Anti-Colonial Science: A Course Journal. Vol. 1, 2022. https://ojs.library.dal.ca/acs/

When You Steal the Land, You Steal the Stories

Sadie Quinn

While considering various interactions between European colonizers and the Indigenous peoples of what is now North America, an important theme emerged for me – when you steal the land, you steal the stories. In my Western understanding of the world, stories are purely metaphysical, something that can be passed around but never quite pinned down. In many Indigenous worldviews, this is not the case. Land and stories are linked in such a way that it is impossible to strip a people of one and not both. The process of colonization often ignores this deeper value of land, preferring to view it as nothing but a source of material wealth. This commodification of land and natural materials leads to the simultaneous appropriation of the land itself and the stories contained within it. Using the framework of Lee Maracle’s definition of appropriation, I will discuss two instances of the theft of Indigenous lands and stories – in the Canadian North as well as in my hometown of Vancouver.

In Chapter 10, “Appropriation”, of her 2017 book My Conversations with Canadians, Maracle characterizes both land and stories as victims of European colonization and of the complex and insidious process of appropriation. The displacement of Indigenous peoples from their land directly impacts the transmission of knowledge because of the way stories are deeply rooted in the ancestral territory of the people who transmit them. Maracle explains that Indigenous “knowledge, stories, songs, and dances… are there to engage the listener in establishing a relationship to the land and help [Indigenous peoples] build good relations between beings and the land”.1 Appropriation, which Maracle stresses is a form of theft, robs the original inhabitants of an area of the ability to benefit from their land, and by extension, from the knowledge and relationships that living on the land has allowed them to develop.2 As the process of appropriation continues, Indigenous peoples are forced to buy back what was stolen from them, whether it be through land settlements or the tuition fees of universities. Because land and story are deeply connected in Indigenous worldviews, the dispossession of the former necessarily leads to the loss of the latter.

Emilie Cameron deepens the connection between land and stories by tracing the history of one particular mineral – copper – in the context of Inuit and colonial relations in the Canadian North. Cameron argues that storytelling is not only an act of imagination, but a “material ordering practice.”.3 The land is not only metaphorically rich in stories, the very minerals in the ground form a concrete part of the narrative of a particular place. Cameron illustrates this point by presenting several retellings of an Inuit story involving a copper knife. Whereas an earlier version of the story casts the knife as an active agent, both tool and guide, the missionary and anthropologist Maurice Métayer’s account “draws lines between the spiritual and the real; it places copper in an abstracted material hierarchy”.4 It is logical that the refiguring of the stories of copper in the Canadian North took place in conjunction with colonization and mining exploration by Europeans; stripping copper of the agency it possesses in the Inuit understanding benefits Europeans who want to view copper simply as a commodity. The colonial domination of copper in the North constitutes appropriation in Maracle’s terms, due to the theft of material wealth as well as the denial of the complex cultural and spiritual knowledge that the materials on the land hold. In the face of this shift in the narrative of copper, the people of Kugluktuk, Nunavut have continued to fight to ensure “that they accrue benefits from mining activity in the region”.5 Much of the narrative value of copper has already been lost, so Kugluktukmiut are trying to hold onto its material value if nothing else. They are fighting against appropriation, against the theft of their land and stories for the benefit of a colonial power.

I was reminded of the inextricable link between land and stories when I learned one particular story of the land on which I grew up. c̓əsnaʔəm is the name of a site in what is now South Vancouver, once a significant settlement of the Musqueam First Nation. To most non-Indigenous Vancouverites, it is an empty lot under a bridge in an industrial area near the Fraser River. To Musqueam Nation members such as Shane Point, it is “the development of who we are as human beings”.6 The simultaneous theft of land and stories became clear in 2011 and 2012, when Musqueam attempted to halt a condominium development application, and an archaeological investigation revealed a grave site at c̓əsnaʔəm. The discovery of this lost story drove members of the Musqueam Nation to reclaim their heritage and their land, holding vigil at the site for 200 days. The provincial government agreed not to renew the development permit, and Musqueam went on to purchase back a portion of the site.7 These events illustrate the pattern of appropriation laid out by Maracle; the Musqueam Nation needed to buy back their land in order to reclaim ownership over this important part of their history. Wendy Grant-John stresses that “we didn’t do it because we wanted to create revenue… we did it to protect the integrity of what that village meant to us”.8 Land was more than a commodity; the Musqueam people saw taking back land as a form of education, within their community and outside of it.9 Reclaiming the land meant reclaiming the stories.

In both the Inuit and Musqueam examples, the conflict between Indigenous peoples and European settlers was largely based on an incompatible understanding of the value of land. Whereas the settlers primarily saw the land as a source of material wealth, the Indigenous peoples knew that it was also rich in stories. The assertion of European dominion over Indigenous lands therefore constituted the simultaneous appropriation of land and knowledge. Indigenous resistance to the dispossession of their land is a reclamation of a physical space in addition to all the stories that that space holds. This process of reclamation may include the re-purchasing of land and resources, which are now seen as a source of revenue for Indigenous communities. While this course of action allows Indigenous peoples to benefit from their land once again, buying back land also means that the communities are buying back knowledge, in a continuation of the cycle of appropriation that Maracle identifies. Understanding land and stories as inseparable makes clear the injustice of the colonial project – even if the colonizers only see the land as a commodity, they are stealing so much more.

Bibliography

Cameron, Emilie. “Copper Stories: Imaginative Geographies and Material Orderings of the Central Canadian Arctic.” In Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada, edited by A. Baldwin, L. Cameron, and A. Kobayashi, 169–190. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.

c̓əsnaʔəm: The City Before the City. Directed by Elle-Maija Tailfeathers. Musqueam First Nation, 2017.

Maracle, Lee. “Appropriation”. In My Conversations with Canadians. Toronto: BookThug, 2017, pp. 99–122.

Endnotes

  1. Lee Maracle, “Appropriation”, in My Conversations with Canadians (Toronto: BookThug, 2017), p. 119.↩︎

  2. Lee Maracle, “Appropriation”, p. 101.↩︎

  3. Emilie Cameron, “Copper Stories: Imaginative Geographies and Material Orderings of the Central Canadian Arctic”, in Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), p. 180.↩︎

  4. Cameron, “Copper Stories”, p. 183.↩︎

  5. Cameron, “Copper Stories”, p. 185.↩︎

  6. c̓əsnaʔəm: The City Before the City, directed by Elle-Maija Tailfeathers (Musqueam First Nation, 2017), 28:17.↩︎

  7. c̓əsnaʔəm (2017), 54:55.↩︎

  8. c̓əsnaʔəm (2017), 56:28.↩︎

  9. c̓əsnaʔəm (2017), 1:05:18.↩︎

Copyright (c) 2022 Sadie Quinn

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