ABSTRACT

In my last big research project (Thorpe 2012), I ended at a beginning. I concluded that the Canadian wilderness is a product of historical power relationships rather than of timeless nature. One culture of nature-a settler colonial one-disrupted another, Indigenous, system. For members of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai, my ending was simply an obvious starting point. N’Daki Menan, or “our land,” existed before Canada: a homeland, not a wilderness, n’Daki Menan, not the Canadian nation. It was a long journey, and a lot of work, to arrive at a beginning. The self-

evidence of n’Daki Menan did not in fact seem self-evident to me, a non-Indigenous person who grew up in what I took for granted as part of Canada. But I should not be surprised by the journey I took to get to what members of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai knew all along, for I am well versed in feminist theory that highlights the radically contingent character of every part of what we understand as our “selves”: our bodies, our ideas, everything. In Simone de Beauvoir’s words, “the body is not a thing, it is a situation” (de Beauvoir 2009, p. 46), and Judith Butler argues that bodies become gendered through the “stylized repetition of acts through time” (Butler 2007, p. 188). What we understand as self-evidently there is self-evident only because of itsand our-situation in place and time. Canada is invented, but that does not make it a pretend place. Acknowledging the politics of location, as Adrienne Rich (1994) calls it, does

not mean forgetting about our individual and collective responsibility for knowledge production. Instead, it means accountability, rejecting the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (Haraway 1988, p. 581) in favour of recognizing and acting from the understanding that all perspectives are partial, embodied physically in historical time and geographical space. Not all partial perspectives, however, possess the power of the status quo. The story of n’Daki Menan as part of the Canadian wilderness, with its mining, forestry and tourism activities controlled by the state, is a story with teeth, a story powerful enough to negate the Teme-Augama Anishnabai’s claim to the same territory, understood differently. It remains important to tell stories about the history of the status quo, to reveal it as a partial perspective rather than an obvious truth, because its power rests in its appearance as the norm. The Canadian wilderness may have been my

story, but it was not my story alone. Because it remains a powerful story, I need to keep un-telling it. Yet there is a danger in endlessly repeating the same story, even from a criti-

cal perspective. It re-centres colonial encounters-the “beginning” of the story, as many of us learned-as the main event, and in so doing re-centres the privileged bodies for whom terms such as Canadian wilderness signify not dispossession, but home. Bodies such as mine. It matters where you begin. Cree scholar Shawn Wilson puts forward the posi-

tion that foundational to Indigenous research methodologies is relational accountability, premised on the underlying perspective that “reality is relationships or sets of relationships” (Wilson 2008, p. 73). In The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, writer and academic Thomas King convincingly argues that the “truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (King 2003, p. 2). While it may appear that an understanding of reality as stories is quite different from a consideration of reality as relationships, they are two sides of the same coin. Stories make possible or prevent different kinds of relationships from forming; it is relationships that stories can make, or break, or hold. Literature professor Ted Chamberlin indeed contends that this is what all stories do: “hold some people together and keep others apart” (Chamberlin 2004, p. 227). Neither is it all about people. The story of the Canadian wilderness, for example, authorizes some relationships between people and land while outlawing others. Beginning with relationships is different from beginning with wilderness.