This Land Is Your Land?: What Matters Now, Fall 2020

Less than an hour’s drive from where I’m writing in Hamilton, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are defending Haudenosaunee territory against private developers and a court injunction. A provincial judge ruled there is no land claim at 1492 Land Back Lane: the territory belongs to the Canadian state. Refusing to obey the court ruling, Haudenosaunee land defender Skyler Williams said: “We’re committed to defending our territory and that includes us staying on the land. This is Haudenosaunee territory and it’s going to remain that.” 

The roots of contradictions fueling struggles over land are often misrepresented by people suggesting ways to ease tensions. J. Edward Chamberlin, a University of Toronto professor of English, argues in his book, If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, that land disputes stem from contending stories about identity and community. Chamberlin’s hopes for overcoming these disputes, for moving toward a future of peace and justice, rest on developing shared commitments to better appreciating each other’s stories. Recognizing that we all have our own “ceremonies of belief,” says Chamberlin, opens the way beyond “Them and Us” politics, toward “common ground.” As though Foxgate, the corporation claiming exclusive title to land in Caledonia, is capable of appreciating, let alone being moved by, the “story” of Haudenosaunee sovereignty. As though Indigenous land defenders ought to be moved by the “stories” of the colonial state (as if Indigenous people haven’t been forced to accept the “story” of Crown title for centuries), stories of Canadian sovereignty that require extinguishing Indigenous rights, backed by police, the courts, the military, the prison system, the exclusive use of legitimate violence.

Of course stories are important (says the book review editor). They mediate our relationships to each other and the earth, to the reality outside our heads. But as the struggle at Caledonia clearly shows, high-stakes clashes between contradictory stories aren’t primarily played out, and are never resolved, on the field of language and ideas. It’s not the qualities of a story being fought over at 1492 Land Back Lane, but our embodied relationships to the material world – the ability to control lands, bodies, overturned vehicles, handcuffs and guns, food and shelter, waterways.

This edition of What Matters Now reviews three books focusing on struggles over land. Adrienne Clarke reviews Pamela Palmater’s Warrior Life: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence (Fernwood). Clarke draws on her experience as an Indigenous woman, a mother and grandmother, a water walker, and a student of social justice long fighting against colonialism and racism, to argue that Palmater’s book “ought to live in every home and school across the country.”

I review Peter McFarlane’s biography of one of the twentieth century’s most powerful leaders on Turtle Island, From Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Between The Lines). By centering the land question in my review, I follow the lead of Manuel’s incredible life as an activist for Indigenous sovereignty in Canada and around the world.

Paul Weinberg’s edited collection on social, economic, and political changes in Hamilton is reviewed by Mark Osbaldaston (author of 2016’s Unbuilt Hamilton). Osbaldaston’s reflections on Reclaiming Hamilton: Essays from the New Ambitious City (Wolsak & Wynn) draw links between the city I write from today, and visions of what Hamilton once was, and might one day be.

James Cairns is associate professor of Social and Environmental Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Senior Editor at Hamilton Review of Books. He is the co-author (with Alan Sears) of The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century (University of Toronto Press, 2012). His most recent book is The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (University of Toronto Press, 2017).