). I offer this brief discussion of ontology and epistemology to do some basic signposting on my way to a paradigmatic question that – in contrast to ontology and epistemology – has received relatively little attention from scholars of sport and physical culture. Rarely do we hear about axiology, which seems to me to be a critically important oversight. As with ontology and epistemology, it is vital to be aware of our assumptions and investments, for we are sure to have them, as Peers (2018) notes in a call for axiologically reflexive work: For researchers, axiological assumptions refer to the often-unexamined, unrecognized, or mistakenly universalized values that influence our work: Personal or disciplinary assumptions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, and more or less valuable, worthy, desirable, and beautiful (Hart, 1971). Is Down syndrome a more or less valuable human variation than blue eyes? Is walking better than wheeling? [Are] generalizable data better? Is scoliosis beautiful? Should people with disabilities be included in society? Should able-bodied people be allowed to play a wheelchair sport? (Peers, 2018, pp. 268–269) If we value sport as an agent of socialization, it will surely inform our work, whether or not we are aware of it. If we see people with disabilities as deserving of only either pity or admiration (Peers, 2009), that, too, will inform the kinds of scholarship we read and write. The point, simply, is that our axiological assumptions are at least as important to consider and interrogate as our ontological and epistemological positions (Wilson, 2008). Of most relevance to my work in these pages, it is especially important to reflect on our axiological assumptions as they relate to settler colonialism. What, in other words, do we value with respect to the still settling state? Do we value western governance, the “rule of law,” and settler-led processes of reconciliation, for instance? Or do we value Indigenous sovereignties and the processes of dismantling settler-colonial rule? If we value the latter, then how do we work towards those ends? What is the process by which we attach value to them? On this last point, Eve Tuck (2009) calls for critical scholars to think carefully about

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our conceptualizations of social change and what is produced in and through our work. Too much scholarly work on Indigenous peoples and topics, Tuck asserts, aims to produce change by (only) documenting the “damage” in Indigenous lives (e.g., demonstrably worse health outcomes than non-Indigenous peoples) without careful attention to the colonial context that has made those outcomes likely. “Without the context of racism and colonization,” Tuck argues, “all we’re left with is the damage, and this makes our stories vulnerable to pathologizing analyses” (2009, p. 415). Tuck hearkens to a “moratorium on damage-centered research,” calling instead for attention to the complexities of Indigenous lives and lifeways, to contradictions, desires, and hope. I understand Tuck to be making an argument here for axiology as ethics, attending to the critical question of what we value – and thus what we produce as valuable – as social researchers (also see Wilson, 2008). For critical autoethnographers in particular, axiology as ethics is a meta-ethical issue shaping how each of us “engage[s] critically in high-stakes problems as both an intellectual and as an invested moral agent” (Tallbear, 2014, p. 3). As I undertake this work, I need to be constantly checking in with both what I value and how those values shape my writing and thinking processes. This is important both analytically and in terms of autoethnography as a craft. Analytically, this process will shape the kinds of research questions I ask and how I go about addressing them. It also has implications, however, for the autoethnographic crafting choices I make in the sense that questions of the accessibility and “tidiness” of texts are axiologically important as well. My own axiological assumptions are tethered to questions of accessibility, justice, and challenging/changing fundamentally inequitable systems. More specifically, in the context of this manuscript, I share Chen’s valuation of working to “draw connections between violences ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’… and radically imagine how our praxis can actively refuse the colonial trajectory designed by the settler state” (Chen, 2021, p. 745). Related to these central paradigmatic questions are the issues of voice and truth in autoethnography, worth considering together, in my view. Any consideration of voice in performative writing such as autoethnography must begin with the idea that language is treated as a “vector of analysis” in such writing (Robinson, 2020, p. 85). Such writing, that is, engages in a kind of “apposite methodology [that] involves a proximal relationship between the method of writing and the experience of the writer” (Robinson, 2020, p. 82). The basic idea here is that the form of the writing is the argument (or, at least, one key element of the argument). As Carolyn Ellis (2004, p. 23) puts it, “…there is nothing more theoretical than a good story.” Though autoethnographers can employ many voices in their work, intimate first-person narratives are quite common in this autoethnographic scholarship. Some autoethnographers employ the second-person voice to great effect (recall Peers’ work from Chapter 1), or even the third person, as it grants authors access to the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters (e.g., Ellis, 2004). In any case, autoethnographers develop a narrative voice that allows them to best capture the truth(s) that animate their work. On this point, it is important to note that while

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this might include the “truth” of exactly what was said, done, thought, or felt at a particular moment, this is not always the case. Often, authors are aiming to capture the truth of (their recollection of) the emotion of a moment in question. For instance, in storying the moments on the bridge in Idaho before climbing over the railing for a BASE jump, I wrote: “Before putting my helmet on, I wipe the sweat from my brow and rub the bridge of my nose methodically, wishing for a drink of water as I do so” (2011, p. 405). I have no idea whether I did, in fact, do that particular thing at that specific moment; I aimed to capture not what happened but how I felt and draw readers into that emotional space. What informs an autoethnographer’s narrative voice, then, is the question of what they are trying to draw readers into. Is it a moment? An idea? An emotion? A political entanglement? Peers’ first interrogation scene (Chapter 1) is again instructive here; it is not an account of an actual interrogation but a “composite of the many times that [they] have had [their] body and [their] disability questioned” (2012, p. 175). Their aim with that scene is not to capture what happened, but to help readers feel the intensity of constantly having one’s body and bodily capacities interrogated. Peers’ work illustrates another important point about voice in autoethnography; they use multiple voices and nuanced storytelling to convey multiple truths and the emotional layering and complexities of disability: With the cough now climbing my chest painfully, I …pull the cannula from my nose, unhook it from my ears and neck, pull myself off the bed and ambulate the seven steps to the bathroom sink. And here, hunched over the bathroom sink coughing, I cringe at the sound of the hotel room door opening. I look up at myself in the mirror and to the unaccompanied wheelchair and oxygen tank behind me. My stomach clenches as I hear a booming accusatory voice chastising me: ‘cheater! Cheater! Faker!’ it calls, echoing angrier and angrier. And as my roommate rushes from the doorway to my side to help hold me up as I cough, I recognise that the accusatory voice is not coming from her. (2012, pp. 185–186) Here, Peers stories a voice inside their own head, one that illustrates how they, too, are entangled with the ableism they interrogate in this work. In so doing, they draw readers into the complexities, the contradictions, of “interrogating disability.” So, what am I trying to draw readers into in the chapters to come? Sometimes it is a specific moment, and I recount it in a much detail as I can recall, as I do often in Chapter 4, for instance. At other times, however, it is a general sense, such as settler common sense (Chapter 5) or dis-ease (Chapter 6 – see Rifkin, 2013; Slater, 2019, respectively). I, too, draw on multiple voices – some academic, some unreflexive, some hopeful, some angry – in an effort to draw readers into the complexities, ambivalences, and contradictions of grappling with (my complicity in) settler colonialism as lived in the everyday (Slater, 2019). That this raises questions about what is true or whether a particular moment really happened in

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the way it is described seems to me appropriate – even generative – in light of the ideological and emotional sleight of hand that is a key part of the reproduction of settler colonialism (Slater, 2020).

“Autoethnography as Decolonization [and] Decolonizing Autoethnography” Recently, several scholars have advocated both for a process of decolonizing autoethnography and for autoethnography as decolonization (e.g., Atay, 2018; Chandrashekar, 2018; Chen, 2021). Bearing in mind the critiques of the metaphorization of decolonization with which I engaged Chapter 1, it is worth considering these calls for a decoloniz(ed/ing) autoethnographic project as part of the process of working towards what Kanien’kehá:ka scholar Daniel Henhawk calls a “decolonizing praxis” (2013, p. 511). I will then, however, articulate a call not for decolonial autoethnography but for anti-colonial autoethnography. As noted above, autoethnography emerged from a set of concerns about imperatives for “objective” or “scientific” knowledge about our social worlds, marshalling emotion and subjectivity as methodological strengths rather than elements that raise doubts about the validity or reliability of one’s research (as these matters would be framed in some methodological conversations). This approach calls, first and foremost, for a commitment to reflexivity, to understanding the ways in which our analyses (as well as our research questions and more) are shaped by our social locations. Nevertheless, some postcolonial scholars have recently highlighted that the autoethnographic “canon” is dominated by “white and U.S.-American-centric ways of engaging in autoethnographic writing” (Atay, 2018, p. 21; see also Whitinui, 2014, 2021). These scholars propose a movement towards “decolonizing” autoethnography as a form of praxis, one rooted in postcolonial theorizing. Postcolonialism is not meant to signify that we are past colonialism; rather, it “refers to the multiple forms and locations of discourse, performance, politics, value, and the ‘everyday’ – both past and present – that emanate from the history of colonialism” (Madison, 2012, p. 55). Postcolonial theorizing, in other words, interrogates both colonial “pasts” and contemporary institutions, practices, and ideas that reverberate from colonialism, understanding the two as inextricably interconnected. The foundations of postcolonial work arise largely from the global south and set the stage for work around a number of key themes: “(a) a resistance of all master narratives with a critique of Eurocentrism as a primary goal, (b) a resistance against all forms of spatial homogenization and temporal teleology, and (c) an understanding of the dialectical relationship between the colonizer and the colonized” (Chawla & Atay, 2018, p. 5). Moreover, this body of work calls for an engagement with the connections between colonialism and the legacies thereof (largely in the global south) and (ongoing) settler colonialism (mainly in the global north); it is in this sense that Chen seeks to “draw connections between violences ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’” (2021, p. 745).

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The “globalized present” is necessarily entangled, that is, with colonial pasts (Madison, 2012). Moreover, in settler-colonial contexts, there is no colonial “past” as the logic of settler colonialism is one of elimination, entailing a “violence that is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 5; also see Wolfe, 2006). As such, in these contexts, settler colonialism does not simply reverberate; it is actively being (re)produced under continued colonial rule. Chawla and Atay highlight the value of a postcolonial lens for shaping autoethnography as a field of study: “addressing autoethnography from a postcolonial lens pushes ahead the genre and method’s agenda of carving out spaces to articulate a plethora of cultural experiences specifically rooted in colonial histories” (2018, p. 4). This, they suggest, will hold more space for scholars from the global south to interrogate their own fractured, multiple, and hybrid experiences as they negotiate their own social worlds from the margins of global power structures, not least the academy itself (e.g., Atay, 2018; Bhattacharya, 2018). It has the potential, in Dutta’s words, to be “a radical form of making embodied knowledge claims that resist the normative use of knowledge as an inherently colonial tool” (2018, p. 94). It will also, they argue, provide a platform from which Indigenous autoethnographers might centre “Indigenous axiologies, ontologies and epistemologies… without having to first justify and defend” (Bishop, 2021, p. 368; also see Wilson, 2008). As for the question of autoethnography as decolonization, Chawla and Atay set the frame by posing a number of key guiding questions for consideration: Can there be a decolonial autoethnography? If yes, what could such an autoethnography look, sound, and feel like? If not, then what are the impediments that disallow a move to a decolonized autoethnographic work? Where would decolonization take us? What does it mean to write the self in and out of colonial historical frameworks? (2018, p. 3) Tuck and Ree seemingly anticipate these questions, arguing that autoethnography has the potential to “violat[e] the terms of settler-colonial knowledge which require the separation of the particular from the general, the hosted from the host, personal from the public, the foot(note) from the head(line), the place from the larger narrative of nation, the people from specific places” (2013, p. 640). Drawing on the work of Avery Gordon, they advocate for attention to “haunting”: “the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation. Haunting is both acute and general; individuals are haunted, but so are societies” (p. 642). Chawla and Atay repeatedly emphasize the potential of autoethnography to contribute to the recentring of subaltern voices, stories, and histories. They suggest that “autoethnography is the ‘postcolonial turn’” that ethnography has taken and emphasize the importance of a “focus upon the kinds of texts that emerge

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when postcolonial subjects write from, about, and through the liminal, hybrid, and diasporic locations that they inhabit” (Chawla & Atay, 2018, pp. 4,7). Whitinui, for instance, crafts an “Indigenous autoethnography” about his experiences with sport to develop “a better personal understanding about how the institution and systemic role of sport co-opted and negotiated [his] identity as a Maˉ ori male” (2014, p. 464). My emphasis in these pages, by contrast, is not on my experiences as a “postcolonial subject,” but my experiences (being produced) as a colonizer. This has important implications, of course, for how I might (and might not) contribute to the project Chawla and Atay articulate. In their discussion of key themes in/towards a “decolonized” autoethnography, Chawla and Atay emphasize the importance of notions of “home,” arguing that “Postcolonial subjects are destined to experience home spaces as uncanny/ unfamiliar/unhomely because of the various ways that their own identities are amalgamations that arise in the interstices of interactions and experiences” (Chawla & Atay, 2018, p. 7; also see Bhattacharya, 2018). Liminality is also key to much of this work as autoethnographers interrogate their feelings and experiences of neither/nor-ness, writing themselves towards a kind of (be)longing so often elusive for those Othered in colonial contexts: “A de/colonizing autoethnography… calls me to understand the liminalities through which I author myself and am authored” (Bhattacharya, 2018, p. 11). Taking up this question of liminalities, Chandrashekar engages in and calls for autoethnographic work that “situate[s] the immigrant as not solely a racialized subject but as an important actor for the settler colonial state” (2018, p. 72). Doing such work, Chandrashekar argues, “can demystify the discourses that privilege select postcolonial immigrants such as [themselves] over Indigenous people and render [them] as a desirable minority and settler [and help illuminate how] immigrants of color are entangled in settler colonial logics even as this process is rendered opaque” (72). To illustrate the value of these ideas for scholars of sport and physical culture, consider the recent work of Chen (2021), who powerfully stories his experiences as an international student undertaking graduate studies in sport sociology at an elite Canadian university. In an interrogation of his positioning as a “settler of colour in-the-making,” Chen suggests that “decolonising autoethnography is tasked to reveal, unpack, and resist how colonial violence is deeply ingrained and (re)produced within academic institutions but also in everyday life” (Chen, 2021, p. 748). Chen articulates the ways in which his own experiences in Amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (more commonly known as Edmonton, Alberta) interpolated him into a web of settler-colonial relations about which he knew little to nothing prior to his arrival in the settler state. He stories “the struggles, uncertainties, and revelations in various stages of [his] ‘encounters’ with settler colonialism, and bring[s] forth its shapeshifting forms” (Chen, 2021, p. 748). Chen’s work illuminates the potential of this approach to autoethnography to shine light on the ways in which settler-colonial subjectivities are produced, an idea to which I return in Chapter 5. He interrogates several of the key ideas

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underpinning postcolonial work – not least liminality, home, and hybridity – in order to theorize his “pathway as an international student, a racialised visitor, who is at once nourished by the occupied territories of Turtle Island and sickened by the violences that made this nourishment possible” (2021, p. 758). Having outlined some key tenets of a call for a decolonial autoethnography, I now turn to a call for anti-colonial autoethnography. In my reading, the anti- is vital here. First, this constitutes a refusal of the de- in decolonization in response to Tuck and Yang’s (2012) point that decolonization is often marshalled as a metaphor that obfuscates the fundamental underlying issues of settler colonialism (esp. questions of land dispossession and sovereignty). The framing of this work as anti-colonial is a refusal, in other words, to metaphorize decolonization. Second, I am drawn to the “anti-” as something towards which we might strive, as opposed to the “de-” in decolonization discourse as something to be undone (if that were even possible). I do so in order to emphasize the potential of autoethnography to articulate “radical imaginaries… of other affects, of solidarities, and of resistance” (Dutta, 2018, p. 95). Third, as Sara Ahmed observes: What we might remember is that to be against something is precisely not to be in a position of transcendence: to be against something is, after all, to be in an intimate relation with that which one is against. To be anti ‘this’ or anti ‘that’ only makes sense if ‘this’ or ‘that’ exists. The messy work of ‘againstness’ might even help remind us that the work of critique does not mean the transcendence of the object of our critique; indeed, critique might even be dependent on non-transcendence. (2004, pp. 10–11) Anti-, in other words, is an inextricably relational position. In writing and advocating for anti-colonial autoethnography, I emphasize the need to grapple with my entanglements in and with the very thing I oppose and encourage readers to do the same. In their discussion of haunting, Tuck and Ree emphasize the sense in which we might attend to relationality in what I am calling anti-colonial autoethnography: I want you to sense the unrecognizable as you might experience seepage, to see the coordinates of the familiar change from underneath and overhead, to trouble the real into a space that momentarily houses ghosts and into a time and place that is unexplainably urgent... Mutual implication, or nos-otras, is a way of describing how the colonized and the colonizer “‘leak’ into each other’s lives”… after centuries of settlement. Mutual implication is evidenced by leaking. (2013, pp. 647, 649) It is vital, in other words, that those of us privileged in and by settler colonialism keep in view our connection to the very project(s) we oppose. We must also, however, keep firmly in mind that we (scholars, autoethnographers) “are not fully

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able to see how we are the subjects and objects of our own inquiries” (Granzow & Dean, 2016, p. 91). This is a call for reflexivity at the same time that it is an interrogation of how reflexivity is not and can never be enough. Building from the insights outlined above, I suggest that it is vital to autoethnographically interrogate how colonizing subjects come to feel at home in our social worlds, to consider how that sense of belonging comes to be, how that comfort comes to shape not only our experiences in the social world but our (in)ability to imagine “elsewheres,” to draw on Tuck and Yang’s (2012) formulation (see also McGuire-Adams et al. 2022). For colonizing subjects, Slater notes, “[w]riting about ‘home’ does not so much reveal the country as the stories we tell to stay in place” (2019, p. 48). Fitzpatrick argues that “remembering, interrogating, and retelling our stories disrupts the colonizing process of forgetting” (p. 44), a process that works in the service of bolstering and reproducing settler colonialism. Lisa Cooke’s autoethnographic work is illustrative here. Cooke provocatively engages with her own complicity in the processes of dispossession she interrogates with respect to a ski hill near where she lives and works: I have skied these tracks— tracks that I now work to read for what they tell us about the production of this place as a settler colonial site of touristic pleasure. I have experienced these very pleasures in this very place, folding me into its production. There is no room for me to distance myself from my own analysis. What is left rather is a responsibility to engage this collapse. (2017, p. 40) In taking up this responsibility, Cooke writes of this ski resort as a “settler colonial moral terrain,” crafting narratives that interrupt “the colonizing process of forgetting” (Fitzpatrick, 2018, p. 44). Looking back at my autoethnography about BASE jumping, I lament that what I entirely failed to interrogate was the “white possessive logic” at work in the stories I told (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). For instance, in storying my early days as a participant, I note: “a few months after my first jump, I am off to Idaho again to learn not only how to do a BASE jump, but how to be a BASE jumper” (2011, p. 408). Here, I now see a “claiming of space and place” at work in my narrative, one that highlights my own “convenient forgetting.” The banality of my description of heading “off to Idaho again” points to my assumption that this is a space I felt (and feel) entitled to occupy. The only considerations shaping my decision to visit Idaho twice for ethnographic fieldwork were financial (could my grant pay for it?), subcultural (would the BASE jumpers there welcome me into that space?), and political (would I be granted access to the United States?). At no point did I reflect on my rights or responsibilities in accessing the homelands of Shoshone peoples (nor did I have any idea at the time that city of Twin Falls laid claim to Shoshone homelands). Carlson-Manathara provides an important cautionary point that settler/ colonizers “are significantly limited in their knowledges of colonialism and

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anti-colonialism, since they do not share the subjectivity, history, and positionality of the colonized, and because ‘the site from which we oppress is the site on which we least cast our gaze’” (Carlson, 2017, p. 500). On the question of whether settlers can engage in anti-colonial work, Carlson emphatically argues that “we must,” contending that though “we will do this work in limited and imperfect ways, with numerous [oversights] reproducing colonialism even as we make strides towards resistance and transformation, we must try. To do otherwise would mean more harm” (Carlson-Manathara, 2021, p. 51). The argument is not, however, that settler occupiers – to use Carlson’s preferred term – should rush headlong into this process assuming that they do or can fully understand the contours and nuances of the lives and struggles of those living under the thumb of colonialism. Rather: [the] limitations and challenges to white settler anti-colonialism should engender humility in the anti-colonial practice of white settler scholars. With Indigenous resurgence at the centre of anti-colonialism, the roles of white settler academics are at the periphery, making space, and pushing back against colonial institutions, structures, practices, mentalities, and land theft. (2017, p. 500) This, it seems to me, is the crux of the matter. The kind of anti-colonial approach to autoethnography that I am advocating here, especially when undertaken by (white) settler scholars, is one aimed at “making space” and “pushing back” in these ways. In no way will this render us innocent or provide us an escape route from settler colonialism, as Toyosaki forcefully articulates: …becoming a postcolonial autoethnographer is not a ceremonial moment that signifies the complete departure from colonizing research; rather, it marks the beginning of and a pledge for our continuous labor of self-reflexive interrogation to trace and mark the colonial ways through which we become autoethnographers, how we do autoethnography, and how autoethnography works in global knowledge production systems and movements. That is, autoethnography does not signify a departure from the “what” it critiques; it is always departing, yet never completely. (2018, p. 35) In the chapters that follow, it is to this process of “always departing, yet never completely” that I turn my attention as I engage the “collapse” of myself and my analysis (Cooke, 2017, p. 40).

References Adams, T., Holman Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (2015). Autoethnography. New York: Oxford University ­ Press. Ahmed, S. (2004). Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of anti-racism. Borderlands, 3(2).

62  Anti-Colonial Autoethnography Atay, A. (2018). Journey of errors: Finding home in academia. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 16–22. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617734009. Bhattacharya, K. (2018). Coloring memories and imaginations of “home”: A de/colonizing autoethnography. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 16–22. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617734010. Bishop, M. (2021). “Don’t tell me what to do” encountering colonialism in the academy and pushing back with Indigenous autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 34(5), 367–378. DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2020.1761475. Carlson, E. (2017). Anti-colonial methodologies and practices for settler colonial studies. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(4), 496–517. DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241213. Carlson-Manathara, E. (2021). Settler Colonialism and resistance. In E. CarlsonManathara & G. Rowe (Eds.), Living in Indigenous sovereignty (pp. 28–59). Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing. Chandrashekar, S. (2018). Not a metaphor: Immigrant of color autoethnography as a decolonial move. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 72–79. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617728953. Chawla, D., & Atay, A. (2018). Introduction: Decolonizing autoethnography. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 3–8. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617728955. Chen, C. (2021). (Un)making the international student a settler of colour: A decolonising autoethnography. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 13(5), 743–762. DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2020.1850513. Connell R.W., & Messerschmidt, J. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the ­concept. Gender & Society, 19(6), 829–859. DOI: 10.1177/0891243205278639. Cooke, L. (2017). Carving “turns” and unsettling the ground under our feet (and skis): A reading of Sun Peaks resort as a settler colonial moral terrain. Tourist Studies, 17(1), 36–53. DOI: 10.1177/1468797616685643. Dean, N. (2019). “Just act normal”: Concussion and the (re)negotiation of athletic identity. Sociology of Sport Journal, 36(1), 22–31. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2018-0033. Denison, J., & Rinehart, R. (2000). Introduction: Imagining sociological narratives. Sociology of Sport Journal, 17(1), 1–4. Dutta, M. (2018). Autoethnography as decolonization, decolonizing autoethnography: Resisting to build our homes. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 94–96. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617735637. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Evers, C. (2006). How to surf. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 30(3), 229–243. DOI: 10.1177/0193723506290394. Fitzpatrick, E. (2018). A story of becoming: Entanglement, settler ghosts, and postcolonial counterstories. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(1), 83–94. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617728954. Granzow, K., & Dean, A. (2016). Ghosts and their analysts: Writing and reading towards something like justice for murdered or missing Indigenous women. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(1), 83–94. DOI: 10.1177/1532708615625690. Guba, E., & Lincoln, Y. (1994). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 105–117). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Henhawk, D. (2013). My critical awakening. A process of struggles and decolonizing hope. International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(4), 510–525. DOI: 10.1525/ irqr.2013.6.4.510.

Anti-Colonial Autoethnography  63 Herrmann, A. (2022). Autoethnography as acts of love. In T. Adams, S. Holman Jones, and C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (2nd ed.) (pp. 67–78). New York: Routledge. Laurendeau, J. (2011). “If you’re reading this, it’s because I’ve died”: Masculinity and relational risk in BASE jumping. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28(4), 404–420. Madison, D. S. (2012). Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Manning, J., & Adams, T. (2015). Popular culture studies and autoethnography: An essay on method. The Popular Culture Studies Journal, 3(1/2), 187–222. McGuire-Adams, T., Joseph, J., Peers, D., Eales, L., Bridel, W., Chen, C., Hamdon, E., & Kingsley, B. (2022). Awakening to elsewheres: Collectively restorying embodied experiences of (be)longing. Forthcoming in the Sociology of Sport Journal. DOI: 10.1123/ ssj.2021-0124. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peers, D. (2009). (Dis)empowering Paralympic histories: Absent athletes and disabling discourses. Disability & Society, 24(5), 653–655. DOI: 10.1080/09687590903011113. Peers, D. (2012). Interrogating disability: The (de)composition of a recovering Paralympian. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 4(2), 175–188. DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2012.685101. Peers, D. (2015). From inhalation to inspiration: A genealogical auto-ethnography of a supercrip. In S. Tremain (Ed.), Foucault and the government of disability (2nd ed.) (pp. 331–349). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Peers, D. (2018). Engaging axiology: Enabling meaningful transdisciplinary collaboration in Adapted Physical Activity. Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly, 35, 267–284. DOI: 10.1123/apaq.2017-0095. Rifkin, M. (2013). Settler common sense. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–4), 322–340. DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.810702. Robinson, D. (2020). Hungry listening: Resonant theory for Indigenous sound studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Slater, L. (2019). Anxieties of belonging in settler colonialism: Australia, race and place. New York: Routledge. Slater, L. (2020). A politics of uncertainty: Good white people, emotions, and political responsibility. Continuum, 34(6), 816–827. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2020.1842122. Sparkes, A. (2020). Autoethnography: Accept, revise, reject? An evaluative self reflects. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 12(2), 289–302. DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2020.1732453. Tallbear, K. (2014). Standing with and speaking as faith: A feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. Journal of Research Practice, 10(2), 1–7. Toyosaki, S. (2018). Towards de/postcolonial autoethnography: Critical relationality with the academic second persona. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 32–42. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617735133. Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational ­Review, 79(3), 409–427. Tuck, E., & Ree, C. (2013). A glossary of haunting. In S. Holman Jones, T. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 639–658). New York: Routledge. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

64  Anti-Colonial Autoethnography Whitinui, P. (2014). Indigenous autoethnography: Exploring, engaging, and experiencing “self” as a narrative method of inquiry. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 43(4), 456–487. DOI: 10.1177/0891241613508148. Whitinui, P. (2021). Decolonizing sports sociology is a “verb not a noun”: Indigenizing our way to reconciliation and inclusion in the 21st century? Alan Ingham memorial lecture. Sociology of Sport Journal, 38(1), 3–15. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2020-0148. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. DOI: 10.1080/14623520601056240.

Chapter 4

Outdoor Recreation, the Wilderness Ideal, and Complicating Settler Mobility1

Proem – July, 2017 I wake before anyone else and slip out of the tent as quietly as possible. This is my favourite time of day in the mountains…. It’s the silence. There are no cars, no appliances, no buzzing of artificial light. Ojibway author Richard Wagamese describes my everyday world all too well: “I am constantly surrounded by noise: TV, texts, the internet, music, meaningless small talk, my thinking. All of it blocks my consciousness, my ability to hear the ME that exists beneath the cacophony” (2016, p. 25). It is the absence of these noises that speaks so loudly to me on this gorgeous morning. As the sun begins to make its presence known, I follow the trail around Bertha Lake, taking in the splendour of Paahtómahksikimi (more commonly known as Waterton Lakes National Park). I wander slowly, revelling in the glorious views in the early morning light, a blissful smile firmly in place. As Wagamese puts it, I find myself in a world “so still you swear you can hear her breathe” (2016, p. 26). Having arrived last night, I am only now hearing beyond the silence. It is not silence at all, of course, but an entirely different cacophony… the wind rustling the trees around me, small non-human animals searching for cover in the underbrush… my own breathing, my own heartbeat, my own contentedness. Most people do not quite understand my enjoyment of backcountry camping. “So, you want to sleep on the ground, and not have running water or a flush toilet, and risk being eaten by a bear?,” some will say, more or less playfully. “Exactly,” I respond, more… or less… playfully. But it’s much more than that, I want them to understand. I feel a sense of connection this morning, one that eludes me in the city, but awaits me every time I visit the backcountry. And this weekend, I get to share that with my favourite eight-year-old for the first time, and it is… magic. Yesterday, after we set up camp, we wandered part-way around Bertha Lake and Quinn was as in awe of this place as am I (see Figure 4.1). We are with two other friends, both, like Quinn, new to backcountry camping; all four of us are stopped in our tracks by the eksisoke in full bloom right now. Quinn and I jump into the glacier-fed lake in a moment of father-son revelry that is sometimes difficult to find in the day-to-day of home. DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-6

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Figure 4.1 Author backcountry camping with son.

In moments like this, to borrow from Sparkes, we are creating “embodied memories [that will] connect my flesh to [his]. In shared movement, in sinews, masculinities crystallise. Him-I-he-me-we-touching trajectories in time and space” (2012, p. 178). As night falls and we bushwhack in search of an overlook at the top of a stunning waterfall, the scraping of legs against branches is punctuated by Quinn’s words to his friend Liam: “This is such an adventure. I can’t believe we’re having such an adventure!” This is, without a doubt, one of my most memorable moments as a father. I am sharing something that I love deeply with Quinn, and watching him fall in love with it as well. But here is the rub: More than a simple love of the mountains is connecting the two of us right now. There is something deeper lurking there, something more troubling. What is troubling – the trouble with which I grapple in this chapter – is my occupation of this land. It is my – our – relationship to the land, its history, and its future. And it is… it should be… troubling for those of us who are trespassers here.

November, 2018 I drive to pick up our littlest one from daycare, the picture of bourgeois daddyhood in our minivan. Quinn, now nine years old, sits in the backseat, and as we discuss

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his nervousness about an upcoming school presentation, I think I might ease his tension a bit by mentioning a talk based on this autoethnographic work. At a certain point, I recognize a different opportunity… “Do you want to know what my talk on Friday is about?” I ask, invitingly. Getting no answer, I up the ante: “It’s about you and me backcountry camping.” “What?!” He is leaning forward, trying to catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. “About camping,” he says excitedly, “or about us camping?” I pause, trying to keep him on the hook. “About us camping,” I say, keeping my voice level. “But what… How… I don’t… Hunh?” I fight the smirk reaching for the edges of my mouth. “Well, it’s kind of about the histories of where we’ve gone camping, and how we’re part of those histories,” I offer. “Oh,” he says, flatly. “So, it’s not about us camping.” “No, it is,” I prod. “But it’s an autoethnography, so it starts with my experience, but then connects it to broader histories, broader patterns….” I trail off, not feeling like I’m speaking nine-year-old right now…

Wilderness and Nation Wilderness is neither a self-explanatory term nor one that exists outside of power structures (Thorpe, 2012). Furthermore, there is nothing inherently “wild” about the wilderness. As Spence cogently puts it, “…uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved” (1999, p. 4). Central to this process of creation, Vander Kloet argues, is the question of who is imagined to exist in wild spaces; wilderness, she posits, is “produced in and through subjects who are imagined within it” (2010, p. 20). In tracing histories of three iconic U.S. national parks, Spence (1999) sheds light on how ideas about wilderness, and specifically about Indigenous peoples’ presence therein, shifted historically and aligned with developments in policy and practice. Over a period of several decades between the late nineteenth and the early/mid-twentieth centuries, Spence argues, these processes culminated in the expulsion of Indigenous peoples and communities from park spaces in the name of conserving “pristine” wilderness. These processes of dispossession were undertaken in the service of producing particular kinds of park experiences for visitors and particular ideas about nature and its place in North American recreation culture. The (ongoing) entrenchment of these ideas works to elide the violences through which they have been written: Generations of preservationists, government officials, and park visitors have accepted and defended the uninhabited wilderness preserved into national park as remnants of a priori Nature (with a very capital N) … For the most part, these romantic visions of primordial North America have contributed to a sort of widespread cultural myopia that allows late-twentieth-century

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[North-]Americans to ignore the fact that national parks enshrine recently dispossessed landscapes. (Spence, 1999, p. 5, emphasis added) The process of creating wilderness is central to the production of ideas about ‘civilization’ – who and what are constitutive of ‘modern,’ ‘advanced’ societies. “The land,” Razack argues, must bear visible evidence of the colonizer, signs, that is, of modernity’s presence. It is mapped, place names are changed, and a steady Europeanization of the landscape begins and continues apace. Wilderness and parks are parts of this Europeanization as spaces are created for modern man to know his modernity. (Razack, 2011, p. 266) “Modern man” knows his modernity, that is, by exerting control over “wild” spaces, by mastering them, (re-)mapping them, navigating them. He knows himself as civilized, in other words, in and through the process of conquering that which he perceives to be uncivilized. In the context of this chapter, it is vital to explore both how particular ideas about the wilderness are produced, and how they are simultaneously productive of particular ideas about bodies, subjectivities, and nations. As Razack points out: The routing of race through notions of nature shows how racial, class, and… gender identities are ‘formed, naturalized, and contested’ through concepts such as wilderness (Kosek, 2004, 126). If ‘unspoilt nature’ is where white men and women must go to understand themselves as white, then it is indeed imperative to understand the relationship between subjectivity and the beautiful things that come with colonization. (Razack, 2011, p. 265) I linger, here, with the notion that these processes are “contested.” Too often, we gloss over the forms of resistance that lead to a reshaping of relations, of systems of meaning. I do not intend the discussion above, for example, to suggest that these processes of dispossession where uncontested, or are, in any way, settled. Many scholars have noted the important forms of resistance in which Indigenous peoples and their co-conspirators have engaged as they have contested colonial claims to land, claims frequently tethered to settler sport and recreation. For instance, the Kanehsatà:ke resistance of 1990 discussed on Chapter 2 was a land defence aimed at preventing the expansion of a golf course onto sacred burial grounds; the people of Kanehsatà:ke stood up “against the government and their security forces with nothing but their spirituality and hope [and defeated] the Federal government of Canada” (O’Bonsawin, 2017, p. 420). Abenaki scholar Christine O’Bonsawin (2010) has also persuasively argued that

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Indigenous protests of Canadian-hosted Olympic games have been key sites of Indigenous resistance and resurgence. More recently, Indigenous nations have endeavoured, as one anonymous reviewer highlighted, to “resist erasure and to regain sovereignty over land and history as re-told ­stories” through legal channels, including land claims that render mountain parks ­contested spaces.2, 3 As one reviewer pointed out, it is important to recognize that “there has been a tipping point reached in Canada’s relations with Indigenous communities in and around parks and protected areas.” Edéhzhíe Protected Area, located in “traditional Dehcho territory in the southwestern part of the Northwest Territories,” is the “first Indigenous protected area designated in Canada under Budget 2018’s Nature Legacy” (Government of Canada, 2018). This is only one of many Indigenous Protected Areas and Indigenous Protected Conservation Areas that can be understood as part of Canada’s efforts to achieve its “2020 Biodiversity Goals and Targets,” arising out of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (biodivcanada, nd). It is against the backdrop of this “tipping point” that I story my own outdoor experiences in this chapter.

On Playgrounds I grew up in Calgary. Like many Calgarians, one of the things I appreciated most about the city was that the Rocky Mountains were “on our doorstep.” Also like many Calgarians, I came to understand Kananaskis Country and Banff National Park as playgrounds for me and other outdoorsy folks. Calgary’s proximity to Bragg Creek, Canmore, Banff, Lake Louise, and more, coupled with its high proportion of wealthy folks, means that numerous outdoor industries are thriving, and are big business. The activities supported by these industries are also common practice among those who don’t think of themselves as among the elite in a keeping up with the Joneses city. Sometime in the Early 1990s… Up early, as always, my dad finds me in the kitchen, packing for a day hike as quietly as I can so as not to wake my mom and sisters. “Where’re you headed?,” he asks, trying to make conversation. “Kananaskis,” I offer, briefly. I can’t be bothered to be more specific than this, sure as I am, in my late teens, that my dad doesn’t care about these things. I do not aspire to be like him… to enjoy “puttering in the garage” and watching The ­Waltons, M.A.S.H., and Little House on the Prairie. Instead, I aspire to be like the  people I see in Mountain Equipment Cooperative (MEC) catalogues, ­searching out adventure in wild places. The affect I attach to MEC is part of my complicity in a number of broader projects. As Vander Kloet puts it: “…while MEC is obviously a place for outdoor enthusiasts to purchase consumer outdoor recreation goods, it is also a place to consume wilderness and nation” (2009, p. 232).

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“Hm,” my dad ponders, clearly searching for the right words, “but don’t you get bored going back to the same place again and again?” Inside, I chuckle at my dad’s naiveté, his lack of appreciation for the mountains. Not only are there hundreds of trails in K-Country, I indict, silently, but going to the same trail at different times of day, different times of year, or different years altogether, means going to different places. *** I distanced myself from my dad in the moment described above, and in so doing elevated my own perspective on the mountains and mountain culture. But reflecting on this moment, the differences in our perspectives are not what matter. Rather, it is the common root that is revealing. In this story, our understandings of the mountains are those of consumers. In my dad’s logic, the mountains might be important because, and so long as, they offer us something novel. In mine, meanwhile, they are important precisely because they cannot do other than offer something novel. Both are consistent with dominant rationalities of the “Anthropocene,” a “geologic epoch determined by the detritus, movement, and actions of humans” (Davis & Todd, 2017, p. 762). As Maynard and Simpson highlight, however, the term “Anthropocene” elides the sense in which these characteristics of the geological epoch arise not from “human” activity per se but from the very particular economic and social relations of late-stage capitalism. As such, they suggest, instead, a term like “racial Capitalocene” (Maynard & Simpson, 2022) to better convey the entanglements of capital extraction, racial injustice, and ecological destruction. As Davis and Todd contend, “the current state of ecological crisis [is] inherently invested in a specific ideology defined by proto-capitalist logics based on extraction and accumulation through dispossession – logics that continue to shape the world we live in and that have produced our current era” (2017, p. 764). Both my dad’s logic and my own stand at odds with the following articulation of one of Courtney Mason’s research participants, whose homelands – my “playground” – were stolen by both the Rocky Mountains Park Act of 1887 and the constellation of colonial policies and practices that accompanied and followed it: “We’ve never owned the land… The land has, and it always will own us” (Mason, 2014, p. 29). The disjuncture between Eurocentric and Nakoda understandings of land and resource ownership, Mason points out, lies at the heart of disputes about Treaty 7.4 But Treaty 7 worked in conjunction with other sinister processes of land dispossession and assimilation. The introduction of a pass system in 1885, for example, coincided with the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway and criminalized the movements (and, consequently, the practices tied to those movements) of local Nakoda peoples, with the clear purpose of protecting land and “resources” (e.g., wildlife, hot springs) for the consumption of colonizers. As Vander Kloet points out, the “shift to seeing wilderness as pristine and sublime [in the late 19th Century] … corresponded with desires for ‘untouched’ or empty wilderness spaces

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which necessitated the removal of Indigenous People from newly significant wilderness sites” (2009, p. 233). Initially, the pass system was not strictly administered in and around Morley, AB, a settlement within the Stoney 142/143/144 reserve in southern Alberta. In the ensuing decades, however, enforcement became a higher priority. Mason notes: a significant factor motivating the enforcement of these restrictions in years to come was the formation of the [Rocky Mountains Park, the precursor to Banff National Park]. The Rocky Mountains Park Act specified that the forceful exclusion and removal of “trespassers” who did not adhere to the new park regulations was critical to the early development of the park. Indigenous subsistence land uses, including hunting, gathering, trapping, and fishing, became a source of conflict between park managers and local Nakoda communities. (2014, p. 52) Mason further outlines how the pass system, in concert with other colonial practices, gradually dispossessed Nakoda peoples of their land in the service of rendering it productive (defined, of course, in Eurocentric terms) for colonizers and the tourism industry. In the first instance, Mason highlights, there was a system of punishments for Nakoda peoples who challenged or ignored colonial rules limiting their movements. In the second, incentives were constructed to encourage Nakoda community members to stay close to their reserve. For example, Mason highlights how “access to health facilities and education, although limited, were incentives for some to remain on the reserve and participate in activities supported by the Indian agent and missionaries, such as attending church or school and engaging in agricultural production” (2014, p. 73). Nakoda hunting practices were a particular concern for colonizers connected to both tourism and sport hunting industries. Paradoxically, colonizers worked to deviantize and curtail Nakoda hunting practices at the same moments as they advertised the park as a haven for (white settler) sport hunters. Moreover, in the eyes of colonizers, Nakoda peoples’ perspectives on the relationship between humans, land, and non-human animals constituted ipso facto evidence of their supposed lack of civility and the so-called need to regulate their activities (Mason, 2014). What Mason’s work makes clear is a specific example of what other scholars have persuasively argued: the formation of, and engagement with, park systems is part of a nation-building process that necessarily values some kinds of bodies over others. As Ray (2009) highlights in the case of U.S. parks and environmental movement, “the mountains” function metonymically as the “frontier” and become a site for the production of certain kinds of revered bodies and bodily capacities.

Bodies “Out of Place” As Carly Adams notes, “Sporting spaces… are constitutive of and constituted by particular bodies, by how certain bodies are invited into that space, and by the

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actions and movements of these bodies” (2014, p. 203). One of the central elements of the production of the wilderness, of course, is the relationship between outdoor spaces and the human animals that engage with these spaces. In a discussion of how the marketing practices of MEC discursively produce the wilderness, Vander Kloet notes: “MEC scripts humans out of the wilderness. Although there is a concession for humans to visit, they are clearly not envisioned as part of it. Rather, humans are produced as outside the wilderness, imagined simultaneously as a threat to its sustainability and as its protector” (Vander Kloet, 2009, p. 239). The matter is not simply, however, whether or not humans are understood to be “outside of the wilderness.” More pointedly, the question is of which bodies are imagined as constitutive of particular spaces and places, of “how particular bodies are positioned as of and in a space, while at the same time not quite belonging to it” (Puwar, 2004, p. 8). Puwar posits that “social spaces are not blank and open for any body to occupy… Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are… in accordance with how spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically, and conceptually), circumscribed as being ‘out of place’” (p. 8). Of direct relevance to my work here, Norman, Hart, and Petherick note that “displacing, spatially confining, and restricting mobilities are pivotal strategies by which European settlers have dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their land and sought to destroy the ability of the ‘group to continue as a group’” (2019, p. 113). As noted above, however, it is not simply settler bodies imagined as “of and in” wild spaces, but masculine, fit, “able” settler bodies. In the contemporary imaginary, encounters with wild spaces are constitutive of a particular – and culturally revered – brand of Canadian masculinity (Vander Kloet, 2010). “Real” (Canadian) men can encounter – even seek out – the hardships, inconveniences, and dangers of wild spaces and emerge with their civilized sensibilities intact. Even affirmed. But affirmed precisely because these men display the (individual, self-reliant) courage and know-how to navigate these spaces; they are, in Vander Kloet’s (2010) terms, “calculating adventurers.” Sarah Ray highlights the connection here to discourses of (dis)ability: …if the wilderness movement was responsible for imbuing the fit body with values of independence, self-reliance, genetic superiority, and willpower, and if wilderness was the setting in which to rehearse these values and reify the fit and healthy body, then “wilderness” and “disability” are constitutively mutually constructed. (2009, p. 270) Ray’s analysis highlights that various nation-building projects must be understood in relation to one another, a point to which I return below.

Settler Futurity Though an interrogation of the past and present of settler colonialism is indispensable, it is, at the same time, insufficient. As Unangaxˆ scholar Eve Tuck

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and Latinx collaborator Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández note, when we “locate the present of settler colonialism as only the production of the past, we overlook how settler colonialism is configured in relation to a different temporal horizon: the future” (2013, p. 80). In other words, we must ask after the ways in which settler-colonial structures, practices, and investments are oriented towards the continued dominance of settler-colonial logics, that, as Tuck and GaztambideFernández argue, work towards replacement. On one hand, replacement is about the replacement of Indigenous peoples. On the other, it is about replacement of ideological challenges to the system of settler colonialism itself: “Here,” they posit, “the future of the settler is ensured by the absorption of any and all critiques that pose a challenge to white supremacy, and the replacement of anyone who dares to speak against ongoing colonization” (2013, p. 73). On the latter point, the Canadian project of multiculturalism is directly relevant: “Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity” (p. 80). Canadian multiculturalism, then, works towards “a liberal multicultural future that requires Indigenous peoples to disappear” (Hunt, 2018, p. 72).

“Something to Be Done” – November 2018 “…it’s an autoethnography, so it starts with my experience, but then connects it to broader histories, broader patterns….” I trail off, not feeling like I’m speaking nine-year-old right now. “Oh, ok… It’s called what?” Though tempted by Quinn’s interest in autoethnography, I opt instead to push a bit further. “You know,” I venture, “the places where we’ve been camping, they’re part of parks now, right?” “Yeah,” he agrees, simply. “Well,” I continue, “do you know how that became park land?” I glance in the mirror, see that he’s with me, and press on. “When European settlers first arrived here, they treated this place as if no one was here, even though First Nations peoples had been living here for thousands of years.” I know Quinn is impressed by big numbers, so I lean on “thousands” like it’s an old friend. I can see that he’s doing his gob-smacked face, so I continue. “Europeans really wanted the land for more settlers to come, so they basically took it from the First Nations peoples… You’ve heard of reserves, right?” “No,” he says, his brow furrowed. “We haven’t talked about that in school.” “You don’t know what a reserve is?!” Anger bubbles up, but I soon realize that it is misdirected. It is not a failure of our educational system that is relevant here. It is our failure to bolster and challenge what Quinn encounters in our educational system on this particular score. We have been doing so in terms of gender and sexuality for years,

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but I have come to realize that we have not done nearly as much to help him develop language and awareness with respect to white supremacy and settler colonialism. We are very much still learning that language and awareness ourselves. I gather my wits and deliver a micro-lecture on broken treaties, the pass system, and land dispossession aimed at clearing the way for settlers and the tourism industry. After letting that settle for a few seconds, I prod: “So, what do we do, buddy?” “What do you mean?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. I pause, biting my lower lip. “What do we do about being part of this history?” I consider my words before continuing: “What do we do to change this?” I pause again, still fumbling… “Do we… not go camping?” A pang accompanies the last question. “We could pick up our garbage when we hike,” he offers, tentatively. I swallow my impatient response and hold the silence, not wanting to squash his suggestion. Instead, I prod: “How does that help the Nations who had the land taken from them?” “We could follow in their footsteps and take care of the land,” he offers, perking up. “We could become one with nature.” Not yet satisfied, I decide to let this one sit. I can feel Quinn genuinely grappling with my question and decide that silence is what is needed at this moment. Neither Quinn nor I know “what to do” just yet, but perhaps the simple recognition that, in Gordon’s terms, there is a “something to be done” (1999, p. 119) is an important – if unsatisfying – starting point. There is much more to be done, though, indicated, not least, by my own discomfort with the spectre of not going camping anymore. My settler fragility (Hunt, 2018) is on display here, and I am working through that at the same time as I’m worried that Quinn is imagining the kind of Totem transfer story that Cree scholar Dallas Hunt highlights, one in which “white settlers leave the chaotic and restrictive confines of the city and flee to the idyllic and enlightening expanses of the rural or natural world” (Hunt, 2018, p. 73). In these stories, Hunt notes, Indigenous peoples are invoked principally in order to transfer ownership –stewardship – to settlers and then, he says, “return to the dirt to make room for the progression of a/the new world” (2018, p. 77).

“K-Country” Alberta Parks’ online description of the history of Kananaskis Country (colloquially known as K-Country) includes the following text (see Alberta Parks, nd): Natural History (excerpted) •

The jagged peaks and U-shaped valleys in Kananaskis Country are 12,000 year-old reminders of the last ice age. They were revealed as kilometre-thick, million-year-old glaciers melted to mere remnants.

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Cultural History • • •

Archaeological evidence of humans in Kananaskis Country goes back over 8,000 years. The Stoney-Nakoda, Siksika, Blood, and Kootenai First Nations all have deep connection to this land. Captain John Palliser chose the name Kananaskis 150 years ago on his expedition through the area. The name comes from the Cree “Kin-e-a-kis” – the name of a warrior who survived an axe blow to the head.

Kananaskis Country – An Experiment that Worked (excerpted) •

• • •

•

•

• • •

As early as 1902, parts of Kananaskis Country were included in the Rocky Mountain National Park (now Banff National Park). This land was removed in 1911. It was eventually turned over to the Government of Alberta in 1930. In 1972, the Alberta Wilderness Association proposed a wilderness area west of Calgary in the Elbow, Sheep, and Kananaskis Valleys. That same year, the Environment Conservation Authority identified a need to set aside this area to protect watershed and to provide resource development, tourism, and recreation opportunities. Banff-Cochrane MLA Clarence Copithorne, a rancher in the Jumpingpound area, recognized the growing pressure on the eastern slopes from Calgarians wishing to escape the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Minister of Highways, Copithorne planned to upgrade the road into the Kananaskis Valley to divert people away from ranchlands. Calgary architect and environmentalist Bill Milne challenged the government to consult the public about the highway upgrade. Through Mr. Milne, the Government of Alberta received over 48,000 responses to a survey about the future of the eastern slopes. The majority supported creating a large protected area. Many say Mr. Milne and Minister Copithorne convinced former Premier Peter Lougheed to create Kananaskis Country with a single helicopter flight over the Kananaskis Lakes. It can easily be argued that simply seeing the magnificent ranges and valleys, the endless forests and rushing waters was all the convincing the Premier needed… In 1978, Premier Peter Lougheed officially dedicated Kananaskis Country and Kananaskis Provincial Park (now Peter Lougheed Provincial Park). Nearly two-thirds of the multi-use area envisioned by Peter Lougheed is now protected as a park, ecological reserve, or recreation area. The needs of industry, ranching, and tourism are still balanced with the mandate to preserve the animals, plants, and processes that keep the Kananaskis Country ecosystem healthy.

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This official account is instructive in several respects. Most importantly, it neatly sidesteps the question of land dispossession. In this story, land came to belong to the government (seemingly by magic!), with First Nations peoples acknowledged, but located principally (and vaguely) in the distant past. Archaeological evidence is cited, along with a vague reference to the “deep connection” four First Nations have to this land, without any specific anchoring in time. Vander Kloet argues: Vague descriptions and an emphasis on the spiritual mark left on the wilderness by Indigenous peoples suggest that these places were abandoned long before colonization and present day recreationists’ encounters with the wilderness. The story of how these places came to be under the control of white settlers is obscured. The assumption underlying these types of narratives is that Indigenous peoples are now, for reasons unknown, absent. (2010, pp. 107–108) This “absence” is striking, not least because the very next point following that about a “deep connection” that the Stoney-Nakoda, Siksika, Blood, and Kootenai First Nations have to the lands – lands that they have occupied for thousands of years – highlights that a settler explorer “chose the name Kananaskis 150 years ago on his expedition through the area.” This clearly points to “a settlercolonial logic that has long used mapping and (re)naming land as a strategy for nation-building” (Wigglesworth, 2021, p. 5), a point to which I return in Chapter 5. Moreover, the following point suggests that the name comes from “a warrior who survived an axe blow to the head,” thus reproducing a trope of the noble warrior. The brevity of the “cultural history” section is telling as well, as it suggests that the Eurowestern history of the park exists outside of culture. “Culture,” in other words, seems in this context to mean the culture of others. This produces the decisions of political leaders in Alberta as somehow acultural. The perspectives and actions of Lougheed’s government, in this narrative, are unquestioned and seemingly neutral, driven only by the “[need] to provide resource development, tourism and recreation opportunities.” This leaves uninterrogated (and uninterrogatable) whether “resource development, tourism, and recreation opportunities” should, in fact, be the way we think about lands such as these. Finally, land is commodified and externalized, with the “needs of industry, ranching, and tourism” as key facets of a so-called balancing act. Overall, then, this account frames K-Country as the product of thoughtful and determined settler politicians and stakeholders committed to protecting – and commodifying – the “magnificent ranges and valleys,” not least so that Calgarians could “escape the city.” (There is a cruel irony to this phrasing, as most visitors to K-Country literally drive through Stoney Reserve 142, 143, 144 – a reserve home to approximately 5000 members of the Stoney-Nakoda nation – in order to “escape” the confines of the city.) Texts like this, Hunt argues, work to “figure Indigenous peoples as obsolete and having no place in the future, as they have already served their necessary

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function in the legitimation of settler presence. In these narratives, settler futures are therefore premised on the denial of Indigenous futures” (2018, p. 74). September 2017 An early first snow dusts the foothills as we approach Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, the southern-most section of Kananaskis Country. “Peter Lougheed” is my favourite part of K-Country; it is deeper into the mountains and thus provides access to more wild spaces. So, it is with enormous pleasure that I get to share this place with Quinn, Adam, and Liam. As we packed up to hike out from Bertha Lake in July, “the boys” were campaigning to stay a second night. Exchanging knowing glances, Adam and I capitalized on their excitement, planning this weekend’s adventure as soon as we could manage it. On the hike out from Bertha, I leaned in so that only Adam could hear me, and said “Next time, Quinn gets a real pack. I was happy to carry all of his shit this time, but now that he’s hooked, it’s time.” Adam’s knowing smirk was the confirmation I needed; in asking more of Quinn, I was doing my duty as a dad… I was making Quinn into the kind of rugged outdoorsy kid I wish I had been. Here, I am guilty of the phenomenon described by Jay Coakley with respect to organized youth sport, wherein I “reaffirm traditional gender ideology at the same time that [I] meet expectations for father involvement” (2009, p. 157). Moreover, it is not simply dominant gender ideologies that I am reproducing; in addition, I am interpolating Quinn into a broader matrix of ideologies that prop up settler colonialism, white supremacy, and ableism. With a brand-new pack for Quinn, and a brand-new ultralight tent for me,5 we get ourselves organized at the Interlakes trailhead before setting off for our seven-kilometre hike to Forks campground. In the first kilometre or two, we stop several times to make minor adjustments to Quinn’s pack. “It’s heavy, Dad. It’s pulling on my shoulders,” he whines, that look in his eyes that I know so well. We’re cutting it tight for getting to the campsite in daylight; I grit my teeth slightly before replying. “Buddy, I get that. But here’s the thing. That’s the deal with backcountry camping. You have a bit of a heavy pack, ‘cause we have to carry everything we need for the next few days. I know that it’s a bit uncomfortable, but that’s just part of the adventure.” “Part of the adventure,” it seems, involves both enduring some level of physical hardship and learning individual responsibility (at age 8). Here, I expose a hidden curriculum of our backcountry adventures: I am teaching Quinn to become a “calculating adventurer,” who, “in his quest for independence and careful examination of the dangerous wilderness, is evidently invested in his physical strength and competence… The overemphasis on self responsibility and self reliance suggests that any degree of interdependence or dependence is undesirable” (Vander Kloet, 2010, p. 131). ***

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It’s day two, and our campsite is perfect… We set up in twilight when we got here last night, then had popcorn by the light of a campfire before snuggling into our sleeping bags. This morning, we’re setting off for Three Isle Lake carrying only lunch, water, and a couple of other essentials. As we head out, both boys are in great spirits, and so are both dads. “Guys, look around you,” I offer. “This is the beauty of multi-day trips like this one… We get to set up, then wander and explore without carrying all our gear.” Quinn and Liam grunt in acknowledgement, more interested in looking for sticks just off the trail than in revelling in the magnificence. A short while later, we are negotiating a steep section of the trail, gaining a couple hundred metres of elevation in less than a kilometre. It’s not easy going, particularly since we don’t yet have proper hiking boots for Quinn.6 He’s doing well, but he’s ready for a rest. Adam and I spot a small outcropping that looks perfect, so we direct the boys there. The views are stunning, and we take several photos, one of which will serve as my lock screen for the next several months. It’s a picture of Quinn on the outcropping, a crystal-clear view of almost our entire route from the trailhead visible thanks to the elevation (see Figure 4.2). Images like this, Vander Kloet points out, are important in the production of the idea of “empty wilderness”: …by presenting an isolated person arriving in an untouched place, the very real status of an empty wilderness is secured… There is a sense that the adventurer has found his way far enough away from other humans to be completely alone and encounter the authentic empty wilderness. (Vander Kloet, 2010, pp. 101–102) I nuzzle in next to Quinn as we munch on trail mix. “Do you know how few people have seen the view we’re seeing right now?” I pause, noting that he is totally focused – present in ways I don’t often get to see. Wrapping my arm gently around his shoulder, I offer: “I am so happy that this is something we get to share, love.” He leans his head against my shoulder. “Me too,” he says, simply. I am in this moment, knowing that it will be a touchstone in the relationship Quinn and I have. It will be something to remind myself of when he is annoying his sister, not listening to his parents, or both. Reflecting on this moment, however, it is more complicated than that. This moment, and our camping trips more generally, are more than simply salve for my soul, more than a collection of touchstone moments and Facebookable photos. I am introducing him to something that I love, something that feels to me like a spiritual home of sorts. But there is another education at work here, one that I have yet to trouble with him in the ways that I can or should. There is an education here about how we conceptualize wild spaces, (able) bodies, the relationship between humans and animals (ALL in air quotes), and more. In these adventures, we are creating stories together, he and I. But what kinds of stories are we making?

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Figure 4.2 Author’s son, backcountry camping, September 2017.

The notion that “few people have seen the view we’re seeing right now,” for example, begs for deeper analysis along several axes. First, it hearkens to a priori Nature, “an empty, uninhabited, primordial landscape that has been preserved in the state that God first intended it to be” (Spence, 1999, p. 131). Second, in my conversation with Quinn, I erase both the long history of Indigenous peoples’ (especially Stoney-Nakoda) presence on these lands, and the fact that these folks lived here.7 For them, this was not a “view” to be consumed, but a territory with which they lived in relation. Third, it invokes the idea that these places are valuable precisely because they are difficult to access. Only those with the abilities, fitness, resources, and fortitude to reach such places are able to appreciate – to consume – views such as this one.

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What Future(s)? The formation of park spaces such as Banff National Park is always rooted in, and productive of, particular racialized logics. Though these founding moments are in the past, they, and the colonial structures built upon them, haunt the present, and are reinscribed by our – by my – participation in and support of them. As Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández point out, the “violence of invasion is not contained to first contact or the unfortunate birthpangs of a new nation, but is reasserted each day of occupation” (2013, p. 73). As I grapple with my own occupation of these lands, I wish to linger with silence for a moment, to think of “silence” (more correctly, the removal of other noise) as productive. Borrowing again from Wagamese, “I want to dive into those small bits of silence. They contain the ocean of my being, and our togetherness” (2016, p. 32). The silence I so appreciate in the mountains is, of course, not silence at all, but the absence of the usual noise (of so-called civilization) that makes it near impossible to attend to other sounds. The other noises, even the echoes thereof in my mind, make it difficult to hear the sounds of what Justice (2018) would call my other-than-human kin in the mountains. Similarly, my own silence around my complicity in settler colonialism wasn’t silence at all; it was selective attention, shaped by the sounds with which I grew up. By the stories I was told. The stories I told. And it is a silence – an ignorance – that I see front and centre in the following excerpt from Justice: The more people move around and become distanced from legacies and histories of place, the more their identities become commodified and separated from specific obligations to kin and community, the more they privilege the nation state and its consumable symbols for notions of belonging – and the more they dismiss and disregard kinship- and land-based identities. The contemporary nation state, in fact, depends upon people understanding themselves in this way to ensure that they privilege their obligations to country and commerce above those to kin and relation to territory. (2018, p. 58) Justice’s words take me, once again, to Flowers’ admonition to think “through the term ‘settler’ as a set of responsibilities and action.” What might that set of responsibilities and action look like, and how might they allow me, allow us, to think through our own obligations? Towards what possibilities might this approach point? What might be the possibilities, to borrow from Audra Simpson, in refusal, in questioning “what all (presumably) ‘sensible’ people perceive as good things” (2014, p. 1)? In particular, in this moment, I am urged by the work of Suzanne Lenon to consider “the refusal of a story of determined noninnocence to explain our lives, changing it instead to the project of accounting for ourselves under conditions of white supremacy and settler colonialism”; following Lenon, I ask: “What will it take for us to do this meaningfully and

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ethically?” (2018, p. 566). What will it take for me to think through my obligations with Quinn in meaningful and ethical ways? In particular, what will it mean to do so when so many structures and practices – what McKegney calls a “nexus of coercive alienations that [lays] at the very core of the Canadian nation-building project” – have been aimed at disrupting the obligations and connections among Indigenous peoples on these same lands (2013, p. 13; see also Forsyth, 2013; Norman, Hart, & Petherick, 2019; O’Bonsawin, 2017)? I worry, now, that Quinn and I have been creating what Justice calls “single stories” (2018, p. 38), when we might be better served aspiring to the “wonderworks” Justice describes, though he does so in a very different context. In these wonderworks, Justice posits, “…there are other ways of looking at and living in the world, different ways of engaging with one another and our other-than-human relations.” Wonderworks, Justice writes, are “rooted in the land – not generic landscapes but specific places with histories, voices, memories” (2018, pp. 155–56). Perhaps, in aspiring to write wonderworks together, we can do more than simply share the beauty of “the mountains.” Perhaps we can interrogate our own privilege in visiting these places, our own complicity in the systems upon which they are built and that they serve to reproduce. Or perhaps we need to ask different questions altogether rather than starting from an assumption of our own settler futurity. As Hunt notes: for decolonization to take place, promised white futures do have to be reimagined—or, rather, dismantled—to the point where the structural position of the settler ceases to exist as such. This would not require the literal death of people who currently inhabit the position of settler, but the total transformation of existing relations (or we might say, nonrelations) between Indigenous peoples and settlers toward something as yet unimagined that would ensure the thriving of Indigenous lands and lives. (2018, p. 86) What would that dismantling look like, what shapes might it take? Might it, for example, include the “repatriation of all National Park lands to Indigenous Nations as part of a decolonizing and reconciliatory process that genuinely addresses past theft through land redistribution” (McKegney, personal communication, Nov. 27, 2018)?8 No doubt many Canadians would balk (and more) at this idea, assuming a right to these spaces that have been understood as part of their country for most/all of their lifetimes. “But,” as Gchi’mnissing Anishinaabe scholar and public intellectual Hayden King (2015) argues, “in this supposed era of reconciliation, surely Canadians can make the necessary institutional and legal changes to accommodate multiple sovereignties, diverse legal orders, and long-delayed justice on the land.” In a similar vein, Leanne Simpson argues that settlers “should all listen [to Indigenous peoples acting with conviction] and ask, what can I give up to promote peace?” (Maynard & Simpson, 2022, p. 83). What am I willing to give up? Giving

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up backcountry camping, it seems to me, misses the point entirely. Giving up my “entitlement to unfettered movement,” though, which constitutes “the very bedrock of settler colonialism as a system of oppression” (McKegney, personal communication, November 27, 2018) … That might be a generative possibility to consider. Do I know what this looks like, how it might be imagined? Certainly not. But if the mere spectre of even imagining my (recreational) movements being constrained dissuades me, then perhaps I should have no place in the “as yet unimagined” future. To return to Justice, there is an opportunity to tell different stories, more “difficult stories that offer the hope of something better.” I take heart in his notion that “stories find their way free to disturb the status quo and to liberate people to express all the rich, bewildering diversity of their lived experience” (2018, p. 38), even if I’m not yet sure of which stories to write myself. What I am sure of is that I must write stories that evoke discomfort… my own, my kids’, and, hopefully, that of (some) readers. These stories must be anchored to the pivotal question posted by Hunt (2018, p. 84): “If futures are not circumscribed by the parameters of settler colonialism, where, in fact, will we go?”

Coda Dear Quinn, Have I told you, my love, that being a father is the hardest thing I’ve ever done? It’s the most rewarding, but also the hardest. And it’s hard in new ways, too, as I worry about different things. One of the things I’m worrying about these days – as you approach your teenage years – is what kind of future you’re going to help build. You’re so smart, so determined, and so passionate, that you will make a real impact. What kind of impact, I wonder? I hope that you will do better than I have done – than I AM doing – at working “toward something as yet unimagined that [will] ensure the thriving of Indigenous lands and lives.” The question is, how will you get there? This summer, we’re going camping again – this time to Lake O’Hara in Yoho National Park. Us not going camping doesn’t address the issues I’ve written about… not in the least. Instead, we need to better understand the “histories, voices, memories” of the places we go. With that in mind, I want to take you, this summer, on a bus tour operated by Glacier Sun Tours, who offer “daily Blackfeet Interpretive tours through Glacier National Park… and throughout Blackfeet country.”9 I also want us to learn about the other parks we visit, and about a number of Indigenous-led movements to create new parks and bring other ones under Indigenous control and management. I want us to visit places like Point Grondine Park, where outdoor recreation is tethered to cultural education and appreciation, where the “histories, voices, memories” of the land are shared with visitors, and are part of the experience itself.

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The point here is that we have a role to play. Indigenous peoples and organizations have been doing this work for a long time. Our job is to listen to them, and figure out how to make space. As Leanne Simpson points out, “there is virtually no room for” you and I in resurgence (2017, p. 228). But we can – we must – be part of tearing apart the structures that continue to impede the important work Indigenous folks are doing. To be clear, my love, this is not so that we can be kind, or benevolent. Rather, it’s about asking ourselves what kind of future we want to be part of. With the deepest love for you, and for the world I can’t yet see, Dad (Letter first composed in July, 2019)

Notes 1 This chapter is adapted from Laurendeau (2020) and reprinted here with thanks to Human Kinetics for permission. 2 Closest to where I live and work, “Southern Alberta’s Blood Tribe [Kainai Nation], the country’s largest reserve, … won part of its 40-year land claim battle against the federal government” (Grant, 2019). Though this part of their claim was denied by Federal Court Justice Russel Zinn, lawyers for the Kainai Nation “argued the town of Cardston and part of Waterton Lakes National Park should be included in its territory” (Grant, 2019). 3 A report by the Yellowhead Institute provides a broader and deeper analysis of “Indigenous cultural and political resurgence” than space allows here (Yellowhead Institute, 2019, p. 3). 4 For a thoughtful and critical account of Treaty 7, see the work of Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council et al. (1996). 5 Like many MEC patrons, I do not (believe that I) simply buy new gear anytime I feel like it, but do so thoughtfully, purposefully, and with an eye towards minimizing my impact on the earth. In other words, I imagine myself to be the “conscientious consumer” Vander Kloet (2010) describes and critiques. At risk of stating the obvious, the fact that I am can afford to be a “conscientious consumer” (and have the knowledge base from which to do so) is rooted in privilege along several axes. 6 According to Vander Kloet, sturdy boots: “reference a type of rugged masculinity that holds tremendous currency in the ­Canadian imaginary. The hefty boots of these outdoor recreation texts remind Canadians of their ability (and need) to navigate a complex wilderness place. The men of Canadian mythology – Franklin, MacKenzie, the courier du bois [sic] – are represented with feet in sturdy boots traversing (some more effectively than others) the wilderness” (2010, p. 121). 7 I use the past tense here not to locate Indigenous peoples themselves in the past but to acknowledge that those who made lives here were forcibly removed by the policies and practices described above. 8 This suggestion was discussed by Hayden King, who had recently given a talk at Queen’s University, McKegney’s home institution. King and Courtney Skye also discussed this topic on the Red Road Podcast (especially S2E4) – see Skye and King (2019).

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Outdoor Recreation, the Wilderness Ideal, and Settler Mobility  85 Norman, M., Hart, M., & Petherick, L. (2019). Indigenous gender reformations: Physical culture, settler colonialism, and the politics of containment. Sociology of Sport Journal, 36, 113–123. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2018-0130. O’Bonsawin, C. (2010). “No Olympics on stolen native land”: Contesting Olympic narratives and asserting indigenous rights within the discourse of the 2010 Vancouver Games. Sport in Society, 13(1), 143–156. DOI: 10.1080/17430430903377987. O’Bonsawin, C. (2017). “Ready to step up and hold the front line”: Transitioning from sport history to indigenous studies, and back again. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 34(5–6), 420–426. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2017.1378184. Puwar, N. (2004). Space invaders: Race, gender, and bodies out of place. Oxford: Berg. Ray, S. (2009). Risking bodies in the wild: The “corporeal unconscious” of American adventure culture. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 33(3), 257–284. DOI: 10.1177/ 0193723509338863. Razack, S. (2011). Colonization: The good, the bad, and the ugly. In A. Baldwin, L. Cameron, & A. Kobayashi (Eds.), Rethinking the great white north: Race, nature, and the historical geographies of whiteness in Canada (pp. 264–271). Vancouver: UBC Press. Skye, C. (Creator & Presenter) & King, H. (Creator & Presenter). (June 11, 2019). Portage this. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/user-794776716/portage-this. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simpson, L. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sparkes, A. (2012). Fathers and sons: In bits and pieces. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(2), 174–185. DOI: 10.1177/1077800411429095. Spence, M. (1999). Dispossessing the wilderness: Indian removal and the making of the ­national parks. New York: Oxford University Press. Thorpe, J. (2012). Temagami’s tangled wild: Race, gender, and the making of Canadian ­nature. Vancouver: UBC Press. Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council, Hildebrandt, W., Carter, S., & First Rider, D. (1996). The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Tuck, E., & Gaztambide-Fernández, R. (2013). Curriculum, replacement, and settler ­futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(1), 72–89. Vander Kloet (2009). A trip to the co-op: The production, consumption, and salvation of Canadian wilderness. International Journal of Canadian Studies, 39/40, 231–251. DOI: 10.7202/040831ar. Vander Kloet (2010). Cataloguing wilderness: Whiteness, masculinity, and responsible citizenship in Canadian outdoor recreation texts. Unpublished doctoral dissertation: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Wagamese, R. (2016). Embers: One Ojibway’s meditations. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. Wigglesworth, J. (2021). The cultural politics of naming outdoor rock climbing routes. Annals of Leisure Research, DOI: 10.1080/11745398.2021.1949736. Yellowhead Institute (2019). Land back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper. Retrieved from https://redpaper.yellowheadinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/red-paperreport-final.pdf.

Chapter 5

Pedagogies of White Settler Masculinity (Un)Becoming(?) Settlers

Ignorance is an activity, it isn’t simply not knowing but a form of knowing supported by the socio-political system (Slater, 2020, p. 9)

Proem – 1996 In between classes at the University of Calgary, Mike and I go to the climbing wall. It’s mid-day, so we hoped we would have the space to ourselves, but today there are two other climbers, one of whom – let’s call him Hercules – is climbing a large overhang at the top of a climb. Curious about his ascent of one of our favourite features, we keep half an eye on him while we rope up. He takes a very different approach than we do to this overhang and eventually positions himself not towards the wall (as we and every other climber we have seen do this overhang does), but away from it, gripping the top of the overhang with both hands turned to face behind him. “Send it!,” his belayer yells, shattering the relative silence of the room. Mike and I briefly exchange raised eyebrows. “Send it!!” Hercules puts his profoundly muscular body to work, flipping himself from his arm-hang position to crouched on the top of the overhang in a move I’ve never seen before outside of a televised Olympic competition. I turn slightly away, not wanting to be caught gawking. I catch Mike’s eye, and we silently communicate in the way only lifetime best friends can do. Shit. These two seem a bit much, but that was something.

Introduction In this chapter, I take up fragments of my childhood, youth, and young adulthood, interrogating various pedagogies of white settler masculinity that shaped the early years of my life. In doing so, I follow the work of Chen (2021a), who interrogates the “settler of colour in-the-making.” My circumstances are very different from Chen’s; rather than moving to lands claimed by Canada to pursue

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-7

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graduate studies, I was born here and grew up ensconced in settler colonialism. What Chen’s work makes clear, however, is the process by which we come to understand ourselves in and through settler colonialism. In this chapter, I briefly consider a number of moments that illustrate the quotidian colonial violence that constituted some of the earliest pedagogies of white settler masculinity I encountered growing up in occupied territories. In doing so, I aim to interrogate the ways in which the “givenness” (Slater, 2019) of settler colonialism, or what Rifkin (2013) calls “settler common sense,” shaped my encounters with sport and physical culture as a youth, and, simultaneously, how my failure to recognize that process ensured that I would leave that logic untroubled and unquestioned for many years to come. These particular stories – especially those that reach back to my youngest years – I write in less detail than those I interrogate in other chapters (e.g., Chapters 4 and 6). I story these in this way to reflect the place and feel of these memories for me; in the overall shape of my life, many of these earliest memories do not feel like anything, they seem, simply, to be banal parts of the time-lapse media from my early life. They are, in Slater’s terms, the “dimly lit memories” that provide clues to my developing settler subjectivity (2019, p. xii). But that is part of the point; they were simply among the constellation of “shape shifting tactics” (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005) for the reproduction of settler colonialism by which I was surrounded during my childhood and youth. They are in other words, part of the “cultural archive” as I encountered it in my first quarter of a century, the “way of acting that [I was] socialized into, that becomes natural, escaping consciousness” (Wekker, 2016, p. 20). As such, I write them with some texture, but devote more attention to unpacking them within an anti-colonial framework.

1986 (Or 1985. Or 1990. Or It Doesn’t Fucking Matter When.) I sit on the hard bleachers of McMahon stadium, bouncing my legs as fast as I can to try to generate warmth. My 13-year-old butt has little padding; I shift often from one cheek to the other and back, searching pointlessly for a comfortable position on the metal bench. As Dad and I drink hot chocolate from a thermos, the “Stamps” score a TD and a horse and rider run the length of the field in celebration. I scream in joy, looking around at the thousands of mostly boys and men doing the same. My “home team” is playing their perpetual rivals, now called the Edmonton Elk. Their then-anti-Indigenous name makes no impression on me. As Chen notes, the Canadian Football League is “a distinct marker of Canadian (white) nationalism” and part of the formation of “a masculine power network” (2021b, p. 955). Football is a game literally based on the (dis)possession of territory; the object is to move into your opponent’s terrain – often by means of tactics designed to distract from your real intent – and thus position your team to score points. It functions, too, as a space for the production of a particular brand of celebrated Canadian

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multiculturalism, one in which “racialized others in sport can be tolerated or even celebrated as long as they appeared grateful for Canada” (p. 955; also see Szto, 2020). A snippet like this could just as easily have come from an NHL hockey game between the Flames and the team from Chicago. On one hand, then, I encountered tropes of Indigeneity in these hyper-masculine professional sport settings, normalizing this as part of my childhood and interpolating me into the “cultural and material entanglements that constitute masculinities” (Aboim, 2010, p. 2). On the other, attending these games – or fervently following the Flames, in particular, especially as part of the “battle of Alberta” in the heydays of both the Flames and the Edmonton Oilers – produced a sense of belonging, tying me to this place, making it feel very much like home. It was my home, but was also produced as such in ongoing and banal ways, including, for example, the ubiquity of the very name “Calgary” (Calgary Flames, Calgary Stampeders, Calgary Stampede, the University of Calgary, etc.). As Chen notes: Names are central to settler belongings to the land. Through the constant repetition of settler names in maps, guidebooks, daily conversation, and other practices, settler claims are continually (re)inscribed across occupied territories (Goeman 2013). Toponyms [function] as part of settler colonialism by ‘lending a sense of permanence and inevitability’ [to] settler presence and domination of the landscape. (Chen, 2021a, p. 750) McKegney and colleagues highlight that these produced affects of belonging do important ideological work in the service of the still-settling state. They refer to this as the “manufacture of settler belonging through sport: if the game belongs here, it belongs to us, therefore we belong here, therefore here belongs to us” (McKegney et al., 2021, p. 34, emphasis in original). I would not learn the Blackfoot name for these lands (Mohkinstsis) until my 40s.

1983 I sit on the couch with my parents and my two sisters. The youngest is just two, so she’s the only one not partaking in our ritual of consuming freshly buttered popcorn. We watch Bonanza. My dad loves Westerns. And televised wrestling. “Stampede Wrestling” and the (then-) WWF are also staples of my/our popular culture diet. What connects these shows is the lionization of a particular version of hetero(hyper)sexual masculinity, one that needs repeated reproduction through violence, often marshalled to “defend” women from racialized others. In the case of Bonanza, the defence is also of “home,” a home that is always, it seems, under threat from (often Indigenous) “intruders.”

1986 I am in Grade 7, having just started Junior High at a French immersion school. In one of our first Social Studies classes, our teacher has us repeat the French

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word for seal (“phoque”) over and over again. We are delighted. We also learn in this course about “les autochtones” (“The Indigenous”) and the ways European explorers helped them adapt to a modernizing Canada. We learn nothing about residential schooling, though the site of the closest institution1 is less than 25 km away. We learn nothing about the Lubicon Lake Cree Nation who, as part of their protests of the 1988 Calgary Olympics currently being organized, are opposing the presence and activities of “oil corporations on contested [I]ndigenous territories, as well as the federal and provincial governments’ unwillingness to engage in honourable treaty negotiations with the Lubicon Cree” (O’Bonsawin, 2010, p. 147).

1997 “On belay?,” I ask. “On belay,” Mike offers. “Climbing.” “Climb on.” I dip my right hand into my chalk bag, rolling the chalk ball around my palm and fingertips, then clap my hands together while exhaling sharply. Once. Twice more. I bounce slightly, testing the springiness of my legs before launching for my first “dyno.” Mike and I are at the climbing wall again; we are regulars. It’s a great escape from the routines and pressures of our senior undergraduate years. Though it’s illuminated mostly by artificial light, it somehow feels like stepping off-campus for a bit. Today we’re on our own. We do our favourite routes. We start with mine – “rocks only” on the tiny wall next to the sport wall. I had to work for weeks to be able to complete that route, one that entails six dynos for me, five for Mike, given his additional height. Then his – “pockets and cracks” on a straightforward wall; we’ve both managed to complete this one in under a minute. On my last climb of the day, I approach the big overhang, inhaling slowly, resisting the sewing-machine leg I can feel starting. I reach my right hand up into the crack on the underside of the overhang, wiggling it a bit to get purchase. Left hand over the edge of the overhang, fumbling around for the rectangular handhold there. Eschewing my usual move to negotiate this section, I extract my right hand from the crack, face away from the wall, and reach for the second handhold on this side of the overhang. “Really?,” Mike queries. “Shut it,” I grunt before taking three quick breaths. “Slack!” I yell, much more loudly than necessary. Feeling the tension ease from my harness, I exhale, grit my teeth, and hoist my legs in front of me and over my head. I grunt and flail my legs around, feeling for the overhang, but have no sense of where my body is in space. I reset and try again… same result. “Ok, that’s it,” I say, trying to catch my breath. “Tension,” I say, as I exhale. After Mike picks up the slack, I offer a deflated “lower.” “Lowering,” Mike says.

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In her consideration of misogynist and racist (as well as homophobic, transphobic, and ableist) climbing route names, Wigglesworth interrogates the settler-colonial underpinnings of outdoor climbing, highlighting the ways in which it is sutured to a colonial imaginary of exploration and conquest, arguing that “the politics of naming routes in Canada cannot be divorced from a settler-colonial logic that has long used mapping and (re)naming land as a strategy for nation-building” (2021, p. 5). In a related vein, Erickson highlights that in elite mountain climbing, “whiteness connects the identity of the participants to colonial geographies of exploration. Whiteness as a classification system is mobilized to legitimate who has the authority to explore and create knowledge” (2005, p. 385). Together, these works point to the sense in which rock climbing is metonymically tied to “exploration” and thus to whiteness and colonialism. According to Camoletto and Marcelli, rock climbing is a “nature sport” that has “undergone a double process of indoorisation… and sportivization” (2020, p. 45). These processes entail leisure activities in which “nature” is the “main subject of the interaction” moving to indoor spaces in significant ways and being rationalized as sporting activities through organized competition and the codification of particular events (e.g., sport climbing). Indoor climbing paradoxically indexes the “risks” and spirit of exploration that underpin outdoor climbing (thus suturing it to a privileged white settler masculinity) yet simultaneously brackets the lands on which those risks are normally encountered, producing a rationalized and Disneyfied version of the activity, one even further removed from the lands and dispossession processes that make possible so much outdoor climbing in the settler state. It is also worth reflecting on the construction materials used in the creation of the climbing facility: “With what materials, that were extracted in what manner, from what Territories (with what free, informed, prior consent)? Beyond the infrastructure of the building, these questions would apply to the gear and equipment too” (Wigglesworth, personal communication, November 7, 2021). The indoor climbing space is not subject to or shaped by weather or, ostensibly, histories. Yet indoor climbing facilities such as the University of Calgary climbing wall are located on lands “cleared” (Daschuk, 2013) as part of the process of European “settlement” – they are, in other words, situated on stolen land. Finally, it is not simply the land itself that is at issue here, but the capital accumulation made possible by this project of dispossession. The wealth (private, corporate, and state) that has and continues to make possible “public” institutions such as the University of Calgary (including its recreational facilities) is inextricably tied to colonial violence and the extractivist industries made possible and profitable thereby. Calgary’s (and Alberta’s) wealth, in particular, is underpinned by both tourism and energy industries predicated on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in order to perpetually extract and profit from the lands that constitute “Wild Rose Country” (Mason, 2008; Millington et al., 2019).

1995 I am at Mountain Equipment Co-op, or as most of my outdoorsy friends call it, MEC. I find myself here more and more often; my family has started considering

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MEC gift cards to be a solid standby if they can’t think of what else to get me for Christmas or my birthday. I walk into the store that increasingly feels like the only retail location in which I’m comfortable. I hate shopping, for the most part, but here is different. From the high ceilings to the cycling, hiking, and camping gear, I am surrounded by both the space and the gear that makes me feel at home. It’s not just the store itself, of course. I spend hours looking through the MEC catalogue each year, both to check out the latest in gear and, just as often, to gawk at the pictures of members engaged in various outdoor adventures. I find myself daydreaming about developing the skill set to access the remote mountain ranges, rivers, and more that grace the pages of the glossy magazine. Today, though, I’m just popping in for some climbing gear so that I’m set up to use the wall at the University. My attachment to MEC was a formative part of coming to think of myself as “outdoorsy” in my late teens and early twenties especially. At the same time, though, my affinity for MEC connected me to a set of ideas and understandings of what it means to be Canadian, of the outdoors themselves, and of the colonial processes by which so many of those outdoor spaces came to be accessible to me: “MEC discourse normalizes certain relationships to outdoor places and constructs a narrow range of bodies to be ‘at home’ in the wilderness, all the while ignoring those who have been displaced and dispossessed in the construction of ‘wild’ spaces” (Laurendeau, Higham & Peers, 2021, p. 121). Not only does this constitute an ignorance of those displaced and dispossessed in order to grant Canadians access to these spaces, but it also articulates with a long history of Canadians claiming or adapting Indigenous activities as quintessentially Canadian (see Poulter 2003; Robidoux, 2006). Snowshoeing, for instance, was championed by many early Canadian nationalists as an activity that differentiated Canadians from both Americans and the British, pointing to “our” hardy constitutions and “civilized” approach to sport and recreation (Poulter, 2003).2 What is also at play here, however, is an important and troubling kind of self-indigenization: “Snowshoeing across country provided an indigenizing experience with the landscape and thereby legitimized their claim to be native-Canadians, while performing these Native activities allowed the colonists to link themselves back into the historical and mythological origins of the continent” (Poulter, 2003, p. 295). Robidoux elaborates on the sense in which this self-indigenization was tied to a nationalist project of constructing “a Canadian consciousness linked to themes of survival and northern character” and highlights that the central tenets of this emergent Canadian (masculine) identity “were drawn specifically from the construct of the frontiersman, the romanticized coureurs de bois whose identity was based in First Nations masculinity” (2006, p. 275). Thinking with Vander Kloet (2009), in consuming outdoor products and services at MEC, I was also consuming ideas about wilderness and nation, ideas that contributed to my failure to understand how my whiteness was constitutive of these adventure activities and to my “forgetting” the histories of land-dispossession and self-indigenization upon which they were predicated: “In a settler-colonial state in which we often celebrate outdoor spaces and our relationship to them, MEC’s branded form of rugged outdoorsy nationalism is central to how many of us think of ourselves as Canadians” (Laurendeau, Higham & Peers, 2021, p. 127).

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Furthermore, MEC hearkens to very particular subjects, constructing “the wilderness” as a space for only certain kinds of bodies (Laurendeau, Higham & Peers, 2021). After all, the people gracing the pages of those magazines I consumed with such fervour were almost invariably white, seemingly able-bodied, and relatively thin.3 Moreover, the majority of those pictured in active poses or involved in adventurous activities read as men, whereas models for women’s clothing were posed in ways that emphasized heteronormative sexual desire more than athleticism. Not only, then, does MEC (and outdoor culture generally) produce very particular ideas about the nation, but they also reinforce specific and harmful ideas about who belongs therein and how they are to be understood in relation to one another.

1995 – In an Alternate Universe “…the sport/kinesiology professors start their first classes by proclaiming: ‘Look, no matter where you come from and what your academic interests are, y’all must understand colonialism first, the violent structure underlying all the research and education activities here’” (Chen, 2021a, p. 743).

1995 – My Universe I transfer to the University of Calgary and begin studies in their newly revisioned Faculty of Kinesiology.4 In my two years in this faculty, Indigenous peoples will be mentioned in one course. Land will be acknowledged zero times. Indigenous ways of knowing will be ignored by professors, made the butt of jokes by students. In terms of faculty complement, curricula, course readings, etc., I will be perpetually in a “sea of whiteness” (Ahmed, 2012; Hampton, 2020). I will not notice. In recent years, a burgeoning body of literature has taken shape interrogating the whiteness of Western academic structures, curricula, research activities, organizational cultures, and more (e.g., Ahmed, 2012; Henry et al., 2017; Mohamed & Beagan, 2019; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017). This is unsurprising given that universities on lands claimed by Canada and the United States emerged as part of the projects of Christianizing Indigenous youth and ensuring settler futurity through teaching “Protestantism, the English language, and British culture to the white settler youth of the growing colony” (Hampton, 2020, p. 16). By the early twentieth century, in “addition to promoting European classical knowledge, the university served as a site for the development of racial ideology that served to justify slavery and colonization without contradicting European Enlightenment ideas about freedom and equality” (Hampton, 2020, p. 17). Academic disciplines, and indeed the institutions themselves, are structured by, and serve to reproduce, particular (white, Western) bodies of knowledge as revered and respected, erasing or marginalizing other ontological, epistemological, and axiological frameworks in the process. As Christine O’Bonsawin pointedly puts it, “the academy has not been a safe haven for Indigenous bodies, nor the epistemologies, methodologies, and practices we bring into such spaces” (2017, p. 422). Indeed, the

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university, Daigle expounds, is “a crucial site of settler colonial relations as well as an intrinsic part of the settler colonial state” (2019, p. 708). The logics, that is, that shape and reproduce the university (and are shaped and reproduced by the university) are necessarily and inextricably tied to those logics foundational to the reproduction of settler colonialism itself – especially imperatives of neoliberal global capitalism. The university is, in Grande’s terms, “an arm of the settler state – a site where the logics of elimination, capital accumulation, and dispossession are reconstituted” (2018, p. 47, emphasis in original). The University of Calgary, like many public universities on these lands, remains a space in which colonial violence is reinscribed daily through such dimensions as: everyday spaces of colonial micro-aggressions…; the ongoing devaluation of Indigenous knowledge and community-based work…; the privileged political and material space that extractive industries continue to hold…; spaces of rape culture [that] are part of the larger continuum of sexualized violence in settler colonial Canada…; and the space of stolen Indigenous land that universities come to occupy. (Daigle, 2019, p. 714) Kinesiology, as a discipline of study, is particularly important to critically interrogate, not least because of its historical roots. As Smith and Jamieson provocatively put it, “race has always been a central organizing principle informing [Kinesiology’s] disciplinary practice” (2017, p. 167). In the North American context, both physical education at the primary and secondary levels, and physical education/kinesiology as an area of academic study, arose out of eugenic concerns with the “stock of the nation.” Writing from a U.S. context, for instance, Couturier explains that the “major tenets of eugenics—the perfectibility of man, race purity, birth rates, the white standard, and the inferiority of other groups—can all be found in physical education literature” (Couturier, 2005, p. 35). Couturier highlights the networked sense in which these discourses became embedded in professional communities of practice: By linking the new field of physical education to the latest scientific theory [eugenics], practitioners demonstrated the credibility and modernity of the field and linked themselves to a powerful network of professional expertise. This network… incorporated physicians, psychiatrists, scientists, statisticians, social workers, academics, literary critics, health officials, public educators, and laypersons. The same experts oversaw the training of future professionals in their respective fields, extending and strengthening their influence through propagation of their ideas in the next generation of scientists, physicians, and educators. (2005, p. 35) The early days of advocacy for and development of physical education, then, were nourished by dominant ideas of scientific racism proliferating at the time. Peers and

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Tink elaborate on the sense in which scientific racism, and thus the work of physical education as an emerging discipline, was tied to the fitness of the settler nation: It was argued by many educators, doctors, and politicians that the physical fitness and mental fitness of the population were deeply linked to each other and to the racial fitness of the population as a whole, which had to be defended at all costs… Fitness, here, [referred] to the degree to which one’s body, capacities, desires, and heritage fit within the white supremacist notions of superior European evolution. (Peers & Tink, 2021, pp. 216–217) As Hampton puts it in a discussion of the university sector more generally, scholarly knowledge purporting to demonstrate the racial superiority of whites and deny “the humanity of Indigenous and African peoples was thus a key aim of the university as it sought to produce ‘noble, intelligent, unselfish men’ to serve the social good of the nation” (2021, p. 17). Importantly, as suggested above, the “fitness of the nation” was rooted not only in notions of physical and mental fitness (defined in very particular terms, of course) but also in racialized notions thereof. In an interrogation of physical education in residential schools, Janice Forsyth expounds: Couched in terms of “self-improvement,” Native students were subjected to regimented physical training programs designed to inculcate patriotic values and instruct male and female students in appropriate masculine and feminine behaviours… [W]hen the prevailing attitudes towards Native peoples are taken into consideration, the idea of self-improvement takes on distinctly racial overtones… regimented training programs were thought to provide Native youth with much-needed lessons in life. This discourse revolved around notions of “racial uplift.” Successful curricula would not only help Native students to “rise above” their race and assume positions in the labour force, they might entice them to give up their Native status as well. (Forsyth, 2013, p. 25). While it might be tempting to read these accounts as relics of a bygone past, especially in light of “[t]raditional histories of kinesiology [that] generally read as chronological narratives of progress” (Smith and Jamieson, 2017, p. 167), this is all part of the myth-making associated with both the discipline of kinesiology (Smith and Jamieson, 2017) and with settler states like Canada (e.g., Thobani, 2007). Smith and Jamieson articulate this as follows: The discipline’s obsession with and uncritical value for scientific data placed physical education (and by extension, sport) on a path that both established and reinforced racial codes and practices. Over the course of more than a century, as the discipline has developed and evolved into various subdisciplines, each is challenged by the ways the past continues to influence their

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present understandings of race and ethnicity and their relationships to the practice and study of human movement. (2017, pp. 167–168) In recent years, a number of scholars have considered contemporary kinesiology programs in Canada, highlighting the ways in which the discipline continues to be an important site for the (re)production of whiteness and white supremacy. As Douglas and Halas point out, “an unmarked culture of whiteness is (re)produced through pedagogical practices and materials, and social relations; the norms, values practices and emphases of physical education programs” (2013, p. 456). Importantly, this whiteness is both reflected and reproduced in a myriad of ways, including the demographics of faculty hires, classroom dynamics, curricular dialogues, and research activities in the various subdisciplines. The pervasiveness of whiteness in Kinesiology contributes to the difficulty of seeing and interrogating it; as C. Richard King writes, whiteness is “a complex, often contradictory, construction: ubiquitous, yet invisible; normalized and normative; universal, but always localized; unmarked, yet privileged” (2005, p. 398). Nachman, Joseph, and Fusco build on Douglas and Halas’ work to consider faculty representation in kinesiology programs and student perspectives thereon, as well as the relative absence of questions of racialization and racial (in)justice in such programs. They offer a scathing indictment of kinesiology’s failures to decentre (or even acknowledge) whiteness in their structures and practices: Whiteness is manifested in Canadian kinesiology programs through white privilege in faculty demographics, overlooking whiteness in research and teaching, and white dominance in student culture, where white cultures are central but unnamed… This aspect of white privilege that functions to affirm white centrality… normalizes ways of thinking, teaching, and researching aligned with the histories, stereotypes, assumptions, and interests of whites. Meanwhile international and racialized students and their communities, knowledges, and epistemologies can feel overwhelmingly devalued, marginalized or excluded. (Nachman, Joseph & Fusco, 2021, p. 797) Troubling white centrality in Kinesiology, Joseph and Kriger argue, will “require reforming institutions and curricula, prioritizing the histories and needs of marginalized and under-served communities, and dislocating (symbolically and materially) those in powerful positions from the safety of Eurocenteredness and universality” (2021, p. 13).

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s I am playing a sport; I don’t even remember which one. Judging by the coaches I encountered in my high school years, I’d guess football. The coach is trying to get our attention: “Boys. Pow-wow over here!” He blathers on, something about putting in the work if we want to make it to the “top of the totem pole.” I see nothing wrong with this.

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1988 I am caught up in the excitement of Calgary hosting the Olympic Winter Games. I covet the Sun Ice jackets volunteers and others sport, follow the saga of Eddie the Eagle, attend a couple of medal ceremonies at Olympic Plaza downtown, getting choked up when I see Canadians atop the medal podium as “O Canada” plays over the loudspeakers. I collect pins and consume many events, both in person and via the televised broadcasts. As O’Bonsawin articulates, the Calgary Olympics employed “Indigenous imagery” in numerous dimensions of the organization of the Games, marshalling the cache of the Calgary Stampede to garner international attention and construct the Games as of this place. Organizers, she notes: utilized the international prestige of the Calgary Stampede and based their cultural programming around the Stampede’s symbolic use of the Mountie, the cowboy and the Indian… For example, the composition of the Olympic medals displayed winter sporting equipment protruding from a ceremonial headdress, an enormous teepee at McMahon Stadium supporting the Olympic cauldron, and the Calgary Stampede Board’s suggestion that an ‘Indian attack and wagon-burning’ be a part of the opening ceremony (this was ultimately rejected). (2010, p. 147) At age 14, I think the Olympics is one of the best things that’s happened in my city.

1997 – Still in an Alternate Universe “…the [sociology] professors start their first classes by proclaiming: ‘Look, no matter where you come from and what your academic interests are, y’all must understand colonialism first, the violent structure underlying all the research and education activities here’” (Chen, 2021a, p. 743).

1987 I am at the Calgary Stampede, the greatest outdoor show on earth. I love the rides and testing myself against the many “games of skill” on the midway. I see teepees. I eat bannock.5

1990 I am on the high school football team. I know, ‘cause I have this great jacket. We play against John Diefenbaker high school – the “Ch#$@s.” This team name makes no discernable impression on me.

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King locates Indigenous mascots in school settings amidst the “increasingly complex articulations of race and pedagogy” (2008, p. 147). The imagery invoked in and through these practices, he argues, “confines [I]ndigenous peoples within overlapping tropes of primitive difference” (p. 149). At a deeper level, he argues, these teams and mascots perform a critical pedagogical function in youth sport settings, teaching profoundly harmful lessons about race, history, and nation. These lessons work in concert with those encountered in other cultural locations, teaching “through complex intertextual, symbolic, and performative dialogues with other formulations of Indianness, such as movies, commodities and advertising, the news media, boy scouts and similar youth groups, biased historical accounts, and fiction” (p. 150). As such, they work to “miseducate the public about cultural difference, history, race relations, and what it means to be a citizen-subject” (p. 150, emphasis his). King stresses that as harmful as these tropes of Indigeneity are, it is not simply that they produce “inaccurate” accounts of Indigenous peoples and histories. Rather, they are engaged in pedagogies of how subjects (me, in this instance) understand both themselves and Others: …Native American mascots always have opened as occasions for the fashioning of the self as well as the Other: they construct White citizen-subjects as proud heirs of once great people sadly gone, …powerful conquerors and rightful owners of place and history, and men (and to a lesser extent women) privileged to honor and imitate imagined and invented alters, while rendering Indigenous others as inhuman objects and deaden masks, demonized threats to civilization and civility, romanticized containers of desire, liminal figures of (transgressive) possibility, and prized, profitable trophies testifying to the triumphant fatalism of EuroAmerican conquest. (2008, p. 150) Later in the school year, I give my football jacket to Nikki, a girl I meet from another school. Though we will never so much as hold hands, I like seeing her in my jacket, my name and team logo gracing her arm. Claiming her. Her boyfriend likes it much less and shows up with two buddies in the locker room to “teach me a lesson” when our basketball team plays an away game at their school. (Luckily for me, two of my biggest teammates step in behind me, and he and his buddies leave.)

1996 It is July, and the city is gearing up for the Stampede. The restaurant at which I work is decorated in predictable corral style, and we are “encouraged” to wear “Western” clothes. I have come to loathe the Stampede. In the last few years, I have developed a keen sense of politics with respect to animal rights, manifesting itself in both my relatively new vegetarianism and my feelings about the Stampede, which now seems cruel and deeply anthropocentric. It doesn’t help that I’m not a fan of country music.

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That this was my objection to the Stampede now strikes me as rather absurd. I hated the televised highlights of calf-roping and the chuckwagon races but didn’t even notice the settler-colonial violence of the spectacle, fundamentally failing to interrogate “the symbolic and corporeal architectures of [the Stampede’s] corporatized consumer spaces and places” (Newman & Giardina, 2011, p. 68). Wandering around the Stampede grounds, in other words, interpolated me not only into a complex of entertainment but also a (re)storying of “the west” and of Canada more generally, one in which Indigenous peoples and their “customs” (food, shelter) are but props for the valorization of rugged masculinities that were supposedly central to “taming” these harsh lands. Now, I see that “the annual event, ostensibly a celebration of the past, mobilizes a surprising presentism by refusing to recognize any regional past that is not ‘Western’ or ‘proud,’ remembering only an era in which the West, the Cowboy, and the Indian are present in commodified forms” (Granzow & Dean, 2016, p. 90). This “greatest outdoor show on earth,” it now seems to me, is also an incredibly effective (and affective) monument to forgetting, (re)constructing “the history” of western Canada every year for the consumption of locals. Adapting from Shields and colleagues, the Stampede: stands as a monument of the particular ways in which a social body has remembered the past; in this capacity, it is a kind fortress against the ghosts of the [countless Indigenous peoples] who have died and whose deaths have done little more than reaffirm the forgetful existence of the living, facilitated as it is through the passive consumption of sporting spectacles. The attempt of an organization like [The Stampede] to compartmentalize space and time in structure[s] dedicated to entertainment is also an attempt to construct historical events as encapsulated in the past, as things frozen and benign, and to render the present immune to them. (Shields, Laurendeau & Adams 2017, p. 199) The Stampede reminds the million or so visitors each year, as well as the city itself, that this is “our” land, that “our” ancestors worked tirelessly to make it their – and our! – home. Moreover, it is a civic institution rooted in “settler desire to be made innocent, to find some mercy or relief in face of the relentlessness of settler guilt and haunting” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 9). In other words, the Calgary Stampede is a poignant example of the “settler moves to innocence” Tuck and Yang critique. Even in coming to loathe the Stampede, I never interrogated the Stampede as a “space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict” (Prat, 1992, p. 6). I was not equipped to understand, that is, how the “past” – as produced by and encountered in spaces such as the Stampede, constructs particular kinds of subjectivities that allow consumers “to erase from their collective conscience” contemporary enactments of settler-colonial violence (Vander Kloet, 2009, p. 232). Perhaps, more to the point, I was invested in not understanding this connection as it would have unsettled the ground on which my own subjectivity was being produced.

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Perhaps, then, “absurd” is not at all the word for it. In terms of my relatively nascent devotion to “animal rights” (itself a discourse often mobilized in deeply anti-Indigenous ways), I was keenly aware of the place of consumption (not only of meat but of spectacle) in the production and normalization of ideas and practices. In focusing on the particular ideas of “animal rights,” however, I was (again) engaging in “cultivated ignorance” (McKegney et al., 2021), one that left perfectly intact and uninterrogated my own settler entitlement and privilege.

Conclusion I return now to the “(un)becoming” from my chapter title. With it, I aim to signal at least three things. First, simply, that settlers become settlers. We are always, in Chen’s words, settlers in-the-making, and we are being (re)made as such through quotidian encounters such as those I have storied in this chapter. Part of the ideological “[sleight] of hand” (Slater, 2020, p. 4) of settler colonialism is the illusion that it is a process that is finished as opposed to one that requires constant nurturing and reproduction. As Slater puts it, “ignorance is an activity, it isn’t simply not knowing but a form of knowing supported by the socio-political system” (2020, p. 9). Similarly, my at-homeness as a settler was and is not simply a given, but one that was and is nourished in innumerable spaces and ways, not least through my encounters with the kinds of physical cultural activities considered in this chapter. We are born into these positions, but we also encounter everyday pedagogies that shape our understandings of and relation to ongoing histories of settler-colonial violence, including through our connections to sport and physical culture. Second, this process is and should be unbecoming: “not fitting or appropriate; unseemly.” Too often, this process unfolds without our awareness of it and certainly without much (or any) discomfort on our part (see Chapter 6). Indeed, that is one of the hallmarks of growing up in a system so shaped by racial privilege that those privileged by it fail to even see it – we rarely, if ever, experience racial discomfort, and, as such, fail to develop the capacity to cope with difficult conversations about race (DiAngelo, 2018) or even simply discomfort (Wise, 2005). By contrast, we settlers need to reckon with our own ugly racisms, challenge ourselves and each other on them, see them as unbecoming. As one early reader pointed out, this constitutes a turning away at the same time as it raises important questions about what to turn towards; what, this reader asked, do I “imagine as fitting or appropriate” (Layton, personal communication, Nov. 2, 2021)? These important questions underpin Chapter 6 in significant ways. Third, whether and how we might unbecome settlers is a vital question. As noted in Chapter 1, I do not mean to suggest here that we can somehow become innocent within settler colonialism. Rather, I argue that we might grapple with what it might mean, what it might look like, not to be settlers in the sense of not living in and under settler colonialism. As I hope to be making clear in this monograph, it is arguably not my job to imagine the “elsewheres” beyond settler colonialism; that is work that has long been done by Indigenous peoples, and in Indigenous kinship networks and communities. It is my job, I think, to unsettle

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my tethers to settler colonialism, to loosen my psychic grip on all that those tethers entail in order to hold space for the important work these revolutionaries continue to do. This is not, however, to suggest that such a process is linear, tidy, or secure. But perhaps we can refuse (some of) these pedagogies and (re)make ourselves, our subjectivities, our political and personal projects. These refusals, to be clear, would not somehow absolve us of complicity in historical or ongoing colonial oppression. But we settlers can, on our own and with and for other settlers, recognize, interrogate, and turn away from these quotidian pedagogies, working to “disorient and reorient [ourselves to] come to understand not only that Indigenous peoples remain part of the social landscape of life in the [still settling state] but that the very terrain [we] inhabit as given has never ceased to be a site of political struggle” (Rifkin, 2013, p. 337).

Notes 1 “In 1892, Anglican missionaries opened the Sarcee Boys’ Boarding School (also known as St. Barnabas’s) on the Sarcee Reserve in what is now Alberta… A 1920 medical survey found that, of the 33 pupils at the Sarcee school, ‘All but four were infected with tuberculosis.’ The school was closed two years later and was turned into a centre for treating Aboriginal tuberculosis patients” (https://collections.irshdc.ubc. ca/index.php/Detail/entities/1092). 2 Poulter highlights snowshoeing and Tewaá:rathon (lacrosse) in particular. See Downey (2018) for a compelling discussion of the impacts of colonization on Tewaá:rathon and Indigenous resistance, refusal, and resurgence thereto. 3 Some elements of these representational politics have changed in recent years. For a more detailed interrogation of the outdoor industry’s efforts towards “diversity” and “inclusion,” see Laurendeau, Higham and Peers (2021); for more on MEC’s representational politics generally, see Vander Kloet (2009). 4 My interest in kinesiology as a site of the production of eugenic and white supremacist ideologies owes much to the work of Cris Miller (2021). 5 “Bannock” is one of several names for a basic fry bread that became ubiquitous in many Indigenous communities following invasion. For a more in-depth consideration, see Cyr and Slater (2016).

References Aboim, S. (2010). Plural masculinities: The remaking of the self in private life. Surrey: Ashgate. Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alfred, T., & Corntassel, J. (2005). Being Indigenous: Resurgences against contemporary colonialism. Government and Opposition, 40(4), 597–614. Camoletto, R., & Marcelli, D. (2020). Keeping it natural? Challenging indoorization in Italian rock climbing. Annals of Leisure Research, 23(1), 34–51. DOI: 10.1080/ 11745398.2018.1561307.

Pedagogies of White Settler Masculinity  101 Chen, C. (2021a). (Un)making the international student a settler of colour: A decolonising autoethnography. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 13(5), 743–762. DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2020.1850513. Chen, C. (2021b). Football legend, role model, cultural ambassador, and true Canadian? A critical reading of the mediated legacy of Norman Kwong, the ‘China Clipper.’ International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 56(7), 943–961. DOI: 10.1177/1012690220969346. Couturier, L. (2005). The influence of the eugenic movement on physical education in the United States. Sport History Review, 36, 21–42. DOI: 10.1123/shr.36.1.21. Cyr, M., & Slater, J. (2016). Got bannock? Traditional Indigenous bread in Winnipeg’s north end. In F. Deer & T. Falkenberg (Eds.), Indigenous perspectives on education for well-being in Canada (pp. 59–73). Winnipeg: ESWB Press. Daigle, M. (2019). The spectacle of reconciliation: On (the) unsettling responsibilities to Indigenous peoples in the academy. Society and Space, 37(4), 703–721. DOI: 10.1177/0263775818824342. Daschuk, J. (2013). Clearing the Plains: Disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of Aboriginal life. Regina: University of Regina Press. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Boston: Beacon Press. Douglas, D. & Halas, J. (2013). The wages of whiteness: Confronting the nature of ivory tower racism and the implications for physical education. Sport, Education & Society, 18(4), 453–474. DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2011.602395. Downey, A. (2018). The Creator’s game: Lacrosse, identity, and Indigenous nationhood. Vancouver: UBC Press. Erickson, B. (2005). Style matters: Explorations of bodies, whiteness, and identity in rock climbing. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22(3), 373–396. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.22.3.373. Forsyth, J. (2013). Bodies of meaning: Sports and games at Canadian residential schools. In J. Forsyth & A. Giles (Eds.), Aboriginal peoples & sport in Canada (pp. 15−34). Vancouver: UBC Press. Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the university. In E. Tuck & K. Wayne Yang (Eds.) Toward what justice? Diverse dreams of justice in education (pp. 47–65). New York: Routledge. Granzow, K., & Dean, A. (2016). Ghosts and their analysts: Writing and reading towards something like justice for murdered or missing Indigenous women. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(1), 83–94. DOI: 10.1177/1532708615625690. Hampton, R. (2020). Black racialization and resistance at an Elite University. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Henry, F., Dua, E., James, C., Kobayashi, A., Li, P., Ramos, H., & Smith, M. (2017). The equity myth: Racialization and indigeneity at Canadian universities. Vancouver: UBC Press. Joseph, J. & Kriger, D. (2021). Towards a decolonizing kinesiology ethics model. Quest, 73(2), 192–208. DOI: 10.1080/00336297.2021.1898996. King, C. R. (2005). Cautionary notes on whiteness and sport studies. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22(3), 397–408. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.22.3.397. King, C. R. (2008). Hostile environments: Anti-Indian imagery, racial pedagogies, and youth sport cultures. In M. Giardina & M. Donnelly (Eds.) Youth culture and sport: Identity, power, and politics (pp. 147–160). New York: Routledge. Laurendeau, J., Higham, T., & Peers, D. (2021). Mountain Equipment Co-op, “diversity work,” and the “inclusive” politics of erasure. Sociology of Sport Journal, 38(2), 120–130. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2020-0031.

102  Pedagogies of White Settler Masculinity Mason, C. (2008). The construction of Banff as a “natural” environment: Sporting festivals, tourism, and representations of Aboriginal peoples. Journal of Sport History, 35(2), 221–239. McKegney, S., Henry, R., Koch, J., & Rathwell, M. (2021). Manufacturing compliance with anti-Indigenous racism in Canadian hockey: The case of Beardy’s Blackhawks. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 53(3), 29–50. DOI: 10.1353/ces.2021.0017. Mohamed, T., & Beagan, B. (2019). ‘Strange faces’ in the academy: Experiences of racialized and Indigenous faculty in Canadian universities. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(3), 338–354. DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2018.1511532. Miller, C. (2021). Troubling kinesiology: Triangulating settler futurities via interdisciplinary research dialogues. Manuscript in preparation. Millington, R., Giles, A., Hayhurst, L., Van Luijk, N., & McSweeney, M. (2019). ‘Calling out’ corporate redwashing: The extractives industry, corporate social responsibility and sport for development in Indigenous communities in Canada. Sport in Society, 22(12), 2122–2140. DOI: 10.1080/17430437.2019.1567494. Nachman, J., Joseph, J., & Fusco, C. (2021): ‘What if what the professor knows is not diverse enough for us?’: Whiteness in Canadian kinesiology programs. Sport, Education and Society, 27(7), 789–802. DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2021.1919613. Newman, J., & Giardina, M. (2011). Sport, spectacle, and NASCAR nation: Consumption and the cultural politics of neoliberalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Bonsawin, C. (2010). “No Olympics on stolen native land”: Contesting Olympic narratives and asserting indigenous rights within the discourse of the 2010 Vancouver Games. Sport in Society, 13(1), 143–156. DOI: 10.1080/17430430903377987. O’Bonsawin, C. (2017). “Ready to step up and hold the front line”: Transitioning from sport history to indigenous studies, and back again. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 34(5–6), 420–426. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2017.1378184. Peers, D. & Tink, L. (2021). Rereading histories of inclusive recreation, physical education, and sport. In. C. Adams (Ed.), Sport and recreation in Canadian history (pp. 203–226). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Poulter, G. (2003). Snowshoeing and lacrosse: Canada’s nineteenth-century ‘national games.’ Culture, Sport, Society, 6(2–3), 293–320. DOI: 10.1080/14610980312331271639. Prat, M. (1992). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. London: Routledge. Rifkin, M. (2013). Settler common sense. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–4), 322–340. DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.810702. Robidoux, M. (2006). Historical interpretations of First Nations masculinity and its influence on Canada’s sport heritage. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 23(2), 267–284. DOI: 10.1080/09523360500478281. Sensoy, Ö., & DiAngelo, R. (2017). “We are all for diversity, but…”: How faculty hiring committees reproduce whiteness and practical suggestions for how they can change. Harvard Educational Review, 87(4), 557–580, 593–595. DOI: 10.17763/1943-5045-87.4.557. Shields, R., Laurendeau, J., & Adams, C. (2017). The logic of memory: “Paroxysms of tears and joy” for the London Olympics and the Bhopal disaster. Memory Studies, 10(2), 193–209. DOI: 10.1177/1750698016638407. Slater, L. (2019). Anxieties of belonging in settler colonialism: Australia, race and place. New York: Routledge. Slater, L. (2020). A politics of uncertainty: Good white people, emotions, and political responsibility. Continuum, 34(6), 816–827. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2020.1842122.

Pedagogies of White Settler Masculinity  103 Smith, M. & Jamieson, K. (2017). The way we never were: Postracial Kinesiology in America. ­ Kinesiology Review, 6, 167–177. DOI: 10.1123/kr.2017-0007. Szto, C. (2020). Changing on the fly: Hockey through the voices of south Asian Canadians. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Thobani, S. (2007). Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Vander Kloet (2009). A trip to the co-op: The production, consumption, and salvation of Canadian wilderness. International Journal of Canadian Studies, 39/40, 231–251. DOI: 10.7202/040831ar. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham: Duke ­University Press. Wigglesworth, J. (2021). The cultural politics of naming outdoor rock climbing routes. Annals of Leisure Research, DOI: 10.1080/11745398.2021.1949736. Wise, T. (2005). White like me. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press.

Chapter 6

O Canada? (Be)longing, (Un)certainty, and White Settler Inheritance

Proem – November 6, 20211 Each team’s starting lineup stands on their own blue line, helmets removed, facing the Canadian flag hanging from the rafters. Quinn, age 12, stands too, like most of the spectators. He looks to me, then to the flag, then back to me, still seated, toque covering my head. I open my mouth slightly, not sure of what to offer him right now. My chest flutters and my cheeks flush as I realize that I am drawing attention, now, not only to myself but to him as well. “It’s ok, love,” I say, and he turns back towards the flag. The familiar anthem begins, pulling at me from behind my belly button. *** Dear reader, I’ve prepared two versions of this letter for you. In this first, I offer the full experience of the journey on which I invite you. In the second, you will find a “safer” version, one that allows you to appreciate the ideas but perhaps experience them with a bit more security. I trust you to judge your own investments and capacity in assessing which version, if any, you choose to engage with. Version 1 I want you to do something with me, if you’re willing… I want you to come on an imaginary journey with me. Tune into your body and let yourself feel how you respond. Imagine you’re in a home. It’s a lovely home – clean, comfortable, tastefully appointed, smelling faintly of oak. The quiet is calming. It’s a lovely home. Or so it seems. As you spend time in the home, as you tune into the sights, feels, sounds, and smells that didn’t register at first, it changes. The paint is chipping and peeling. The smells of ammonia and mould take shape, overpower the oak, and tickle the back of your throat. Noises you had not noticed before start to come into your awareness.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-8

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You reach out involuntarily to steady yourself as the ground shifts beneath your feet. You hear yourself yelp in pain and see slivers along your arm from where you steadied yourself. You recover your balance momentarily, then are thrown into a wall. You fumble around for equilibrium but can’t seem to hold onto it as everything moves around you. As you are flung around the room, scenes of violence flash through your awareness. There is an assault underway. Several, actually. It’s difficult to know how many or whether or where one ends and another begins. You are so busy trying to get your balance that you can’t be sure, but it seems that you are part of the assault. That you are an assailant. Police officers, reporters, politicians, social workers, teachers… fragments of visions suggest that they, too, are taking part in the assault. In the flashes that register in your awareness, several of them whisper “I’m here to help” as their fists and elbows continue to fly. As you fight for equilibrium, the underlying sounds that you first missed grow in intensity. They are hard to discern from one another, jumbled as they are. But with effort, you are able to pick up some of the threads woven together in the soundscape: “I can’t run that fast. Not fast enough. Never fast enough.” “We now recognize that it was wrong… we apologize for having done this.” “Come get me, devils!” “I’m going to die.” “He doesn’t give a fuck… He doesn’t give a fuck…” “…when we were on our knees with fever and pukes, they decided they liked us there, on our knees. And that’s when they opened the first schools.” “They never came back.” “We now recognize that it was wrong… we apologize for having done this.” “He doesn’t give a fuck…” “…the black cars came from town and burned out our homes along the roadside.” “He doesn’t give a fuck…” “At best, I was prey.” “We now recognize that it was wrong… we apologize for having done this.” “He doesn’t give a fuck… He doesn’t give a fuck…” “…too many corpses and not enough graves.” “He doesn’t give a fuck…” “Families, loved ones, were torn apart…”2 These audio snippets keep repeating as the flashes of the assault continue. Before long, bile charges up the back of your throat. You are overcome by the smell as you vomit, your stomach contents splattering haphazardly as you tumble around. I live in this home too, and one day, Carly and I will be passing it along as an inheritance to Quinn and Avery. This is not a home they have asked for, but it is the one we have helped build for them. The one we are helping build for them. The one, in fact, that has been and can only be built because of the ongoing assaults. What, dear reader, are the legacies you have inherited? What are the legacies you will pass along? Version 2 I want you to do something with me, if you’re willing… I want you to go on an imaginary journey with me. Don’t worry – I’ll keep it short; we’ll be back before

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long. But I want you to really work at this… don’t simply read the words, but actually try to conjure the images, the smells, the sounds. Tune into your body and let yourself feel how you respond. Ready? Imagine you’re in a home. It’s a lovely home – clean, comfortable, tastefully appointed, smelling faintly of oak. The quiet is calming. It’s a lovely home. Or so it seems. Now imagine that you’re in the same home, but it is different. You now notice the paint is chipping in areas. Running your fingers along a beautiful antique table, you get a sliver. The smells of ammonia and mould start to overpower the oak and tickle the back of your throat. Noises you had not noticed before now invade your senses and make you feel off-kilter. You find yourself in the middle of a scene of violence. Right in front of you. So close that you’re part of it. The person claiming ownership over the home is assaulting another person who lives there. The assailant is apologizing for past assaults but doing so while continuing the present assault. What do you do? Are you tempted, perhaps, to call the police? Not gonna’ work – the police are already there, taking part in the assault. Social workers, maybe? Nope – they’re part of it too. Elected leaders? They hired the police and the social workers to help organize the attacks so they could build the home and keep renovating it. This is the home in which you find yourself, dear reader. It is the home in which I live, too. In fact, I am the assailant; I am apologizing for past instances of violence, but also perpetrating current ones. Are you the assailant too? One day, Carly and I will be passing this home along as an inheritance to Quinn and Avery. This is not a home they have asked for, but it is the one we have helped build for them. The one we are helping build for them. The one, in fact, that has been and can only be built because of the ongoing assault. What are the legacies you have inherited? What are the legacies you will pass along? *** I wonder, dear reader, which version of the letter you read. I wrote the second version first, for what that’s worth. It felt radical, at the time, but an insightful friend and colleague pointed out that in it I rescue readers from discomfort, only hinting at the disorientation and violence of the house. The fact that I first wrote this somewhat sanitized version is worthy of further reflection. It now seems to me to point towards my own investments in the house. I want(ed), it seems, to acknowledge that there is violence in the house, but hold onto the idea that the house itself might be fixed. Redeemed, if only we could stop the assault. In the second, I work harder to convey the idea that the house is the assault.

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I invite you to reflect, too, on the version with which you engaged. Did you find the first version (or the idea of it) too much? Too unsettling, perhaps? I invite you to consider this not in order to determine whether or not you’re a “good settler” (if, indeed, you are a settler), but to help point you towards the kind of work you are ready to do in this regard, much as I’ve used the process of writing this monograph (and this chapter in particular) to point me towards the kind of work for which I was (and was not) ready. In (shared?) pain, Jay This chapter is for Quinn and Avery; it is about the beautiful, messy, complicated, and deeply unsettling legacies that they will inherit.

November 6, 2021 At age 12, Quinn doesn’t get overly excited about too much apart from his favourite video games. So, when he came home from school a few days ago chomping at the bit to watch a men’s AA hockey game in town, Carly and I didn’t hesitate to rearrange our date night so I could take him to the game. As we pull into the parking lot of the arena, I see many more cars than I anticipated. Never having attended a game at this level of hockey, I assumed that it might be a bit of a sparse turnout, which would also explain why one of Quinn’s teachers – a player on the team – was giving away tickets to the game. As we make our way into the arena, I’m paying close attention to the vaccineverification process and spectators and staff around us. “Can we have popcorn, dad?” Quinn asks as we climb the cement steps to the spectator seating area. “No.” I pause, exhale purposefully, remind myself that everyone here has been vaccinated, and try again as we hit the top step. “Ok, love, if you want to have popcorn, then let’s go sit at the far end of the arena.” Seeing his raised eyebrow, I offer a somewhat tired explanation: “I’m not going to be jazzed about taking off our masks near tons of other people.” A few minutes and some popcorn and iced tea later, as the players finish warming up, we hear “please stand and remove your hats for the singing of the national anthem” over the loudspeaker. The front of my neck tenses. As Quinn stands up from the hard plastic chair, he looks down at me, eyebrow raised. “Dad?,” he queries. The intensity – even desperation – of his gaze is too much for me right now. “It’s okay, love,” I offer (too) quickly, fleetingly meeting his eyes. What the fuck am I doing? Why, when I’ve spent 48 years of my life standing for the anthem, do I suddenly have a visceral response to doing so? How do I plan to explain this to Quinn? To Ave? To Carly? And what the hell is this supposed to accomplish? “You go ahead… I’ll explain in a minute.”

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“Uh…” he looks to me, then to the Canadian flag hanging from the rafters, then back to me, still seated, toque covering my head. I open my mouth slightly, not sure of what to offer him right now. My chest flutters and my cheeks flush as I realize that I am drawing attention, now, not only to myself but to him as well. “It’s ok, love,” I say, and he turns back towards the flag. The familiar anthem begins, pulling at me from behind my belly button. It is not ok. None of this is “ok.” The tingling in my cheeks reaches for the tips of my ears. As the anthem finishes, polite applause accompanies people taking their seats. Quinn turns slightly to me. “I’m struggling with what to do with the anthem, love,” I offer, as if that isn’t patently obvious. “Why?,” he queries, earnestly. “Well…,” I start, fidgeting in my chair, “I don’t like what it stands for, I guess.” Then what do I want to stand for?! Quinn holds my gaze, not letting me off the hook that easily. “I worry that if I took part, I’d be supporting, or maybe celebrating, a country that I think needs to be doing better.” Wait a minute there… Who needs to be doing better? In this moment, I distanced myself from “a country,” neatly locating myself outside of the scope of culpability and responsibility. *** Home from the game, I sit in the living room recounting the events of the evening with Carly. When I mention that I refused to stand for the anthem, Carly shifts slightly in her seat. “Love…” she starts, a hint of trepidation in her voice. “What are you hoping to do by staying in your seat?” “I don’t know,” I offer, my forehead pinched. “Honestly, I’m trying to figure that out.” “Ok, I just wonder…,” she starts… “Does it do anything?” I start to respond, catch myself, and regroup. “Does me not standing do anything?” I query, my face flushing slightly. “Yeah. I mean, if Indigenous folks were protesting the anthem and you were doing something in solidarity with them, that would be one thing.” Carly holds my gaze lovingly, seeming to decide whether to go on. “But no one at the game tonight will know why you were sitting; they’ll just think you were being rude.” Rude? I don’t care if someone thinks I’m rude! Aren’t we Canadians a bit too hung up on being polite, on being seen as polite? Isn’t that one of the processes by which we keep all of this intact? I don’t know what the hell I’m doing or what it will accomplish, but I sure as shit don’t care if someone thinks I’m rude. Or do I?

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I take a deep breath, trying to settle my energy. “Maybe so,” I start. “But the answer can’t be that I just go along with it, can it? Not when I know what it stands for, what the anthem itself does…” This is the complicated story of what Quinn and Avery will inherit from me. From us. It is a story of shared and ritualized settler culture, of a stable, committed, hetero-nuclear family recognized and recognizable in policy and practice.3 It is about the ideas that are simply part of their common-sense worlds.

August 2022 “It’s good to hear your voice,” Heather offers gently. After years of working with her, I feel myself breathe more deeply whenever we connect; she’s a skilled and kind therapist. “Thanks for making time for me.” “Of course,” she says. “I’ve been looking forward to hearing about your interest in how trauma lives in the body.” I pause, wondering where to wade in. “Right,” I start. “Thanks to a conversation with a dear friend, I’ve been reading Peter Levine’s work on healing trauma. I’m struck by the sense in which the body is, as my friend said, both an ‘access point and a resonant chamber,’ how the body tells us, if we are able to listen, what we carry with us.” “Yes,” Heather offers, her enthusiasm evident even over the phone. “Levine’s work very much resonates with me as well. I completed his three-year training program and was fortunate to spend some of that training with him.” After a short pause, she adds: “So, from this perspective, some of the disconnection you’ve described when we’ve talked is your body’s response to trauma that hasn’t been healed. When we store that trauma and don’t process it, it shows up in our bodies in all kinds of ways. As Levine says, when trauma is healed, shift happens.” “So,” I jump in, “when we process something in a session and my breathing deepens dramatically…” “Exactly,” Heather affirms. “That’s evidence of some healing.” “I still feel disconnected often though,” I say, somewhat more quietly. “Remember, it’s a process. It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion; as we peel back some, we’re able to access deeper ones. Over time, our bodies have built layers of protection around our traumas, so our job is to create the safety needed to work through those layers.” “So, be gentle with myself?” “Yes, definitely,” Heather offers, gently but firmly. “Remember to honour the work you’re doing and the layers of trauma with which you’re engaging. Our bodies figure out how to function while protecting themselves from what triggers our trauma responses. So, as we do work to uncover and heal those traumas, we are literally changing our bodies and reorienting ourselves to the world around us.

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We’re bound to experience dis-ease as we do this. It’s a lot to process, so honour the work you’re doing.” “I’ll try to remember that. Thank you.” I pause, sitting with the dis-ease Heather has mentioned. “I think maybe that’s been part of my trauma response, actually.” Heather holds the space while I gather my thoughts. “Dis-ease itself has been a trigger for me. My own discomfort feels like a lack of safety, so I think I’ve been shutting that down. But that also means I’m not growing because there’s no growth possible without discomfort.” “That seems important,” Heather says, simply. “The challenge might be to lean into that discomfort, knowing that you are building the resources to work through it. You can be uncomfortable – even deeply uncomfortable, and still be ok. I think you saw that in our last session.” My lips purse slightly as I recall bawling in our last session but still feeling totally present in my body. “You’re right. Thank you for that reminder.” “You’re welcome,” Heather offers. “And remember one more layer to this. You have your own personal trauma, but there’s also the racialized trauma you’re reading about in Menakem’s work that you mentioned over email. Whatever our relationship to what Menakem calls ‘white body supremacy,’ our bodies are rife with trauma that has been passed down through many generations.” “That, I think, is where I have the most work to do,” I say, feeling the truth of the statement in my upper chest. “That prospect scares me a bit, but that fear is underpinned by a palpable optimism, or hope or something.” This is the story of the work that we do and the work that we don’t do. The story of what our bodies tell us, if only we can listen. The story of how histories are written in and on our bodies, and of how we can rewrite those histories if we commit to doing the work, to leaning into the dis-ease. Quinn and Avery will inherit the house, but it is one that can be remade, even torn apart.

November 19, 2021 Quinn has just played his first season of organized volleyball and is a bit obsessed. It’s among my favourite sports to play, and I absolutely love watching it at elite levels, so I’m delighted to bring him to Lethbridge College to watch the Kodiaks play against the Medicine Hat Rattlers. We sit in the very highest row, sacrificing the view I love from just above the net in order to better distance from other people; I try not to get distracted by the folks a few rows away who remove their masks every time they lean in to talk to someone. From up here, we have a great view of the whole court as well as the stands. We got here early; I wanted Quinn to be able to see the warm-up. The men’s match is first, and we’re delighting in watching some of the big hitters kill the ball at the attack line as they warm up. Though I never played at this level and it’s been 20 years since I played seriously, my body lights up watching these athletes; it remembers the feeling of setting a beautiful quick hit, of digging a hard attack.

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With the teams ready to play, the announcer says: “Ladies and gentlemen, please stand and remove your hats for the singing of the national anthem.” I have noted the location of the Canadian flag (to our right), have purposely angled myself slightly away from it, and now remain seated. Fuck, fuck, fuck… I still don’t know what I’m doing here. From my vantage point, I see everyone stand and face the flag. My legs tingle as the anthem begins, and my interlaced fingers throb as I squeeze them together, willing myself to sit in my discomfort. The opening chord calls my body to be in synch with those around me, people I don’t know, many of whom almost certainly have politics I don’t share. Instead, my face flushes and an ache radiates through my chest. As I sit there, I tune out the anthem itself, thinking, instead, about how I want to explain my small act of refusal to Quinn. To myself. Working through the legacies – the histories, presents, and futures – that come with the anthem. And working through the fact that though I want to refuse some of these legacies, there are others that I have carefully protected. *** The men’s match is excellent; I revel in helping Quinn understand some elements of the game that he has not yet encountered. He and I connect as I explain the role of the libero, service-receive configurations, back-row setting, and more. The Kodiaks win the match three sets to zero, and after the presentation of the players of the game, the women’s teams start warming up. Some people leave, seemingly having come just for the men’s match. Others take a bathroom break, and many – us included – distract themselves on their phones. After a few minutes of mindless absence, I return to the moment, reminding myself that I’m here to connect with Quinn, not with Number Bubble or Wordzee. As the Kodiaks hitters warm up, upbeat music plays on the PA system; I fail to notice the particular tune. Then, amidst the cacophony of warm-ups, the announcer offers a standard institutional land acknowledgement, one that “honours” Blackfoot peoples as traditional stewards of these lands. Brow furrowed, I look around the stands at the people engaged with their phones and each other; I see nothing to suggest that anyone has so much as registered this land acknowledgement. The tightness in my temples is accompanied by a heat charging up the edges of my forehead. The women’s warm-up complete, the announcer again asks the crowd to stand and remove their hats. Again? For fuck sake… This time, however, there is a problem with the music; everyone stands facing the flag, but the anthem does not play over the speakers. A few seconds of slightly awkward silence later, a single voice from the northwest corner of the stands chimes out. A chuckle ripples through the crowd before a few more voices join in. Before long, most of the crowd is singing along, all still standing and facing the flag. There’s a resonance, a kind of communion, that is palpable in the room;

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I could reach out (or stand up) and touch it. I hear the slightly different pitches from various parts of the stands and notice, too, that some in the crowd sing the “all our sons command” line while most sing the updated “all of us command.” My mind is present in the gym as the acappella anthem wraps up to more enthusiastic applause and the announcer’s congratulations to the crowd for making the best of it. My heart, however, is unmoved by the display of collective nationmaking, aching instead over the militarized arrests of land defenders and journalists at the Gidimt’en camp in Wet’suwet’en territory just a few hours ago. “What is the soundscape there?,” I wonder. “What,” I ask myself, “would it look like to work towards being in resonance not with those in my (very white) day-today life, but with those on the front lines of land defense, of refusing settler rule?” This is the complicated story of the nice words we say, the gestures we make towards “tolerating” diversity on these lands, our (seemingly) shared commitment to “stand on guard” for Canada, while continuing to dispossess those who’ve cared for these lands since time immemorial. These, too, are Quinn’s and Avery’s inheritances. Dear Quinn and Ave, When I first wrote this chapter, I wrote it for Quinn. It was easier to see that way, maybe, since I had been going to these events where the anthem was sung with him. But that’s also patriarchy at work – writing from a father to a son about inheritance. Patriarchy has been such a huge part of colonial violence, and here I was mirroring that in my writing about settler colonialism and trying to refuse it! There’s another thing. I’ve been writing letters to the two of you, writing stories about you, throughout this project. But I think I’m using you as foils, really. These stories, these letters, don’t – can’t – convey what these things mean to you, only how they are meaningful to me. You’re characters – the most important of characters! – in my stories, but they’re still my stories, at the end of the day. I am made by my experiences as a parent, so when I’m writing about you or about our experiences together, I’m really writing about how I’ve been put together, how being in relation to you two is always putting me together. And I’m doing so by drawing on the metaphorization of childhood as innocence, even while I try to trouble my/our own innocence. I think the other thing I’m doing in making you two foils in this work is caring for my younger self. I’m taking as much care as I am to teach you two about settler colonialism because it’s incredibly important. But I also think I’m doing so to help heal my younger self, who learned nothing about these things. I didn’t get this kind of care from teachers or my parents, for example, so I think I’m going back and doing that care work for myself through you. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense to you; maybe you’re thinking “what’s Dad rambling about now?” Here’s the thing, though… care can be dangerous, especially in the settler state. When the care comes in the form of a patriarchal “father knows best” position, care is almost always a violence.

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So, what am I trying to say here? I’m not really sure. But maybe just that I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I’m trying to do my best but that it will never be good enough. That even my best will fail you sometimes. Often, probably. But maybe failure is okay too. Not ok, exactly, but it gives us the chance to learn, to grow. Maybe what I’m really saying, then, is that I love you both and hope that you fail better than I am. With all of my love, Dad (letter first composed August 8, 2022)

November 23, 2021 I sit in my home office wishing that the pandemic was at a stage that would allow me to meet with my counsellor in person rather than by phone. “What does that feel like in your body?,” Heather queries. “That emotion that you’ve just described around the injustices of settler colonialism… you’ve said that you’re having trouble accessing it. What do you feel in your body as you say that?” I chuckle softly and exhale through my nose. This is not the first time we’ve done an exercise like this. “Hm…,” I begin, trying to tune out the sounds of the dryer and my loved ones, to quiet my brain and listen to my body. “I can feel it there… No, it’s more than I can sense it. There’s a huge amount of emotion there, but it’s like it’s in my core, wrapped up in a kind of protective coating.” I pause, feeling around for an apt metaphor. “Like, bubble wrap, maybe.” “Ok,” Heather prods, gently. “So, the bubble wrap is protective. The emotion is so big that you worry it will hit you like a tsunami and it will undo you?” “But I shouldn’t have this bubble wrap,” I jump in, hearing the plead, almost a whine, in my voice. My throat constricts and my eyes tingle, tears welling up. My voice breaks slightly as I continue: “Because not everyone does… I can’t imagine that the land defenders at Gidim’ten checkpoint have the luxury of that kind of bubble wrap.” I conclude, more softly: “I think I kinda’ want to be undone by this. I should be undone.” Tenderly, Heather asks: “Why do you think you want to be undone by this?” “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want, exactly.” I pause, feeling I’m not digging deep enough. “I just feel like it’s so big, how can I not get to that emotion that I know is there?” Heather holds the silence for a moment before asking “Do you feel this in other areas? Other kinds of injustice?” I pause, considering her question. “I think so,” I say, tentatively. “I have no problem thinking about these issues – that’s in my wheelhouse. Actually, thinking about them seems like kind of an armor against feeling them, which I really have trouble doing.” “Always?”

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I sit, quietly, letting different injustices float through my brain, feeling for them in my body. “No, not always. There’s this one piece on ableism I teach… I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read it. And yet, every time, like every single time I read this one scene in particular, it brings me to tears.” “What is it about that?” “About that piece? Or about ableism?” “About that piece,” Heather clarifies, softly. “Oh!” I exclaim, clarity striking me. “It hails me. The author – also a dear friend  – has this brilliant scene where they’re in an interrogation room, wondering who’s coming into the space to harm them, and asks if it’s a doctor, a reporter… and then ‘is it you, reader?’ And it is. It is me. And I know it’s me, just like I know it’s me in terms of settler colonialism. But that line gets through the bubble wrap… helps me feel that it’s me.” I release my breath, feeling a weight lift. As it does, it strikes me that there’s more. “Oh. Ok, so there are actually two interrogation scenes, and it’s the second one that gets me. In the first, the author hails me as an interrogator. In the second scene they flip the script, interrogating the interrogators. So, I am hailed in the second interrogation scene in order to be held to account.” “Ok,” Heather offers, “so, what’s different here?” “I don’t know,” I say, conscious of how many times I say “I don’t know” in our sessions. “This feels bigger, somehow.” I stumble, not wanting to frame this as any kind of hierarchy of systems of oppression. “Maybe it’s more that it feels like this one reaches into literally every part of my life. Reckoning with settler colonialism feels like reckoning with everything.” “And?,” Heather prods. “It sounds to me like you want to reckon with it, even if that means reckoning with everything.” “I do. I do.” I let that sit for a moment, letting it land, feeling the truth of it. “I just feel like I’m reckoning with it intellectually, but not doing so emotionally. Or not enough, maybe. I’m surprised, I guess, that I can’t get to that feeling that I know is there.” “It might be that that’s how your system manages the intensity of it all.” Dear reader, Do you feel the “intensity of it all”? Are you pausing to reflect here? I’d like to offer part of a poem in the hopes that it might be helpful. It’s from Ktunaxa poet Smokii Sumac, set in the midst of the Gerald Stanley trial for the murder of Colten Bushie: preparing to fly back across these so many nations and i know

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there will be sobbing i hope my seatmates are folks with blood like my own or just folks with friends like me and my family so that maybe if i can’t hold it in they will understand why maybe they’ll cry too this country’s problem is pretty clear to me now a problem of grief we know to grieve it you settler it’s clear do not instead of asking us “what can i do?” or even “hey, how are you?” instead of waiting send a quick message any words of comfort help don’t expect response instead of fearing always the wrong thing just act out of love (Sumac, 2018, p. 45) Sumac’s poem is so powerful – it reminds me that I have a compass in doing this work. We all have this compass, in fact: love. Too often, I have been guilty of “fearing… always the wrong thing,” so I haven’t acted, haven’t reached out. As I do this work, however, I am learning to trust my instincts not because they’re perfect but because I trust the process and my compass. I’m learning to feel that compass in my body to listen to the wisdom stored there. What is your compass, dear reader? How do you access it? How does it register in your body? With love, Jay This is the complicated story of the emotional uncertainty – of emotional intelligence, of empathy, and of the challenges and contradictions of both in and under settler colonialism – that Quinn and Avery will inherit. It is the story of their father struggling within and against his own inheritances.

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Dear Quinn, You asked me at a hockey game recently why I didn’t stand for the national anthem, and I gave you an answer, but not a great one, I don’t think. Can I try again, love? Ok, so you know how you’re learning about residential schools in social studies? Well, one of the things you’ll learn about at some point is called “intergenerational trauma.” It’s the idea that the trauma of residential schools wasn’t limited to those Indigenous folks that attended while they attended, but that it showed up – and is showing up – in their lives and the lives of their loved ones in many ways and for generations after they left those places (I don’t want to call them “schools”!). It’s an important idea. But I was recently reading a book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and one author pointed out that maybe we need new language, like “intergenerational responsibility,” or even “intergenerational perpetration,” to challenge settlers – to challenge you and me, my love, to understand our role in all of this. Do you remember, sweetheart, using the term “settler” when we were talking about some of this stuff while we were kayaking this summer? Remember you told me you felt ok using that word? I do too. I use it all the time and have become pretty comfortable with it. But we shouldn’t feel ok, love… not with any of this. I can almost hear you thinking “Um, dad… I thought this was about the anthem.” It is, love… I’m getting there. I often hear about intergenerational trauma, but do you know what I don’t hear about? Intergenerational privilege. That’s what we have, love – intergenerational privilege. But the two are connected. Our lives are as comfortable as they are because of the exact same system that has put so many barriers up in the lives of so many Indigenous peoples. Our ancestors were granted land to homestead, but that was only possible because Indigenous peoples were removed from that land. Our ancestors built lives and wealth on stolen land and passed all of that along to us. And it’s not just our ancestors… The city we live in, the house Mom and I own, those things are only possible because settlers wanted Blackfoot lands and worked hard to remove Blackfoot peoples from them and keep them away from cities like Lethbridge. And because settlers continue that process in all kinds of ways. These same processes are happening all over the country, the country that our anthem celebrates as “home and native land.” The country that we are supposed to “stand on guard for.” So, it is about the anthem. Not just the anthem, but the anthem is one place where I’m trying to think through my responsibilities – my perpetration – right now. This is not just about things that happened in the past. It’s not just that I don’t want to stand and honour Canada because of residential schools. It’s about things happening – things I am allowing to happen – in the present. So, me thinking this through is about me thinking about the mess that I have inherited from my parents and grandparents, but also the mess that you and your sister will inherit from me and Mom.

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I don’t know what to do about that yet. And I’m not even quite sure how to figure it out, love. But I am clear that I don’t want to stand for the anthem. I hope that this makes a bit of sense. Actually, maybe I hope that it doesn’t, that it makes you ask more questions. That you’ll have more questions for me, but also for your social studies teachers. And for yourself. With all of my love, Dad (letter first composed November 21, 2021) This is the complicated story of the pride and discomfort around the national anthem that Quinn and Avery will inherit. It is the story of their father, who still feels echoes of national pride at moments, and struggles with the injustices of this nation in many others, trying, desperately, to figure out how to fight for justice. Dear reader, Did you know that the Canadian government has actually codified both the “history of the national anthem” and the “timing and etiquette for anthem use”? Perhaps you’re not surprised by that. I shouldn’t have been, maybe, but I was. From the very first words, the (intended) meaning of the anthem is clear: “When the first familiar chords of ‘O Canada’ play at schools, hockey games and other events, Canadians stand with pride in honour of their country.” When the anthem is played, what do you feel? Are you drawn to stand, to be in harmony with those around you? Do you feel a kind of connection? A kind of belonging? Do you “honour” Canada by singing the anthem? Do you, as “a matter of respect and tradition, …stand for the playing of ‘O Canada’”? Do you feel a connection of any kind to those not in resonance at that moment? To those regularly subject to the violences of the settler state? Do you think of them at all as the anthem plays? I’m not asking you to simply be empathetic, as “white empathy razes everything in its path” (Belcourt, 2020, p. 56). I’m asking if you think of how your belonging structures the violence in the lives of those who experience the “complicated and compromised living in the crosshairs of settler governance” (Belcourt, 2020, p. 142). What do you stand for, reader? Jay

November 19, 2021 Driving home from an errand, I have the rhythm and tune of “O Canada” stuck in my head. I let my mind wander somewhat; without much conscious effort/focus, I change the lyrics to fit the rhythm of the anthem but better reflect my ambivalence: O, Canada Claims home on stolen land, True, tainted love,

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For which I will not stand With aching hearts, We see the lies, Through which you make us “we” From far and wide, O Canada, We question all we see Give back the land, To those who should be free, O Canada we do not stand with thee O Canada we do not stand with thee These lyrics now piss me off. They seem to me as the kind of performative bullshit that I so abhor from our federal politicians – not least our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In an argument with a loved one in the summer of 2021, I was asked “Does Trudeau not get to kneel at these unmarked graves?” and replied, emphatically: “No. He doesn’t get to appeal human rights tribunal decisions that call for compensation for Indigenous kids in the care system and have the graveside photo op. He does not get to do both of those things.” I’m struggling, right now, with the idea that I’m no better than Trudeau in this respect. I’m thinking a lot about settler colonialism, and saying the right words sometimes, but not doing nearly enough to develop deep, reciprocal, consensual relationships with Indigenous peoples and communities, to engage with Indigenous political orders, including on the territories I occupy. With these lyrics, I’m hearkening to “land back” without working towards that myself in any meaningful way.4 Actually, the very fact that I want to be better than Trudeau – and I do, desperately, want to be better than Trudeau – tells me that I’m still not getting it. This is not about being a “good settler” or playfully writing subversive lyrics that fit the rhythm of the anthem. That’s some settler bullshit right there. This must be about dismantling settler colonialism. This is the complicated story of a commitment to some form of resistance that Quinn and Avery will inherit.

November 16, 2021 I’m shaken not by Indigenous assertions of sovereignty, but by, on one side, rituals of Canadian national myth-making (like the anthem), and on the other, Quinn raising even hints of the perils of our continued connection to provincial and national parks, for example. This leaves a really narrow space of certainty, one where I feel entitled to use the land in these ways and simultaneously want to disavow the rituals of white possessive logic so the logic itself can remain intact while I performatively question the ritualistic reassertion thereof. (audio message texted to myself November 15, 2021)

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Ok, fine. Important, even, maybe. But what does that certainty feel like? More importantly, what would it feel like not to reach for that certainty? To refuse it? This is the complicated story of the contradictions that Quinn and Avery will inherit. (Re)Introduction In this chapter, I take up the potential for settler ambivalence and uncertainty to be politically productive. I draw on my current ambivalence around the anthem as well as other moments of (un)certainty to interrogate my own settler emotion as I work to figure out how to live my politics as I weave “…a tale of white belonging and the tenacity of colonial desire” (Slater, 2019, p. 45). I consider how I (try to) make sense of the complicated material and epistemic privileges and troubled legacies I have inherited and am passing on to my children. That I am actively building for them. This is about the house, about “good” families, about fathers who try. This is about how “the coordinates of the familiar change from underneath and overhead” (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 647) as we learn to see how we occupy the house, as we come to understand the house as violence. This is about the empathy we feel, the collective stories we tell. This is about our emotional attachments to shared rituals, about fighting for what is right, about resistance, and about the contradictions that come with all of that. This is about my kids and how I shape who they will become. Most importantly, it is about how all of this is connected to the “training of the heart” of settler colonialism (Slater, 2020, p. 3). This is about me as a father wrestling with raising children who will inherit the bounty and the discomfort inherent in benefiting from this complicated and multifaceted Canadian experiment in settler colonialism, from a system I now think of as state-enacted terrorism. It’s about me grappling with the same questions as Daniel Henhawk articulates, though from a radically different position; it’s about me seeing “where colonization has affected my life (essentially in every aspect of my life)” (2013, p. 513) and trying to figure out what to do about it. As settlers, what are we to make of our own complicated inheritances as well as the ones we are producing for and with our children? How might we think (and feel!) more carefully and move more deliberately towards a just future? In the stories I tell in this chapter, I inquire into my constitution as a “good white settler” – my investments in that subjectivity even as I do critical work interrogating those very investments. My aim, in other words, is to grapple with the sense in which all of this is not simply about my complicity, but about how I am “constituted by the racial logic of settler colonialism” (Slater, 2020, p. 3). Thinking with both Sara Ahmed and Lisa Slater, I interrogate how I “feel my way,” approaching “emotion as a form of cultural politics or world making” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 12). Following my own affective (un)certainties, I consider what kinds of world-making I am involved in, what kinds of world-making I inherited… what kind of world I am bringing into being as an inheritance. I interrogate, in other words, what it is that I allow to “orientate my subjectivity and embodied relationships to people, place and history” (Slater, 2020, p. 7).

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In this instance, as in Chapters 4 and 5, I interrogate this constitution through a consideration of what might seem the smallest of moments – in this case, standing (or not) for the national anthem. As Robinson and Martin note, however, …small, symbolic, and everyday actions are significant and therefor need to be thought through carefully. While focusing on small actions puts us in danger of feeling that we have ‘done enough’ (thereby avoiding the larger decolonizing actions that need to take place), discounting them not only risks creating a sense of powerlessness and despair, but also misses the potential of micro-actions to ripple, to erode, and to subtly shift. (2016, p. 2) Moreover, while my (non-)engagement with the anthem might seem to be unimportant, the stakes are not. As illustrated in recent debates over athletes kneeling for the U.S. national anthem especially, sport, nationalism, patriotism, and politics are entangled in complicated and important ways. These entanglements point to the importance of bodies as sites of political resistance and protest (e.g., Boykoff & Carrington, 2020; Dickerson & Hodler, 2021; McDonald, 2020). I approach the national anthem, and my engagement with it, not simply as a written or performed text, but as a process; I interrogate the “long reach” of this ritualistic performance-as-process (Diamond, 2016). Moreover, since “the aural is inevitably about relationship,” I draw on my (dis)engagement with/from this particular aurality in order to interrogate my relationships, especially to settler colonialism and “intergenerational irresponsibility” (Robinson, 2016, p. 63). Robinson (2016) points out that both the structure of the testimonials at the TRC and the idea of intergenerational trauma put the focus on the trauma that was suffered, not on the people and systems that perpetrated the harm. Here, I aim to take up his call for work that centres not the need for Indigenous folks to “confess” their trauma so that settlers can feel and perform pity and move on, but on careful considerations of settlers’ intergenerational responsibilities to repair harm, both done and ongoing. Robinson suggests that settler Canadians “might consider using a phrase that names the continued ignorance of Indigenous histories and the lack of civic responsibility for what it is: intergenerational perpetration” (2016, p. 63, emphasis in original). It is my uncritical participation in the “epistemic violence” of the national anthem (Robinson, 2020; Stewart, 2021) – and, more recently, my ambivalence about this practice and my complicity – that forms the focal point for this chapter. The point here is to take up the hesitations, ambivalences, and uncertainties as sites of possibility. Recently – in Avery’s kindergarten classroom, for instance – when the anthem is about to be played, I find myself unsure of what to do (or not do) in light of the particular context in which I find myself. Do I sit? Do I leave the room? Kneel? What work would each/any of these strategies do in terms of creating a dissonance for myself and/or those around me? Is leaving the room (as I did in the case of my visit to Avery’s classroom) simply a form of fleeing?

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Slater highlights the importance of interrogating the “nagging, unsettling questions and senses of uncertainty and anxiety” (Slater, 2020, p. 7), suggesting that such considerations might shed light not only on the contours of settler colonialism but also “maybe a way out. Rather than settling my dis-ease by pursuing ‘good white politics’ or to belong better, a more useful anti-colonial approach might be to feel – get to know – how I refuse to relinquish privilege” (Slater, 2020, p. 7). It is with this in mind that I forefront in this chapter how I refuse to relinquish privilege, even in moments of political possibility. In fleeing Avery’s classroom, for instance, not only do I fail to trouble the anthem itself, but I leave fully intact my own legibility as a (good) national subject, and, not incidentally, Avery’s. “O Canada”: On Being Hailed At sporting events (and elsewhere), national anthems do important affective and ideological work. As McDonald notes, “the imagining of the nation works through the concealment of this constant process of ritualized repetition of symbols and ceremonies—including that of the ritual of singing the anthem—as constitutive of the nation” (2020, p. 4). An anthem operates as an ideological state apparatus (ISA), which Althusser discusses in the following terms: I shall talk of actions inserted into practices. And I shall point out that these practices are governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports’ club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc. (Althusser, 1971, p. 83) ISAs, Althusser (1971) explains, interpolate or hail individual audience members as subjects, which is inescapably an ideological hailing. This is evident in the context of the Canadian national anthem, the current English lyrics for which follow: O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all of us command. With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.5 Drawing on an analysis of the French and English lyrics, the histories of the anthem, and the musical composition thereof, Stewart argues that “O Canada”

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produces a “narrative that both writes into being and sings into existence an idealized subject within the lyrics and music of the anthem… citizens rise to attention and obey the anthem’s command, becoming hailed into the ideology of the nation-state’s embrace” (Stewart, 2021, p. 16). This hailing is evident not least in the official history and etiquette of the anthem. From the settler state, we learn that as “a matter of respect and tradition, it is proper to stand for the playing of ‘O Canada’… There is no law or behaviour governing the playing of the national anthem; it is left to the good citizenship of individuals” (see https://www.canada. ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/anthems-canada.html#a4). The paternalism and nationalism could not be clearer here – in order to be a “good citizen,” one is expected to observe this ritual as “a matter of respect and tradition.” In my encounters with the anthem, I am hailed to be such a good citizen, to embody good citizenship. Moreover, I am interpolated in this hailing not simply as a subject but as a parent. The “minor match at a sports’ club” and the “school day” to which Althusser (1971) refer unfold, in the context of my stories, as part of the cisheteronormative family life in which Quinn and Avery are enmeshed. As parents, in other words, we are domesticating our children via the replication and ritualization of the norms of the nation-state, that which we have often celebrated on “Canada Day,” for instance. To the extent that we reproduce these ritualized performances, however, every day is Canada Day. This is true even of those days ostensibly marked otherwise, as days like Orange Shirt Day become moments of performative national mourning, moments in which we collectively acknowledge past wrongs to redeem the contemporary nation as one committed to doing better. What thinking and writing autoethnographically – especially about the stories in this chapter – has made possible for me is a reimagining not only of my own relationship to the nation and how I want to enact that in the world but also a reimagining of the kinds of colonial disciplining that have long been embedded in my (our) parenting practices. Here, I centre Stewart’s seemingly simple question: “When the anthem hails [me, ] how do [I] respond?” (Stewart, 2021, p. 70). This question now resonates for me in more registers as I consider not only how I will respond as someone being hailed but also how I will respond as a parent inescapably involved in the hailing of my children (whether that is through uncritical reproduction, mediation, some kind of conscious refusal of the hailing, or, more often, some messy amalgamation of all of the above). Lyrically and rhythmically, “O, Canada” (re)produces settler colonialism, bringing the nation-state into being, situating it – and “us” – as the rightful occupants of, as “native” to, these lands. Indeed, it constructs the nation as land and emphasizes the freedoms and responsibilities of its “rightful” citizens (Stewart, 2021). Stewart (2021) provides a detailed, layered interrogation of the Canadian anthem, worth quoting at length here: “O Canada” seeks to bring into being the existence of Canada as a dominant ideological concept, by both asserting itself as a nation and asserting its subjects as its possessions, declaring that Canada is “native land” that “all of

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us” must “stand on guard for.” The anthem …hails “all of us” into being as subjects of the nation, as long as “we” identify with its ideological premises of the pre-ordained possession of the land now known as “Canada” and, with the help of “God,” to “keep our land glorious and free,” we promise to “stand on guard for thee.” (Stewart, 2021, p. 69) As Stewart (2021) explains, the lyrics in the English-language version of the anthem have been revised a number of times over the years. Most recently, the 2018 change to “gender neutral” language was shepherded through Parliamentary processes under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who was PM when the anthem was officially adopted as the national anthem. This 1968 adoption was also shaped by the political pressures of the day, coming about, to some extent, in response to Quebecois nationalist sentiment (Stewart, 2021). In both instances, we see what Ahmed (2012; 2017) calls a “fantasy fold,” one that hearkens to an idealized inclusive Canada. In other words, the anthem invokes a “fantasy of inclusion [that is simultaneously] a technique of exclusion” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 112). As Himani Bannerji (2000) points out, diversity language is “a coping mechanism for dealing with an actually conflicting heterogeneity, seeking to incorporate it into an ideological binary… predicated upon the existence of a homogeneous national, that is, a Canadian cultural self with its multiple and different others” (p. 37). These changes, then, serve to “fold in” those who might feel excluded, to make them part of a (very particular) “we.” Interpolating folks into the settler state, however, is also always a way of excluding or denying other political configurations, other ways of conceptualizing and putting into practice belonging. The lyrical shifts over time also parallel the mutability of settler colonialism itself; each shifts in response to socio-political pressures and contexts, taking (new) shape while positioning itself (again) as simply (settler) common sense (Rifkin, 2014; Stewart, 2021). The moment in the Lethbridge College gym, then, was interesting in the sense that vestiges of an earlier version – one that hailed “all our sons” – were made apparent thanks to a technical glitch. This palimpsestic moment briefly highlighted the mutability so often erased in public performances of the anthem (just as the shifting web of settler colonial policies and practices is so often obscured as settler colonialism disguises itself as a completed project). Stewart argues that while it is important to analyse the text of “O, Canada,” it is equally important for settlers, especially, to (re)consider their own engagement with it. Settlers, he suggests, might participate in restorying the anthem itself, changing this keynote song of settler colonial Canadian society from a story that presents an innocent heritage bereft of responsibility, to reveal its role as a theme song for ongoing colonial dispossession that must be confronted by every person who might decide to sing “O Canada.” (Stewart, 2021, p. 74)

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Further, Stewart asserts that as part of taking up our responsibilities as settlers, we might learn “to listen to the command of ‘O Canada’ with differently tuned ears…, hearing not an obfuscating history of peaceful relations, but a terrorizing tale of cultural genocide and territorial dispossession celebrated in song” (Stewart, 2021, pp. 70–71).6 Moreover, the terror in this tale is not an abstraction, something perpetrated by others in an elsewhere. The terror is me. It lives in my occupation of stolen lands. It lives in my cisheteronormative family whose interests are invariably considered in elections at all levels. It lives in my employment at a colonial institution and in the protections afforded to me and us by the so-called justice system. The terror is me and the myriad institutions built and perpetuated with me in mind. Moreover, the terror will outlive me, passed along to future generations. Unless we tear it all apart. A ritual like the anthem hails us not only in terms of the words and musical structures, as important as those are. We are also called to belong, to celebrate that belonging, at the level of our bodies. Our nervous systems are regulated (without our conscious input) to prioritize feelings of safety, which, in the case of social animals such as humans, comes with community, with belonging. In that sense, our systems are set up according to a “belong or die” logic (Menakem, 2017). In refusing to stand for the anthem, then, I aim to challenge both the settler state and my own neurobiological processes with the ultimate aim, arguably, of reshaping both. The point, from this perspective, is not to refuse belonging, but to reimagine belonging in ways that are predicated not on nationalism but on justice. Land acknowledgements hail us in a different register as they become commonplace, not least in colonial institutions. The acknowledgement at the volleyball match stands in such stark contrast to the anthem. The acknowledgement is simply dropped into a moment of noise and distraction, a non-performative box ticked along the way (Ahmed, 2012). For the anthem, by contrast, we were asked to stand and remove our hats, and those in the gym stood at attention, many singing along. The anthem, in other words, hails us in a much more direct and profound way than does the institutional land acknowledgement. We are hailed to participate in the singing of the anthem, facing the flag, and observing the solemnity of the occasion. The acknowledgement, meanwhile, is so often offered without asking anything of us; we are to simply let it wash over us. Perhaps washing is an apt metaphor, in fact, as it seems meant to cleanse institutions to some extent, pointing to their progressiveness in the present. “Settler land acknowledgments,” though increasingly commonplace, are often “shadows” of the Indigenous protocols upon which they ostensibly draw (Stewart-Ambo & Yang, 2021, p. 25). An acknowledgement often “operates as an alibi or excuse,” functioning as a way institutional actors legitimate their occupation of Indigenous lands (p. 25). Such acknowledgements hail settlers, that is, as gracious guests, those willing to (briefly and without taking responsibility) acknowledge who stewarded the land before they came to (rightly) occupy it. I suggest that “O Canada” might be productively read alongside and in relation to land acknowledgements. The anthem functions as a very different kind of

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acknowledgement, one that works against the supposed underpinnings of institutional land acknowledgements. The anthem, indeed, functions as a claiming of land, as a structuring of land as a white possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Settler Affect Lisa Slater’s work points to the value of considering the “affective economy” of still settling states. Slater argues that though feelings “appear to originate prior to social and political relations – to be personal or private sensations – …they are incited by and circulate within historically and politically specific arrangements, which align and differentiate bodies in particular ways” (Slater, 2020, p. 5; also see Ahmed, 2014). Settler emotions, Slater argues, are indicators – performances, even, of the “cultural politics of inhabitation” in still settling states; they reveal – and bring into being – social worlds “in which belonging and authority are given” (Slater, 2020, p. 5). Close readings of settler affect, Slater highlights, can shed important light on the political projects that are rendered (un)thinkable in and through settler responses to calls for truth and reconciliation, to assertions of Indigenous sovereignty, and to Indigenous political will. The point, then, is to interrogate what kinds of selves and social worlds we are creating in and through our affective responses to engagements with Indigenous peoples, Nations, and politics. “Settler anxiety,” Slater argues, “is a cultural practice: an activity of self and social constitution” (2019, p. 13). Settler anxiety comes about when settlers encounter Indigenous peoples not as abstract subjects about whom they can feel concern or pity, but as political actors with agendas and interests, particularly those that challenge settlers, settler benevolence, and the legitimacy of the settler state. Slater explains the sense in which settler colonialism both structures and is reproduced by settler anxiety: I conceptualise settler colonialism not as a consistent, coherent and uniform structure or logic, but rather gaining its force, as Rifkin proposes, through ‘reiterative yet shifting formations, practices, and inclinations’ (2013, p. 326). The ‘problem’ is that Indigenous political life threatens settler territorial authority and integrity, and demands the sharing of sociopolitical space, which occasions a crisis… Settler anxiety is provoked by the proximity and the demand to share sociopolitical space with Indigenous people. (Slater, 2019, p. 20) Slater focuses on anxieties of belonging in particular, noting that while belonging may register at the individual level, it fundamentally indexes something social: who we are in relation to other people and to the places we call home. As such, our “[s]enses of belonging can conceal the emotional economy in which such good feelings are generated and circulate, obscuring the coordinates of race, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and sexuality” (Slater, 2020, p. 6). In other words, setter belonging “feels like ease, certainty and security”; this feeling of security

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of and in the places settlers occupy is only maintained by not “feeling how one’s place is riven with colonial power relations” (Slater, 2020, p. 6). The yearning for ease and certainty to which Slater refers is not simply for the sake of emotional comfort; it does important political work, serving as “an emotional binding between subject and space, facilitating comfort, identity and becoming” (Slater, 2019, p. 21). The “identity and becoming” here are vital and are tied directly to ongoing projects of colonial dispossession. Drawing on Moreton-Robinson’s (2015) concept of white possessive logic, Slater explains that “settlers re-enact territorialisation by identifying as modern subjects – the present and future – thus justifying the right to claim possession, denying Indigenous sovereignty and governing for everyone” (Slater, 2019, p. 20). Settler belonging, Slater highlights, is produced through an array of affects in the still settling state: Settler belonging is not only common sense, it is innocently felt. The work of innocence and ignorance – alongside the complex muddle of guilt, shame, anger, denial and so on – are distancing strategies, keeping at bay the disturbing realities of good white peoples’ investments in maintaining the racial logic of settler colonialism. (Slater, 2020, p. 9) These affects work together as a kind of “fleeing,” one actively (re)produced through the cultivation of ignorance which helps maintain a sense of innocence (Slater, 2019; Wekker, 2016). Not all settler anxiety, however, works in the service of reproducing settler rule, at least not in any uncomplicated way. Slater expands on two different “modes of anxiety.” The first manifests itself as concern for Indigenous peoples and their plight; Slater notes that this is “an evasion of the political: a virtuous anxiety” (2019, p. 3). The second entails “an encounter with the political that interrupts settler certainty and suspends agency” (p. 3). The second mode has potential to reshape the contours of settler colonialism “if it is harnessed to reflect upon what is going on [in terms of] settler colonialism’s troubling relationship” with Indigenous peoples, communities, and Nations (Slater, 2019, p. 3). Slater argues that it is important to “examine how, within our socio-political context, settler uncertainty – a form of dis-ease – is recalibrated into security” (2020, p. 6). Uncertainty, Slater posits: is not something that can be simply ‘catalogued by the intellect’ it needs to be experienced – deeply felt – it stays with you. In doing so, it has the potential to disturb the emotional politics of settler colonialism. It also implicates one in the here and now; in the messy, ordinary, contaminated world. To my mind, decolonization requires imagining a politics in which good white people don’t know what they want: don’t reach for readily available hurt feelings and the knowingness of settler logic. (2020, p. 10)

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This, it seems to me, is the “difficult story” that still needs telling in this chapter. While I am deeply committed to interrogating and challenging injustices structured by settler colonialism, the particular shapes that these interrogations and challenges take are, themselves, revealing. They point to the kind of “settler concern” that “distracts from the main game: the need to feel secure and in the political possession of the country” (Slater, 2020, p. 4). Following from the above, I need to interrogate my refusal to stand for the anthem as a settler move to innocence, as one of “those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 10). One person wrote on social media in response to a short piece I wrote about my refusal to stand for the anthem: “I found the lowest effort form of protest that would still let me brag and feel superior to everyone at the faculty cocktail parties” (Hooper, 2022). While I found their (somewhat humorous) effort at trolling me relatively easy to dismiss intellectually, there’s also something that resonates, that lands in my body as a kind of tightness under my chin. Am I bragging at (or even attending) faculty cocktail parties? Certainly not. But, do I feel that this protest that makes me a more thoughtful settler? Yes, I do. And that is the sense in which this too-easy form of protest constitutes a move to innocence. If, that is, I feel that refusal with certainty or assurance, then I am simply reconstituting myself as a good white person, as somehow innocent in all of this. My refusal to stand, then, is not an answer to the question, but points to a number of questions with which I must engage. What (else) am I to do, not in order to be or feel innocent, but to work towards more just futures? How can I engage more deeply with Indigenous peoples, communities, knowledge systems, and political orders? How can I parent (differently) with questions of colonial complicity squarely in mind? A Politics of (Uncer tain) Possibility Though unsure of how to thoroughly do so, I want nothing more than to refuse “inherited histories of ignorance” (Robinson, 2016, p. 63) and to refuse to uncritically pass along to Quinn and Avery those same histories. But I am convinced that starting with my own emotionality can be productive: If the white settler emotional economy stymies antiracism, then emotions are a site for ethical and political action. The encounter with Indigenous politics can trigger settler dis-ease. Rather than retreat to the affective security of settler innocence, guilt, anxiety and fragility, which reproduces colonial authority, I am arguing that creating space for anti-colonial relationships requires being uncertain about the ‘good self’ (Phillips 2019). Asking, what is my relationship to colonialism? (Slater, 2020, p. 10)

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What my counsellor referred to as my system managing “the intensity of it all,” it seems to me, is part of the “training of the heart” to which Slater refers. As Slater elaborates, settler colonialism is “a logic that organizes desire” (2020, p. 3). Thinking with the literature on how trauma lives in our bodies, I suggest that settler colonialism organizes not only desire but also capacity. Metaphorically, it is a training of the heart. In Menakem’s (2017) terms, however, it seems to me a training of our nervous systems. Menakem highlights that the traumas of “white body supremacy” are many and various. They are contemporary in terms of our own lives being structured by racial injustice and in terms of witnessing racial injustice and sometimes seeing ourselves as perpetrators of it. They are also historical in that unresolved or “unmetabolized” traumas are passed down over generations, compounding themselves in our individual and collective bodies. As Tuck and Ree put it, “individuals are haunted, but so are societies” (2013, p. 642). Menakem argues that these stored traumas shape our “lizard brain” and its responses to our social worlds – not least racial injustice. These trauma responses precede our conscious engagement with these questions, focused as they are on the question of (perceived) safety. As a result, we often respond to stresses in our social world through our fight (e.g., getting angry at the suggestion that Canada is racist), flight (e.g., withdrawing from conversations about race and racism), or freeze (dissociating from the harms we know to exist) responses. This, perhaps, is the (un)sense in which Belcourt refers to “the embargo on care that is Canada” (2020, p. 9). Menakem argues that individually and collectively attending our bodies and embodied responses will help heal racial trauma and reorient ourselves to our social worlds. For me, doing so might point not simply to how I am “constituted by the racial logic of settler colonialism” (Slater, 2020, p. 3), but perhaps to possibilities for retraining and what such a process might make thinkable. Following Slater, I could do more to see the political possibility in uncertainty. I could, in other words, allow myself to see (more correctly, to feel!) uncertainty as “fundamental to forming, or more so, reforming political relationships. A feeling that alerts one to other possibilities” (Slater, 2020, p. 4). What shape do those political relationships take? I don’t know, and perhaps that is part of the point. If I limit myself only to those political relationships I can imagine – as I have done for most of my life, and to a large extent continue to do today – then I am one of the “good white people” Slater writes about, engaging in a form of fleeing; one that leave intact, or rather actively buttresses, the (racial) logics underpinning settler colonialism (Slater, 2020, p. 9). I have boxed myself in – there is discomfort and uncertainty all around me. In one direction, discomfort looms in the rituals of the settler state – national anthems, among other things. In another, I feel uncertain about my and our continued occupation of national and provincial parks as well as other outdoor spaces tied to histories of land dispossession. But in both directions, I have retreated to certainty, to ease, if not to comfort. In simply remaining sitting during the anthem, am I doing anything? Or am I performatively questioning the ritualized nationalism of the moment while still embodying the possessive white logic of that very same still settling state? Perhaps the point is not to focus

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on the narrow strip of certainty I have built for myself, but the increasing expanse of uncertainty. That, arguably, is where political possibility is to be found. Building on Slater’s discussion of uncertainty, I note that in Chapter 4, I reach for certainty even as (and perhaps precisely because) I work through my uncertainties about backcountry camping (and outdoor culture in general). In my closing letter to Quinn, for instance, I express a desire to take him to particular places – places with which I’ve already had (virtual) encounters, and thus spaces with some degree of ease attached to them. Places, that is, likely to leave intact both his and my feelings of at-homeness. Places that might, indeed, help me/ us feel more at home, as they might foster in us a sense that we better “know” the histories of which we are a part. Also in Chapter 4, I note that settlers have no place in imagining a future beyond settler colonialism, and I take seriously Leanne Simpson’s arguments on this point. At the same time, that leaves me struggling with figuring out what to do, who to be, what future to imagine myself a part of. The future to imagine for and with Quinn and Avery. I desire a future beyond settler colonialism politically; tellingly, I desire the subjectivity I construct through this first desire. I am anxious, however, because I don’t know what shape this future will take, what my place will be in it (if anything), what kind of access (if any) I will have to the mountains, for instance. For me, this takes on an ominous shape: “…things do not simply disappear but rather have a strange, menacing, overbearing presence… We cannot see anything and therefore do not know what surrounds us and if we are in danger… The world turns into something remote and unfamiliar. A foreboding future consumes the present” (Slater, 2019, p. 13). I’m very clear (with the anthem, for instance) on what I refuse to stand for, what I stand against. What I want to stand for is more difficult to pinpoint; it lives only as a vague notion at the moment, and perhaps that is as it should be. I need to do more to welcome, even cultivate, uncertainties about futures, including and especially my own and those of my loved ones. Will we still be able to live in Lethbridge? Can we visit Waterton Lakes National Park? Will it even still exist? Will we be called to give land back? What would that mean for us, not only financially but in terms of having a place we call home? As Tuck & Yang note, the question of “‘what will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler?’ …need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework” (2012, p. 35). Perhaps, by contrast, I could simply sit in the hesitation, which Slater conceptualizes as “an intervention in thoughtless feelings; a space for settlers to reflect upon how ‘we’ are bound [to and ignorant of] colonial relations. It’s unlikely that political responsibility will feel good or innocent. I’m certain that it is not feeling at home in settler colonialism” (2020, pp. 10–11). Feeling the dis-ease of my own occupation of the spaces I inhabit might better point towards political possibility than simply occupying different spaces from time to time. Perhaps, following Slater, the dis-ease I am feeling is potentially politically important and productive. Like Slater, I want to:

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dismantle the power and privilege of disembodied, displaced knowledge, but [my] subjectivity is produced from white authority and privilege. If the time has arrived, as I’d argue it well and truly has, to produce subjectivity fit for the post-colony, then it will hurt. …Bearing ontological pain is one of the costs that good white settlers need to endure to participate in the creation of more just futures. (Slater, 2019, p. 66) All of this is not (or should not be, perhaps) in the service of “knowing ‘who I am’ in relation to Indigenous issues and intercultural relations, which offers selfcertainty” (Slater, 2019, p. 9). I must find ways to “live in Indigenous sovereignty” rather than producing a kind of subjectivity that “reproduces colonial relations of authority and vulnerability” (Slater, 2019, p. 9). As I revise this chapter (August 2022), I am working at a public library on the lands of the Saugeen First Nation, lands claimed by colonial governments and subjects. The ache I feel today about doing so is a small knot underneath my left clavicle, deep under the skin. That could be anything, of course, but somehow I know it to be this particular dis-ease. As I become more conversant in the language of my body, I am much better able to feel myself present in the world around me. On a run yesterday, for instance, I was deeply in tune with how the breeze exerted pressure on my arm hairs, the feel of the occasional raindrop from the leaves above. This presence amplifies the joy in moments like that, but also draws my awareness of this deeper dis-ease more to the surface. That, too, is generative, as it helps me think (and feel) my way through questions of what I want to do (differently). For instance, this past weekend, I took Avery backcountry camping for the first time, and it looked radically different than Quinn’s first time. The point here isn’t to suggest that I have this figured out or that what we did (and didn’t do) was “right,” but that in leaning into my dis-ease I resisted the too-easy approach to backcountry camping that is deeply familiar to me. Feeling the uncertainty, in other words, helped me make some small changes that lead to important realizations, conversations, and resonances. As much as anything, this is all helping my hold onto a kind of compass as I continue to do this work: “Just act out of love” (Sumac, 2018, p. 45).

Notes 1 As noted in Chapter 3, it can be productive to play with the “truth” of particular moments in autoethnographic work in order to draw readers into particular emotions, moments, or possibilities. I do so in this chapter in particular, drawing in some cases on what was said or done as clearly as I can recall, and in other instances fictionalizing (elements of) vignettes as part of building my arguments. 2 The soundscape I have constructed here is drawn from a combination of the public record (from the Canadian Parliament) and a work of fiction (Dimaline, 2017). In terms of the former, I draw on (then) Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools in Canada, delivered in the House of Commons on June 11, 2008 (https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1 571589171655) as well as the words of Cree lawyer (and former Canadian Member

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3

4 5 6

of Parliament) Romeo Saganash when he criticized current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the House of Commons on September 25, 2018 (Zimonjic, 2018). As for the latter, though it would have been all too easy to find quotes from Indigenous peoples attesting to the violences of this “house,” I engage here in an “analytic [practice] of refusal.” Such practices, Tuck and Yang argue, “involve an active resistance to trading in pain and humiliation, and supply a rationale for blocking the settler colonial gaze that wants those stories” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 812). In this moment, I am reminded by their work to resist making the targets of colonial violence “the subject of research” to avoid building my career by adding to the “archive on pain [that] grows and grows” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 813). That the “facts” (e.g., statements part of the official record) and “fictions” here articulate with one another, complicate one another, and speak (back) to one another also serves to trouble the very distinction between fact and fiction, alluding to the ways in which “facts” which are really fictions (e.g., school curricula) and fictions that get taken as fact (e.g., that white settlers’ “development” of these lands improved lives for everyone) are among the “shapeshifting forms” of settler colonialism (Chen, 2021, p. 748). The point here is about the system(s) and not about particular family formations. “[S]table, committed, hetero-nuclear famil[ies]” take many shapes demographically, politically, in terms of parenting styles, etc. My point is not to flatten the complexity of these family forms but to point towards how policy makers and processes, how institutional spaces, centre and privilege this particular family form. For more on the “land back” movement, see this excellent issue of briarpatch: https:// briarpatchmagazine.com/issues/view/september-october-2020. See https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/anthems-canada.html#a4. In keeping with the focus of this chapter on settler emotion in still settling states, it is worth highlighting that one way to feel the anthem is to engage with a process of “detuning” it, as in Stewart’s research creation project: https://detuningtheanthem.ca/.

References Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Althusser. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation). In B. Brewster (translator) Lenin and philosophy and other essays (pp. 79–87). New York: Monthly Review Press. Bannerji, H. (2000). The paradox of diversity: The construction of multicultural Canada and “women of color.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 23(5), 537–560. Belcourt, B. (2020). A history of my brief body. Toronto: Hamish Hamilton. Boykoff, J., & Carrington, B. (2020). Sporting dissent: Colin Kaepernick, NFL activism, and media framing contests. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 55(7), 829–849. Chen, C. (2021). (Un)making the international student a settler of colour: A decolonising autoethnography. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 13(5), 743–762. Diamond, B. (2016). Resisting containment: The long reach of song at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. In D. Robinson & K. Martin

132  (Be)longing, (Un)certainty, and White Settler Inheritance (Eds.), Arts of engagement: Taking aesthetic action in and beyond the truth and reconciliation commission of Canada (pp. 239–266). Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Dickerson, N., & Hodler, M. (2021). “Real men stand for our nation”: Constructions of an American nation and anti-Kaepernick memes. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 45(4), 329–357. Dimaline, C. (2017). The marrow thieves. Toronto: Dancing Cat Books. Henhawk, D. (2013). My critical awakening. A process of struggles and decolonizing hope. International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(4), 510–525. Hooper, B. [@biff_hooper]. (2022, July 1). “I found the lowest effort form… [Twitter post]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/biff_hooper/status/1543020557347786753?s=10&t=-x_ N6j9Sq5HiwuuUZvISYw. McDonald, M. (2020). Once more, with feeling: Sport, national anthems, and the collective power of affect. Sociology of Sport Journal, 37(1), 1–11. Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rifkin, M. (2014). Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday colonialism in the American renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, D. (2016). International sense, intergenerational responsibility. In D. Robinson & K. Martin (Eds.), Arts of engagement: Taking aesthetic action in and beyond the truth and reconciliation commission of Canada (pp. 43–65). Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Robinson, D. (2020). Hungry listening: Resonant theory for Indigenous sound studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, D. & Martin, K. (2016). The body is a resonant chamber. In D. Robinson & K. Martin (Eds.), Arts of engagement: Taking aesthetic action in and beyond the truth and reconciliation commission of Canada (pp. 1–20). Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Slater, L. (2019). Anxieties of belonging in settler colonialism: Australia, race and place. New York: Routledge. Slater, L. (2020). A politics of uncertainty: Good white people, emotions, and political responsibility. Continuum, 34(6), 816–827. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2020.1842122. Stewart, T. (2021). What does it mean to “stand on guard for thee”? Detuning the Canadian national anthem. Unpublished M.A. Thesis. University of Lethbridge. Stewart-Ambo, T., & Yang, K. (2021). Beyond land acknowledgment in settler institutions. Social Text, 39(1), 21–46. Sumac, S. (2018). You are enough: Love poems for the end of the world. Neyaashiinigmiing: Kegadoce Press. Tuck, E., & Ree, C. (2013). A glossary of haunting. In S. Holman Jones, T. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 639–658). New York: Routledge. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative ­research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811–818. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham: Duke ­University Press. Zimonjic, P. (September 25, 2018). MP drops f-bomb in commons, accuses Trudeau of not caring about Indigenous rights. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ romeo-saganash-f-bomb-house-commons-1.4838124.

Chapter 7

(Autoethnographic) Futures “Something as Yet Unimagined”

Stories speak. Stories imagine. Stories bring worlds into being, making up the fabric that is stitched together by the symbolic and the material, coloring possibilities with our desires, and inviting us as participants in the work of cocreating futures. Dutta (2018, p. 94)

Proem – June 24, 2021 Seated fairly comfortably in a double kayak I share with our now 12-year-old, I take in the morning light illuminating the contours of Dogtooth Lake in Rushing River Provincial Park, just east of Kenora in Northern Ontario. I breathe deeply, revelling in both the beauty of this place – one of our favourite spots to camp – and the fact that I haven’t checked my email in almost two weeks. A part of me is present in this moment, connecting with Quinn as we have an important conversation about residential schools, current events, and settler colonialism on these very lands and waters. Another part of me – one that does a better job of hiding – feels anxious and uncomfortable. I want to shy away from that anxiety, but Quinn’s words invite me to lean into it. “We’re camping here, and it’s beautiful, but is it worth it?” My face flushes. I search for a thread to grab onto in this direction, but don’t come up with one. Here, Quinn is picking up on earlier conversations about provincial and national parks as colonial institutions predicated on land dispossession. Importantly, he’s bringing the analysis directly into the present and focusing on our complicity in ongoing colonial violence. “That’s such an important question, love,” I wade in. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that in recent years, and I don’t have a great answer for you at the moment.” We paddle together for a few more strokes before I go on: “Our challenge, I think, is maybe to do the things that we love doing – like camping, hiking, kayaking – but think really carefully about where and how we do them…” Have you done that, though? You started writing about this very idea three years ago, and yet here we are, still camping (mostly) in provincial parks as we make our way to Ontario, for example. DOI: 10.4324/9781003130451-9

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“…and it’s also about what we’re doing in other parts of our lives to challenge settler colonialism,” I add as a somewhat weak post-script. No, it’s not! I don’t want to be part of this history. These histories! But I also can’t imagine giving up the mountains, kayaking like this, snowshoeing, etc. And every time I’ve looked for other places to do it, other ways of being in these places that speak to me in such deep ways, I get stuck ‘cause it’s not easy. I find a great place like Point Grondine, but it’s too far away, so it makes it less convenient, or means I’ll spend less time actually in these places. Or I can’t find much information about it online, so I’m not sure if it will be good for all four of us as we’re making our way to or from Gramma & Grampa’s place. “I don’t know, sweetheart,” I wade in. “I really don’t. I think, maybe…” My voice trails off. Quinn, seemingly picking up some steam, refuses to let it lie. “I mean, we’re settlers enjoying a park that’s part of the problem, right?” I inhale deeply. “Right,” I offer, unsatisfied with my own answers. Seeing a different entry point, I ask “Is that the first time you’ve used that term out loud? Settlers?” I say, exhaling. “You’re right, love. So, what do we do about it?” Dear Jay, The fact that you don’t know what to do about our occupation of park spaces, that you don’t know how to answer Quinn’s question, is instructive. Pay attention, and sit there. Not because you should know, but quit turning away from the not knowing. You’re uncertain, and that’s good… that’s actually important. But what’s not good is that your uncertainty is only in your head, like most of the work you’ve been doing to interrogate your white settler privilege. You’ve been doing important labour, listening to Indigenous voices through their written work, podcasts, and artistic production, and that’s vital. But it’s also the easy labour, ‘cause it doesn’t actually require that you engage in deep, reciprocal, relational work with Indigenous folks. Even after years of this other work, you’re not quite sure how to be in relation, stuck as you are in your own settler ways of knowing and (non-)relating. You’re worried (or so you think) about asking too much of Indigenous folks, of asking them to do your work for you. But maybe you’re worried, too, about what you’ll hear from them about the work you’re doing, about whether they’ll feel that it supports their sovereignty. So, you retreat to the comfortable discomfort of reading great books and articles and teaching Indigenous scholars in your classroom with mostly settler students. Might it be time to really devote yourself to the more uncomfortable process of figuring out how to share personal and political space – consensually! – with the folks who have long been doing this work, especially those on the lands you occupy? Let me rephrase: it’s fucking time. You worry about “staying in your lane,” and that’s important; your job is not to step into these spaces assuming that you know much or maybe anything. But staying in your lane can’t mean staying in your settler bubble where your privilege stays perfectly intact and mostly unquestioned by those around you, where you get to occupy the position of the “expert” in the classroom or sit comfortably among

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your progressive and anti-racist friends. Where is the growth in that? Where is the co-resistance in that? How is that centring Indigenous cosmologies, sovereignties, and lifeways? This is not work that is meant to be easy, or quick, or linear. Nor is it work where you’re supposed to know what shape it will take before you sign up for it. You wrote a few years ago now that you weren’t sure what to do about camping in provincial and national parks. And yet, you keep doing it, wondering, briefly, what else you could do. But you then shy away from that wondering, that uncertainty, that low-level anxiety, retreating most often to the comfort and familiarity of parks you know and love, bracketing the discomfort that you yourself have acknowledged as a sure sign that there is work to be done. As you, Carly, Quinn, and Avery packed up a trailer and headed east towards loved ones this past summer, the vast majority of the places you stayed were in provincial and national parks, ‘cause you knew how to book them and what to expect. They were comfortable. It was hard to find reliable information about Indigenous-owned campgrounds, so most often you simply slid back towards that comfort, that knowingness. You write that you “complicate settler mobility” in Chapter 4, but what you haven’t touched there – and what remains fully intact in your life – is the white, possessive logic. You feel so much discomfort about your occupation of these lands, but you don’t actually sit with that discomfort in any way. Instead, you bubble wrap that, too, and move towards certainty – the certainty that in any given moment, if you want to be “in the mountains,” desire connection to “the outdoors,” it is available for you. You feel ambivalent about that, but your possessive logic is not at all undermined by that ambivalence. Do something with that ambivalence. Reach out to land defenders and support the important work they’re doing. Reach out to folks on the very lands you occupy and find ways to be in relation to those lands, those histories, and the futures those folks are imagining and building. Do better. Jay

(Re)Storying Sport and Physical (In)Activity As noted in the first section of this monograph, autoethnography has much to contribute to studies of sport, recreation, and physical cultural practices. It is well positioned to draw readers into embodied social worlds and experiences with which they might not be familiar, helping them understand these spaces, activities, and subjectivities intellectually and emotionally. As I have tried to highlight in these pages, it might also be marshalled to help readers understand familiar activities and spaces anew, seeing and feeling them differently in light of the histories both shaping and shaped by our experiences with sport and physical culture. As Robinson notes, “colonial inheritances… structure particular disciplines” (2020, p. 12). This structuring is evident, I emphasize, in both autoethnography (see Tuck & Ree, 2013) and “sport studies” (see Whitinui, 2021). I considered this structuring of the former in some detail in Chapter 3. As for the latter, I briefly point here to

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the notion that “understanding sport as a ‘colonizing tool’ is not widely accepted in the discourse of sport sociology” (Whitinui, 2021, p. 3). Moreover, these disciplines shaped by the long reach of settler colonialism go on to reshape and reproduce the web of practices in the settler state, not least by (re)producing the epistemic violence foundational to settler rule. The very least we can do, it seems to me, is carefully engage with the axiological underpinnings of our work, interrogating our own entanglements, and those of the disciplinary spaces into which we write along with the “colonial inheritances” producing and (re)produced by both. This is vital work for (white) settlers in particular: “White settlers cannot comfortably belong in and to settler colonialism; nonetheless, we need to work to understand how we are constituted by it” (Slater, 2019, p. 131). Henhawk puts it in beautiful and heart-wrenching terms, connecting these processes to long-overdue social change: “…colonizers pontificate about ‘change being slow’ when, from an Indigenous perspective, change is slow because of the colonizers’ inability and, most often, outright refusal to recognize their privilege and the role their privilege plays in maintaining change as being slow” (2013, p. 516). It is imperative that we continue to support the important work sport scholars have done towards understanding Indigenous sporting histories and cultures, the ways they have been impacted by colonization (e.g., Forsyth & Giles, 2013; Paraschak, 1997), and how they engage in processes of resistance, resurgence, and reterritorialization (e.g., McGuire-Adams, 2020; Norman, Hart, & Petherick, 2019; O’Bonsawin, 2010; Paraschak, 2013). It is equally important that we critically consider how settler colonialism has structured the lives of those privileged in and by the settler state, marshalling our analytic skills towards interrogations of how sport and settler colonialism are entangled in the lives of those for and around whom this system has been built.

Autoethnographic Futures In this monograph, moved by Dutta’s words in the epigraph, I advocate for anticolonial autoethnography not to feed the machine of academia. My interest, instead, is in marshalling the tools and resources of academic work to engage in and with the process of co-creating futures, as Dutta puts it. Slater posits that settlers committed to an anti-colonial project “can learn to be affected by other stories” of the lands we occupy, not in order to foster belonging, but in order to “encounter the plurality” of Indigenous lands (Slater, 2019, p. 67). In doing so, she argues, we might find – or, rather, forge – pathways to more just futures: “it is being alive to the liveliness of places that might be a way out of a masculinist, colonial mode of inhabitation” (p. 67). My suggestion in these pages is that autoethnographic work has much to contribute to learning to be affected by the plurality of stories of the lands we occupy. The kind of autoethnographic work I have undertaken in these pages cannot and should not take the place of engaging deeply with stories that centre Indigenous voices, cosmologies, and political aspirations. It can, however,

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stand alongside such stories, be in conversation with such stories, and, indeed, foster the process of seeking out such stories and engaging with them as stories not about some abstract “others,” but as stories fundamentally interwoven with our own. Autoethnography is uniquely positioned to consider the contours and textures of everyday life. As such, it holds tremendous potential for interrogating settler colonialism not simply as a constellation of abstract systems that structures lives and lifeways (though it is certainly such a constellation), but as lived, (re)produced, and (re)shaped through our day-to-day lives and emotional landscapes. “Everyday life,” Slater argues, is saturated with cultural and political differences, divergence and relatedness, even when there is no evident exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. It is in the “thickness” of everyday life that people navigate, however unaware, the effects of power-laden relational processes, be they familial, local, regional, national, or global. (2019, p. 131) In other words, it is not only in our direct encounters with Indigenous peoples, Nations, and assertions of political sovereignty that we encounter settler colonialism. Rather, settler colonialism structures and saturates our everyday lives, shaping both who we are and who we want to be. This is especially true when settler colonialism does not seem to be in view; it is simply the air we breathe as we go about our lives. As Wise notes, however, we have to be careful with the air we breathe and what comes with it: The perverse thing about growing up amidst racism is that no matter your own views, no matter your commitment to resisting it, you inhale it anyway; you ingest it, inhale it just as surely as you inhale any other environmental pollutant. Having done so, you are then always at risk of coughing it back up, of vomiting it back into the world whence it came. (Wise, 2005, p. 121) Wise’s words point to the difficulty – even impossibility – of breathing “clean air” in a context structured by racism, whatever our “commitment to resisting it.” But perhaps we can stretch this metaphor a bit. As I write these words (December 2021), the world is bracing against what looks likely to be the biggest wave yet of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Omicron variant becomes the dominant strain of this virus around the world, we are being reminded to get our vaccinations and boosters, but that vaccinations and boosters are not, by themselves, enough. We must also constrain the size of gatherings, limit our contacts, wear good masks, and engage in the other behaviours we have been encouraged to follow since the pandemic was formally declared 21 months ago. So, the (long, slow, non-linear, uncertain) way out of this pandemic

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is to take care of each other and ourselves by assuming that both we and those around us are potentially infected and minimizing the chances that we will cough this particular virus “back up… into the world whence it came.” Perhaps, if we position ourselves to take a similar approach to the virus of settler colonialism, we can find a (long, slow, non-linear, uncertain) path to a different future, a more just future. But in order to do that, we must first recognize and understand this particular virus as the air we breathe in still settling states. As I revise this chapter (August 2022), I am compelled to revisit this particular metaphor. It speaks to my (ableist) privilege that I imagined a “way out of this pandemic.” For so many people (those with underlying conditions, those with disabilities, etc.), there is no way out as so much of the world blithely returns to business (more or less) as usual. The eugenic logic underpinning so many “reopening” plans is plain to see at this point as governments, universities, academic associations, and many more institutions and spaces hearken to personal responsibility and identify “mask-friendly” spaces. It now seems to me that what this virus calls for is not a “cure” but a rethinking of how we put care into practice, a rethinking of the politics of care writ large. This is important not least because of the tensions at play at this stage of the pandemic when it’s crystal clear that some of the best defences against the virus (e.g., isolation) have real costs in terms of social and emotional health and well-being. To the extent that we focus on and celebrate attending to these social and emotional dimensions,1 we continue to create the conditions for the COVID-19 virus to mutate and become more lethal. In other words, as those of us (me included!) structurally positioned to weather this pandemic (relatively) well embrace opportunities to see loved ones again, socialize with friends, attend massive concerts, etc.; we are rendering the world more dangerous for those most vulnerable to this virus and the many health threats that accompany it. All of this puts the lie to the oft-heard mantra: “we’re all in this together.” The metaphor of the air we breathe works in a number of ways, as both the pandemic and settler colonialism affect all of us, but some much more (directly) than others; some are better positioned to mitigate the harms of each. Moreover, while most people are learning to negotiate the world to minimize the effects of the spread of the virus, others (scientists, political leaders) are working on ending the pandemic, not by eliminating the virus altogether, but by limiting is spread and lethality enough to render this virus simply one of the many endemic illnesses that circulate in society. Both approaches are necessary; we need both those visionaries with the long-term solutions in view and everyday people limiting the spread of the virus to make that long-term possible. Moreover, we need everyday people to support the work of scientists in numerous ways while limiting the spread themselves. (As for the folks who think the virus is fabricated, exaggerated, or some sort of conspiracy? Well, let’s just say, I have feelings. But there’s no convincing many of them so that’s not where I want to invest my time and energy.) What’s more (and more difficult!), we need to re-envision our responsibilities to one another, our consideration of the impacts of our own choices and lives on those more squarely in the crosshairs of these health crises.

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It is difficult to predict what the world will look like on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic; this uncertainty is deeply unsettling for many of us. But if we simply try – as seems to be in the case in too many jurisdictions, professional associations, etc. – to get back to the “way things were,” we will have learned nothing from all of this. We have to be open, that is, to different ways of being in the world, different ways of relating to one another, and, perhaps most importantly, different ways of thinking not simply of our own needs and desires, but of those made most vulnerable by this crisis. We don’t have to know what that future will look like to commit to working towards it; we need only know that we cannot survive and thrive in the present system. Or, more to the point, that some will survive and thrive while others suffer, and that those are two sides of the exact same coin. Similarly, we don’t have to know what a future not structured by settler colonialism will look like. We need only recognize the need for such a future – the need for justice – and commit to working towards it and to supporting those who have long been leaders in imagining it. We need only understand that in such a future, the different ways of being in the world, relating to one another, and thinking of ourselves in relational terms need not be understood as giving something up. We might, instead, exercise enough humility to think that perhaps there is a better way of being in this world, of being in relation to ourselves, each other, and the world around us, one that we cannot yet see but that must surely be more just. If we can embrace the not-knowingness – whether through writing autoethnographically or by other means (or both) – we can give ourselves permission to imagine elsewheres (McGuire-Adams et al., 2022; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Imagining elsewheres is about imagining different futures, yes. But it is also about imagining different presents without needing to know where they will lead, exactly. This might encourage us to foster different kinds of relationships with Indigenous peoples and knowledge systems, with the work of land defenders, with the territories we occupy, and with our own desired futures: “Autoethnographies as cultural critiques are acts of love that hopefully will emancipate a better future for all of us” (Herrmann, 2022, p. 75).

On Centring Whiteness Redux In Chapter 1, I thought with Sara Ahmed to highlight the risks of doing anti-­ colonial work that centres whiteness (and proposing work that for many readers would involve the same). I return to this idea here conscious that the work I have undertaken in these pages is (still) enmeshed in the tensions and problematics Ahmed critiques. Specifically, for many readers, the call I am cautiously issuing falls under the “organizing impulse… that the studying of whiteness will be critical and transformative” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 8). Ahmed’s critique of this impulse is worth quoting at length: The fantasy that organises this new white subject/knowledge formation is that studying whiteness will make white people, ‘self-conscious and critical’.

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This is a progressive story: the white subject, by learning (about themselves?) will no longer take for granted or even disavow their whiteness. The fantasy presumes that to be critical and self-conscious is a good thing, and is even the condition of possibility for anti-racism… racism is not simply about ‘ignorance’, or stereotypical knowledge. We can learn about racism and express white privilege in the very presumption of the entitlement to learn or to self-consciousness… Indeed, if learning about whiteness becomes a subject skill and a subject specific skill, then ‘learned whites’ are precisely ‘given privilege’ over others, whether those others are ‘unlearned whites’ or learning or unlearned non-white others. Studying whiteness can involve the claiming of a privileged white identity as the subject who knows. My argument suggests that we cannot simply unlearn privilege when the cultures in which learning take place are shaped by privilege. (Ahmed, 2004, p. 9) Ahmed’s words give me pause, as they so often do. Ahmed’s admonition calls forth a kind of caution, even vigilance, for many of those who might take up the call I have offered in these pages. It is vital, I think, for (white) settlers to do the work to (better) understand their entanglements with settler colonialism, as I have argued above. At the same time, the danger is that this will simply become a(nother) claiming of white privilege, this time through the “claiming of a privileged white identity as the subject who knows.” I suggest here that the work I am undertaking is, to a large extent, remedial. As Ahmed (2004) points out, whiteness is only invisible or unmarked to those who occupy it. As such, and thinking with Macoun, my aim with this work has been to bring my white settler subjectivity into (my) view not in order to centre or fetishize it, but as part of the work I need to do as a first step. Macoun advocates for “an awareness of complicity among white settlers and the ways that we are located within whiteness and coloniality in the hope that this may ultimately assist us to effect a necessary political turn away from the white subject” (2016, p. 90). This is, indeed, a learning process shaped by privilege in the ways Ahmed articulates. For me, that is an inescapable part of this work. It is not, however, a reason to turn away from the work itself, but a reason to approach this labour with care and humility, keeping in view these very tensions and risks.

A Plurality of Stories As noted in Chapter 2, context is foundational to autoethnographic work. The context in which most of my stories unfold, as I’ve emphasized in these pages, is what Billy-Ray Belcourt provocatively calls “the embargo on care that is Canada” (2020, p. 9). In Chapters 4–6, I have endeavoured to trace some of the contours of this embargo on care as they have shaped and been shaped by my experiences with physical cultural practices at various points in my lifetime. In so doing, I have struggled to attend to the specific emplaced histories – particularly

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those unfolding in Treaty 7 territory – of which my stories are a part. I write into this space, these lands, these histories, and encourage others who (have) call(ed) Canada home to do the same. There is much work to be done, however, (re)writing embodied histories in other still settling states, not least in the territories most people think of as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Sport and recreational practices take on particular shapes in these different contexts, of course, but so too does settler-colonial rule. In Australia, for instance, discourses of reconciliation gained significant traction in the political and cultural realm significantly earlier than in Canada (Slater, 2019). Aotearoa (New Zealand), meanwhile, has very different histories of both Indigenous peoples and colonization than does Canada (Whitinui, 2014), and engagements with Indigenous (especially Maˉ ori) histories and language occupy a more prominent place in public debate and institutions than they do in Canada, for instance (Whitinui, 2021). The histories of settler colonialism in the United States, meanwhile, share significant elements with those in Canada, but diverge in important ways as well and occupy different spaces in social and political discourse. My point, simply, is to invite those who might choose to take up the call I offer in these pages to (better) understand the histories of which they are a part, the “plurality of stories” unfolding on the lands they occupy. My call for sport scholars to take up anti-colonial autoethnography is simultaneously a call to devote (more) attention to our own entanglements with settler colonialism, particularly on the lands on which we live, work, and play. The lands that have made our lives and research possible and profitable. Centrally, this involves all of us interrogating the ways our own lives have been structured by racism. This call to centre our own entanglements is not, primarily, an intellectual imperative. Rather, my point, following Whitinui, is to “ask us to examine our own ethical responsibilities, positionality, and criticality when engaging in decolonizing work, but also to consider how opportunities to transform are enacted—socially, politically, and economically” (2021, p. 5). To return to the arguments I highlighted in Chapter 1, this is fundamentally about heeding King’s admonishment that we “have to be careful with the stories [we] tell. And [we] have to watch out for the stories [we] are told” (King, 2003, pp. 9–10). The care towards which King points here is vital, constituting a refusal of the embargo to which Belcourt refers. Moreover, this care with the stories we tell and are told is rooted in a project of not simply better understanding our social worlds, but transforming them: Stories have a hold over us and they cannot easily be discarded or simply replaced by good intentions, rather it is through ruptures and forms of estrangement that their claims over us slacken and lose their force. The possibility of self and social transformation is generated through exposure, which can be a painful process… Good white people need to feel how settler colonialism is lived in the everyday. (Slater, 2019, p. 48)

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Writing the words that fills these pages has, at times, been a painful process indeed, one that has contributed to a bone-deep ache that I now carry with me. That ache is, perhaps, a form of estrangement, but it is a generative one that has compelled me to engage differently with my day-to-day world and “[colour] new possibilities with [my] desires” (Dutta, 2018, p. 94). Dear reader, I first wrote to you almost two months ago, fuelled, as I wrote at the time, by urgency and anger. I’m not feeling any less urgency or anger than I was then, that’s for sure. The anger, though, is living in my body differently. The urgency pointing me in new directions. I still hold that the work I’ve done in these pages, and the work towards which it gestures, is important and worthwhile, if always already fraught. But it is also not enough. There is no enough. I’ve been joking with friends lately that I need to finish this project in order to sleep better at night. But there’s a little voice whispering in my ear that I won’t. It is not the book that has been waking me up early, but the deep, aching desire to help pull this system apart in whatever ways I can. And that isn’t going anywhere. Doing this work has planted and watered a seed that I want to nurture, though I have no idea what it is I’m growing, exactly. I know only that I want and need to grow something new, something with which I’m unfamiliar, something that will claim a space I can’t yet name or see. In my first note to you, I was a bit flippant. Righteous even. I’m feeling neither of those things as I write these words. Rather, I’m feeling the odd combination of deeply saddened and simultaneously energized and hopeful. Energized because I know what I want to do. It’s not to finish this book or write another anti-colonial autoethnography, though I plan to do both of those things. Doing this work has clarified for me, though, that I want more of my energy to go towards engaging with Indigenous political will much more than I currently do or ever have. I hope, dear reader, that if you’ve made it this far, something in these pages has moved you. I hope that you are moved to think and feel deeply (about) your own entanglements with settler colonialism in terms of both your experiences with sport and physical activity and your academic journeys, whatever shape they take. I hope, more than anything, that you are moved to pull apart this system on the lands you occupy, to listen to those imagining elsewheres, and to imagine them yourself. What kinds of stories are you listening to? What kinds of stories are you telling? What kinds of worlds, that is, are you bringing into being? Most importantly, in what ways are you participating in the work of co-creating futures? Autoethnography, it seems to me, cannot simply be an academic undertaking – something we do to build our careers and navigate the contours of the “ivory tower.” Rather, autoethnographic thinking, writing, and creating is part of figuring out how to be in the world, what kind of world we want to be in. Yet it must be said that the pressures and contours of academia position scholars very differently to commit to this project writ large. One of the many privileges that shape my

(Autoethnographic) Futures  143

life is professional privilege: I am a mid-career tenured scholar not subject to the degree of “publish or perish” pressure that infuses the lives of many friends and colleagues. Those more precariously positioned face different kinds of barriers to doing this work than do I, and that is no small consideration. My hope, however, is that those interested in undertaking this labour connect with one another, support one another (personally and professionally), and hold one another (lovingly) accountable as we do so in whatever ways our life and professional circumstances permit. Yesterday, I said to Carly that I was feeling the weight of all of this. I was (and am) feeling the weight of the book, but also the weight of knowing that the book is, at best, a form of harm reduction that ten people would read. Maybe I was being a bit dramatic. Either way, I’m a believer in harm reduction, so maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if this is work that reduces harm in some small way. Goodness knows we could use some harm reduction. Also, harm reduction is only one piece of the puzzle when we’re trying to address a social problem; sometimes we need harm reduction while we’re imagining and working towards different systems altogether. In some ways, then, what I’m encouraging you to do is to think and write about your own social worlds, the harmful systems in and with which you are entangled, and, for those of you who are settlers like me, the harm you are perpetrating. It is not enough for settlers to lament the barriers and challenges in the lives of Indigenous Nations and peoples. We need to better understand – and work to refuse – the ways those barriers are foundational to the privileges and comforts of our lives, to our very desires. This is not to suggest that our lives are without challenge. Rather, it is to highlight that even when we face difficulties, we do so from within a system designed to support us. A system predicated on the erasure of Indigenous peoples, Nations, and ways of knowing. A system that has been and is being built and, as such, one that can be dismantled. Autoethnography is sometimes criticized as being little more than therapy for writers and, perhaps, for readers. It’s an odd line of critique, it seems to me. If therapy is what helps us heal or strengthen our bodies and minds, what helps us think in terms of our responsibilities and our accountability, why would that be a weakness of any kind? What’s more, if autoethnography therapeutically bolsters our abilities to gather the fabric of our social worlds and colour it with desires for more just futures, helps us think in terms of relational reflexivity (Spry, 2016) then I will sign up for that in a heartbeat. Will you, reader? (letter first composed December 12, 2021)

Note 1 For example, the theme of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport’s conference held in May 2022 in person with almost no virtual participation options was “Inclusivity, Togetherness, Community, and the Sociology of Sport in a Post(?)-Covid World.” In my reading, the failure of a sociological association to reckon with the very real structural

144  (Autoethnographic) Futures barriers in the lives of (potential) attendees is worrisome indeed. Moreover, a conference themed around “inclusivity” and “togetherness” while structurally excluding many folks from participating constituted, in my view, a kind of gaslighting of those calling for more a more careful approach to conference planning.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of anti-racism. Borderlands, 3(2). Belcourt, B. (2020). A history of my brief body. Toronto: Hamish Hamilton. Dutta, M. (2018). Autoethnography as decolonization, decolonizing autoethnography: Resisting to build our homes. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 18(1), 94–96. DOI: 10.1177/1532708617735637. Forsyth, J., & Giles, A. (Eds.) (2013). Aboriginal peoples and sport in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Henhawk, D. (2013). My critical awakening. A process of struggles and decolonizing hope. International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(4), 510–525. DOI: 10.1525/ irqr.2013.6.4.510. Herrmann, A. (2022). Autoethnography as acts of love. In T. Adams, S. Holman Jones, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (2nd ed.) (pp. 67–78). New York: Routledge. King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, Inc. Macoun, A. (2016). Colonising white innocence: Complicity and critical encounters. In S. Maddison, T. Clark, & R. de Costa (Eds.), The limits of settler colonial reconciliation: Non-Indigenous people and the responsibility to engage (pp. 85–102). Singapore: Springer. McGuire-Adams, T. (2020). Indigenous feminist gikendaasowin (knowledge): Decolonization through physical activity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. McGuire-Adams, T., Joseph, J., Peers, D., Eales, L., Bridel, W., Chen, C., Hamdon, E., & Kingsley, B. (2022). Awakening to elsewheres: Collectively restorying embodied experiences of (be)longing. Forthcoming in the Sociology of Sport Journal. DOI: 10.1123/ ssj.2021-0124. Norman, M., Hart, M., & Petherick, L. (2019). Indigenous gender reformations: Physical culture, settler colonialism, and the politics of containment. Sociology of Sport Journal, 36, 113–123. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2018-0130. O’Bonsawin, C. (2010). “No Olympics on stolen native land”: contesting Olympic narratives and asserting indigenous rights within the discourse of the 2010 Vancouver Games. Sport in Society, 13(1), 143–156. DOI: 10.1080/17430430903377987. Paraschak, V. (1997). Variations in race relations: Sporting events for Native peoples in Canada. Sociology of Sport Journal, 14(1), 1–21. DOI: 10.1123/ssj.14.1.1. Paraschak, V. (2013). Hope and strength(s) through physical activity for Canada’s aboriginal peoples. In J. Forsyth & A. Giles (Eds.), Aboriginal peoples & sport in Canada (pp. 229−246). Vancouver: UBC Press. Slater, L. (2019). Anxieties of belonging in settler colonialism: Australia, race and place. New York: Routledge. Spry, T. (2016). Autoethnography and the other: Unsettling power through utopian performances. New York: Routledge. Tuck, E., & Ree, C. (2013). A glossary of haunting. In S. Holman Jones, T. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 639–658). New York: Routledge.

(Autoethnographic) Futures  145 Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Whitinui, P. (2014). Indigenous autoethnography: Exploring, engaging, and experiencing “self” as a narrative method of inquiry. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 43(4), 456–487. DOI: 10.1177/0891241613508148. Whitinui, P. (2021). Decolonizing sports sociology is a “verb not a noun”: Indigenizing our way to reconciliation and inclusion in the 21st century? Alan Ingham memorial lecture. Sociology of Sport Journal, 38(1), 3–15. Wise, T. (2005). White like me. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. AA hockey game 107 Aboriginal peoples 21n6 Adams, C. 71 Adams, T. 48, 50, 52 affective (un)certainties 119 affective economy 125 Ahmed, S. 9, 10, 39, 41, 43, 59, 119, 123, 139, 140 Alberta Wilderness Association 75 Althusser 121, 122 Amiskwaciy-wâskahikan 58 analytic autoethnography 50, 53 Anglican missionaries 100n1 anti-colonial autoethnography 9, 10, 11, 14, 18–19, 48–61, 136 anti-racism 10, 40, 135, 140 anxieties of belonging 125–126 anxiety 133; low-level 135; modes of 126; whiteness studies 10 Aotearoa (New Zealand) 141 assault 105–106 Atay, A. 57, 58 autoethnography 12, 21n4; anti-colonial 9, 10, 11, 14, 18–19, 48–61, 136; crafting 54, 60; decolonizing 56–61; disability interrogations 14–15; dualism of fact and fiction 14; epistemological foundations of 49; futures of 136–139; hockey tournament 16; impressionistic work 52; interrogating Canada 26–44; lacrosse 16–17; narrative approaches 49; paradigmatic underpinnings

49–56; physical (in)activity 135–136; physical cultural practices 19; plurality of stories 140–144; postcolonial lens 57; social-scientific/analytic 50; in sport studies 11–17; storying sport 135–136; variations in 52; white cisgender man 27–28; writing sport and physical activity 6–22; see also specific autoethnographies axiology 18, 49, 53, 54 balancing act 76 Banff National Park 69, 75, 80 Bannerji, H. 123 Bannock 100n5 BASE jumper 51, 52, 55, 60 Belcourt, B. 33, 128, 140, 141 “belong or die” logic 124 Bertha Lake 65, 77 Beyak, L. 6 Biodiversity Goals and Targets (2020) 69 Blackfeet Interpretive tours 82 Blackfoot Confederacy 28 Blood Tribe 83n2 bodily experiences of sport 12 Bonanza 88 bourgeois daddyhood 66 Bushie, C. 114 Calgary Olympics 89, 96 Calgary Stampede 96, 98–99 Camoletto, R. 90

148 Index Canada 9; affects in 126; hearkening to reconciliation 43; legitimacy of 125; pass system in 1885 70–71; reproduction 19, 42; rituals of 127; see also settler state Canada Day 8, 122 Canada’s Aboriginal policy 21n6 Canada’s treaty commissioners 38 Canadian flags 43, 44, 104, 108, 111 Canadian Football League 87 Canadian government 36, 117; class-action lawsuit 44n2 Canadian histories and politics 33 Canadian-hosted Olympic games 69 Canadian kinesiology programs 95 Canadian masculinity 72 Canadian multiculturalism 73 Canadian mythology 83n6 Canadian national anthem 19, 116, 117, 119–123, 128 Canadian nation-building project 81 Canadian Pacific Railway 70 Canadian society 32, 35, 123 Carlson, E. 61 Carlson-Manathara, E. 29, 60 Carter, S. 33 Chandrashekar, S. 50, 58 Chawla, D. 57, 58 Chen, C. 48, 54, 56, 58, 86, 87, 88, 99 Cherokee Nation 9 civilization 68, 80, 97 class-action lawsuit 44n2 Coakley, J. 77 colonial dispossession 126 colonial inheritances 136 colonial violence 7, 37, 38, 39, 43, 58, 93, 112, 131; quotidian 18, 87 colonizing white innocence 31 complicate settler mobility 65–84, 135 conceptualist autoethnography 52 conciliation 42 concussion 16 conference planning, careful approach to 144n1 containability 37 contemporary kinesiology programs 95 Cooke, L. 60

Copithorne, C. 75 Corntassel, J. 42, 43 Coulthard, G. 28, 29, 42 Couturier, L. 93 COVID-19 pandemic 137, 138, 139 crafting autoethnography 54, 60 creative-artistic autoethnography 50 Cree lawyer 130n2 critical autoethnographies 51–52, 54 cultivated ignorance 99 cultural genocide 21n6, 36, 124 cultural history 76 cultural politics of inhabitation 125 Cyr, M. 100n5 Daigle, M. 34, 43, 93 damage-centered research, moratorium on 54 Davidson, J. 15, 16 Davis, H. 70 Dean, A. 10 Dean, N. 16, 51 decolonization 39–43, 81; autoethnography 56–61 decolonizing praxis 56 De Lisio, A. 22n7 Denison, J. 13–15, 49; Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research 11 Denzin, N. 12 detuning process 131n5 disability: discourses of 72; interrogations 14–15, 55; Peers’ critical disability autoethnography 51–52 dismantling settler colonialism 17, 118 dispossession process 67 diversity 100n3 Dogtooth Lake 6, 133 Douglas, D. 95 Downey, A. 100n2 dualisms, tyranny of 12, 13 Dutta, M. 9, 57, 136 economy: affective 125; visual psychic 22n8; white settler emotional 127 Eddie the Eagle 96 Edéhzhíe Protected Area 69 Edmonton, Alberta 58

Index 149 Edmonton Elk 87 Edmonton Oilers 88 Elliot, A. 42 Ellis, C. 49, 50, 54 emotional health 138 emotional uncertainty 115 empathy 115, 119 empty wilderness 78 Environment Conservation Authority 75 epistemic violence 17, 41, 120 epistemology 49, 53 Erickson, B. 90 ethical engagement, on respect 32 ethic of incommensurability 40–41 ethnography 56; auto- (see autoethnography); traditional 50 European classical knowledge 92 Euro-Western population 34 Evers, C. 50, 51 fact and fiction 13–14 Faculty of Kinesiology 92 Fanon, F. 42 fantasy fold 123 The Fatal Flaw: A Narrative of the Fragile Body-Self 12 Federal government of Canada 68 fictionalizing vignettes 130n1 field of sport studies 11, 13 First Nations 44, 73, 76, 84, 91 fitness of the nation 94 fitness of the population 94 Fitzpatrick, E. 60 Flames 88 Flowers, R. 8, 28, 32, 80 football game 87, 95–97 form of relationality 29–30 French immersion school 88 Fusco, C. 95 Garneau, D. 42 Gaudry, A. 41 Gaztambide-Fernández, R. 73, 80 “gender neutral” language 123 genocide 7 George III, King 33 Gidimt’en camp 112 Glacier National Park 82

Glacier Sun Tours 82 Gordon, A. 57, 74 Grande, S. 93 Granzow, K. 10 ground-penetrating radar 38 guest 29 Halas, J. 95 Hampton, R. 94 harm reduction 143 Harper, S. 36, 37, 130n2 Hart, M. 72 Haudenosaunee land ethics 35 healing trauma 36, 109 Helstein, M. 22n8 Henhawk, D. 56, 119, 136 Herrmann, A. 52 historical injustice 39 hockey game 88, 107, 116, 117; tournament 16 Holman Jones, S. 50 House of Commons 36, 130n2 Hunt, D. 37, 74, 76, 81 ideological state apparatus (ISA) 121 illusion 99 Indian Act 34 Indian Residential Schools in Canada 36, 130n2 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement 21n6 indigenization 39–43 Indigenous imagery 96 Indigenous peoples 74, 76, 83, 83n7, 84n9, 98, 99, 100, 116, 125, 126, 131, 137, 141; and advocates 8; and communities 43; dispossession of 90; European settlers 72; and knowledge systems 139; physical and spiritual health of 36; replacement of 73; resistance and resurgence 69; Royal Proclamation of 1763 33–34; selfdetermination 19; settler futurity 72–73; settlers and 37, 38, 81; sovereignty 32, 34, 118, 125, 126, 130, 137; territory on Turtle Island 34 Indigenous Protected Areas 69 Indigenous Protected Conservation Areas 69

150 Index indoor climbing space 90 inherited histories of ignorance 127 injunction to incompletion 17 intellectual inquiry 10 intergenerational irresponsibility 120 intergenerational perpetration 116 intergenerational privilege 116 intergenerational responsibility 116 intergenerational trauma 38, 116, 120 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) 49 interpretive autobiography 11 interpretive autoethnographies 51 interpretive-humanistic autoethnography 50, 52, 53 intimate relation 9, 59 Jamieson, K. 93, 94 John Diefenbaker high school 96 Joseph, J. 95 Justice, D. 28, 80, 82; difficult stories to heart 10; discomfort stories 9; wonderworks 81 justice system 124 Kainai Nation 83n2 Kananaskis Country (K-Country) 69, 70, 74–80; cultural history 75; ecosystem healthy 75; experiment 75–77; natural history 74–75; in September 2017 77–79, 79 Kananaskis Lakes 75 Kananaskis Provincial Park 75 Kananaskis Valley 75 Kanehsatà:ke resistance of 1990 68 Kanien’kehaka resistance 35 kayaking 116, 134 kinesiology 93–95, 100n4 King, C. R. 95 King, H. 81, 83n8 King, T. 16; The truth about stories 8 Kizuk, S. 30, 43 Koleszar-Green, R. 29 Kriger, D. 95 Ktunaxa poet 114–115 lacrosse 16, 100n2 Ladner, K. 34, 35

Lake O’Hara 82 “land back” movement 118, 131n4 land dispossession 7, 18, 40, 70, 74, 91, 128 Lenon, S. 80 lens of complicity 30 Lethbridge College 110, 116, 123 Levine, P. 109 liberal settlerism 43 liminality 58 limits of scientific knowledge 50 logic of elimination 57, 93 Lorenz, D. 41 Lougheed, P. 75; Lougheed Provincial Park 75, 77; Lougheed’s government 76 Lubicon Lake Cree Nation 89 Mackey, E. 36, 37 Macoun, A. 28, 30, 31, 140 mainstream media 35 Mann, G. 37, 38, 43, 48, 50, 52 Marcelli, D. 90 Markula, P.: Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research 11 Martin, K. 120 masculine power network 87 masculinity: Canadian 72; First Nations 91; rugged 83n6; white settler 18, 86–100 Mason, C. 70, 71 Maynard, R. 70 McDonald, M. 121 McKegney, S. 81, 83n8, 88 McMahon Stadium 87, 96 Medicine Hat Rattlers 110 Menakem, R. 110, 128 metaphorization of decolonization 39 Milne, B. 75 Minister of Highways 75 modernizing Canada 89 modes of anxiety 126 modus operandi of colonial power 42 Mohawk 35 moratorium on damage-centered research 54 Moreton-Robinson, A. 126 Mountain Equipment Cooperative (MEC) 44, 69, 72, 83n5, 91 Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research (Denison and Markula) 11

Index 151 multiculturalism project 73, 88 Murray, L. 17 Nachman, J. 95 Nakoda peoples 70, 71 narrative approaches, autoethnography 49 national shame, public proclamations 43 nationhood 32, 43 Nature Legacy 69 neoliberal global capitalism 93 NHL hockey game 88 non-performativity 39 Norman, M. 72 North American OutGames 16 North American recreation culture 67 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport’s conference 143n1 numbered Treaties 38, 44n1 Nunavut 32 O’Bonsawin, C. 68, 92, 96 O Canada 96, 104–131; on being hailed 121–125; politics of (uncertain) possibility 127–130; settler affect 125–127 Oka Crisis 35 Olympic Plaza 96 Olympic Winter Games 96 Omicron variant 137 ontological pain 130 ontological violence 41 ontology 49, 52–53 Orange Shirt Day 122 OutGames 16 Paahtómahksikimi 65 Palliser, J. 75 paradigmatic underpinnings 49–56 Paralympic sport 52 Parks, A. 74 pass system 70–71 pedagogies of white settler masculinity 18, 86–100; in 1983 88; in 1986 87–89; in 1987 96; in 1988 95; in 1990 96–97; in 1995 90–95; in 1996 97–99; in 1997 89–90 Peers, D. 14, 15, 51, 52, 53, 55, 94; Peers’ critical disability autoethnography 51–52

personal-cultural entanglements 50 Petherick, L. 72 physical (in)activity 135–136 physical education 93–95 physiotherapist, sports injury and 12 Point Grondine Park 82, 134 politics of declaration 10 politics of distraction 43 politics of (uncertain) possibility 127–130 postcolonialism 56 postcolonial lens, autoethnography 57 Poulter, G. 100n2 Prete, T. 33, 34, 36 proto-capitalist logics 70 public proclamations, national shame 43 Puwar, N. 72 qualitative inquiry 12 Quebec 28, 35 Quebecois nationalist sentiment 123 Queen’s University 83n8 quotidian colonial violence 18, 87 racial capitalocene 70 racial ideology 92 racialization 95 racialized trauma 110 racial (in)justice 95 racial logic, of settler colonialism 126, 128 racial superiority 94 racism 140 Ray, S. 71, 72 Razack, S. 20, 68 reconciliation 39–43, 81, 125 Red Road Podcast 83n8 Ree, C. 57, 59, 128 Regan, P. 43 relational reflexivity 143 replacement of Indigenous peoples 73 residential schools 21n1, 37–38, 89, 116; conversation about 133; effects of 32; formal apology for 36; trauma of 116 Rifkin, M. 87, 125 Rinehart, R. 11, 13–15, 49 ritualistic performance-as-process 120 Robidoux, M. 91 Robinson, D. 120, 135 rock climbing 90

152 Index Rocky Mountain National Park 69, 75 Rocky Mountains Park Act 70, 71 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 35 Royal Proclamation of 1763 33 rugged masculinity 83n6 Rushing River Provincial Park 6, 133 Saganash, R. 131n2 Sarcee Boys’ Boarding School 100n1 Sarcee Reserve 100n1 Saugeen First Nation 130 scene of violence 105, 106 self-determination 19 self-identification 21n5 self-improvement 94 self-indigenization 91 self reliance 77 self responsibility 77 settler 27–29, 116; anxiety 125–126; comfort 20; feelings of guilt or responsibility 127; and Indigenous Peoples 37, 38, 81; shame 30 settler affect 125–127 settler ambivalence 119 settler anxiety 125–126 settler belonging 126 settler bodies 72 settler colonialism 7–10, 17, 18, 19, 26–32, 36, 53, 57, 60, 61, 80, 82, 99, 100, 112, 120, 129, 136–142; anxieties of belonging 125–126; Canadian experiment in 119; contemporary politics of 44n1; dismantling 17, 118; emotional politics of 126; givenness of 87; injustices of 113; intimate relation 9; issues of 59; legacies of 39; mutability of 123; past and present of 72; racial logic of 126, 128; reckoning with 114; reproduction of 56, 87, 93; shapeshifting forms 131n2; violences of 37 settler-colonial logics 33, 73, 76, 90 settler-colonial rule 34, 141 settler-colonial violence 18, 98; contemporary enactments of 98 settler common sense 87 settler emotions 125 settler fragility 74 settler futurity 10, 72–74, 92

settler land acknowledgments 124 settler liberalism 43 settler mobility, complication 65–84, 135 settler society 38 settler state (Canada) 18, 20, 34, 35, 38, 40, 48, 54, 58, 93, 94, 112, 136; affects in 126; hearkening to reconciliation 43; interpolating folks into 123; legitimacy of 125; pass system in 1885 70–71; reproduction 19, 43; rituals of 128 settler subjectivity 87, 140 settler time 38 Seven Year’s War 33 shame 30 shape shifting tactics 87 Shoshone homelands 60 Simpson, A. 36–39, 43, 80 Simpson, L. 27, 34, 35, 70, 81, 83, 129 Skye, C. 83n8 Slater, J. 100n5 Slater, L. 30, 37, 60, 87, 99, 100n5, 119, 121, 125–126, 128–129, 136, 137 Smith, M. 93, 94 snowshoeing 91, 100n2, 134 social contract 43 social health 138 social reality 52 social-scientific autoethnography 50 social work 36, 93, 105, 106 sociological association 143n1 sociological narratives 13 Sociology of Canadian Society 32 Sociology of Sport Journal 11, 13 socio-political system 99 sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples 32, 34, 118, 125, 126, 130, 137 Sparkes, A. 11–13, 15, 66 Spence, M. 67 sport-related concussion 16 sport scholars 11–12, 49 sports injury and physiotherapist 12 sport sociology 17, 58 sport studies: autoethnographic method and methodology in 11–17; field of 11 sport writing 6–22 Stampede Wrestling 88 Stanley, G. 114 state-enacted terrorism 119 state-sanctioned terrorism 20

Index 153 Stewart, T. 121, 122, 123; Stewart’s research creation project 131n5 Stoney-Nakoda nation 76 Sumac, S. 114 surrender clause 38

vaccine-verification process 107 Vander Kloet, M. 67, 70, 72, 76, 78, 83n5, 83n6, 91 visual psychic economies 22n8 volleyball 110, 124

Three Isle Lake 78 Tink, L. 94 Todd, Z. 70 Toyosaki, S. 61 traditional ethnography 50 trauma: healing 36, 109; intergenerational 38, 116, 120; racialized 110; residential schools 116–117 traumatic head injury 16, 51 Treaty 7 28, 44n1, 70, 83n4, 141 treaty-making process 33 Trudeau, P.E. 123 Trudeau, J. 118, 123, 131n2 The truth about stories (King) 8 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 8, 18, 21n6, 36, 37, 39, 42, 116, 120 Tuck, E. 36, 40, 53–54, 57, 59, 60, 72, 73, 80, 98, 128, 129, 131n2 Turtle Island 34–35, 59 Twin Falls, Idaho 60 tyranny of dualisms 12, 13, 15

Wagamese, R. 65, 80 Waterton Lakes National Park 65, 83n2 well-being 138 Western Cup 16 white body supremacy 110 white cisgender man, autoethnography 27–28 white innocence, colonizing 31 whiteness studies 10–11, 140–141; attentive to risks 10–11; learning about 140 white possession 125 white possessive logic 126 white settler: anti-colonialism 61; control of 76; emotional economy stymies antiracism 127; inheritance 104–131; innocence 31; masculinity 18, 86–100; mythologizing of nation 20; researchers of 28; sport hunters 71; subjectivity 87, 140; vital work for 136 Whitinui, P. 58, 141 Wigglesworth, J. 90 wilderness 72; creating process 68; empty 78; and nation 67–69 Wild Rose Country 90 Wise, T. 137 Wynn, G. 33

uncertainty 9, 17, 126, 134, 135; COVID19 pandemic 139; emotional 115; to politically productive 119; political possibility in 128; Slater’s discussion of 126–130 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity 69 University of Calgary 90, 92, 93 U.S. foreign policy 44 U.S. national anthem 120

Yang, K. 36, 40, 59, 60, 98, 129, 131n2 Yellowhead Institute 83n3 Yoho National Park 82 Zinn, R. 83n2