Kieran Way

KIERAN WAY, then a graduate student at University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, was approved funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Life, Concepts, and Politics: Decolonization or [and] Reconciliation in a Contested City,” supervised by Dr. Michael Lambek. This dissertation draws on 18 months of ethnographic research in Thunder Bay, Canada, to explore how Indigenous persons, mainly Anishinaabeg and Cree, use institutional reconciliation processes, especially at a church and a library, to advance diverse, intergenerational efforts to challenge settler relations. The grantee argues that settler relations impose an extractive double bind, which denies Indigenous freedom and secures settler control over Indigenous persons and their land, and operates through five strategies — separation, containment, conscription, subjugation, and displacement — that settlers enact institutionally and interpersonally out of fear of relinquishing control. In turn, settlers are understood to betray a promise of Indigenous freedom that conditions their relations with Indigenous persons through treaties of historical and/or sacred forms. Trust, research shows, depends on acknowledging this betrayal. What should follow, however, is contested. Indigenous persons and settlers hold incommensurable understandings amongst and between themselves of the relations necessary to achieve mutual freedom. These rest on different, autonomous, and rooted concepts of personhood, which prioritize sovereign-forging and exchange-enacting or kin-making and gift-giving practices, respectively. The project considers why most Indigenous persons encountered prioritize rooted practices and therefore look to cultivate relations through which the exercise of settler, but also human, control is disempowered.