Emily Davidson

Emily Davidson is an artist and activist based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her current research-creation focuses on the entangled relationship of print media in historic and ongoing colonization of Indigenous lands across Turtle Island and interrogates and the role printers played in Transatlantic Slavery in the territories that became Canada. Emily graduated from NSCAD University in 2009 (BFA, Interdisciplinary) and 2024 (MFA). Emily is a Research Assistant at Slavery North, UMass Amherst.

Positionality Statement: I am white settler currently living in Mi’kma’ki. I am directly descended from Loyalist colonizers who invaded and occupied Wolastokuk starting 1783, the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War. My ancestors, John Davidson and Hamilton Davidson, formed close political alliances and kinship bonds with known enslavers, including witnessing Jacob Elligood’s 1802 will in which he distributed enslaved human property to his family members. As a white settler, I ground my research-creation in a practice of settler responsibility and explore my implication in contemporary colonialism and continued land theft of Indigenous territories. Additionally, as a person who inherited privilege from the white supremacist practice of slavery in Canada, I am driven to participate in scholarship that exposes the history of Canadian slavery. Within the field of Transatlantic slavery studies, my focus is on interrogating the practices of white enslavers, whose slave ownership has often been obscured in the (colonial) historical record.

Ibukun-Oluwa Fasunhan

Ibukun is a researcher, theatre director, stage manager, producer, playwright, and researcher. As a researcher, his interest lies in the area of anti-Black racism, site-specific performance, spectatorship, immigration, and social-engaged works. He has published and presented some articles on site-specific performance, and also co-authored a book on cultural and creative arts for high school students in Nigeria. He is currently undergoing his Interdisciplinary doctoral program at the University of Regina Canada, where he is researching how site-specific performance can address racism against Black people in Saskatchewan. He is a UNESCO Janusz Korczak Chair Fellow 2023.

As an international artist whose works have been staged in different theatres in over five countries across three continents, his professional work spans the area of musical theatre, children’s theatre, and site-specific performance amongst others. As a playwright, his play Beertanglement won the second runner-up for the 4th Beeta International Playwright Competition 2021, and another play, Breathe, was selected for the Saskatchewan Playwright Centre’s “Write Like You Mean It” program in 2022. He has won several awards and grants including a Canada Council for the Arts grant in 2023, and a Creative Saskatchewan grant. He is currently the Southern Artistic Director at Common Weal Community Arts.

Positionality Statement: As a Black settler on Treaty Four, I am aware of the harm done to the Indigenous Peoples, which resonates deeply to what my ancestors faced with the transatlantic slave trade. The history of genocide, continuous displacement and settler colonialism of the Indigenous Peoples informs my understanding of the land, and my relationship to it. I acknowledge that the land on which I live and work is the traditional lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota peoples. By acknowledging my positionality as a settler, I benefit from this colonization, and I understand that my liberation as a Black person is intricately tied to the liberation of the Indigenous Peoples, and I will continually use my art and research, as a tool to confront the evils of the ongoing racism, discrimination, and settler colonialism.

Janice Feng

Janice Feng is Assistant Professor of Political Studies and Philosophy at Trent University, in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, ON). She is a feminist political theorist who explores questions of subjectivity and subjection, desire, embodiment, power and resistance, in the contexts of empire and colonialism. Her first book project, tentatively entitled The Cultivation of Desire, Settler Colonial Subjectivation, and Indigenous Women’s Self-Making and Resistance in Early Modern French North America examines desire–affective and embodied attachments–as both a dense site of colonial imaginary and investment, and a locus of decolonial politics and Indigenous resistance in early modern northeastern Turtle Island. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2023. She is also starting a project on the politics of address in nineteenth-century Indigenous political thought.

Positionality Statement: Janice Feng currently resides on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg. She has also spent much of her life on another part of the Anishinaabeg–—The Three Fire Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi Nations, as well as the Wyandot Nation,Treaty Six Territory and the territory of the Lekwungen, Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples. She is an immigrant-settler person of Asian descent who is committed to decolonization both in her scholarly work and everyday praxis.

Emily Grafton

Emily Grafton (Métis Nation) is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan. She has a PhD in Native Studies and Master of Public Administration from the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg), and a Bachelor of Arts (Advanced) in Political Science and Women’s Studies from the University of Winnipeg. Emily has worked in provincial, municipal, and Indigenous politics. Also, she held a research fellowship at the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies (Chicago, IL), was the research-curator of Indigenous Content at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (Winnipeg, MB), and held the roles of Indigenous Research Lead and Executive Lead, Indigenization at the University of Regina. She teaches courses on settler colonialism, reconciliation, the Canadian government, international relations, and feminist theories.

Emily is connected to the prairies through lived experience and ancestral connections. She was raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Treaty 1 territory, and later moved to Regina, Saskatchewan in Treaty 4, where she married into the McKenzie/Brabant families. Emily’s ancestors, the Lafrenières, were fur traders with the Northwest Company and Hudson’s Bay Company, working the waterways from the Great Lakes to Cumberland House in the Northwest (now Saskatchewan). They settled in the historic Métis Red River Settlement in Selkirk, St. Francois Xavier, and St. Boniface, and also the Pembina Mountains. As a community researcher, Emily affirms her continuing, expanding, and deepening kinship ties with many Indigenous communities.

Neil Kohlmann

Neil Kohlmann is a Ph.D. student in government at Cornell University. He received an M.A. in political science from the University of Victoria in 2023. He specializes in political thought, with a focus on settler colonialism, the foundations of political community, and the work of Edward Said. His current research applies these interests to the political thought of Victorian Era North America, when Canada and the United States strove to consolidate their authority across the continent.

Positionality Statement: I am a third-generation settler of British-German descent. I was born on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat. Living the first eighteen years of my life in suburbia, I was raised on Indigenous land without ever building any kind of relationship with the Indigenous peoples on whose land I lived. I have been able to benefit from the land without ever having to question my right to the land. As a Canadian, I have valuable freedoms, such as the rights of democracy, mobility, and expression, but they are confined according to settler-colonial structures. Settler-colonialism, through capitalist property rights, also enables me to consume, exploit, and destroy. I immensely benefit from these freedoms, but they also further alienate me from what it would mean to live in good relationship with Indigenous peoples. As a graduate student first on Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Esquimalt), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) land, and now on the land of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫɁ (the Cayuga Nation), I am trying to use my graduate education to learn more about Indigenous constitutionalisms, settler-colonialism, and how, as a settler-scholar, I can better understand and investigate beyond the settler colonial power and authority from which I directly benefit. While I strive to make my work valuable to both settlers and Indigenous peoples, I see myself primarily speaking to, and on behalf of, other white settlers. I feel that white settlers have a responsibility to learn about their complicity with settler-colonialism and help teach other settlers. The anti-colonial struggle must be Indigenous led and settlers ought to divest their power while also doing the work to learn, listen, and teach. I strive to acknowledge and learn from my mistakes to continue to grow in what is an ongoing, reciprocal, and imperfect journey.

Johanna Lewis

Johanna Lewis is a community organizer, a former doctoral candidate in History, and the queer femme parent of two magical kids. Their scholarly work focuses on cultural histories of settler colonialism and the British empire, with a focus on family and intimacy, identity and power, and questions of inheritance, commemoration, and historical production. Their dissertation looks at the lives and afterlives of several clusters of their British colonist ancestors to chart the relationships between personal lives and larger structures, between colonial histories and the colonial present, and between the stories that these historical actors told themselves about empire and the ones that we tell now. As a co-founder of Showing Up for Racial Justice Toronto, Johanna organizes white people to take committed, accountable action for collective liberation, abolition, and decolonization, from Turtle Island to Palestine. Johanna is a Senior Organizer at 350.org, working to build capacity, alignment, and strategic impact in the climate movement across so-called Canada.

Positionality Statement: I work, write, organize, and raise my kids in Toronto, on Dish with One Spoon lands that have long been stewarded by the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat, and are the current treaty territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit. As a white settler with intimate ties across the former British Empire, I am forever grappling with personal, familial, and collective complicities while fumbling, imperfectly, towards other ways of being, knowing, and relating. Because my ancestors were homesteaders in Saskatchewan and took part in the ground-up colonial mythmaking discussed in this contribution, I bring a personal perspective to their stories and have a distinct investment in tracing the consequences of this historical production.

SherJan Maybanting

SherJan Maybanting (he/him) finished his A.B. and M.A. in Philosophy in 2002 and 2006, respectively. In 2020, he finished his Bachelor in Social Work at the University of Regina and is now currently finishing a Master’s in Social Work with the thesis on newcomers’ settlement and integration from a constructivist grounded theory framed under anti-racist research methodology. He was a recipient of The Faculty of Social Work Dr. Judy White Equity and Inclusion Award in 2021, received the Saskatchewan Association of Social Workers (SASW) Student Award in 2022, and is a recipient of Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canadian Graduate Scholarship-Master’s (CGS-M) 2023. In 2022, he was an Outstanding Student Proposal Award Recipient from Canadian Association of Social Work Education (CASWE) and a 3-Minute Pitch Awardee of the Social  Innovation  Summit initiated by the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research (FGSR, U of R), the Community Engagement and Research Centre (Faculty of Arts, U of R), and the Non-profit and Voluntary Sector Studies Network (Luther College). In 2023-2024, he served as a member of the Saskatchewan Post-secondary Student Council of the Ministry of Advanced Education, Government of Saskatchewan.

Positionality Statement:SherJan Maybanting is a diasporic first-generation economic-based migrant from the Philippines. He is a racialized settler since 2009 in the colonial state of Canada’s rural geographic location situated in Treaty 4 Territory that encompasses the lands of the Cree, Saulteaux (SO-TOE), Dakota, Nakota, Lakota, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation in the province of Saskatchewan. He descended from ancestry that was colonized by Spain for over three centuries, went under American rule for almost five decades, and was occupied by Japanese for over three years. It is this positionality and social (dis)location that his research intentionality and work inclination is towards decolonial and anti-racist engagements.

Jérôme Melançon

Jérôme Melançon (he/him) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Regina. During the completion of this project, he was Associate Professor in French and Francophone Intercultural Studies. His current research focuses on political phenomenology and specifically on figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Tran Duc Thao; on settler colonialism in Canada, especially as it concerns Francophones; and on political modes of coexistence. He has published one book and has co-edited four volumes or journal issues on Merleau-Ponty, and co-edited two journal issues around Indigenization and marginalisation in Francophone communities. He is currently completing a manuscript on reconciliation in Canada and leading research around the history of residential schools and the translation of documents from their archives. He is a monthly columnist for Francopresse and the Réseau.Presse across Francophone communities in Canada.

Positionality Statement: I am a settler, coming for a long line of settlers who, through choice or displacement, have occupied and developed for agriculture various territories in what is now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and especially Québec. Since my move to the Northern Plains in 2005, I have been learning about settler colonialism and Indigenous peoples and cultures, and creating relations that allow me to support Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural and linguistic revitalization, and to begin to undo some of the harm that has allowed me to live here as a French speaker and Euro-Canadian.

Kate Motluk

Kate Motluk is a PhD Student in Geography at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on issues of forced migration, criminalization, and containment. Kate completed her MA in Geography at Wilfrid Laurier University, where her thesis examined responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in carceral spaces across Canada and Australia. Prior to graduate school, Kate worked in the refugee sector in Canada, which greatly informs her academic work. In Fall 2024, Kate will be a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.

Positionality Statement: A statement of positionality calls for thoughtful consideration of the many identities we all have. There are numerous identifiers that describe who I am, but here I focus on those that afford me power and privelge in many spaces: I am a white, cisgendered, Canadian citizen. This positionality informs how I encounter the world, and is especially relevant in the case of a project examining the historical and ongoing harms of settler colonialism, from which I directly benefit. My work seeks to interrogate my own complicity within unjust systems and contribute to projects that make a decolonized world ever more imaginable.

Cleo Nguyen

Cleo Nguyen (they/he) is a recent graduate with a Masters of Arts in Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. They are interested and passionate about political and legal theory, mental health advocacy, and community well-being. Their research interests include working with diverse peoples, and ultimately aim for this knowledge to better serve and enhance collective well-being and community relations for the long-term.

Positionality Statement: Before I present my research, I acknowledge my standpoint as an educated, lower-middle class Southeast Asian who is outside of the Indigenous and Black communities of which my research includes and concerns. I am a disabled transmasculine person whose research leans towards critical political and legal theories, such as abolition feminism which draws upon Black traditions. I acknowledge my positionality affects and influences my research. Thus, I attempt to undertake reflexivity by recognizing that I as a researcher am not external to the context in which I operate: I am a settler, a scholar within colonial regimes of knowledge, and possess the potential to reproduce pathologizing, imperialist, and recolonizing research. In acknowledging this, my work attempts to counterbalance damage-centered narratives with that of Black and Indigenous futurity and resilience.

Callie Parisien

Callie Parisien is an undergraduate student at the University of Regina and is working on her bachelor’s degree in Human Justice. As well, she works as a Research Assistant and is presently working on a project that has to do with Metis conceptions of Religion and Spirituality. In the future, she wishes to work with marginalized women who struggle with issues such as domestic violence, addiction and mental health. She currently resides in Regina Saskatchewan with her partner and two children.

Positionality Statement: I am a Mother, a Daughter and a Sister as well as a Student and a member of the Metis Nation of Saskatchewan. My family, the Parisiens, are a founding family of the village of Lebret and are well known in the Métis community in Regina and Lebret, particularly my Papa, who worked in various Métis organizations and was by many accounts, a very generous man, interested in helping his community. My mother however, is of unknown European decent. Having taken after her physically, I have gone about my life, studies and even the writing of this piece, looking non-Indigenous and being treated by others as such. This has had various effects on me including doubt and confusion regarding the authenticity of my Metis identity, though the effect most relevant to mention here is that it has endowed me with certain privileges, specifically those arising from an assumed membership in the dominant white race. These factors affect my overall position in the world and thus the point of view I take in this piece.

Alyssa Parker

My name is Alyssa Parker, and I am a francophone teacher, sister, and researcher. I am currently located in Yorkton, Sk, on Treaty Four territory.  I work as a grade 2/3 French immersion teacher. Reconciliation with Métis, First Nations and Inuit is part of my personal as well as university journey because I have personal relationship to the Métis community through my brother’s parentage. This relationship to both Francophone and Métis communities has inspired my research inside and outside of my master’s thesis. I situate myself as a Jewish settler on treaty territory, I use my position as an educator and researcher to promote truth and reconciliation in my community. I see the harm past and present that is done to Indigenous Peoples in Canada. Through my family’s connection to the Métis homeland in Willow Bunch and Duck Lake as well as the continuous prosecution and genocide of the Jewish people, I try to understand how history has shaped my experience on this land.  I continue my work towards decolonization by contributing to this collection as well as selectively choosing projects that align with my values.

Kaitlyn Pothier

Kaitlyn Pothier (she/they) is a (recently graduated) Master’s student at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. She completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Guelph, in sociology, criminology, and public policy. Her research interests include intersectional theory, gender-based violence, restorative and transformative justice, family law, disability studies, and Indigenous scholarship. When her researcher hat is off, she enjoys yoga, concerts, roller-skating, binging old Disney shows, and being with friends and family (furry and otherwise).

Positionality Statement: I am a white settler scholar living and working on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and the Attiwonderonk peoples and the current territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit in Guelph, Ontario. With distant roots to the Mi’kmaq of southern Nova Scotia, I aim to approach decolonization and reconciliation through consistent community engagement and ongoing discourse with those at the forefront of this important movement. Let this serve as a reminder for us to always practice allyship that ‘follows the turtle’.

Kathryn Currie Reinders

Kathryn Currie Reinders is a PhD Candidate with the Social Practice and Transformational Change program at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.  She has completed both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Guelph in political science.  Her research interests include human rights, disability studies, public policy, and political action.  Outside of academic pursuits she loves martial arts, gardening, being with her family, and working with animals.

Positionality Statement: I am a white settler scholar with a disability living and learning on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and the Attiwonderonk peoples and the current territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit in Guelph, Ontario.  I work towards decolonization and reconciliation through connection with community, stewarding the land upon which I live, and through research and learning.  Working on this project has been a really wonderful experience to practice community engaged scholarship, meaningful allyship, and learning together.

Sanchari Sur

Sanchari Sur is a PhD Candidate in English & Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Their work can be found in the Toronto Book Award Shortlisted The Unpublished City (Book*hug, 2017), Malahat Review, Room, Flare Magazine, Daily Xtra, Al Jazeera, Joyland, CBC, Toronto Star, and elsewhere. Sanchari is a recipient of a 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop Residency, 2019 Banff Residency (with Electric Literature), 2018 Lambda Literary Fellowship in fiction, and grants from Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. They curate Balderdash Reading Series (est. Jan 2017), are the co-editor of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020), and the Editor-in-Chief of The Ex-Puritan.

Positionality Statement: As a South Asian first-generation immigrant who is also a writer, I am constantly interrogating my positionality as a non-Indigenous racialized Other in relationship with the Indigenous peoples in “Canada” as both a nation-state and unceded lands and territories. Through this positionality, I approach both literary works by other South Asian Canadians like Soraya Peerbaye, as well my own creative writing. In this context, this chapter is a part of the first chapter of my doctoral dissertation.