This article was downloaded by: [Natalie Baloy]On: 19 March 2015, At: 09:53Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Click for updates

Settler Colonial StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rset20

Spectacles and spectres: settlercolonial spaces in VancouverNatalie J.K. Baloya

a University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USAPublished online: 16 Mar 2015.

To cite this article: Natalie J.K. Baloy (2015): Spectacles and spectres: settler colonial spaces inVancouver, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

Spectacles and spectres: settler colonial spaces in Vancouver

Natalie J.K. Baloy*

University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

This paper argues that non-Indigenous ideas of Indigenous alterity shape and are shaped byprocesses that render Indigeneity spectacular and/or spectral. In Vancouver, BC, the urbancentre of the Northwest Coast and ancestral homeland of the Coast Salish people,performances, art, and other forms of display are experienced by non-Indigenous people asspectacles: cultural not political, visual not otherwise sensorial, passively observed notparticipatory. And Indigeneity also haunts; despite dispossession, erasure, and displacement,Indigenous people return again and again to exercise their sovereignty and refuse conditionsof disappearance and display. This revenant spectrality combined with spectacularrepresentation creates a complex structure of feeling in the city. I suggest that, for non-Indigenous people, these conditions produce a holographic Indigeneity: hyper-visible fromsome angles, invisible from others; constantly present even in moments of apparent absence.Drawing on urban ethnographic research with non-Indigenous subjects, I use the socio-spatial cases of Stanley Park’s totem poles and the Downtown Eastside’s socialmarginalization to exemplify how spectacular/spectral dynamics characterize and sustainsettler colonial logics in a city decorated with Northwest Coast art, haunted by legacies ofcolonialism, and uncertain about the future of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. I arguethat conditions of spectacle and spectrality must be identified and transgressed to reimaginea different future.

As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe1 and critical theorist Andrea Smith2 have argued, the eliminationof Indigeneity was and remains a goal of the settler colonial project.3 In Vancouver, Coast Salishpeople did not disappear with colonial settlement, though they were displaced, dispossessed, andtargeted by assimilationist policies aimed at facilitating their disappearance. In the absence ofabsence, Coast Salish Indigeneity was and is managed – circumscribed through policy, spatialallocation, racialization, representational practice, and conditions of inequality.4 Unlike otherparts of Canada, treaties were not signed between Indigenous people and government represen-tatives in the areas around Vancouver or in much of British Columbia, contributing to modern-day‘uncertainty’ around contemporary Indigenous rights and territory and anxious relations betweenIndigenous and non-Indigenous people settling on unceded lands. As local Indigenous people and(urban) Indigenous social movements like Idle No More persist in their efforts towards sover-eignty and equity, the ‘over-and-done-with’ of colonial history is continually revealed as ever-present, emergent, and shifting.5

Today, over 600,000 people live in the city of Vancouver and 2.3 million live in Metro Van-couver. All are living on Coast Salish lands. Approximately 2% of the population on those lands isIndigenous.6 Regional Coast Salish populations, including three urban reserves occupied by

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

*Email: nbaloy@ucsc.edu

Settler Colonial Studies, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2015.1018101

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and Indigenous people from other parts of BCand Canada form a culturally and linguistically diverse urban Indigenous population.7 Whilemany early non-Indigenous settlers were white, European, and Euro-Canadian from other partsof Canada, Vancouver’s settler population has always been quite diverse and complex as well,beginning with Chinese migration in the 1880s. As a result of waves of migration since,visible ‘minorities’ have surpassed the white ‘majority’, reaching 51.8% of Vancouver’s popu-lation according to the 2011 census.8

As diverse non-Indigenous settlers continue to live in and move to Vancouver, how do theyrelate to Coast Salish land claims, Northwest Coast art, Indigenous inequalities, and their Indigen-ous neighbours? How do they make sense of their own occupation of Coast Salish lands? Basedon participant observation and interviews with non-Indigenous research participants, I argue inthis article that their ideas of Indigenous alterity – racial, cultural, and political difference –shape and are shaped by processes that render Indigeneity spectacular and/or spectral in thecity. Vancouver is a place haunted by an unjust past of dispossession and displacement, anunequal present of marginality and disconnection, and an uncertain future of recognition and rec-lamation. It is also a place decorated with totem poles and Northwest Coast art, regularly featuringIndigenous art and performance in place promotion and high-profile events like the 2010 WinterOlympics. Indigeneity in Vancouver is simultaneously pushed to the margins and front and centre,hidden from view and in plain sight.9

Spectacle and spectrality operate as primary regimes of (in)visibility in settler coloniality.10

Spectacle and spectrality share a common root in different iterations of the Latin verb spectare:to look at or to see.11 Using these concepts, I examine what is made visible by colonial ghosts andconcealed by spectacles. I ask what is seen, unseen, and remains to be seen in the everyday livedexperiences of settler Vancouver. Using Stanley Park’s totem poles and the Downtown Eastside’ssocial marginalization as socio-spatial exemplars, I illustrate how conditions of spectacle andspectrality sustain settler colonial logics.

Orientations

To study contemporary settler coloniality, it is necessary not only to explore Indigenous people’sexperiences, nor only colonial and/or state actors, but also to understand ethnographically hownon-Indigenous settlers participate in socio-spatial and socio-political settler colonial processes.Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs (1923–1932), famously called the conundrum of Indigenous alterity and efforts towards sovereignty,Canada’s ‘Indian problem’. My research responds to calls to examine Canada’s ‘settlerproblem’ as an ethical reorientation to studying colonialism.12 By studying settlers, I in factaim to decentre and denaturalize the settler subject and to demonstrate that colonialism structurescontemporary realities for all settler state inhabitants, albeit in different ways.13 As a non-Indigen-ous white anthropologist, I am motivated to examine the ‘settler problem’ to move from ananthropology of the Other to an anthropology of Othering as a process and settler colonialismas a produced socio-political structure. This enables me to locate myself within my critical analy-sis, and to point out how other settlers are implicated – through complicity, complacency, ignor-ance, and privilege, and a range of practices to counteract these relations – in settler colonialism.

As Corey Snelgrove, Rita Dhamoon, and Jeffrey Corntassel have recently argued, a focus onsettlers can serve to reify settler dominance and drown out voices of Indigenous peoples and scho-lars.14 This is a serious challenge I continue to grapple with. By interrogating settler normativity,I am working against settler anthropology’s fixation with Indigenous cultures at the expenseof critical and self-reflexive settler analysis. While my disciplinary intervention sits somewhatawkwardly within the emergent interdisciplinary field of critical Indigenous and settler colonial

2 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

studies, I hope my analysis enacts a critical corrective within my own discipline; complementsIndigenous voices and stories, rather than substitute or displace them; and brings a much-needed ethnographic perspective to theorizing about settler colonialism.

In this article, I draw from my larger research project15 on settler participation in three Indi-genous ‘inclusion’ initiatives in Vancouver: (1) the 2010 Winter Olympics, particularly the Abori-ginal Pavilion and other sites of Indigenous representation, including protest events; (2)Vancouver Public Library’s Mount Pleasant branch, which houses a special collection of Indigen-ous resources and offers Indigenous programming; and (3) the BladeRunners programme inVancouver’s Downtown Eastside and a BladeRunners placement site (BladeRunners is anemployment programme that trains street youth, the majority of whom are Indigenous, in the con-struction trades). Inclusion projects like these aim to redress social exclusion by promoting activeIndigenous participation in civic life and local economies.16 As such, these initiatives providedethnographic access to non-Indigenous peoples engaged in or proximal to inclusion work thatbrings Indigenous and non-Indigenous people together in time and space.

Non-Indigenous participants in these sites regularly indexed two places in Vancouver as keysites of Indigeneity: Stanley Park’s totem poles and the Downtown Eastside. These sites werementioned over local reserves, other neighbourhoods and areas, and my field sites themselves.Thus, rather than focus on the social dynamics within my field sites as I do elsewhere,17 inthis article, I apply a spectacular and spectral analysis to explain why these two places figureso prominently in participants’ imaginaries of Indigeneity in Vancouver.

Spectacle

Anthropologist Leslie Robertson observes, ‘Non-Aboriginal people of every age group discusstheir perceptions of Indigenous people through spectacle and ceremony, contexts where theyare culturally visible. Spectacle provides a frame through which non-Indigenous peopleimagine Native Americans.’18 During interviews, research participants frequently recountedtheir experiences with Aboriginality through recollections of powwows, regalia, museums, andother forms of observation and mediated consumption. Spectacular cultural visibility throughart, display, and performance is a constitutive feature of settler knowledge production in Vancou-ver. Colourful and monumental Northwest Coast artwork by artists like Bill Reid (Haida) andSusan Point (Musqueam) adorns the city, particularly in touristic spaces like the airport’sinternational terminal, Stanley Park, and Granville Island. Indigenous singing and dancing per-formances increasingly figure in local events and attract broad audiences. Local ethnographerDara Culhane calls attention to another dynamic of spectacle in Vancouver: the fascinated gazeresearchers, journalists, and the public cast on the Downtown Eastside. She writes that journalists,artists, and researchers ‘have been drawn as moths to flames to document, analyse, represent,treat, and market the dramatic and photogenic spectacle of social suffering in this neighbour-hood’.19 An overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples populates this spectacle, shaping settlerimaginaries of space and spectacular Indigeneity in the city.

Spectacle thus functions as a central regime of Indigenous (in)visibility in settler colonialismtoday. This regime has several key features. First, spectacles privilege sight above all other senses,attracting spectators to watch, observe, and look. As anthropologist John MacAloon notes, ‘theyare things to be seen’: visuality is primary and essential.20 Sites and events must also achieve aparticular scale or visually impressive quality to be characterized as spectacles. For example,many deem totem poles spectacular but not other examples of Northwest Coast materialculture, such as baskets or spoons (though the baskets and spoons may be ornate and beautiful).Similarly, powwow dancers in bright and expressive regalia are spectacular in a way that a story-teller in jeans and a t-shirt is not (though she may still captivate audiences).

Settler Colonial Studies 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

Spectacles must involve an audience of some kind who see, watch, and look. Spectacle is a‘social relationship [… ] mediated by images’, as Debord notes.21 The positioning of spectatorsin spectacle implies a passive form of participation: audience involvement is reduced to watching.Experiencing Indigeneity as spectacular enables non-Indigenous peoples to assume/embody apassive subjectivity in settler colonial processes. Furthermore, spectators often observe spectaclesas cultural rather than political occasions. This reinforces spectators’ – or settlers’ or spectator-settlers’ – self-perceived role as cultural observers rather than political actors in spectacle/settler colonialism. They privilege cultural qualities of Indigenous spectacles – art, performance,display, and even social suffering – over political or social characteristics and effects. As severalscholars, artists, and performers have demonstrated, Indigenous art and performance often cannotbe isolated from historical context and socio-political issues related to land, decolonization, andsovereignty.22 In many Northwest Coast communities, for instance, potlatch ‘audiences’ aredirectly involved with the political work of potlatch activity: they act as witnesses, not spectators,shifting their role and responsibilities. My emphasis on cultural spectacle calls attention to non-Indigenous modes of (dis)engagement, rather than to reflect the intentions and goals of artists andperformers themselves. What are the different ethical positions and social and political impli-cations of acting as a spectator rather than a witness or actor in settler colonialism?

As Stuart Hall demonstrates, popular representations often spectacularize racial and culturalOthers.23 From common national narratives (the frontier and the Wild West) to museums and eth-nographic displays (e.g. World’s Fairs and expositions), spectacularized Indigenous Others form aconsiderable affective archive of images that spectator-settlers can and do access in their construc-tions of Indigeneity. Debord notes: ‘all that once was directly lived has become mere represen-tation’.24 Indigenous spectacles come to stand in for and shape direct encounters withIndigenous people, playing a significant role in knowledge production.

Finally, spectators often understand spectacles as distinct from everyday life even as theyinform and constitute it. Spectacular sites and events offer discreet moments to see, watch, andobserve something apart from the ordinary. Yet an accumulation of spectacles can also come tocomprise the ordinary and populate the everyday. The totem poles in Stanley Park, forexample, remain distinct from everyday life – colourful, grand, and memorable, they representa spectacularized Otherness, a site to be visited on occasion – even as they are also a familiarsite/sight for city residents. They remain Other, outside the everyday.

Anthropologist Don Handelman25 observes that spectacles can function as either models ormirrors, allowing analysts and audiences to examine ordinary conditions through comparisonand contrast with spectacular representations. In Vancouver, paying critical attention to Indigen-ous spectacles opens significant lines of inquiry: How do spectacles distract from and/or illumi-nate historical injustices and material inequalities? How does familiarity with Indigenousspectacle become synonymous with or different from intimate knowledge of Indigenoushistory, politics, and sociocultural life? How does the banality of spectacle in the city limit ormake possible Indigenous recognition and colonial reckoning?

Spectrality

The shadows of Indigenous spectacle are the spectres of settler colonialism. Spectrality is a stateor condition of haunting; spectre is another word for ghost or apparition. Indigenous alterity andthe unfinished business of settler colonialism produce spectral effects that shape settlers’ spatio-temporal imaginaries of the city. Always present but often hidden or repressed, the unjust past,unequal present, and an uncertain future haunt the everyday. Spectrality, a settler colonialregime of (in)visibility, offers critical insight into non-Indigenous people’s experiences of Indi-genous visibility/erasure, presence/absence, and marginality/reinscription in settler society.26

4 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

For many non-Indigenous residents, Indigenous alterity functions almost holographically:apparent and visible in some contexts, erased or minimized in others. Now you see it, now youdon’t. Different elements of Indigeneity – cultural, racial, social, and political difference – are some-times emphasized, sometimes ignored. For example, attention to racial alterity can eclipse politicaldistinction, rendering Indigeneity invisible. At other times, efforts towards universalized, liberalforms of equality erase Indigenous sovereignty. A dimension of this holographic quality ofsettler colonial Indigeneity is revenance: Indigeneity can seem to disappear and return, therebyhaunting contemporary social relations or disrupting linear narratives of settlement. SometimesIndigeneity, called forth and summoned, retreats from view as attention switches to other concerns.Narratives of city history offer an example: local Coast Salish people appear at the start of the story,then disappear as the focus turns to stories of railways and city development, only to return again indescriptions of the multicultural, colourful cultures of the city today.

My distinct conceptual and critical analysis of haunting does not interpret others’ ghost storiesbut rather considers how the city is haunted by the unfinished business of colonialism and theongoing production of alterity. Using sociologist Avery Gordon’s language, I contend that weshould be ‘hospitable’ to spectres that haunt city spaces rather than exorcise or ignore them.Just as I do not address ‘ghost stories’ told about ‘Indian graveyards’ and other forms of NorthAmerican haunting, I also do not engage with other versions of spectrality as imagined inCoast Salish and other Northwest Coast Indigenous communities.27 Musqueam belief systemsrecognize ancestors as having a contemporary presence that requires certain protocols, forexample. I do not use the language or conception of ancestors and related protocols, but I do ident-ify ‘ghosts’ of settler colonialism present in the city today.

Ghosts take up space and exploring haunting is a form of unmapping, which ShereneRazack28 advocates as a strategy to dislodge naturalized racialization and spatialization processesto reveal settler mythologies underpinning them. This spatial project involves contesting erasuresand refusing to take absence for granted. Unmapping familiar terrain to make space for the erasedand marginalized – the ghosted – opens opportunities to experience the uncanny. Same spaces aremade different, and sameness and difference are felt simultaneously.29 Like spectacle, spectralityinvolves sight and seeing; yet spectres play tricks on sight and also activate other senses. AsGordon explains, ‘haunting is not about invisibility or unknowability per se’; instead, haunting‘refers us to what’s living and breathing in the place hidden from view: people, places, histories,knowledge, memories, ways of life, ideas’.30 To acknowledge ghosts makes visible what has beenrepressed or concealed but never fully disappeared.

In addition to spatial insights, spectral analysis encourages examination of time and tempor-ality. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida regularly repeats a line from Hamlet to convey how ghostsaffect our perception of time: ‘time is out of joint’. He asks, ‘Is there a present of thespectre?’31 Or, put differently, are ghosts of the past, present, or future? Is Indigeneity of thepast, present, or future?32 Spectrality can function to make the past alive in the present oranimate a yet-unseen future, or switch time around: ‘time is out of joint’. Indigeneity, conceptu-alized through a frame of spectrality, can be understood as a political and social location thatemerged in the colonial past, continues to persist and take new shape in the present, and engendersuncertainty around its expression in the future.33 Indigeneity can be uncanny – both present andabsent – and revenant, re-presenting in the present. For settlers, when familiar places becomehaunted by unfamiliar stories, spectrality can operate as a potentially generative process, creatingnew meanings and senses of time and place.

To further consider temporalities of haunting, it is useful to compare spectrality to spectacle.While spectators recognize spectacles as distinct temporal moments and spatial sites, spectrality isdifficult to delimit temporally. Although a feeling of haunting can be fleeting, ghosts often lingerand can continue to haunt even after they have been acknowledged or exorcised. If their presence

Settler Colonial Studies 5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

is a reminder or signal of something amiss or previously repressed, even if this is righted or other-wise addressed, ghosts can leave a mark – traces and residues of injustice and trauma. Colonialpolicies, for example, leave tangible traces on the built environment and contemporary material-ities but also haunt in more subtle ways, shaping affective knowledges and personal encounters –disrupting illusions of post-coloniality: ‘the over and done with comes alive’.34 Haunting, writesGordon, ‘alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate andsequence the past, the present, and the future’.35

Seemingly apart and even otherworldly, spectres populate the spaces of the quotidian presentin the settler colonial city. Spectrality produces a ‘structure of feeling’, to borrow from RaymondWilliams.36 I explore ethnographically how the ‘real’ – everyday settler coloniality – is producedand experienced in the interstices of surreal spectrality and hyper-real spectacle. I turn now toillustrate how these regimes of settler colonial (in)visibility function in and around two sites ofIndigeneity in Vancouver – Stanley Park’s totem poles and the Downtown Eastside.

Stanley Park’s totem poles

In Leslie Robertson’s ethnography of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Fernie, BC, shedescribes a grade 5 social studies test asking students to define ‘heritage, history, ancestor,totem pole, Haida, tipi, igloo, culture, belief’.37 Students were also asked to write a story usingthe words chant, courage, harpoon, pride, ritual, shaman, and soul. Robertson questions theabsence of politically relevant words like ‘land’ or ‘treaties’ or ‘colonialism’ or ‘racism’, andstates, ‘[i]t is not surprising that many in the youngest generation recognize these people onlyat powwows’. She further notes that under the heading ‘Ktunaxa’, the name of the local FirstNations people in the area, students were asked to fill in ‘What I know about them’ and ‘WhatI want to know’ boxes. She asks, ‘How are these children supposed to “know” “them” giventhe actual contexts within which Aboriginal people are made visible?’38

Like students in Fernie, my research participants recalled learning about Indigeneity throughschools units on art, architecture, and cultural traditions, or visits to totem poles and museums. Forexample, Cam, a library patron, states, ‘To come across the culture… [it’s] really hard to accessfor someone. Unless they go and look at the totem poles in Stanley Park. I don’t really see [Indi-genous people]… and I haven’t met a lot of [them] either.’ In her three years in Vancouver, Camhad lived in the Downtown Eastside and Mount Pleasant, both neighbourhoods with sizable Indi-genous populations. Despite her proximity to Indigenous neighbours, she placed Aboriginality intourist sites like Stanley Park’s totem poles and the Gastown district, which features souvenirshops and Native art galleries. These are the spectacularly circumscribed contexts of Indigenousvisibility and knowability in Vancouver for her.

Stanley Park holds tremendous significance for local residents. It occupies a large peninsulajutting out from downtown Vancouver. A popular paved path rings its perimeter along the shoresof False Creek, English Bay, and Burrard Inlet. Its forested interior is dotted with attractions, likethe Klahowya Village, constructed at the site of a former petting zoo near the aquarium in 2010.Its northern shore features a lookout point and restaurant, a large grassy area called Lumberman’sArch, and the totem poles and lighthouse at Brockton Point. Rounding the point east and south,park-goers encounter the nine o’clock gun, a military base on Deadman’s Island, tidal flats, amarina and rowing club, the ‘Lost Lagoon’, and popular public beaches.

The totem poles at Brockton Point are a landmark for locals and one of the city’s most populartourist attractions.39 Against a backdrop of cedar and fir, eight poles stand clustered together, mostof them brightly painted and featuring stylized animals and figures in the formline designs ofHaida, Nuu-Chah-nulth, and Kwakwaka’wakw artists. As a primary site to access Indigeneity,the poles are in many ways the epitome of spectacle: looked at and admired for their impressive

6 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

size, bright colours, and distinctive design (and cordoned off from other sensory experiences,including touch, by a fence and moat of rocks). They regularly attract a sizable audience. Impor-tantly, these spectators view them as cultural, not political, objects, and their location, too, seemsapolitical and unworthy of specific attention or engagement. As such, spectators experience thetotem poles as representations of a generalized Aboriginal culture and art aesthetic: exotic, time-less, extraordinary. They are distinct from everyday life even as familiar icons in the city. Thisspectacle, however, is built on a more complicated history of Indigeneity and colonialism thatis not so visible and cannot be understood through spectatorship.

On Canada Day in 2010, the front page of the Province newspaper featured a photo of StanleyPark with the question ‘Xwayxway Park?’40 In the accompanying story, journalist Suzanne Four-nier explains that a pair of First Nations elders suggested changing the park’s name during anopening event at the new Klahowya Village. According to the article, Xwayxway (pronounced‘kwhy-kway’) was a permanent Coast Salish village on the peninsula.41 Squamish elder EmilyBaker is quoted, explaining, ‘Where that nine o’clock gun is, that is where my grandfather wasburied. We had a village at Lumberman’s Arch, we lived all through here and the name [of thepark] should reflect our people.’ Musqueam band councillor Wade Grant states that StanleyPark is ‘a perfect place’ for the Klahowya Village, emphasizing that the Musqueam, Squamish,and Tsleil-Waututh peoples had lived in the area for millennia: ‘For far too long, this place hasbeen void of drums. Now the trees, our ancestors, will remember. They’ll hear those drumsand welcome us back.’42 The article closes with basic details about Stanley Park: ‘a 404.9hectare urban park, opened in 1888 in the name of Lord Stanley of Preston, the governor-general of Canada. It attracts about eight million visitors every year’.

In their stories of buried relatives, Baker and Grant bring attention to a fact well-known intheir communities but unfamiliar to many Vancouver residents: the land and waters of Vancou-ver’s beloved Stanley Park were part of a rich Coast Salish network of residence and resourcesites, now significantly altered through processes of colonial displacement. Although the park’stotem poles are a significant site of visible Indigeneity for non-Indigenous residents, I suggestthat this visibility is in fact premised on the invisibility of local Coast Salish connections toplace. In this section, I describe the park’s spectral genealogies and geographies and use theStanley Park renaming controversy to explore affective tensions that emerged when a familiarspectacle and space became haunted by an unfamiliar history.

From Xwayxway to Stanley Park

Sociologist Renisa Mawani and historian Jean Barman have each analysed the history of CoastSalish dispossession and representations of nature and Indigeneity in Stanley Park.43 Barman44

details how Indigenous, mixed-race, and settler people were evicted from park lands between1888, when Stanley Park officially opened, and 1958, when the last remaining resident died.The establishment of the park, she explains, was part of a centuries-long colonial project, withEuropean and Euro-Canadian officials dispossessing Indigenous people not only of their landsbut of their very presence in the storylines of the places they inhabit(ed): ‘The plan was asuccess, so much so that rarely if ever do we consider the possibility of other histories. Yetother histories exist.’45

Prior to and after early European settlement, Coast Salish peoples relied on the land, waters,and resources of the peninsula now called Stanley Park, harvesting shellfish, cedar trees, and clayfrom its shorelines and forests. Seven village or occupation sites have been identified archaeolo-gically, the most populated of which was Xwayxway. Xwayxway is translated as ‘a place formaking masks’, indicating its spiritual importance.46 Deadman’s Island, nearby off the peninsu-la’s northeastern shore, was a site to lay to rest residents’ dead relatives.

Settler Colonial Studies 7

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

As Mawani explains, this sacred territory has been carefully produced as a ‘natural’, ‘wild’,and ‘empty’ park through imperial imposition, using colonial techniques of mapping and law.47 Inthe early twentieth century, this spatial transformation project ambivalently acknowledged andignored Indigenous spaces through descriptions of ‘temporary’ or ‘seasonal’ land use that disre-garded intensive, long-term emplacement. From an Indigenous lived place to a spectacular ‘publicspace’, Stanley Park’s land was reinscribed with new meanings that significantly inform(ed) localsettler senses of place.48

As the park became an ‘imperial icon’ in the early days of city development, pressuremounted to relocate the park’s residents to nearby Indian reserves. Indigenous and mixed-racefamilies were labelled ‘squatters’ and ‘illegal’ residents and asked to leave their homes nearBrockton Point in the 1910s. They refused. The families used maps and other legal means tosupport their claims to space.49 Their case was ultimately unsuccessful, however, and theSupreme Court of Canada ruled against them in 1925. When they were finally served official evic-tion notices in 1931, they moved out and their homes were burned to the ground.50

Indigeneity got from elsewhere

At the very same time that city officials actively displaced Coast Salish presence in Stanley Park,they were also supporting efforts to erect the park’s now famous totem poles. The poles werepart of a broader plan to build a faux Kwakwaka’wakw village at Lumberman’s Arch – thesite of Xwayxway. As Barman argues, this apparent paradox is in fact part of a broader colonialstrategy of erasure designed to replace Coast Salish ‘indigenous Indigeneity’ (local Indigenousconnections to land) with ‘a sanitized Indigeneity got from elsewhere’ (material culture strippedof political content).51 Her discussion reveals the dual purposes displacement and emplacementserved: to make room for colonial settlement and expansion and to ‘create the illusion that Van-couver was Indigenous-friendly, even as it rid itself of the real thing’.52 Examining the StanleyPark evictions and totem pole display together helps to explain why Northwest Coast materialculture is prominent in Vancouver – indeed spectacular – while Coast Salish and their historiesare marginalized in the city. When interpreted critically against a history of colonialismand contemporary discourses of multiculturalism and tolerance, the spectacle of the totempoles becomes animated with the ghosts of an unjust past and spectres of a re-Indigenizedlandscape.

As Coast Salish people were increasingly restricted to designated Indian reserves and/orencouraged to assimilate, members of the white settler public were developing their fascinationwith romanticized Aboriginality. Interest in Northwest Coast stories and material culture contrib-uted to anxious efforts to ‘preserve’ Indigenous artefacts, especially totem poles. The Art, Histori-cal, and Scientific Association of Vancouver (AHSAV) participated actively in totem polepreservation campaigns. In the early 1920s, as Coast Salish families were defending theirhomes, AHSAV proposed the establishment of the Stanley Park Kwakwaka’wakw village to pre-serve the material culture of the ‘Kwakiutl’ and Haida peoples, who AHSAV considered to be themost advanced and intelligent tribes on the coast.53

In 1924 two totem poles and two house posts, collected from Alert Bay, were erected at Lum-berman’s Arch/Xwayxway.54 Soon after, AHSAV determined that there were insufficient funds toconstruct the ‘Indian Village’. Incidentally, members of the Squamish Nation had vocalized theirdispleasure with the village plans, suggesting that it was an affront to their territorial rights.55

While the village was never constructed, the totem poles remained and the collection has sinceexpanded to include Haida, Nisga’a, and Nuu-chah-nulth totem poles. In the early 1960s, thetotem poles were moved to Brockton Point, by then emptied forcibly of Indigenous residentsby colonial orders. The totem poles still stand there today.56 As Barman observes,

8 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

The Squamish presence at Whoi Whoi [Xwayxway] and Brockton Point was overlaid with thematerial culture of a wholly different people who lived a safe distance from Vancouver. [Shortlyafter] the initial victory over indigenous Indigeneity, its counterpart got from elsewhere was inplace.57

Mawani58 links campaigns to ‘save’ deteriorating totem poles with totem poles’ touristicpopularity and their role as a symbol of heritage for the young Canadian nation. ‘Visiblemarkers of Otherness’, she explains, ‘were a necessary reminder to tourists and travellers thatwhile Canada no longer had an “Indian problem” it did indeed have an “ancient past”’.59 Inthis way, the totem poles in Stanley Park align with Patrick Wolfe’s observation that settlercolonialism operates through an elimination/preservation logic.60 Settler colonies sought toeliminate Indigeneity to make room for and legitimize settlement while also maintaining elementsof Indigenous culture or status to enhance colonial place identities and establish their localesas distinct from the imperial metropole. Thus, the totem pole display in Stanley Park reflectsits settler colonial construction and meaning more than Indigenous peoples and the original cul-tural meanings embedded in the poles. They are ‘an iconic yet shifting symbol of colonialalterity’.61

In recent years, the city’s parks board has supported the construction of an interpretive centreand installation of commissioned poles and house posts by Coast Salish carvers Robert Yelton(Squamish) and Susan Point (Musqueam). At a pole-raising ceremony in 2009, Yelton dedicatedhis unpainted totem pole to his mother, Rose, one of the last residents of Stanley Park.62 SusanPoint’s three welcome ‘portals’, inspired by Coast Salish slanted-roof architecture, stoodnearby, erected in 2008 after years of collaboration.63 At the ceremony for the portals, Musqueamelder Larry Grant said, ‘We are finally being acknowledged as the Salish people of this territory.The rain you see coming down is very much like the tears of our ancestors who inhabited this landmany years ago prior to the city making this into a park.’64

At the new Brockton Point interpretive centre, three storyboards depict local technologiesand traditions, historical use of Stanley Park’s resources, and the adaptation of modern CoastSalish people to contemporary life, highlighting First Nations-owned fisheries and tourismenterprises. The site provides more details about the totem poles, including some selectiveinformation about the removal of poles from Indigenous communities, but there is no infor-mation about the dispossession and displacement of the park’s former inhabitants.65 Theseghosts remain hidden from view. Mawani66 suggests that increased attention to local CoastSalish people is part of a discursive strategy of nation-building that seeks redemption for anunjust colonial past through the establishment of a more tolerant, multicultural identity andthe politics of recognition. Such attempts to rid the site of its colonial haunting do not fullycontend with traumas of dispossession and the spectre of Indigenous sovereignty – both con-tinue to haunt. These spectres returned to visibility in 2010 when Coast Salish elders suggestedrenaming Stanley Park.

From Stanley Park to Xwayxway

In Fournier’s Province article on Xwayxway, she quotes two government officials sympathetic tothe name change. Kevin Krueger, provincial Minister of Tourism, Culture, and Arts, ‘enthusias-tically endorsed the idea’: ‘We have the Salish Sea, we have Haida Gwaii, and I look forward totalking to you about what your people called this place.’67 Representing Mayor Gregor Robert-son, councillor Ellen Woodsworth said that she and the council will ‘enthusiastically follow up’and consult the public if local nations submit an official name change proposal. She pointed outthat First Nations homes were destroyed or removed from the park, so ‘an Aboriginal name wouldhonour the land’s history’.

Settler Colonial Studies 9

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

These officials’ enthusiasm was not widely shared. By the end of the day, the online version ofthe Province story had over 100 comments, the majority of them negative and many openlyracist.68 Other news outlets picked up the story, politicians spoke out publically for and againsta name change, and more online commentary and offline discussion ensued for several days.69

Mayor Gregor Robertson publically stated that he had heard the name Xwayxway as a boygrowing up in Vancouver. Tourism officials weighed the merits and costs for the park’s publicityand marketing if it became Xwayxway. On July 5, James Moore, Canadian Minister of Heritageand Official Languages, stated on his website that the Conservative government did not support aname change. On the same day, president of the Treasury Board, Stockwell Day, held a press con-ference in front of Lord Stanley’s statue in the park, effectively closing the debate by declaringthat the name would remain Stanley Park:

Stanley Park is a park that’s rich in history, and rich in heritage… It was designated as a park well overa hundred years ago by the governor-general of the day, Lord Stanley. And it is our intention to main-tain the name as Stanley Park, respecting and reflecting on a wonderful heritage going back for hun-dreds and hundreds of years – our Aboriginal peoples and those immigrants who settled here later andhave continued to enjoy the park.70

Day’s speech deftly acknowledged Indigenous people while also reproducing the status quoby blocking the name change before an official proposal had even been filed. The quick timing ofhis press release event, staged only four days after the Province article, indicates the high anxietiesthe name change provoked among non-Indigenous residents and government officials. Onceagain, like the land rights claims advanced by the park’s Coast Salish and mixed-race familiesin the 1920s, the spectre of an Indigenized landscape was too much to bear and had to be exor-cised. Revenant Indigeneity at the site again was only temporarily acknowledged, and substantiverecognition and retribution further postponed. While the art and display of the totem poles and theKlahowya Village were uncontroversial and even celebrated, redress and re-emplacement of localCoast Salish Indigeneity presented a form of incommensurable alterity too uncomfortable andchallenging to accommodate. The familiar became unfamiliar, producing uncanny and anxiousa/effects.

‘Just colours’: the a/effects of renaming

The renaming debate opened (and closed) a few months after Vancouver’s Olympics, around thetime I began my fieldwork at the library and construction site. I was thus able to elicit researchparticipants’ responses to the (‘re’)naming controversy, which reflect the ambiguities andanxieties of everyday life for settlers in a colonized city. 71 In the days after the Provincearticle came out, staff members at the library shared their reactions to the story in casual conversa-tions in the staffroom and on break, and sometimes later in our semi-structured interviews. Whilesitting with a few construction workers at lunch, when the name change came up, one of the Indi-genous workers said no one would call the park Xwayxway anyway, even if the name were offi-cially changed. The other men agreed.72

In an interview with one of the white construction workers, he got angry just thinking aboutthe controversy, weeks after Stockwell Day had announced that the name would not change.

‘Why change the name?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘It’s been this way forever. It’s been that name forever.What’s the point of changing it now? Just so we can say, “Hey, it’s got another name.”’He was unable to recall the proposed name.‘Xwayxway’, I said.‘See’, he replied sarcastically, ‘the way it usually rolls off the tongue is “Stanley Park”.’

10 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

I offered to play devil’s advocate, explaining that some proponents of the name changesuggest that, in fact, the land had ‘always been’ Xwayxway before it become Stanley Park.73

They argue it should be renamed to reflect its original name.

‘Oh, is that what happened?’ he asked.‘It used to be called that, yeah,’ I said, referring to the village site. ‘So what do you think of thatargument?’‘Well, if that’s the case, then rename it back. I don’t care! Do your thing, but make it known to thepublic that that’s what’s going on. Don’t just say you want to change the name of the park!Because I had no idea [and] I read the paper. I didn’t know it was previously named this and theywant to change it back. Like I just thought they were taking Stanley Park and changing the namebecause, “Hey, Native land, here we go!”’

The worker’s explanation for his initial discomfort communicates the deeper anxiety thename change evoked: that Indigenous people will simply rename this land just becausethey can, and in doing so, will repossess lands he (and others) considered long ago settled.To re-Indigenize and rename feels threatening and/or nonsensical in part because the proposalseems like it ‘comes out of nowhere’ rather than out of a history of colonialism – a history headmits he knows little about. The spectre of what he thought was past or elsewhere – Indi-genous claims to land and the business of colonization – returns to trouble the here and nowand the future.74 Even as these men dismissed the idea that anyone would even use the newname, they express anger and consternation over the very prospect of it. If no one will use thename, then what is the problem with renaming it? That there is a problem reflects the limitsand possibilities of Indigenous recognition and the limited extent of reckoning with a colonialpast.

Mawani suggests that recent circumscribed recognition of multicultural Indigeneity can‘facilitate new resentments about Aboriginal peoples…“wanting too much” and… having“too many rights”’.75 Resentments like these are bolstered by unthreatening and familiar culturalspectacle. Spectatorship is comfortable while political reckoning is not. For many, the renamingcontroversy required reimagining mental maps of the city to make room for previously unconsid-ered possibilities of Indigenous presence. Adding Coast Salish poles or the Klahowya Village didnot engender such affective responses as the spectre of renaming, and ultimately repossession.‘Indigenous Indigeneity’ – local Coast Salish Indigeneity – had been successfully erasedenough through colonial removals and replaced with familiar cultural spectacles to make CoastSalish claims uncanny.76

Even participants sympathetic to First Nations’ concerns felt troubled by the proposal. Awhitewoman at the library commented,

The thought of changing Stanley Park’s name came up a month ago… I don’t want them to do that.But it’s – it’s… I guess for me it’s also like… it’s just in relation to my life. I grew up with StanleyPark. It’s what I know and it’s just – but really, my opinion – it doesn’t matter – because that’s not myland over there [emphases in original].

The park, though important to her life and sense of place, is not her land – she recognizes it asunceded territory of the local First Nations. Her (in)ability to speak about her affective responseto the name change – concern, anxiety, uneasiness – reveals the tension between her desireto respect Indigenous connections to land and the unsettled (and unsettling) nature of theirclaims.

I asked another staff member, raised in Vancouver, if he had ever heard the name.77

Settler Colonial Studies 11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

‘No, never. I had no idea that there was another name for it other than Stanley Park.’‘Did you know that there had been Aboriginal people living in Stanley Park, or what is now StanleyPark?’ I asked.‘No, I didn’t actually. Never crossed my mind.’‘What about Kitsilano?’ I asked, referring to the neighbourhood where he grew up, named after a localSquamish leader. ‘Do you know anything about the Aboriginal history of that place – who lived there,or… ?’‘No, I have no idea.’‘Have you ever been to the Musqueam reserve?’ I asked, thinking perhaps he knew of the reservegeography of the city more than its pre-settler or early colonial history. ‘The one out by Dunbar?’‘No. I didn’t even know it was there.’

At the end of the interview, he reflected,

Even though I’ve [lived here] my whole life, I realize how little I know about Aboriginal experienceand culture. I mean the images are around… there is artwork in most places, but… it doesn’t reallyinform you about anything. Just colours, you know?

His sentiment communicates the successful replacement of a complex Indigenous geography witha socio-spatial imaginary empty of Indigenous people and history yet full of their colourfulartwork. Even their reserves are invisible. Not only did he not know of Xwayxway, he neverreally considered the spaces that Coast Salish people inhabit(ed) in the city. Familiar with North-west Coast art, he and many others are wholly unfamiliar with other forms of Indigenous empla-cement. Thus, confronted with the name change proposal, they are shocked to learn that spectreshaunt their familiar spectacle. Mawani observes:

From the time the first Kwakwaka’wakw pole was erected at Lumberman’s Arch – at the formervillage of Whoi Whoi – the poles became a spectacle of Otherness that was highly visible to city resi-dents and travellers… [W]hile the totem poles display could be read as a presence – a symbol ofAboriginality – the poles could also and perhaps more accurately be seen as an absence; onewhich tells us nothing about the local Coast Salish, their histories, culture, and most importantly,their struggles against the state’s colonial legal practices of displacement and dispossession.78

The emplacement of Coast Salish poles and opening of Aboriginal Tourism BC’s Klahowya Village– though a shift towards attention to local people –were packaged in familiarly spectacular forms. Incontrast, the renaming controversy made visible, briefly, what had been previously hidden fromview in the shadows of the totem poles: Coast Salish emplacement, removal, and revenance.79

Non-Indigenous affective responses to the spectre of Xwayxway – the ‘place of the masks’ –reveal the ambivalences and tensions around colonial reckoning, regularly felt but seldomexpressed – another dynamic of presence and absence. Stories of the ‘forgotten’ families ofStanley Park demonstrate that ‘forgetting’ is in fact a process supported by the colonialproject. Remembering, renaming, and remapping can create new opportunities to encounterand animate the ghosted, marginalized, and erased – if they are not simply reburied only toreturn again and again. Next, I explore these dynamics in another space of settler colonial spec-trality and spectacle, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The Downtown Eastside

Many of my research participants identified the Downtown Eastside as a site of visible Indigene-ity. The neighbourhood is also an avoided place; visibility is made invisible through aversion.Indigenous people and other residents are ‘in plain sight’ on its streets and ‘hidden from view’

12 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

as are the colonial processes that produce this duality and their marginality.80 The exceptionalismof the Downtown Eastside as a representational and material space of poverty, addiction, sexwork, and crime has become an ordinary dimension of settler colonial sociality: a spectacle ofsuffering that occasionally haunts the city. This dialectic shapes residents’ lives and impressionsof them formed by people who drive through or avoid their streets.

To critically interrogate this problematic dynamic, I discuss the missing and murdered womenof the Downtown Eastside, many of whom are Indigenous, and the February 14th Annual Mem-orial March that commemorates their lives and deaths. The march, now in its 25th year, presentsan annual opportunity for the women and their family and friends to be heard and seen. TheMarch contests what geographer Jennifer England has described as an oscillation between hyper-visibility and invisibility for Indigenous women, especially sex workers, in the Downtown East-side: hyper-visible on the streets through processes of racialization, precarity, and harassment bypolice and others; invisible through discourses that ignore the intersections of colonialism, race,and class that (re)produce their precarity and ignore their expressions of agency and resistance.81

Drawing on Avery Gordon’s analysis of haunting, feminist theorist Amber Dean contends that thedisappeared women of the Downtown Eastside are a ‘seething presence’ and the March marks anopportunity to recognize and mourn them.82 In this section, I draw on England and Dean’s ana-lyses, as well as ethnographer Dara Culhane’s account of the 2001 march and my own partici-pation in the 2012 march, to examine the Downtown Eastside as a site of spectacle and aspace-time that haunts.

I attended the 2012 march with Theresa, a young white university-educated woman fromAlberta who worked as the BladeRunners officer manager during my fieldwork there. Throughoutthat time, Theresa and I had many conversations about her reasons for working with the organ-ization, her learning curve within it, and her overall impressions of the Downtown Eastside. Sheinitially worked in the neighbourhood to take an active role in social change, but faced criticismand difficulty in the process. Her complicated feelings and stories provide some insight into hownon-Indigenous people like her form their impressions of the neighbourhood through personal,affective experiences with its spectacles and spectres.

In the late morning on Valentine’s Day in 2012, Theresa and I stood with hundreds of otherwomen at the intersection of Main and Hastings to recognize and remember over five dozenwomen who have been murdered or disappeared from the Downtown Eastside. We were thereto resist a settler colonial ‘regime of disappearance’.83 Reports of missing women in the neigh-bourhood emerged in the early 1980s, but a serious investigation did not ensue until the late1990s, after the women’s families, journalists, and community advocates demanded attentionto the growing number of the missing; public pressure mounted as this number continued torise in the early 2000s.84 The delay of concern and justice for these women conveyed public,police, and violent perpetrators’ devaluation of their lives, sustained by moralizing metrics thatemphasized their prostitution and drug use over recognizing their humanity and equal right tosafety, care, and justice.

In 2007 pig farmer Robert Pickton was convicted of second-degree murder of six women:Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Le Frey, Georgina Faith Papin, Mona LeeWilson, and Brenda Ann Wolfe. Convicted to serve consecutive life sentences, the court didnot try Pickton for his remaining charges for 20 counts of murder. He had confessed to killingover four dozen women in total, accounting for many but not all of the neighbourhood’s disap-peared women. While Pickton’s conviction demonstrated an important act of justice, media cover-age of the trial perpetuated social processes that invisibilize women in the neighbourhood andfixation on Pickton alone redirected potential focus from structural violence to Pickton’sviolent acts, reducing social and state culpability to a (re)solvable court case.85 Furthermore,media accounts erased and minimized the disproportionately Indigenous profile of the victims

Settler Colonial Studies 13

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

and failed to address the colonial dimensions of their structural positions and delayed justice. TheAnnual Feb. 14th Women’s Memorial March aims to ensure that these women, their present andliving counterparts, and the structural inequalities they face(d) can ‘emerge into visibility’.86

Culhane emphasizes that march participants resist invisibility by constructing their own rep-resentations of their community and the missing and murdered women. To begin the event eachyear, community members gather inside the Carnegie Community Centre for a ceremony withsmudging, prayers, and speeches about patriarchy, poverty, violence, and local service provision.Loved ones share their grief, concern, anger, and hope. At the march in 2012, I waited withTheresa outside Carnegie during the ceremony, the crowd spilling onto the street as policeblocked off traffic. Soon Indigenous women in regalia led a procession out onto the street, drum-ming and singing. The crowd formed a large circle around the Main and Hastings intersection,clutching quilt squares decorated for each missing woman. Singing the Lil’wat Women Warriors’song, we all began to walk together through the Downtown Eastside.

Each year, a group of women periodically stop to smudge where women’s bodies have beenfound – in alleys, outside of bars, in parking lots. Privacy is requested; no photographs areallowed. They read the women’s names, say how they died, and link the women with their rela-tives: ‘mother of ___, sister of ___, daughter of ___, friend of ___’.87 ‘In this way’, Culhaneexplains,

they [inscribe] these women’s lives on land, and in place. It is appropriate that there is so much empha-sis on mourning and death. Perpetual, repetitive, relentless experiences of tragic loss permeate thelives of individuals and families in this community.88

Reinscribing these disappeared women on the colonized landscape claims space for them andbrings them into view.89 It is a haunting act: a ‘repressed or unresolved social violence ismaking itself known’.90 Haunting as well is the realization that there is no place to stop for thewomen disappeared or found elsewhere. Their ‘seething presence’ is felt in their absence.

Photogenic spectacles

In 2010 New York Times reporter Greg Bishop located the Downtown Eastside in the ‘shadows’ ofVancouver’s spectacular North Shore Mountains and 2010 Winter Olympic Games, repeating avariation on a common theme as he described the neighbourhood’s poverty and ‘depravity’:

At the corner of Main and Hastings, residents of the poorest postal code in Canada passed a recentTuesday afternoon. One man lighted a crack pipe, inhaling deeply. Another urinated on a wall.Another burned a book of matches, muttering at the flame. Two men started fighting. One brandisheda bicycle seat, the other a salad that spilled onto the sidewalk. ‘All that over drugs,’ a passer-by said.‘Welcome to the Downtown Eastside.’91

Sensational discourses like Bishop’s are central to ‘regimes of disappearance’ that invisibilize thepolitics of inner-city socio-spatial segregation and marginalize residents, Culhane contends. Suchrepresentations produce a ‘dramatic and photogenic spectacle of social suffering’ that endorsesspectators to observe a cultural display of human turmoil rather than pay attention to the struc-tural, historical, and political processes that produce inequalities.92

The Downtown Eastside is located east of Stanley Park and Vancouver’s Downtown. Itsnorthern border, Burrard Inlet, is clear, but its eastern, western, and southern borders are blurryand overlap with distinctive neighbourhoods like Chinatown, Strathcona, and Gastown. Its epi-centre is the intersection of major corridors Main Street (north-south) and Hastings Street(east-west). Of the approximately 17,000 residents living in the Downtown Eastside, between

14 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

15% and 30% are Indigenous, compared with just 2% in Vancouver overall.93 At least one third ofthe missing and murdered women were/are Indigenous. Indigeneity in the Downtown Eastside,visible to passers-by and residents, is rarely acknowledged in accounts like Bishop’s or occasion-ally ‘slipped in’ to stories of the missing women with signifiers like smudging ceremonies orbland one-liners like ‘many of the women were/are Aboriginal’.94 Culhane notes, however,‘Anyone passing through inner-city Vancouver on foot, on a bus, or in a car cannot help butSEE, in a literal sense, the concentration of Aboriginal people here.’95 As Culhane argues, sensa-tional and/or invisibilizing discourses are bound up in practices of ‘race blindness’ that fail toaddress the ‘burden of social suffering carried by Aboriginal people in this neighbourhood –and in Canada as a whole’.96

Consistent with my definition of spectacle, instead of situating this burden in broader his-torical/political perspective, non-Indigenous spectators observe Indigeneity as a taken-for-granted part of the neighbourhood’s ‘culture of poverty’ on display. As one of England’s par-ticipants observes, Indigenous women are imagined to ‘belong’ in this culture. A culture ofpoverty interpretive gaze ignores, displaces, and/or distracts from the politics of poverty andrace in the neighbourhood. England writes, ‘the inner city is marked primarily by racializedbodies of deviance [in ways that] naturalize the material and symbolic “place” of urbanFirst Nations people’.97 Non-Indigenous scholars and settler-spectators have long imaginedIndigenous people as out of place in the city – owing to a history of forced displacementfrom cities and romantic ideas of Indigenous culture perpetuated by ethnographers. Thosewho are ‘found’ in the city are constructed as dysfunctional, therefore ‘belonging’ in the dys-functional parts of town.98 Informed directly by colonial processes, this teleological reading ofculture and ‘cultures of poverty’ collapses urban dysfunction and Indigeneity in harmful ways.It also ignores dispossession of local Indigenous peoples as part of urban development andalso how experiences of colonialism in other Indigenous communities, such as residentialschools and disconnection from traditional lands, contribute to Indigenous movementbetween cities and reserves.99

Such structural legacies of colonial injustice shape the Downtown Eastside’s demographicsbut are largely ignored in favour of exotic stories of addiction, sex work, crime, and violence.100

Representational spectacles like these also disappear resistance and social change advanced byneighbourhood residents.101 For many non-residents, the neighbourhood is produced throughthese imaginaries and looking relations: a sight/site to behold but not inhabit or engage or ques-tion critically.102 In the introduction of their volume of Downtown Eastside women’s narratives,editors Leslie Robertson and Dara Culhane quote a woman named Laurie:

You’re looking at me but you’re not looking at me. You’re not seeing me…We’re here but you can’tsee us. You can’t see the real us… See, the buses come and go down here and you see people lookingbut they don’t see nothing. All they see is dope.103

Several of my research participants’ experiences are a testament to Laurie’s analysis, includingTheresa’s:

My second week [living in Vancouver], my friend picked me up and gave me a driving tour ofVancouver and the North Shore, and she drove me down Main and Hastings. And she said, ‘Thisis the Downtown Eastside.’ And I was horrified. I was just… blown away by the… the fact thatit existed and that… a city, a Westernized city, a Westernized city in my country, could notonly allow it to happen but could ignore it…And all you have to do is drive down the street …The recycling place – just the sheer amount of people… they were dirty, clearly mental issues, anddrug use, and no concept of where they were, and what was going on … just filthy [emphases inoriginal].

Settler Colonial Studies 15

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

From the windows of the bus and car, Theresa and others are spectators, gazing out at the spec-tacular poverty, addiction, and Indigeneity on display: ‘all you have to do is drive down thestreet’. They look but do not understand or relate to the lives of the people there. They remainremoved as settler-spectators with the privilege of looking and looking away.

In our conversations, Theresa reflected on how her perspectives on the neighbourhood shiftedover time – what once shocked her became less shocking, but not less spectacular. She regularlycalled her mother and friends to share scandalous stories. The spectacle became absorbed into hereveryday socio-spatial imaginary, a normalized place apart from the rest of the city – just asStanley Park’s totem poles are part of and apart from everyday life. Even when she becameinvolved in BladeRunners, Theresa often talked about the neighbourhood as an outside observer,not a participant, and left each day for home in a different part of Vancouver. Another distinctivefeature of spectacle and settler colonialism is to observe without feeling implicated.

Resisting representations

In her essay ‘Haunted Spaces’, art historian Denise Blake Oleksijczuk links artist Stan Douglas’sphotograph Every Building on 100 West Hastings to the then-emerging case of missing women inVancouver’s Downtown Eastside.104 In Douglas’s carefully engineered panoramic photograph,the usually busy street is emptied of its inhabitants – an allusion pointing to neglect and the neigh-bourhood’s decline and to the dozens of women disappeared from view. She suggests that Dou-glas’s photograph ‘resists viewers’ attempts to incorporate only ideal images of the city’ andinvites an active, not passive, form of looking upon and for an absence.105 Emphasizing the dehu-manization of the neighbourhood’s women, and systems of power that isolate the DowntownEastside, she argues that the photograph encourages ‘spectators to cross both social andpsychic boundaries not simply to feel empathy by putting themselves in these women’s shoes,but to consciously and corporally implicate themselves in that which is disavowed’.106

In a broadsheet Sister Outsiders, issued by the Vancouver Rape Relief andWomen’s Shelter incritical response to the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, Lee Lakeman considers thepassive and disconnected language often used to describe women in the Downtown Eastside:

‘Marginalized’. Over and over that is how the women are referred to at the Missing Women Commis-sion of Inquiry. ‘Marginalized women’. Those using the term may mean to be respectful but they aremissing the point. The point is: Who creates the ‘main stream’? Who sets its margins? Who controlsits centre? And who did the marginalizing?107

Her questions refuse an interpretation of the Downtown Eastside as separate from broadersocio-political, historical, and spatial contexts. She resists the tendency to cast a fascinatedgaze on victimhood without searching for perpetrators, whether individuals or institutions orstructural conditions. She and other Sister Outsiders writers demand attention to the colonialproduction of the neighbourhood, and insist on actively listening to local women rather thanperpetuating their silencing.108 They challenge observers, like those who view Stan Douglas’sphotograph, to refuse their role as passive spectators and become witnesses, implicated in theprocesses the women describe.

In December 2012, the Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter hosted a roundtable just before thepublic release of the Missing Women Inquiry’s final report.109 Although the report ultimatelydemonstrated that racism permeated the flawed investigation into the missing women’s cases,many women’s and advocacy groups felt the Inquiry’s process failed to sufficiently addressother structural dimensions of injustice and appropriately include local women’s perspectives.Without hearing the voices of living, breathing Indigenous women in the Downtown Eastside,roundtable participants argued, justice for the missing and dead women is still missing.

16 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

As Culhane’s analysis demonstrates, Indigenous women join together with their allies to resistspectacular images and narratives of their neighbourhood and demand recognition on their ownterms. They return year after year to challenge media spectacles of drugs, sex, and violence andenact their own politics of representation, bringing to the centre what is systematically pushed tothe margins. The march brings pain and mourning out into the open, but in ways that differ fromthe open suffering visible on the street and captured by accounts like Bishop’s. The march, whilespectacular in scale, is not intended to entertain others. It is both a memorial and a call to actionaround circumstances that continue to haunt. Haunting, Gordon reminds us, can produce a ‘some-thing-to-be-done’.110 Unlike the Downtown Eastside media spectacle or drive-by spectatorshipthe march commands, again and again, attention to the shadows and margins.111

Haunting encounters

As hundreds of women marched along Hastings Street, I told Theresa I was surprised she cameout for the march, given her complicated feelings about the neighbourhood. The year before, shedeclined to attend. During the year, however, she had several encounters and learning momentsthat challenged her to engage differently with the neighbourhood and its ghosts. While Theresathought the Inquiry report was ‘a joke and an embarrassment’, and though the neighbourhoodcontinued to trouble her, she was unequivocal in her assessment of the conditions that enabledthe women’s disappearance and delayed the investigation. ‘This is different,’ she said, glancingaround at the women at the march and the photos of the missing women. ‘This was wrong.’

The social problems the march highlighted in 2012 have been remarkably consistent andpersistent over its 25-year history; Theresa herself felt different. Informed by affective spectraland spectacular encounters and confronted with banalities of marginality, she began to recognizethe ghosts. For example, in an interview, Theresa recalled a particularly haunting encounterof (dis)connection. Retelling the story chokes her up, her nose red and eyes wet. One day atBladeRunners,

a girl walked in and she was… upset. And she reached out to shake my hand… and her hands – I havevery tiny hands, and her hand was the same size as mine. And it was dirty, and cold. And it was just…heartbreaking… because this was the first time that I really saw one of them as being like me.

Her voice steadied and she spoke quietly:

And then she came in the next week, and then she came in the week after that. And you realize that itwas a pattern. And that is the difficult part – the first time it’s heartbreaking. By the third time, thefourth time, I don’t know what after that?… It’s difficult because…what do you do in the face ofa patterned behaviour? She was one of the ones that helped me… see the pattern. But the patternis even more heartbreaking because you realize that it is so vast in terms of a problem… that theissues are so vast, and so ongoing, and so engrained [emphases in original].

This encounter’s pedagogical impact reverberates and takes new shape over time for Theresa. Awoman she had ghosted through disconnection, became real through the act of touch: a corporealconnection gave up the ghost, shifting a persistent form of dehumanization. The story revealsmicroprocesses of marginalization, a cast of two characters that personifies a pervasive structuraldynamic. As a woman situated on the margins came into view, her return opened a space to reflecton more insidious forms of haunting: normalized processes of privilege and penalty, structuralinequalities, and misrecognition.112

As we walked towards Gastown, pausing occasionally as the group of women smudged wheremurdered women’s bodies were found, Theresa updated me on her upcoming plans to leave

Settler Colonial Studies 17

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

Vancouver to return to Alberta.113 She was excited to get out of the Downtown Eastside, herenthusiasm fuelled by frustration with constraints she observed in efforts towards meaningfulintervention.114 She commented once that she wanted to retreat back into her privilege, to distanceherself from the neighbourhood’s social problems. She wanted to resume her role as a spectator,with the attendant ability to look away. Injustice and marginalization haunt the privileged whenthey no longer remain hidden from view and disrupt cultural spectacles with revenant politics,accusations, and suggestion of culpability and implication.

‘In haunting’, Gordon argues, ‘systemic structures that appear removed from us make theirimpact felt in everyday life in a way that confounds our analytic [and] social separations’.115

Walking along ‘haunted spaces’ of the Downtown Eastside disabled Theresa’s ability, for atime, to remain removed and unmoved, confounding her separation and challenging her to feelthe impacts of systemic inequalities and situate herself in relation to them. At the same time,she could and did leave – daily and then for good. Gordon argues that attending to the politicsof ghosts involves ensuring that they are ‘not ghosted or abandoned or disappeared again inthe act of dealing with the haunting’.116 In the Downtown Eastside, how can non-Indigenouspeople sustain an engagement beyond looking relations or abandonment? What are the edu-cational, material, and affective resources required for ethical relations and socio-politicalaccountability in this context? What is the role of resistance, like the march, and representations,like Bishop’s and others, in transforming these relations? How can the circumscribed conditionsof spectacular and spectral Indigeneity in the neighbourhood and Vancouver be disrupted andreimagined? Now you see it, now you don’t does not provide a solid foundation for reckoningbut perhaps acknowledging this dynamic does allow us to ask critical questions to imagineotherwise.117

Not a conclusion: looking back, around, and forward

Coast Salish people fished and gathered around Burrard Inlet, English Bay, False Creek, and otherwaterways and lands for millennia. The Squamish established a permanent settlement on FalseCreek’s shores in the mid-1800s. Colonial officials designated Snauq ‘Indian Reserve 6 (theKitsilano Reserve)’. In the late 1800s, the Canadian Pacific Railway expropriated False Creeklands, and soon province and city officials pressured the Squamish to ‘unsettle’ the KitsilanoReserve altogether.118 In 1913 remaining families at Snauq loaded their possessions onto abarge to the Capilano Reserve on Burrard Inlet’s northern shore. Snauq’s structures wereburned. Beginning in the 1970s, the Squamish Nation pursued court action to reclaim the Kitsi-lano Reserve and successfully brokered a $92.5 million settlement outside of court in the early2000s. The land once again belongs to them.

In Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle’s story ‘Goodbye, Snauq’, the narrator grieves for the formervillage site: ‘In this goodbye we will remember Snauq before the draining of False Creek’.119

The character is haunted by the eyes of her ancestors, who first looked upon False Creek searchingfor sustenance, and later watched as it was transformed for industrial use and reworked again forgentrified waterfront residential development. Her ancestors continue their vigilance as theirmodern-day descendants find ways to resist erasure and removal, sometimes using colonizers’tools: the courts, the law, expressions of nationhood. They return in archival documents filedwith the courts to support Snauq’s reclamation. They speak in Maracle’s story – August ‘Jack’Khatsahlano, Chief George (Chipkaym), her Ta’ah – describing shifts in the social order andtransformation of their homelands. Though the nation has ‘settled’ the land, the ancestors arenot laid to rest. They are increasingly present, returning to watch the next transformation: the bill-boards the nation erects, the outcry that ensues from city residents who do not understand thisspectacular expression of sovereignty. Though Maracle’s narrator says goodbye to Snauq, she

18 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

also greets an uncertain future and blurs any sense of linearity or closure implied in stories of‘settlement’. ‘Although today, I must say goodbye, tomorrow I may just buy one of the town-houses slated for completion…’ she says, ‘Today, I am entitled to dream. Khatsahlanodreamed of being buried at Snauq. I dream of living there.’120

In 2012 a construction project in Vancouver uncovered a Coast Salish burial site, part of thevast Marpole Midden, a National Heritage Site on the Fraser River. The Musqueam call the sitec ̓əsnaʔəm and members of the community quickly mobilized there to protest the constructionproject, reclaim the property, and lay their ancestors to rest.121 Their claims to place had beencovered up (quite literally, by concrete and tar) through colonial urban development, but weremade visible again through their contemporary acts of resistance and remembering. In January2015 the Museum of Vancouver, the Musqueam Nation, and the Museum of Anthropologywill feature a collaboratively curated exhibit called c ̓əsnaʔəm: The City Before the City. The exhi-bit’s goals are manifold: to revisit the museum’s earlier role in excavating and displaying MarpoleMidden materials and ‘construct[ing] a story about Vancouver’s past that distanced and excludedthe Musqueam’; to provide visitors with opportunities to ‘meet’Musqueam people through multi-media displays; and to facilitate public discussions about Indigenous-settler relations.

C̓əsnaʔəm: The City Before the City thus offers a Coast Salish-led opportunity for members ofthe non-Indigenous public to experience Indigeneity not as spectacular or haunting, but asdynamic, place-based, contextualized, and living and breathing in full view, all around the city.The exhibit’s direct confrontation of the colonial dynamics of the Marpole Midden’s excavationand museum collection and intentional narrative to contest colonial narratives of the city’s devel-opment indicates the power of revenant Indigeneity to disrupt linearity and make visible buriedstories. The Museum of Vancouver is situated at the site of Snauq, adding another layer of signifi-cance to this already significant effort. Indigeneity returns at this site: (re)presenting in new waysthat refuse spectacularization or re-erasure.122

Many non-Indigenous residents living in Vancouver today had never heard of c̓əsnaʔəmwhenthe construction crew unearthed Musqueam ancestors. Many still have not, just as most have notheard of Snauq or Xwayxway either. These sites have not factored or fit into their socio-spatialimaginaries of the city or Indigeneity. As I explained in this article, they are more likely toindex Stanley Park’s totem poles or the Downtown Eastside. These sites illustrate well thesettler colonial conditions of spectacle and spectrality – regimes of (in)visibility that circumscribeIndigeneity in Vancouver. Spectacle facilitates passive settler observation of Indigenous perform-ance and suffering rather than encouraging recognition of Indigenous peoples’ voices, realities,histories, spaces, and sovereignty. Under the spectacular/spectral regime of (in)visibility, Indi-geneity is holographic and shape-shifting: now you see it, now you don’t. These conditionslimit other possible ways of being-together in difference and relation, enabling settlers to disen-gage altogether. The spectral colonial past and uncertain future make space and time feel uncannyand ‘out of joint’ in the city.123 This ‘structure of feeling’ involves anxious affects that must beaddressed and accounted for.124

Indigenous claims on the present and future, as expressed at the February 14th AnnualWomen’s Memorial March, Stanley Park renaming proposal, the Squamish Nation’s (re)settle-ment at Snauq, and Musqueam’s reclamation and renarration of c̓əsnaʔəm refuse this circumscrip-tion and unjust relational arrangement. It is necessary for settlers to understand that when the‘over-and-done-with’ of colonialism returns to haunt the present, it was there all along for Indi-genous peoples.125 This article endeavours to contribute to these efforts by interrogating thesocio-historical conditions that produce these terrains of recognition, memory, and elision orabsence. The stories told here of Xwayxway and Stanley Park, the Downtown Eastside andmissing and murdered Indigenous women, and the revenant possibilities for Snauq andc ̓əsnaʔəm convey a complex Indigenous spatio-temporality in Vancouver that is flattened,

Settler Colonial Studies 19

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

shifted, reimagined, and elided in spectacular and spectral settler imaginaries. This article worksto denaturalize these conditions to demonstrate how they are produced, sustained, and constitutiveof everyday life in a settler colonial place and also to encourage all of us to look – and feel – dif-ferently.126 This need not be a spectacular gesture, nor motivated by a desire to simply rid ourhomes of ghosts. Instead, it will come through the hard but important work of dismantling spec-tacular and spectral settler colonial conditions to reorient ourselves relationally to each other andthe Indigenous land we all live on.

Funding

This work was supported by a scholarship from the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of BritishColumbia.

Notes on contributorNatalie J.K. Baloy recently moved to Amah Mutsun territories in coastal California to work as a Postdoc-toral Scholar with the Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California at the University of Cali-fornia, Santa Cruz. She is working on a project entitled ‘Ethical Issues in Collaborative Community-BasedResearch.’Additionally, Baloy is a lecturer in the UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program. She com-pleted her PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where she lived on theunceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Notes1. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethno-

graphic Event (London: Cassell, 1999).2. ‘Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy’, in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First

Century, ed. Oneka HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2012), 66–93.

3. See also Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States(Duke University Press: Durham; London, 2014).

4. Jean Barman, ‘Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity in Vancouver’, BC Studies 155 (2007): 3–30; ColeHarris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancou-ver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2002); Robert A.J. McDonald, Making Vancouver:Class, Status, and Social Boundaries, 1863–1913 (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 1996); JordanStanger-Ross, ‘Municipal Colonialism in Vancouver: City Planning and the Conflict over IndianReserves, 1928–1950s’, The Canadian Historical Review 89, no. 4 (2008): 541–80.

5. Idle No More developed as a broad-based social movement in the winter of 2012–2013 to contestConservative legislation and assert Indigenous treaty rights and sovereignty. See Glen SeanCoulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Indigenous Amer-icas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

6. Metro Vancouver, ‘Metro Vancouver Key Facts: Metro Vancouver Aboriginal Population, 2011 Census’,2014, http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/regional-planning/PlanningPublications/AboriginalPopulationbyMunicipality.pdf (accessed March 3, 2015).

7. The Capilano and Burrard reserves are situated along Burrard Inlet in North Vancouver, and Mus-queam reserve is in Vancouver at the mouth of the Fraser River. The Hulitsum, Katzie, Kwantlen,Kwikwetlem, Matsqui, Qayqayt, Semiahmoo, Sto:lo, and Tsawwassen are recognized as localFirst Nations, most with local reserves. Since the arrival of settlers, management of local Indigenouspeoples has entailed the establishment of Indian reserves; the development of federal policies includ-ing the Indian Act, which attempted to define Indian status and regulate Indigenous lifeways; and theinstitutionalization of the residential school system, which aimed to facilitate children’s assimilationinto mainstream settler society. These policies serve(d) to entrench social and spatial differencesbetween Indigenous people and the non-Indigenous population settling in large numbers on theirlands. Differences within and between Indigenous communities have been blurred through theseracialized processes. Local Coast Salish groups have responded by exercising and defending their

20 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

Indigenous rights through landmark court cases, economic development enterprises, and otherexpressions of sovereignty. At the same time, many urban Indigenous organizations have developedto address the causes and effects of marginalization, tackling issues related to poverty, education,housing, addiction, employment, childcare, cultural empowerment, and more.

8. Statistics Canada, ‘National Household Survey: Immigration and Ethnocultural Diversity inCanada’, 2011, http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-010-x/99-010-x2011001-eng.cfm (accessed February 24, 2015). In the 1970s, after a series of federal immigration policychanges, non-European immigration to Vancouver increased rapidly, with the majority of immigrantsarriving from Hong Kong and Mainland China, followed by the Punjab and other regions of India, thePhilippines, and other Asian countries.

9. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, New University ofMinnesota Press ed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Leslie A. Robertson andDara Culhane, eds., In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (Vancouver,BC: Talonbooks, 2005).

10. See Dara Culhane, ‘‘Their Spirits Live within Us’: Aboriginal Women in Downtown EastsideEmerging into Visibility’, American Indian Quarterly 27, nos. 3/4 (2003): 593–606 for her useof the concept ‘regimes of disappearance’ in her analysis of missing and murdered women inVancouver’s Downtown Eastside. At the 2014 American Anthropological Association AnnualMeetings, I co-organized two panels with colleagues Solen Roth, Joseph Weiss, and EugeniaKisin. We used the theme ‘regimes of visibility’ to bring together scholars working to analysethe politics of Indigenous art, performance, display, and sovereignty on the Northwest Coast.

11. To speak of spectacle and spectrality in academic circles calls to mind two French philosophers: GuyDebord and Jacques Derrida –Marxist critics and contemporaries who rarely engaged in debates withone another. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Derrida’s Specters of Marx are both foundationaltexts that have generated considerable scholarly discussions, each with its own distinct trajectory. Myaim is not to contribute to these disparate debates, but rather to draw on both Debord and Derrida, anda range of other scholars, to formulate my own definitions and applications of their terms.

12. Roger Epp,We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays, 1st ed. (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press,2008); ‘‘There Was No One Here When We Came’: Overcoming the Settler Problem’, The ConradGrebel Review, The 2011 Bechtel Lectures, 30, no. 2 (2012): 115–26; Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy:Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Paulette Regan, Unset-tling the Settler within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

13. It is important to note that, just as ‘Indigenous’ is a political term describing a heterogeneous popu-lation, so too is ‘settler’ heterogeneous. Still, the Indigenous/settler binary is heuristically useful aswell as ethnographically salient, despite the diversity of identities and experiences that both termsand their binary configuration gloss over.

14. ‘Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigen-ous Nations’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 2 (September 29, 2014): 1–32.

15. Natalie J.K. Baloy, ‘Spectacle, Spectrality, and the Everyday Settler Colonialism, Aboriginal Alter-ity, and Inclusion in Vancouver (Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2014).

16. While living in the Pacific Northwest from 2006 to 2014, I observed a proliferation of Aboriginalinclusion efforts. I understand these projects to be responses from settler peoples and governmentto Indigenous people’s persistent demands for distinct status and recognition, as well as evidenceof unequal social and material conditions. My broader research project examines the forms and qual-ities of encounter inclusion projects enable and disable. At the interstices of government policy, on-the-ground services, and everyday urban life, I ask how inclusion initiatives broker shifting relationsbetween Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and make possible new forms of meaning-making,presenting ethnographically grounded critiques of the (il)logics of ‘including’ Indigenous Others ontheir territories and homelands. Glen Coulthard’s recent critique of recognition in Red Skin, WhiteMasks offers some analytical parallels and opportunities for further work in this direction.

17. Baloy, ‘Spectacle, Spectrality, and the Everyday’.18. Robertson, Imagining Difference, 161.19. ‘Their Spirits Live Within Us’, 594.20. ‘Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies’, in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spec-

tacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon (Philadelphia:Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 243.

21. The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 13.

Settler Colonial Studies 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

22. For example, historian Susan Roy uses examples of Musqueam performances in the 1960s to demon-strate how Musqueam dancers played off of non-Indigenous audience’s expectations of Indigenousperformance to articulate their own political attachments to land and history. She writes,

although non-Aboriginal audiences, who were steeped in a tradition that distinguishesbetween Aboriginal or folk cultural tradition and political activity, likely viewed Aboriginalperformances as non-confrontational, even nostalgic, [the Musqueam’s] displays containedelements of promotion and protests that were only possible within such celebratory intercul-tural settings.

‘Performing Musqueam Culture and History at British Columbia’s 1966 Centennial Celebrations’,BC Studies 135 (2002), 67. See also Julie Cruikshank, ‘Negotiating with Narrative: Establishing Cul-tural Identity at the Yukon International Storytelling Festival’, American Anthropologist 99, no. 1(1997): 56–69; Paige Raibmon, ‘Theatres of Contact: The Kwakwaka’wakw Meet Colonialism inBritish Columbia and at the Chicago World’s Fair’, Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 2 (2000):157–90; Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century NorthwestCoast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Bruce Granville Miller, ‘Bringing Culture in:Community Responses to Apology, Reconciliation, and Reparations’, American Indian Cultureand Research Journal 30, no. 4 (2006): 1–17; Charlotte Townsend-Gault, ‘Circulating Aboriginal-ity’, Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 2 (2004): 183–202; Nick Stanley, Being Ourselves for You:The Global Display of Cultures (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998).

23. ‘The Spectacle of the “Other”’, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Prac-tices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 226.

24. Society of the Spectacle, 12.25. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990).26. As geographer Emilie Cameron observes in her article ‘Indigenous Spectrality’, spectrality has

emerged as a ‘compelling metaphor’ for critical scholars working to reveal the influence of the ‘colo-nial past in this ongoing colonial present’. ‘Indigenous Spectrality and the Politics of PostcolonialGhost Stories’, Cultural Geographies 15, no. 3 (2008): 383–4. Although Cameron critiques the spec-tral turn for its collusion in disappearing Indigenous voices and peoples, she explains that stories ofghosts can enable analysts to unsettle and critique colonial conceptions of time and space, and tointerrogate the ‘mismatch between the ideal and the real, the present and the absent’ (383).

27. cf. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush, eds., Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts inNorth American Culture and History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).

28. Race, Space, and the Law (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002).29. Spectral analysis is especially useful when addressing issues of race, racialization, and racism, which

continue to shape everyday encounters and material conditions even as historical and biological con-ceptions of race are increasingly recognized as defunct, inaccurate, and scientifically and morallywrong. As geographer Anoop Nayak writes, ‘Although race may be a “floating signifier”, we mustask under what conditions it is summoned-to-life and allowed to materialise within time andplace.’ ‘Race, Affect, and Emotion: Young People, Racism, and Grafitti in the PostcolonialEnglish Suburbs’, Environment and Planning A 42, no. 10 (2010): 554. Race effects a spectralforce on contemporary social relations that only occasionally comes into full view.

30. ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity’, Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011): 3. Ibid.31. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London:

Routledge, 1994), 39.32. Sociologist Renisa Mawani writes, ‘specters, as apparitions, phantoms, ghosts, Derrida contends, are

always of time and its interruption’. ‘Specters of Indigeneity in British-Indian Migration, 1914’, Lawand Society Review 46, no. 2 (2012): 374. In her analysis of Indian migration in the 1910s, Mawanidemonstrates how the spectral figure of Indigeneity emerged in surprising, sometimes contradictoryways in Indian satire, legal arguments, and public debates at the time. By tracking the ghosts, Mawanicontests colonial histories that suggest successive linearity of colonial time: Indigeneity then Euro-pean settlement then non-European migration.

33. Gordon also addresses the temporalities of haunting, suggesting that ghosts are not simply of the pastbut rather constitute the present and even evoke a sense of ‘something-to-be-done’ in the future.

22 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

Haunting is ‘at its core a contest over the future’. ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting’, 3. While the Indi-genous spectral figures in Mawani’s account are circumscribed and instrumentalized, Gordon thinksthat ghosts can serve a more hopeful and emancipatory purpose if they are given a hospitablewelcome by social analysts and actors. By directly attending to ghosts and the ‘trouble they representand symptomize’, we can work to avoid a haunted future: ‘in the gracious but careful reckoning withthe ghost…we [can] locate some elements of a practice for moving towards eliminating the con-ditions that produce the haunting in the first place’ (17).

34. Ibid., 2.35. Ibid.36. ‘Structures of Feeling’, inMarxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35.37. Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town (Vancouver, BC:

University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 166.38. Ibid.39. Geographer Eva Sierp notes that commentaries often frame Stanley Park’s poles as touristic. As I

demonstrate, however, the poles are in fact quite significant for Vancouver residents, shaping theirideas about Aboriginality.

40. ‘How about a Stroll in Xwayxway?: First Nations Propose Reverting to Name of Ancient NativeVillage on Site’, The Province, July 1, 2010.

41. Xwayxway is also called or spelled Whoi Whoi, Why-why, Qoiquo, xw’ayxway, and xwáýxway.Jean Barman, Stanley Park’s Secret: The Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch andBrockton Point (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 2005).

42. Grant did not comment on the name change in the article.43. Renisa Mawani, ‘Imperial Legacies (Post)Colonial Identities: Law, Space and the Making of Stanley

Park, 1859–2001’, Law Text Culture 7, no. 1 (2003): 98–141; ‘From Colonialism to Multicultural-ism? Totem Poles, Tourism, and National Identity in Vancouver’s Stanley Park’, Ariel: A Reviewof International English Literature 35, no. 1/2 (2004): 31–57; ‘Genealogies of the Land: Aborigin-ality, Law, and Territory in Vancouver’s Stanley Park’, Social & Legal Studies 14, no. 3 (September1, 2005): 315–39; Barman, Stanley Park’s Secret; ‘Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity’.

44. Stanley Park’s Secret.45. Ibid., 13.46. Ibid.47. ‘Imperial Legacies’.48. Ibid.49. Mawani, ‘Genealogies of the Land’.50. Except for Agnes and Timothy Cummings, who were inexplicably allowed to remain in their Brock-

ton Point home until their deaths in 1953 and 1958.51. ‘Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity’.52. Ibid., 4.53. For discussion of how northern pole design and artistic styles contributed to the invisibilizing of

Coast Salish material culture, which featured houseposts that differed in style and scale from Kwak-waka’wakw, Tsimshian, and Haida poles, see Roy, ‘Performing Musqueam Culture’ and RonaldWilliam Hawker, Tales of Ghosts: First Nations Art in British Columbia, 1922–61 (Vancouver:UBC Press, 2003). See also Leslie Dawn, National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art andIdentities in the 1920s (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006).

54. Eva Sierp, ‘Culture as a Product: The Use of Native Art for Tourism in Vancouver’ (master’s thesis,The University of Potsdam, 2010).

55. Mawani, ‘Imperial Legacies’; Sierp, ‘Culture as a Product’.56. Some poles have been removed for conservation off-site and replaced with replicas.57. ‘Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity’, 27; Mawani, ‘From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?’.58. ‘From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?’.59. Ibid., 44.60. Settler Colonialism.61. ‘From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?’, 32.62. Yelton’s pole is the second Squamish totem pole to be erected in Stanley Park. In 1936 the City of

Vancouver commissioned Chief Joe Mathias to carve a pole commemorating the meeting of theSquamish people and Captain George Vancouver in 1792; the pole was raised at Prospect Point,near the Lions Gate Bridge, Mawani, ‘From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?’.

Settler Colonial Studies 23

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

63. The project was supported by Coast Salish Arts, Vancouver Storyscapes, the three local First Nations,and the Vancouver Parks Board. City of Vancouver, ‘First Nations Art and Totem Poles’, City of Van-couver – Parks, Recreation, and Culture, 2013, http://vancouver.ca/parks-recreation-culture/totems-and-first-nations-art.aspx (accessed February 25, 2015).

64. Quoted in Matt Hern, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future(Edinborough: AK Press, 2010), 38.

65. Mawani, ‘From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?’.66. ‘Genealogies of the Land’.67. Krueger is referring to recent projects to rename the Georgia Strait area and the Queen Charlotte

Islands to reflect local Indigenous peoples and territories.68. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to analyse the online commentary, the posts neverthe-

less convey the anxiety, anger, and frustration the name change proposal provoked. Below is a selec-tion of comments:• Next they will want to change the name of the Province to some unpronounceable name that means

nothing to the majority who live here. Enough is enough.• To answer Jeffries’ question about why Stanley Park has a ‘White man’s name’. We (The White

Man) came, we saw, we kicked your butts and took the lands. It’s ours now, and we like thename ‘Stanley Park’. Read a history book to learn more about it…

• No more indulging the Natives. Sure, we took their land. But in return, they got the wheel, thehorse, the alphabet.

• I am truly appalled by the lack of awareness shown by many of the posts on here. First Nationsculture is beautiful in how it is built around love and respect for our earth, our air, our water,life and humour. It is a culture we would all learn from embracing. I fully support changing thename of Stanley Park to Xwayxway.

• ‘It’s hard to pronounce the name…maybe you need to slur to make it sound right?’

69. Interestingly, the local hockey stadium GM Place was renamed Rogers Arena within weeks of theStanley Park renaming proposal. By comparison, the corporate name change received much lesspublic outcry than the prospect of Xwayxway.

70. Quoted in Wendy Stueck, ‘No Name Change for Stanley Park: Stockwell Day’, Globe and Mail, July5, 2010, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/no-name-change-for-stanley-park-stockwell-day/article1386877/ (accessed February 25, 2015).

71. The renaming controversy also emphasized how issues and events happening in the city permeate the‘boundaries’ of my field sites, affecting settler colonial sociality within them.

72. In fact, recent renaming initiatives suggest that new names can be taken up widely and quickly;examples include Haida Gwaii, Nunavut, the Salish Sea, and Denali in Alaska. Furthermore, manyIndigenous place-names were adopted in Anglicized form and are commonplace throughoutCanada (whose name, incidentally, was adopted from an Iroquoian language).

73. There are also different Coast Salish place-names for other parts of the park.74. Amal Treacher Kabesh, ‘On Being Haunted by the Present’, Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011): 1–21.75. ‘From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?’, 52.76. Barman, ‘Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity’.77. He had learned about the renaming debate when friends expressed scepticism that Mayor Robertson

knew the name Xwayxway. The Coast Salish name of the former village in the park was so foreign tohis friends that the mayor’s comments appeared disingenuous and pandering.

78. Mawani, ‘From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?’, 38.79. Gordon, Ghostly Matters.80. Robertson and Culhane, In Plain Sight; Gordon, ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting’.81. Jennifer England, ‘Disciplining Subjectivity and Space: Representation, Film and Its Material

Effects’, Antipode 36, no. 2 (2004): 295–321.82. Amber R. Dean, ‘Hauntings: Representations of Vancouver’s Disappeared Women (Dissertation,

University of Alberta, 2009).83. According to Culhane, anthropologists Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky coined the term ‘regime of

disappearance’ to examine ‘a neo-liberal mode of governance that selectively marginalizes and/orerases categories of people through strategies of representation that include silences, blind spots,and displacements that have both material and symbolic effects’. Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky,eds., New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in theUnited States (New York: New York University Press, 2001). ‘Their Spirits Live within Us’, 595.

24 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

84. Dean, ‘Hauntings’; England, ‘Disciplining Subjectivity and Space’; Yasmin Jiwani and Mary LynnYoung, ‘Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse’, CanadianJournal of Communication 31, no. 4 (2006): 895–917.

85. Dean, ‘Hauntings’; England, ‘Disciplining Subjectivity and Space’; David Hugill, Missing Women,Missing News: Covering Crisis in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Halifax, NS: Fernwood,2010); Jiwani and Young, ‘Missing and Murdered Women’; Geraldine Pratt, ‘Abandoned Womenand Spaces of the Exception’, Antipode 37, no. 5 (2005): 1052–78.

86. Culhane, ‘Their Spirits Live within Us’.87. Ibid., 602.88. Ibid.89. Cheryl Teelucksingh, ‘Toward Claiming Space’, in Claiming Space: Racialization in Canadian

Cities, ed. Cheryl Teelucksingh (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006), 1–18;Gordon, Ghostly Matters.

90. Gordon, ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting’, 2.91. Greg Bishop, ‘In the Shadow of the Olympics’, The New York Times, February 4, 2010, http://www.

nytimes.com/2010/02/05/sports/olympics/05eastside.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&. (accessed Feb-ruary 25, 2015).

92. ‘Their Spirits Live within Us’, 594.93. Patrick Brethour, ‘Exclusive Demographic Picture’, February 13, 2009, http://www.theglobeandmail.

com/incoming/exclusive-demographic-picture/article4277604/ (accessed February 25, 2015);Culhane, ‘Their Spirits Live within Us’; see also Dean, ‘Hauntings’, 99–101, for discussion of thechallenges with demarcating the Downtown Eastside.

94. England, ‘Disciplining Subjectivity and Space’; Jiwani and Young, ‘Missing and Murdered Women’,910.

95. Culhane, ‘Their Spirits Live within Us’, 595, emphasis in original.96. Ibid., 594.97. England, ‘Disciplining Subjectivity and Space’, 307–8.98. cf. Kurt Peters and Susan Lobo, American Indians and the Urban Experience (AltaMira Press, 2002);

Evelyn Peters, ‘Aboriginal People in Urban Areas’, in Urban Affairs: Back on the Policy Agenda, ed.Caroline Andrew, Katherine A. Graham, and Susan D. Phillips (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press,2002): 45–70.

99. cf. Peters, ‘Aboriginal People in Urban Areas’; Kathi Wilson and Evelyn J. Peters, ‘‘You Can Make aPlace for It’: Remapping Urban First Nations Spaces of Identity’, Environment and Planning D:Society and Space 23, no. 3 (2005): 395–413; see also Sherene Razack, ‘Gendered Racial Violenceand Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15,no. 2 (2000): 91–130; Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and JuridicalTruths in British Columbia, 1871–1921, Law and Society Series (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009);Penelope Edmonds, ‘Unpacking Settler Colonialism’s Urban Strategies: Indigenous Peoples in Vic-toria, British Columbia, and the Transition to a Settler-Colonial City’,Urban History Review 38, no. 2(2010): 4.

100. Culhane, ‘Their Spirits Live within Us’, 594.101. Hugill, Missing Women, Missing News; Jeff Sommers and Nick Blomley, ‘The Worst Block in Van-

couver’, in Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings (Vancouver, BC: Contemporary ArtGallery and Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 18–61.

102. Townsend-Gault, ‘Circulating Aboriginality’.103. In Plain Sight, 7.104. ‘Haunted Spaces’, in Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier (Vancouver,

BC: Contemporary Art Gallery and Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 96–117.105. Ibid., 97.106. Ibid., 100; see also Dean, ‘Hauntings’, 96–9 for her discussion of Douglas’s photograph and Olek-

sijczuk’s reading.107. ‘Marginalized’? Who Did the Marginalizing + How?, Sister Outsiders (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver

Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, November 30, 2011), http://rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/sites/default/files/imce/2011-11-27_sisteroutsider_3_FINAL-corrected.pdf (accessed February 25, 2015).

108. Sister Outsiders, When Things Go Very Wrong: How the Missing Women Commission of InquiryFailed Women, Sister Outsiders (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter,December 17, 2012), http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/sites/default/files/imce/Issue5_FINAL_corrected.pdf (accessed February 25, 2015); Wally T. Oppal, Forsaken: The Report of the Missing

Settler Colonial Studies 25

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015

Women Commission of Inquiry – Executive Summary (British Columbia: Missing Women Commis-sion of Inquiry, November 19, 2012).

109. Sister Outsiders, When Things Go Very Wrong.110. ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting’, 3.111. Oleksijczuk, ‘Haunted Spaces’.112. Rita Dhamoon, Identity/Difference Politics: How Difference Is Produced, and Why It Matters (Van-

couver: UBC Press, 2009).113. She now works at a homeless shelter in Calgary.114. For example, she once attended a city budgeting meeting and stood up to challenge what she called

the ‘third world’ conditions of poverty in the Downtown Eastside. Afterwards, a city councilorapproached her and suggested she reconsider her language to avoid exoticizing the problems there.Theresa read this as a personal scolding that protected insular politics in the community and distancedpeople like her from engaging in meaningful change. Part of the challenge surrounds the question ofwhat change should look and feel like, for what purpose and for whom.

115. Ghostly Matters, 19.116. ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting’, 3.117. Dean, ‘Hauntings’, 23–8.118. Stanger-Ross, ‘Municipal Colonialism in Vancouver’; Barman, ‘Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity’.119. ‘Goodbye, Snauq’, West Coast Line 42, no. 2 (2008): 124.120. Ibid., 125.121. The website for the exhibit c̓əsnaʔəm: The City Before the City provides the following pronunciation

guide for the site’s name: ‘The first letter /c ̓/ sounds very much like “ts” in the word nuts. Note also theapostrophe which causes /c̓/ to have a slight popping sound. The /ə/ is similar to the “u” sound in“but”. The /ʔ/ is a consonant with no sound, like the space in “uh-oh”.’ ‘C̓əsnaʔəm, the Citybefore the City’, C̓əsnaʔəm, the City before the City, http://www.thecitybeforethecity.com/ (accessedJanuary 26, 2015).

122. See Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks for forceful analyses of thepower and possibilities of a politics of refusal.

123. Derrida, Specters of Marx.124. Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’.125. Gordon, ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting’.126. Dwayne Donald, ‘Forts, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Aboriginal-Canadian Relations: Imagining

Decolonizing Educational Philosophies in Canadian Contexts’, in Decolonizing Philosophies of Edu-cation, ed. Ali A. Abdi (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense, 2012), 91–111.

26 N.J.K. Baloy

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nat

alie

Bal

oy]

at 0

9:53

19

Mar

ch 2

015