ABSTRACT
Appeals for status and inclusion in the nation-state may reify the authority of that nation-state, thereby ignoring the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples of those unceded lands and waters. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada made 94 calls to action. Indigenous methodologies have always attended to rounded and deep conceptions of place, and more concretely, land; thus, taking Indigenous theorizations of land seriously is to engage with the work of decolonization. Tuck and McKenzie advocate paying attention to place in research as having “multidimensional significance as sites of presence, futurity, power, imagination, and knowing”. Byrd argues that much of settler colonial logic is built upon a “paradigm of Indianness” that relies on the original dispossession of Indigenous territories and peoples, and on the idea that Indigenous peoples are always about to disappear. Reconciliation is an ongoing process that needs a critical understanding and dismantling of the “colonialist consciousness”.
