Webs of Relationships: Pedagogies of Citizenship and Modalities of Settlement for “Muslims” in Canada

During the Canada 150 celebrations of confederation in 2017, the Dalhousie Student Union passed a motion declaring that the student union would not be participating in the celebrations that summer. Their rationale for the motion was that they deemed the nation-wide yearlong festival a celebration of ongoing colonialism towards Indigenous people, specifically towards Mi’kmaq people on their unceded territory.¹ The motion had been proposed by Masuma Khan, the vice president of the student council and a hijabi Muslim woman, and it was Khan who faced the brunt of campus anger at the decision in pointedly racialized attacks.  She responded by writing an angry Facebook post describing how standing in solidarity with Indigenous people needed to take precedence over white feelings, saying: “white fragility can kiss my ass. Your white tears aren’t sacred, this land is.”² Khan faced a barrage of hate speech online directed at her personally and in response to news organizations covering the story. The hate speech attacked Khan in terms of her religion and gender, and much of the news commentary revolved around her being Muslim and perceived as foreign. Despite being a born-and-bred Canadian citizen, she was told to go back to where she came from, to be grateful to the country that welcomed her parents, and to assimilate to Canada’s heritage and tolerant multiculturalism.³ Dalhousie University initiated disciplinary action against Khan, but later halted its process, opting to move to university dialogue sessions instead—sessions to which Khan was noticeably not invited.  Commenting on Dalhousie’s stepping back from disciplinary action, Khan remarked,

The reality is this doesn’t end for me. I’m still getting those hateful messages, I’m still being told to go back, I’m still being called a terrorist . . . I would like the conversation to go back to where it started, and that’s talking about reconciliation through solidarity with Indigenous people, learning about the territory that we’re on.⁴

Muslims live in Canada, are born in Canada, have multi-generational genealogies in Canada, and yet they are seen as not really belonging in Canada.⁵ The citizenship of racialized Others offers a case to chart the tension between competing socio-spatial relationships: a national relationship to a settler colonial Canada celebrating its confederation, which Masuma Khan was expected to maintain, versus a land-based relationship to territory that upholds Indigeneity, which she backed instead. This article examines the ways that Canadian citizenship positions its citizens racialized as Muslim, who find themselves caught in a contradictory position between overt exclusion and inclusion into a nation-state defined in white settler terms.⁶ Following Khan’s articulation, I prioritize Indigenous thought regarding relationship with Land—which is sacred and contextualized, distinct from the physical formation land—to examine “Muslim” Canadians’ relation to Land and nation.⁷ I understand citizenship as a pedagogical process through Audra Simpson’s expansive definition of the term: “citizenship, instantiated in different ways, as a living form of claiming, of being claimed, and of feeling within the polity, rather than an act of government conferral.”⁸ This definition allows us to account for how orientalist logic structures “Muslim” citizenship in many different registers, including the nation as an imagined cultural-political community⁹ and the state as a legal geopolitical entity. Sherene Razack describes how those perceived as Muslims are racialized to be under constant threat of eviction from both the nation and its social rights, as well as the state and its legal rights.¹⁰ “Muslim” belonging and presence in Canada is tenuous, always in a place that is at risk of being physically or symbolically evicted, and as I argue elsewhere, seen as never really there to begin with.¹¹ Yet much scholarship on settler colonialism speaks of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the binary terms of Native–Settler, erasing how processes of settlement are different for racialized groups, while the thoughtful and growing scholarship theorizing non-Indigenous racialized people on Turtle Island remains under-discussed.¹²

Theorizing Black people’s presence on Turtle Island, Tiffany Lethabo King makes the case that we need to think about settlement processes, the structural positions they make available and the subjectivities they shape, rather than settler as an identity label because processes more precisely trace the intricate differential flows of power and push us to rethink our lateral relationships together.¹³ She argues for thinking about these processes that make Black people into “settled-slaves” as modalities of settlement, interrogating them as modes of governance for racialized bodies.¹⁴ What do we find when we trace the citizenship process as a modality of settlement for those racialized as Muslim? A simmering racialization flared up when Khan challenged colonization, demonstrating that citizenship for “Muslims” has a mercurial quality and that her challenging colonization exposes an outrage based on race: “How dare you people?” Khan was relating her belonging to Indigenous people and “the territory that we’re on,” while dominant society was disciplining her to relate to the white nation her parents had immigrated to (“I’m still being told to go back”). What did her defiance mean, and why did it provoke such reactions? What is the spatiality of the code that she spurned? What spatial-racial conditions does the citizenship process and Khan’s experience tell us about what it means to become—and remain—social citizens? A primary object of my research is to respond to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s call concerning those whose work takes up settler colonialism to pair this work with an Indigenous analytic.¹⁵ Because racialization and colonization operate as threads knotted together, as Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd points out,¹⁶ the precarious citizenship and belonging available to racialized Others, such as Khan, provides us with insight into how these systems of power interlock, reinforcing each other.

To that end, I unpack two key citizenship processes in which the entwinement of racialization and colonization are evident in Canada: the citizenship study guide, Discover Canada: Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship, and the citizenship oath of allegiance to the queen. By examining these two formal articulations of citizenship, I aim to show how the socio-spatial relations inscribed in Canada’s official citizenship process were the parameters by which Khan was institutionally and socially judged, by Dalhousie and her detractors, respectively. I demonstrate the ways in which settler colonialism and orientalism are constitutive of each other in Discover Canada and the oath, as they shine a light on curricular and pedagogical processes of settlement. In highlighting the socio-spatial relations immigrants are expected to have and carry forward in their lives as Canadians, I argue that they explicitly articulate the terms of belonging in citizenship as a racial-colonial project. Khan’s story demonstrates how these terms of belonging do not go away, even with succeeding generations, making Discover Canada a site where settler colonialism and orientalism converge for “Muslim” immigrants who are always already “fresh off the boat” temporally and without roots in Canada spatially.¹⁷ 

If citizenship is a racializing, dispossessing project, as Sunera Thobani argues,¹⁸ I ask, how does it spatially operate? I argue that citizenship as a racial project operates through matrices of socio-spatial relations that are structured by white settler capitalist colonialism. For those racialized as Muslim, belonging in Canada is contingent on their subscribing to white settler capitalist colonial relations to land as opposed to Indigenous ways of relating to Land. To resist this, I use Indigenous ways of relating to Land to help us understand how racializing and colonizing operate through citizenship.¹⁹

This essay is, in part, a way of analyzing my own experience in becoming a Canadian citizen. Ten years ago, Discover Canada was a document that I had to study to pass the citizenship exam, and I had to affirm the oath of allegiance to the queen, as an Egyptian British Muslim hijabi at the time. Although I was born British, I had never had to swear allegiance to the queen, but to become Canadian I did. As an Arab Muslim immigrant who is complicit²⁰ in settler colonialism on Anishinaabek and Haudenosaunee lands, my Arabness works as an afocal lens, layering an Arab understanding of settler colonialism with an Indigenous analytic. The Israeli occupation of Palestine structures my recognition that settler colonialism’s dispossession, genocide, and racialization of Turtle Island’s Indigenous people is ongoing and that performing settler colonial citizenship is complicit in the lived daily violence towards them. Also, as a mother I have to ask myself, how do I teach my children a “Good Way”²¹ of belonging on this Land that will not harm them? Cree scholar Shawn Wilson describes ontology as a point of light at the center of our being that connects to other points of light at the center of other beings, and by tracing the outline of a person’s web of relationships, our bodies take form.²² What is the web of relationships I am part of, even if I cannot see them, even if I do not immediately recognize them? Discover Canada is the state’s understanding of what it means to belong to Canada in a way that makes one acceptable, but what if this state recognition is not a Good Way?

Following this introduction, I give a brief overview of Discover Canada and the citizenship oath by contextualizing and describing their histories. I examine the oath of citizenship and how it demonstrates relations of power between the state and immigrants that perpetuate settler colonialism through what Unangax scholar Eve Tuck and Latinx scholar Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez call settler futurities—racial-spatial colonial constructs that operate to perpetuate settler futures.²³ I draw on Blackfoot scholar Dwayne Donald’s concept of fort pedagogy to demonstrate how the oath functions to allow immigrants into the fold of the nation on racialized terms, terms that embody particular relationships with nation and Land.²⁴ Next, I use Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the social construction of space²⁵ and Edward Said’s method of contrapuntal reading²⁶ to disrupt colonial narratives and unpack the social construction of space along the three dimensions Lefebvre articulates: spatial imaginaries, spatial practices and spatial planning. By thinking about the social construction of space through these three dimensions and reading the colonial construction of space against Indigenous scholars’ relations to Land, I am teasing out how we relate to the nation through spatial settler futurities. Finally, I examine how Discover Canada specifically racializes “Muslims.” Overall, I argue that citizenship compels a menu of limited futurities that is always already settler colonial, for “Muslims” who are always already contingent. Throughout, I draw on Masuma Khan’s well-articulated experience of Indigenous solidarity to demonstrate how citizenship as a settlement project functions for those racialized as Muslim, to interrogate how Discover Canada and the citizenship oath are formal sites of citizenship that spectacularly articulate understandings of relationships to nation and obfuscate Indigenous relationships to Land. Though Khan was not an immigrant, her experience demonstrates the precariousness of her belonging; and while not all immigrants are racialized as Muslim, Khan’s experience and its significations highlight how “Muslims” are an extreme example of how colonization racializes and racialization colonizes.

Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship

In unpacking the socio-spatial construction of Canada, there are few sites as richly articulated as the citizenship study guide. When the guide was created in 1947, the Liberal government of the time described the need to teach new Canadians the “essence” of their adopted country. The first edition, How to Become a Canadian Citizen, consisted of British colonial versions of history, geography, and culture.²⁷ The study guide’s narrative has remained fairly consistent through its various iterations over decades under different governments.²⁸

The social life of this structural narrative that the nation tells itself about itself gains power from public discourse that echoes it in various forms and installments as the shared story of Canada.²⁹ It could be argued that the oath and the study guide should not be taken too seriously, as they belong to a short moment that new citizens quickly forget once they attain their citizenship. However, the citizenship oath is important enough that immigration officials circulate it among citizen-hopefuls and watch as they recite it to make sure that their lips are moving to the words of the oath.³⁰ Prospective citizens risk denial of Canadian citizenship if they fail to score at least fifteen out of twenty on the citizenship test, which is based on the study guide’s curriculum.³¹ Given that citizen-hopefuls between the ages of 18 and 54 must take the citizenship test and oath, much of Canada’s immigrant population has passed the test on some version of this story and taken the oath.³² Thus, the study guide is an important formal Canadian national story linking to and echoing other stories of Canada, collectively forming a lens through which immigrants are compelled to understand their belonging and citizenship. Taken together, the oath and study guide curriculum function as gate-keeping exercises for the nation, permitting only those who profess allegiance to its socio-political order to become citizens. The importance of the act of taking the oath was made singularly explicit for Muslims in the 2015 Canadian federal election, nicknamed “The Niqab Election.” An election flashpoint became whether Zunera Ishaq, a Muslim woman who wears the face covering, should be allowed to do so when taking her citizenship oath, even though she was open to removing it in front of female officers.³³

In interrogating the study guide and oath for their pedagogical functions and what they tell us about the social space of Canada, I am cautious not to assume that all Muslims in Canada are immigrants. The national stories in Discover Canada and the relationships espoused in the oath are the Canadian story that is repeated ad infinitum in Canadian public pedagogy,³⁴ and even though Khan was not an immigrant and did not have to take a citizenship exam or an oath, they still espouse the relationship to nation she was expected to have as a racialized woman. The backlash she faced as a result of her solidarity with Indigenous people demonstrates how Canadians such as Khan have to depict their solidarity to Indigenous people through the framework of the settler colonial nation or face serious consequences.

If the oath and Discover Canada demonstrate how the citizenship process offers a racialized menu of limited subject positions for Others such as Khan’s family to become citizens of the Canadian state, this menu does not expand with succeeding generations to the point of equality with white citizens. A dissenting, decolonizing subject position must not be permitted for “Muslims” such as Khan. In fact, for Khan to avoid social eviction, she needed to continue to respect the boundaries of that racial project, demonstrating that the subject positions the oath and study guide make available and unavailable remain protected as an organizing racial matrix of Canada even for subsequent generations. If Discover Canada and the oath are sites where settler colonialism and orientalism converge for perpetually fresh-off-the-boat “Muslim” immigrants, I am interested in exploring how this particular imbrication of racialization and colonization is manifest. As pedagogies of citizenship,³⁵ they reliably demonstrate the relational production of racialized subject positions and show that Muslimness is not considered to be “of Canada,” as well as what terms of belonging are offered to “Muslims,” be they precarious migrants, seventh-generation Canadians, Express Entry permanent residents, or refugee seekers.

The Logic of Racial Capitalism: Relationships to Nation, Relationships to Land, and Citizenship as a Modality of Settlement

Examining Khan’s incident through the lens of the relationship between citizenship, Land, and nation reveals rich paradoxes in racialized people’s ways of belonging in Canada. Radhika Mohanram’s argument of the “metonymic link between bodies, landscape and nation . . . [which] function to temporarily replace one another”³⁶ makes it possible to see how the landscape unites bodies in identity and patriotic feeling while simultaneously undermining Indigenous Canadians’ relationship to their Land and discursively favoring settler sovereignty. Settler nations, which discursively position communal place-based relationships to Land in service of Cartesian capitalist relationships to nation, link bodies to identity through their varying relationships to the nation.³⁷ “Capitalism is racial capitalism,” Cedric Robinson teaches us,³⁸ and we can then understand how differing relationships to Land and nation reveal the matrix of social relations as a colonizing, racializing structure organized by the logic of racial capitalism.³⁹ Jodi Melamed develops this further, explaining how “Muslims” enter into this system of racial capitalism as neoliberal multicultural subjects who can contribute to capitalism—that is, as waged laborers or skilled professionals, integral parts of the capitalist project and its competitiveness, alibis against the racism the capitalist state is founded on.⁴⁰ Yet because neoliberal multiculturalism displaces racism based on skin color in order to racialize based on a cultural model, the distinction between the civilized multicultural Western subject and the barbaric monocultural “Muslim” subject is anything but smooth. For example, neoliberal multiculturalism results in paradoxes such as the Bush administration providing copies of the Quran to Guantanamo Bay detainees even as it withheld their rights to due process.⁴¹ Privileged and disadvantaged people gain differing access to the capitalist social structure, reconfiguring conventional racial groups, while democracy and nationalism are foot soldiers of a logic that shrinks collective relations to the political, and multiculturalism differentiates while homogenizing to erase complex social relations and exploit its manufactured difference.⁴² It is the logic of racial capitalism that shapes social relations towards land and nation, such that contributing to settler capitalist colonialism as neoliberal multicultural subjects forms the bedrock of “Muslim” belonging to the nation-state.

Unpacking the kinds of discursive acrobatics that need to be made for this belonging to happen makes clear how those racialized as Muslims are in a precarious and contingent position based on two discursive moves: exaltation and eviction. Exalting the white national subject is the central socio-political process of citizenship for racialized people in Canada, argues Sunera Thobani.⁴³ This socializing process of exalting the white national in a settler colonial nation renders citizenship for racialized immigrants a simultaneously immigrant-racializing and Indigenous-dispossessing project.⁴⁴ Changing the citizenship requirements for Canada from outright racist (whites preferred) to a point system in 1967 enhanced Canada’s image from a settler colony to a liberal democracy, and morphed the white exalted Canadian subject from a white racial identity to a civil and political Canadian identity, in effect obfuscating racial capitalism’s economic need for more workers under a veneer of liberalism.⁴⁵ Exaltation helps us understand how the state makes particular structural subject positions available for racialized immigrants, positions that must always support a politics of recognition through appeals to the settler state and its self-validating laws, especially when we bring it alongside the consequences for racialized immigrants in their own unique specificity. “Muslims” must be in agreement not only with the dominant group’s exaltation of itself and its corresponding racial matrix, but also use this matrix to hierarchically structure their social relations with other racialized groups, or face dire consequences. 

The “Muslim” exaltation of whiteness required by the logic of racial capitalism must stand not only on the dispossession of Indigenous people, but centrally on the denigration of Blackness. Whiteness as a subject position, or what George Lipstiz terms “the possessive investment in whiteness,”⁴⁶ is financially and socially rewarding, and the relational dominance of what Ghassan Hage terms “White Nation Fantasy” is lucrative indeed.⁴⁷  Whiteness as a system of power both requires and rewards immigrants for being politically white; this means aspiring to systems of power and distancing themselves from political Blackness, a subject position James Cone describes as directed towards overthrowing those systems of power.⁴⁸ “Muslims”—in particular Arab and South Asian immigrant “Muslims” who are in greater proximity to whiteness—have more often than not distanced themselves from Blackness and eschewed solidarity with Black people, even though there has long been a sizeable and politically involved Black Muslim community in the United States, for example. In part, this relates to how race as an apparatus of power shapes racial formation such that whiteness and Blackness, rather than being only essentialized identities, are political conditions.⁴⁹ “Muslims’” claims to whiteness—particularly for those who had some measure of racial mobility cut short by 9/11—appeal to and are invested in white subject positions rather than in Black subject positions that seek to disrupt structures of domination.

Disrupting structures of domination complicates the already slippery place those racialized as Muslim have in the West, whose belonging is challenged in multiple registers. As Sherene Razack argues, Muslims are spatially evicted from Western law and politics, their tenuous presence always in a place that is at risk of being physically or symbolically ousted.⁵⁰ This eviction happens along a spectrum of “stigmatization, surveillance, incarceration, abandonment, torture, and bombs,” and it is worthwhile unpacking this spectrum of eviction from a Canadian perspective.⁵¹ Khan’s stigmatization took the form of her eviction from social citizenship, as she did not exalt the settler colonial national celebrations. The heightened surveillance Canadian Muslims are subject to by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) comes in such banal forms as mosque moles⁵² and intelligence agents’ interrogating Muslim student association leadership on campuses,⁵³ and needs to be read as an eviction from privacy rights. When Canada deports permanent residents who commit crimes “back” to countries with civil wars and to which they have little connection,⁵⁴ and a Canadian minor is left to languish in Guantanamo for years, the state is abandoning its people and withholding their citizenship rights.⁵⁵ The torture of Canadians Abousfian Abdelrazik and Maher Arar (as well as others) under brutal regimes with the cooperation of Canadian officials can only be seen as an eviction from human rights.⁵⁶ Meanwhile, bombing is an eviction from grievability rights, seen in the way Somali, Pakistani, and Palestinian victims (to name but a few) of Western allied wars and arms supply are seen by the public as collateral damage (if they are seen at all). Eviction is thus part of a “racial project” that situates Muslims as always-already cast out from the national imaginary and subject to having their rights suspended.⁵⁷ Bringing exaltation and eviction together, Khan was already in proximity to being evicted because of her perceived Muslimhood; her belonging was precarious and contingent before she did anything. Refusal to exalt the white national subject and its necessary spatial-racial relations is not a subject position the duo of exaltation and eviction make available to her. Nowhere is it clearer that “Muslim” belonging is contingent upon exaltation of the white settler capitalist colonial subject than when “Muslims” try to decolonize their belonging on this stolen Land. Hidden in plain sight is how their  relationship with the settler state, as an imposed relationship to nation, makes particular subject positions available and unavailable, as well as how it simultaneously subsumes and erases their relationship with Land.

How is this duo of exaltation and eviction spatially accomplished in citizenship processes? What might an immigrant relationship to Land look like if we analyze the  spatial construction of Canada in Discover Canada and the oath of citizenship alongside an understanding of Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies of Land? What kinds of subject positions become available for those racialized as Muslim if, like Masuma Khan did, we relate “Muslim” belonging here through other kinds of relationships?

The Queen, the Citizenship Oath, and the Grammar of Gate-Keeping

 The first item in Discover Canada describes Canadians’ relationship to the queen:

In Canada, we profess our loyalty to a person who represents all Canadians and not to a document such as a constitution, a banner such as a flag, or a geopolitical entity such as a country. In our constitutional monarchy, these elements are encompassed by the Sovereign (Queen or King). It is a remarkably simple yet powerful principle: Canada is personified by the Sovereign just as the Sovereign is personified by Canada.⁵⁸

How does the queen, as a stand-in for the nation-state, operate to spatially order Canada? What is at stake in the statement, “Canada is personified by the Sovereign just as the Sovereign is personified by Canada”?⁵⁹ Similar to how adults teach children to say the “magic” word please, the imperative to take the oath functions as a pedagogy of citizenship—that is, a relational, hierarchical, and intentional move to set up a relationship of social and political belonging within a polity.⁶⁰ As Donald argues, what he calls “fort logics” have always spatially separated white civilized settlers from the uncivilized “Indians.”⁶¹  Materially and symbolically, the nation is a fort: inside the nation is a place of belonging and safety, and outside the nation is a place of danger and Otherness. Bringing together the act of taking the oath to the queen as a pedagogy of citizenship, then, and understanding the nation as a fort, we can identify a grammar of gate-keeping that conditions entry into citizenship for immigrants in terms of their spatial relationship to nation. To come into the fort, you need to say the “magic” words:

I swear (or affirm) 
That I will be faithful 
And bear true allegiance
To Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second
Queen of Canada

Under a facade of “including” immigrants, the nation-state can open its gates to those who aspire passage into the civilized fort of the nation—and the act of taking the oath sediments subscription to this white settler capitalist colonial order, a relationship to the nation that only recognizes “Muslims” as neoliberal multicultural subjects.  The act of taking the oath reproduces what Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez describe as settler futurity, a “settler colonial curricular project of replacement . . . anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state.”⁶³ With fort logics operating as pedagogy, the fort functions “as a socio-spatial organizer of peoples and cultures that delimits and explains difference as irreconcilable.”⁶⁴ As Khan’s social eviction suggests, the racialized terms of citizenship that require perpetual exaltation from the immigrant towards the settler for being allowed to come into the fort of the nation do not dissolve with subsequent generations. Khan’s defiant refusal of colonial socio-spatial relations with Indigenous people exposes how the belonging of those racialized as Muslim hangs by the thread of their exalting settler futurity.  

Furthermore, the queen as symbol of Canada functions to imprint spaces with a haunting “consciousness of the place” as a settler colony.⁶⁵ In the oath, and elsewhere in government-sponsored Canadian culture, the queen creates an ideological interpellative effect. Through an embodied absence and disembodied presence, her image works as a technology that makes us impute a presence despite her absence.⁶⁶ She is everywhere and nowhere, branded onto the stuff of our lives, peering at us from schools and government buildings, the money in our pockets, our passports that stamp us with a vestige of her aura and therefore mobility. This powerful haunting is repeated throughout symbols that the study guide educates us in: the Canadian Crown; the Mace of the House of Commons; the Coat of Arms containing symbols of England, France, Scotland, and Ireland; the Gothic revival style that the Parliament buildings were built in; and the Royal Anthem God Save the Queen.⁶⁷ Only for the exalted white colonial subject do statements in Discover Canada, such as “Most Canadians were proud to be part of the British Empire” or the oxymoron, “Her Majesty is a symbol of Canadian sovereignty,” make sense.⁶⁸ For the exalted white colonial subject, the colonial order is freedom and independence because it was created for them and they continue to materially and symbolically benefit from these inequitable power relations. At stake in the symbol of the queen are settler futurities, recuperating settler colonialism on Indigenous Land as part of the multicultural settler colonial nation state.⁶⁹ As the pointed attacks on Khan illustrate, racialized multicultural neoliberal subjects cannot be permitted to defy these settler futurities.

Reading Discover Canada Contrapuntally

Tracing how citizenship as a technology of settlement knots together colonization and racialization in intricate flows of power requires a nuanced spatial analysis to understand how the logic of racial capitalism structures social relations with Land/land and nation. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the moments of social space provides a useful framework.⁷⁰ It begins with the premise that a triad of social processes imbricate space with power relations: representations of space (or spatial planning), representational space (or spatial imaginaries), and spatial practices (or spatial norms). Spatial norms are both produced by and shape the parameters set by spatial imaginaries and spatial planning.⁷¹ These three moments of social space allow us to deconstruct how the citizenship study guide spatially reproduces settler futurities. However, while Lefebvre’s focus on the social construction of space allows for a layered unpacking of power relations, it also constrains the analysis of how citizenship processes spatially efface Indigeneity as modalities of settlement and racial governance, focusing as it does on  capitalist relations of social space. Edward Said’s method of contrapuntal reading adds another dimension to our reading of space for the effaced colonized presence that makes the visiblized colonizing presence possible and deepens a socio-spatial reading of the study guide to foreground Indigeneity rather than settler colonialism.⁷² Thus I will be contrapuntally reading Discover Canada through Lefevbre’s three layers of social space to search for the effaced Indigenous spatializations on which the exalted settlement spatializations are built and sustained. Employing a contrapuntal reading of the guide presents an occasion to think productively about Indigenous erasure and demonstrate openings to other ways of being on this Land. Examining Discover Canada’s spatial imaginaries and its narrative of Indigenous people, its spatial practices of resource extraction and tourism, and its representations of space in the politics of naming places, my reading establishes an ongoing dialogue with Indigenous thinkers to show how “Muslim” Canadians find themselves embroiled between very different onto-epistemologies of Land and nation.

Spatial Imaginaries: Cartesian Modernity or Land as Pedagogy

The spatial imaginary of land is always described as a physical, geographic formation,⁷³ and most often represented in the study guide as the site of colonization and battles for land sovereignty between the British and the French, who spent the eighteenth century fighting over land, which was won, lost, separated from the respective motherlands, and consolidated. In describing Indigenous people present prior to European colonization, the study guide frequently uses the passive voice, expunging the culpability of the settlers who purposely spread smallpox: “Large numbers of Aboriginals died of European diseases to which they lacked immunity.”⁷⁴ Throughout these stories, depiction of Indigenous people’s relationship to Land is cursory. We are told that Indigenous people “lived off the land, some by hunting and gathering, others by raising crops” early on, before the settlers arrived.⁷⁵

In the same breath that settlers are portrayed as more worthy of being in control of the land, the narrative simultaneously positions them as merely continuing what the Indigenous people were doing before, without any reference to an epistemological difference between capitalist Crown ownership of the land and Indigenous communal sovereignty over Land. Instead, the focus is on activity. Unlike the Aboriginal pre-modern savage predecessor, for whom “Warfare was common . . . as they competed for land, resources and prestige,” the new European settler engages in modern capitalist activities of trapping, conquering, and mapping.⁷⁶ Conquering and mapping characterize settlers as owners of the land, derived from a discourse that sees a capitalist relationship to land as “civilized” and “progress.” The European settler thus becomes the civilizer and transmitter of progress, in touch with modernity and sovereign of the land he (always a he) lives on. The European conqueror becomes the model for the Anglo-Canadian citizen, the people who rule and run government then and now, belying sophisticated Indigenous forms of governance. What is evoked here is not a static representation of the past—it is very dynamic in what is retained, ignored and interpreted, and it indexes the present and its power relations. Thus, while Indigenous people are pre-modern and pre-capitalistic, settlers are portrayed as modern, capitalist subjects. 

These descriptions fit into well-worn ways of describing supposed racial difference. Mohanram unpacks the racial construct behind the replacement of relation to land with relation to nation, which she sees as a binary spatialization of the bricoleur and engineer.⁷⁷ The bricoleur relates naively and situationally to objects, while the engineer is guided by a plan and stands separate from the material.  In the study guide, the Indigenous appear as local, pre-modern bricoleurs, working with the “science of the concrete” to survive, while the European explorers are engineers—universal subjects, modern, and working with the abstract to control the world. Mohanram analyses how a pre-capitalistic knowledge of the land entraps Indigenous people locally and casts them as bricoleurs, yet, simultaneously, modern knowledge of the land by settlers is connected to Cartesian knowledge and therefore seen as universal and superior.⁷⁸

Even when the study guide seemingly praises Indigenous people, and even their knowledge of the land, it simultaneously asserts a relationship to nation, and puts this knowledge in service of the colonial nation to assert its sovereignty and assure its security. Describing the Canadian military’s arctic force, the guide tells us, “Drawing on indigenous knowledge and experience, the Rangers travel by snowmobile in the winter and all-terrain vehicles in the summer from Resolute to the Magnetic North Pole, and keep the flag flying in Canada’s Arctic.”⁷⁹ In the same breath that the study guide grants knowledge creating expertise to the Inuit, it casts them as pre-modern bricoleurs, their Indigenous knowledge seamlessly servicing the modern colonial nation. (The queen even makes a symbolic appearance here, her state crown emblazoned over the cap of an Inuit boy shooting in Nunavut [Figure 4], a reminder of the queen’s embodied absence and disembodied presence.)

If we bring a contrapuntal reading and restore an invisibilized Indigenous understanding of the spatial imaginary to these narratives of Canada, Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Simpson’s narrative of spatial imaginaries relating to Land is a good example.⁸⁰ Standing in contrast to the study guide’s seamless fitting together of different imaginaries in relating to nation, Simpson demonstrates instead a sharply jagged incommensurability through the story of a little girl, Kwezens in Anishnaabemowin, who learns to make maple sugar in the sugar bush through watching a squirrel one spring day. Simpson describes the relationships Kwezens is embedded in that make her knowledge generation possible. These include her mother, her grandmother, her Aunties, and a whole group of Ojibwe women. Simpson describes Kwezens’s knowledge of and confidence in herself, as well as the human, not human, and spiritual relationships around her that make knowledge creation possible. It is a story of strength and knowledge wisdom based on Land as pedagogy and methodology. Central to Simpson’s argument is that stories of Land are not pre-contact stories, though they may seem so because they must be pursued outside of capitalist systems, and are forms of meaning-making that cannot be extracted from the systems of relationality in which they were made, systems that always highlight Land as pedagogy.⁸¹ For Simpson, it is important to situate this story as happening in the here and now, despite settler colonialism, despite missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and despite the notion that Indigenous people are eradicated, destitute, and damaged. Simpson stresses how settler colonial relations are incommensurable with Indigenous relations with Land.⁸² In other words, like night and day, Simpson’s spatial imaginary of relating to Land—an Indigenous futurity—and the study guide’s relationship to the settler nation—a settler futurity—cannot exist at the same time, a tension that remains unresolved for non-Indigenous, non-white Canadians. To become a Canadian citizen, immigrants have to subscribe to the stories settler colonists believe about themselves and those they Other, stories that spatially interpellate racial relations.

For example, a panel on the Victoria Cross (V.C.), the highest award the nation rewards for bravery, informs us that the first Black man to receive the Cross was “Able Seaman William Hall of Horton, Nova Scotia, whose parents were American slaves.” Hall was awarded the V.C. for “his role in the Siege of Lucknow during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.”  Specifically, Hall’s role as part of the Canadian naval forces supporting the British was to engage in the fusillading of the Shah Najeef mosque against Hindu and Muslim sepoys during their mutiny in the First War of Independence.⁸³ By pitting Black Canadians against Brown subjects of the British empire, the war machine of racial capitalism structures social relations such that Seaman was able to achieve Canada’s highest honor by participating in its brutal imperial wars, demonstrating how racial capitalism plays off racialized groups against each other for aspirational whiteness.

Spatial Practices and Norms: Mining and Recreation or Iethi’nihsténha Ohwentsia’kékha

In the study guide, the activities involving land that receive the most attention are resource extraction and tourism. Canada’s provinces are described largely in mining and extraction terms, chiefly with respect to oil and gas extraction, but also precious metals. The Yukon, for example, is described this way:

Thousands of miners came to the Yukon during the Gold Rush of the 1890s, as celebrated in the poetry of Robert W. Service. Mining remains a significant part of the economy. The White Pass and Yukon Railway opened from Skagway in neighboring Alaska to the territorial capital, Whitehorse, in 1900 and provides a spectacular tourist excursion across precipitous passes and bridges. Yukon holds the record for the coldest temperature ever recorded in Canada (-63°C).⁸⁴

First, the study guide highlights mining as the primary spatial practice in the Yukon. This portrays an extraction of resources from the land, and belies knowledge of Land beyond a physical, geographical place, useful as a factor of production. Mining from the land is “celebrated” in Canadian culture, as shown by Service’s poetry. This representation of space expunges consequences of mining such as land degradation and pollution.

Second, tourism is a normalized spatial practice on land available for Canadians’ recreational pleasure. The land here is a wilderness with no apparent population besides “some [who] continue to earn a living by hunting, fishing and trapping.”⁸⁵ Discursively cast as bricoleur and pre-moderns, not worthy of informing us of the Aishihik and Kluane First Nations presence, the study guide continues a pattern of generalized reference to Indigenous relationship to Land in language that casts it as not serious. Rather, a settler colonial relationship to land as central to Canadian identity is supported across the narrative, and consolidated through the photographs, which also tell a land story of ownership, recreation, and mining development, ready for settler use.⁸⁶ It is a relationship to land that the queen makes a constant appearance in, through the claiming of these ownership and extraction rights for the “Crown.”  The recreational photographs offer a socio-spatial construction of Canada as terra nullius, or vacant land, ready to be populated by settlers and immigrants, evaporating Indigenous dispossession and land claims.⁸⁷

Contrapuntally bringing Indigenous spatial practices with Land side by side with these settler colonial capitalist practices on land will help decipher the palimpsest of the study guide. Spatial practices and how they are shaped by colonial capitalism play a key role in Dene scholar Glen Coulthard’s analysis of Indigenous sovereignty and colonial recognition.⁸⁸ Analyzing the struggles over land between the Dene and the state through outright expropriation and land claim negotiations, Coulthard argues that the structured dispossession of Indigenous rights is not just about physical ownership of the land, but an onto-epistemological difference of seeing Land. He reminds us, “Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood as struggles oriented around the questions and meaning of land,” where land is seen as a bundle of meanings distinct from economic development: “land as resource, central to our material survival; land as identity, as constitutive of who we are as a people, and land as relationship.”⁸⁹ During negotiations for land claims with the state, colonial recognition paved the way for the state to disregard Indigenous ways of relating to land: “The state insisted that any institutionalized accommodation of Indigenous cultural differences be reconcilable with one political formation­—namely colonial sovereignty—and one­ mode of production—namely capitalism.”⁹⁰ Colonial capitalism restructures relations to Land to subsume them in service of relations to the settler colonial capitalist nation.

The study guide’s erasure of the central tension in Canadian spatial practices and norms between Land as relationship and land for economic capitalist development normalizes spatial practices of relating to land in ways that underpin market economies. Bringing immigrants in to the space of Canada is an ongoing project dispossessing Indigenous people. Relationality and interdependence in using resources the Land provides would cast resource extraction as less inevitable. But this would require the study guide to consider very different relations to the physical formation land than as the exploitable object of extraction and tourism. That is, it would need to consider seriously Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies of Land and belonging.

A sense of the Indigenous, effaced approaches can be found in the way Mohawk scholar Sandra Styres elaborates on Indigenous relationships with Land: “Iethi’nihsténha Ohwentsia’kékha is a Kanien’keha (Mohawk) word meaning ‘our Mother the Earth.’ It refers to the ways we honor and respect her as a sentient and conscious being.”⁹¹ Furthermore,

Living in a deeply sacred and intimate relationship to Land requires respectful knowledge of whose traditional lands one is on, a commitment to seeking out and coming to an understanding of the stories and knowledge embedded in those lands, a conscious choosing to live in intimate, sacred and storied relationships with those lands, not the least of which is an acknowledgement of the way one is implicated in and informed by the networks and relations of power that compose the tangled colonial history of the lands.⁹²

Styres stresses that this approach to Land is not meant to be a “romanticized utopia or empty generality.”⁹³ Rather, it highlights how Land is central to an Indigenous worldview:  “Land is our primary relationship—it is first, before all else.”⁹⁴ She is highlighting four practices here: learning, committing, understanding, and choosing. These practices are not settler futurities. Rather, they establish Indigenous futurities—they repatriate and rematriate Indigenous ways of living and relations with Land. Yet to become Canadian citizens, immigrants are compelled to continue the practices settlers enact on land. How are prospective citizens studying Discover Canada to reconcile extraction and recreation (and their concomitant disputes, such as the Trans-Canada pipeline, the mercury poisoning of communities at Grassy Narrows, or the Oka crisis) to these four practices? The spatial practices that are conditions for potential citizens entry into the fort of the nation are white settler capitalist relationships that subsume land to nation, settler futurities that are incommensurable with a relationship to Land as Indigenous scholars describe it.

Spatial Planning: Colonial Naming as Claiming Indigenous Land

Consistent with the spatial imaginaries and spatial practices previously outlined, spatial planning or the naming of places continues to shape how the study guide conceptualizes sovereignty over land or landmarks, which seem to be only worthy of mention in the study guide if named by the British or French. Colonial naming of places in Canada is prevalent throughout the guide: New Founded Land, named by John Cabot in 1497; the province of Alberta and Lake Louise, named after “Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, fourth daughter of Queen Victoria”; or Mount Logan, “named in honor of Sir William Logan . . . born in Montreal in 1798 to Scottish immigrant parents.”⁹⁵ Nowhere are we informed of the Indigenous meanings behind any place in Canada save for the word Canada itself (a European rendering of the Iroquoian word for “village,” learned from two captured guides), and Iqaluit. The Eurocentric explanations of names demonstrate that places are worthy of mention only insofar as they are acknowledged by settlers to be so. Through these namings, and their framing in Discover Canada, the study guide establishes a normative recognition that colonial sovereignty is natural for Canada.

One example is particularly striking in its explicit articulation of all three Lefebvre’s components of social space—how we are informed about the naming of Iqaluit. We are told that the current capital of Nunavut is “Iqaluit, formerly Frobisher Bay, named after the English explorer Martin Frobisher, who penetrated the uncharted Arctic for Queen Elizabeth in 1576.”⁹⁶ What the relevance of knowing the obsolete name for a Canadian city (which changed in 1987) is for immigrants is difficult to fathom beyond its once again reinforcing the stamp of settler colonialism on the Canadian landscape. 

A more relevant definition would be to discuss what “Iqaluit” means, but the study guide only briefly informs us about this, preferring instead to focus on the story of the expired name. Such a precedence of the colonial “naming” of places that makes them exist in the real world suggests that these are more important for immigrants to know. The early colonists “discovered” the land, and their proof is in the act of naming it. The “place of many fish,” which is what Iqaluit actually means in Inuktitut, would promote a more contextualized understanding of Land. Furthermore, the sexual violence implied by the verb “penetrated,” calls forth a trope of metaphors about virgins, untouched empty land, and the act of penetration that claims it through being the first to touch and deflower. Recall Mohanram’s metonymic link between body, landscape, and nation. Here, woman as virgin and land as terra nullius are metonymic equivalents, and the spatial construction of land as virgin works to create an imaginary of land as void of Indigenous people. Penetrating the Arctic, a symbolic virginal deflowering, functions as an assertion of Anglo settler colonial power and authority. Since Europeans are conceived as always already modern, replacing Aboriginals, the penetration of the Arctic remains part and parcel of a settler colonial discourse that defines the penetration and conquering of virgin lands as inevitable progress. Describing how Israeli national memories of Palestine mirror desires of the Israeli psyche to establish dominance, Joseph Massad draws on Freud to unpack how childhood memories and their meanings are not remembered as they happened; rather, they are remembered through desires of the present.⁹⁷ The reconstructed memory, Massad argues, is a mirror of the nation in that it reflects what the nation sees about itself in the present. It is possible to understand the study guide’s narration of Frobisher’s expedition to penetrate the Arctic as reflective of a desire to penetrate and establish ownership. When the study guide metonymically invokes land for woman, its assertion of colonial power over land is an assertion of control over that land’s identity, where land, penetration of land, and penetration of virginity can be read as sexual metaphors for power and control. Thus, the place is named through a colonial lens, the imaginary is shaped to take ownership of that which is virgin, and the normative practice is to establish dominance over virginial land.⁹⁸  

Unpacking the three layers of the social construction of space in Discover Canada contrapuntally, this analysis affirms that Indigenous relations to Land are incommensurable with colonial relations to nation and how a relationship to nation produces a capitalist Cartesian subject, while a pre-civilization, pre-modern subject is the fate of those who relate to Land. The study guide narrates a spatial imaginary of Indigenous people as relics of the past and their primitive stories as irrelevant, in contrast to Simpson’s stories of Kwezens and the maple sugar, stories that evidence an Indigenous relationality to Land that is firmly in the present. Coulthard’s analysis demonstrates how onto-epistemologies underpinning spatial practices structure Indigenous dispossession displacing Indigenous onto-epistemologies of Land or, as Styres names it, Iethi’nihsténha Ohwentsia’kékha.⁹⁹ The Freudian slip in the discussion of renaming Iqaluit reveals colonial naming and dominance as more worthy.

In each layer of spatial imaginaries, practices, and naming, a contrapuntal reading of the study guide reveals how the socio-spatial relationships of Land and nation are positioned as mutually exclusive by white settler colonial racial capitalism. Coming into the fort of the nation is contingent on swearing allegiance to colonial relationships to land and nation based on racial capitalism. In bringing in racialized Others to the nation as neoliberal multicultural subjects, this spatialization reproduces settler futurities for the racial project of the state, creating its own antibodies against Indigenous socio-spatial relations.

“Muslim” Relationship to Nation, Relationship to Land

In advocating for the Canada 150 celebrations at Dalhousie to be recognized as a celebration of Indigenous genocide rather than a celebration of the state’s confederation, Masuma Khan snubbed socio-spatial relations espoused by the Canadian state. On all three levels of Lefevbre’s social space, Khan did her own contrapuntal reading of her belonging here and swapped out settler colonial capitalist relations with nation to enact Indigenous relations with Land. She disregarded the colonial imaginary of the Indigenous person as a simple bricoleur with no significant presence in Canada. Khan’s spatial practices enacted Styres’ injunctions of honoring Iethi’nihsténha Ohwentsia’kékha: respectful knowledge that prioritized an Indigenous relationship to Land by learning the Indigenous history of the Land she was on, committing to honor that Land, and acknowledging the way in which she was implicated in colonial history. She disregarded colonial naming of the 150th anniversary of Confederation and saw it as an anniversary of genocide, not cause for celebration. She scorned all the spatial relations laid out in Discover Canada. In doing so, Khan’s move can be seen as decolonizing her belonging to this Land. Nation demands we subsume, erase, and ignore the “storied relationships” with Land, “the way one is implicated in and informed by the networks and relations of power that compose the tangled history of the lands” and exalt the stories of the settler state.¹⁰⁰ Instead, Khan related to Land in ways that superseded and negated the colonial ordering structure. Recall the three injunctions framing the attacks on Khan when she prioritized the sacredness of Land and her solidarity with Indigenous people over white tears: go back to where she came from, be grateful to the country that welcomed her parents, and assimilate to Canada’s heritage and tolerant multiculturalism. She did not explain herself to colonial whiteness as the arbiter of relations on Turtle Island nor subsume her belonging on this Land to colonization and a racialized hierarchy. By decolonizing her belonging, she broke out of the structural positions settler colonialism makes available to racialized people. In refusing to exalt the white subject and its stories of itself, she found herself being socially evicted from the nation and subject to a months-long institutional attempt by her university to police her.

Khan’s act was diametrically opposed to the way the study guide explicitly warns those racialized as Muslim as to who is sovereign in Canada. In a panel entitled “The Equality of Women and Men,” the study guide informs prospective citizens that “barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honor killings,’ female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender based violence” are criminal and “severely punished.”¹⁰¹ This unsavory text is accompanied with photos of people, including, noticeably, the only photo of a hijabi woman in the guide, demonstrating all the workings of an orientalist logic.

Exemplifying a trio of racist orientalist tropes that Razack identifies as the oppressed Muslim woman, the oppressive Muslim man (and assumed aggressor in such crimes), and noble white saviors, this panel builds on the assumption that misogyny and patriarchy are specifically Muslim cultural/religious problems positing Western civilization against the Other.¹⁰² Beside the fact that such incriminations do not appear elsewhere in the study guide, what is revealing is how the study guide explicitly incarcerates a Muslim cultural essence outside of a constructed “open” and “generous” Canada. In spite of five other people depicted in the photographs accompanying the box, it is unmistakable that the message is targeted to those for whom the charges of barbaric cultural practices stick—in this case, the Muslim woman learning from the white woman by her side. This panel’s implication of guilt by being Muslim relies on tropes of Muslims as perpetually foreign to Canada. As “Muslims” whose cultural essence is pathologized by the logic of racial capitalism and suspect in the nation, they are evicted and cast out on the basis of a moral geography that places them not here but over there, where female genital mutilation is routine and accepted. Their belonging to Canada can potentially be severed on the flimsiest of suspicions, on incredible pretexts, on having to prove over and over—as did the Canadian minister of immigration, himself originally a Somali refugee—that he does not subscribe to female genital mutilation, when the Conservatives challenged the Liberal government’s attempt to remove this panel from the guide.

Conclusion

White supremacy’s double moves shine through in Discover Canada and the oath, demonstrating how the state conditions racialization and colonization simultaneously in the socio-spatial relations immigrants are expected to have and carry forward in their lives as Canadians. Through a contrapuntal reading of the study guide, this paper has made visible incommensurable sets of socio-spatial relations to Land and nation those racialized as Muslims in Canada have to contend with, relations that make “Muslim” belonging in Canada contingent, relations that are shaped by white settler capitalist colonialism. Through complex alibis of racialized settlement, the state spatializes a white settler capitalist colonial relationship—a settler futurity—to the nation as a condition for coming into its fort, making those racialized as Muslims contingently present on Turtle Island. They must either exalt whiteness—even as it superficially purports to reconcile its relationship with Indigeneity—or risk being evicted. They must exalt the stories colonial whiteness tells of itself to define itself, uphold the practices whiteness espouses in relating to land and nation, and recognize the primacy of colonial naming practices, all of which are clear socio-spatial matrices of power relations. The second layer of this exaltation is that those racialized as Muslims are coerced to accept the denigrated structural positions this racialized arrangement configures and its inter-racial relations. That is, they must relate to Indigenous people as premodern bricoleurs, not as rightful owners of this Land, and racially benefit from distancing themselves from political Blackness.

The citizenship oath and Discover Canada serve racialized pedagogical functions for new immigrants, a manifesto for their expected racial-spatial relationship to Canada—a relationship that cannot sit side by side with an Indigenous relationship to Land, nor can the two be understood in terms of each other. Khan’s move was a decolonizing act, deriding whiteness as the arbiter of socio-spatial relations. In one fell swoop, she cut through the Gordian knot, decolonizing and de-racializing her belonging in terms outside of either orientalism or settler colonialism. Furthermore, by refusing to relate to nation, she revealed the liberal democracy for what it was―a settler colony.

My analysis may seem obvious: like mercenaries, those racialized as Muslim are useful to the settler state and nation insofar as they subscribe to racial capitalism and exalt the dominant order by playing the part of the neoliberal multicultural subject. Once they reject settler colonialism and align themselves to Indigenous struggles around Land, the basis of their belonging no longer exists and they can be evicted. Yet discussions of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations rarely pay attention to the material costs racialized people with varying degrees of white privilege must confront. As a mother, this state of contingency, its threat of eviction in any form, and the very material costs involved are not something I can brush away lightly—and in my broader research I see how they shape “Muslim” youth’s subjectivity and conditions of possibility. There is a parallel move the state and dominant discourse make when Canada’s latest trend of Indigenous reconciliation, land acknowledgments, and settler confessions are used as alibis to marginalize immigrant voices that challenge the notion of Canada as a benevolent nation, just as multiculturalism was not so long ago used to marginalize Indigenous voices.¹⁰³ Whiteness morphs and twists and slides through any challenge to emerge at the top of the racialized hierarchy in what Said aptly names a “flexible positional superiority.”¹⁰⁴

As case in point, a new study guide and citizenship oath have been in the works since 2017. News of updates to the process continues to come in: the oath will now include treaty obligations as well as an oath to the queen; the study guide will contain sections on “sad chapters” in Canadian history such as residential schools and its reconciliation process underway in Canada; and it “delves extensively” into the history of Indigenous people.¹⁰⁵ Yet, as I have demonstrated, Discover Canada and the oath remain derivative of the ways the citizenship process conditions immigrants’ acceptance on socio-spatial relations that are antithetical to Indigenous relations to Land. Khan’s story demonstrates how those racialized as Muslim are caught in the middle of this incommensurability. Unless the spatial logic of settler colonialism is addressed, even new iterations of the study guide and the oath that describe Indigenous people more fairly will camouflage the pedagogical production of colonial, racialized subject positions and their commensurate relations. Until then, developments such as a new study guide and citizenship oath must be read as attempted window dressing for a benevolent, reflexive Canadian state, and an attempt to accomplish what was previously done explicitly under new guises.

Coda

Early on in this essay I asked, how do I teach my children a “Good Way” of belonging on this Land that will also not harm them? What is the web of relationships I am part of, even if I cannot immediately see them?  I conclude this essay by drawing on Indigenous testimony that provides a partial answer. Philip Blake, a Dene leader from Fort McPherson, testified in what became known as the Berger Inquiry in 1974 opposing government development of Indigenous Land for oil exploration and extraction. I situate Blake’s testimony describing Indigenous onto-epistemologies of living on and sharing this Land as a manifesto for non-Indigenous people to center Land in our relations of belonging:

If our Indian nation is being destroyed so that poor people of the world might get a chance to share this worlds [sic] riches, then as Indian people, I am sure that we would seriously consider giving up our resources. But do you really expect us to give up our life and our lands so that those few people who are the richest and most powerful in the world today can maintain their own position of privilege?

That is not our way.

I strongly believe that we do have something to offer your nation, however, something other than our minerals. I believe it is in the self-interest of your own nation to allow the Indian nation to survive and develop in our own way, on our own land. For thousands of years we have lived with the land, we have taken care of the land, and the land has taken care of us. We did not believe that our society has to grow and expand and conquer new areas in order to fulfill our destiny as Indian people. We have lived with the land, not tried to conquer or control it or rob it of its riches. We have not tried to get more and more riches and power, we have not tried to conquer new frontiers, or out do our parents or make sure that every year we are richer than the year before. We have been satisfied to see our wealth as ourselves and the land we live with.

It is our greatest wish to be able to pass on this land to succeeding generations in the same condition that our fathers have given it to us. We did not try to improve the land and we did not try to destroy it. That is not our way. I believe your nation might wish to see us, not as a relic from the past, but as a way of life, a system of values by which you may survive in the future. This we are willing to share.¹⁰⁶

Acknowledgments

This article would not be possible without generous permission from Masuma Khan to draw on her story. Thanks to Wael El-Dakhakhni, the editors at Lateral, the anonymous reviewers, as well as Jonathan Adjemian, Paola Bohorquez, Heba Elsherief, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez, David Perriera, and Neil Ramjewan for feedback on various parts. Discussions with Daniela Bascunan, Chandni Desai, Christy Guthrie, Andre Mazawi, Jean-Paul Restoule, and Jacqueline Scott have helped shape and sharpen the argument.