Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (197... more In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (1979), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017). My purpose is to underscore the historical dimensions within Alien’s depiction of the future and to demonstrate that the film series is far more exercised with historicity than with futurity. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s metaphors, themes, and plots were intentionally evocative of the horrors of British imperial expansion within North America and function as a kind of mnemonic device that remember the violence of the settler colonial past. More broadly, I offer this analysis because, like many other scholars, I view the science fiction and horror genres, between which we can locate Alien, as remarkably provocative and productive. Such non-realist depictions of monsters, zombies, ghosts, alien invasions, or the human colonization of outer space contain archives of historical feeling that can be accessed through what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd called a “mnemonic reading” praxis. In The Transit of Empire, Byrd explains that a mnemonic reading seeks to “connect the violences and genocides of colonization to cultural productions […] in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion” (xii-xiii). In reading Scott’s film series mnemonically as a larger story invested with settler colonial genocide and preoccupied with foreclosures of human futurity, I add to a considerable body of scholarly literature on Alien that has [End Page 188] shaped my reading of the series as well as my approach to the horror and science fiction genres as cathected with coloniality.
Between 2000 and 2011 seven students from First Nation communities across northern Ontario lost t... more Between 2000 and 2011 seven students from First Nation communities across northern Ontario lost their lives while attending high school in Thunder Bay. These losses of Indigenous life became the subject of a joint provincial inquest that concluded in the summer of 2016. In this article the author offers a critical examination of the scope of this inquest as well as a broader chronological review of its proceedings. The focus is on the ways in which the presiding coroner shaped the scope of the inquest to include things like the alcohol consumption of the students and to exclude things like the quality of police investigations. The issue of First Nation Jury Representation and its role in delaying the inquest for several years is also contextualized. Ultimately, it is argued that the Seven Youth Inquest conforms closely to what Sherene Razack (2011; 2015) has written about the colonial function of inquests into the deaths of Indigenous peoples: mainly that such proceedings stage deco...
Kim Anderson. Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teaching, and Story Medicine. Winnipeg: Unive... more Kim Anderson. Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teaching, and Story Medicine. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011. 210 pages. Notes Bibliography. Index. $27.95 sc. There are very real and pressing realities attached to critical conversations about Anishnabek cultural practices, ways of being, language, and movement politics. In Life Stages of Native Women: Memory, Teaching, and Story Medicine, Kim Anderson offers a rigorously researched text that takes these considerations seriously. Anderson writes in her introduction that her purpose is to "dig up the medicines of the past," (3) although the main success of Life Stages is its decolonizing effect on the future. In her first chapter, she offers a historiographical discussion on oral history and the importance of the relationship between story and storyteller. Here, the scope and relevance of her conversation extends far beyond the bindings of the book, and the impressive skill of Anderson as a writer, historian, and storyteller shines brighter than it does in the short chapter that follows, which briefy explains her interview methodology and project participants. Chapters Three to Six delineate and describe four central stages of life: from birth to walking; childhood and youth; the stage of adulthood; and the process of becoming grandmothers or Elders. Having interviewed other Native women and some men about these practices, experiences, and teachings, Anderson fleshes out the facts of the various lifestages with humorous stories and clever anecdotes. In her conclusion, Anderson does not flinch when addressing the realities of ongoing colonial concerns in Native communities; nonetheless, Life Stages ends with an empowered affirmation of personal optimism that is compelling and convincing--particularly given the wider movement into which one might place Anderson's work. Life Stages needs to be read as part of a wider anti-colonial project that views gender justice as the platform for political resistance and resurgence in First Nations communities. It is important to remember that this struggle is ongoing, and that sex discrimination persists in the policies of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (see http://www.lynngehl.com). The Canadian government clearly needs some guidance on how to make gender equality a reality for all of its citizens, and Life Stages proves useful as a teaching tool in this respect: in sketching out what a non-colonized society looks like, Anderson helps readers to formulate and conceive of an ontological alternative to the Canadian society in which we currently live. Life Stages can also be read, therefore, as a fitting follow-up to Anderson's previous publication, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood. …
Purpose Responding to the needs of homeless and marginally housed persons has been a major compon... more Purpose Responding to the needs of homeless and marginally housed persons has been a major component of the Canadian federal and provincial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, smaller, less-resourced cities and rural regions have been left competing for limited resources (Schiff et al., 2020). The purpose of this paper is to use a case study to examine and highlight information about the capacities and needs of service hub cities during pandemics. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on the experience of Thunder Bay – a small city in Northern Ontario, Canada which experienced a serious outbreak of COVID-19 amongst homeless persons and shelter staff in the community. The authors catalogued the series of events leading to this outbreak through information tracked by two of the authors who hold key funding and planning positions within the Thunder Bay homeless sector. Findings Several lessons may be useful for other cities nationally and internationally of similar size...
The introduction outlines the unique characteristics of the collection—its global focus, multidis... more The introduction outlines the unique characteristics of the collection—its global focus, multidisciplinary composition, and the combination of historical and contemporary analyses. By drawing on transnational feminism, transculturalism, intersectionality, and reproductive justice frameworks, it illuminates the similarities and variance in past and contemporary studies of reproductive politics. The editors explain the importance of complicating the many histories and ongoing politics of abortion by situating them within the broader conditions in which women make decisions about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. The introduction demonstrates that putting conversations about abortion and contraception, reproduction, and personhood alongside one another in this multidisciplinary fashion creates a more nuanced understanding of reproductive health.
Health promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice, 2017
This paper looks at the market food environments of First Nations communities located in the prov... more This paper looks at the market food environments of First Nations communities located in the provincial Norths by examining the potential retail competition faced by the North West Company (NWC) and by reporting on the grocery shopping experiences of people living in northern Canada. We employed two methodological approaches to assess northern retail food environments. First, we mapped food retailers in the North to examine the breadth of retail competition in the provincial Norths, focussing specifically on those communities without year-round road access. Second, we surveyed people living in communities in northern Canada about their retail and shopping experiences. Fifty-four percent of communities in the provincial Norths and Far North without year-round road access did not have a grocery store that competed with the NWC. The provinces with the highest percentage of northern communities without retail competition were Ontario (87%), Saskatchewan (83%) and Manitoba (72%). Respond...
In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (197... more In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (1979), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017). My purpose is to underscore the historical dimensions within Alien’s depiction of the future and to demonstrate that the film series is far more exercised with historicity than with futurity. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s metaphors, themes, and plots were intentionally evocative of the horrors of British imperial expansion within North America and function as a kind of mnemonic device that remember the violence of the settler colonial past. More broadly, I offer this analysis because, like many other scholars, I view the science fiction and horror genres, between which we can locate Alien, as remarkably provocative and productive. Such non-realist depictions of monsters, zombies, ghosts, alien invasions, or the human colonization of outer space contain archives of historical feeling that can be accessed through what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd called a “mnemonic reading” praxis. In The Transit of Empire, Byrd explains that a mnemonic reading seeks to “connect the violences and genocides of colonization to cultural productions […] in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion” (xii-xiii). In reading Scott’s film series mnemonically as a larger story invested with settler colonial genocide and preoccupied with foreclosures of human futurity, I add to a considerable body of scholarly literature on Alien that has [End Page 188] shaped my reading of the series as well as my approach to the horror and science fiction genres as cathected with coloniality.
This article interrogates the settler colonial history of Thunder Bay through place names and arg... more This article interrogates the settler colonial history of Thunder Bay through place names and argues that gendered forms of anti-Indigenous violence are part of the city's social architecture. Between 1860 and 1910, settlers produced vast amounts of wealth and built a local industrial economy founded upon land-based resources such as silver, timber, and shale; at the same time, settlers forcefully relocated Anishnaabe peoples to multiple reserve sites, prevented them from participating in the emergent industrial economy, and used their sacred mountain as a quarry for brick-making and as a stop-butt for a settler rifle range. The article deploys the concept of settler colonial reterritorialization to critique the ways in which this history has been sanctioned and celebrated through local place names such as Mount McKay, Fort William, Port Arthur, and Simpson Street. Ultimately, I show that the material violence of enfolding the land and its resources into an exploitative and exclusive settler colonial economy emerged in tandem with the power to name the land in honour of white men who played primary roles in that very violent historical process.
Understanding Atrocities: Remembering, Representing, and Teaching Genocide, 2017
This article critiques the racist discourses that recast housing crises in Mushkegowuk communitie... more This article critiques the racist discourses that recast housing crises in Mushkegowuk communities with references to racist, sexist, and fatphobic discourses that insulted the hunger strike or political fast of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat First Nation
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (197... more In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (1979), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017). My purpose is to underscore the historical dimensions within Alien’s depiction of the future and to demonstrate that the film series is far more exercised with historicity than with futurity. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s metaphors, themes, and plots were intentionally evocative of the horrors of British imperial expansion within North America and function as a kind of mnemonic device that remember the violence of the settler colonial past. More broadly, I offer this analysis because, like many other scholars, I view the science fiction and horror genres, between which we can locate Alien, as remarkably provocative and productive. Such non-realist depictions of monsters, zombies, ghosts, alien invasions, or the human colonization of outer space contain archives of historical feeling that can be accessed through what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd called a “mnemonic reading” praxis. In The Transit of Empire, Byrd explains that a mnemonic reading seeks to “connect the violences and genocides of colonization to cultural productions […] in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion” (xii-xiii). In reading Scott’s film series mnemonically as a larger story invested with settler colonial genocide and preoccupied with foreclosures of human futurity, I add to a considerable body of scholarly literature on Alien that has [End Page 188] shaped my reading of the series as well as my approach to the horror and science fiction genres as cathected with coloniality.
Between 2000 and 2011 seven students from First Nation communities across northern Ontario lost t... more Between 2000 and 2011 seven students from First Nation communities across northern Ontario lost their lives while attending high school in Thunder Bay. These losses of Indigenous life became the subject of a joint provincial inquest that concluded in the summer of 2016. In this article the author offers a critical examination of the scope of this inquest as well as a broader chronological review of its proceedings. The focus is on the ways in which the presiding coroner shaped the scope of the inquest to include things like the alcohol consumption of the students and to exclude things like the quality of police investigations. The issue of First Nation Jury Representation and its role in delaying the inquest for several years is also contextualized. Ultimately, it is argued that the Seven Youth Inquest conforms closely to what Sherene Razack (2011; 2015) has written about the colonial function of inquests into the deaths of Indigenous peoples: mainly that such proceedings stage deco...
Kim Anderson. Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teaching, and Story Medicine. Winnipeg: Unive... more Kim Anderson. Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teaching, and Story Medicine. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011. 210 pages. Notes Bibliography. Index. $27.95 sc. There are very real and pressing realities attached to critical conversations about Anishnabek cultural practices, ways of being, language, and movement politics. In Life Stages of Native Women: Memory, Teaching, and Story Medicine, Kim Anderson offers a rigorously researched text that takes these considerations seriously. Anderson writes in her introduction that her purpose is to "dig up the medicines of the past," (3) although the main success of Life Stages is its decolonizing effect on the future. In her first chapter, she offers a historiographical discussion on oral history and the importance of the relationship between story and storyteller. Here, the scope and relevance of her conversation extends far beyond the bindings of the book, and the impressive skill of Anderson as a writer, historian, and storyteller shines brighter than it does in the short chapter that follows, which briefy explains her interview methodology and project participants. Chapters Three to Six delineate and describe four central stages of life: from birth to walking; childhood and youth; the stage of adulthood; and the process of becoming grandmothers or Elders. Having interviewed other Native women and some men about these practices, experiences, and teachings, Anderson fleshes out the facts of the various lifestages with humorous stories and clever anecdotes. In her conclusion, Anderson does not flinch when addressing the realities of ongoing colonial concerns in Native communities; nonetheless, Life Stages ends with an empowered affirmation of personal optimism that is compelling and convincing--particularly given the wider movement into which one might place Anderson's work. Life Stages needs to be read as part of a wider anti-colonial project that views gender justice as the platform for political resistance and resurgence in First Nations communities. It is important to remember that this struggle is ongoing, and that sex discrimination persists in the policies of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (see http://www.lynngehl.com). The Canadian government clearly needs some guidance on how to make gender equality a reality for all of its citizens, and Life Stages proves useful as a teaching tool in this respect: in sketching out what a non-colonized society looks like, Anderson helps readers to formulate and conceive of an ontological alternative to the Canadian society in which we currently live. Life Stages can also be read, therefore, as a fitting follow-up to Anderson's previous publication, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood. …
Purpose Responding to the needs of homeless and marginally housed persons has been a major compon... more Purpose Responding to the needs of homeless and marginally housed persons has been a major component of the Canadian federal and provincial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, smaller, less-resourced cities and rural regions have been left competing for limited resources (Schiff et al., 2020). The purpose of this paper is to use a case study to examine and highlight information about the capacities and needs of service hub cities during pandemics. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on the experience of Thunder Bay – a small city in Northern Ontario, Canada which experienced a serious outbreak of COVID-19 amongst homeless persons and shelter staff in the community. The authors catalogued the series of events leading to this outbreak through information tracked by two of the authors who hold key funding and planning positions within the Thunder Bay homeless sector. Findings Several lessons may be useful for other cities nationally and internationally of similar size...
The introduction outlines the unique characteristics of the collection—its global focus, multidis... more The introduction outlines the unique characteristics of the collection—its global focus, multidisciplinary composition, and the combination of historical and contemporary analyses. By drawing on transnational feminism, transculturalism, intersectionality, and reproductive justice frameworks, it illuminates the similarities and variance in past and contemporary studies of reproductive politics. The editors explain the importance of complicating the many histories and ongoing politics of abortion by situating them within the broader conditions in which women make decisions about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. The introduction demonstrates that putting conversations about abortion and contraception, reproduction, and personhood alongside one another in this multidisciplinary fashion creates a more nuanced understanding of reproductive health.
Health promotion and chronic disease prevention in Canada : research, policy and practice, 2017
This paper looks at the market food environments of First Nations communities located in the prov... more This paper looks at the market food environments of First Nations communities located in the provincial Norths by examining the potential retail competition faced by the North West Company (NWC) and by reporting on the grocery shopping experiences of people living in northern Canada. We employed two methodological approaches to assess northern retail food environments. First, we mapped food retailers in the North to examine the breadth of retail competition in the provincial Norths, focussing specifically on those communities without year-round road access. Second, we surveyed people living in communities in northern Canada about their retail and shopping experiences. Fifty-four percent of communities in the provincial Norths and Far North without year-round road access did not have a grocery store that competed with the NWC. The provinces with the highest percentage of northern communities without retail competition were Ontario (87%), Saskatchewan (83%) and Manitoba (72%). Respond...
In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (197... more In this article, I offer a settler colonial reading of Sir Ridley Scott’s Alien films: Alien (1979), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017). My purpose is to underscore the historical dimensions within Alien’s depiction of the future and to demonstrate that the film series is far more exercised with historicity than with futurity. Specifically, I argue that Scott’s metaphors, themes, and plots were intentionally evocative of the horrors of British imperial expansion within North America and function as a kind of mnemonic device that remember the violence of the settler colonial past. More broadly, I offer this analysis because, like many other scholars, I view the science fiction and horror genres, between which we can locate Alien, as remarkably provocative and productive. Such non-realist depictions of monsters, zombies, ghosts, alien invasions, or the human colonization of outer space contain archives of historical feeling that can be accessed through what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd called a “mnemonic reading” praxis. In The Transit of Empire, Byrd explains that a mnemonic reading seeks to “connect the violences and genocides of colonization to cultural productions […] in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion” (xii-xiii). In reading Scott’s film series mnemonically as a larger story invested with settler colonial genocide and preoccupied with foreclosures of human futurity, I add to a considerable body of scholarly literature on Alien that has [End Page 188] shaped my reading of the series as well as my approach to the horror and science fiction genres as cathected with coloniality.
This article interrogates the settler colonial history of Thunder Bay through place names and arg... more This article interrogates the settler colonial history of Thunder Bay through place names and argues that gendered forms of anti-Indigenous violence are part of the city's social architecture. Between 1860 and 1910, settlers produced vast amounts of wealth and built a local industrial economy founded upon land-based resources such as silver, timber, and shale; at the same time, settlers forcefully relocated Anishnaabe peoples to multiple reserve sites, prevented them from participating in the emergent industrial economy, and used their sacred mountain as a quarry for brick-making and as a stop-butt for a settler rifle range. The article deploys the concept of settler colonial reterritorialization to critique the ways in which this history has been sanctioned and celebrated through local place names such as Mount McKay, Fort William, Port Arthur, and Simpson Street. Ultimately, I show that the material violence of enfolding the land and its resources into an exploitative and exclusive settler colonial economy emerged in tandem with the power to name the land in honour of white men who played primary roles in that very violent historical process.
Understanding Atrocities: Remembering, Representing, and Teaching Genocide, 2017
This article critiques the racist discourses that recast housing crises in Mushkegowuk communitie... more This article critiques the racist discourses that recast housing crises in Mushkegowuk communities with references to racist, sexist, and fatphobic discourses that insulted the hunger strike or political fast of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat First Nation
Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, afford... more Though First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable health care, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. Inventing the Thrifty Gene examines the relationship between science and settler colonialism through the lens of “Aboriginal diabetes” and the thrifty gene hypothesis, which posits that Indigenous peoples are genetically predisposed to type 2 diabetes and obesity due to their alleged hunter-gatherer genes.
Hay’s study begins with Charles Darwin’s travels and his observations on the Indigenous peoples he encountered, setting the imperial context for Canadian histories of medicine and colonialism. It continues in the mid-twentieth century with a look at nutritional experimentation during the long career of Percy Moore, the medical director of Indian Affairs (1946–1965). Hay then turns to James Neel’s invention of the thrifty gene hypothesis in 1962 and Robert Hegele’s reinvention and application of the hypothesis to Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario in the 1990s. Finally, Hay demonstrates the way in which settler colonial science was responded to and resisted by Indigenous leadership in Sandy Lake First Nation, who used monies from the thrifty gene study to fund wellness programs in their community.
Inventing the Thrifty Gene exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian health care that persist even today.
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Hay’s study begins with Charles Darwin’s travels and his observations on the Indigenous peoples he encountered, setting the imperial context for Canadian histories of medicine and colonialism. It continues in the mid-twentieth century with a look at nutritional experimentation during the long career of Percy Moore, the medical director of Indian Affairs (1946–1965). Hay then turns to James Neel’s invention of the thrifty gene hypothesis in 1962 and Robert Hegele’s reinvention and application of the hypothesis to Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario in the 1990s. Finally, Hay demonstrates the way in which settler colonial science was responded to and resisted by Indigenous leadership in Sandy Lake First Nation, who used monies from the thrifty gene study to fund wellness programs in their community.
Inventing the Thrifty Gene exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian health care that persist even today.