ABSTRACT
The histories and ongoing struggles of Indigenous people living under settler-colonialism form an endless story of removal, relocation, and violence in which roads figure as more than neutral backdrops. The disappearances and deaths of several Indigenous women along British Columbia’s Highway 16 are part of a long legacy of colonial violence that can be linked to racialization of space in settler-Indigenous history. The disturbing image of Saunders’ body lying abandoned along the Trans-Canada Highway was evocative of a larger, seemingly interminable story in which Indigenous lives and bodies are treated as disposable within a biopolitical social order. The view of Indigenous people as suspended between nostalgia and modernity revealed more about the longings of postindustrial culture than it reflected the daily realities of Indigenous people. Louise Erdrich travel centers itself instead in an understanding of territory formed by millennia of Indigenous occupancy and migration across borders. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
