Visiting: Anticolonial Practices for Learning in Place

• In Event: Pursuing Truths and Enacting Change: Educational Research in Chosen Spaces

Abstract

Objectives
Drawing from work completed for the author's MA thesis, this paper theorizes visiting as anti-colonial practices for deepening relationships to place. The author’s MA work involved the analysis of conversations that took place within arts spaces, gathering spaces, and within academic contexts on the topic of territory acknowledgements. Through analysis of these conversations the author shows the pedagogical possibilities and limitations of territory acknowledgements. The author then pivots to theorize visiting and visiting practices as facilitated and collaborative ways to deepen learning connected to the themes such as positionality, responsibility, and relationality.

Perspective(s) and theoretical framework
This paper is informed by the work that Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists have done in critiquing and rethinking territory acknowledgments, including the work of Chelsea Vowel (Vowel, 2016) and Hayden King (King, 2019). In theorizing visiting practices, the author draws on the work of Métis artist, activist and scholar, Dylan Miner. In his public performance, The Elders Say We Don’t Visit Anymore, and in the WalkingLab event, To the Landless: Visiting with Lucy and Emma, Dylan Miner practices what he calls “a methodology of visiting”, which he reminds us has always been embedded within Indigenous ways of knowing and being in relation (Springgay & Truman, 2019; Sylwia, 2016). The author is also informed by Eve Tuck and Karyn Recollet’s Visitations (you are not alone), Recollet’s writing on kinstillatory gathering (2018) and on visiting in relation to land-based storytelling practices (Recollet & Johnson, 2019).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
This project involved the thematic analysis of five conversations on the topic of territory acknowledgements that took place between 2016-2020 in Canada and the United States. These conversations took place within arts spaces, gathering spaces, and within academic contexts and involved 18 Indigenous and 8 non-Indigenous scholars, artists, and community members.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or material
Data sources included the transcripts and recordings of the five conversations. Objects/materials include concept maps created through analysis of the conversations.

Results substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
In this paper, the author posits that visiting practices resist the settler colonial status quo of making relationships to place based on individual belonging through possession (land ownership or the possession of the Indigenous sacred), or through the exotification of ‘touring’. To avoid replicating these harmful ways of making relationships to place, visiting must denaturalize imposed settler-colonial “truths” and instead emphasize impermanence, relationality, responsibility, and positionality.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
This paper contributes to a growing body of Indigenous scholarly and artistic work on visiting practices, ethics and methodologies. In this paper, the author focuses on learning spaces, the pedagogical possibilities (and limitations) of territory acknowledgements, and visiting practices as anti-colonial practices for learning in place.

Author

• Jo Billows, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author