ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a reading that puts critical mobility studies and literary criticism into conversation with analyses of urban space and Vancouver’s settler and neocolonial spatial politics specifically. It explains the contribution that Marilyn Dumont poems—and the settler-Indigenous context from which they are written—can make to ongoing conversations about mobility justice and urban studies. The speaker’s joyous reconciliation with the city is achieved by her ability to leave it—to escape the gridlock of the urban pedestrian and those dependent on mass transit. The ways in which Indigenous subjects are seen in the city spaces depicted in Dumont’s poems also can be approached through the politics of recognition. The spaces in which Dumont sets each poem might be seen as contact zones, sites of encounter that have the potential for interaction, but the social interactions conditioned by these spaces also force a type of disengagement.
