Why Do You Need to Know That?

• In Event: 64.088 - Sheraton Roundtable 12 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 64.088-2 - Storying Land, Consent, and Radical Relationality as Practices of Walking-With

Abstract

1. Objectives
First Story Toronto is an Indigenous-led community-based organization that is focused on researching, keeping, and sharing stories and knowledge of ancient and ongoing Indigenous presence in Toronto. One of our most popular initiatives has been its tours of Indigenous presence in places across the city. These tours constitute important opportunities for participants and guides to engage in respectful conversations around Indigenous histories, communities, places, perspectives, and knowledges. Yet, the tours are also fraught convergences of people with knowledges and experiences that vary significantly across age, gender, culture, nation, and privilege within a colonial system that upholds certain kinds of knowledges, experiences, ontologies, and epistemologies as truth over others.

As two First Story Toronto members that have long served as ‘tour guides’ we regularly navigate thorny ethical questions around issues of voice, representation, and what should and should not be shared. We endeavour to foster deeper understanding of Indigenous peoples, worldviews, and issues but are simultaneously aware of the potential for such tours to become opportunities to extract, decontextualize, and fetishize Indigenous Knowledge as primarily ‘stuff’ to know, rather than a ‘way’ of knowing.

We ask, ‘Why do you need to know that?’ as a way to engage discussion around how a decolonial walking tour could foster more meaningful, respectful, and consensual personal relations with places and each other. This involves asking difficult questions and being open to the multitudinous implications of reorienting our praxis to modes that reflect decolonizing possibilities of radical relationality towards our lands and each other.

2. Perspective(s) and Methods

Drawing on insights from Indigenous and Indigenous feminist theory our lens is specifically situated on the Humber River in Tkaronto.We examine a series of intersectional provocations that include, 1) the overflow between sky and land, 2) radical relationality to places and each other, and the ‘slipstream’ of time that is perceptible in well-storied places.

We are careful in our practice, in that we wish not to further the mode of representing decoloniality as merely a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012). We therefore mobilize a ‘conversive’ approach to attend to the complexities, tensions, and possible incommensurabilities of decoloniality and its promise, scale, and futurity in relationship to Indigenous walking tours. We ask witnesses / participants to co-imagine desirous possibilities for the future of Indigenous feminist ‘decolonial walking tours’.

3. Significance

Our intention is to generate discussion around the possibilities of coming into relationship with decolonial praxis and, since this process is continuous and personal, there can be no conclusion. However, this circle of ongoing inquiry allows us to begin to formulate tentative answers to questions about consent, representation, stories and extraction, and decolonial praxis.

Authors

• Jon Johnson, University of Toronto

• Karyn Recollet, University of Toronto