Writing as righting: Truth and reconciliation, poetics, and new geo-graphing in colonial Canada

Abstract

This paper is anchored in two recent and concurrent openings, openings that offer opportunities for geographers to consider new modes of engaging colonial violence. The first opening is the release, in Canada, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report and calls to action. By demanding new types of settler-subject attention to Indigenous peoples and places, it opens new spaces for extending reflection about anti-Indigenous racism and colonial violence in Canadian consciousness. The second opening is geography's growing uptake of creative and humanities-informed theories and practices. These manifest in new knowledges and practices with consequent possibilities for addressing colonial violence. I consider these two openings first by proposing changes to conversations about settler-normalized violences lived by Indigenous peoples, and, second by engaging poets working to radically re/configure language and written expression. Specifically, the paper ends with a call for geographers—particularly non-Indigenous settler geographers—to rethink ways (and forms) by which we produce knowledge, especially about colonialism and Indigenous geographies and especially in and through writing practices. The paper is experimental in form, meant to disrupt easy uptake or digestion of ideas that must remain—for settler subjects—fundamentally ragged, upsetting, and always beyond conclusion, coherence, or closure.