Introduction

The killing of George Floyd by a police officer in May 2020 in Minneapolis sparked intense waves of allied protest whereby toppling became a staple act. Toppling is understood as an act of counter-violence against dominant commemorative practices that elevate colonial leaders, slave traders, and nation-builders into to “mnemonic icons”^[1]. Seeking to disturb the economies of national memory, toppling is characterized by “iconoclastic fury”^[2] that challenges essentialist material relationships and their organization and expression in public space. Amongst notable fallen statues is the statue of the first Prime Minister of Canada, John A. Macdonald, in Montreal, as part of a #defundthepolice protest in August 2020^[3]. While many condemn the toppling of statues as an affront to history, others see it as a form of protest against the ways nationalisms construct collective memory and public spaces. I approach toppling as a protest praxis that challenges how settler colonialism imagines spatialized economies of remembrance. I turn to the monuments of John A. Macdonald to drive the conversations about protest, critical justice, public space, and memory ‘home,’ that is, to the Canadian context where there is a strong need for social justice movements to engage with Indigenous place and self-determination. In acts of toppling, I locate an activist politics of place consciousness that not only necessitates that we grapple with the need for alternative modes of remembering, but also the need to rethink the ways we inhabit Indigenous place through practices of commemoration and the ways we engage with monuments. In this context, I suggest that critical pedagogies of place that emphasize anticolonial material practices play an important role in spatializing contentious politics.

Known as the “father”^[4] of the Canadian Confederation, John Alexander Macdonald has a prominent place in Canadian national memory and his monuments can be found in many Canadian cities. Macdonald, who was born in Scotland in 1815, migrated with his family to the province of Upper Canada where they established themselves in Kingston, present day Ontario. At large, Macdonald is remembered for his political work in Canadian Confederation, the unification of the provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into one dominion on July 1, 1867, a date that signified the ‘birth’ of the Canadian nation and therefore a new era of cultural independence from the metropole. Under this form of centralized government, Macdonald became the first Prime Minister of Canada and got involved in many high-profile nationalist projects of expansion, such as the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which connected the country coast-to-coast and became a symbol of the territorial dominion of Canada.

Yet Macdonald has also been the subject of intense controversy. He was a main figure behind a number of devastating anti-Indigenous policies, such as the removal of Indigenous populations from the land through starvation tactics and their containment into reserves for the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway; the execution of Métis revolutionary Louis Riel; the planning of the Residential School system; and exclusionary anti-Asian immigration laws such as the Chinese Head Tax. Macdonald’s involvement in the Residential School system is often invoked as the most questionable aspect of his legacy as it directly facilitated Indigenous genocide. Residential Schools were an assimilationist schooling system organized by the federal government and churches to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children. This system articulated a civilizing discourse that sought to both remove Indigenous children from their traditional lands and eliminate their language, culture, and beliefs, carrying out settler colonialism’s basic tenet of “elimination”^[5]. Residential Schools (the last one closed in 1996) have been discussed both by Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities as a reminder of Indigenous genocide and a source of intergenerational trauma for Indigenous peoples. To this day, although the Canadian government has offered an official apology to Residential school survivors in tandem with the commission of a Truth and Reconciliation Inquiry, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to deconstruct the belief that this system was a benign project of civility. In this regard, Macdonald’s nation-building will always be connected to Indigenous genocide in the place that became known as Canada, and therefore while for many Canadians the statues of John A. Macdonald are reminders of nationhood, for Indigenous communities his statues are a constant reminder of a lack of accountability for ongoing colonial violence.

Although critiqued for its insistence on closure and their obscuring of the issue of land, Canadian discourses of reconciliation have produced a climate of visibility in terms of official memory and commemoration practices. In this regard, the publication of the Final Report of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Committee in 2015 has shifted the attitudes of many with regards to Macdonald’s monuments to an extent. Notably, Macdonald became the centre of a nation-wide debate after the Ontario Teacher’s Federation passed a motion to rename schools which carried Macdonald’s name in 2017^[6]. The year of 2018 was catalytic for the conversation about Macdonald’s place in Canadian cities when the city of Victoria, British Columbia, voted to remove the statue of Macdonald from the City Hall entrance, as part of conversations with Indigenous leaders from the Songhees and Esquimalt nations, on whose territory the city is located^[7]. This decision produced heated responses across the political spectrum, a notable example being the province of Ontario requesting to ‘adopt’ the removed statue^[8]. At the same time, statues of John A. Macdonald have been attacked, vandalized, and toppled during protests in different cities, particularly in Montreal where Macdonald’s monument was targeted repeatedly since 2017. The statue was eventually toppled by a group called #MacdonaldMustFall in August 2020. Given the ways toppling has opened up alarming questions about ongoing coloniality in Canada, my problematic is twofold: I interrogate acts of toppling as a form of radical place-making in public space and in the same vein I also suggest that such acts of politicized anger against settler colonial systems of memory and space evince a need to inhabit place otherwise, especially if we live on unceded Indigenous lands.

Monuments and a settler politics of occupation

Commenting on the decision of the city of Victoria to remove John A. Macdonald’s statue, Paulette Regan challenged Canadians to think of this as unsettling Canadian collective memory: “In light of these harsh realities, Canadians must ask themselves some critical questions. Whose stories are told and whose are excluded? Who are the heroes we honour and who are forgotten? Which historical events are remembered and why?”^[9]. In this regard, critics of the term collective memory have pointed to the role of monuments as official forms of commemoration that express different scales of national mythmaking in public space. Kirk Savage, for instance, is suspicious of the term, noting that “we think of collective memory—and indeed the ‘people’ who supposedly share this memory—as complicated fictions, manufactured to serve ideological ends”^[10]. Given Canada’s settler colonial history, it is not hard to imagine the reasons why Macdonald figures centrally in Canadian collective memory. In their influential work “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that “settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain”^[11]. Under this logic, the settler seeks to replace the Indigenous populations off the lands through violence and through emplacing the settler historical record of remembrance via official forms of commemoration. 

Looking at the ways the so-called Canadian collective memory uses monuments to strengthen the naturalization of the settler in public space speaks to the ways statues replicate systems of occupation. By occupation I mean both the identity of monuments as permanent reminders of specific versions of history in place, and at the same time, their involvement in reproducing levels of what Patrick Wolfe called the “replacement”^[12]: that is, the logic of settler-place making whereby the Native is displaced and the settler is emplaced in all orders and scales of territoriality: “settler colonialism destroys to replace”^[13] states Wolfe. In other words, monuments sustain ideations of settler spatiality by ultimately rendering public space as placeless in the attempts to erase Indigeneity and Indigenous sovereignties. This process of territorial domination, I argue, happens through the ways monuments reproduce multiple forms of occupation—both material and symbolic.

In this regard, monuments function as settler mechanisms of occupation, mapping settler memory of nationhood into the urban cartography where monuments find their locations. Monuments, in this sense, mediate permanency and as Michael Kolb has argued they themselves become “culturally constructed place[s]”^[14] within the physical landscape. In this regard, national pedagogies dictate how the past still takes place by being mediated in the present through monuments that uphold celebratory events and prominent national symbols. Thinking about official memory and national pedagogy, Angela Failler argues that “the past does not simply exist, waiting to be rediscovered, but is constructed through highly mediated, often hidden processes of interpretation and struggles over meaning that reflect as much about the present as about what has already supposedly ‘happened”’^[15]. Monuments in this sense connect memory with settler place-making, that is, the collective and subjective process of constant meaning making in place, in turn sustaining “a vast network of experiences and memories as people occupy, reuse, and recreate places”^[16]. In this sense, statuary is not only a mythology of the ways nations draft history, but statues function as reminders of cognitive and material bartering between replacements and emplacements.

The monuments of John A. Macdonald are physical reminders of ongoing colonial violence and the continuing logic of replacing Indigeneity with settler histories. For urban Indigenous communities, and especially Residential School survivors and their families, the image of Macdonald challenges any meaningful attempts toward redress. As Enzo Traverso mentions, toppling of colonial monuments is deeply connected to anti-racist praxis, noting that “anti-racism is a battle for memory”^[17] through space. The specificities of the protest work that toppling achieves, in this way, is to expose the fact that colonial monuments involve a double sense of occupation in Canadian cities, which rest on Indigenous lands. In this regard, the spatial land-based logic of toppling speaks to a rejection of liberal politics of recognition and reconciliation, which, as Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard critiqued in his influential book Red Skins, White Masks “form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power”^[18]. To understand how toppling Macdonald’s statue can provoke thinking about accountability through grounded and land-based forms of protest within cities, it is important to connect monumental occupation to the territorial logic of settler colonialism and Canadian nationalism within public space.

Countering occupation: toppling as place-making praxis

What is the difference between a city council removing a statue and a statue being toppled down by protestors and land defenders during demonstrations? Although an institutional removal of a statue could signify movement toward fostering cultures of accountability, I would argue that toppling operates at a different political level. The modern liberal democratic expression of Canadian civility is arguably maintained by a language of reconciliation and pseudo-acknowledgement, which in fact replicates colonial relationships through an emphasis on resolution and closure and not land and land-based relationships. The toppling of the John A. Macdonald’s monuments in Canada is ultimately a rejection of reconciliation discourses that seek prefigurative politics via closure and not decolonial acts and practices regarding land. As many scholars have argued, official redress, especially through the 2008 Apology for Residential Schools and the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission often codes place in terms of visions of peaceful coexistence and cohabitation, ideals that are taken at face-value in liberal gestures of closure that do not critically engage in what Regan has termed practices of “truth-telling”^[19].  Land remains a forcefield of conflict, evident in the legacies of territorial disputes and the aggressive dispossessive reach of development projects that threaten Indigenous unceded lands, waterways, and relations with other nations.

Centering its political vision vis-à-vis land, acts of toppling seek to remove roadblocks that hinder grounded forms of accountability. In the example of toppling down John A. Macdonald’s monument in Montreal we can view these forms of allied protest as disrupting scales of colonial occupation. Paul Routeledge in his book Space Invaders makes an important argument for understanding processes of place-making in contentious politics and radical geographies. Routeledge argues that “protestors are space invaders”^[20]. Looking at the ways the “geographical logics”^[21] of protest allow for place-making practices such as re-commoning public spaces or literally hindering organizational processes through blockades and demonstrations, Routeledge argues that “activists us and transform everyday landscapes in the process of protesting, creating not only sites of resistance but also places where alternatives and symbolic challenges can be made ‘real”’^[22] (41). In the context of Macdonald’s monuments, the inconoclastic character of toppling seeks to alter the landscape of public space by challenging Macdonald’s prominence in Canadian national memory. The literal removal of the statue of Macdonald is represented as an act of defiance against the official option to uphold Macdonald in a strategic form of collective memory, which celebrates nationalism. In this sense, the local movement of #MacdonaldMustFall is a call not only for rethinking memory but also rethinking how we practice living in place, where different forms of occupation are replicated.

I consider place-based and land-based pedagogies to be useful analytics for understanding anticolonial allied activisms. In this context, the work of David Greenwood has led the field of place-based education toward a critical place-consciousness which advanced traditional theories toward a place-based critical theory which considers the sociology and ideological construction of place in order to critique power inequalities. Greenwood has coined the term a critical pedagogy of place as the “convergence”^[23] (3) of critical pedagogy and pedagogies of place into a distinct synthesis that at the same time advances “the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well- being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit”^[24]. Greenwood’s theory is located within the context of educational place-based approaches that seek to remedy the lack of social consciousness about the ecological crisis. Greenwood thus identifies two important political goals of his notion of critical pedagogy of place: decolonization and what he calls “reinhabitation”^[25].

Reinhabitation along with decolonization are described as “generative themes, decolonization and reinhabitation challenge learners to confront the long history of colonialism in all its modern and postmodern guises, and to reinvent their ideological and material relationship to place”^[26]. Reinhabitation specifically describes a place-based practice of confronting the material and ideological problematic of how to live in a place that has been compromised by violence or injustice. Greenwood’s language has been discussed across different place-based pedagogies, noting that it has potential for decolonizing perspectives of place, although reinhabitation is also not entirely free of problems. In this context, land education positions itself as a corrective to traditional place-based pedagogies, which originated from western forms of schooling that emphasized on ecological consciousness and outdoor education^[27]. Land education and critical place inquiry have taken up the term reinhabitation in different ways, pointing out the promising aspects of the term in terms of place-based consciousness and potential decolonial commitments. Yet at the same time, many critics have highlighted that while reinhabitation is on the right direction, it often needs to engage with bolder critiques of settler colonial spatialities that hinder any form of meaningful place-based consciousness. In this sense, Tuck and McKenzie in their book Place in Research point out, despite the calls made by a number of Indigenous artists, critics, philosophers, educators, and community leaders, non-Indigenous and settler scholars often do not engage with place in ways that support Indigenous self-determination and as a result “the saliency of land/place is frequently left out of the picture”^[28].

What does reinhabitation potentially reveal about the ways allied activisms obstruct the ongoing settler place-making through memorializing and institutionalizing John A. Macdonald? Indigenous-Black solidarities arguably signal forms of grounded accountability in places, and this is particularly visible in the ways urban Indigenous people and black diasporic communities come together in allied forms of protest in the context of toppling monuments. I see such examples of place-based solidarities as a site of potentiality in terms of cultivating respect and responsibility in place and for place. Emplaced solidarity involves praxes of mutuality that put forward shared forms of anti-colonial commitments. Making those commitments visible and identifiable in the ways place is not only inhabited but lived and engaged with is the main trait and goal of emplaced solidarities. How does solidarity mobilize location and self-location in envisioning decolonial activisms based on considering place as part of the collective endeavor to destabilize oppressive structures? For activisms that seek to involve Indigenous self-determination under an ethic of co-resistance, as activist Harsha Walia argues, responsible self-location is an integral part of decolonizing relations of solidarity^[29]. For Walia, “decolonization is the process whereby we create the conditions in which we want to live and the social relations we wish to have”^[30] and therefore it “requires us to exercise our sovereignties differently and to reconfigure our communities based on shared experiences, ideas, and visions”^[31].

The removal of Macdonald’s statue generated landscapes of dissent and visibility within the settler spatial arrangement of the city and in doing so it also arguably envisioned practices of reinhabitation through defining solidarities as a spatial relationality. In this sense, toppling performs a different kind of land affirmation in its demand for a different place-based practice through centering Indigenous sovereignty and not in liberal politics of reconciliation and recognition. Forms of iconoclastic protest in the case of toppling Macdonald’s statue pose the problematic of ethical and accountable emplaced practice and in their “iconoclastic fury”^[32] protestors and land defenders break open the image of Macdonald and assert its removal not only from a sense of collective remembrance, but also a sense of collective dwelling within the topography of memory in the urban. In her critical work on resurgence, As We Have Always Done, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg educator and poet Leanne Betasamoke Simpson argues for the importance of rejecting “colonial spatialities”^[33] as a material and critical methodology of resurgence that realizes itself in everyday acts: “Everyday acts of resurgence sound romantic, but they are not. Put aside visions of ‘back to the land,’ and just think land—some of it is wild, some of it is urban, a lot of it is ecologically devastated”^[34]. In emphasizing that all land here is Indigenous land, embodiment marks Indigenous presence across different scales, and becomes itself an important praxis and practice of reclamation of place. Further, for Simpson, any potential for solidarity should also be grounded in this understanding. The land-based awareness of toppling within allied activist contexts arguably mobilizes a renewed place-based consciousness that necessitates conversations between social movement theory and Indigenous land affirmation. That is, acts of toppling John A. Macdonald from Canadian public space speaks not only to the image-breaking capacity of allied protest, but also puts forward a call to responsibility into connecting organizing and grassroots theory with Indigenous decolonizing methodologies and literacies that strengthen the connection between spatiality and activism: that is, the material and symbolic forms of protest that consider place not only as a surface, but as an important political agent. 

After the fall: toward critical solidarities

To suggest renewed place-based practices of reinhabiting place or remembering otherwise as solutions to structures of coloniality and unfreedom seem erroneous. If we are to engage with toppling as part of an anticolonial politics, we need to problematize any spatial logic involved in resistance to avoid replicating unconscious or conscious colonial commitments. Like every approach or theory that seeks to reconsider place in accountable ways, this analysis also runs across certain problematics. I began this analysis by hoping to emphasize how memorials such as John A. Macdonald’s reproduce forms of material and ideological occupation on Indigenous lands. Through understanding memorials and commemorations as practices connected with place and place-making, I see toppling—in its larger role within protest movements—as putting forward the need to situate ourselves in places differently. This approach, in a sense, is a part in a broader contemplation of the role of place in strategies of resistance and dissent. In questioning toppling as a material interruption of the ways Canadian cultural memory emplaces a white settler polity on Indigenous place, I ask: how can protest amplify the ways place plays into dissent? Can acts like toppling potentially ground visions of accountability in place? How can shared agency and protesting publics inform renewed visions of collective remembrance? In lieu of a conclusion, I would like to interrogate the place-based idiom I have used for this paper for further thinking about the multiple epistemic grounds place and protest ask us to consider.

What would it mean to want to reinhabit public space by refusing colonial spatial structures of living and remembering and affirming Indigenous place? It is within this material and discursive arena of conflict and co-resistance that toppling brings about an alternative radical reimagining of Indigenous place through allied forms of solidarity. I certainly do not use the term solidarity here lightly or to further conflate different equity seeking groups that find themselves violated by colonial and racist structure. As Tuck and Yang warn, this uncritical reckoning with solidarity would be a form of “colonial equivocation”^[35], that is, conflating different social justice demands with decolonization. Thinking about solidarity and place perhaps seems like an ambivalent or even contradictory statement considering how solidarity is often imagined as a way to move, to mobilize a sense of responsibility or support before a shared ideal or goal. In other words, solidarity generates movement. This is true for solidarity and especially the type of solidarities that despite their differences pose a shared challenge to settler colonial structures of domination.

It is also important to acknowledge that although place-based pedagogies emphasize on taking up protest in ways that seek to affirm Indigenous place and nationhood, they do not always do so. I recognize, in this sense, that no matter how promising the urge to somehow reinhabit might be it might also turn into a re-occupation and what Eve Tuck has called “settler emplacement”^[36], reinhabitation constitutes a productive point of entry for critiquing settler complicity and the ongoing colonization and black subjugation as main structures that have sustained coloniality. In this regard, communities of Indigenous and racialized place-based educators and thinkers have turned to land education as an alternative pedagogy of place that can potentially interact with place-based education both in corrective and productive ways. Accordingly, “land education calls into question educational practices and theories that justify settler occupation of stolen land or encourage the replacement of Indigenous peoples and relations to land with settlers and relations to property”^[37]. That is, although land education does not position as a polemic to place-based education, it importantly calls attention to the discursive uses of decolonization and reinhabitation as terms of engagement that run the risk of further “emplacing” the settler on Indigenous lands^[38].

Further, toppling, although presenting moments of visibility does not necessarily mean decolonization. As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang have powerfully argued, decolonization is about land: about repatriation and does not accept settler emplacement of moves to innocence. In this sense, the removal of memorials under reconciliation rubrics and their taking down in protests might be doing, in effect, different things. Reconciliation—in whatever form—is incompatible with decolonization. As Tuck and Yang have powerfully argued, Decolonization cannot be abstracted as a metaphor for conciliatory “settler moves to innocence”^[39], “at-risking” or “asterisking Indigenous peoples”, “settler nativism”, and “re-occupation”^[40]. In this regard, Tuck and Yang identify these settler practices as acts toward maintaining a colonial order. Decolonization, they argue, is about Indigenous place and land and cannot be abstracted into metaphor. Yet toppling is also not a metaphor. It becomes a metaphor, only when we abstract it away from actual place, if we continue to deterritorialize activism. What toppling does is draw our attention to the placeness of public space; it asks us to reterritorialize the ways we remember and the ways we inhabit places.

References

Activists Topple Down Statue of John A. Macdonald in Downtown Montreal”, CBC, Aug.2020, retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/defund-police-protest-black-lives-matter-1.5705101.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resurgence, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, p. 191-210.

Oksana Borysocych, Tetyana A. Chaiuk, Kateryna S. Karpova, “Black Lives Matter: Race Discourse and the Semiotics of History Reconstruction”, Journal of History, Culture,  and Art Research, vol.9, no.3, 2020, p. 325-340.

Angela Failler, “Remembering the Air India Disaster: Memorial and Counter-Memorial” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, vol. 31, 2009, p.150-176.

David Greenwood, “Place, Land, and the Decolonization of the Settler Soul”, Journal of Environmental Education, vol.50, no.4, 2019, p.358-377.

David Gruenewald, “The Best of Both Wolds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place”, Educational Researcher, vol. 32, no.4, 2002, p.3-12.

Sean Hier, “Monumental Panic: Reconciliation, Moral Regulation, and the Polarizing Politics of the Past”, Critical Sociology, vol.46, no.4-5, 2020, p.661-675.

Michael Kolb, Making Sense of Monuments: Narratives of Time, Movement, and Scale, New York, Routeledge, “Routeledge Studies in Archaeology”, 2020, p. 3-11.

Scott Lauria Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now”, Settler Colonial Studies, no.1, 2011, p. 52-76.

Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth-Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2010, p.35-63.

Paulette Regan, “Comment: Council’s Statue Decision is Unsettling in a Good Way”, Times Colonist, August 2018, np, retrieved from: https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-council-s-statue-decision-is-unsettling-in-a-good-way-1.23404594

Paul Routeledge, Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest, London, UK, Pluto Press, 2017, p. 1-31.

Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 2-20.

Timothy Stanley, “Commemorating John A. Macdonald: Collective Remembering and the Structure of Settler Colonialism in British Columbia” BC Studies, no. 204, 2019, p.89-113.

Enzo Traverso, “Tearing Down Statues Does Not Erase History, It Makes Us See it More Clearly”, Jacobin Magazine, Published Online June 24^th, 2020, retrieved from: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/statues-removal-antiracism-columbus.

Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor”, Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol.1, no.1, 2012, p.1-40.

Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie, Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods, Routeledge, 2016, p. 1-22.

Harsha Walia, “Decolonizing Together: Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity Toward a Practice of Decolonization” The Winter We Danced, ARP Books, 2014, pp. 44-50.

Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”, Journal of Genocide Research, vol.8, no.4, 2008, p. 387-409.

Notes

[1] See Oksana Borysocych, Tetyana Chaiuk & Kateryna Karpova, “Black Lives Matter: Race Discourse and the Semiotics of History Reconstruction”, Journal of History, Culture and Art Research, vol.9, no.3, p. 330.

[2] See Enzo Traverso, “Tearing Down Statues Does Not Erase History” The Jacobin Magazine, June 24^th, 2020, np, retrieved from: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/statues-removal-antiracism-columbus.

[3] See “Activists Topple Down Statue of John A. Macdonald in Downtown Montreal”, CBC, Aug.2020, np, retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/defund-police-protest-black-lives-matter-1.5705101.

[4] See Timothy Stanley, “Commemorating John A. Macdonald: Collective Remembering and the Structure of Settler Colonialism in British Columbia”, BC Studies, no.204, 2019, p.89.

[5] See Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” Journal of Genocide Research, vol.8, no.4, 2006, p.390.

[6] See Sean Hier, “Monumental Panic: Reconciliation, Moral Regulation, and the Polarizing Politics of the Past”, Critical Sociology, vol.45, no.4-5, 2020, p. 667.

[7] See Timothy Stanley, art. cit., p.89.

[8] Ibid., p.90.

[9] See Paulette Regan, “Comment: Council’s Statue Decision is Unsettling in a Good Way”, Times Colonist, August 2018, np, retrieved from: https://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-council-s-statue-decision-is-unsettling-in-a-good-way-1.23404594.

[10] See Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997, p.8.

[11] See Eve Tuck and Kayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” Indigeneity, Education, and Society, vol.1,p.5.

[12] See Wolfe, art. cit., p.338.

[13] Idem.

[14] See Michael Kolb, Making Sense of Monuments: Narratives of Time, Movement, and Scale, New York, Routeledge, “Routeledge Studies in Archaeology”, 2020, p.11.

[15] See Angela Failler, “Remembering the Air India Disaster: Memorial and Counter-Memorial” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, vol. 31, 2009, p. 151.

[16] See Kolb, ob. cit, p. 3.

[17] See Traverso, art., cit, np.

[18] See Glen Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, p. 3.

[19] See Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth-Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2010, p.65.

[20] See Paul Routeledge, Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest, London, UK, Pluto Press, 2017, p. 1.

[21] Idem.

[22] Ibid., p. 41.

[23] See David Gruenewald, “The Best of Both Wolds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place”, Educational Researcher, vol. 32, no.4, 2002, p.3. 

[24] Idem.

[25] See Gruenewald, art.cit, p.9.

[26] See David Greenwood, “Place, Land, and the Decolonization of the Settler Soul”, Journal of Environmental Education, vol.50, no.4, 2019, p.363.

[27] See Kate McCoy, Eve Tuck & Marcia KcKenzie, Land Education: Rethinking Pedagogies of Place from Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives, London & New York, Routeledge, p. 1.

[28] See Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie, Place in Research, Methodology, and Methods, Routeledge, 2016,p. 17.

[29] See Harsha Walia, “Decolonizing Together: Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity Toward a Practice of Decolonization” The Winter We Danced, ARP Books, 2014, p.50.

[30] Idem

[31] Idem

[32] See Traverso, art. cit, np.

[33] See Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resurgence, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, p. 195.

[34] Idem.

[35] See Tuck and Yang, art. cit., p.4.

[36] Idem.

[37]See Eve Tuck, Kate McCoy and Marcia McKenzie, Land Education, p. 4.

[38] Ibid., p.8.

[39] See Tuck and Yang, ob. Cit, p.9.

[40] See Tuck and Yang, ob. Cit., p.4.