Arts, Faculty of
Geography, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Barr, Caolan
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Building on established frameworks of housing justice, urban studies, legal geography, conservation and environmental studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous studies, this work argues that to properly understand housing injustice and the increased prevalence of urban encampments, settler colonialism as a set of ongoing power relations needs to be centered within housing justice scholarship and organizing. Grounded in firsthand accounts of supporting an encampment of unhoused residents at Meegan or ‘Beacon Hill Park’ in Victoria BC, this project reveals the settler colonial discourses and spatio-legal relations underlying efforts to displace unhoused communities from urban parks. Through autoethnography, participant observation and interviews with local community organizers, I examine the connections between settler colonialism and housing injustice through the frame of ‘settler revanchism’. In doing so, I apply a shoreline analytic in which Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice are revealed to be relationally situated struggles connected through everyday resistance to settler colonial power. Across nine chapters, understood as islands connected across seemingly disparate shores, this thesis examines: the development of encampments on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories during the Covid-19 pandemic; the urban history of the City of Victoria focusing on the spatial exclusion of Songhees and Esquimalt people as central to the city’s urban development; the history of Beacon Hill Park, the City’s ‘Crown jewel,’ and the symbolic meanings it carries for settlers in urban space; the ways in which a campaign to evict campers sheltering in Meegan mobilized conservation discourses to retrench settler colonial forms of control; mobilization of the colonial land trust to evade questions of justice for unhoused residents; reflections experiences of organizing through mutual aid at the Meegan encampment relationally with Indigenous sovereignty movements, and; finally, I bring the concepts of sovereignty and value into friction with one another in settler-led solidarity movements, grounded in the everyday care work within encampments in the City today.
ACROSS DISTANT SHORES? BRIDGING HOUSING JUSTICE AND DECOLONIZATION ON LƏK̓ʷƏŊƏN AND W̱SÁNEĆ TERRITORIES by Caolan Barr MA., University of Toronto, 2018 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Geography) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2024 © Caolan Barr, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, a dissertation entitled: Across Distant Shores? Bridging Housing Justice and Decolonization on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories submitted by Caolan Barr in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography. Examining Committee Dr. Sarah Hunt, Associate Professor, School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria Co- Supervisor Dr. Glen Coulthard, Associate Professor, Political Science and First Nations and Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia Co-Supervisor Dr. Deborah Cowen, Professor, Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Alexandra Flynn, Associate Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia University Examiner Dr. Geraldine Pratt, Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia University Examiner Dr. Jeffery R. Masuda, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Social Policy, University of Victoria External Examiner iii Abstract Building on established frameworks of housing justice, urban studies, legal geography, conservation and environmental studies, and settler colonial and Indigenous studies, this work argues that to properly understand housing injustice and the increased prevalence of urban encampments, settler colonialism as a set of ongoing power relations needs to be centered within housing justice scholarship and organizing. Grounded in firsthand accounts of supporting an encampment of unhoused residents at Meegan or ‘Beacon Hill Park’ in Victoria BC, this project reveals the settler colonial discourses and spatio-legal relations underlying efforts to displace unhoused communities from urban parks. Through autoethnography, participant observation and interviews with local community organizers, I examine the connections between settler colonialism and housing injustice through the frame of ‘settler revanchism’. In doing so, I apply a shoreline analytic in which Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice are revealed to be relationally situated struggles connected through everyday resistance to settler colonial power. Across nine chapters, understood as islands connected across seemingly disparate shores, this thesis examines: the development of encampments on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories during the Covid-19 pandemic; the urban history of the City of Victoria focusing on the spatial exclusion of Songhees and Esquimalt people as central to the city’s urban development; the history of Beacon Hill Park, the City’s ‘Crown jewel,’ and the symbolic meanings it carries for settlers in urban space; the ways in which a campaign to evict campers sheltering in Meegan mobilized conservation discourses to retrench settler colonial forms of control; mobilization of the colonial land trust to evade questions of justice for unhoused residents; reflections experiences of organizing through mutual aid at the Meegan encampment relationally with Indigenous sovereignty movements, and; finally, I bring the concepts of sovereignty and value iv into friction with one another in settler-led solidarity movements, grounded in the everyday care work within encampments in the City today. v Lay Summary This work examines homeless encampments in Victoria, British Columbia (Lək̓ʷəŋən territories) during the Covid-19 pandemic to understand the connections between settler colonialism and housing injustice. To do so, I analyze the urban development of Victoria, the establishment of public parks like Beacon Hill, an anti-sheltering campaign launched against those experiencing homelessness, legal decisions surrounding sheltering and the practices of local community members in support of encampments. These avenues allow me to illustrate that settler colonialism continues to undergird housing injustice in contemporary municipal governance and, oftentimes, in settler-led solidarity movements as well. vi Preface The research questions and research design were developed by myself, under the supervision and guidance of Sarah Hunt, Glen Coulthard and Deborah Cowen. The ethics application was completed by me, then approved and submitted to UBC Research Ethics Board by Sarah Hunt. The ethics certificate number is H22-00824. Much of the thinking throughout this dissertation was developed in conversation with collaborators who I worked closely with in pursuing this community work: Niki Ottosen, Nic Olson, Ella Martindale, Casey Lake, Shae Perkins, Leslie Robinson and Gina Mowatt. It has also been shaped by people who were generous with their time and knowledge and interviewed for the project: Joshua Goldberg, Kym A. Hines and Lacey Jones. Content from this thesis has been presented at: The North America Indigenous Studies Association Conference hosted in Tkaronto at the University of Toronto as “Bridging Housing Justice and Settler Colonialism” on May 11, 2023. The Commission on Political Geography hosted by the International Geographic Union hosted at Queen’s University Belfast on the panel “Activism Beyond Binary” as “Decolonizing Housing Justice? Unpacking Solidarity across Difference” on August 22, 2024. vii Contents ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................................................................. iii LAY SUMMARY ...................................................................................................................................................... v PREFACE ............................................................................................................................................................... vi CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................................................... vii LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................................................... x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................................................................... xi DEDICATION ....................................................................................................................................................... xiii 1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 SETTING THE SCENE: TROUBLING THE THRONE AND RUBBISHING COMMUNITY INFRASTRUCTURE............................................. 1 1.2 WHITHER HOUSING JUSTICE IN ANTICOLONIAL INQUIRY? ................................................................................................. 5 1.3 COLONIAL RACIAL CAPITALISM .................................................................................................................................. 14 1.4 ‘SETTLER’ REVANCHISM? ......................................................................................................................................... 18 1.5 PROJECT OUTLINE .................................................................................................................................................. 23 1.6 CONCLUSION: DISTANT SHORES OR A SEA OF ISLANDS? ................................................................................................. 25 2 METHODOLOGIES AND METHODS: PLACING ONESELF IN THE MESS OF THINGS ............................................... 28 2.1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................................... 28 2.2 CONTEXTUALIZING RESEARCH: KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN THE SETTLER COLONY ............................................................ 32 2.3 CONDUCTING RESEARCH: BUILDING A METHODOLOGICAL PRAXIS .................................................................................... 37 2.4 HOW I CAME TO THIS WORK .................................................................................................................................... 41 2.5 METHODS AND TIMELINE ......................................................................................................................................... 44 2.5.1 CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ...................................................................................................................... 45 2.5.2 INTERVIEWS ............................................................................................................................................... 48 2.5.3 STORYTELLING, AUTOETHNOGRAPHY, PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION, AND POLITICAL ACTIVIST ETHNOGRAPHY................ 56 2.6 LIMITATIONS OF RESEARCH ....................................................................................................................................... 65 3 ‘GIMME SHELTER’: ENCAMPMENTS, HOME AND HOUSING JUSTICE AMIDST A GLOBAL PANDEMIC ................. 67 3.1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................................... 67 3.2 ADDRESSING HOMELESSNESS’ ROOT CAUSES ............................................................................................................... 77 3.3 INDIGENOUS EXPERIENCES OF HOUSING PRECARITY AND HOMELESSNESS .......................................................................... 86 3.4 ON ENCAMPMENTS AS FEATURES OF EVERYDAY LIFE ..................................................................................................... 90 3.5 RACIAL SPACE: REPRESENTING THE ENCAMPMENT ........................................................................................................ 95 3.6 ENCAMPMENT AS ALIMENTARY INFRASTRUCTURE ....................................................................................................... 100 4 OCCUPYING METULIA?: PRODUCING THE SETTLER COLONIAL CITY THROUGH LƏK�ʷƏŊƏN EXCLUSION AND CRIMINALIZATION ............................................................................................................................................. 104 4.1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 104 4.2 PRODUCING THE SETTLER COLONIAL CITY THROUGH INDIGENOUS DISPOSSESSION ............................................................ 106 4.3 URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE SETTLER COLONIAL CITY ................................................................ 112 4.4 CRIMINALIZING AND POLICING RACIAL SUBJECTIVITY ................................................................................................... 122 4.5 CONCLUSION: THE LONGUE DUREE OF DISPLACEMENT: CONNECTING VICTORIA’S PAST AND PRESENT .................................. 132 5 ‘VICTORIA’S CROWN JEWEL’: MEEGAN, GARDENS AND SETTLER REVANCHISM .............................................. 135 viii 5.1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 135 5.2 ‘WELCOME TO VICTORIA, BC’S CITY OF GARDENS!’ .................................................................................................... 139 5.3 MEEGAN: ‘A PLACE TO WARM THE BELLY’ ................................................................................................................ 144 5.4 APPROPRIATION AND THE PICTURESQUE ................................................................................................................... 148 5.5 RESTORYING THE LAND THROUGH LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN ..................................................................... 153 5.6 ENGINEERING THE SETTLER CITIZEN THROUGH LANDSCAPE DESIGN ................................................................................ 156 5.7 ‘TAKE BACK OUR PARK!’: REVANCHISM, ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY AND SETTLER ENTITLEMENT ........................................... 165 5.8 CONCLUSION: REPRESENTING MEEGAN, REHEARSING THE FRONTIER ............................................................................. 170 6 WITH ‘FRIENDS’ LIKE THESE: GREENWASHING DISPLACEMENT THROUGH CONSERVATION DISCOURSE ......... 174 6.1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 174 6.2 THE FRIENDS OF BEACON HILL PARK: TO (PRE)SERVE AND PROTECT .............................................................................. 177 6.3 “CONSERVATION IS COLONIALISM”: MAPPING THE ROOTS OF A HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE................................................... 181 6.4 PRODUCING URBAN NATURES ................................................................................................................................ 185 6.5 SECURING CONSERVATION, SECURING TERRITORY....................................................................................................... 189 6.6 ARBOROPOLITICS?: TREE CULTURE, BIOPOLITICAL MANAGEMENT AND URBAN PUBLICS .................................................... 196 6.7 FROM CONSERVATION TO ‘ORDER’: PROTECTING SETTLER ENTITLEMENTS....................................................................... 202 6.8 CONCLUSION: PLANTS OVER PEOPLE? ...................................................................................................................... 207 7 “IN COLONIALISM WE TRUST”: ‘USE, RECREATION AND ENJOYMENT’, AND THE COLONIAL LAND TRUST IN THE COURTS ............................................................................................................................................................. 210 7.1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 210 7.2 SIGNPOSTING US THROUGH LEGAL GEOGRAPHIES ....................................................................................................... 212 7.3 MAKING ‘PUBLIC’ SPACE IN THE SETTLER COLONY ...................................................................................................... 216 7.4 ‘UPHOLD THE TRUST’: FIGHTING THE RIGHT TO SHELTER AND LƏK̓ʷƏŊƏN JURISDICTION THROUGH THE 1882 TRUST .............. 220 7.5 SEEKING PRECEDENCE: THE LEGAL HISTORY OF THE TRUST ........................................................................................... 226 7.6 THE ‘USES OF USE’ UNDER SETTLER COLONIALISM ..................................................................................................... 231 7.7 TECHNOCRATIC GOVERNANCE AND RECREATIONISM ................................................................................................... 237 7.8 CONCLUSION: LIFE AND DEATH EFFACED: THE TECHNOCRATIC FUNCTIONING OF LAW ....................................................... 242 8 TENSIONS AND ERASURES: CONDUCTING SOLIDARITY ON LƏK�ʷƏŊƏN AND W̱SÁNEĆ TERRITORY ................. 247 8.1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 247 8.2 PLACING OURSELVES WITHIN THE STORY ................................................................................................................... 258 8.3 ‘STARTING WHERE WE STAND’: EMPLACING STRUGGLES FOR JUSTICE ............................................................................ 267 8.4 MUTUAL AID AND COMMUNITY SHOWERS ................................................................................................................ 272 8.5 INSTALLING ‘ALIMENTARY INFRASTRUCTURES’ ............................................................................................................ 283 8.6 NATURALIZING COLONIAL AUTHORITY AND PRODUCING ‘NEEDY’ SUBJECTS ..................................................................... 289 8.7. CONCLUSION: NAVIGATING OUR SEA OF ISLANDS ...................................................................................................... 295 9 TOWARD SHORELINES OF SETTLER SOLIDARITY: UNPACKING DOMINANT DISCOURSES OF SOVEREIGNTY AND VALUE IN LOCAL ORGANIZING ........................................................................................................................... 299 9.1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 299 9.2 SOVEREIGNTY: CONDITIONING THE ‘PROPERLY POLITICAL’ ............................................................................................ 301 9.3 PRODUCING VALUE: NORMATIVE SUBJECTS AND THE VALUATION OF STRUGGLE ............................................................... 314 9.4 ‘CHOICE’, AFFECT AND SOLIDARITY .......................................................................................................................... 324 9.5 MAKING CONNECTION ACROSS SHORELINES .............................................................................................................. 330 9.6 CONCLUSION: SURFACING FRICTION ......................................................................................................................... 340 10 CONCLUSION: CARE WORK AND REIMAGINING SOLIDARITY ........................................................................ 342 ix 10.1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................. 342 10.2 SCENES OF CARE, INTIMACY AND REIMAGINED SOLIDARITY ......................................................................................... 346 10.3 RETURNING TO THE SHORELINE ............................................................................................................................. 352 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................... 356 x List of Figures Figure 1 THE COMMUNITY CARE TENT AT MEEGAN. PHOTO BY AUTHOR.................................................................... 4 Figure 2 TIMELINE ........................................................................................................................................................ 44 Figure 3 ENCAMPMENT ON STORE STREET. IMAGE PN 1433; COURTESY OF ROYAL B.C. MUSEUM, B.C. ARCHIVES. 95 Figure 4 GREATER VICTORIA HARBOUR AUTHORITY. ................................................................................................ 140 Figure 5 KYM A. HINES SPREADING JOY IN THE COMMUNITY CARE TENT. PHOTO BY SHAE PERKINS. USED WITH PERMISSION. .............................................................................................................................................................. 342 xi Acknowledgements I acknowledge first and foremost, the community members who this dissertation is about and for. I am blessed to be a part of a community of creative, compassionate and fierce advocates, many of whom directly participated in and informed this work. I want to thank these community members for their generosity, their time and for their friendship, Niki Ottosen, Nic Olson, Ella Martindale, Kym A. Hines, Casey Lake, Shae Perkins, Leslie Robinson and Gina Mowatt. I am deeply proud to know all of these people, and am constantly in awe of their ability to serve their communities. I hope that this work can do justice to what they offer me. I am also grateful for people who I did not directly work with but who agreed to share their knowledge and their time through the interview process; Joshua Goldberg and Lacey Jones. I also want to thank the broader community that passionately fight to make life livable for everyone, in spectacular and everyday ways, on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories and beyond: the Indigenous youth who held it down at the Legislature in the face of immense violence, Wet’suwet’en communities who continue fighting, the students who organized encampments at UVic and across Turtle Island in support of Palestinians shores apart, the housed and unhoused communities who ran the community care tent and showed me what community could be, the group I organized the showers with, the Stop the Sweeps Victoria group that I currently organize with and the community currently sheltering at Irving Park, who are passionate and, most of all, caring. I also need to extend my thanks to the broader network of friends and colleagues who have supported me as inched through this research, reading countless drafts and fielding many panicked phone calls: Sara Fruchtman, Ricky Forgo, Mariko Omiya, Melpetkwe Matthew, Sarah Graham, Madi Bourette-Knowles, Onyx Sloan Morgan, Mercedes Peters, Tara Campbell, Seb Bonet, Faeryll Bosworth, Morgan Mowatt, Colin Brown, Mason de Vries, Stacie Swain, Linde Alcock, Salia Joseph, Quill Christie-Peters and Alexis Hildreth. My family has been a constant support, and I am grateful to for them every day, my sisters Rachel Barr and Sara Reside, and my mother, Lynne Reside. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my committee members, Jeffery R. Masuda, Alexandra Flynn, and Geraldine Pratt for their engagement with my work. Deb Cowen and Glen Coulthard, patiently encouraged me to think deeply and ethically about these pressing issues. Finally, Sarah Hunt provided a guiding influence on this work, and has gone above and beyond in supporting this work and me personally. And, of course, Gwaat’lax. xii I give my deepest thanks to all of these people for showing up, for showing care. xiii Dedication For Edna, I told you I would finish. 1 1 Introduction 1.1 Setting the Scene: Troubling the Throne and Rubbishing Community Infrastructure I want to begin by telling two stories, stories that seem to occupy distant shores, before moving to tether these stories together, to place them in relation, to bridge the waters and distance across which they seem to speak. February 11th, 2020. At the British Columbia Legislature Building, preparations are being made for the Throne Speech which inaugurates every session of the BC Legislative Assembly. Delivered by the Lieutenant Governor, the event is typically accompanied by performances of colonial pomp and ceremony. The Lieutenant Governor arrives and is welcomed by a Guard of Honour, conducts a formal inspection of the Guard along the Legislature’s front boulevard, and receives a 15-gun salute as cannons fire across Victoria’s Inner Harbour. The Premier formally receives the Lieutenant Governor and escorts them through the ceremonial gates of the Legislature building. These gates are kept closed and locked at all other times. The Lieutenant Governor then reads a speech that outlines the governing party’s proposed goals and objectives in convening the Assembly. This is a treasured ceremony of Canadian political culture, a performance that rehearses the authority of both the Province and the nation, affirming an ongoing connection to British Empire. However, a different kind of political performance is being enacted on this day. Over a thousand people have descended on the Legislature in support of Indigenous youth occupying its ceremonial gates [Figure 1]. The occupation is in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en communities asserting their jurisdiction over their unceded territories. In January, the RCMP raided 2 Wet’suwet’en territory to enforce an injunction that, TC Energy, a Calgary-based energy company, had been granted to evict Wet’suwet’en community members and make way for the Coastal Gas Link pipeline. Protests, blockades and actions erupted across the nation aiming to ‘shut down Canada’. At the Legislature, supporters block entrances, disrupting business-as-usual and attempting to hold MLAs and the government responsible for the invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The Throne Speech does not go as planned. There is no Guard of Honour, no military salute. MLAs and the Lieutenant Governor do not enter with fanfare through the building’s ceremonial gates. Instead, they are smuggled in through tunnels under the building. Chants from the outside can be heard in the corridors and on the Legislature floor as the Lieutenant Governor, Janet Austin, delivers her speech. The normally peaceful halls of the Legislature ring with calls to ‘shut down Canada’ and ‘stand up, fight back!’. These are the voices that carry the day. November 20, 2020. Barely six months after the Throne Speech, over 40 police officers and bylaw agents have descended on the space known by Lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples as Meegan, colonially-known as Beacon Hill Park. Police tape off park entrances, and city workers drop an industrial roll-off dumpster in the center of the park. Police and bylaw officers target two forms of community-built infrastructure for destruction, a care tent established to distribute badly needed harm reductions supplies and a set of showers built to provide people with access to sanitation services. During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, shelter services have been restricted or discontinued and people experiencing homelessness have been kettled into the park with few other options. Meegan has become host to an encampment where people attempt to band together and weather the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, intensifying criminalization and the approaching winter. However, the encampment is under-resourced and subject to constant 3 policing and surveillance. People have been forced into the space but not provided the basic resources necessary to survive. Recognizing this, local community members have banded together to operate a community care tent where people can rest, get food and access resources, including tents, blankets, clothes, handwarmers and harm reductions supplies like sharps, pipes, naloxone and basic medical supplies, and to build two basic outdoor shower units where people can wash and clean themselves, an increasingly difficult task during the height of the pandemic. Yet, these forms of community-built and maintained infrastructures are hosted in an urban park and subject to city bylaws and ordinances. Despite the exceptional moment of a global pandemic and its disproportionate impacts on unhoused communities, the showers and the care tent are deemed illegal and slated for impoundment. Police and bylaw officers ignore the enormous amount of effort poured into these two projects as they move in to trash these community-built infrastructures, slashing the care tent, rubbishing harm reduction materials and throwing the showers unceremoniously into the dumpster. Arrests are made as community members try to protect the showers and tent that they had laboured over. Eventually, the dumpster is loaded onto a city truck and driven away. All that is left of months of organizing, fundraising, struggling and working are a few scattered scraps littered around the park. It seems that police power and draconian municipal policies have carried this day. 4 FIGURE 1 THE COMMUNITY CARE TENT AT MEEGAN. PHOTO BY AUTHOR. How do these stories speak to one another? Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice movements, while both contesting the violence, dispossession and displacement of colonial governance, did not always seem to occupy shared space. For many in the community, particularly White settlers, these moments appeared to be separate scenes occurring across distant shores. 1 In practice, these movements were too rarely in conversation about the common foundations of dispossession and displacement that diverse communities were experiencing within shared geographies. They seemed to be waged in differing discursive and even material terrains, distinct and disconnected. Why? How might we understand raids on Wet’suwet’en territory or solidarity at the Legislature as connected to the space of the encampment, the 1 I am grateful to Sarah Hunt for providing me the opportunity to explore the concepts of shorelines and shoreline law in relation to settler colonialism and Indigenous governance in her scholarship, guidance and teaching. My orientation towards the shoreline has been deeply influenced by Sarah’s teaching. I note the influence of Sarah’s work in this way to embody a citational politics which emphasizes relational learning and knowledge production and unsettles the normative ways in which the geographic canon and body of literature is assembled. 5 political claims of people experiencing homelessness and housing justice advocates? What underlies and links these experiences? I was involved in both the occupation of the Legislature and with providing encampment support in Meegan and was deeply shaped by both experiences. This research has been my attempt to understand and work through these experiences and their political meanings. This dissertation is an extended reflection on what housing justice, Indigenous sovereignty and settler solidarity mean and how we might more meaningfully bridge these movements constructed as shores apart. It is also an analysis of how homelessness, precarity and abandonment are constituted and experienced in the settler colony, and a generative exploration of the reformulated strategies of dispossession that settler states, institutions and citizens mobilize against Indigenous and unhoused communities (Withers 2021). Drawing on my own experiences within these spaces, and deeply informed by the communities and relations I am embedded within, I seek ways to hone, strengthen and bring closer together the important work of local organizers and Indigenous theory in ways that are potentially useful to wider struggles and concerns. 1.2 Whither Housing Justice in Anticolonial Inquiry? “Why shouldn't we be going to local nations for the rights to live in our homes rather than to our landlords and our governments?” -Leslie Robinson (personal communication). This project is based on my experiences as a community organizer, but it is also the story of how I came to this work, why I was present in both scenes described above, and why this work matters to me. My work as a scholar and researcher previously focused on the development of infrastructure in Treaty 3 territory, namely the construction of a system of dams which displaced Anishinaabeg communities (Barr 2018). I approached this work, as a White settler, 6 trying to understand how settler colonialism functions and the impact it had on the territory and community I was living in at the time. In that work, questions of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession were at the fore. It was not possible to understand Northern Ontario’s history of hydroelectric or urban development without seeing it through the prism of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession. This approach was understood to make sense in this context. Recently, however, my life has brought me back to so-called British Columbia, where I call home, and towards the issue of housing justice. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, I began actively supporting people experiencing homelessness and forced into encampments on the territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, in so-called Victoria. Though this kind of anti-poverty work was new to me, I was drawn into it because of the pressing need for housing and shelter in the city where I now make my home. Locally, the issue simply could not be ignored. As I built community in Victoria, I found myself drawn from the issues of resource extraction on which I had previously focussed, to questions of housing justice that were animating organizing on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. This move involved developing new analytical frameworks and critically reflecting on the organizing and scholarship I had previously conducted. Practicing solidarity in this context meant conducting forms of mutual aid, harm reduction and eventually, working on projects to build and support community infrastructure within Victoria’s largest and most prized park, ‘Beacon Hill’. Living in Victoria, a city in the depths of a tenancy crisis and structured by racialized experiences of urban development, impoverishment and homelessness, encouraged me to attend more fulsomely to housing precarity as an effect of colonial governance in both my organizing and scholarship. 7 However, as I have oriented my work towards housing justice, I have been struck by the ways in which this issue is taken up, particularly by White settlers, and settler-led NGOs, as somehow detached from questions of settler colonialism and Indigenous jurisdiction; as if precarity, housing and tenancy crises and the rampant commodification and financialization of housing experienced in cities like ‘Victoria’, ‘Vancouver’ or ‘Toronto’, bear no relation to ongoing settler colonial governance and histories of Indigenous dispossession. In practice, housing justice is often seen as somehow separate or distinct from land-based anticolonial movements (Blatman and Sisson 2023). An understanding of how ongoing Indigenous jurisdiction could radically reorient projects of housing justice is rarely allowed to inform local organizing practices (Porter and Kelly 2023). While Indigenous organizations like Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction, the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society in ‘Vancouver’ or QomQem in Victoria carry on long traditions of Indigenous anticolonialism which understand settler power as intimate and everyday, the connections between precarity, housing justice and settler colonialism have been taken up much more slowly and haphazardly within settler solidarity organizing and scholarship. As an analytic, settler colonialism is less often meaningfully brought to bear on questions of precarity, poverty, homelessness and housing justice (Kent-Stoll 2020; Ellis-Young 2022). 2 For instance, how homelessness and encampments are the products of ongoing settler colonial governance is not always unpacked in mainstream policy, but also within settler anti-poverty, 2 Instead, Indigeneity is often seen as a social determinant of health and homelessness. When this is not paired with a robust analysis of settler colonial violence, this can result in Indigeneity itself being framed as a form of debility (Puar 2019). This often results in Indigenous people being framed as the ‘problem’, and thus the site of intervention through therapeutic strategies, rather than addressing the set of social relations and structures of settler colonial domination that result in disproportionate experiences of precarity and homelessness. (Million 2013; Clark 2016a). This is to say, that the question of settler colonialism is often invoked to responsibilize Indigenous peoples themselves for experiences of precarity and poverty, rather than the structural conditions that shape settler states (Waller and McCallum 2022). 8 housing justice and solidarity movements. Within much of the scholarship on contemporary housing justice, the question of housing precarity is often seen as somehow separate or ancillary to the ongoing history of settler colonialism, occurring across what I call distant shores (Porter and Kelly 2023). References may be made to the historical effects of colonization, but the impacts of ongoing colonial governance, how a recognition of Indigenous jurisdiction might fundamentally reorient housing justice’s political projects or why responding to the concerns of unhoused communities should be central to projects of decolonization, are less fully pursued. Following Indigenous thinkers and local community organizers, and building on the established frameworks of urban studies, I press both scholarship and activism to think housing precarity and settler colonialism in tandem, as foundationally intertwined structures and experiences, and ask how this acknowledgement might help bridge movements for housing justice, Indigenous sovereignty and decolonization. We cannot understand the crises of housing, of tenancy and affordability, of racialized policing, or of structural abandonment, that lead to homelessness and shape the distinctive spatiality of encampments without accounting for the ongoing history of settler colonial relations and the production of urban space (Ellis-Young 2022). An analysis of settler colonialism and a meaningful engagement with Indigenous theory has not yet been fully centered within much of the literature in either urban studies or housing justice. Even the notable and powerful exceptions of scholars who explicitly engage the connections between urban development, housing precarity and settler colonialism (see Cowen 2020; Hugill 2017, Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak 2022; Mays 2023; Miller 2020; Dorries 2023; Tomiak 2017) have not meant that the connection between settler colonialism and precarity is fully accounted for in local organizing practices. Indigenous peoples continue to be framed as particularly ‘vulnerable’ to housing precarity. Yet, less often explored are the ongoing settler 9 colonial conditions that produce this ‘vulnerability’ and contour experiences of precarity and housing insecurity or how unhoused communities represent politically astute actors engaged in political projects that intersect with decolonization. An analysis of settler colonialism must be brought into a more robust conversation with housing justice to both understand housing precarity and effectively and ethically combat it. Thus, I advocate for the necessity of understanding colonial, neoliberal and antipoor governance as co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing. This recognition requires that we address these systems simultaneously, rather than as separate features of distinctive structures of power. Illustrating the colonial dimensions of precarity and the need to apply a settler colonial analytic to housing injustice is what this project seeks to accomplish. How could a more meaningful linkage of settler colonialism and precarity shift the ways in which we practice solidarity? What would this require of local organizers and scholars? To properly understand homelessness and the space of encampments, we need deeper analyses of the functioning of settler colonialism and how its logics produce the conditions under which encampments occur. Yet, the inverse is also true, to understand settler colonialism as a structure we need to understand how it is constituted, felt and lived by Indigenous peoples through affective experiences like homelessness, housing precarity and state-led interventions into the home, body and family (Million 2013; Belcourt 2018a; Wilson 2015). We must also attend to these experiences in our projects of decolonization. Precarity is a part of the ‘affective infrastructure’ of settler colonialism (Bosworth 2023; Mackey 2016). The communities that disproportionately experience this kind of precarity, people who are unhoused, sex workers, people who use drugs, or people with disabilities are also involved in struggles against a specifically settler colonial kind of power, even if a tendency remains within settler organizing 10 and scholarship that imagines colonial power to take particular forms and to occur within circumscribed spaces. Thus, we need to visualize settler colonial power, not only in the space of spectacle and resistance that surrounds land-based struggles; the blockade or the occupation, but also in the intimate and embodied ways in which settler colonial violence is experienced and felt through processes like precaritization, impoverishment and homelessness, and in spaces like the home and the encampment. We must continue to orient to the felt, domestic and everyday scale of experiences like precarity and abandonment to fully contend with the breadth and extent of settler colonial power (Hunt and Holmes 2015; Million 2013; Leeuw 2007). This is not to say that the spaces of public resistance to colonial violence do not matter. They matter deeply, but so too, do the spaces of invisibilized violence that can be erased in in hegemonic articulations of what decolonization entails. These processes buttress and support one another, and colonial power is exercised across a range of spaces and scales, from the intimate to the spectacular (Tomiak 2016). I follow Hunt and Holmes (2015) in pursuing frameworks that refuse colonial binaries and dualisms emphasizing either/or positions and instead advocate for a ‘both/and’ perspective that attends to the importance of the intimate and the spectacular, the domestic and the national. In this work, I draw on the literatures on legal geography, urban studies, housing justice and settler colonialism to animate conversation that provides understandings of housing precarity and racialized dispossession in the settler colony. To my mind, this is a process of bridging literatures, but also political movements that, in Victoria, were often understood as distinct, occurring across separate shores. Accordingly, my primary concern in this dissertation is how colonial power, racial capitalism and anti-poor neoliberal governance collide in the space of the encampment. Encampments are an increasingly prevalent response to precarity across Turtle Island and are 11 seen as a pressing concern of urban and municipal governance. A range of responses to encampments have been pursued by federal, provincial and municipal governments (Houle 2024; Flynn et al. 2022; Sparks 2017a). However, neither official policy nor much of the scholarship on encampments have adequately linked this space directly to the effects of ongoing settler colonial governance. Even within liberatory social movements, distinctions continue to exist between a political ‘occupation’, understood as an act of political agency, and an ‘encampment’, understood as an act of desperation and affectability, the very opposite of political agency (Silva 2007). Many social movements and organizing communities have internalized an understanding of unhoused communities as incapacitated and inagentive, as subjects in need of ‘help’ but not solidarity. This can work to depoliticize homeless encampments in juxtaposition to occupations like those witnessed at the Legislature or across Canadian university campuses in support of Palestinian liberation which are seen by anticolonial solidarity movements as expressions of political agency and resistance linked to broader projects of decolonization. In this dissertation, I trouble the normative ways in which encampments are understood, as spaces of abjection and degradation, and addressed, through interventionist policies which are generally attended by increased forms of policing and carcerality that target encampments and their residents as a ‘problem’ of contemporary urban governance (Sparks 2017b). Encampments like those witnessed at Meegan, are both a physical space, the informal grouping together of people without secure access to home, and a political process, a form of assembly, the act of being together, of sharing resources, space, and struggle. They are a means of building community that stands in opposition to antipoor colonial governance. In this, they have an affinity with occupations and encampments at the BC Legislature and across Canadian university campuses in support of Wet’suwet’en and Palestinian peoples, for instance. Yet, in practice, they 12 continue to be imagined and addressed quite differently by both state actors and grassroots organizers. Contrary to framings which understand encampments solely as spaces of desperation and degradation in need of ‘rescue’, we might aim to politicize this form of assembly and honour the labour and political intelligence of unhoused communities linking these communities to larger abolitionist and decolonial projects. To stake a tent is to stake a claim; to public space, to belonging and, for many, a space within the category of the ‘human’. 3 Yet, encampments are rarely understood as ‘properly political’. Delinked from decolonial politics in local organizing, encampments are seen as spaces of degradation constituted by either incapacitated or ‘criminal subjects’, rarely as a political community that contests particular kinds of social, racial and economic orderings. Encampments like those at Meegan are more than simply spaces of abjection, but rather are a form of political assembly crafted under conditions of duress. We need to take seriously the encampment as a political space, the organizing and acumen of encampment residents and their contributions to movements for both housing justice and decolonization (Dozier 2022; Sparks 2010). Yet, claims-making processes like pitching a tent in public space are always fraught and contested processes on unceded Indigenous territories in which it is the very question of who has the authority to make or authorize a claim which is at issue. Indigenous scholars like Joanne Barker (2015) and J. Kehalauni Kauanui (2016) alert us to the ways in which claiming or occupying ‘public’ space can also replicate Indigenous dispossession and work to secure settler futurity. Housing justice has often relied on a normative understanding of the commons; ‘public’ space in which settler entitlements are taken for granted (Fortier 2017; Porter and Kelly 2023; Blatman and Sisson 3 As Amanda K. Winter (2019:264) argues, “camping in tents on public land are acts of resistance against the neoliberal privatization of land, the related housing crisis and the regulation of public space.” It is necessarily an expression of a political claim. 13 2023). This has routed housing justice towards objectives that can overwrite or erase Indigenous jurisdiction. Yet, alternatives are possible, if we work to imagine and build them. As local organizer Leslie Robinson (personal communication) argues, “why shouldn't we be going to local nations for the rights to live in our homes rather than to our landlords and our governments?” Understanding encampments through Indigenous theory and a settler colonial analytic helps us to nuance this claims-making process; the ways in which robust and ethical social justice must also be connected to decolonization and land back. In this work, I examine how distinctive forms of colonial governance and settler attachments to place manifested in contestations over parks, public space and the city during the Covid-19 pandemic and how this illustrates a potent connection between settler colonial power, housing injustice and urban space. I take as my primary site of inquiry a particular space, Meegan, that was host to an encampment and where many of these tensions and legal processes have been most evident in the city of Victoria. During the pandemic, Meegan became the site of intense contestation over the use and status of public space that illustrated how settler colonial geographies are continuously reconstituted, reproduced and understood (Goeman 2013). I look to understand Meegan as a legal space, as an affective and symbolic space, and as a material space in which struggles over shelter, occupancy and use could be life and death. To understand these processes, I examine the broader context in which encampments occur (Chapter 3), the racial foundations of the urban development of Victoria (Chapter 4), and the history of ‘Beacon Hill’ and how the space was transformed and represented according to settler colonial aesthetic categories (Chapter 5). I also discuss how NIMBY organizations justified the eviction of people sheltering in the park through an analysis of both the environmental and legal discourses mobilized by NGOs, the City and eventually, the BC Supreme Court and Court of Appeals 14 (Chapters 6 and 7). Finally, I examine how settler-led antipoverty movements against eviction and displacement could also evidence forms of coloniality and replicate respectability politics that erased or devalued unhoused or poor Indigenous peoples and their political struggles (Chapters 8 and 9). It is only through understanding the settler colonial dynamics of these processes that we can get a full sense of the political landscape. 1.3 Colonial Racial Capitalism “To own land and trade land and make money off of land is where capitalism meets colonization.” -Leslie Robinson (personal communication). As a framework, housing justice has, at times, struggled to adequately attend to settler colonialism, emphasizing class and capital as the primary analytics through which we might understand precarity (Porter and Kelly 2023; Blatman and Sisson 2023). This can imply that experiences of homelessness and precarity are produced strictly through the financialization and commodification of housing, erasing other systems of power and domination at work. Scholars have recently begun productively thinking precarity, the home and housing in relation to settler colonialism especially in the context of Palestine (Daher-Nashi 2022; Tabar and Al-Botmeh 2021; Joronen 2019). These scholars argue that we cannot address precarity without simultaneously pursuing decolonization and abolition, without understanding the ways in which precarity is inextricably tethered to colonization. Likewise, in Victoria, a settler colonial analytic is required to understand revanchist attempts to remake public space. The literatures on settler colonialism and Indigenous thought must be placed in conversation with robust Marxist frameworks that undergird much of housing justice’s analytical frameworks to meaningfully understand the encampment in Meegan. The question then becomes how the circuits of capital and the disciplining of public space by capital articulate with settler colonialism in the affective 15 life of the city and the reimagination of public space (Bhandar 2018; Cowen 2020). Bringing settler colonialism into the analytic framework used to understand homelessness, encampments and precarity is key. This is where I position my intervention and where a generative connection can be made between Indigenous studies, with its nuanced account of settler colonialism and racialized dispossession, and Marxist political economy and urban geography, with their established and insightful frameworks for understanding the political economy of precarity and housing injustice. This work then builds on articulations of racial capitalism developed by scholars like Cedric Robinson (1983) that argue for understanding capitalism as always already contoured by the specific dynamics of race. Understandings of capitalism require the nuanced articulations of race that the Black radical tradition offers us. Robinson pushed Marxism to contend with the centrality of the racialized dynamics of capital. The notion that capitalism is racial capitalism is now well-established (Melamed 2011; Kelley 2002). Yet, there is also an emerging literature that seeks to build on Robinson’s insights and attend to the specifically settler colonial dynamics of racial capitalism (Koshy et al. 2022; Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak 2022; Pasternak 2020; McCreary and Milligan 2021; Issar 2021). This work aligns with these attempts to theorize colonial racial capitalism; to place settler colonialism in relation to established frameworks of racial capitalism, not as supplemental, but as central in the same ways that the Black Radical tradition forcefully situated race as foundational to capitalism. In Colonial Racial Capitalism, Koshy et al. (2022:11) claim that “Indigenous, decolonial, and Black radical critiques consider colonization, racialization, and capitalism as coevolving and co-constitutive.” To robustly understand these processes, we have to attend to their colonial foundations, an intervention that Indigenous scholars have led, “one of the interventions that North American Indigenous studies 16 has made to conversations about capitalism and racialization is to highlight how the dispossessive regimes of accumulation through differentiation, elimination, expropriation, enslavement, and incarceration have themselves always been settler colonialist” (Koshy et al. 2022:4). Settler colonialism and coloniality emerge as foundational to the development of racial capitalism, not as extraneous or supplemental conditions, “Indigenous dispossession is not the precondition for racial capitalism to emerge but always has been part of its very structure.” (Koshy et al 2022:5). As an analytic, colonial racial capitalism “allows a centering of relations of racism, settler and franchise colonialisms, and capitalism across a variety of historical and geographical contexts and engages their relation to the persistence of violence, precarity, and inequality in capitalist modernity” (Koshy et al. 2022:6). These are the frameworks I bring to bear on the space of the encampment and movements for housing justice. While central to the development of global racial capitalism and the contemporary production of precarity, the colonial relation is often disavowed (Coulthard 2014). Yet, colonial accumulation is unfinished; dispossession ongoing (Nichols 2020). Encampments are an effect of this, but we have a limited grasp of how this functions if our analyses of capital and precarity are not meaningfully linked to a settler colonial analytic. Capital accumulation relies on the colonial relation and this relation continues to contour experiences of precarity and impoverishment for those cast as ‘surplus’ or ‘disposable’. The space of the encampment is produced by and subject to the logics of colonial racial capitalism. Yet, this colonial relation often continues to be elided in analysis and organizing, and many articulations of housing justice and precarity take settler colonialism for granted, naturalizing occupation and invasion in the process (Thompson 2024; Ellis-Young 2022; Porter and Kelly 2023; Fortier 2017). Ongoing Indigenous dispossession remains central to the constitution of the settler state, the functioning of 17 capital and the production of urban space (Simpson 2017; Nichols 2020). We cannot understand the functioning of capital and the uneven distribution of precarity without attention to this relation (Coulthard 2014). Like the well-worn claim that capitalism is racial capitalism, racial capitalism is colonial capitalism. What we require is an understanding of what this actually means, how this process works and its local effects. Colonial power relations continue to articulate with race and racial capitalism to produce dispossession and shape the production of ‘public’ space. These power relations continue to matter even in spaces where they are considered unexpected or extraneous. Housing justice is one such space in which colonial dynamics can appear as ‘unexpected’ by local organizers (McKittrick 2006). What might be revealed when colonial power relations are centered in questions of housing justice? Following Stuart Hall, Brenna Bhandar (2018) presses us to think about how systems of power articulate with one another in evolving and novel ways that involve reformulation. It is precisely these rearticulations that I argue we are witness to in the governance of poor, unhoused and Indigenous communities on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. Novel modes of governance and reformulated discourses are being developed to manage both poor and Indigenous communities, that continue to rely on colonial and racial logics and legal mechanisms. To fully understand this process, we need an analysis of the social relations of capitalism, race and settler colonialism and how these systems articulate with and co-constitute one another (Bhandar 2018). The elision of settler colonialism as foundational to capitalism, precarity and housing crises has worked to erase the resistance and intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples, siloing Indigenous anticolonialism to particular terrains. Within dominant frameworks, Indigenous peoples become confined to discrete issues and spaces, rather than seen as 18 contributing to global movements for liberation across a range of scales and issues. It compartmentalizes Indigenous resistance, thought and movements, working to frame them as ‘natural’ in some spaces and anomalous in others, “it is important to work against the devaluation and erasure of Indigenous, Black radical, and subaltern epistemologies because the destruction of these worldviews is vital to the reproduction of colonial racial capitalism precisely because they offer alternatives that have always existed” (Koshy et al. 2022:11). This work then follows the organizing and theory of Indigenous communities and scholars who are already connecting precarity, capital and colonialism (Coulthard 2014; Fabris 2018). 1.4 ‘Settler’ Revanchism? Placing the literatures on gentrification, environmentalism and public space in conversation with Indigenous studies, I describe the rehearsals of colonial power evidenced in Meegan as a form of settler revanchism to outline attempts to regain symbolic, affective and material territory seen to be under threat from ‘unruly’ or ‘threatening’ populations like Indigenous and unhoused communities. 4 Contemporarily, these efforts are characterized by specifically colonial dynamics and logics. Neil Smith (1996:45) described revanchism as “a broad, vengeful right-wing reaction against both the ‘liberalism’ of the 1960s and 1970s and the predations of capital.” 5 He argued that in the 1990s, cities were characterized by a revanchist 4 In this work, I primarily engage with and develop Smith’s (1996) work on the subject of revanchism. Yet, the field of urban studies and geography have also taken Smith’s contributions in a number of different directions, describing contemporary urban governance as characterized by ‘compassionate revanchism (Hennigan and Speer 2019; Kudla 2024), ‘post-revanchism’ (Murphy 2009; DeVerteuil 2019) and ‘Dracula urbanism’ (Wilson and Wyly 2023). These approaches have all contributed to understandings of urban governance today. I do not understand any of these approaches as mutually exclusive. Cities can shuffle through and make use of all of these strategies over time and simultaneously. I offer the conditional settler revanchism not to challenge Smith’s original approach or any of these other orientations, but rather to emphasize the specifically settler colonial dynamics of urban governance and municipal discipline today. While beyond the scope of this dissertation, settler revanchism could productively be put into conversation with these other frameworks for understanding revanchism. 5 Revanchism characterizes not only right-wing politics, but more liberal politics as well. There is an affective reaction to the both the social and economic conditions under late capitalism and to the social movements that 19 orientation predicated on a politics of vengeance, ‘reclamation’, and efforts to ‘take back the city’. Smith (1996:18) claimed that a revanchist orientation in urban space “embodies a revengeful and reactionary viciousness against various populations accused of ‘stealing’ the city from the White upper classes.” Revanchism then is an effort to reclaim the city, ideologically and materially from subjects and populations produced as threatening or usurping the ‘proper’ inhabitants of urban and public space. It “represents a reaction against the supposed ‘theft’ of the city, a desperate defense of a challenged phalanx of privileges, cloaked in the populist language of civic morality, family values and neighborhood security” (Smith 1996:207). Anti-sheltering advocates in Victoria used this exact language in claims to ‘take back our Park!’ and in their insistence that the city and its spaces of recreation and leisure were no longer safe for their ‘proper’ inhabitants. The violence of these claims is increasingly normalized in municipal policy and the ‘activism’ of anti-sheltering advocates. Revanchism is most powerful in moments when the most marginalized are seen by ruling elites to gain a modicum of visibility, or presence within urban space. Smith (1996:211) noted how revanchism was inaugurated by White fears of the emergence of powerful new urban actors, women, immigrant and ‘minority’ communities, stating that revanchism “portends a vicious reaction against minorities, the working class, homeless people, the unemployed, women, gays and lesbians, immigrants.” This was strikingly evidenced as people experiencing homelessness began sheltering in the ‘Crown jewel of Victoria’, and the intense emotional backlash that this engendered. Local residents were stricken and aggrieved that marginalized people, expected to occupy liminal or ‘forgotten spaces’, like aim to contest them. This reaction comes from both the right and left. Smith (1996) recognized this in his critiques of the ways in which traditionally ‘liberal’, or even nominally ‘radical’ politicians and organizations aligned themselves against communities experiencing homelessness in American cities. Randall Amster (2008: 92) notes this as well, arguing that “cities traditionally seen as liberal or progressive have seen some of the most bitter struggles” around issues of homelessness. Thus, revanchism is less defined by liberal or conservative politics than it is a feature of urban organization under late racial capitalism and ongoing settler colonialism. 20 ravines, overpasses or shelters, could occupy the center of the city’s material and symbolic heart, ‘Beacon Hill’ (Gilmore 2008). Smith (1996:43) also argued that revanchism is often characterized by “a Heideggerian romance of place, precisely at the time when ‘traditional’ identities of place are most threatened by global capital.” There was a distinctly colonial and affective structure that subtended the campaign against sheltering in Meegan. The hegemony of settler colonial identities and orderings was seen to be jeopardized by both sheltering and Indigenous claims to place. Particular affects and emotions attend revanchist projects, a sense of impending loss, and that this loss is not only represented by the threat of global capital and its social and economic reorderings, but by perceived disruptions to forms of urban order and spatial imaginaries, such as when ‘bodies out-of-place’ appear in spaces in which they are unexpected or disordering, when people experiencing homelessness become visible in the daylight hours in Victoria’s manicured ‘Beacon Hill’. I argue that we witness these affects in the romanticization of ‘Beacon Hill’ and the attempts to rehabilitate settler colonial legitimacy and orderings of public and urban space through a reclamation of settler place. As I will show, ‘Beacon Hill’ became iconic of a whole set of values seen to be under attack; to represent and signify much more than simply urban public green space. It came to represent the city itself and became metonymic for the aspirations and axiologies which settler residents oriented themselves around. Thus, it needed to be reclaimed or ‘taken back’ from the forces of anarchy which threatened to unsettle colonial orderings of space and social hierarchies, Indigenous movements for sovereignty and poor peoples’ claims to public space, for instance, in order to stabilize settler subjectivities and understandings of the normative ordering of urban worlds. ‘Beacon Hill’ thus becomes an affective object to anchor projects of vengeance intended on disciplining and punishing 21 marginalized communities and re-establishing normative orderings of urban space and buttressing the racial and gendered hierarchies on which they are based. I use the conditional ‘settler’ to illustrate that there is a specifically colonial orientation evidenced in attempts to reclaim public space in Victoria. The ‘order’ understood to be under threat was a colonial one. Anti-sheltering campaigns and municipal responses to the encampment were distinguished by attempts to retrench specifically colonial forms of spatial order and to discipline the settler state’s originary antagonist, the ‘Native’. As Smith (1996:208) argues, the revanchist city is “often about the rediscovery of enemies within.” Attempts to reclaim ‘Beacon Hill’ were certainly characterized by the reinvigoration of the threatening figure of the ‘Native’, and attacks on ‘civilization’ itself. In the encampment, displacement and the impoundment or destruction of belongings that could make life on the land livable, was rationalized through colonial logics of civilization and barbarity that conjured the threatening figure of the ‘Native’; the putatively vanquished figure that had allowed for the City’s originary development. 6 This position not only echoes historical representations of Indigenous peoples as disordering and antithetical to settler urban space, but it also extends these representations by tethering Indigeneity, criminality and deficiency together in the figure of the ‘vagrant’ or encampment dweller (Barker 2021; Crosby and Monaghan 2018). The residents of encampments are assumed to be violent or criminal, to be disabled or mentally ill, to use substances and more likely than not, to be Indigenous. This nexus of representation justifies a range of intercessory strategies 6 It is no surprise then that this figure would be summoned in revanchist attempts to remake, resignify and reclaim the city and public space. This figure is framed as calling out for conquest, for invasion through the developmentalist logics of what Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007) describes as a global idea of race. These global logics of race and coloniality allowed for the dehumanization and disciplining of poor peoples even when these subjects were White. Global logics of race and colonialism created a space outside of the category of the human, of mattering into which people experiencing homelessness could be slotted. This matrix continues to be operative, positioning some communities as differentiated, ‘barbaric’, outside of the category of urban citizen. 22 designed to reclaim and manage public space and discipline Indigenous, racialized, disabled and poor bodies. Like historical representations of Indigenous peoples, the figure of the encampment dweller is understood to be deeply unsettling to urban colonial order and must be vacated from or managed within urban space for the ‘health’ and ‘wellbeing’ of the city and its (settler) citizens (Razack 2000; Edmonds 2010b; Mawani 2009). 7 Settler revanchism then is a distinctly colonial strategy to retrench and maintain colonial orderings of territory and bodies within ‘public’ space. Mobilizing this analytic allows us to understand gentrification, urban planning and municipal governance as deeply tethered to settler colonial relations and affects (Jackson 2009). As I discuss in later chapters, the rhetoric of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarity’ and racist representations of Indigenous peoples were reanimated and repurposed to be deployed against unhoused communities in anti-sheltering campaigns. What was understood to be taken from urban residents of Victoria was not only the expectations of class privilege, but also the entitlements that attend colonial occupation, the ontological security of settler subjectivity (Stein et al. 2017; Mackey 2016). Settler residents were angry that the putatively vanquished figure of the ‘Native’ was perceived to be re-emerging to threaten ‘civilization’ with ‘barbarism’ in the form of the encampment resident. There was a distinctly colonial logic subtending anti-sheltering campaigns and the emotional reactions that sheltering elicited, and NIMBY organizations and the city deployed colonial strategies of displacement, dispossession and dehumanization to 7 Transience, vagrancy and Indigeneity have historically and contemporarily been associated within colonial discourse. The discourse of transience has often been weaponized against Indigenous peoples as preventing any kind of authoritative territorial claim (Bhandar 2018) or rationalizing forms of abandonment and disregard when it comes to Indigenous women’s health, safety and bodily integrity (Dean 2015). Likewise, the assumed transience of unhoused communities has been utilized as a rationale through which to justify the systematic denial of claims to public space and urban citizenship (Amster 2008). Transience has historically been seen as subversive, disordering and a threat to public space and conceptions of the orderly city and thus, has been an efficient logic through which to rationalize the policing, exclusion or dispossession of communities coded as unruly (Ahmed 2000). 23 govern public space and address the encampment. Smith (1996) noted the emotional and affective pull of revanchism, the drive towards vengeance and retribution in urban space, and here I emphasize the specifically settler entitlements that animate this orientation. ‘Settler revanchism’ then builds on Smith’s framework to understand the processes in which White middle and upper-class urban residents attempt to reclaim the city through discipline and punishment, while also emphasizing specifically colonial logics and affects and their links to the construction of settler subjectivity and placemaking that attend this process. Settler revanchism is also about re-entrenching and maintaining a set of hierarchical social relations predicated on domination and ongoing Indigenous dispossession and erasure, and buffeting settler subjectivities and senses of self as ascendant and superior to other forms of racial and political identity. 1.5 Project Outline I begin this work in Chapter 2, Methodologies and Methods: Troubling Colonial Knowledge Production by unpacking the politics of knowledge production and illustrating how my methodologies have shaped (and been shaped by) the course of the project. In Chapter 3, ‘Gimme Shelter’: Encampments, Home and Housing Justice Amidst a Global Pandemic, I contextualize the development of encampments on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories during the Covid-19 pandemic. In Chapter 4, Occupying Metulia: Producing the Settler Colonial City Through Lək̓ʷəŋən Exclusion and Criminalization, I explore the urban history of the City of Victoria focusing on how the spatial exclusion and marginalization of Songhees and Esquimalt people has been central to the city’s urban development. Racialized exclusion is a part of ‘Victoria’s’ past and present. Chapter 5, Victoria’s Crown Jewel’: Meegan, Gardens and Settler Revanchism brings us to the palimpsestic space known dually as Meegan and ‘Beacon Hill’. In 24 this chapter, I examine the Park’s history and the symbolic meanings it carries for settlers in urban space. Chapter 6, With ‘Friends’ Like These: Greenwashing Displacement through Conservation Discourse, analyzes the campaign led by a local NGO, the Friends of Beacon Hill Park, to evict campers sheltering in Meegan to illustrate how conservation discourses were mobilized to retrench specifically settler colonial forms of control over the space. Chapter 7, “In Colonialism We Trust”: ‘Use, Recreation and Enjoyment’, and the Colonial Land Trust in the Courts, examines the right to shelter cases that came before the BC Supreme Court and the BC Court of Appeals during the pandemic. In this chapter, I examine how the colonial land trust through which the Park was conveyed to the City continues to shape how the space is governed in specifically settler colonial ways through an analysis of the petition that was brought before the BC Supreme Court to establish whether sheltering in the park was legal under the terms of the trust. I then turn towards my own experiences of organizing in Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory in Chapter 8, Tensions and Erasures: Conducting Solidarity on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Territories. In this chapter, I look at the ways in which mutual aid, housing justice and solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty movements have been understood and practiced locally, highlighting some tensions that have emerged in the past 4 years. Finally, in Chapter 9, Framing Settler Solidarity: Unpacking Dominant Discourses of Sovereignty and Value in Local Organizing, I pursue how the colonial concepts of sovereignty and value are entrenched in settler-led solidarity movements in reductive ways that work to condition how and where settler solidarity is practiced. I conclude by platforming and highlighting practices of care that have resisted the delinking of housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty and the binaries created between forms of intimate and public resistance and solidarity. I recognize that it is unusual for a doctoral thesis to include 9 chapters. As you will see, this dissertation has been an iterative 25 process whereby I have been guided by relations in community and, at times, reoriented to ask different questions about housing justice. Each site of inquiry led to another, as the work underlying each spatial formation of settler colonialism revealed the need to unpack yet another normative colonial rationale underlying the treatment of encampments. Recognizing there are many more possible sites of connection, I have come to see these 9 chapters as islands in a sea of struggle, already situated in relation. 1.6 Conclusion: Distant Shores or a Sea of Islands? Recently, my friend Quill Christie-Peters has reminded me how colonialism functions through compartmentalization and confinement, by debasing and attacking the relations between things, removing and disconnecting people from the land, attacking and disrupting family and community, disconnecting people from their very bodies. 8 I carry this in mind as I pursue the connections between housing justice and decolonization and I want to use this to return to my opening metaphor in which housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty appeared as ‘distant shores’, unable to speak to one another across a sea of difference. Colonial discourse works to compartmentalize these struggles, to frame them as disparate and disconnected shorelines. Yet, this metaphor relies on a particular construction of the ocean, the sea as an obstacle, unknowable and obstinate. Coastal and Pacific nations in deep relation with the ocean do not conceptualize the ocean as a body which disconnects us from one another, rather the ocean is a space of relation, a world unto itself. Fijian and Tongan theorist Epeli Hau’ofa (1994) noted this connection in a germinal piece when he reframed Oceania as a ‘sea of islands’ rather than ‘islands in a distant sea’. Hau’ofa emphasized connection in his remapping of Oceania, that the 8 Again, I am grateful to the shape this sharing has given to my work and want to acknowledge Quill’s contribution here. Even though it takes places outside of the normative conventions of scholarly citation, in the realm of relational knowledge production, I want to acknowledge and honour the importance of this contribution. 26 islands of Oceania were in deep and enduring relation, not despite the ocean, but because of it. The metaphor of separate shores collapses in the face of this understanding of the ocean as a space of deep relation. To inhabit the space of the shore is to look out on a world of connection, not an abyss, across which relations cannot be formed. Settler colonialism encourages us to disaggregate struggles for housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty, to compartmentalize these struggles and to understand them as distant shores, tiny islands in an inhospitable sea, but the work of Oceanic and coastal peoples allows us an alternative imagining of difference and distance, that refuses this compartmentalization and the violence it allows. I bring this orientation to my understanding of solidarity work and its deep and ongoing importance. We might think about what it means to inhabit different shores, yet remain connected together through shared struggle, a sea of islands in the project of liberation. I carry this forward as I attempt to think through the connections between housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty, between solidarity movements working across difference and between people, land and waters. I see Hau’ofa’s (1994) orientation towards capaciousness, towards worldbuilding, towards the overflow of colonial boundaries and the refusal of binaries, in the ongoing community work here on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. Our community projects do not need to pivot around either/or boundaries, emphasizing land or people, home or homeland, but rather can be structured around both/and orientations, around deconstructing the division between land and people entirely (Hunt and Holmes 2015). Housing justice, land defense and Indigenous flourishing cannot be detached from one another. I extend this to argue that our critiques of settler colonialism, precarity and abandonment must also be tethered to one another in our pursuit of an emancipatory, care-centered and justice-oriented politics (Thompson 2024; Fields, Power and Card 2024). I see unhoused communities necessarily invested in these same 27 kinds of both/and politics, building home and community under deplorable conditions of abandonment and intervention, the encampment in Meegan was not an either/or experience. It was both a space of structural abandonment, surveillance and heightened policing on stolen lands as well as a place where unhoused communities created spaces of refuge, of care, creativity and even, joy; where people practiced the politics of assembly and rehearsed projects for shared liberation but did so under conditions of extreme duress and in the teeth of settler colonial violence. I hope this project can honour the work of community and relationship-building witnessed in Meegan and hold up these communities and those who stand in solidarity with them and dispossessed peoples everywhere by learning from and following their orientations towards justice and a different kind of living in the world. This work then is for the community members who organize to make life livable in the crucible of settler colonial violence and who work to tether together the projects of housing justice, Indigenous sovereignty and decolonization. So, while it is a story about ongoing dispossession, abandonment and harm, it is also a story about joy, vivacity and community-building through deep and abiding relationships (Montgomery and Bergman 2017). I hope to do justice to the very important work of community members and organizers who continue to live and struggle under extremely adverse and fatiguing conditions, while also continuing to imagine and dream into existence worlds that are big enough to hold all of us, to practice what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robin Maynard (2022) describe as ‘rehearsals for living’. 28 2 Methodologies and Methods: Placing Oneself in the Mess of Things 2.1 Introduction Before moving further forward, it is important to situate myself in this work; my experiences, my social location and my relations to structures of power, to make transparent the ways in which I come to understand questions around home, housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty. This leads me to the vexing question of how to, in Judith Butler’s (2005) terms, ‘give an account of ourselves’, that is honest, ethical and importantly, generative. How can these accounts of ourselves, our narrations of our own histories, social positions and privileges, make us more accountable to one another? Descriptions of our social locations can be conducted in ways that, like land acknowledgements, are perfunctory, serving to close off rather than open up deeper critical thinking and difficult dialogues (Sloan Morgan 2014). This tension causes me to remain conflicted about how we place ourselves in our research, deeply cognizant of the ways in which our social location and experiences shape our perspectives, but also wary of the tokenizing and formulaic ways in which we communicate our positionalities. However, I do believe it is important to let readers know of the social positions that structure and bracket my perspective. Nicole Latulippe (2015:7) describes this as an “accounting for the coming-to-know process”. How we come to know intimately shapes what we come to know. How then to make self-location a meaningful practice? I write and organize as a cis White settler man, born on the unceded territories of the hən̓ q̓ əmin̓ əm̓-speaking, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl ̓ ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil Waututh) and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) nations and raised in the unceded territory of the nsəlxcin-speaking Syilx nations to a White single mother of Scottish, Irish and English descent. My father was a 29 White Catholic and first-generation settler from Northern Ireland. I have experienced housing precarity for periods of my life but have never experienced being unhoused. This work then is written and conducted from the perspective of a White settler man who, while deeply engaged in solidarity politics, has a circumscribed and particularly situated understanding of Indigenous sovereignty, racialized precarity and experiences of homelessness. My organizing and solidarity work has primarily revolved around Indigenous sovereignty movements until recently. I have worked at Indigenous organizations like xʷc̓ic̓əsəm, the Indigenous Health Research and Education Garden at UBC and the Aboriginal Coalition to End Homelessness in ‘Victoria’, but my primary orientation has been grassroots organizing around Indigenous sovereignty and antipoverty work, particularly as it pertains to encampments and police and bylaw sweeps. This work then is personal for me, and a part of my everyday life. The ‘field’ is not somewhere I ‘visit’ before returning home. These communities and spaces are where I make my home and I have a deep and abiding responsibility to them, before, after and beyond this research project. How I come to pose questions about housing justice, sovereignty and community organizing is influenced by my own experiences organizing, working and living on stolen Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ lands as a settler and the complicity with ongoing dispossession and violence that this occupancy entails. It is likewise shaped by my own relations to Whiteness, to settler colonialism, to dis/ability and to cisheteropatriarchy (Steinhauer 2002; Latulippe 2015). As decades of standpoint theory have illustrated, how we come-to-know or produce knowledge is shaped by the perspectives afforded us by our social locations (Haraway 1988; Harding 2004; Kovach 2021; Moreton-Robinson 2013). How I articulate and understand this research is an expression of situated knowledge, necessarily partial and incomplete, and always structured by relations of power (Haraway 1988; Smith 2021). My proximity to Whiteness 30 affords me material privileges and circumscribes my ability to fully understand experiences that are beyond my own frame of reference. Rather than attempt to overcome that partiality through gestures towards objectivity and universality, we might lean into the potential of recognizing our work as situated and necessarily partial. Unsettling claims to authority by situating our perspectives is a critical methodological praxis that I pursue throughout this work (Leeuw and Hunt 2018). I hope that this work will provide one perspective on immensely complicated and multivalent experiences, those of home and power. I hope that this work can be built on, challenged, and developed within community. Throughout, I attempt to place myself in the everyday messiness of research, organizing and life under White supremacist cisheteropatriarchal settler colonialism as well as ongoing and vibrant anti-colonial resistance and community building, so that I might enact forms of responsibility and accountability to the communities I am enmeshed within and to communicate that clearly and honestly (Hunt and Holmes 2015). Yet, this work also emerges through community, in conversation and collaboration with scholars, organizers and community members who offer differing perspectives, orientations and standpoints. I write as a member of many of the communities I talk about in this work. This work is always personal and intimate, and this shapes my perspective as well. I have been involved with grassroots community organizing in Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory since 2020, and also conducting research for organizations like the Aboriginal Coalition to End Homelessness, working with the Indigenous street community to combat stigma and stigmatizing language and to map out the services and resources the community accesses. I have done legal observing in parks and on the block, organized and hosted rallies, crowded into city hall to shout and boo, offered harm reduction and participated in mutual aid, organizing around precarity and 31 colonialism in this city for almost 5 years now. Through this research and my ongoing community work, I have built many important relationships, and it is to these relationships that I orient and am responsible. These relationships will extend beyond the end of this research project, and I must make sure that, as an involved community member, I tend and care for them. It is in these spaces that I have found and built community. My intimate relations, friends, colleagues and family, are routed through and tethered into these spaces. My involvement and interest in these spaces is not primarily academic. They are the places I have built home, and as such, I am protective of them. As a community member and organizer, I am looking for ways that the academy and research might possibly support these communities and struggles. I convey this to signal where my allegiances lie in conducting research; to community first, and the academy, second. This leads me to ask how I can create something through research that could be of service, that honours the creativity and strength of people in the communities that I call home. This work, then is deeply personal and shaped by my own position with community, on stolen land, and contoured by the responsibility that this engenders. In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson (2014) talks about refusal in the context of research. What must be withheld and what can be shared? In the book, Simpson (2014:111) asks a question about research that has always stuck with me: “can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why?” This is what Simpson (2014:111) describes as ‘enough’, “the limit of my own return and a collective arrival”. It is notable that Simpson expresses her ethics and methodological practice through a relationship to home. Home is the site which anchors a particular set of ethics. What do I have to do to be able to come home? What can’t I do? Home is a complicated and varied concept, especially on stolen and occupied Indigenous land, but for me home is that set of relations, to land, to people to community, that sustain us, 32 provide shelter and refuge, both materially and emotionally. I share my work as a community member and organizer, not to establish my authority or credentials, but rather to illustrate the ways that I am beholden and responsible to these relationships and communities, to show that these are the spaces and relationships that I call home and that this work emerges through community. This shapes how I pursued this research, how I interpret it and how I have attempted to communicate it here. 2.2 Contextualizing Research: Knowledge Production in the Settler Colony Research within Indigenous communities has long been understood as ‘a dirty word’ (Smith 2021). In Indigenous, racialized and unhoused communities, research is so commonly experienced as invasive and extractive that the very idea that it could be a means of enacting responsibility can register as incoherent (Tuck 2009; Calderon 2016; A. Simpson 2014; Smith 2021; Boilevin et al. 2019). Research has often served the interests of empire, functioning as a mechanism of rule by imposing interpretative frameworks on Indigenous lives that attempt to confer settler senses of order on Indigenous experiences, polities and culture. Colonial knowledge production has historically been a technology for rendering Indigenous and racialized communities legible and hence, governable. As Jennifer Nelson (2008:35) argues, “the capacity to know the racial Other is the capacity to govern.” Likewise, Heather Dorries (2023:110) argues that “the ways in which Indigenous peoples are recognized and made known are also ways in which Indigenous peoples are made subjects of empire.” Making knowledge claims about Indigenous communities facilitates making territorial claims to Indigenous lands and waters and authoritative claims over Indigenous bodies and communities. Positioning settlers and settler 33 institutions as ‘knowers’ and Indigenous communities as objects of that knowledge justifies a right to govern, to decide (A. Simpson 2020). Very little research actually upsets this paradigm; the drive to know and the links between knowledge, control and possession. This is because, as scholars, we rarely ask after research’s function. What do we expect research to do? Who will it speak to? Colonial research operates under the assumption that the expansion of territories of settler colonial knowledge regimes is an unreservedly beneficial and desirable objective (Tuck and Yang 2012). Producing knowledge is seen as valuable, no matter what purpose that knowledge is put towards or the levels of scrutiny that researched communities must endure (Tuck 2009). Here, I am asking after the politics of knowledge production: to what ends is research put and whose interests does most research serve? The answers follow depressingly well-worn paths. To counter this, we need to demand that scholarship is politically situated and that it has some utility to the communities it engages (Tuck 2009). Our allegiances need to be with our communities, rather than academia itself. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021:5) argues, researchers have a responsibility to situate and politicize the work that they do and acknowledge that “research is not an innocent or academic exercise but an activity with something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions”. This is particularly true in this work which involves community organizing which I am deeply invested in. To be clear, I am not framing my own research as outside of this complex. This research is also entrapped in this conundrum. While I hope that this research does not simply contribute to the growing mass of scholarship on settler colonialism and racialized precarity, that it can find some utility for community organizers and spark or kindle deeper conversations between movements for housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty, I remain conflicted and skeptical about what research can accomplish under these 34 conditions and how it has the potential to stoke academia’s insatiable appetite for ‘data’ that fixes Indigenous, racialized and poor peoples within an interpretative framework that facilitates colonial projects of management, regulation and control. Research often works to construct what Eve Tuck (2009) describes as ‘damage-centered frameworks’. Damage-centered frameworks serve to discursively contain Indigenous communities in immiseration and impoverishment, to justify further colonial intervention by producing Indigenous subjects and communities as pathologically deficient (Million 2013). This can result from well-intentioned work that seeks to ameliorate conditions of privation for Indigenous peoples as well as from more openly racist, dehumanizing or pathologizing accounts (Leeuw, Greenwood and Lindsay 2013). However, without a critical lens the result is the same: the production of Indigeneity as deficient or dysfunctional, and by extension in need of ‘improvement’ and intervention by a settler state of colonial academy coded as benevolent (Chapman and Withers 2019; Gebhard, McLean and St. Denis 2022). This is a powerful story and one which continues to shape research dealing with settler colonialism and attempting to engage Indigenous and unhoused communities. Interrupting this narration requires that we think critically about how we conduct research, interpret knowledge and communicate our arguments. How we story experiences of colonial violence, what is shared and what is withheld, then is important (Starblanket and Hunt 2020; A Simpson 2014; Leeuw 2017; Tuck 2009). Stories of Indigenous pain and suffering cannot be haphazardly offered up for colonial institutions and settler subjects to peruse and consume. This is particularly critical in engaging communities that experience intersecting forms of dehumanization and pathologization stemming from experiences of poverty, substance use, sex work, mental illness, disability, or Indigeneity. While this work does deal with violence, I refuse sensationalized or spectacular accounts of that 35 violence. Likewise, I strive to locate violence in the structures of settler colonialism rather than within pathologizing accounts of Indigenous peoples and unhoused communities that can work to frame these communities as naturally predisposed or inured to experiences of violence, harm and injury (Wallace 1979). This research then follows Tuck’s (2009) assertion that it is structures of power themselves that must be subjected to scrutiny, rather than already intensely surveilled communities. This work attempts to understand how colonial processes function; White supremacy, racialized precarity, dispossession, invasion, and criminalization. However, simultaneously rejecting Whitestream scholarship’s tendencies towards solipsism and insularity (Arvin, Tuck and Morrill 2013; Kauanui 2016), this work builds on methodological frameworks I developed in conversation with Anishinaabeg community members in Treaty 3 territory to contend with the problematics of research including responsible intellectual engagement with Indigenous thought, struggle and organizing (Barr 2018). In practice, this means highlighting the resiliency, thought and agency of Indigenous communities and making space to engage with this thought and praxis to the degree that is ethical and responsible without becoming appropriative or extractive (Hunt and Holmes 2015). Thus, this dissertation seeks to examine both the tools of settler colonial governance as well as alternative articulations of care, infrastructure and community offered by a diverse range of actors, practices and political projects. Work from organizations within Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, a historically poor, marginalized and ‘over-researched’ neighborhood (Boilevin et al. 2019; Mannoe 2022; Maritn and Walia 2019; Masuda, Kobayashi and the Right to Remain Collective 2021) has also rearticulated what ethical research and collaboration could look like with poor and unhoused communities. These organizers emphasize a ‘peers-based’ approach that privileges an attention 36 to positionality, structures of power and reciprocity as critical methodological strategies. Challenging iniquitous relations of power and the ways in which research often serves to entrench these relations rather than dismantle them, is central to these methodologies (Neufeld et al. 2019). Delivering something of utility to the communities that we work with to conduct research is central to ethically grounding our projects. As such, it is critically important that research relationships be mutually beneficial and provide communities with something of value. It is critical to make opportunities to give back to community foundational to research rather than ancillary. Yet, articulating in what ways such research could tangibly benefit communities often remains unclear (or perhaps, better stated, unresolved). How we represent the issue of housing and impoverishment is also important. If representations of Indigenous communities have been invasive, extractive and disfiguring, the presentation of housing and impoverishment in relation to Indigeneity also matters deeply. There is a cottage industry in mainstream Canadian media in representing life on reserve (and Indigenous home life, broadly) as fundamentally desolate and bleak; images of dilapidated housing, impoverished or malnourished children and stories of abuse and trauma provide the primary signifiers for this distinctly Canadian idiom and genre (Belcourt 2018a; Landertinger 2021). These representations adhere to settler expectations of Indigenous deficiency and dysfunction; of reserves and urban Indigenous space as toxic ‘forgotten places’ (Gilmore 2008), and Indigeneity as fundamentally impoverished. These images and narratives come to represent a recognizable colonial genre which White settlers are eager to consume (Culhane 2005; May 2021; Dean 2015). Such representations find parallel in the visualization of the encampment. Mainstream media uses similar framing devices in their representation of encampments, establishing visual 37 grammars or tropes that are intended to immediately convey degradation, disorder and perceived danger. For instance, a clearly housed person, preferably a woman, preferably White, walking juxtaposed against a series of tents, and garbage if the photographer can find some. A woman jogging, a form of recreation seen to be infringed upon by people sheltering, is also a popular trope. Such framings are intended to incite fears for personal safety, around gendered violence and concern for public health, safety and order; a juxtaposition between urban order and the anarchy or degradation seen to attend the space of the encampment. This relational framing is key. People experiencing homelessness are rarely understood on their own terms, they are most often understood in relation to their housed neighbors, as a paradigmatic ‘noncitizen’, and through the perceived threat that they represent to normative citizen-subjects’ enjoyment of public space. These images and accompanying narratives confirm settlers’ already racially informed expectations and encourage further intervention and management of Indigenous and unhoused communities coded as ‘broken’. They represent the ‘problem’ of housing precarity and homelessness as the responsibility of Indigenous and unhoused communities themselves. I refuse this mode of enframement and representation of impoverishment. 9 While housing is an ongoing site of contestation and political struggle, in this work, I choose to highlight the resiliency and creativity of poor people’s movements that pivot around housing, rather than traffic in stories of trauma and depredation that a lack of access to safe, secure and adequate homes produces. 10 2.3 Conducting Research: Building a Methodological Praxis 9 To this end, I use the language of ‘impoverishment’ rather than ‘poverty’, in the same way as Black studies scholars mobilize ‘enslavement’, to emphasize its active and processual nature. This places emphasis back on the political processes, the relations of power through which one is enslaved or impoverished (Rinehart 2022). 10 This does not mean that violence, harm and trauma do not exist in these spaces, rather it is a conscious political decision to orient ourselves elsewhere to counter hegemonic and dehumanizing representations of these spaces and communities. 38 Beyond shaping our perspectives, social position also compels differing ethical imperatives and guides the methodological orientation of our work. As differentiated subjects, we all have different roles and responsibilities within varied projects for social and political justice. How might this inform our research? In 2020, after almost a decade away, I moved back to Vancouver Island, initially to Stz'uminus and Snuneymuxw territory in the town of Ladysmith and on Gabriola Island. After the raid on Wet’suwet’en territory and during the occupation at the Legislature in the winter of 2020, I traveled from Ladysmith to bear witness and offer support to the ongoing occupation and subsequent sit-ins and blockades across the city. This experience convinced me to move back to Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory to help foster and grow the relationships I had established there. Victoria is now where I call home and I think often about what responsibilities my claiming of this place as home compels. What is required of me to be a good ‘guest’ and ‘visitor’ on stolen Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ land (Daigle and Sundberg 2017)? How might I enact and bring to life those responsibilities? For me personally, this has entailed processes of unlearning inherited assumptions about my place in the world and working to actively undo some of my own behaviours as they relate to the lands I inhabit and the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ people whose territory I occupy. Alongside this unlearning and decentering, part of enacting my responsibilities has entailed doing community work in support of those experiencing the privations of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and White supremacy in a way that respects Lək̓ʷəŋən sovereignty and jurisdiction, rather than erasing or diminishing these forms of governance. This has involved projects of mutual aid and harm reduction for marginalized community members on Lək̓ʷəŋən territory. I understand this, in my limited way, to be a part of respecting Lək̓ʷəŋən protocols and governance 39 that emphasizes ethics of reciprocity, care and interdependence. 11 Taking care of the people is a part of taking care of the land (Martindale personal communication). When we do work that follows the ethical imperative set out by Lək̓ʷəŋən axiologies, we are attempting to respect that form of governance. 12 This is not without its own problematics, in its potential for distortion and appropriation or that this is the only way we respect Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction (rather than, say, taking direct guidance from Lək̓ʷəŋən community members and leaders when this is appropriate), but remains one way in which I personally, orient myself to Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction, governance and values. When speaking with community organizers about this work, a process I detail below, many settlers spoke of their responsibilities as beneficiaries of ongoing dispossession on stolen lands. This acknowledgement compelled organizers to conduct work that would address the harms of settler colonialism and the uneven distribution of privation and privilege. It asked settlers to do work, both personal and community driven (Leeuw and Hunt 2018). Organizers described this as conducting ‘heart-centered work’ in which settlers do not evade their complicities and responsibilities, but rather lean into the messiness of their occupation and privilege on stolen lands in ways that invoke an ethic of care and love and compel a motivation to seek justice on stolen lands (Goldberg personal communication). Indigenous organizers asked what it means to be a good guest (even an uninvited one), how one could conduct themselves 11 Songhees community members articulate these values in a number of different places in more robust ways (Songhees Nation 2013), I do not expand on them here as my own understandings and ability to speak to these values is limited. It would not be appropriate, yet, I still try to wrestle with these values and, as I understand them, and have them guide my work. 12 In practice, understanding my role and responsibilities as an uninvited guest and settler on Lək�ʷəŋən territory is not always easy or straightforward. The desire to organize and conduct work about pressing issues can at times work to undermine Lək�ʷəŋən jurisdiction and neglect protocols around on how to carry ourselves and be in good relation on this land. Oftentimes, in responding to the crises that settler colonialism engenders, we are in such a rush and desperation, that we may not take time to attend to build and support the relations that enact our responsibilities to host Indigenous nations. This is an ongoing tension that I return to in later chapters. 40 well and in right relation as uninvited guests in someone else’s home (Jones personal communication). They also emphasized a responsibility to the land itself and framed taking care of the land which provides for home as another means of respecting and aligning oneself Lək̓ʷəŋən authority (Martindale personal communication). In this work, I am attempting to think through and embody what these responsibilities mean for me as a researcher, a community member, and a settler on Lək̓ʷəŋən territory. This work is intimate, intractable and never finished (Hunt and Holmes 2015; Leeuw and Hunt 2018). I am still learning how to do this work respectfully and through an ethic of care alongside a diverse community of friends, family, organizers and community members. It is through these relationships that I try to understand my roles and responsibilities here on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory and within community. Part of enacting this responsibility is through taking seriously Hunt and Holmes’ (2015) contention that ‘we start where we stand’. This imperative requires that we situate ourselves and the places we speak from, but also that we conduct our work in the intimate and everyday spaces of daily life and relation. For me, this has meant that we begin in our most intimate spaces: at home. It also asks that we come to value the view from home, the unique perspective that situating our analyses and obligations in home affords. What does orienting ourselves to home reveal? What does valuing the view from home allow (or disallow)? This perspective can help to unsettle orientations that allow us to distance ourselves from complicity with projects of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and White supremacy (Tuck and Yang 2012). Beginning analyses from home allows us to see the ways in which the very process of making home is enabled by settler colonial power and projects of dispossession in intimate and messy ways. It allows us a situated, grounded and deeply intimate perspective on how settler colonialism functions through 41 what Sarah de Leeuw (2016) describes as ‘tender grounds’, our most intimate and affective spaces. 2.4 How I Came to This Work To better articulate my methods, here, I want to place myself within this story to illustrate how I came to be involved with solidarity organizing and encampment support and how this has shaped how this influences the methods I took up. This story begins for me, in the winter of 2020, when the RCMP conducted a militarized raid of the Gidim’ten checkpoint on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The Wet’suwet’en are a nation in Northern BC that have long opposed the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline across their territory. In a series of raids, land defenders were arrested and ripped from their territories. In response to this militarized invasion, calls to ‘shut down Canada’ were announced and solidarity movements sprung up in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver blockading infrastructure like ports and railways and grinding the resource economy of so-called ‘Canada’ to a halt. On Lək̓ʷəŋən territory, a group of Indigenous youth occupied the entrance to the BC Legislature in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en calling for the immediate removal of the RCMP and CGL workers from the territory. These youth issued a call for support asking people in Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory to come and stand with them at the heart of BC’s site of colonial governance. Responding to this call, I travelled from the Town of Ladysmith to support. I would end up spending most of the next two weeks camped on the Legislature’s steps, supporting the delegation of Indigenous youth in whatever way I could. This experience was transformative for me leading me to move to Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory to continue fostering the relationships I had established. After relocating, in the summer of 2020, eager to continue work in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en, I was part of a small group of local organizers, who accepted a call from the 42 community at Gidimt’en to fundraise and build community infrastructure, in this case, a mobile tiny home that land defenders could use to access and live on the territory. The build took place in an empty lot on a street off Pandora. During the day, we would work on the tiny home and in the evenings we provided food and hosted workshops and teach-ins welcoming the community to participate in collaborative learning and skills-building. The space attracted a lot of people, functioning as a community hub during the week of the build. Lots of people experiencing homelessness on Pandora came by to ask what was going on, to access food and drink and to participate in workshops. People were overwhelmingly supportive and interested in the project. However, when they asked where the tiny home would be placed, we had to explain that it was destined for Wet’suwet’en territory thousands of kilometers away. In response, people would often explain the dire situation within Victoria for the unhoused community and reiterate that projects like the tiny home were desperately needed, right here and right now. While people remained supportive, their disappointment and feelings of abandonment were also clear. This sat with heavily with me and I began to think critically about how our organizing was oriented to a spatial ‘elsewhere’, to spaces that were recognizably ‘political’, recognizably resistance, to the exclusion of enacting our responsibilities within the intimate, embodied and everyday geographies in which we lived our lives. The spectacle of resistance was prioritized as more important in our organizing over quieter forms of carework, practices which unsurprisingly are distinctly gendered. In orienting ourselves towards particular spaces, we helped to reproduce and reify a binary that distinguished between Meegan and the Legislature as distant shores. These experiences clarified for me the importance of an ethic of what Hunt and Holmes (2015) describe as ‘starting where we stand’, and I began to think of how we might more adequately enact our responsibilities to place and to each other, 43 This would lead a group of local organizers to reorient our work towards Meegan, where by then, over 100 hundred people were sheltering without adequate supports. We began attending weekly circles where the unhoused community sheltering there asked for solidarity from their housed neighbors in their fight for adequate shelter, for a right to housing. A recurrent theme was the need for forms of harm reduction and sanitation. As a group, we took this seriously and after garnering consent from the community, we raised money to build showers, a service that the community there desperately needed and had explicitly asked for, that could be placed directly in the park. However, within a week, citing the colonial land trust under which the Park is governed, the City destroyed the showers and a community care tent set up to provide harm reductions supplies. In conducting harm reduction, mutual aid and practicing solidarity in the spaces of the Legislature and Meegan, I could not help but note the differential ways in which these struggles were take up by settlers who claimed to support Indigenous self-determination. I have continued doing anti-poverty, conducting mutual aid, and pursuing harm reduction since my experiences at Meegan working in institutional and grassroots settings as a community member in solidarity with both unhoused and Indigenous peoples. After these experiences, I decided that this would be my research; that I would focus my dissertation on the community work that I was already doing. I hoped to produce research that would speak to the local organizing community that I was a part of; to challenge all of us to make more robust connections across struggles, across arbitrarily separated shorelines. I began to think about what methods would allow me to best address the tensions and complexities I was witnessing in local organizing. I decided to employ a mixed methods approach of critical discourse analysis, interviews and autoethnography/ political activist ethnography. I detail these methods below. 44 2.5 Methods and Timeline This project utilizes a mixed methods approach including interviews, autoethnography, participant observation and critical analysis of legal discourse, policy and popular media over a period of four years. Before describing each of my methods, I begin this section by sharing a timeline outlining how and when I conducted research and the methods utilized: January/February 2020 Conducted ‘participant observation’ at the Legislature over two weeks. March 17, 2020. Province of British Columbia declared a public state of emergency in response to Covid-19 pandemic. Summer 2020 Organized and conducted the Tiny Home Build, recorded my observations and shifts in perspective, ‘field notes’. Fall 2020 Organized, built and installed showers in Meegan, recorded my observations and noted disparities in practices of solidarity, ‘field notes’. November 20, 2020 City impounds cistern and destroys community care tent and showers. Winter 2021-Spring 2024 Compiled and analyzed resources, media articles, and legal documents about sheltering. February 24-October 2022 BC Supreme Court Rules Against Sheltering in Beacon Hill. Analyzed the ruling. Fall/Winter 2022-2023 Conducted interviews. February-May 2023 BC Court of Appeals affirms Supreme Court’s ruling against sheltering. Analyzed ruling. May-September 2023 City of Victoria officially reversed its policy of deferred enforcement against sheltering in parks. Participated in legal observing and mutual aid. Recorded the process in journal, ‘field notes’. Fall 2023 Transcribed and analyzed interviews. Began compiling interviews, notes and analysis into final dissertation. Spring 2024 Shared dissertation with participants, solicited feedback and made amendments that folks requested. FIGURE 2 TIMELINE 45 2.5.1 Critical Discourse Analysis My first method has been the decolonizing framework and method of critical discourse analysis which I bring to my engagement with theory and analysis of popular media and legal texts. Throughout, I am informed by Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (2021) magisterial work Decolonizing Methodologies, that asks us to remain attuned to the politics of knowledge production. This has guided me to a citational politics that emphasizes Indigenous, Black and POC scholars. I platform and emphasize local scholars and people I am in relation with, either through interviews, dialogue or references to scholarly work, if possible. Bringing this relational orientation to research and interpretation is useful in pursuing decolonial inquiry. Yet, de Leeuw and Hunt’s (2018) intervention into the discipline of geography highlights the necessity of unsettling putatively decolonizing inquiry and the facile traps that such scholarship (and practice) may easily fall into. Geography continues to betray its colonial origins (and present) even in its most ‘radical’ guise. While spatial analysis remains key to understanding settler colonialism, an imperative that geography is uniquely attuned to, this analysis continues to be located in very specific spaces, highlights the work of particular actors and scholars, and privileges colonial modes of inquiry, analysis and representation (Absolon 2022; Wilson 2008). Identifying and destabilizing the ways in which geography as a discipline continues to participate in and encourage forms of erasure and invasive, extractive inquiry is central to this project (Oswin 2019; Roy 2020; Roy et al. 2020). Upsetting arbitrary compartmentalizations between disciplinary spaces is also a critical goal. Disciplinary boundaries must, at the very least, be troubled. Thus, the project’s intervention occurs in the expansive field, methods and practice in which settler colonialism is debated, challenged and hopefully, disrupted. It aims towards an intervention into how we imagine and conduct decolonial inquiry and praxis as much as it pursues a strictly (inter)disciplinary 46 unsettling. Although geography as a discipline certainly requires an intervention, so do the broader frameworks for theorizing settler colonialism. The objective then is to upset normative frameworks for how we conduct critical inquiry, organizing and study across a range of disciplines (Harney and Moten 2013). Pursuing a view from home is one means of conducting such a project which troubles hegemonic notions of space, scale, sovereignty, jurisdiction and settler colonialism as an ongoing project. Situating the home as a space across which all of these processes unfold troubles deeply held assumptions about their character and location. Such an example can be illustrative of the multiple struggles that remain invisibilized within normative modes of conducting inquiry and producing knowledge. Thus, the project seeks to unsettle certain treasured and hegemonic concepts like sovereignty, jurisdiction and scale within geography and beyond. To conduct this discourse analysis, I compiled a substantial list of resources pertaining to the issue of sheltering in Meegan. First, I read and analyzed both the BC Supreme Court’s response to the City’s petition inquiring into the legality of sheltering in Meegan and the Court of Appeals subsequent ruling. Likewise, I read other pertinent legal cases relating to the legality of sheltering including the Adams and Shantz decisions as well as the 1884 case presided over by Justice Begbie that would establish most of the legal precedent governing the Park (Abbotsford (City) v. Shantz 2015; Anderson v. Corporation of City of Victoria 1893; Victoria (City) v. Adams 2009).I set alerts for any local media stories pertaining to sheltering in Meegan and compiled these for cross-reference. In the end, this amounted to over 50 news stories from both sympathetic and more antagonistic news sources, including the Times Colonist, CHEK News, 47 CTV News, CBC News, the Tyee and the Capital Daily. 13 These articles ranged from the beginning of the declaration of emergency in March 2020 to March 2023 when the BC Court of Appeals handed won its ruling. At this point, most city residents and media outlets understood the issue as ‘resolved’ and abandoned it. I parsed these sources drawing out common themes, tropes and narratives that have informed how I am frame the anti-sheltering campaigns and the practices of municipal governance. I also watched and read council meeting minutes pertaining to the issue of sheltering in Parks. As a particularly contentious topic, sheltering and responses were discussed numerous times in council, primarily from the period of March 2020 to the official dates of decampment in May of 2022. This has helped to inform how I understand the machinations of municipal governance. I also closely followed social media accounts that directed anti-sheltering campaigns. This included the Change.org petition page, the GoFundMe page that sought monetary contributions to support the FBHP’s legal case, and the SaveBeaconHill Facebook group, that also directed and coordinated the effort against sheltering. 14 I also conducted a detailed reading of the Friends of Beacon Hill Park’s website, reading monthly newsletters, their updates on sheltering in Beacon Hill, and all of the materials hosted on the site to better understand the rationales that underwrote their campaign for eviction. After compiling all of these resources, I began reading and rereading, identifying recurring tropes, themes, and logics, coding these themes and using them to guide further research and the 13 Members of our group organizing in support of people sheltering in Meegan were also interviewed in many of these articles that documented the construction of showers in ‘Beacon Hill’, for instance. As a group, we coordinated and strategized how best to frame our arguments and ensure that they were consistent. Likewise, we also ran a popular social media account, VicMutualAid, through which we could convey or messages and events directly. 14 In general, I have chosen not to cite these sources due to the complexities of engaging social media and questions of anonymity. My primary exception has been when a public figure like City Council members, or those from the Friends of Beacon Hill Park used them to defame and direct actions against the unhoused community. 48 overall orientation of the dissertation. 15 This analysis helped me to form my arguments at the macro scale, identifying some of the recurrent processes that were witnessed in the revanchist campaign against sheltering. I supplement this with more detailed and fine-grained accounts from organizers and my own experiences in these spaces as an active participant. 2.5.2 Interviews My second method was interviews. When I began this project, I knew I wanted to conduct interviews with some of the folks that I had been organizing and thinking alongside but was not sure what form or direction this would take. Community organizers and advocates were approached due to lived experiences working alongside unhoused and housing precarious communities in so-called Victoria. These interviewees came primarily from the circle of relationships that I had already fostered through my organizing and community work in the city. This approach, rather than placing a general call, aligns with the emphasis on relationality championed by scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021) that places research in the relationships from which it emerges, and renders me accountable to those relationships. It is a means of refusing claims to objectivity in favour of more situated analyses that are produced relationally and within the community of which I am a part. I conducted ten interviews with local organizers. I am very grateful to the following people for so generously offering their voices and knowledge to this project: Leslie Robinson, Shae Perkins, Lacey Jones, Casey Lake, Ella Martindale, Niki Ottosen, Nic Olson, Joshua Goldberg, Kym A. Hines, and Gina Mowatt. 16 While drawing on relations I had formed through community and organizing, I tried to emphasize a diversity of social positions in the 15 I read many of these resources ‘against the grain’, noting common themes, but also trying to draw out their ideological foundations, what was left unsaid, and what underwrote campaigns against sheltering and the exercise of municipal governance. 16 Throughout I use the citation ‘personal communication’ to indicate that I am drawing on these interviews. 49 interviews. 17 I especially wanted to have a mix of community members who had been organizing around housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty in the city for a long time, alongside folks who were newer to organizing in Victoria or around housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty to understand how the relations between these movements had changed or evolved. This meant prioritizing a range of different ages in participants. Participants ranged in age from their early 20s to their 60s. Some participants had lived experiences of homelessness, while others did not. However, one key feature of the interviews was that I did not interview any organizers or community members who were currently experiencing homelessness. While these perspectives would have been welcome, I felt that I did not have strong enough prior relationships to ensure that this process would not be exploitative or place undue pressure on community members. Another key limitation of the interviews was that they do not include any Lək̓ʷəŋən or W̱SÁNEĆ community members whose perspectives would have been welcome and indeed, deeply impactful. 18 In the summer of 2021, I began reaching out to folks that I thought would be interested in participating. The bulk of the interviews were conducted over 6 months, in the fall of 2021 and the winter of 2022. Pre-interview consultations were used to establish specific frameworks for consent, what the parameters of the interview would look like, and to determine what interviewees hoped to get out of the process. Interviews were conducted with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people; the only criterion was that participants be involved with organizing 17 While participants represented a diversity of genders, one potential gap was lack of racial diversity. Most participants were either Indigenous or White. Interviews could have benefitted from the experience and expertise of Black, Asian, Muslim and Latinx perspectives. 18 There are a number of reasons for this. I had reached out to some organizers who were from local nations, but was not able to coordinate an interview. This limitation, while constraining, is, however, indicative of the state of local organizing that I am trying to unpack here, where relations may be lacking and local input is not always sought. 50 for housing justice or Indigenous sovereignty within Victoria in some capacity. This was broadly conceived as some participants conducted outreach, harm reduction or forms of mutual aid, that while not always explicitly about housing aimed to ameliorate and address the effects of housing precarity. This work might center on particular communities like Indigenous people, people who use drugs or do sex work or might aim to service those experiencing homelessness or housing precarity generally. Most participants combined unpaid grassroots work with some form of paid institutional labour in the service sector. Interviews were conducted over Zoom or in a physical space in which the participant felt most comfortable, at home, at their work or outside. Interviews were semi-structured with a set of questions that were shared with participants beforehand. The interview script was generally followed but I asked follow-up questions if it seemed relevant or the flow of conversation allowed. This process allowed participants to situate their work, describe the communities they serve and the changes they hoped to affect. Interviews normally took about an hour and a half. This is how long I found that participants generally had capacity to engage, though this could differ. I was able to have follow up conversations with some participants, and informal discussions are always occurring. I developed a set of question about how folks understood concepts like home, housing justice and sovereignty and the spaces where they saw these concepts converging on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory over the past 5 years. How did these concepts shape local organizing practice? How were the spaces of the encampment or the occupation were understood? I wanted interviews to provide a sense of how and where sovereignty and housing justice intersected in the minds and practice of service providers, local organizers, and communities of mutual aid. How did local organizers frame and understand solidarity, the work that they conducted and the 51 space in which this occurred? Interviews were intended to illustrate how local community organizers thought about these terms and conceptualized their work, rather than providing detailed accounts of specific events and histories. I began with personal questions asking folks who they were, what they did, and importantly, what brought them to this work. These questions typically animated and enlivened participants who were eager to story their work and experiences, describe what drove them and why they felt the work was important. 19 In the next section of the script however, I asked folks about some of the concepts that animated their work, home, justice and sovereignty, or key ideas that shaped their practice, harm reduction mutual aid or allyship, for instance. I share here some of these questions. 1. What does ‘home’ mean to you? How is this important in the work you do? 2. What does ‘justice’ mean to you? How does your work strive towards justice? 3. What does ‘sovereignty’ mean to you? How do you engage or exercise Indigenous sovereignty in your organizing or community work? 4. What are some key ideas that motivate your work? Harm reduction? Mutual aid? Allyship? Are there others? 5. Do you even use terms like housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty in your work? Do you have other ways to describe or understand these ideas? 6. How do you see Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice as connected? Why is it important to recognize housing justice organizing as taking place on stolen and occupied Indigenous land? Likewise, why should ongoing housing crises and homelessness be central components of projects for decolonization? While these are interesting questions, they did not always land with or frankly, interest participants. While some participants spoke eloquently about some of these concepts, most 19 People were invariably drawn to this work through lived experience or relationships with people experiencing the harms of housing precarity, once again highlighting the importance of experiential knowledge and relationships in this work. 52 people guided the conversation back to the particularities of organizing in Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories and towards the language of care, often situating their work within emotional registers, what guided their work was practices of compassion, empathy and care, not typically abstracted notions of justice. In general, people were less comfortable with unpacking these concepts or discussing their work through the frameworks of housing justice or Indigenous sovereignty, even as they participated in these movements. These concepts were not enlivening. People were more interested and animated in talking about work; the labour of community work, of care work. I want to make sure that I am clear about what I believe shaped these responses. The people that I interviewed were all seasoned organizers, politically astute and skilled in analyses and concepts like housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty. It was not that folks had not thought about questions of justice or sovereignty. Rather, I take the hesitancy and reorienting as actively placing value in different practices and different places, to relocate concern and where we direct our critical attention. In this way, participants actively guided the interviews to be gesturing towards other spaces, other practices, that those that I introduced, saying that this too matters, that the gendered labour of care work also matters and is deeply political. Upon reflection, I found that folks were gently guiding me back to a grounding in a particular place and a particular set of relationships, highlighting the gendered labour and care work (often invisibilized) on which solidarity runs, and asking me to interrogate the inaccessibility of many of the concepts that we use to describe and understand solidarity work. Like Audra Simpson (2014) has argued, refusal or hesitancy, can be generative, a way of addressing the very framework of inquiry itself. In their answers, participants helped me to rethink the questions that were being asked and my strategies for pursuing these questions. They were asking me to think 53 what the work of solidarity looks and feels like, how the space of the political is produced and valued, how concepts like sovereignty have been taken up in ways that delimited the practice of solidarity. Rather than seeing the interviews as a failure or a mistake, I take them for what they were: a response, an answer to a set of questions, but importantly, an invitation to orient myself in differing ways, to question the very concepts that we typically use to describe Indigenous and poor people’s social movements (Halberstam 2011). ‘Sovereignty’, ‘housing justice’ or even, ‘organizing’ were not always terms that community members preferred. As Nic Olson (personal communication) explained me, “some of these concepts that we use are just so taken for granted that we never actually unpack them.” Shae Perkins (personal communication) echoed this, “one thing that I notice a lot and in organizing circles is, the language that is used in so much of this and, how inaccessible it is and how academic it is.” Shae went on, “it's concepts that I understand and feel on such an integral core level, but trying to word it, trying to actually articulate it in actual language is so much harder.” Current frameworks and even language were seen as insufficient in capturing the complexity of this work, “I feel like English language does fall short in terms of articulating it” (Perkins personal communication). Community member Casey Lake (personal communication) described their discomfort with the label of housing justice or even describing themself as an antipoverty or housing justice organizer, “I just have relationships with people who are either precariously housed, substance users, or unhoused.” Nic discussed a similar discomfort with the term ‘organizer’, “I don't feel like an organizer, per se. I feel like I'm able to support and be in those spaces and support people that are doing it.” Some participants stated that they preferred to describe their work as community work or care work because the term ‘organizing’ was associated with a particular kind of politics and one that could work to erase the kinds of 54 invisibilized labour and support that they were involved with. 20 These responses asked me to think about the work that concepts like ‘sovereignty’, ‘public space’ and ‘housing justice’ do. I had taken for granted the saliency and transparency of concepts like sovereignty, for instance, not thinking about what these practices of enframement can do. This has led me to unpack these concepts in detail throughout this work asking what they allow or foreclose. Responses to complicated questions and issues are not always straightforward. People’s circumscribed engagement with the questions and interview process was not due to any lack of proficiency in engaging in critical analysis or thinking about complex concepts, but, I believe, with my assumptions about the concepts and community work, the framing of my questions and the somewhat rigid process of interviews themselves. The interviews therefore prompted me to reconsider the questions I was asking, what I hoped the project would achieve and the methods through which I would pursue this. At times, I felt the interviews posed questions of housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty at the level of abstraction, that they did not get to the messy, 20 Some participants did use the language of housing justice or were intrigued by the term. Nic Olson (personal communication described his work as “for sure under the idea of housing justice, because it's a bit of a war on the poor and bylaws, kind of the ones doing most of that against the unhoused, on behalf of the general population, which is housed.” Yet, he also stated that “I wouldn't have maybe described it as that before. I usually call it antipoverty work, I guess. I don't know, but it's 100% rooted in housing.” Tenant organizer Leslie Robinson (personal communication) explicitly described their work as housing justice, seeing HJ as a more robust and expansive complicating of previous frameworks like housing rights, “one government can, and it takes a fuckload of work to get it, but they can give you rights and then another government, or the same one can come along and just wipe them away. And those aren't rights. That's something else. Those are negotiated benefits. If you've got a right, it's a right. I've really been listening to the people these days that are talking about shifting from talking about housing rights to talking about housing justice. Because justice is a whole different thing than rights.” Finally, some participants used the language of housing justice but understood it as occurring within broader frameworks like Coast Salish law and protocol; relationships and responsibility. Lacey Jones (personal communication) described how housing justice fit in with her understandings of her responsibilities, “I think it's just important doing the work of housing justice on stolen lands. It's important that we are constantly circling back to be talking to local nations and be pulling them into the work that we're doing.” She expanded that “it ties back to relationships and responsibility to one another to be able to learn and take in those teachings that really teach of who we are within our homelands and within our home, in our long houses and all those spaces”. Housing justice was a part of embodying and enacting Coast Salish law and being in right relation with both land and community. 55 lived realties of conducting solidarity work and that the process itself did not encourage this. The vibrancy of this work was often missed in the questions I asked. Even as I attempted to render interviews more conversational and dialogic, I found them quite rigid and alienating for participants. These are people I have worked alongside for years now, people that I have learned so much from, and this kind of interviews seemed a pale way to uphold and honour their work. The intimacy we nurtured in our everyday organizing and community-building felt difficult to communicate because of the framing of my questions and the interview process itself. I found myself wanting to story my experiences of organizing over the past four years alongside these collaborators, rather than code or thematize issues or subjects that arose from the interviews that seemed to remove these critical; issues and histories from their lived, visceral and embodied context. It was difficult to capture the ways in which knowledge was built between community members in the interviews, or the relationship between theory and practice, how we produced knowledge in the very process of working and being together. Participants gently suggested that interviews alone might not be sufficient in grasping or communicating the complex political landscape that has animated Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory over the last five years. I felt a different approach was required. After the interviews, I transcribed our conversations, and again, read and reread, and cross-referenced the texts, drawing out common themes and concerns. This informed how I approached my analysis and structured the dissertation. I shared the completed dissertation with participants, reaffirming consent and ensuring that quotes were used in appropriate and representative ways, working with folks to reshape the text if there were any lingering concerns. While I found interviews a little restrictive, participants still shared beautiful and insightful stories and thoughts. I honour what was shared with me throughout by opening every chapter and 56 subsections with the voices of the participants that I share community with. While I have incorporated some of these conversations in-text, in general, I allow these quotes to stand on their own and frame or comment on the content that follows asking the reader to draw connections and make their own meaning. In this way, I hope that these quotes offer a sense of the ongoing dialogue that is occurring within community. 2.5.3 Storytelling, Autoethnography, Participant Observation, and Political Activist Ethnography My final methodologies have been the interconnected frameworks of storytelling, autoethnography, ‘participant observation’ and political activist ethnography, documented through the use of a journal and field notes. My experience with the interview process guided me towards storytelling as a complementary practice. I knew that I would need to rely on reflections of our shared experiences as a community. Throughout the thesis that follows, I emphasize stories that include interview participants as a way of illustrating theory in practice, ethics in motion. I wanted to remember how things were negotiated and emerged in place and through our relations, how we built knowledge and honed analysis in community, reflecting participants’ reframing of my imposed frameworks. I therefore returned to talk with folks about our experiences working together and, in the thesis that follows, reflect on them in more of a dialogic way. This felt generative and is what I am describing as a praxis of storytelling, sharing scenes and reflecting on their meanings (Cameron 2015). Again, while I do describe this as participant observation or ethnography, I am trying to complicate these terms a little here by introducing storytelling as a framework as well. 57 As a methodology, storytelling felt closer to the spirit of what I want to accomplish in this work (Archibald 2008; Phillips and Bunda 2018; Smith 2021; Hunt 2014; Cameron 2012). 21 I wanted to emphasize the felt components of this research and work through story, describing ‘this is what it felt like to participate in community organizing’ and to reflect on those experiences. This led me to an emphasis on critical self-reflection and inquiry, autoethnography, participant observation and eventually, political activist ethnography (Holman-Jones 2016). At Sarah Hunt’s suggestion, throughout the past 4 years, I have kept a journal, (what could be described as ‘field notes’, though I remain uncomfortable with the framing) documenting my experiences, thoughts and feelings conducting this work. Journal reflections were sometimes very specific, documenting how many police and bylaw showed up to displace people sheltering and at what time, for instance, and sometimes they were more reflective, observations I recorded in the moment when in parks, or at council meetings. 22 I returned to these reflections throughout my analysis, attempting to place them in conversation with my interview transcripts, to construct a timeline for the multitude of everts that were occurring simultaneously in relation to sheltering, and often using them to initiate actual conversations with organizers and friends where we could revisit specific events and wrestle with how we interpreted them. As such, one method I have used is autoethnography, reflecting on my own experiences and feelings, through conversation, reflection and reference to my journal. Chawla and Atay (2018:4) describe autoethnography as a mode of inquiry that emerged as “a reaction to social-scientific research and the dominance of White/Western voices within social inquiry. Even 21 Yet, I also remain wary of the potential for settler scholars to engage with Indigenous methodologies like storying in ways that are appropriative or misrepresentative. Hence, there is a tension in this work between a draw towards Indigenous theorizations of storying and the literatures and practices of autoethnography which emerged from the disciplines of anthropology and qualitative inquiry (Henson 2021). 22 Keeping a notebook and documenting police activity is required for conducting legal observing and I have several notebooks filled out with this data. 58 though autoethnography’s intent was to provide scholarly space to the lived experiences of the underrepresented, oppressed, and marginalized, academic publishing within this tradition remains limited to the White majority group in the United States.” While I remain critical of some aspects of autoethnography, I appreciate the ways in which it values experiential and felt knowledges and employ it throughout to challenge some of the rigidity of academic conventions. 23 Having journals and notes to refer to allowed me to do this. Another foundational method has been ‘participant observation’, being physically (or virtually) immersed in many of these spaces and communities and recording my observations, experiences and reflections as an active participant in social movements. Again, I prefer to frame this work as witnessing rather than the more anthropologically-oriented ‘participant observation’, because witnessing emphasizes my active responsibility and embeddedness within these communities. Witnessing has been an important ethical and methodological framework within Indigenous feminist frameworks (Clark 2016a; Hunt 2014). Sarah Hunt (2014) describes witnessing as an embodied and relational practice, and one which compels a responsibility from the witness. Being a witness means that you have both an obligation and a responsibility to share what has been shared with you, what you have observed and experienced. Hunt (2014:38) argues that “as witness, we have a role that is not to take up the voice or story of that which we have witnessed, nor to change the story, but to ensure the truths of the acts can be comprehended, honored and validated” . Witnessing is about honouring what has been shared with you, what you have experienced and seen and ensuring that these experiences are treated with dignity and not subsumed nor placed under erasure. The difference for me is how witnessing renders you responsible to a community 23 I appreciate the contributions of my committee member Gerry Pratt in describing these journals as ‘field notes’, and encouraging me to think of these as a valid and legitimate form of documentation and knowledge production, 59 of which you are a member, while participant observation renders your responsible to your research and the academy. 24 This is the ethic through which I engage in ‘participant observation’. What we learn compels a responsibility of us, and I use witnessing here, rather than the more passive and analytic, ‘participant observation’, to emphasize this active ethics, the responsibility that being in community; being a witness entails. While uncomfortable with the anthropological undertones of participant observation as a term, the process of being an active participant within community and social movements is an absolutely central method of this work. Much of the knowledge contained in this dissertation was produced through the experience of being in community and the relationships that constitute these communities. So, while I am critical of how participant observation is practiced, I understand active and responsible participation as a central to ethical and robust research. As I described above, this work is not separate from my daily life. My community work has preceded this research and extends beyond it, so it can be difficult to categorize and list all of the events, actions and observations that have informed this research. It is hard to delineate and silo what is ‘research’ and what is ‘organizing’ in this context. That said, I will outline some of the key events in which I was present as a community member, as a participant and as a critical observer. I estimate that I have participated in around 50 community events in relation to housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty in the past few years. These more public forms are complemented by the everyday interactions and gathering through which community is formed and negotiated, distributing food, handing out smokes, dropping off harm reduction supplies, planning and plotting, or simply hanging out with community members. My presence and active participation in these spaces has fundamentally shaped this research. Below, 24 As Hunt (2014:39) argues “witnessing entails creating knowledge not as solitary actors but within a network of reciprocal relations.” We are responsible to one another. 60 I note some of the more transformative and influential events I have participated in over the past four years. First, I camped or was present at the BC Legislature during its occupation for about 2 weeks, sometimes sleeping at my sister’s but there almost everyday. This experience was transformative and enlightening illustrating some of the affects that mobilized settlers in their support of Indigenous sovereignty. In the summer of 2020, I spent months fundraising, organizing and assisting the Tiny Home build, through which I was able to have innumerable conversations with local organizers, deeply informing my understandings of how solidarity is understood and practiced in the city. This culminated in a week-long build where I was also witness to how the broader community in Victoria understood and supported Indigenous sovereignty here and elsewhere. After this, in the fall of 2020, I again spent months planning, organizing and fundraising to build showers in Meegan, attending weekly meetings, and eventually installing and even, camping with the showers once they were in place. This allowed for the building of relationships with folks camped in Meegan as well as interactions with the broader activist community in Victoria where once again I was able to better understand and observe the logics and rationales through which solidarity was pursued in the territory. Through this project, I also engaged, as a part of our group, with City Councillors, parks managers, local media, and more violently with bylaw and police, giving me a visceral vantage point on the functioning of municipal governance which has informed my analysis here. After the showers were destroyed, we also navigated the City’s bureaucracy, attempting to obtain funding to run a mobile shower unit. This, once again, entailed engaging with mayor and council, attending city council meetings and working with service providers, NGOs and lawyers to draft an application. In 2021, I also volunteered regularly at the community care tent, 61 taking shifts to operate the space, witnessing the strength and resilience of the community, as well as NIMBY responses to an ‘alimentary infrastructure’ that literally saved lives (LaDuke and Cowen 2020). Since the beginning of decampment in 2023, I have served as a legal observer, arriving at parks or on the block at 7AM to document police and bylaw’s daily displacement of the community. This has given me perspective of the operations of police, bylaw and parks staff and their deeply punitive orientations. I am now a member of Stop the Sweeps-Victoria, a group that conducts monthly block meetings on Pandora, providing food, information to the community sheltering there, practices legal observing and offers legal observer trainings. In this capacity, we have marched through the streets, held film screenings, packed city hall, and confronted police and bylaw, but we have also shared food, held space and built relationships with the unhoused community here. These experiences and relations have been the most informative in developing the arguments I forward here. This is the body of knowledge and experience that I am drawing on, in relation to the communities that I am a part of, to articulate my arguments here These actions could be described as participant observation or ethnography, but in general, I find these terms alienating. I share this community work to illustrate exactly what informs my interpretations here. These experiences shaped the literature I engaged, guiding me to work and concepts like revanchism that could help me to explain the complex interplay of punishment, displacement, home, belonging, support and complicity that I was witnessing (and a part of). It is these experiences, these relationships, through which, in collaboration with my community, I attempt to make sense of colonization, precarity and housing injustice on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. I understand this participation in community, in organizing work as not only valid, but a deeply generative method. These experiences shaped my research and how I understand 62 knowledge production. Organizing, being in community is a form of collaborative knowledge-building, even if it occurs outside of established or recognized academic frameworks. It is theory in practice. Terms like autoethnography and participant observation are loaded concepts, fraught with the colonial baggage that attends their development through disciplines such as anthropology and geography. I use them here critically and with a healthy dose of what Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) describes as ‘skepticism’; a hesitancy about what they might reproduce. I engage with autoethnography and participant observation with skepticism, not because I refute these projects (the work of racialized postcolonial researchers has illustrated how autoethnography might be taken up with a critical and decolonizing lens), but because I worry about what it means to recenter the figure of the White researcher and his interpretations (Chawla and Atay 2018). 25 Yet, as Strakosch and Macoun argue (2020:505) “it is possible for colonisers to act in solidarity from a position of complicity.” Both/and once more. I try to counter any creeping solipsism by grounding this work and these reflections in community, emphasizing the communal nature of the work and checking in with other community members. While I use some of the tools of autoethnography, this is not only my story. It is a community story, and I try to honour that while recognizing how my situated perspective, ‘the view from my home’, shapes it. Autoethnography and participant observation are the terms that are currently available to us, and they do begin to get at some of what I am searching for here, to story the experiences of organizing, what our theories, ethics and political models look and feel like in practice (Leeuw 2017). While I do not feel that either really captures the process I am describing, at the very least, they gesture towards the practices through which I have attempted to generate 25 Whiteness is a structure which is difficult to entangle ourselves from. It precedes and pre-empts us, even as we kick against its pricks. While we retain the agency to fight against this structure and disidentify with its normative logics, I believe that we cannot simply choose to function outside of it. Hence, I use the language of investment. As a settler, I remain privileged and protected by the structure of Whiteness. 63 knowledge and develop this project (and help us to avoid some of the appropriative tendencies of settlers engaging with Indigenous knowledge). 26 At the conclusion of my research, I encountered the terms political activist ethnography and movement-relevant theory that feel closest to what I am attempting here (Crosby 2023). Andrew Crosby (2023:35) describes political activist ethnography as “a qualitative research method that focuses on how everyday experiences are represented, organized, and mediated through institutional and ruling relations”. This method is related to movement-relevant theory which “centres the knowledge produced by social movements and supplements political activist ethnography through research that is relevant and useful for social movement struggles.” (Crosby 2023:35). Crosby (2023:35) argues that political activist ethnography, while not uniform, tends to “(1) start with activist experiences (through participant observation and interviews); (2) analyze interviews and field notes to discover references to institutions and ruling relations; (3) trace these ruling relations to uncover their textual mediation.” This is the approach that I have pursued here. Crosby (2023:37) claims that “political activist ethnography begins from an activist standpoint.” It is always already involved, invested and engaged and attempts to produce knowledge and theory that has utility for the social movements from which it is articulated. Political activist ethnography “emphasizes that activists hold particular social and political insights into the institutions and social organization of issues that they struggle against” (Crosby 26 Part of what makes me uncomfortable is the ‘auto’ of autoethnography. So, much of what I narrate here was lived, thought through and revolves around community. I do not see this as my story but rather as the story of a particular community, people encamped in Meegan and their supporters refracted through my telling, even if this telling is informed by my position with and relations with community. But, if it’s not my story, what right do I have to tell it? Yet, I must then be responsible for the telling and any limitations it contains. How to properly navigate this without appropriating the voices of friends and interlocutors, while still acknowledging that this story has been crafted in relation, through conversations, organizing and interviews, is never entirely resolved. 64 2023:37). This method seeks to not only explicate these relations, but to change them. Crosby (2023: 39) argues that this necessitates direct engagement with social movements which “enables researchers to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of social movements, which is more likely to produce better research and useful theory.” Crosby (2023:39) breaks his method down concisely describing stating that his practice is about ‘doing, not studying’. This aligns with my approach where, where I see research as supplemental to the community work that is already being done in the City. Again, I see research as supporting community activism, and as such it is not necessarily my primary orientation. Thus, the method is all the work that being in community already entails. Participant observation informs how we conduct political activist ethnography. As Crosby (2023:43) notes, participation in social movements helps researchers develop understandings of what is useful for social movements in terms of academic research as well as where activists can most effectively make change. Likewise, my position within social movements and local communities, my participation in organizing over the past 4 years, has guided me to arguing for the necessity of understanding the connections between settler colonialism, precarity and housing injustice. This argument stems from my position in community, my experiences organizing around these issues over the past 4 years. Organizing then is a community practice, is a method of generating knowledge and theory, and one that I rely on heavily here. So, my experiences, but also importantly, my relationships, position and responsibilities within community, shape how I interpret the events outlined in this dissertation., This form of ethnography with its political commitments, attention to subjectivity and expansive objectives forms a distinctive method, a way of working with and within communities and social movements. Again, this is a valid method and the framework of political activist ethnography helps to articulate it. 65 2.6 Limitations of Research My methods and methodologies also have their own limitations. Using a mixed methods approach means that I have attempted to move laterally, to cover the many aspects that animated housing justice and decolonization in Victoria. However, applying a singular method or approach, while less likely to capture the breadth of the issues animating the territory, could have provided more fine-grained accounts of local organizing, of the City’s history, of the functioning of colonial legal systems. All of these aspects could have been their own dissertation, that required more involved methods, interviewing more community organizers or accessing primary historical documents, for instance. Likewise, deciding to select interview participants relationally provides both potential and limitations. It means that the knowledge shared here was produced in conversation, through relation, but also that it is confined to the communities and spaces that I move within, perhaps circumscribing more diverse perspectives. In particular, the lack of Lək̓ʷəŋən or W̱SÁNEĆ participants amongst the interviewees has to be acknowledged as a real limitation of this research. In the end, while this work consists of discourse analysis, interviews and relational knowledge production, much of it is my own situated and subjective telling of the past four years of organizing here on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory. As such, it is subject to limitations of perspective and deeply shaped by my own emotional experiences of events and the practice of organizing. This has both its drawbacks and its potentials. I want to be clear that while this work is informed by my location within communities and the interviews I conducted and an ongoing process of relational production of knowledge, it is one way of telling this particular story. I accept and welcome that there are other ways of narrating this history and reiterate that, while informed by my position in community, my ongoing relations and the process of interviewing, this is my way of telling this story from a situated and limited position. I hope that this work 66 finds an audience with community members who are struggling with these questions in the ways that I have. I see this dissertation as a response to the stated concerns of both Indigenous and unhoused communities that their movements are being attacked by the settler state and often invisibilized within solidarity movements. These communities are asking us to be wary of the ways in which solidarity practices can reinscribe colonial logics and to think critically about how we might do better in how we think through and practice solidarity (Gaztimbide-Fernandez 2012). As supporters, we are being called to witness and directly asked how we might more meaningfully connect our sea of islands. Taking these concerns seriously is an act of care, responsibility and consensual allyship, but what this looks like will take work to understand and embody. In conversations with local organizers there is a desire to make these connections. As Leslie Robinson (personal communication) communicated to me, “there's room for alliance. There's room for mutual learning and solidarity building, but I don't know how to start.” Leslie’s statement illustrates that the disconnections could be felt keenly by local organizers and that the work could certainly feel daunting. Yet, it’s work that we can take on as a community. Niki Ottosen (personal communication) summarized this beautifully, “when you're together as a community, and you find like minded people, and you stay connected with those people. The work doesn't seem so daunting.” 27 I hope that this work and its engagement with a vibrant community full of creative, compassionate and caring people, helps us to keep thinking about how to embody our responsibilities and to continue bridge our shorelines (Hau’ofa 1994) 27 Casey Lake (personal communication) also pursued this emphasis on community-learning and building in the face of colonial violence, “we're all learning how to be in this space and keep each other safe and what it means to push back”. 67 3 ‘Gimme Shelter’: Encampments, Home and Housing Justice Amidst a Global Pandemic 3.1 Introduction “What are we actually fighting for? Are we fighting for [local housing provider] Cool Aid to get $2 million to build shitty housing where people are living under horrible rules and every aspect of life is surveyed and controlled? I'm sure that's not what we're fighting for, but that is what happens.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). During the Covid-19 pandemic, in the early summer of 2020, an encampment was established in Meegan as the unhoused community pushed the City to enact its responsibilities through lively, creative and at times, fiercely oppositional politics. 28 What I want to unpack in this chapter are the ways in which encampments lay bare the connection between settler colonialism, neoliberal governance and forms of racialized precarity like homelessness. The encampment illustrated the astute political acumen of the unhoused community in so-called Victoria, but also the strategies of reassembled governance that the City employed to reorder public space and the distinctly colonial and revanchist orientation of local non-profits and settler citizens as they attempted to reclaim urban space seen to be under threat from ‘unruly’ populations (Withers 2021). To understand this process, I explore the context in which the encampment was established in Meegan before turning to examine the broader emergence of encampments across so-called ‘Canada’ under neoliberal regimes of governance and how they intersect with prior projects of settler colonial urbanism. 28 I remain wary of the language of ‘encampment’ but have still chosen to utilize it here absent more appropriate nomenclature. As Flynn et al. (2022:8). argue “the dominant language of “encampment” does not reflect the depth of community and belonging experienced by those living outdoors together, nor does it reflect that tents are homes for many people, and “encampments” are communities or villages. This is particularly evident with respect to Indigenous people, who have distinct rights and relationships in relation to land and housing. We ask that the reader understand encampments as homes and that our use of the term encampment’ reflects that understanding.” 68 Following a winter of anticolonial unrest, in which solidarity movements sought to ‘shut down Canada’, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and global lockdown was met with intense fear and trepidation by people experiencing homelessness. Understanding that support systems were already stretched thin by an affordable housing and tenancy crisis, and an ongoing and devastating toxic drug poisoning epidemic, unhoused communities and their supporters knew that a pandemic would be catastrophic for those most marginalized within the city; people experiencing homelessness, those immunocompromised, with disabilities, sex workers and people who use drugs. Unfortunately, even as cases became confirmed within so-called ‘Canada’ and the Province of B.C., no one could imagine the full extent to which these communities would be impacted; the disregard and abandonment they would experience and the intensification of policing they would endure. People experiencing homelessness would be abandoned to the vagaries of the virus, placed in a ‘sacrifice zone’ by governmental disregard and would disproportionately bear the bodily burdens of a virus that would kill millions of people worldwide (Montanez and Christiansen 2022). For those most marginalized, the exhortation from BC’s Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, to ‘be kind, be calm’ would not be enough to allow them to ‘be safe’. Government inaction illustrated that lives of the most marginalized within the city were not ‘grievable’; they were, in fact, disposable (Butler 2009; Pratt 2005; Razack 2016). In her work, In the Wake, Christina Sharpe (2016) describes settler states as characterized by particular kinds of climate or ‘weather’, pervasive, ambient and atmospheric conditions of anti-Blackness and White supremacy. A similar kind of climate characterized the settler colonial city during the pandemic, as unhoused communities were left to weather the pandemic, and the weather was bad. 69 The pandemic illuminated existing disparities and produced further barriers to care for people sheltering outdoors (Maynard and Simpson 2022; Cook and Crowe 2022). As Nicole Chaland (2021:4) would write in a report about the City of Victoria’s homelessness plan and service systems, “COVID-19 made visible the gaps and weaknesses in the systems that serve people experiencing homelessness.” People were told to stay home, to isolate, to mask and to practice stringent hygiene routines. Yet, for people experiencing homelessness, these measures were not only impractical; they were laughable. Obviously, ‘staying home’ was not an option for those deprived of home. Much of the shelter space that remained open was congregate and even the parks that would be opened were redzoned to the degree that practicable social distancing was impossible (Sylvestre, Blomley and Bellot 2019). Personal protective equipment (PPE) was in short supply and difficult to acquire. Finally, accessing water and practicing hygiene routines was exceedingly difficult outdoors with most retail and public spaces closed. The government’s recommendations were clearly not applicable and had not been designed with those facing homelessness in mind. Contrary to popular discourse and the proclamations of pedestaled folk hero, Dr. Bonnie Henry, it was clear that we were not all in this together; that some lives did, indeed, matter more than others. While the pandemic is often described as a catastrophic epidemiological event, scholars argue that we need to denaturalize the idea that the pandemic is a strictly ‘natural’ phenomenon (Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Starblanket and Hunt 2020). Instead, these scholars encourage an understanding of the pandemic as a socionatural event, structured by already existing relations of inequality. 29 How the pandemic was experienced by unhoused communities was shaped by a set 29 I see this as akin to the ways in which Black studies scholars have challenged the framing of Hurricane Katrina as a ‘natural’ event (Alkalimat 2006). These events are socionatural and their effects are determined by historical and 70 of prevalent social relations and already established city policies like street sweeps and policing which intensified with the onset of the pandemic (Gordon and Byron 2021). The crisis the community experienced was formed in the nexus of an epidemiological event and its interactions with policies that already serve to debase and disregard marginalized communities. In ‘Canada’, that means they occur in a nexus of settler colonialism, White supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy which renders some lives disposable, not worthy of ‘investment’. The crisis that the pandemic initiated is not ‘natural’, nor even unforeseeable, it is the result of decades, and for some communities, centuries, of abandonment and invasion, of policies that dehumanize and target entire communities for elimination and abandonment and of sustained attacks on the infrastructures of care that would allow communities to weather the onset of an ‘unprecedented’ epidemiological event (Power and Mee 2020; Chatzidakis et al. 2020). 30 The pandemic is mediated by social disparities in care and access to badly-needed resources like housing and healthcare services. There is nothing natural about the differential exposure to premature death that attended the onset and duration of the pandemic for poor, disabled, unhoused, racialized and Indigenous communities. As Gina Starblanket and Dallas Hunt (2020) claimed, the “virus may not discriminate, but responses to it do.” The pandemic then is a socionatural nexus whose burdens are borne bodily by those people constructed as surplus, remaindered or disposable (Ahuja 2016; Ferguson 2020; Tadiar 2022). This is the logical outcome of decades of disinvestment, abandonment, policing and outright invasion (Pasternak and Houle 2020). It is the existing social conditions. There is a reason that Black communities bore the brunt of Katrina’s aftermath, decades of disinvestment, redlining practices and environmental racism. I argue that this is true of unhoused communities’ experiences of the pandemic in Victoria as well. 30 I use the scare quotes here to indicate the ways in which the Province of BC has, in fact, experienced epidemiological events akin to Covid-19 including Spanish flu and smallpox. Smallpox, in particular, had a devastating effect on Indigenous communities. The pandemic is exceptional here only if we erase the experience of Indigenous peoples. The point is, we have been here before. It was not inconceivable that existing disparities in health could be exacerbated by and epidemiological event at the scale of Covid-19. Municipalities and governments simply do not have the political will to care for those most marginalized. 71 result of policy and governance in which some people are produced as not mattering. This orientation precedes and shapes our understanding of the pandemic and its effects. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Province of British Columbia declared a public health emergency on March 17, 2020. Public gatherings were banned, and people were told to stay home and socially isolate. In Victoria, people experiencing homelessness and housing precarity sheltered in place on the Pandora Green, a median green space on the busy Pandora Avenue, near service and housing providers like the Portland Hotel Society and Our Place. The Pandora Corridor has long been a community hub for those experiencing homelessness in the city. It is a space where people gather, where they access services and resources and where they create community and look after one another. However, the right to assembly for unhoused community members is always under threat, and Pandora is a space that has consistently been vilified and stigmatized within popular discourse and local media often drawing pejorative comparisons to Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. 31 The block is intensively policed and surveilled, with sweeps, raids and dispersal common. The pandemic made the threat to the community sheltered there actionable by the city under the guise of health and safety measures. Following the declaration of the public health emergency, in May of 2020, citing the ‘unsafe’ and ‘unsanitary conditions’ on the block, the City conducted street sweeps on Pandora, displacing people that had been sheltering there without providing adequate options for alternative shelter. As AJ Withers (2021:179) argues in the context of ‘Toronto’, “safety became 31 Indeed, it was recently pejoratively described as a “magnet for displaced persons” in a national article that invoked the same tired tropes of good weather and ‘soft’ municipal politics as the reason for Victoria’s increasing homelessness (Mason 2024). 72 the city’s watchword to legitimize forced decampment”. Arrests were made, tents and belongings impounded or destroyed and construction fencing erected to block people from accessing the space. While some people were provided with housing, most were not. Decades of disinvestment into public housing through neoliberal restructuring and austerity regimes, meant that options were simply not available (Rolnik 2019; Suttor 2016). A sanctioned encampment was established at Topaz Park, a sports field situated away from downtown and distant from any services, but this could not entirely accommodate the sheer number of people experiencing homelessness and conditions there were notoriously inadequate. With nowhere to go, people took shelter where they could. If the City’s decision had been made to render those sheltering outdoors less visible, as many housing justice advocates had claimed, it backfired. With shelters limiting service and the community on Pandora displaced, the extent of people experiencing homelessness became visible throughout the city. The City of Victoria has always been deeply aware of optics, presenting itself to a global audience as a beautiful city and tourist destination, and to local residents as a liberal bastion, a small city in which the problems of larger urban centers, like homelessness, do not penetrate. The City knew that it would have to provide some solutions to the increasing visibility of the crisis, but needed time to appropriate more housing and develop a comprehensive plan. In Victoria, city bylaws allow people to erect temporary shelter overnight in designated parks. This bylaw is colloquially known as the 7-to-7 bylaw, because it allows people to take shelter in parks from 7PM to 7AM absent any other practicable options. The bylaw was established in response to the BC Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling in Victoria (City) v. Adams which found that depriving people of the right to shelter in the absence of adequate housing options represented an infringement of their constitutional right to life, liberty and security of the person 73 protected under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Buhler 2009). 32 The case pivoted around the fact that, at the time, Victoria had a demonstrable scarcity of shelter beds compared to the number of people experiencing homelessness. This meant that sheltering outdoors was their only practicable option and that their safety and security, constitutionally-protected rights, required this recourse. The Adams case was won through the tireless advocacy of the unhoused community and their supporters. 33 The fight for housing justice and human dignity has a long history here and the Adams decision has proven influential in establishing precedence for Charter challenges to municipal bylaws that look to displace people experiencing homelessness from sheltering in public space. 34 32 The case revolved around the City’s attempt to displace about 70 people experiencing homelessness who had taken shelter in Cridge Park in 2005. The City sought an injunction against the campers arguing that campers were in violation of the city’s Parks Regulation Bylaw and Streets and Traffic Bylaw by ‘loitering’ and “taking up temporary abode overnight”. The BC Supreme Court and Court of Appeals found that City’s Parks Regulation Bylaw and Streets and Traffic Bylaw were overly broad and infringed upon residents’ Charter rights under Section 7, because they “applied in all places, and at all times” (Buhler 2009). 33 The case dragged on for almost four years, illustrating why Charter challenges to anti-homeless bylaws often fall short. The City could afford to keep the case in courts, while it is often much more difficult for people experiencing homelessness to maintain such a case with daily survival taking a priority. Yet, against all of this, the community who launched the Charter challenge were able to endure and garner a victory in the courts (with limiting conditions) (Flynn et al. 2022; Buhler 2009). 34 These included the Shantz decision from Abbotsford and the Adamson decision, which was once again a response to an injunction that the Province sought against an encampment in ‘Victoria’, Super InTent city, on the provincial grounds of the city’s courthouse. These decisions clarified, but did not resolve, provincial and municipal responsibilities under Section 7 of the Charter. The judge in Adamson found that “the balance of convenience is overwhelmingly in favour of the [encampment residents], who simply have nowhere to move to, if the injunction were to issue, other than shelters that are incapable of meeting the needs of some of them, or will result in their constant disruption and a perpetuation of a relentless series of daily moves to the streets, doorways, and parks of the City of Victoria.” Judge Hinckson “challeng[ed] the near-presumption that the government would suffer irreparable harm from allowing encampments to persist, as well as comprehensively exploring the benefits of encampments, including improved health, access to services, safety of persons and possessions, and sense of community, and finding the balance of convenience favouring the residents. The decision also noted that—as in Adams— the number of people experiencing homelessness continued to exceed shelter spaces, meaning that clearing the encampment at the courthouse would simply result in the same issues ‘migrat[ing] to other areas in the City of Victoria. A second decision by Hinkson in July 2016 granted an injunction against the same encampment, finding that the province had sufficiently increased the number of alternative housing spaces available and that conditions in the encampment had worsened in the intervening months, increasing the costs incurred by the province and the city and decreasing the benefits gained by the encampment residents” (Flynn et al 2022:66). The ability to shelter in place then still rested on a very limited understanding of what constitutes adequate or practicable shelter space, an issue around which subsequent challenges would revolve. 74 In 2009, the City responded to the Adams ruling by reorienting its strategies of governance to maintain control over public space and ensure access would continue to be restricted to those deemed ‘deserving’ of urban green space by implementing the 7-to-7 bylaw in its reformulated Parks Regulations. Recognizing their legal responsibility to allow sheltering overnight, the City moved quickly to limit access to parks during the day. In proposing the 7-to-7 bylaw, the city moved quickly to delimit the rights won under Adams and to regulate and manage access to public parks, restricting them to ‘publics’ and ‘uses’ deemed normative. Following the work of AJ Withers (2021) and Tania Murray Li (2007), I describe this response to a loss in the courts as a means of ‘managing failure’ and ‘reassembling governance’. While the Adams decision represented a win for the unhoused community and their advocates, the 7-to-7 bylaw also means that people must pack up all of their belongings every day as their presence within parks is effectively criminalized during daylight hours. 35 The constant churn or ‘hum’ of this daily displacement has been illustrated to have damaging effects on the overall health of the community (Chavez et al. 2024). During the pandemic, advocates and antipoverty organizations agitated for the expansion of 7-to-7 camping to allow for 24/7 sheltering in parks arguing that it was particularly unreasonable and injurious to people’s health to make them pack up their shelter and wander the city every day during a global pandemic. While the City was initially resistant, after the chaotic rollout and operation of the sanctioned encampment ran by the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness in Topaz Park, the City conceded and Council voted to temporarily amend its bylaws to allow for ‘deferred enforcement’ of 24/7 camping in designated parks. This 35 The criminalization of sheltering is deeply funded and over-resourced. Teams of police, bylaw officers and city workers often numbering dozens of city employees descend on parks every morning to displace and ticket as little as a single tent. The amount of money that the city spends on ‘enforcement’ of this singular bylaw is staggering. 75 amendment allowed people to leave their tents up during daylight hours according to a set of strict regulations and restrictions. 36 Sheltering would be restricted to designated parks and particular areas within those parks. This contributed to feelings of being kettled into smaller and highly policed spaces and away from the services that the community accessed daily. The City maintained restrictions on size, footprint, and the building materials of shelters deemed allowable. Shelters still could not be constructed in ways that might be considered permanent. 37 This is to say, that the parameters under which sheltering was permitted remained restrictive, contrary to alarmist NIMBY discourse that framed the encampments as anarchic spaces abandoned by municipal governance. 38 While the scope of the City’s amendment was severely limited and only offered ‘deferred enforcement’, the move met immediate and vociferous opposition from local residents and NIMBY organizations alongside the ambivalence or outright opposition of city bureaucrats and staff. Opening parks to temporary sheltering was not seen by the City (or anyone) as a solution, it was an ad hoc response to a humanitarian crisis in the absence of other available options. The enormity of the crisis was initiated by decades of systematized disinvestment into social services and housing, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) calls ‘organized abandonment’, and racialized policing, surveillance and state intervention into Indigenous, Black, POC and poor homes and families (Maynard 2017; Monaghan 2013; Browne 2015). Covid-19 did not create the affordable housing and tenancy crisis, it merely exacerbated the conditions under which people 36 I want to emphasize that this move was made in the face of City intransigence and compelled only by the advocacy and activism of the unhoused community and their supporters. Parks were to be pushed into service as temporary respite spaces in the absence of will to procure enough other adequate options. 37 By tacking structures or using materials like wood, for instance. 38 Apocryphal stories of syringes taped to handrails and benches circulated in social media like the Save Beacon Hill Facebook pages. These, of course, were never substantiated. 76 experiencing homelessness were already living (Maynard and Simpson 2022). Covid-19 was a match thrown into the dry timber of decades of governmental disregard and targeted policing and intervention. The crisis that would precipitate encampments was so severe because the city was already experiencing a tenancy crisis with rents skyrocketing due to decades of disinvestment into social housing and the dismantling of rent and development regulations; a toxic drug poisoning epidemic; and an over-burdened social services sector subject to the budget cuts and constriction of services that attend neoliberal governance. 39 More and more people were already facing housing precarity and absolute homelessness. By refusing to adequately address the humanitarian crises that were already occurring, the city was woefully ill-prepared to ameliorate the trebled crises of the pandemic alongside housing insecurity and toxic drug poisonings. Yet, in its response, beyond ill-preparedness and negligence, the City exacerbated the crisis by conducting street sweeps on Pandora at the beginning of the pandemic contrary to the advice of legal advocacy groups like Pivot Legal Society, the BC Civil Liberties Association, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, displacing people and leaving them with nowhere else to go. The decision to allow camping 24/7 (or more properly, ‘defer enforcement’) was made in the face of this clear humanitarian crisis, during a global pandemic and with restrictions on the extent of camping and erecting shelter that were intended to ensure that encampments were tightly controlled and inhibit the possibility of entrenchment, or for that matter, livability. It was an inadequate response to a lack of investment into housing and services for those experiencing housing precarity that predated the onset of the pandemic. For the City, the question was more of optics than humanitarianism. Having conducted street sweeps without adequate housing options, 39 Indeed, social services increasingly function as apparatuses of police and carceral power, employing surveillance regimes and utilizing forms of ‘soft incarceration’. Even when services are available, unhoused communities increasingly experience them as carceral, looking towards other means of meeting basic needs. 77 the City needed to provide something for the people displaced from Pandora and elsewhere or risk being viewed as cruel and unreasonable by the base of its ‘liberal’ constituency. Opening the parks to sheltering during an unprecedented global pandemic was the absolute barest gesture that the city could make. They did not immediately provide housing in the wake of an unprecedented crisis, but rather simply offered to temporarily suspend one aspect of their own policing of the community through ‘deferred enforcement’. Yet even this ad hoc and inadequate response was met with fierce, even rabid, opposition from businesses, NIMBY organizations and city residents, with groups like the Friends of Beacon Hill Park claiming that parks had been ‘stolen’ or ‘hijacked’ from city residents. While the City mandated clear and stringent regulations and continued to (pro)actively police the community at Meegan, housed residents framed the encampment which developed as anarchic, unsafe, and dangerous, a ‘theft’ of public green space. This was the beginning of the revanchist project to displace, evict and bar people from what was understood as public space, but also a colonial entitlement. Why such a fervent response to allowing for the bare necessities of life during the period where everyone seemed to be trumpeting that we were all in this together? What do these responses tell us about settler entitlement and how colonialism and neoliberal austerity regimes continue to function in tandem? To better understand this response, we need to explore the space/process of encampment and the foundations of homelessness in so-called ‘Canada’. I ask what we can learn about encampments and homelessness by applying a settler colonial analytic to them. 3.2 Addressing Homelessness’ Root Causes “It felt like I was throwing Band-Aids out at gunshot wounds from a moving car. You know, I didn't feel like I was making an impact.” -Niki Ottosen (personal communication). 78 The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness defines homelessness “as the inability of an individual, family, or community to access or acquire stable, safe, permanent, and appropriate housing” (Gaetz et al. 2012). 40 It is estimated that an average of 235,000 people in Canada experience one of the many types of homelessness each year. On any given night, around 25,000 people are experiencing homelessness in so-called ‘Canada’ (Dionne et al. 2023). Homelessness is a prevalent social and political issue that disproportionately affects marginalized communities: Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, the elderly and those with disabilities. As Nicholas Olson and Bernie Pauly (2023:124) argue “homelessness is a serious public health issue in which individuals experience poor health, lack of access to health services, and deficits in key social determinants of health such as housing, food, and income as well as high levels of stigma and discrimination and lack of self-determination.” Determinants for experiences of homelessness are structural, systemic and individual (Gaetz and Dej 2017). Primary structural factors include “lack of investments in affordable housing; erosion of social safety nets and inadequate incomes; and multiple forms of discrimination including racism, classism, and sex and gender discrimination” (Olson and Pauly 2023:125). Yet, despite these insights there is often a tendency to understand homelessness as inevitable, a ‘natural’ feature of social life. In a recent article in the Globe and Mail, Gary Mason (2024), describing the appalling conditions for the street community in Victoria, states matter-of-factly that “we, as a society, may need to adjust our expectations. We may need to accept that 40 This definition is understood to encompass those at risk of homelessness, people whose housing is precarious and does not meet public health and safety standards; those provisionally accommodated, whose accommodation is temporary and lack security of tenure, including temporary support housing, shelter hotels or facilities operated by mental health providers; those who are emergency sheltered, in overnight shelters and shelters for those fleeing domestic interpersonal violence, and those who are unsheltered or absolutely homeless, sheltering outdoors or in places not intended for human habitation (Gaetz et al. 2012). 79 homelessness is a crisis that is here to stay.” A social and political crisis is naturalized as somehow, an expected and inevitable feature of everyday life. Worse still, there is also a tendency to place the onus or responsibility for homelessness within the supposed failings, shortcomings or deficiencies of those who experience homelessness. Neil Smith (1996:220) had already identified this tendency in the 1990s, “discussion of causes increasingly reverted to aspects of individual behavior rather than societal shifts, and the practice of blaming the victims quietly gained credence in erstwhile liberal circles”. Beyond being framed as the authors of their own forms of injury and depredation, unhoused communities increasingly became scapegoated for a whole range of social problems, “the dominant discourse on homelessness has moved decisively away from the sympathetic albeit often patronizing stance of the late 1980s to a more brazen indictment of homeless people not just for their own predicament but for larger social ills” (Smith 1996: 222). The intensification of structural homelessness emerged alongside neoliberalization, the commodification of housing and the evisceration of social welfare and social housing (Suttor 2016). 41 As Flynn et al. (2022:11) argue “the rise in rates of homelessness in Canada since the 1980s is generally attributed to three broad trends: nationwide disinvestment in affordable housing, shifts in employment away from permanent positions and towards precarious labour, and the broad defunding of social welfare programs.” 42 The withdrawal of social housing investment and neoliberal cuts to social assistance inaugurated what has come to be understood as the structural problem of ‘homelessness’ (Gaetz and Dej 2017; Suttor 2016, Walks and 41 This, of course, does not mean that displacement and precarity are novel for some communities, like Indigenous peoples. I return to the differentiated effects of urban and settler colonial development and the longue duree of tenure and housing precarity below. 42 Federal spending on the construction of new social housing ended in 1993 (Suttor 2016). 80 Clifford 2015). 43 The response to the emerging crisis was to invest in emergency services, but also to commit deeply to funding further policing. These efforts have not addressed the root causes of inequality and precarity and have served to exacerbate the issue through criminalization. By the 2000s, federal, provincial and municipal governments were investing less in affordable housing and social welfare that could ameliorate the effects of impoverishment and more in policing and crisis responses that attempted to punish or rehabilitate poverty and precarity, a task to which these institutions were distinctly unsuited. The result of decades of these policies are clear unmitigated failures to address precarity as the number of people experiencing homelessness has skyrocketed. Policing homelessness and criminalizing unhoused communities has not solved the ‘problem’, it has exacerbated poverty and rendered peoples lives unimaginably worse. Precaritization continues today with the financialization and commodification of housing which has engendered a full-blown tenancy crisis in cities across so-called ‘Canada’. Housing is increasing financialized, produced as an asset, commodity and investment rather than a social good (Stein 2019; Crosby 2023). Martine August (2022:4) argues that “the financialization of housing refers to the growing dominance of financial actors in the housing sector, which is transforming the primary function of housing from a place to live into a financial asset and tool for investor profits. The financialization of housing is recognized as a trend that is undermining the realization of the right to adequate housing.” Financialization is not a ‘natural’ occurrence, “the state has played a fundamental role in catalyzing financialization, through policies to 43 Advocates note that until the 1980s, the term ‘homeless’ was not even used. Instead, the language of ‘transient’ was used to described experiences of precarity which, while similar, were in many ways qualitatively different because of the resources to social housing and welfare that still existed. Homelessness was not understood as a permanent condition. 81 deregulate finance, increase the power of central banks, and expand the role of credit and of the financial sector” (August 2022:4). In Victoria, as Nicole Chaland (2021:5) argues, “homelessness exists against the backdrop of the affordable housing crisis. Shortages of affordable housing for the lowest income group cause new inflows to homelessness and prevent exits from homelessness.” This is another way in which experiences of homelessness index a structural condition of the contemporary social, political and economic organization of settler states. The clawing back of social safety nets and the dismantling of social housing means that some people will experience homelessness, and those people are the ones who are most marginalized, people without access to social resources and economic capital. As Nicole Chaland (2021:76) illustrates, “as a result of federal government disinvestments in social, affordable housing, Canada now has one of the most privatized housing markets of the 38 members countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Only 3.5 per cent of Canada’s housing stock is protected from market influences.” Poor communities are hit hardest privatization, financialization and the lack of core housing supply. Carolyn Whitzman (2023:5) projects that by 2031, there will be “shortage of 4.3 million homes affordable to very low- and low-income households,” across so-called ‘Canada’ and an overall shortage of 9.6 million homes across all incomes. The social housing that does exist often does not meet the Canadian definition of affordability or adequacy, more properly representing housing protected in limited ways from the full brunt of market forces, but still inaccessible to the poorest communities in direst need (Houle 2024; Walks and Clifford 2015). Canada’s Federal Housing Advocate, Marie-Josee Houle (2024:15), conveys that “in some locations, there is now a ten-year waitlist for rent-geared-to-income housing.” In the meantime, people suffer and struggle to get by, often entering into homelessness. 82 All of this is occurring, even though the federal government has affirmed the fundamental right to housing with the introduction of the landmark National Housing Strategy Act, “the NHS Act requires Canada to undertake actions that progressively realize the right to housing.” (Chaland 2021:75). In the September 2020 Throne Speech, “the federal government committed to ending chronic homelessness in 10 years. And the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation recently committed to ensuring that everyone has a secure, affordable place to call home by 2030” (Chaland 2021:75). Yet, Whitzman (2023) illustrates that Canada is far short of its goals of ensuring that everyone has an adequate and affordable home by 2030. Housing precarity is getting decidedly worse and the affordability crisis intensifying, despite the rhetoric of a right to housing, and some material investment into housing. These policies do not address the financialization and commodification of housing for profit that drives our current affordability and tenancy crisis. The affordability crisis is not a natural or inevitable outcome or even the result of a lack of available housing, it is the effect of the commodification of housing, once a social good, and now a primary market mechanism (Stein 2019). As August (2023:4) argues, “deregulation of rent control and the introduction of “vacancy decontrol” created a lucrative incentive for landlords to acquire buildings, remove tenants paying low rates, and increase rents to “market” levels. Legislation allowing for rent increases above the cost of living has also been used as a revenue-generating tool by financial firms.” Financialization is a product of active and organized abandonment of the poorest communities to market forces (Gilmore 2007). Victoria has been deeply impacted by these processes. Frontline workers argue that the housing crisis has gotten progressively more dire, “there was a street population in the 1990’s, but there wasn’t the massive homeless population we now see. The last five years is the worst I’ve ever seen. Five years ago, it really started to get unaffordable. There always was a problem, 83 but it really accelerated in the last five years” (Chaland 2021:43). In Victoria, affordable options like rooming houses and low-cost market options disappeared in the 1990s increasing the duration and intensity of experiences of homelessness. One service provider put it succinctly, “rather than planning around the needs of the people of our city, we gambled on development” (Chaland 2021:43). As is so often the case, it has been the most marginalized who have lost on this gambit. The City of Victoria is losing affordable housing options faster than it creates them (Chaland 2021). Without adequate rent controls, it is impossible for the city to produce affordable options at the same pace and rate as current market units become prohibitively expensive. From 2011 to 2016, the number of units in the CRD renting for under $750 a month declined by 12,880 units (Chaland 2021:83). Less than a decade later, finding a rental unit for $750 seems impossible. The median available rent for a one-bedroom in ‘Victoria’ as of April 1st, 2024, was $2,149. This figure calculates 93 units in the rental market in March 2024. Median available rent refers to the mean of rents of apartments that are currently available and advertised for rent. Thus, median rent broadly indicates the general cost to enter the current rental market. Sustainable housing is considered 30% of one’s income. This means that renters would need a monthly income of $7,300 or $87,760 per year to be able to afford the average asking price of rental units in the city today. Instead, people make do spending unsustainable amounts on rent and attempting to scrimp on other basic necessities like food. These rental prices are particularly hard on the working poor and people with disabilities. Deregulation has meant that many households occupy very tenuous positions as they “could face homelessness with any event – such as a family break-up or eviction caused by redevelopment – that results in a new attempt to secure a market rental apartment at today’s rents” (Chaland 2021:82). With these extreme numbers, we can see how easily one could fall into homelessness. 84 Less than living paycheck-to-paycheck, tenants in Victoria are often renting at an unsustainable and precarious deficit, where even minor unexpected costs could result in homelessness. This exacerbates the potential for landlords to exploit tenants, as many tenants fundamentally cannot afford to re-renter the housing market at its current prices. People moving from tenancies in which rental increases are controlled could see their rent as much as double. Retaining cheaper units then becomes a fundamental necessity for survival, granting landlords excessive amounts of power over tenants. Eviction then is catastrophic for families and renters because it compels them into a housing market where it will be almost impossible to secure adequate shelter (Crosby 2023). BC lacks comprehensive protections for tenants and has seen the highest rate of ‘no-fault’ evictions in Canada, through demolition, renoviction or statutes which allow family members to move into units and evict the original tenants. Occurring more than twice as often as the rest of Canada, 85% of the evictions in British Columbia are considered ‘no-fault’ (Xuereb and Jones 2023). Extremely favourable market conditions for landlords incentivize them to evict tenants because of the lack of rent controls in place between tenancies. BC regulates how much rents can be raised for individual tenants at 3.5% per year, but it does not place any controls on rental increase between tenancies, meaning that landlords can see astronomical increase of rents if they are able to transfer between tenants. In Victoria, where rentals prices have almost doubled over the last decade, this means that landlords are intensely incentivized to evict tenants to maximize profit. Following eviction, renters find themselves in an extremely hostile housing market leading to increased forms of housing precarity and often homelessness, for those without adequate social supports. 44 44 Evictions are also contoured by race. Xuereb and Jones (2023:21) illustrate that Indigenous renters are almost twice (1.7x) as likely to experience eviction than non-Indigenous peoples after controlling for other factors, “high 85 Contrary to reductive and facile supply side arguments, building more housing does not necessarily mean that housing becomes cheaper or more affordable. Indeed, the crisis is not one of ‘housing’ at all, but rather of tenancy and affordability (Roy et al. 2019). We cannot build our way out of an affordability crisis. As fast as new units are built, rents climb on existing units. There is no way that the city could develop enough units to make up for ones that have been priced out of affordability without adequate rent controls. These processes benefit developers and landlords and do not keep up with the pace of demand. The problem is the speculation in housing and financialization of the market (August 2022; Aalbers 2016). It is the commodification of housing which fuels the affordability crisis, not a lack of available options. Without adequate rent controls and legislation, landlords and developers are allowed to set astronomical prices for basic necessities of life like shelter and housing. Governments, however, have been unwilling to impose such restrictions on the operations of real estate, developers and landlords (Stein 2019). Rather than installing rent controls, the government has invested in producing rent supplement programs and subsidizing housing development (Crosby 2023). This has been an absolute windfall for real estate developers and landlords while marking very little change for renters. Here, we can see that homelessness is not, as government, developers and local actors often argue, simply a housing supply issue. This framing is known as a supply-side argument within tenancy justice, the idea that if we simply subsidize developers, that is, if we make building and renting homes more profitable, homelessness will be solved. This orientation has led to incentives for developers, lining the pockets of corporate interests, and rent subsidies that eviction rates for Indigenous renters may be caused by a wide range of factors but there is no doubt that discrimination against Indigenous people exists in the rental market in Canada.” 86 go directly to landlords. Governments at all levels have invested heavily in this approach, yet rents continue to rise, and people continue to experience homelessness. All of these multiple factors would lead Nicole Chaland (2021:87) to conclude in her report on the state of housing, service provision and homelessness in Victoria, that “by ignoring the affordable housing crisis, especially as it pertains to the lowest income group, we have – to some degree – institutionalized homelessness.” 3.3 Indigenous Experiences of Housing Precarity and Homelessness “The injustice that we see from colonialism just impacting somebody every single day, haunting them every single day, you know, trying just to survive.” “I have a responsibility just to support my other relatives who are struggling because of the same colonial violence that we've all faced in North America, really because of colonialism.” -Lacey Jones (personal communication). It is also important to acknowledge that homelessness is not a homogenous experience and is deeply contoured by historic and ongoing experiences of colonization that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples. For Indigenous peoples, experiences of displacement and precarity precede the state’s turn towards neoliberalism complicating accepted narratives about the roots of homelessness. Indigenous peoples’ experiences of homelessness are always shaped by settler colonial relations. Jesse Thistle (2017:6) describes Indigenous homelessness as “a human condition that describes First Nations, Métis and Inuit individuals, families or communities lacking stable, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect, means or ability to acquire such housing.” Thistle (2017:14) links these experiences directly to processes of ongoing colonization, “Indigenous homelessness in Canada today can be explained, and solutions to it envisioned, only if we pay attention to the broader legacy of marginalization and displacement created by settler colonialism.” Indigenous exposure to 87 housing precarity is long-standing and deep-seeded. As Mikaela Gabriel (2023:88) argues, “to say that the Indigenous housing crisis is a modern problem is incorrect; Indigenous Peoples have had a housing crisis for 530 years. Displacement and forced relocation, the construction of reserve systems, and genocide are but a brief list of strategies that have displaced Indigenous Peoples from traditional territories”. Thistle (2017:8) argues that Indigenous homelessness is “best understood as the outcome of historically constructed and ongoing settler colonization and racism that have displaced and dispossessed First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples from their traditional governance systems and laws, territories, histories, worldviews, ancestors and stories.” Indigenous homelessness “is produced by the multisystemic impact of history, societal structures, systemic inequities, and enduring barriers to Indigenous success” (Gabriel 2023:90). For Thistle and Gabriel, experiences of homelessness are about distinctly more than simply the lack of shelter or housing but are about the wide ranges of colonial systems that have worked to dispossess Indigenous peoples at a range of differing scales. 45 A number of intersecting factors contribute to ongoing experiences of Indigenous homelessness. First, available and adequate housing is severely restricted for Indigenous peoples both on and off-reserve (Mannoe 2022). Canada has chronically underfunded Indigenous infrastructure and housing. These policies have led to systemic experiences of housing precarity and insecurity for Indigenous peoples. Even the former Minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, Marc Miller, had to concede that “Indigenous People face the worst housing outcomes in the country” (Canada 2022:18). The report, The Effects of Housing Shortages on Indigenous Peoples in Canada, produced by the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs (2022:1), 45 Thistle (2017) lists 12 distinctive dimensions of Indigenous homelessness that distinguish the experiences of Indigenous peoples. 88 found that “colonial policies have affected housing at its core, including by making it less accessible, less affordable and in worse condition.” The Standing Committee (Canada 2022:9) found that “Canada faces a housing crisis which is acute in many Indigenous communities. First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and rural and remote communities lack sufficient housing stock. This lack of housing has been experienced by generations of Indigenous families for many decades.” As Andersen et al. (2018) illustrate, inadequate and insufficient housing stock is known to affect known to affect health, education, employment and child development outcomes for Indigenous people globally. The Standing Committee (Canada 2022:9) reports that “overcrowding leads to poor physical and mental health and the spread of infectious diseases (as the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted). Many existing units require retrofit and renovation. Many contain health hazards such as mould, including black mould. The lack of availability of housing has led Inuit, First Nations and Métis to move to urban areas, where Indigenous People also experience a lack of safe, affordable and culturally appropriate housing.” Lack of adequate housing has severe health impacts contributing to the increased prevalence of respiratory ailments and communicable diseases including tuberculosis, asthma and COVID-19 (Andersen et al. 2018). 46 Insufficient housing stock also contributes to experiences of gender-based violence, hinders socioeconomic development, can lead to displacement, disconnection and cultural loss and increases fire risk and hazards (Canada 2022). According to census figures, in 2021, 17.1% of the Indigenous population, or 309,345 Indigenous people lived in overcrowded housing, almost double the non-Indigenous population. Likewise, 16.4% of the Indigenous population, or 295,745 people, lived in a dwelling in need of 46 As Stan Delorme submitted to the Committee (Canada 2022:19), “the effects of the housing shortage include illness due to mould... Generally, families are deprived of rest and sleep, and there is a loss of education due to the high cost of utilities, which has increased dramatically in the last number of months. Sometimes families have to choose between heating and lighting their homes and buying food.” 89 major repairs and considered substandard, nearly 3 times the national average (Statistics Canada 2022). Reports from 2023 claimed that “the estimated cost to bring housing and infrastructure on reserves up to general Canadian standards is more than $342 billion, with housing alone accounting for $135 billion of that” (Al Mallees and Passafiume 2023). This is the extent to which Indigenous housing has been under-resourced at the expense of Indigenous communities’ health. Poor or limited housing stock is a major contributing factor in experiences of homelessness. As the Federal Housing Advocate, Marie-Josee Houle argues “high rates of Indigenous homelessness are linked, in large part, to inter-generational harms caused by Canada’s colonial laws and policies and the longstanding lack of equitable federal investment in housing and related infrastructure in First Nations, Inuit, Métis communities.” Yet, this harm is not simply a legacy but is actively ongoing. This has led advocates like the Pivot Legal Society (2023) to argue that “solving the “housing crisis” and creating housing justice is fundamentally tied to decolonization, to respect for Indigenous sovereignty and for systems of care, and collective stewardship.” Secondly, housing precarity is exacerbated by systemic barriers in employment, health education and the housing market. Indigenous peoples face systemic racism in the rental housing market “which is becoming exceedingly unaffordable, is largely hostile to urban Indigenous renters who face high rates of overt and covert anti-Indigenous racism from landlords as well as systemic barriers to securing housing due to risk-based assessments that discriminate against low-income renters” (Canada 2022:23). Systemic and institutionalized racism in health, education, employment and housing all affect Indigenous people’s ability to secure and maintain housing (Andersen et al. 2018). Finally, the effects of colonization, including enforced immiseration, displacement and land degradation, have had intergenerational effects on families 90 and communities leading to dispossession and impoverishment that can make it difficult to simply afford housing in overheated markets. As the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres claimed in their submission to the Standing Committee (Canada 2022:22) “the annexation of lands long inhabited by Indigenous communities, forced segregation, and settlement are the foundation of the history of this country.” The ongoing effects of dispossession, land seizure, occupation, displacement and genocide have severely impacted Indigenous peoples’ ability to ‘compete’ in the housing market in cities across so-called ‘Canada’. As Andersen et al. (2018) argue, housing itself has been a mechanism used to created and maintain racial disparities. Disparate access to housing then is a ‘racial project’, the outcome of colonial policies, but also a means of giving race and Indigeneity meaning, of sustaining differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (Omi and Winant 2015). Racialized precarity and Indigenous homelessness are structural conditions, effects of the simultaneous processes of invasion and abandonment, the violent interruption of Indigenous economies and lifeways and the organized abandonment and chronic under-provisioning of Indigenous communities. Put simply, for these communities, precarity and attendant experiences of homelessness are an effect of ongoing colonization. These factors must be addressed simultaneously. Homelessness is not a homogenous experience but is variegated according to class, race, gender, ability and Indigeneity. Yet, the way in which settler colonialism intersects with precarity and homelessness is not always fully unpacked in either scholarship or antipoverty organizing. 3.4 On Encampments as Features of Everyday Life “The building of community is something that is feared by enforcement and the city and maybe housed people, even, like, there's always this fear of entrenchment of people that are in encampments or just on the street.” 91 -Nic Olson (personal communication). The increased prevalence of homelessness has led to the proliferation of encampments across Turtle Island as spaces in which the most marginalized attempt to create community and provide basic necessities for each other. Encampments are becoming increasingly prosaic and everyday, if vilified, spaces. As UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Adequate Housing, Leilani Farha and Kaitlin Schwan (2020:5), state, “the term ‘encampment’ is used to refer to any area wherein an individual or a group of people live in homelessness together, often in tents or other temporary structures (also referred to as homeless camps, tent cities, homeless settlements or informal settlements)”. Federal Housing Advocate, Marie-Josee Houle (2024:6), illustrates that “there has been a significant rise in encampments in the last five years, and particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Encampments are now being reported across the country – in both large and small municipalities, as well as in more rural areas.” Encampments have become increasingly hypervisible, policed and surveilled, identified as a ‘problem’ of urban governance and placed firmly within media spotlights as a social ill. Within policy and housing justice frameworks they have been described as a symptom of Canada’s ongoing tenancy crisis, “the lack of affordable housing, the opioid crisis, racial injustice, police misconduct, and ongoing colonization all converge at these sites” (Flynn et al. 2022:10). All of these factors, alongside systemic racism in the housing market and a broken emergency shelter system have increasingly driven people into informality and to find shelter where they can (Olson and Pauly 2023; Flynn et al. 2022). The prevalence of encampments has led the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate to declare that “the rise of encampments is a truly national crisis” (Houle 2024:2). People have increasingly turned to encampments to find and foster community, to seek safety and to simply survive. 92 COVID-19 exacerbated the housing, opioid and affordability crises that communities were already experiencing leading to more numerous, densely populated and visible encampments (Olson and Pauly 2023). Flynn et al. (2022:6) demonstrate that “during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of shelter spaces decreased, indoor congregate settings became increasingly unsafe, and individuals lost their livelihoods. This has led to a rise in homeless encampments across the country… many individuals had little choice but to turn to living in tents or informal shelters to survive the confluence of historic crises in health, housing, climate change, colonial violence, and unemployment.”. Encampments then are a response to systemic precarity and, I argue, ongoing settler colonial governance. Under neoliberal regimes of austerity governance, precaritization and racial capitalism, encampments, such as the one established at Meegan, increasingly characterize urban life and the organization of urban public space. Encampments are no longer understood as exceptional, but rather are seen as a feature of everyday life in the settler colonial city. 47 However, the space of the encampment is seen to be both prosaic and to disorder public space often drawing the ire of both settler citizens and municipalities, that is, they are both considered increasingly ‘normal’ and deeply unsettling. This leads to the encampment and homelessness generally, to be understood as a vexed and prevalent ‘urban problem’ needing to be solved by municipal, provincial and federal authority and governance. 48 However, municipalities across so-called ‘Canada’ have struggled with how to address or manage the ‘problem’ of encampments. 49 Rather than addressing the underlying social 47 Encampments provide a challenging proposition for housing justice advocates. On the one hand, advocates argue that everyone deserves a home and that encampments shouldn’t exist at all. Yet, many advocates concede that encampments can provide forms of harm reduction for people exposed to precarious conditions. 48 This is not to say that encampments are not also seen as ‘problems’ within peri-urban or rural space, but rather that within most urban spaces municipal authority is expected to address the space of the encampment. 49 Or at the very least, encampments’ visibility within public space. 93 conditions which produce encampments, municipal governance has typically relied on strategies to contain, police or displace encampments and their residents, rendering encampments themselves the ‘problem’ in need of intervention (Thompson 2024). Flynn et al. (2022:13) argue that “government policy responses tend to fall within the following four strategies: abandonment, emergency relief, heightened law enforcement, and housing-led responses. Rarely do these policies produce permanent housing outcomes for people experiencing homelessness and living in encampments, as even the housing-led responses tend to focus on temporary measures like hotels or shelters.” The structural conditions that underwrite encampments are erased in strategies that seek to rehabilitate individual subjects experiencing homelessness or simply disperse encampments. Most people fall into homelessness because they cannot afford a home. No amount of therapy, training or support can change the fact that rent is too high, people earning too little. These approaches do not address the systemic and structural barriers that people face in securing housing. As Farha and Schwan (2020:5) found, “while encampments are often framed and discussed as matters of individual poverty or deficiency, they are the result of structural conditions and the failure of governments to implement the right to housing or to engage with reconciliation and decolonization materially and in good faith.” Encampments represent a challenging site of municipal governance because of the multiple jurisdictions that they occupy. 50 As Flynn et al. (2022:31) “several levels of government are involved in these different situations, raising questions about who is ultimately responsible for people’s and communities’ well-being, social inclusion, and the protection of their human rights.” Encampments are typically understood as the responsibility of the individual 50 For instance, “the two issues of affordable, accessible housing and mental health and addictions support are directly linked in practice, but fall under the purview of different, unconnected federal, provincial and territorial programs and agencies, without any established structure of coordination” (Houle 2024:18). 94 municipalities in which they occur. 51 Yet, municipalities do not have the resources to address the root causes of precarity and homelessness, and as illustrated, have invested deeply in the financialization of housing, drawing closer and closer to the interests of developers (Stein 2019; Madden and Marcuse 2016). Flynn et al. (2022:50) found that “while municipalities largely have primary jurisdiction over encampments, they often lack the resources and competencies to adequately address the underlying structural causes driving homelessness and encampments (e.g., unaffordability, dwindling housing supply for low- and even middle-income households, and higher demand). For cities to adequately address and eliminate homelessness through prevention measures and by transitioning those living in encampments into permanent, adequate housing, consistent with their human rights obligations, they will undoubtedly need greater cooperation with and support from other levels of government.” This has led municipalities to often complain that the responsibility for homelessness has been ‘downloaded’ onto them (Cook and Crowe 2022). Meaningfully addressing the root causes of precarity would require collaboration between municipal, provincial and federal governments. Yet, these governments have shown little interest in this. 52 All levels of government have proved both unwilling and incapable of actualizing a right to housing instead fostering close relationships with developers, resourcing policing and punitive approaches, criminalizing homelessness and restricting access to public space. Indeed, municipalities have often used the ambiguity around jurisdiction and responsibility to justify their inaction and apathy, arguing that it is BC Housing’s responsibility to fund supportive housing in the city. Meanwhile, hundreds of people are left outside with fewer 51 This is why we see such a wide range of responses to these practices of assembly across ‘Canada’. 52This is, however, changing. Recently, the City of Victoria and the Province signed an MOU to guarantee funding and resources for supportive housing. This MOU came with the caveat that the City must continue to invest in policing and bylaw to ensure that encampments do not become entrenched in urban space. In short, the effect that increased collaboration will have is still uncertain. 95 and fewer places to shelter as the city redzones sheltering in parks and invests more heavily in police and bylaw budgets. While the pandemic initiated a little more collaboration between the municipal, provincial and federal governments, little movement to address structural issues has been evident. Even with more robust resources provided by the Province, the response has been the same, incentivize and subsidize development and invest in policing, rather than introducing rent control, providing a safe supply or developing community and peer-led solutions). More money, the same approach. 3.5 Racial Space: Representing the Encampment “Negative perceptions of encampment residents as authors of their own misfortune, or as threats to community safety, impact the political will of governments to recognize and act on their human rights responsibilities.” -Federal Housing Advocate Marie-Josee Houle (2024:8). FIGURE 3 ENCAMPMENT ON STORE STREET. IMAGE PN 1433; COURTESY OF ROYAL B.C. MUSEUM, B.C. ARCHIVES. 96 Representations of encampments continue to be subtended by colonial and racial logics. Encampments have been subject to consistently pejorative representations that link them to ideas around criminality, disorder and racial alterity. These means of narrating the encampment have severe material consequences for people experiencing homelessness. Flynn et al. (2022:22) argue that while encampments are always subject to legal powers such as bylaws and ordinances, they are also subject to forms of discursive ‘soft power’, “persuasive strategies often employed by politicians, such as characterizing encampments as criminogenic.” These discourses work to “negatively characterize encampment residents and mischaracterize the realities experienced by people living in encampments. In doing so, they shift attention away from their human rights obligations and individualize the systemic failure to realize the right to housing” (Flynn et al. 2022:50). How encampments are represented has material consequences for how they are governed. These narratives produce stigma around encampment residents that are both psychologically and materially harmful. As Marie-Josee Houle (2024:18) argues, “the stigmatization of encampments, and homelessness more generally, fuels enforcement-based responses that do nothing to alleviate the crisis, and only add to the marginalization and precariousness of life for unhoused people. This stigmatization also masks the systemic causes of the crises and obscures the accomplishments made by encampment residents in asserting their rights and meeting their own basic needs.” Encampments have often been represented as sites of threatening alterity often mobilizing racial logics to establish these spaces as unsettling or disorderly. This framing has deep historical roots and relies on representations of racial spaces like the ‘slum’, the ‘ghetto’ or 97 the reserve. 53 Historically, spaces like the urban Indigenous ‘camp’ or racialized spaces like Victoria’s Chinatown, were seen as sites of immorality, criminality, danger and disorder (Razack 2000; Stark 2016; Nelson 2008; Anderson 1991). 54 These spaces were seen to unsettle the rationality by which the modern settler colonial city was supposedly constituted and governed (Edmonds 2010a). 55 Representations of the encampment as disordering, anarchic and usurping public space align with the history of Victoria’s early urban period when settlers complained about Indigenous camps within the city limits (Cook et al. 2021). 56 There is a direct link between these constructions of settler colonial urban space and anxieties around encampments today. In his exploration of the historical development of homelessness and ‘skid rows’ in the United States, Don Mitchell (2020) reminds us that encampments and poor neighborhoods used to be described as ‘hobos’ jungles’. There is a racial logic at work here, an attempt to associate impoverished neighborhoods with colonialism’s paradigmatic space of barbarism, the racially-coded wilderness. This clearly racializing representation of space is intended to associate poor or unhoused communities with a discourse of ‘savagery’. It invokes the archetypal figure of the Native as emblematic of civilization’s racial Other, the ‘savage’. The encampment, the ‘ghetto’ is akin to racialized spaces, coded through expectations of ‘savagery’ or ‘barbarism’. Representations of the homeless encampment then rely on racist tropes about savagery and barbarism that were developed against Indigenous peoples. These representations are already 53 The encampment also has parallels with space of exceptions, like the reserve, the concentration camp or the plantation, that is, with spaces associated with racialized abjection, misery and suffering (see Weheliye 2014; Razack 2000; McKittrick 2013). 54 Given that the residents of encampments are disproportionately Indigenous peoples, the throughline in representations and governance of these spaces is actually quite clear and explicit. Opponents of sheltering in Meegan often explicitly made these connections. I explore these representations in later chapters. 55 As Don Mitchell (2020) argues ‘power abhors a tent’. Tents seem to interrupt the rigid boundaries of private property and the ways in which they attempt to order the world. 56 These camps could invoke moral panics within the settler populace that I argue are echoed in contemporary responses to homeless encampments in the city. 98 ‘overdetermined’ by a racial and colonial logic (Silva 2007). It is no surprise then when municipal governments and ‘concerned citizens’ make use of distinctly colonial strategies to police this community coded through a racial logic. Dehumanizing representations of unhoused communities invoke the specter of Indigeneity, with colonialism’s paradigmatic form of racial and civilizational alterity, the ‘Native’, as a shorthand to denigrate the community and to rationalize punitive and disciplinary measures. This works because these measures continue to function as the condition of possibility for settler colonial society, that is, dispossession of Indigenous peoples is the foundation on which settler colonial society is built. Rehearsal of this dispossession against unhoused communities comes to be seen as a moral imperative and a requirement to maintain settler colonial order. 57 Indigenous peoples and unhoused communities are tied together through this dehumanizing representation and distinctly colonial form of governance. This specter of Indigeneity, of racial alterity, what Jodi Byrd calls the unsettling ‘figure of the Native’, can be invoked and weaponized by settler colonial society, because the association of Indigeneity with ‘threat’ and the need to be spatially managed, is taken-for-granted and common sense with settler colonial logics. To invoke the figure of the Native is already assumed to simultaneously call out for the requirement to police and subjugate this figure and the subjects associated with its paradigmatic ‘Otherness’. The association between the Indigenous ‘camp’ and the homeless encampment naturalizes punitive and disciplinary governance, because this subjugation is 57 Again, I want to reiterate that it is also a part of the unfinished project of subjugating and dispossessing Indigenous peoples. The disciplining of unhoused communities is not only akin to that of Indigenous peoples, in many cases it is the continuation against the very same families that historic processes had targeted. Thus, this disciplining is the extension of the settler colonia project, not merely a similar process. 99 already so foundational to the production of settler space and structural relations between Indigenous peoples and colonial authority. This is another way in which, as Jodi Byrd (2011) argues, Indigeneity functions as a site of transit, a space to be traversed, allowing settler authority to reassemble itself, and rehearse and re-deploy colonial logics to affect contemporary projects of gentrification and revanchism which further extend colonial projects by invoking the threatening figure of the ‘Native’ and the unsettling potential of ‘Native space’ within the colonial city. 58 The meaning of Indigeneity as colonialism’s paradigmatic colonial racial Other and the dehumanization and rendering criminal or ‘savage’ of Indigenous peoples is what provides the condition of possibility to weaponize these same discourses against unhoused peoples (Stark 2016; Byrd 2011). This functions efficiently because the figure of the Native is already coded as threatening to settler order (Barker 2021). Vagrancy and criminality are attached to the unhoused subject through a shorthand association with Indigeneity, a figure already produced as criminal, threatening and ‘savage’ through settler colonial discourse (Stark 2016; Monchalin 2016). Meanwhile, the space of the encampment is coded as the extension of the wilderness or the Indigenous encampment, anarchic, unruly, and barbaric, that is, requiring the civilizing mission of settler colonial urbanism. Unhoused people become entrapped within the racist logic, the pre-existing discourse of savagery, in the same way in which the figure of the vagrant or the criminal was mobilized against Indigenous peoples (Stark 2016). 58 I am using the concept of transit slightly differently than how Byrd develops it, to illustrate how Indigeneity as a space to be traversed facilitates forms of disciplinary and punitive governance against unhoused communities policed and abandoned by the state, but with a different relationship to the settler state than Indigenous peoples. Byrd argues that continental theory transits through the figure of the Native to disavow or rationalize colonialism’s ongoing hegemony. Here, I am arguing that an association with Indigeneity facilitates violence against other (but sometimes, also the same) communities. 100 3.6 Encampment as Alimentary Infrastructure “We were doing the thing. We were providing a warming tent and donation tent and providing people survival supplies and coffee and care and community and connection and safety and we were providing people with showers and hygiene because the city wasn't doing anything about it and the city literally came in and tore it all down and impounded it.”’ “If the city just fucking left us alone and let us provide care for people, it would have been such a different situation.” -Shae Perkins (personal communication). What can we glean from this exploration of municipal governance and the encampment as contested space? How might this inquiry orient us to different understandings of the space and practice of encampment? In response to these dehumanizing representations, I frame the encampment as a particular kind of political community that arises in response to conditions of precarity that emerge out of a particular set of racialized and settler colonial logics and practices of abandonment, indifference and intrusion (McCallum and Perry 2018). I ask what we can learn about settler colonialism and racial capitalism from encampments as spaces produced by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) describes as ‘organized abandonment’, racialized policing and criminalization, ongoing and active intervention into Indigenous, Black and Asian homes, and a tenancy crisis initiated by the commodification and financialization of housing. Yet rather than frame encampments as strictly spaces of degradation and despair, I also examine how encampments represent spaces of creative, resilient and lively community governance, how they can be spaces in which unhoused community members also foster connection, tend relations and experience the joy of community under conditions of extreme privation and duress, and how we might connect this struggle to broader projects of decolonization (Dozier 2022). I refuse to see the encampment solely as a space of degradation or abjection; a racial wasteland. Instead, I frame encampments as lively and active political communities fostered under condition of extreme duress. This position is shaped by the relations I formed through 101 community organizing and participating in the community that developed at Meegan. No one should be forced to live outside because of the structures of organized abandonment. Everyone has the right to a home, whatever form that home may take. In the absence of critical infrastructures which some subjects may take for granted, communities have created alternatives, other imaginings of community and home, created under conditions of extreme privation and duress, but all the more remarkable for that. Encampments are community infrastructure that coalesce in both the absence of the settler state’s provisioning of housing, and its active and ongoing interventions into Indigenous, Asian, Black and poor communities. In the structural violence created by colonial governance, unhoused communities have built social and material infrastructures to take care of one another, and they often do this better, with more care and fewer resources than the authorities of settler governance. Encampments, while indexing structural abandonment, are also a marker of the resilience, creativity and knowledge of those experiencing homelessness but who still work to foster community and struggle against structures of disregard and active intrusion in their lives. Some of the most beautiful expressions of community that I have witnessed have come from within encampments where people are making do under conditions of extreme duress, yet still have the capacity to care, and to care deeply about one another. I thus frame encampments as creative responses to the catastrophic effects of racial capitalism, colonial and neoliberal governance that produce homelessness in the first place. While encampments may be effects of the violence of colonial governance they are also spaces of community where people struggle to take care of one another as best they can and share what resources are available to them. 59 What do we learn when we 59 Once again, inspired by the work of Hunt and Holmes (2015), I bring a both/and framework to my understanding of encampments as both the product of structural violence and a resilient response to that violence. 102 take seriously encampment as a set of political relations, an act of community-building that involves nuanced and robust community governance? This means attending to encampment as a political process, rather than solely as a symptom of urban ‘blight’. This reframing emphasizes the agency and capacity of people experiencing homelessness, as active political subjects rather than acted-upon or overdetermined objects of political governance (Silva 2007). Encampments then are both a material space and a political process; a mode of assembly fostered by marginalized subjects that is necessarily and deeply politicized. Encampments have always been political spaces; they have to be in their very constitution; the conditions that initiate them. They index and mark the failure of systems to provide the basic necessities of life for large segments of the population. Yet, encampments can also provide forms of alternative infrastructure for people experiencing homelessness, spaces which can be turned to the interests and needs of community members that refuses the individualization of impoverishment and the neoliberal reforms that have been developed to address the ‘problem’ of homelessness (Withers 2021; Speer 2016). Unhoused communities encourage us to attend to the conditions that produce homelessness, rather than denigrating the spaces in which these communities practice their politics and live their lives. I attempt to think of encampments as forms of what Winona LaDuke and Deb Cowen (2020) describe as ‘alimentary infrastructures’, systems that heal, and care and provide sustenance for the fostering of life outside of systems of capitalist accumulation and colonial possession, that promote community health and well-being. Increasingly, infrastructure is understood as a process and site through which settler colonialism extends and fortifies itself and lays claim to Indigenous territory (Cowen 2020; Ruiz 2021; Salamanca 2016; Needham 2014; Curley 2021). An entire literature has emerged examining infrastructure’s close ties to the production of the colonial state and 103 settler futurity (Stanley 2019; Crosby 2021; Fox 2022; Spice 2018). Infrastructure is often associated with the development and expansion of the settler state, through railways, ports, dams or increasingly, any resource development project that serves the interest of settler capital. Infrastructure as a technique of settler accumulation is now taken-for-granted. Yet, there are also ‘infrastructures otherwise’, enduring networks and relations that support and foster life, rather than constrain the life chances of marginalized peoples (Cowen 2020; LaDuke and Cowen 2020; Spice 2018; Gilmore 2007). As Deb Cowen (2020:483) argues, “infrastructure is not only a vehicle of domination – it is also a means of transformation”. Encampments represent community-built infrastructures that people experiencing homelessness foster in the face of systematic abandonment and disregard and active and ongoing policing and intrusion of Indigenous, Black, Brown and poor communities (Speer 2016). These infrastructures are heuristic and, by definition, imperfect, yet they follow the tenets of harm reduction in attempting to ‘meet people where they are at’; to provide support that acknowledges and contends with the conditions under which people are forced to live. As Jessie Speer (2016:1050) argues “infrastructural inequality and exclusion is often culturally marginalizing…Thus, being excluded from infrastructural access can lead to exclusion from societal norms.” The struggle to create infrastructures that could support encampments was simultaneously a struggle to be recognized as human, as a community. Recognizing encampments as forms of heuristic infrastructure created in times of hardship initiated by colonial dispossession, racialized policing and neoliberal abandonment could alter how we move in solidarity with the communities that take shelter within them. 104 4 Occupying Metulia?: Producing the Settler Colonial City through Lək̓ʷ əŋən Exclusion and Criminalization 4.1 Introduction “If you look at the history of colonization here, there's talk about tent cities from the very first waves of displacement.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). In this chapter, I examine ‘Victoria’s’ history of urban development to better understand the governance of urban space contemporarily. Following from the discussion of homelessness and precarity in the last chapter, here I ask how the City’s history of urban development continues to inform the governance of spaces like encampments. How does it contribute to the affects that structure feelings of belonging in urban space? To understand how the struggle that unfolded at Meegan is connected to ongoing colonial governance, we need to address the histories of settler colonial urbanism, how space has been produced within the city according to a set of racial, gendered and colonial logics (Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak 2022). I pursue this through an engagement with the work of critical historians examining Victoria’s urban, Indigenous and colonial history. This includes the work of Adele Perry (2001), Renisa Mawani (2009) Jean Barman (2005a), John Lutz (2008) and Penelope Edmonds (2010). Edmonds work, in particular, has been central in illustrating how urban development has intersected with colonization in Victoria in both her book Urbanizing Frontiers (2010a) and an article published the same year, Unpacking Settler Colonialism’s Urban Strategies (2010b). I build on Edmonds work to illustrate the endurance of many of these municipal strategies of urban governance in relation to encampments. Many of the strategies of urban development and municipal governance established at the City’s founding remain intact to this day. Yet, I also engage these histories to show how these strategies have reformulated in some ways over time, 105 while maintaining an orientation towards dispossession. Engaging with the work of critical historians allows me to illuminate both the continuities of colonial governance and its reassemblage and current processes of articulation (Bhandar 2018). Engagement with this literature allows me to argue that the City of Victoria was produced through a long history of dispossession, displacement and exclusion that has worked to naturalize colonial occupation, the city’s hegemonic Whiteness and settler constructions of order (Miller 2020). Municipal actors developed strategies to manage racialized populations in the ‘contact zone’ of the city’s early colonial period that are reassembled and rearticulated in its governance of ‘disorder’ in the city today (Bhandar 2018; Mawani 2009; Perry 2001). The struggle over Meegan, far from being unique, is the latest episode in attempts to order the city according to the logics and values of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and White supremacy; to displace, contain or manage ‘threatening’ or ‘unruly’ racial subjects within urban space. There is a distinctive genealogy of governance that can be traced back to the city’s founding and development, as municipal governments use rearticulated strategies to manage and displace Indigenous peoples against unhoused communities today. Dispossession and displacement have been central to the production of the settler colonial city, and I argue that contestations over public spaces like ‘Beacon Hill’ continue these processes with a distinctively settler colonial character (Masuda et al. 2020; Miller 2020). It is thus, important to place contestations over urban space in the longer history of the city’s urban development to illustrate how contemporary governance reformulates and extends the settler colonial logics on which the city is founded. In this chapter, I turn towards this task through an engagement with the secondary literature involving Victoria’s urban development. 106 4.2 Producing the Settler Colonial City through Indigenous Dispossession “The fact that such a disproportionate number of people who are homeless and precariously housed are Indigenous just drills it home even deeper, that it's not only the continuation of the practice, but it's also against many of the same people, disproportionately the same people.” -Leslie Robinson (personal communication). The city has long been a site of intensive inquiry within critical geographic scholarship (Simpson and Hugill 2022; D. Smith 2012; Derickson 2015; Harvey 2013). Yet, while urban space and the development of the city have been front and center in geographic inquiry, the structuring function of ongoing settler colonial relations has been elided until relatively recently (Cowen 2020; Dorries 2023; Simpson and Hugill 2022). The city often continues to be seen as tabula rasa, an urbs nullius in which Indigenous presence and jurisdiction is erased, evacuated or disavowed (Coulthard 2014). While Indigenous social movements have long contended with urbanity in their projects of decolonization and liberation, urban geography itself has only recently begun to engage meaningfully with Indigenous studies and to robustly theorize the city in relation to settler colonialism and Indigenous urbanism (Blomley 2004; Coulthard 2021; Dorries 2023; Cowen 2020). This increased concern has led to the development of Indigenous urbanism as an analytic (Dorries 2023; Mays 2023; Tomiak 2017; Blansett, Cahill and Needham 2022; Goeman 2013) and nascent attempts to understand how settler colonial relations continue to structure the production of urban space (Hugill 2017; Porter and Kelley 2023; Cowen 2020; D. Hunt 2020; Edmonds 2010a). These scholars argue that while urban geography has taken up issues of colonialism through the relation between metropole and periphery under franchise colonialism or addressed the legacies of colonial development through the framework of postcolonialism, urban geographers have been less apt to explore the contours of the settler colonial city; how colonial relations continue to shape the production of urban space in the settler colony and beyond and how Indigenous jurisdiction complicates normative ideas of urban justice 107 (Hugill 2017; Simpson and Hugill 2022; Porter and Kelly 2023). How ongoing Indigenous dispossession functions as the precondition for urban development and citizenship, and what this means for housing justice, for instance, continues to be marginalized in the literature, even those grounded in supposedly liberatory and critical frameworks and traditions (Leeuw and Hunt 2018; Porter and Kelly 2023). This dearth of analytical attention arises from the naturalization of settler occupation in practice and in theory. Indigeneity has historically been distinctively spatialized in the analytic frameworks of urban geography. As Nicholas Blomley (2004:114) argues, “if located anywhere, native people are frequently imagined in the past or in nature. In either case, they are placed outside the city”. Urban issues are often seen to be distinct from Indigenous politics. The implications of recognizing the ongoing salience of settler colonial relations to the construction of the city is not always fully pursued in either analysis or political organizing (Porter and Kelly 2023). Cities like Victoria have always been populated by Indigenous communities; were built on Indigenous land and revolved around Indigenous labour and economies (Perry 2001; Lutz 2008; Mawani 2009; Knight 1996). Yet, the visible presence of Indigenous people and the centrality of Indigeneity to settler colonial cities has consistently been obscured through representations that frame Indigenous peoples as out-of-place in the city. This has material implications for how local organizing is conducted. In many ways, settler solidarity movements have internalized a normative assumption that Indigeneity is antithetical to urbanism; that the ‘authentic’ terrain of decolonial struggle exists outside of the city, and that a clear distinction exists between decolonization and movements for urban justice. This has worked to silo Indigenous political projects and delimit their scope in the work of settler scholars and 108 organizers. Here, I ask, how does the narrative that Indigeneity is antithetical to urbanism come to be felt to be true? Colonial discourses have worked to frame Indigeneity as antithetical to urbanism (Dorries 2023). The space of the city is often normatively understood as a place where Indigenous peoples are anomalous or ‘vulnerable’ (Dorries 2023; Deloria 2004). As Heather Dorries (2023:112) argues, both policy and scholarship often “treat the city as a container for processes of cultural assimilation.” This is part of settler colonial grammar of place and the city; that Indigeneity is anomalous within urban space, and indeed, that the city has certain deleterious effects on Indigenous peoples who are associated with and are seen to rightly belong to the rural, the reserve, the elsewhere (Hunt 2014). As M. Bianet Castellanos (2021:18) argues, “the estrangement between urban studies and indigenous histories is a residue of imperial legacies that consign Indians to rural spaces”. These discourses rely on authenticity narratives which seek to define and circumscribe the very parameters of what it means to be Indigenous or urban, to contain Indigenous peoples within a colonially produced image that serves to relegate Indigeneity to the past and distinctively outside of modernity and urban space (Deloria 2004; Lawrence 2004; Vizenor 1998; Raibmon 2005; Rifkin 2017). 60 More than simply erroneous or a misrepresentation of the lived realities of Indigenous peoples, this framing informs law and policy that governs and regulates Indigenous people within urban space. As Dorries (2023:112) argues, “laws that define urbanization and Indigeneity in opposition have informed a long history of forced Indigenous removal from cities, while also positioning cities as places of cultural loss”. 60 This is what Gerald Vizenor (1998) describes as the ‘fugitive pose’ of Indigeneity, a colonial representation based on settler romanticizations and expectations that works to absent Indigenous peoples from modernity, and I would add here, from the quintessentially modern space: the city. 109 Historically, this framing rationalized displacement and removal as forms of benevolent and ‘common sense’ colonial governance, in the best interests of Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Mawani 2003; Snelgrove 2014). The production of the settler colonial city as White space was facilitated by the application of a colonial frame which positioned Indigenous peoples outside of modernity and worked to map the city in ways that erased its Indigenous inhabitants (Razack 2002). This racial representation encouraged the drafting of bylaws, statutes and ordinances that explicitly targeted Indigenous presence in the city for surveillance, policing and expulsion. Anomalous, ‘surprising’ or unexpected urban Indigenous presence then functions as what Patricia Hill Collins (2002) describes as a ‘controlling image’, a discursive frame that attempts to imbue racial subjectivity with a set of negative or pejorative values and characteristics that facilitate the exercise of power against Indigenous peoples (Deloria 2004; McKittrick 2006). This representation seeks to categorize and contain racial subjectivity to a set of truncated and pejorative meanings and to spatialize Indigeneity elsewhere. These images do work. If Indigeneity is ‘naturally’ antithetical to urbanity, then it is not wrong, amoral or violent to remove or exclude Indigenous peoples from the city. These representations were made tangible and given veracity through the force and violence of law, a process made possible through the naturalization that the controlling image allows (Cover 1986; Sarat 2001; Valverde 2010). This is how Indigenous peoples are made illegible as urban citizens and legible (indeed, hypervisible) as racial ‘Others’ out-of-place within the city requiring surveillance, regulation and policing, both historically and contemporarily. Despite the presumed naturalness of antagonisms between Indigeneity and urbanity, settler colonial cities had to be actively produced as spaces of Whiteness by developing the city according to racial logics that excluded, segregated or managed Indigeneity (Dorries 2009; 110 Razack 2000; Mawani 2003; Hugill 2017). There was nothing natural about this process. As Glen Coulthard (2014:174) argues, “urban planners and policy makers went through great efforts to expunge urban centers of native presence.” It took work to produce an urban spatial imaginary from which Indigeneity had been materially and discursively evacuated. This work was often conducted through the apparatus of law; vagrancy statutes, nuisance bylaws, racialized drug and alcohol laws, and the targeting of Indigenous women through deeply racist and misogynistic sexual services laws (Barman 2005a; Perry 2001). To render the disassociation between Indigeneity and urbanity normative and common sense, Indigenous peoples had to be materially displaced through law and violence, and imaginatively vacated from urban space and citizenship through discursive productions that framed Indigeneity as ‘naturally’ antithetical to urbanity. 61 Yet, the violence of this process is obscured behind the naturalization of an antagonism between urbanity and Indigeneity. Indigenous dispossession, enduring colonial relations and racial violence are at the heart of the (re)production of urban space (Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak 2022; Tomiak 2016). As Kyle Mays (2023) argues, Indigenous dispossession is the condition of possibility for the settler colonial city. Indeed, urbanization itself was often seen to be the means of effecting settler colonial control over territory, of domesticating recalcitrant territories and peoples. The extension of urban space was seen to vanquish Indigenous peoples and their land-based economies and ways of being. If the ‘figure of the Native’ is absent from or antithetical to urban space, then urbanization was seen as the completion of the settler colonial project implying the 61 Of course, to accomplish this municipal authority could rely on entrenched representations of Indigenous peoples that framed Indigeneity as ‘outside of time’, a remnant of civilization’s past that were incongruent with ‘modernity’ (Vizenor 1998; Rifkin 2017). This controlling image already circulated and structured Indigenous/settler relations. 111 spatial ‘elimination of the Native’ and the triumph of colonial modernity (Wolfe 2006). Concepts of the frontier and manifest destiny were distinctly evident in the narratives that surrounded urbanization. In 1860, an editorial in ‘Victoria’s’ newspaper, the British Colonist, epitomized the settler assumption which tied urban development to conquest, claiming “our race sweeps on, our civilisation knows no halt, and as fast as we cut down trees the red man disappears” (quoted in Edmonds 2010a:222). Urbanization was seen as a final frontier through which settlers completed the colonial project. As Penelope Edmonds (2010a:75) argues, the city was understood to be the ‘consummation of Empire’. Urban development then cannot be disentangled from the extension of settler colonial authority and was tethered to the civilizational logics of colonization (Cowen 2020). City building was understood as a component of Manifest Destiny. This logic was captured in another editorial from the British Colonist describing Indigenous displacement: “as an inferior race… we believe they must give way in order to make room for a race more enlightened and by nature and habits better fitted to perform the task of converting what is now a wilderness into productive fields and happy homes” (quoted in Lutz 1998:18). The ‘happy home’ of the settler is constructed through, indeed, requires the eviction of Indigenous presence (Buhler and Barkaskas 2023). Urbanization is explicitly framed as the extension of settler modes of authority and economic production. The city thus becomes a powerful site of identification for settlers, a symbol of the legitimacy and vitality of the settler colonial project and how settlers come to know themselves as authoritative. Yet, this cathexis can also produce anxieties about the vulnerability of urban space to disorder or threatening alterity leading to a vigilance around policing and regulating the space of the city. To better understand this, I explore in detail the City’s urban development and how the production of abjected racial spaces continues to inform the governance of encampments today. 112 4.3 Urban Development and the Production of the Settler Colonial City “I don't think it's possible to have housing justice or justice in general when things function the way they are based on colonial property systems.” -Nic Olson (personal communication). The area that the city of ‘Victoria’ occupies is known as Metulia, the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən -speaking peoples, as well as the SENĆOŦEN-speaking W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Songhees Nation 2013; Keddie 2003). Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples are part of the broader network of Coast Salish nations who’s traditional unceded territory came to be known anthropologically as the ‘Northwest Coast’, today bisected by the Canada/US border. Regionally, this also includes the nations of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth and the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples whose traditional territories make up what is colonially-known as ‘Vancouver Island’. Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples harvest camas, use reef nets to fish and have far-reaching trade relations and complex land use systems within Metulia (Claxton 2015). The area’s abundant resources supported a large population prior to invasion. The Lək̓ʷəŋən are organized around seven distinct family groups that speak a shared language, Lək̓ʷəŋən. These seven families are now represented by two First Nations, the Songhees and Esquimalt (Bryce and Sam 1997). The region’s history of invasion and colonization began in 1841, when, seeking trade hegemony and worried about American encroachment into the Northwest, the Hudson’s Bay Company sent James Douglas to Vancouver Island to establish a fort, a nexus for resource extraction in the area (Keddie 2003). The HBC functioned as a quasi-state proxy for the British Crown in establishing claims to sovereignty over Indigenous territory and stripping the land of resources for profit (Cavanagh 2011). 62 The establishment of resource outposts like Fort 62 The HBC was chartered by the British government to further the territorial claims of Britain as their occupation of the territory served to strengthen British claims to sovereignty against American claims. 113 Camosack, as it was initially called, functioned as the initial colonial foothold that would precede more intensive settlement and allow the Crown to stake a claim to sovereignty at little or no expense through corporate/state partnerships and the chartering of companies like the HBC (Stern 2023). The fort was completed in 1843. 63 During this period, the nascent community was dominated by the interests of the HBC, its internal politics and the requirements of the fur trade economy which relied on Indigenous labour. The fort supplied furs to the metropole but was not the site of intensive settlement until the signing of the Treaty of Oregon in 1846 which set the American and Canadian border at the 49th parallel (Brazier 2021). After this, the British Colonial Office began to develop plans for more comprehensive settlement to allay ongoing fears of American encroachment in the area. The discovery of gold in the Fraser River Valley in 1858 would lead to a boom with the city serving as the gateway to the Fraser and outfitting hub after which the city would incorporate in 1862 (Chang 2020). However, with the decision to site the Canadian Pacific Railway’s terminus in Vancouver, Victoria’s economic ascendancy was permanently eclipsed (Lutz et al. 2018). Yet, Victoria would still become capital of the Province of British Columbia when it joined Confederation in 1871. This emerging Province would be characterized by what scholars have recently described as “the Pacific politics of White supremacy”, in which institutions like BC’s immigration system and its voting policies remained structured by a virulent form of White supremacy and racialized exclusion (Claxton et al. 2021). During its early colonial period, Victoria was home to a racially-mixed community with significant populations of White settlers, Kanaka Maoli, Black communities, and Chinese 63 While early relations between Lək�ʷəŋən peoples and the HBC settlers are sometimes framed as equal or amicable, the very presence of a fort on the territory highlights the violence that attends settlement and occupation. As Adele Perry (2021:38) argues, “Fort Victoria was a kind of palisaded village, a militarized commercial space that spoke to the material aspirations and colonial authority of the private fur trade company.” 114 communities, as well as Coast Salish, Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Kwakwaka’wakw with longstanding trade relations in the area, Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg and Metis who worked for the HBC, and, of course, local Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ communities (Turner and Loewen 1998). Each community had a unique trajectory in bringing them to ‘Victoria’. Indigenous peoples from elsewhere on Turtle Island were often employed by the HBC, who relied on their skills as trappers and sealers and as mediators with local peoples. Kanaka Maoli also worked for the HBC, taking employment on the ships that would stop in Hawai’i in the trans-Pacific trade networks of the period. James Douglas expressly invited Black communities from San Francisco to settle in Victoria (Claxton et al. 2021). Chinese communities had been drawn to the area as miners in the boom that attended the Fraser Valley Gold Rush. The emerging city was a ‘contact zone’ where diverse racial communities lived in close proximity to one another (Mawani 2009; Perry 2001; Edmonds 2010a; Lutz 2008). However, this proximity also produced racial and gendered anxieties that municipal actors and colonial bureaucrats attempted to manage through law and policy (Mawani 2009). The need to police racial boundaries was deemed particularly pressing in the contact zone of the early colonial city. While scholars have illustrated that Victoria was characterized by a certain amount of interaction and relation across racial difference and contained some racially mixed neighborhoods, the city still developed according to a set of racial logics which sought to manage difference, allay fears of racial miscegenation and guarantee White supremacy within urban space (Lutz et al. 2018; Chang 2020; Mawani 2009). This became more distinct after White settlement intensified in the late 1800s. As Jennifer Nelson (2008:40) argues, “the mixing of different bodies in common space begs new forms of delineation.” Distinct racial neighborhoods 115 developed according to a set of explicit policies and informal practices. 64 There was Kanaka Row, an area in James Bay where Kanaka Maoli and Indigenous peoples lived. There was also Canada’s oldest Chinatown, housing the city’s significantly large population of Chinese people and businesses. Early Black communities and families also lived together throughout the city. There was the ‘Indian Quarter’ on Johnson Street where Indigenous peoples came to find accommodation and make home within the city limits (Lutz et al. 2018). Finally, there was the Songhees reserve, initially located directly across Victoria’s Inner Harbor, in the heart of its downtown. The City was characterized by both formal and informal development initially developing in proximity to the HBC fort. The informal developments that emerged near the fort, but outside of its palisaded walls, and later outside of the city limits, were an ongoing preoccupation of the colonial press and administrative actors. Often described as ‘shanty towns’, these communities consisted of clusters of tents, lean-tos and shacks, housing primarily Kanaka Maoli and Indigenous peoples with economic relations to the fort, trappers and sealers who came to sell their furs. These encampments ballooned in the summer but dwindled in the winter. Lutz et al. (2018) note their significant presence estimating that by the 1870s they could consist of 2000 to 4000 residents in the summer months. Race and space were distinctively tethered in colonial representations of these places and in their ongoing governance. Kanaka Row was framed as an anarchic space antithetical to the cadastral logics and orderly and gridded planning that the city’s settler citizens saw themselves as pursuing (Edmonds 2010a). This neighborhood was associated with Indigeneity, racial alterity and disorder. As a ‘slum’ or ‘shanty town’, Kanaka Row was 64 Today, other than Chinatown or the Songhees and Esquimalt reserves, Victoria is not often seen as having distinctively racial or ’ethnic’ neighborhoods at all. Yet, these logics continue to condition the management and governance of spaces like the encampment and Victoria’s rapidly gentrifying areas. 116 imbued with a range of pejorative meanings that were deeply racialized. As Penelope Edmonds (2010a:197) argues, “Native camps at the edge of the town and in the reserve were represented as places of disorder, violence and disease”. The ‘orderly’ city was fashioned in relation to its ‘disordered’ spaces. Representing racialized space as dysfunctional and inferior was a mode of urban knowledge production that worked to give coherence and meaning to ‘orderly’ settler spaces and render spatial domination normative. This narrative of deficiency is how settlers come to know themselves and their modes of urbanism as ‘superior’, ‘civilized’. The denigration of racialized space then was part of the making and constitution of White, settler space and settler senses of self. The orderly city was made in contradistinction to disordered racialized spaces, like the ‘shanty town’, the reserve, or the encampment. 65 As Nelson (2008:28) argues, “dominant groups express their own identities, and reinforce what they see as their rightful rule, through acts of regulation and destruction of the racial Other – and, simultaneously, through space.” Debasing and policing racial alterity in the ‘slum’ were how settlers differentiated themselves from Indigenous and racialized subjects and established their authority over emerging cityspace, “the preservation of respectable spaces relies on the containment of slum conditions in a separate sphere understood to be ‘outside’ and beyond the bounds of legitimate society, a space apart, where the rules and conditions of dominant space no longer apply” (Nelson 2008:41). ‘Racial slums’ are often seen as wastelands, or surplus spaces outside of the parameters of respectable or dominant society. Such spaces “may be treated as repositories for the wastes of the dominant society or for groups deemed contaminated” (Nelson 65 Jennifer Nelson (2008:43) argues that even the very names of these places, Africville, Chinatown or Kanaka Row are intended to mark racial alterity, to “signify their essential difference.” 117 2008:41). 66 In terms of Victoria’s early sociospatial organization, Kanaka Row was the repository for the surplus racial bodies that could not, would not, be incorporated into the body politic of the emerging settler colonial city. Yet, Victoria’s fur trade economy ran on exactly such racial subjects and the value they produced, creating a tension where the camp was actually central to the city’s nascent economy but disavowed or marginalized within its city-building projects. The ’racial slum’ then is a quintessential space of exception, framed as outside of the boundaries of law and colonial urbanism, but, in fact, absolutely central to these processes, through their circumscribed exclusion/inclusion (Agamben 1998). This racial calculus is a central component of the project of racial capitalism, the “process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person” (Leong 2013:2152). Spaces like Kanaka Row then were thoroughly racialized, imbued with a set of racial logics and meanings which White settlers used to produce forms of economic value and to rationalize modes of regulatory control over impoverished neighborhoods and their racialized subjects. Racial subjectivity was also given meaning through the abjection of spaces like the reserve or the ‘slum’. A central tenet of critical geography is that space is productive, not simply an inert or passive container ‘filled up’ with people, things, or events (Massey 2006). Space is generative, a socionatural production and itself socially productive (Razack 2002). It is produced through social relations and works to shape those relations, producing and constituting racial subjects in the process. The racial logics which denigrated spaces like the reserve or the slum 66 Of course, the ‘slum’ was not entirely segregated and represented a powerful private allure at the same time as it produced public disgust. White subjects were also drawn to racial difference and the space of exception, where they could ‘cross over’ transgress racial and civilizational boundaries into spaces where they assumed they could pursue desires for sex, drinking or gambling (Mawani 2009). The point is that the ‘slum; was not actually a space set entirely apart, though it is often framed as such to establish forms of racial superiority. 118 were mobilized against their residents as well. 67 As Razack (2002:19) argues, place is always shaped by a “dialectical relationship between spaces and bodies.” Bodies are coded by a spatial and racial logic, “racialized groups are seen not only to live within defiled spaces, but to embody those spaces” (Nelson 2008:34). Racialized bodies came to carry the connotations of disease, disorder or ‘savagery’ with which colonial authority painted spaces like Kanaka Row. As Lutz et al. (2018:326) note “local newspapers linked this Kanaka Row with undesirable people generally. The papers associated Kanaka Row with drunken fights, stabbings, illegal liquor sales, and break-ins.” The British Colonist described Kanaka Row in these terms, “the vicinity named Kanaka Row is a perfect sink-hole of iniquity-- a lazar house of vice and immorality . . . a neighborhood of [a] blackguard population” (quoted in Lutz et al. 2018:326). The space was imbued with a negative moral value and its residents represented as abject and depraved, “the state of moral degradation into which a number of habitués and resident of so Kanaka Road have fallen, is a . . . standing disgrace to the town” (quoted in Lutz et al 2018:326). Race and space were mutually constitutive racial projects that gave each other meaning (Omi and Winant 2013). As the process of urban development, land titling and formalization began displacing and evicting the residents of Kanaka Row and other informal settlements in the 1870s, the City’s vitriol and dehumanizing representations turned towards the spaces of Chinatown and the Songhees reserve across the harbor. To move beyond the pejorative connotations of a frontier town or a resource outpost and claim a place within a global network of settler colonial cities, Victoria had to present itself as rational, gridded, orderly, White. As Renisa Mawani (2003:165) argues “early European colonists and colonial authorities endeavoured to rationalise ‘the city 67 This process is recursive, not necessarily linearly causal. ‘Shanty towns’ were denigrated, were labelled as ‘shanty towns’ in the first place, because they were inhabited by racialized subjects. Race and space inform one another (Razack 2002). 119 space’ by constituting Victoria as racially homogeneous.” Racialized narratives of progress and civilization fuelled urbanization and the City’s transformation from a resource outpost, reliant on forms of colonial proximity and racial interaction, to a ‘modern’ settler city expected to be ordered across clearly demarcated racial lines. In 1863, Victoria’s local newspaper, the British Colonist ran an article that described the colonial imperative as it related to urbanization, the shift from a resource outpost to a modern settler colonial city. It claimed “the fort has disappeared; a city of the White race occupies its place. The refinements of civilization have been introduced, yet King Freezy [Lək̓ʷəŋən Chief] and his fishy, clam eating subjects are still located upon what ought to be part of the site of the city” (quoted in Lutz et al. 2018:331). 68 Indigeneity is explicitly made the antithesis of modernity and urban order. The racial difference and colonial proximities that had characterized the space of the Fort and its reliance on racialized labour, was framed as a vestige of the modern settler city’s frontier past. Modernity and urbanization were explicitly understood as processes of Whitening the city and imposing control and order. Indigenous peoples are associated with animality or bestiality (‘fishy’ subjects, clam-eating subjects), as atavistic and impeding the march of modernity, progress and civilization. The proximities and relations that the colonial fur trade economy had relied on, now had to be undone or stringently policed and spatially segregated. In particular, the proximity of the Songhees reserve in VicWest to the downtown core was seen to inhibit this process. 68 I cannot help but hear echoes of this statement in Audra Simpson’s (2016) analysis of the discourse that surrounded Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike during Idle No More. Spence subsisted on fish broth which racist commentators framed as ‘cheating’ or ‘fishy’ in the sense of being suspect, unbelievable. Spence was dehumanized and vilified through what Simpson describes as her ‘fleshy body’. In both instances, food, what people eat, is used to create an image of barbarity, or animality through racial disgust. To eat clams, is to ‘be fishy’; suspect and associated with the stages of barbarity and savagery, the animal that the anthropological discourse of stadial theory propounded at the time (Ben-zvi 2007). This visceral or ‘fleshy’ discourse and practice of racial representation was mobilized to affect dispossession and extend the reach of colonial authority (Simpson 2016). To debase the ‘fleshy’ body through what it consumes, was also to debase the political body of the Songhees as unfit, atavistic, retrograde and unworthy of not only authority, but space within the city. 120 Spaces like reserves were seen to bring down property value, impede development and disorder settler space and colonial senses of civility. Indigenous presence within the city at all was framed as aberrant or anomalous, unsettling to colonial constructions of urban space and settler senses of order, safety and propriety (Dorries 2023). 69 As Victoria developed from a racially mixed trading post centered around Fort Victoria, to a burgeoning settler colonial city, settlers increasingly pressured Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples outside of the city through harassment, violence and legislation and sought to ossify the boundaries between racial space (Perry 2001; Mawani 2003; Edmonds 2010b). As Hunt (2014:62) argues “the settlement of BC, as with colonialism the world over, was premised on, and facilitated through, a process of creating spaces which were orderly, easily commodified and clearly defined through the imposition of Western socio-legal property regimes.” In 1850, Songhees leaders signed a treaty affirming certain rights and protections and setting aside reserve lands. This set of treaties are now known as the Douglas Treaties, which stated that “our village sites and our enclosed fields are to be kept for our own use, for the use of our children, and for those who may follow after us” (quoted in Petrescu 2017). Land for a Songhees reserve was initially set aside at the site that now hosts the BC Legislature. However, the government illegally expropriated this land and instead established a reserve across Victoria Harbor, in the neighborhood now known as VicWest. 70 As Renisa Mawani (2003:169) argues, “from the outset, the reserve was constructed both by early settlers and by authorities as an affront to imperialism, White civility and respectability, 69 Renisa Mawani (2009) discusses how ‘colonial proximities’ of inter-racial encounter in the contact zone of the early colony produced anxieties, fears of miscegenation and the potential for cross-racial solidarity. Racial difference then had to be managed and spatially sequestered to the extent that this was possible. 70 In 2001, Songhees and Esquimalt filed a lawsuit against the federal and provincial government alleging that under the direction of colonial Governor James Douglas, these governments had illegally taken back portions of the land set aside for this reserve under a Douglas Treaty in order to build what would become the BC Legislature buildings. In 2007, the federal and provincial government settled out-of-court with the Songhees and Esquimalt, paying the nations 31.5 million dollars for this infringement on their treaty rights. 121 racialised ideas that were materially inscribed into space.” The reserve in VicWest was almost immediately placed under pressure from White settlers as the population boomed and the city developed. It was framed as a space of vice and disorder in need of rehabilitation and cleansing for the health of the city and its settler residents in ways similar to, yet not exactly the same, as representations of Kanaka Row and Chinatown. The reserve was represented as ‘urban blight’ or unproductive and wasted land in the heart of the settler colonial city, impeding opportunities for urban development as the land became increasingly valuable through urban expansion. 71 Pressure from city residents and government continued to mount until 1911 when an agreement was reached under duress to expropriate the Songhees reserve and displace the community into the area adjacent to the municipalities of Esquimalt and what would become View Royal. The reserve was developed into Victoria’s VicWest neighborhood and the Songhees pushed even further to the city’s outer limits (Lutz et al. 2014). Like the ‘slum’, the reserve was produced and governed according to a set of racial logics that tethered together abjected spaces and racial bodies and facilitated the extension of settler colonial authority. 72 Sarah Hunt (2014:71) describes the ways in which the spatialization of the reserve, for instance, is seen to ‘stick’ to the bodies of Indigenous people, “reserves are produced as spaces of assumed violence, while ‘Indians’, inherently ‘of the reserve’, are produced as subjects of this naturalized violence. ‘Indians’ can thus be understood as ‘reserved subjects’, as their spatio-legal subjectivity travels with them anywhere within the boundaries of Canada. The 71 It should be noted that these are the same processes and even language, active in both gentrification discourses which focus on ‘urban blight’ in need of ‘regeneration’ and anti-homeless projects that target encampments as the site of ‘cleansing’ urban governance. 72 As Sara Ahmed argues these denigrating representations of racialized space ‘stick to’ the bodies of racial subjects. Ahmed (2015:90) argues that this is “an effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs” and we might add here, spaces. 122 reserve, in essence, can be imagined and produced anywhere within national borders.” Racialized subjects ‘carried’ the abjection of racial space with them bodily. The denigration of certain spaces as ‘waste’, could be deployed against the bodies of racialized subjects associated with the space of the slum or the reserve. Associating Indigenous and poor peoples with the racial slum, cast these communities as paradigmatic noncitizens, outsiders, who belonged neither in the physical space of the city nor the imagined community of its body politic. The casting of these spaces as frontiers that marked the boundary between civilization and savagery, order and disorder, naturalized the exercise of colonial violence within them and on the bodies of their residents. Able to be discursively transported wherever and whenever to the conceptual space of the frontier, the slum or the reserve, where violence was considered permanently legitimate, racialized subjects become subject to the full force of colonial power (Hunt 2014). Denigrating representations of racialized space and bodies and the policing and regulation this allowed has been absolutely central to Victoria’s urban development and a process continued in the denigration and punitive governance of unhoused communities today. 4.4 Criminalizing and Policing Racial Subjectivity “The policies that are being used to displace people in contemporary times are direct descendants, are linked to policies that were used to dispossess Indigenous people on contact, when BC became a province and before that, even. They're not the same exact bylaws, and they're not targeting necessarily the same populations, but I think the purposes are the same. They're meant to displace unwanted people that don't fit within the colonial understanding of land value so that generally wealthy housed people can enjoy the land that they feel entitled to. So, to me, it's directly connected because the policies of today are rooted in those that were used then.” -Nic Olson (personal communication). In the late 19th century, as the city sought to expropriate the reserve and destroy informal settlements at the edge of town, individual Indigenous people also became subject to intensified forms of police power and criminalization through the development of racialized law, statutes 123 and criminal offenses. These forms of police power sought to constrain Indigenous movement and marginalize or exclude Indigenous presence in the city. The City pursued twinned policies of criminalizing vagrancy, substance use and sex work and associating Indigenous communities with these practices. As David Chang (2020:92) argues “on page after page of the newspaper and the police records, crime was racialised and race was criminalised; crime was Indigenous and indigeneity was criminal.” Lək̓ʷəŋən people were policed through the development of vagrancy statutes, liquor laws, and the criminalization of sex work (Mawani 2003; Barman 2006a). Associating Lək̓ʷəŋən people with vagrancy, criminality or licentiousness rationalized the drafting of punitive laws that disproportionately targeted Indigenous peoples. In a report of the Dominion Indian Office, Deputy Superintendent Spragge, claimed that local Indigenous people “are depraved, virtue is unappreciated and vice and intemperance prevail” (quoted in Lutz 1998:24). He describes the Songhees as being characterized by “indolence and intemperance and dissolute conduct” (quoted in Lutz 1998:24). An editorial written by the future premier of British Columbia, Amor de Cosmos, described Indigenous men as “hordes of thieves and cut-throats, and the women a community of prostitutes” (quoted in Barman 2006a:205). Representations of Indigenous people were gendered, structured around associations with ‘vice’ and immorality and intended to dehumanize and rationalize subjugation and displacement as necessary or even, benevolent. By discursively associating Indigenous peoples with vagrancy, substance use and sex work, and then crafting laws that targeted these ‘immoral’ behaviours, Indigenous peoples were criminalized and colonial police given carte blanche to arrest or evict Indigenous people from the city. Eventually, Indigenous peoples were banned from being within the city limits at night altogether, physically forced across the bridge that separated the reserve from downtown (Perry 2001). Indigeneity was rendered criminal through a discretionary association with 124 ‘immoral’ behaviours. Associating Indigenous peoples with behaviours deemed deviant was a way of efficiently policing and expelling Lək̓ʷəŋən people from urban space. The exercise of law was distinctly racialized in the settler state and the colonial city. In 1876, the Indian Act, a tool of racial governance which cast Indigenous peoples as ‘wards of the state’ and regulated the most minute aspects of Indigenous life was introduced. Some of Canada’s first drug policies and laws are enshrined in the Indian Act which banned the sale of liquor, opiates and intoxicants to Indigenous peoples (Boyd 2022). 73 As Susan Boyd (2022:51-52) argues, “the Indian Act banning status Indians from consuming alcohol and non-medical opiates initiated a framework of racialized categories between moral and immoral people, good and bad drugs, legal and illegal drug use”. The Indian Act was one of the first pieces of Canadian legislation that attempted to impose a moral framework onto substance use. 74 The beginnings of stigmatization and the targeted and uneven policing that would accompany the war on drugs are already present in the Indian Act at the inception of the settler nation-state and were explicitly developed to police Indigenous peoples. 75 The Indian Act criminalized ‘intoxication’ for 73 Likewise, Canada’s first drug law outside of the Indian Act, 1908’s Opium Act, targeted opium due to its association with Chinese labourers (Boyd 2022). The law addressed the moral panic that had been incited around Chinese immigration by White supremacists, and served to criminalize and thus, control Chinese men. After the initial criminalization of heroin and opium for instance, most charges were placed against Chinese men often leading to deportation aligning policing of substances with racist policies by Canada and BC to produce the Province as White through targeted exclusion and racist immigration policies (Claxton et al. 2021). There were also gendered dynamics to this legislation as it was often justified to protect White women from intoxication and degradation within ‘opium dens’ associated with Chinese men. This well-worn narrative played on fears of racial miscegenation and contained the beginnings of the trafficking discourses that we still witness today. Opium laws were seen to protect the chastity and morality of White women (deemed particularly vulnerable to substance use and degradation) and by extension, the purity of the White race. 74 Today’s war on drugs and war on the poor trace their roots to the criminalization of Indigenous people’s. Settler colonial power honed the strategies that it would more fully deploy with the onset of the drug war, the prison industrial complex and neoliberalization in its early history against Indigenous peoples. To pursue abolition, housing justice and decriminalization we need to fully account for this history. 75 Perhaps one of the reasons solidarity movements struggle to support those who use substances, who engage in sex work and who are homeless, is in response to deeply-entrenched stereotypes and colonial narratives that 125 Indigenous peoples, providing settler colonial authority the justification to patrol Indigenous peoples ‘suspected’ of consuming alcohol or using substances and allowing for the exercise of arbitrary and discretionary enforcement with broad definitions and implications. As Boyd (2022:48) argues, over the next century, this “race-based colonial policy led to the social control, arrest and imprisonment of thousands of Indigenous people.” Simultaneously, popular accounts worked to discursively link Indigenous peoples to disordered or even pathological forms of substance use and alcohol consumption (Mawani 2000). 76 These accounts worked to rationalize the segregation of Indigenous peoples onto reserves to protect both the ‘civility’ and coherence of urban space and to facilitate processes of assimilation through carceral regimes. Increased spatial management was an effect of such colonial representations of Indigeneity. As Renisa Mawani (2000:61) argues “many believed that by vigorously policing liquor, they could also eliminate inter-racial mingling and eventually achieve their desired goals of racial segregation and purity.” These laws would be mobilized to manage Indigeneity in urban and public space, to arrest or evict Indigenous peoples from the city and to demarcate and maintain clear racial boundaries. Canada’s history of policing substance associate these experiences with Indigeneity. Settlers would often rather dispute the association, rather than conceptualize Indigenous peoples who use substances, engage in sex work or are unhoused, as human beings deserving of support or as important in movements for decolonization. This orientation reifies rather than unsettles stigmatization and points to the extent to which stigma around these experiences are both internalized and naturalized. Indigenous peoples who use substance, engage in sex work or are unhoused trouble settlers’ understandings of Indigeneity and the objectives of decolonization. Understanding Indigenous peoples with lived experience as deserving of support would mean dismantling and unpacking the moral frameworks which position these experiences as negative, morally objectionable or ‘bad’ and those associated with them as criminal, deviant or self-destructive aberrant subjects. 76 This racist representation of alcohol consumption had many uses for colonial authorities. As Renisa Mawani (2000:61) argues “while their assumed predisposition to intoxication was used by government officials and missionaries to reinforce Native inferiority, it also rationalized and buttressed the need for spatial segregation”. Liquor laws reinforced White supremacy, rationalized the reification of distinct racial spaces and provided the mechanism to manage and regulate communities and space through law and policing. 126 use is foundationally intertwined with its policing of Indigenous peoples and the maintenance of clear racial boundaries in racially-diverse urban space. A related process unfolded in relation to sex work. Sexual service laws were consolidated when Canada’s Criminal Code was introduced in 1892. Sex work was criminalized and legal responses consolidated. Sexual service laws helped to establish the boundaries around respectability and morality, working to produce the contours of settler society and space. The criminalization of sex work helped to produce both a ‘deviant’ subject and its opposite, the moral and upstanding subject. It also allowed colonial authorities to police both space and women’s bodies. Dominant settler discourse worked to frame Indigenous women as licentious and immoral tethering them to an association with sex work or sexual exploitation rationalizing either criminalization or biopolitical intervention (Kaye 2017; Hunt 2015). Thus, a justification always existed in which Indigenous women’s bodies and conduct were suspect and subject to intense scrutiny and policing that facilitated colonial management of Indigenous women in public space; how and where Indigenous women could ‘appear’ in the city and the mechanisms for evicting Indigenous women from urban space (Brownlie 2005; Barman 2005a). Associations with ‘deviant’ sexualities rendered Indigenous women subject to surveillance and sexual services laws and gave this surveillance the force of law, effectively criminalizing Indigenous women within urban public space at the discretion of racist police. Sexuality was a means of policing Indigenous women whether through incarceration in the city jail, or in the soft incarceration of the reserve under the watchful eye of the Indian agent (Brownlie 2005). Via these representations of Indigenous women as ‘belonging’ in the racialized, ‘backward’ space of the reserve, the controlling image of them engaged in sex work was utilized to normalize their policing, regulate their bodies and sexuality and manage public space according to cisheteronormative mores and 127 values. Alongside the Indian Act, sexual service laws were utilized to ‘space Indigenous women out’ of the city. 77 This discourse of Indigenous women’s threatening or disordering sexuality was illustrated over and over in the British Colonist: “the Indian women should be sent to the [Songhees] Reserve to live, and the White and black men who glory in keeping them proceeded against under the Vagrancy Act” (quoted in Barman 2005a:211). In 1860, when a law was introduced to prohibit Indigenous peoples from the city after dark, Indigenous women, in particular, were targeted, and efforts were made “to enforce it against the women” and thereby have the streets “cleared from a nuisance which has long infested them” (quoted in Barman 2005a:215). An author in the British Colonist wrote of Indigenous women, “the whole system of permitting them to frequent the town, or to live in its vicinity, is radically wrong” (quoted in Barman 2005a:218). As Jean Barman (2005a:222) argues, “aboriginal women were harassed to the margins, for the most part off the streets of Victoria.” Indigenous women’s very presence in public space was enough to render them criminal, through a colonial logic that understood Indigenous women as embodying dangerous sexualities that threatened to disorder dominant forms of cisheteronormativity and cisheteropatriarchy, “merely by virtue of being on the streets of ‘Victoria’, Aboriginal women misbehaved” (Barman 2005a:208). Finally, vagrancy laws and statutes could criminalize Indigenous peoples for simply being in the wrong spaces at the wrong times (Nicolazzo 2020). Vagrancy statutes gave wide 77 This exclusion and ‘spacing out’ comes to be a feature of the space known as the ‘city’. As a space, the city is not predetermined, its boundaries and character defined. What the city means, its boundaries, what it communicates was actively produced through the exercise of law and Indigenous women’s exclusion. This exclusion produced through law gave coherence to the city as a spatial project, delineated its boundaries and defined its character. Indigenous women are not simply evicted from a space called the ‘city’, rather the idea of the city itself is produced through this very exclusion. The city does not precede experiences of exclusion, displacement and dispossession, it is produced through these processes. 128 discretionary powers to police that were shaped by racial meaning (Foster 2022). The Indian Act also criminalized Indigenous cultural practices once again rendering Indigeneity as a status crime capable of being criminalized through the interpretation of police (Cacho 2012). As Sarah Hunt (2014:65) illustrates, many “status offences applied only to Indigenous people, including the 1884 ban of the potlatch and the tamanawas (a healing ceremony), as well as the 1885 ban of the sundance”. The criminalization of cultural practices and an association of Indigeneity with vagrancy meant that simply being Indigenous in public space could be construed by settler authority as a criminal offense. Unhoused communities today also find themselves pushed out of public space, ‘guilty’ of status crimes that criminalize poverty and render it a crime to be poor in public space. The City’s historic governance of Indigenous peoples and racial space has provided a template and a ready-made rationale for these forms of punitive and exclusionary governance. As David Chang (2020:92-93) argues “criminalisation served a purpose, of course. It made settlers and their state powerful and sought to render the colonised and the racialised powerless. Even more it created a public theatre of domination: the public arrests, the public labour of the chain gang building the streets, maintaining the harbour, clearing the trash of the settler town – all this was on display. Alongside exclusion and displacement, the public theatre of domination and the spatial management of racial ‘Otherness’ through policing are how settler senses of order and urbanism were produced.” This is how Indigeneity is produced as out-of-place in the city. What the city signifies was produced through this disciplining of racial bodies and public space. City-building and cityspace are historically and contemporarily racial projects that work to create racial subjects and give the category of race meaning. The very meanings of urbanity and the city were shaped by these forms of regulation and exclusion (Mohanram 1999). It is no surprise then that municipal governments and settler residents mobilize these same logics 129 against unhoused communities today. Racialized law and the everyday exercise of police power meant that Indigeneity came to be associated with deviance or criminality and vice versa. Lutz (1998:23) argues that Indigenous peoples became subject to the biopolitical techniques developed to reform ‘abnormal’ or deviant’ communities of the mad, the criminal, “placed in a category of British subjects, but not citizens, Indians found themselves in a civic cell shared with felons and the insane. Indeed, the state blurred the boundary between Indians and felons by criminalizing for Indians was normal behavior for everyone else-- the consumption of alcohol subsequent revisions to the Indian act also criminalized traditional aboriginal behavior.” 78 This association between the ‘criminal’ and the racial subject has meant that the strategies developed against both communities can be used interchangeably. Contemporarily, we witness techniques of spatial management and policing used to space Indigenous peoples out of the city rearticulated and used against unhoused communities. Indigenous peoples and unhoused communities continue to ‘share a cell’ wherein strategies of rule and biopolitical management can be utilized interchangeably against either community. This process continues to shape the constitution of urban space and the practice of municipal governance to this day. Contemporarily, a nexus of criminality and Indigeneity is brought to bear on people who are experiencing homelessness as a means of vilifying the community by associating unhoused communities with the threatening and disordering ‘figure of the Native’ and the encampment with the racial spaces of the ‘slum’ or the reserve in order to conglomerate the full force of state power against them (Wolfe 2006). If colonial history has been characterized by a distinctive drive to render Indigeneity criminal (Stark 2016; Barker 2021; Ross 1998), contemporarily we 78 Yet, we might also invert this and look at the ways in which ‘mad’ communities were subject to reformist techniques developed against Indigenous communities that were intended to ‘kill the Indian, save the man’. 130 are also witness to simultaneous efforts to render the poor or the ‘criminal’ ‘Native’; an ontologically threatening racial Other. This works because the ‘figure of the Native’, the image of ‘barbarians at the gate’, continue to trouble the settler colonial city and suggest the unraveling of settler colonial order. Associating unhoused communities with Indigeneity allows the full force of colonial law and policing to be brought down up these communities because anti-Indigenous racism and the ontological threat of Indigeneity are hegemonic and common sense within settler societies, baked into the very social fabric of everyday life. Discourses that serve to dehumanize Indigenous peoples and unhoused communities work in conjunction to produce and buttress dispossession by associating these communities with one another. Once again, Indigeneity is a site of ‘transit’, invoking this paradigmatically threatening and ‘savage’ figure allows the full violence of settler governance to be conglomerated against poor people and to operate unencumbered. In portraying unhoused communities through the civilizational frameworks of ‘barbarism’ and ‘savagery’, the state is able to amass the full force of settler power against these communities because the denigration and abjection of Indigeneity is already established, the requirement of the ‘elimination of the native’ and the vanquishing of Indigeneity is already understood as common sense; the precondition, the founding logic of settler colonial societies (Wolfe 2006; Byrd 2011; Kotef 2020). Thus, this abjected figure can be associated with and transposed onto other communities to rationalize projects of negation, dehumanization and violence. As a site of transit, the figure of the Native is heuristic and allows for the extension of settler colonial authority into other spaces, other bodies. Likewise, the space of the frontier is not fixed, but moves, can be applied to other spaces rendered wild or abject. Thus, the space of the reserve, the slum and the encampment are intricately connected in how they are produced by colonial sociolegal and sociospatial regimes. From this perspective, the 131 encampment becomes imaginatively pinned to the space of the reserve and slum in ways that naturalize both its assumed abjection and the requirement to manage, sequester or cleanse this space. Associating encampments with racial space and racial subjects, linking them to the reserve or the slum rationalizes the colonial strategies of governance, of subjugation and domestication used to contain the threatening presence of Indigenous communities’ sovereignties, and mapping of territory. Rendering a link between Indigenous peoples and unhoused communities has been a means of entrenching colonial possession and rearticualting strategies of dehumanization and control formulated in colonialism’s encounters with Indigeneity in the city. It is no surprise that many of the ways of representing unhoused communities invoke ‘civilizational’ narratives that were developed to dehumanize and dispossess Indigenous peoples. Unhoused communities are understood as incapable of forming cogent political communities, lacking agency and without any coherent political claim in the same way that Indigenous peoples were understood as bereft of recognizable legal and political systems that justified dispossession. Both communities’ claims to space are rendered irrational, incoherent or illegible. This link to ‘racial Otherness’ continues to be embedded in how homelessness and unhoused communities are policed and ‘managed’ today. These structuring exclusions and productions of racial difference shape the city today providing the base materials for settler grammars of place. Displacing and criminalizing Indigenous presence in the city meant that urban space was increasingly produced and experienced as a space in which Whiteness was anticipated, while Indigeneity was produced as anomalous or something dangerous to be policed. 132 4.5 Conclusion: The Longue Duree of Displacement: Connecting Victoria’s Past and Present “[The City] is trying to make it look like they're approaching this from a lens that understands the harms of the histories of an ongoing colonization. But they're not doing a very good job at it.” “I think [council] are allowing and creating policies that give bylaw and police so much discretion in how they enforce that it’s ruining people's lives effectively.” -Nic Olson (personal communication). Why begin the story of encampments today with Victoria’s history of urban development? My point in detailing this spatio-legal history of displacement and policing is to illustrate how constructions of the settler colonial city continue to inform the city’s character and management of public space (Masuda et al. 2020). Recently, Jessica Miller (2020) has attempted to complicate understandings of gentrification by placing it in conversation with the longue duree of colonial displacement. Miller connects the displacement of Indigenous peoples to the racialized displacements that gentrification has engendered contemporarily, seeing them as components of the same processes. Contemporary displacements are only novel if we disconnect them from this longer history of Indigenous dispossession that have structured the founding of the settler colony and the production of the colonial city. While the form that this takes has evolved and represents distinctive modes of modern governance, geopolitics and sociospatial arrangements, I argue that we need to place contemporary governance of public space and the displacement it entails into relationship with the City’s founding exclusions. As such, I have charted the long history of displacement within ‘Victoria’ to illustrate how contemporary practices of eviction and displacement, policing and surveillance are part of a longer history of dispossession whose techniques have evolved but whose objectives remain the same, the seizure of Indigenous land and the maintenance of White and settler hegemony through the construction of abject racial spaces like the reserve or the ‘slum’ and through the dehumanization of 133 marginalized subjects. I want to make clear how the processes of exclusion, displacement and the management of public space extend back to the City’s very founding and evince clearly colonial logics in the form of civilizational and racial discourses and rhetoric; narratives of progress and modernity, stories of race, difference and the need for spatial management of racial alterity. The racial management of urban space has a long history in Victoria and cannot be disentangled from colonization or these racial logics. If we do not place displacement, policing and eviction in this deep colonial context, they can appear as separate or distinct issues. Producing urban and public space as White and colonial through law, displacement and exclusion has a deep history here as elsewhere. The displacement of people experiencing homelessness does not simply parallel this colonial history, it extends it (Ellis-Young 2022). They are part of the same processes across a wider continuum, a longer genealogy (Miller 2020; Masuda et al. 2020). People experiencing homelessness within ‘Victoria’ are disproportionately Lək̓ʷəŋən and Indigenous whose parents and grandparents also experienced forms of displacement and racialized exclusion in the city. What connects these processes is the overarching structure of settler colonialism. We can map a concrete throughline from the exclusion of Lək̓ʷəŋən people from urban space to the dispersal and displacement of communities experiencing homelessness on stolen land today. Strategies of abjection and dehumanization are being reformulated to target communities that are seen to be disordering to urban space today. These communities are often the same, or interpellated in homogenizing ways through colonial discourse that associates Indigeneity and homelessness in ways that facilitate dehumanization and expanded policing. Yet, despite all of these efforts to transform the city into settler space, it remains characterized by the presence, labour and spatiolegal imaginaries of Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, evidencing particular forms of Indigenous urbanisms and mappings (Goeman 134 2014; Dorries 2023). While mapped, propertied and renamed as Victoria, the city also remains Metulia and Lək̓ʷəŋən people continue to assert their jurisdiction and stake claims to urban belonging and identity. 79 79 Reuben Rose-Redwood (2016) has written incisively about the mapping function of naming and renaming Indigenous territories, in order to stake claims and naturalize occupation. 135 5 ‘Victoria’s Crown Jewel’: Meegan, Gardens and Settler Revanchism 5.1 Introduction “Attention was immediately called to a landscape, almost as enchantingly beautiful as the most elegantly finished pleasure grounds in Europe” -George Vancouver (quoted in Oliver 2010). On March 18, 2020, the Province of British Columbia declared a public state of emergency in response to the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic. While the state of emergency interrupted daily life for all those living in so-called ‘British Columbia’, it had particularly severe effects for those experiencing homelessness or housing precarity on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory. Shelters and social service providers shut down or limited service and the city conducted a series of street sweeps in the name of ‘public health and safety’. This would lead to the establishment of an encampment in the City’s largest and most famous park, ‘Beacon Hill’, the space originally named in Lək̓ʷəŋən as Meegan. Cheryl Bryce explains that this place name means, ‘a place to warm your belly’ (CBC News 2018). This encampment would be the subject of an eviction campaign by settler NGOs and ‘concerned citizens’ in which colonial legal systems were called upon to legitimize displacement, policing and spatial banishment during a period of extreme duress for some of the City’s most marginalized residents. In this chapter, I introduce us to the palimpsestic space of Meegan and ‘Beacon Hill Park’, the meanings with which the park was imbued, and why sheltering there precipitated such a vociferous response from local residents. After the City’s move towards ‘deferred enforcement’, people lacking other available sheltering options began to seek shelter (and community) in Meegan looking for spaces that would keep them safe during the initial dark days of the pandemic. While encampments 136 were also established at other parks like Topaz and Central, the community at Meegan was the largest and most contentious due to the Park’s symbolic place in residents’ urban imaginaries. By the summer of 2020, a lively community had formed at Meegan. Yet, it did so under immense pressure from housed residents and NIMBY NGOs. In the heated moment of the pandemic and the longer history of settler colonialism, Meegan became an ideological terrain in which certain structuring concepts on which settler colonial societies rest, ‘nature’, parks and public space, were contested and refigured. The Park is a dense nomospheric space, a site of legal pluralisms and overlapping jurisdictions, in which spatiolegalities are made and remade through the everyday practices of urban residents and their interactions with systems of law and governance (Delaney 2010; Valverde 2009). Delaney (2010:25) describes the nomosphere as “the cultural—material environs that are constituted by the reciprocal materialization of ‘the legal,’ and the legal signification of the ‘socio-spatial,’ and the practical, performative engagements through which such constitutive moments happen and unfold.” Honed over several decades in the subfield of legal geography, the concept of the nomosphere challenges us to break down divisions between space and law, encouraging us to understand them as not only intersecting but indivisible and mutually constitutive (Delaney 2010; Blomley 2014; Yip 2021). ‘Nomospheric investigations’ then ask us to inquire “under what conditions, and with what consequences is that domain of the social that is identified as ‘law’ spaced or spatialized, how is it worlded?” (Delaney 2010:8). The struggle over the park is part of the everyday sociolegal landscape in which law and space are articulated and given meaning; ‘worlded’. This struggle tells us not only about how urban space is constituted and governed, or how marginalized communities are regulated and policed within public space, it illuminates how structures of settler colonial power are felt, experienced and 137 reassembled within the city (Bhandar 2018; Million 2008). To accomplish this, I look at the everyday legal practices through which Meegan is ‘wordled’, including settler constructions of the pictureseque, the imposition of parks management regimes, and, importantly, the gendered, ongoing and everyday practices of Lək̓ʷəŋən caretaking, a practice that I understand as the expression and exercise of Lək̓ʷəŋən law. As Val Napoleon (2007:3) argues, “law is something that people actually do. Indigenous peoples applied law to harvesting fish and game, the access and distribution of berries, the management of rivers, and the management of all other aspects of political, economic, and social life.” As Napoleon (2007:1) argues, law is not only the formal, centralized and deliberate systems associated with courts, legislation and enforcement. It is also the everyday actions through which law is given life and meaning. As such, I have tried to attend to the everyday practices of law that index ongoing Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and shape Meegan as a nomospheric space in which law and space are mutually constitutive. Lək̓ʷəŋən caretaking practices are a part of the legal orders that constitute Meegan as dense and heterogeneous place. 80 Throughout this thesis, I argue that struggles around the right to shelter and to public space evidence particularly settler colonial logics that require investigation. In the previous chapter, we witnessed the historical ways in which the settler colonial city was produced through racialized and gendered exclusion and Indigenous dispossession and how this has informed contemporary governance. Here, I look at settler constructions of ‘nature’, the picturesque and urban parks, particularly ‘Beacon Hill Park’, to understand how these spaces are given meaning 80 Recognizing my own positionality, I have tried not to impose my own interpretive frameworks on Lekwungen caretaking practices; to overburden them with translation into another legal register. As such, I have generally avoided applying the robust literature on Indigenous legal orders to these practices (Napoleon 2007; Hunt 2013; Borrows 2019; Christie 2019). I have neither the knowledge, relationships nor authority to attempt such a project. That said, I believe that it is important, at the very least, to acknowledge and recognize these practices of expressions of law, which is what I have attempted to sketch here. 138 and foster settler attachments to place. 81 In this chapter, I chart a representational history of Meegan and provide context for the web of actors, processes and histories that work to constitute Meegan as nomospheric, a dynamic, shifting and socially constructed place in both a legal and lived sense. If the last chapter addressed the production of urban space, following the work of Indigenous scholars and critical geographers, here I am concerned with place (Goeman 2008; Larsen, Wildcat and Johnson 2017; Banivanua-Mar and Edmonds 2010; McKittrick and Woods 2007). What feelings is place invested with? How do the co-constitution of space and law work together to produce place through the practices of ‘legal technicians’ like FBHP’s in their anti-sheltering campaign (Delaney 2010)? How does the space continue to be shaped by the everyday enactments of Indigenous law practiced by Lək̓ʷəŋən women? I focus on Meegan because of its powerful symbolic and affective presence within the urban space of Victoria and the material ways in which it came to be at the center of encampment support during the pandemic. Much of my organizing and community work was located there. Understanding the dynamics that work to produce Meegan as a place, the meanings with which it is imbued, and what it represents for settler citizens, helps us to better understand the struggles over the space. This analysis helps to explain the strong drive of settler citizens towards forms of what I describe as settler revanchism. In this chapter then, I trace the history of ‘Beacon Hill’, unpack the centrality of parks, gardens and colonial landscape narratives in Victoria and analyze what the space has come to signify for settler citizens, to better 81 I use the terms Meegan and Beacon Hill throughout, but I do not use theme interchangeably. I use ‘Meegan’ to refer to place, and the totality of relations and that constitute it. I use ‘Beacon Hill’ to refer to the park, and the parks management regime with its specific bureaucratic infrastructure and governance regime that has been imposed on that space. Thus, I use ‘Meegan’ in the expansive sense and ‘Beacon Hill’ or the Park, in the more circumscribed or specific sense. 139 understand the attachments to place that would drive attempts to displace the community sheltering in Meegan. 5.2 ‘Welcome to Victoria, BC’s City of Gardens!’ “Victoria has a lot vested in its appearance to the outside world, whether it's flower baskets or clean streets.” “It doesn't line up for tourists to come to this town that's beautiful and puts money into a lot of cosmetic things and then see people with no water living a block from the main street.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). Victoria occupies a unique position within the Canadian settler state and its apparatus of governance. It is the capital of ‘British Columbia’, the locus of provincial governance and authority, yet eclipsed in size and economic influence by its neighbour, ‘Vancouver’, on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh territory. It runs primarily on tourism and the infrastructure of governance, rather than industry. Presenting a coherent and attractive image of the city is vital to its economic success. The city’s colonial history is deeply entwined with its urban character. Tourism Victoria (2024) trumpets the city as “the most British city in Canada”, continuing that “our rich history holds deep ties to the British Royal Family, and Victorian period architecture, landmarks, heritage and tradition found across the city make it a popular destination for history buffs and Royal Family fans alike.” Central to these tourist ad campaigns is an emphasis on its settler history, colonial aesthetics and British ambience. ’Victoria’ is a place where colonial history is actively marketed and celebrated (Smith 2012). This history is, of course, denuded of the violence which constitutes it, and reduced to quaint markers of ‘Britishness’; tea rooms, tweed, double decker buses, Victorian Period architecture, a fixation on the Royal Family and a passion for English Gardens. Part of the City’s draw is its association with this truncated telling of history in which the violence of colonialism is transformed into something quaint and genteel, a consumable narrative available for both visitors and residents. 140 Settler residents have internalized and are fiercely protective of this domesticated image of colonial history; an aestheticized tableau that obfuscates the City’s bloody history and the violence necessary to maintain settler colonial hegemony and occupation. 82 Spaces like ‘Beacon Hill’ are seen as an exemplars of Victoria’s ongoing connection to Britain and its celebration of colonial history. FIGURE 4 GREATER VICTORIA HARBOUR AUTHORITY. (VICTORIA’S OFFICIAL WELCOME SIGN IN THE INNER HARBOUR. THE ‘SIGN’ IS A BED OF FLOWERS, PRODUCED AT GREAT EXPENSE, YET LINKING THE CITY’S URBAN IDENTITY TO ITS ASSOCIATION WITH GARDENS.) 82 No mention in the City’s official histories of the dispossession of Lək�ʷəŋən and WSANEC peoples or the violent transformation of their lands and waters, nor an accounting for the city’s role as the epicenter for the smallpox epidemic that devastated Indigenous communities in 1862 (Van Rijn 2006). Instead, we are regaled with heroic tales of coal magnates and land grabbers like Robert Dunsmuir, responsible for building the popular ‘Victoria’ attraction Craigdarroch Castle, but who made his fortune from coal and from large swaths of land stolen from Salish nations, granted to Dunsmuir for the construction of the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway (Ekers 2023). Land grants which he promptly sold to private interests alienating it from local nations. Or stories of Emily Carr, the idiosyncratic and proto-feminist artist who painted local landscapes devoid of Indigenous presence or haunted by their ghostly presence, either erased, invisible or dying out (Hunt 2023). 141 Important in the construction of the City’s identity has been an emphasis on gardens, and particularly, the English Garden. Victoria is informally dubbed the ‘Garden City’, another aspect on which the city officially markets itself in a global economy to tourists and prospective residents. 83 ‘Victoria’ prides itself on the amount of green space the city encompasses, from larger parks like ‘Beacon Hill’ to smaller tracts of land and community gardens, particularly native gardens. In Victoria, parks, gardens and green space are understood as uses of land with indisputable moral value and part of the urban fabric of the city. 84 As Reuben Jentink (2022:29) argues, the City’s self-image “relies on the vast manicured lawns fronting the Provincial Legislature buildings and the Empress Hotel or the lavish gardens at Butchart and Abkhazi.” Gardens and urban green space are understood to be a part of what makes Victoria, ‘Victoria’. Parks and gardens are associated with forms of propertied leisure, sustainable living and genteel repose that are expected to appeal to Victoria’s normative demographic often jokingly referred to as ‘newlyweds and nearly-deads’ (Hawthorn 2023). 85 In short, parks and gardens are another way of narrating the city’s colonial history and are critical to its ongoing economic viability. Gardens are at the heart of the city’s ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ urban character and how its populace understand themselves as ‘green’ urban citizens. ‘Beacon Hill’, in particular, is seen as 83 Gardens can be big business. In 2022, as a part of ‘Canada’s national Year of the Garden, Victoria hosted the International Garden Tourism Conference, that aimed to capitalize on the “abundant possibilities for gardens and the tourism sector to collaborate to enhance the appeal of gardens as well as destinations, especially post-pandemic, thereby attracting more visitors.” The Year of the Garden initiative itself was a corporate and government collaboration likely involving millions of dollars. 84 Not to mention, economically valuable as part of what makes Victoria one of ‘Canada’s most livable cities’, a metric which directly translates into economic power. 85 The extent to which this demographic still applies is up for debate in the context of a housing crisis in which families and young people who do not own their homes are increasingly under market pressure to move to more economically viable cities. 142 the highest and fullest expression of the City’s preoccupation with green space, the English Garden and colonial landscape architecture. 86 As the largest park in Victoria and a dominant presence in downtown space, covering over 183 acres, ‘Beacon Hill’ occupies an outsize position within Victoria’s urban tableau. It is often described as the ‘Crown jewel of Victoria’s park system’. The Park includes “natural areas, many of which are environmentally sensitive, culturally sensitive areas, manicured greenspace, horticultural areas, two sports fields, a golf putting green, a baseball diamond, a cricket pitch, a lawn bowling pitch, outdoor fitness equipment, tennis courts, two playgrounds and spray parks. As well there is a children’s petting zoo, a music performance stage, a maintenance yard, pathways and roadways, artificial ponds, sculptures and monuments and a story pole” (Beacon Hill Park Trust (Re), 2022 BCSC 284:7). As we can see from this extensive list of features and amenities, contrary to framings that position the park as an untouched or fragile ecological habitat, the space is actually highly developed, but in the tradition of English gardens, in ways that are meant to still present as ‘natural’, to integrate with the landscape while providing amenities for leisure and recreation. The Park is a powerful exemplar of a kind of manicured ‘nature’ which settler residents understand themselves as possessing proprietary claims to and incorporate into their own senses of self as urban citizens (Cronin 2011; Loo 2007). As the largest park in the city, ‘Beacon Hill’ is prized for the urban green space it provides. It inflates property values, attracts investment into the affluent neighborhoods which surround it and entices economically valued tourists from outside the city. The Park has always been embedded within systems that deploy nature as a mechanism of economic development 86 It should also be noted that the public park or garden was historically not a space of universal public access, but rather was structured by classed, gendered and raced exclusions. 143 (Safransky 2014). Yet, while the park is cherished for economic benefits it provides, it is also highly valued as an affective space which is seen to be representative of the city and deeply tethered to settler senses of self. It is a source of pride for city residents, and for many, the Park metonymically symbolizes the city itself. As the City of Victoria’s website states, “Beacon Hill defines the very essence of Victoria”. Symbolic of the City as a whole, this ‘Crown jewel’ is often pushed into service as a barometer for the City’s health and vitality in toto. One anti-sheltering advocate described the Park as the “canary in the coal mine” for the whole city (Change.org 2020). The park is seen as both representative of the values around which residents orient themselves but also as a site of intense anxiety and vulnerability, a space open to incursion or misuse from ‘unruly’ populations. As the ‘Crown jewel of Victoria’, ‘Beacon Hill’ is heavily scrutinized and policed not only as a material space, but also for what the space symbolizes and how it serves to index settler heritage and articulations of urban value. While people also sheltered at Central Park, Topaz Park and around Rock Bay, it was Meegan which drew the most ire from housed residents and symbolized the conflict that would develop over public space and the question of sheltering. Indeed, many of those opposed to sheltering in Meegan seemed more concerned with its symbolic and affective, rather than material, registers. Many complaints about sheltering came from housed residents living outside of Victoria who admitted that they no longer or rarely accessed the Park. It was the idea of allowing sheltering in ‘beautiful Beacon Hill’ and what this communicated about urban space and settler order that enraged them, not any material impact that such a decision would have on their daily lives. Settler claims to the park were in excess of what it materially provisioned, grounding instead, on an affective desire for order, control and authority, and a vengeful drive to punish and expel ‘unruly’ subjects seen as not belonging to the urban community (Bosworth 144 2021). I argue that it was this sense of settler order which was seen to be threatened by sheltering within the park, not simply a convenient or practicable green space within the City. Sheltering in this symbolic space indicated a social and political system under threat. Yet, for those seeking to access the Park for shelter, its importance could not remain solely on this semiotic register, it was a pressing material need in a time of extreme privation. To understand how and why the park became such a site of affective investment, we must return to the Park’s founding and development. 5.3 Meegan: ‘A Place to Warm the Belly’ “Beacon Hill was once a camas field, and it became this British kind of, gardens, and then it became an encampment. So, in all these ways, it's like, what's the underlying value of those lands? And why weren't Lək̓ʷəŋən people being consulted in that space and that use?” -Lacey Jones (personal communication). In Lək̓ʷəŋən, the area of ‘Beacon Hill’ is named Meegan, alternatively ‘warmed by the sun’ or ‘warmth in the belly’ (CBC News 2018). This place name refers to the eponymous hill’s gentle sloping towards the sea and the camas beds that it shelters. The Lək̓ʷəŋən built and maintained a palisaded village dating to over 1000 years ago up until 300 years ago on the site (Songhees Nation n.d.). The village was placed to access the abundant resources available in the area and to provide a strategic vantage point to monitor people entering the Salish Sea. Meegan, and its surrounding area, was a space for reef-net fishing at Muqwuqs (known colonially as ‘Macaulay Point’), and clam shell and crab harvesting at Whosaykum (the area known as ‘James Bay’). Songhees knowledge holder, Cheryl Bryce, (Bryce and Corntassel 2012) describes Meegan as a ‘managed landscape’, an area distinctly shaped by Lək̓ʷəŋən governance and relations. Lək̓ʷəŋən presence is notable across the landscape, due to its distinctive meadow ecology produced by prescribed burns and evident in the burial mounds that map the area 145 (Mathews 2014; Lowther 2022). Yet, this history is overwritten through the imposition of a parks management regime that attempts to transform Meegan into a space of settler leisure invisibilizing the labour that produces this ‘natural’ landscape. Meegan’s history of Lək̓ʷəŋən governance is vibrant and ongoing. It is an important site for the harvesting of camas or kwetlal, a staple crop for Lək̓ʷəŋən people. While visually striking for its flowers, kwetlal is harvested for its starchy bulb, a primary source of carbohydrates and an important component of Lək̓ʷəŋən, W̱SÁNEĆ and many Salish peoples’ diets (Joseph 2023). 87 Kwetlal meadows are managed through selective harvesting and ongoing care and cultivation (Joseph and Turner 2020). Management of kwetlal (spánanexw in the Skwxwú7mesh language) involves “developing a reciprocal relationship with the plant based on an understanding of what encourages it to thrive and what its thresholds for shade, fire, harvesting, and competition with other plant species are” (Joseph and Turner 2020:10). To facilitate kwetlal growth, Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples utilized prescribed burns to clear the meadowlands and add valuable nutrients to the soil. Burning provided space for kwetlal to grow without encroachment from coniferous trees and clearing promoted growth and eased the process of cultivation and harvesting (Corntassel 2024). These practices of tending to kwetlal are what gave the landscape its particular character and appearance as open meadowland. They were also a means of embodying Lək̓ʷəŋən legal orders and practicing law in the everyday. Yet, this labour was obscured in the accounts of early colonists describing the space as an untrammelled or untouched ‘wilderness’. 87 Kwetlal was also a major economic crop, traded from so-called Oregon all the way up the Northwest Coast for oolichan grease, clams and other staples (Joseph and Turner 2020). Kwetlal then also linked Lək�ʷəŋən people to other nations and embedded them in relations of diplomacy, exchange and reciprocity. 146 Importantly, the space was produced through an explicitly gendered form of labour. Kwetlal meadows are managed by women as a gendered form of responsibility and held by specific families (Corntassel and Bryce 2012). Cheryl Bryce explains that it “usually it was the head woman of a family that would oversee the work that had to take place on the land throughout the year. Bringing people in to help with the work on the land, for- whether it be harvesting or preparing sites, and she would decide who, how it would be divided amongst those who came to help and within the family, and how it would be traded” (Corntassel 2024:42). Bryce also illustrates that “it was our role as Lək̓ʷəŋən women to harvest camas and those are things that went with your family. Your family would be known to harvest these areas” (Down2Earth 2010). A family’s right and responsibility to particular areas was recognized and respected by other families and communities. Kwetlal areas were often characterized by stones and brush cleared and piled to ease the process of digging and cultivating the bulbs. These piled stones and brush came to serve as markers of particular families’ use of the space (Turner and Hebda 2012). Stewardship over specific areas established certain families’ jurisdiction and authority. Stewardship then is deeply political, establishing particular responsibilities to land and territory. Caretaking the space was, and is, an active legal practice. As Napoleon (2007:3) argues, “law is one of the ways we govern ourselves.” Law is a “collaborative process—something that groups of people do together” (Napoleon 2007:4). Caretaking in Meegan was a part of how the space was organized, resources were distributed, authority established and exercised, and relations maintained, that is, an active expression of law. Indigenous scholars like Napoleon (2007) and Sarah Hunt (2014) encourage us to ‘unbox’ law; to see it as operative outside of colonial legal systems and embedded in everyday yet complex practices like the caretaking of kwetlal. As Hunt (2014:199) argues, “what is needed, then, is not new actions but a 147 shift in the way law, space and society are theorized such that the ongoing everyday enactments of Indigenous law become recognized. “Governance is deeply intertwined with the cultivation and care of kwetlal. 88 Lək̓ʷəŋən relations to kwetlal and the gendered labour required to care for the plant distinctively shaped the landscape and are inextricably wrapped up in the governance of the space. As W̱SÁNEĆ knowledge holder Beangka Elliott (Spotlight Features 2020) explains “the way we connect to land, the way we connect to our foods… our teachings are wrapped into all of those things”. Kwetlal holds a position within a complex nexus of governance and social, cultural and legal organization. A relationship with kwetlal is fundamental to the social organization of Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples and to the landscape and character of Meegan. 89 Meegan then is a nomospheric space, of governance, relation and interaction between humans, plants, animals and non-human entities. Law and space are clearly inseparable here. Lək̓ʷəŋən women actively and daily embody law and governance through their stewardship of kwetlal in ways that work to produce Meegan as a place. As Songhees knowledge keeper Cheryl Bryce explains, the meadowlands are “a ‘managed landscape’ living artifacts of my ancestors that require constant interaction” (Acker 2020). Yet, the labour and agency of Lək̓ʷəŋən women as legal actors would be erased in colonial representations of the space. The ‘untouched nature’, 88 Yet contemporarily, settler authority disregards and effaces such jurisdictions particularly through the imposition of a homogenizing conservation regimes and parks management. 89 Colonization and urban development have depleted kwetlal to 5% of its original area and private property regimes and parks management have effectively criminalized much of its harvesting (Corntassel and Bryce 2009). Disruption of the kwetlal food system led to breakdowns in cultural transmission and a disordering of the complex set of relations that constituted Lək�ʷəŋən and WSANEC governance and political orders. Lək�ʷəŋən women’s role in governing and stewarding the nation’s staple crop was devalued undermining their position within community governance and initiating a shift towards forms of patriarchal authority (Corntassel and Bryce 2012). As Cheryl Bryce explains, the loss of kwetlal food systems “has led to cultural loss and the destruction of roles and responsibilities within the Lək�ʷəŋən community. For example, “the Lək�ʷəŋən people have seven major families each with food resources, roles, and an area of land. However, because of colonial encroachment, gender roles relating to traditional land management and harvesting have been disrupted and fishing and planting areas governed by particular families have been encroached upon by settler populations” (Corntassel and Bryce 2012:158). 148 the picturesque landscape, that drew settlers to establish a fort and later a city, in Metulia, that appeared so amenable to development, was actually a document of thousands of years of stewardship, care and law between the Lək̓ʷəŋən and their lands and waters (Corntassel and Bryce 2012). The reason the space was seen as so eminently appropriable to settlers is because it was already extensively, yet sustainably, cultivated by Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples who cleared the area to harvest kwetlal. This contributed to what Jill Casid (2005) describes as the ‘fiction of the found’, the ideological assumption that the landscape that colonizers encountered was somehow ‘naturally’ available, simply awaiting settler development and improvement, rather than a political, legal and living landscape already governed and storied by Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples. The cultivation of kwetlal and the management of the landscape was what initially drew colonizers to Lək̓ʷəŋən territory where settlers storied the space as ‘undeveloped’ and awaiting the hand of colonial improvement. 5.4 Appropriation and the Picturesque “The area is a natural park; noble oaks and ferns are to be seen in the greatest luxuriance; thickets of the hazel and the willow, shrubberies of the poplar and alder are dotted about. One could hardly believe that this was not the work of art… we were astonished by all we saw.” -Berthold Seeman, naturalist aboard the HMS Herald on encountering Lək̓ʷəŋən territory in 1846 (quoted in Gough 2023:40). Accounts of early colonists described Meegan through ‘imperial eyes’ unable to see or understand the geo-legal relations or labour of Lək̓ʷəŋən women that had gone into producing this environment, relying instead on the aesthetic convention of the ‘picturesque’ to describe the storied landscapes that they encountered (Pratt 1992). The picturesque was an aesthetic convention for representing landscape coming out of the Romantic tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries and the work of painters like Claude Lorrain (Lutz 2020). It emerged in a particular historical moment under a set of social, economic and political relations and contained culturally 149 situated understandings of ‘nature’ informed by European concepts of property and wilderness. Postcolonial scholars like Mary Louise Pratt (1992), Jill Casid (2005) and Denis Cosgrove (2008) have worked to illustrate the logics of capitalist relations and colonial accumulation that subtend the picturesque as an aesthetic category. The picturesque initially developed as a means to portray the manors and country estates of the English landed aristocracy. Communicating possession and ownership of a landscape to an audience assumed to be landholding men who commissioned such pieces was a central function of the picturesque. As Jeff Oliver (2010) argues, “according to the aesthetic ideals of Romanticism, popular among society’s so-called better half, landscapes fell into one of two extremes: Cultivated, bounded, and harmoniously gradualist landscapes were considered picturesque and beautiful, and because they were knowable and could be held or contained by the eye, they evoked a sense of calm. At the opposite end of the spectrum, wild and rugged landscapes were considered sublime. In stark contrast to cultivated settings, their vastness was unbounded, awe-inspiring, and even frightening, beyond the imagination’s capacity to comprehend”. The picturesque then is a ‘way of seeing’, of representing and understanding the world, deeply informed by colonial and capitalist relations (Berger 1973). The picturesque then was a document of a particular form of social relation; the capitalist relation allowed by the exploitation of workers and peasants in England, the colonization and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the slave and indentured labour of Black and Brown bodies in the colonies. It was a document of ownership and possession produced for the edification of the propertied class. The picturesque provided a means of visually appropriating the landscape while obscuring the exploitative relations through which this landscape was produced (Casid 2005). In surveying the landscape, the viewer was understood to claim to it. As 150 Penelope Edmonds (2010a:96) argues, “the picturesque was, thus, a harbinger of settlement” in that it worked to apprehend Indigenous territory and imagine its future development into colonial property. Following Mary Louise Pratt, Jill Casid (2005) argues that the picturesque empowered the imperial subject as a ‘seeing I’, an agentive actor who makes claims to territory through the process of apprehension, converting that territory into the familiar aesthetic categories of colonial societies. The natural features which early colonial actors understood as picturesque were those that could be developed to mirror the English countryside, the plantation and the colonial estate. They were deeply tied up with capitalist relations and modes of colonial accumulation. In the colonial context, this way of seeing converted the ‘foreign’ landscapes that colonizers encountered into recognizable forms with legible features (Dillman 2015).It is this convention that early colonizers used to describe Lək̓ʷəŋən territory, placing the landscape within established aesthetic categories that facilitated its appropriation, but not recognizing the gendered labour that went into producing this landscape. Early colonists often mobilized the language of the picturesque. In 1798, George Vancouver described the coastline he encountered on his journey in his journal, “I could not possibly believe any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture. Stately forests pleasingly clothed its eminences and chequered its vallies; presenting in many places, extensive spaces that wore the appearance of having been cleared by art” (quoted in Lutz 2020:110). The picturesque in its very definitions blurred the boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘art’. Yet, Vancouver still claimed in his journal that “he had no reason to imagine that this country had ever been indebted for its decoration to the hand of man” (quoted in Lutz 2020:112). As Jeff Oliver (2010) argues, “Vancouver’s gaze rhetorically desocialized the Aboriginal landscape and recategorized it in the language of the picturesque, not unlike Rousseau’s 151 celebration of the noble savage who lived in harmony with nature instead of controlling it.” Vancouver concluded that the area was “as enchantingly beautiful as the most elegantly furnished pleasure grounds of England . . . A picture so pleasing could not fail to call to our remembrance certain delightful situations in old England” (quoted in Lutz 2020: 110). The picturesque helped to render the landscape familiar, placing into the aesthetic categories of Romanticism and in relation to the English landscape, “transforming terra incognita into an overtly British space” (Oliver 2010). Indeed, on receiving dispatches from its colonial agents, MP Edward Ellice, claimed that “from all we have heard of it is a kind of England attached to America” (Gough 2023:40). Lutz (2020:112) argues that these early accounts of the picturesque were shaped by an epistemic blindness, “the astonishment of these European visitors that such a picturesque country existed independent of human manipulation was related to their discursive and cartographic emptying of the land.” Early colonizers’ assumptions about civilization and racist framing of Indigeneity foreclosed the possibility of understanding the landscape as cultivated, cared for, or a legal space even as this fact stared them in the face. Upon arrival, James Douglas claimed that “the place itself appears a perfect ‘Eden’ in the midst of the dreary wilderness of the Northwest Coast and so different in its general aspect from the wooded rugged regions around, that one might be pardoned for supposing it had dropped from the clouds into its present position” (quoted in Edmonds 2010a: 95) Divine intervention was more legible to Douglas than the careful and creative efforts of Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples in producing the landscape. For Douglas, the area “was picturesque, reminiscent of aristocratic estates at home, and available for appropriation and immediate use” (Lutz 2020:120). The area’s similarity to the English countryside and differentiation from the ‘dreary wilderness’ that surrounded it, was what initially drew colonizers to the place. The Park’s historian Janis 152 Ringuette (2009) argues that “anyone with an English background was culturally trained to find such a landscape attractive.” Yet, they could not understand this land as occupied in meaningful or political ways, crafting utopian narratives around it through the framework of the picturesque rather than simply recognizing the Lək̓ʷəŋən labour which produced the space. A range of explanations is offered to avoid an acknowledgement of Lək̓ʷəŋən labour and relations to their territory, and many of these early colonists describe the space in terms that seem to anticipate its transformation into a park. 90 If early colonizers relied on the paintings and aesthetic conventions of the picturesque to inform their visions of Lək̓ʷəŋən territories, they also produced particular images through their narrativization of the space. As Lutz (2020:111) argues, “by seeking, selecting, and describing only those aspects of what they saw, these British observers were creating a landscape for themselves and for their audience in Britain. Not only was this landscape familiar and safe, but it was also a landscape accessible only to the nobility in England. Here, settlers drawn from the English middle classes, as they themselves were, could live like lords.” From its outset, the land was understood in ways shaped by colonial knowledge systems, aesthetic categories and expectations. The framing of the space as a natural ‘pleasure ground’ that erases the work and presence of Indigenous women continues to inform the colonial governance of ‘Beacon Hill’ today naturalizing settler occupation through the erasure of Indigenous authority and stewardship, particularly Lək̓ʷəŋən women. This labour, these people, simply fall out of the frame constructed by the picturesque as a way of seeing (Hunt 2023). 90 Lutz (2020) notes that many contemporary accounts of the territory of the time already described it as ‘natural’ and a park, reminiscent of the estates of England’s aristocracy. This allowed them to easily imagine the area’s colonization. Its development into a park was seen as a fait accompli, colonial aesthetics guiding urban development. 153 5.5 Restorying the Land Through Landscape Architecture and Design “The arrangement I propose, would disturb as little as possible any of the existing trees, exposed rocks or other natural beauties of the site, as I consider that much of the ground would be spoilt if cut up or greatly altered from its present appearance.” -Landscape architect, Henry Creswell, describing his rejected plan for the design of ‘Beacon Hill’ (quoted in Ringuette 2009) The development and landscape design of the park was another means of ‘writing’ the space. After the fort was completed in 1843 and the city had begun to develop, the land that would become ‘Beacon Hill’ was set aside by James Douglas in 1858 who was by then HBC Governor. The park was initially developed haphazardly, incorporating features like a bandstand and a horse track but retaining is ‘rustic’ or ‘natural’ character. While the space had been set aside as a park, it was characterized more as a commons without many of the infrastructural features associated with park design or landscape architecture today. It was formally conveyed to municipal governance through a colonial land trust established in 1882. Looking to further develop the space, in 1889, the city hosted a landscape design competition calling for plans to beautify and embellish the Park (Ringuette 2009). While the competition was initially won by local architect Henry Creswell, the contract was eventually awarded to Scottish landscape architect John Blair. Blair’s plan was contentious as it sought to definitively alter the ‘natural’ character of the Park transforming the space from a commons to a pleasure garden and ornamental grounds. Blair’s plan was more ecologically invasive, entailing the removal of Garry Oaks, the creation of a large lake and the cutting of a road to the top of the Park’s eponymous hill (Ringuette 2009). 91 It is not clear why Blair’s plan was selected after Creswell had already won a city-sponsored design competition. Yet, I speculate that Cresswell’s plan was eventually 91 Popular opinion appearing in the Times Colonist claimed that the “park needs very little ‘improvement’ indeed. Nature made it beautiful and the corporation need not expect to improve upon nature” (quoted in Ringuette 2009). 154 jettisoned because it did not sufficiently mark the territory through ‘improvement’ thereby distinguishing it from uncultivated ‘wasteland’ (Di Palma 2014). In contrast, Blair’s plan staked proprietary claims to the space by dramatically altering it according to the values of English Romanticism and the georgic aesthetics in vogue in the period (Williams 2014). During the Victorian period, Blair’s design likely appeared more modern and aligned with the goals of a nascent settler colonial city to ‘improve’ the landscape and beautify the young city. The embellishment and development of the park was intended to communicate specifically colonial ideals of urban dwelling and urban life, stake a claim to the territory and position the city on the forefront of emerging forms of settler colonial urbanism through reference to the traditions of landscape design and the nascent urban parks movement in so-called ‘Canada’. 92 Blair’s design would align the city with the urban parks’ movement in vogue in other settler colonial metropolitan areas. Ron Williams (2014) situates the park’s design firmly within the tradition of English landscape design and the emergent urban parks movement stating that the park featured many of the environmental archetypes that characterized the work of Frederick Olmsted and his designs at Central Park in New York and Mount Royal in Montreal. Developing a monumental park like Beacon Hill was a means for the City to stake a claim to membership in an emergent network of settler colonial cities that included metropolises like Toronto, Chicago, Montreal and New York. Beacon Hill’s design and the parks movement generally, was deeply informed by the georgic aesthetics of Romanticism. The urban parks movement was a part of the emergence of centralized city planning which sought to engineer the city and shape urban subjectivity through the practice of planning. The industrializing city was seen as a space of vice, degradation and moral decay and parks were framed as attempts to rehabilitate the city and 92 This included Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, High Park in Toronto and Stanley Park in Vancouver. 155 reform urban subjectivities through communion with nature, a revitalizing force in the ideologies of Romanticism. Parks were seen to counter the deleterious effects of urban living and were also understood to be projects of moral reform and spiritual uplift. As Sandra Cooke (2022:349) argues “rooted in the theories of such advocates as Olmsted was the belief that parks could counteract the poor living conditions that the working class endured by benefiting their moral, mental, and physical health through contact with nature.” Parks also provided a forum through which urban residents could begin to understand and imagine themselves as part of a shared community of urban subjects. Parks then were fundamental to the production of urban citizenship and the ‘imagined community’ of the city (Anderson 2016). Parks hailed a settler public into being, by establishing a shared set of cultural values and providing a space in which to practice and actualize those values and imagine a sense of commensurability with other urban denizens. Yet, they were also expected to reform the unruly or disorderly urban poor. The urban parks movement was also understood as a movement of moral reform, one which sought to engineer urban subjects according to the tenets of liberalism and the set of values and affects that accompanied Romanticism (Rifkin 2014). As such, parks often had lofty goals and proponents utilized grand liberal rhetoric to explicate and define their projects. At the opening of Stanley Park, on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh territories, Fredrick Arthur Stanley, the Governor General of British Columbia, decreed that the park was for “the use and enjoyment of peoples of all colours, creeds, and customs, for all time” (quoted in Kheraj 2013:63). Yet, despite this liberal rhetoric, Stanley Park was established through the dispossession of Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh peoples and Kanaka Maoli communities who made their home there and were displaced by the imposition of parks management (Barman 2005b; Kheraj 2013). 156 Stanley’s decree elided the violence of the territory’s capture, occupation and renaming by invoking its utility for a universal public of liberal subjects. ‘Public’ access then was produced through distinctly targeted forms of dispossession. Parks never fulfilled this liberal promise, indeed, never intended to, continuing to be shaped by the precondition of Indigenous dispossession and racialized exclusion. At the same time as the urban parks movement mobilized the language of ‘Universal Man’ and liberal ideology, the establishment of parks management regimes was often the very technique through which displacement and dispossession of Indigenous and racialized communities was effected. 5.6 Engineering the Settler Citizen through Landscape Design “[The settler] adopts the love of land and therefore thinks he belongs to the land. He is a first environmentalist and sentimentalist, nostalgic for vanishing Native ways”. (Tuck and Yang 2012:16). The urban parks movement was fundamentally biopolitical, an attempt to engineer certain subjects, to produce and direct life towards certain ends (Million 2013; Dietrich 2017). Beacon Hill’s landscape design and planning also pursued such ends attempting to craft a normative settler subject, to give meaning to settler subjectivity and hail a shared community of urban colonial citizens under the banner of the Canadian nation. Blair’s design was influenced by Olmsted and relied heavily on the aesthetics of the English garden and the ideologies of Romantic thought. The English Garden, in contrast to earlier traditions of landscape design, was intended to integrate with the landscapes on which they were developed, rather than impose a rigid or symmetrical sense of order. Yet, it still marked possession through landscaping projects and normalized settler occupation. ‘Beacon Hill’s’ design followed this pattern. 93 Through its 93 It should be noted that this does not mean that the English garden’s design did not entail dramatic projects of relandscaping. They did. However, the English garden was intended to mask this very process; to present the 157 references to English landscape architecture and the English Garden, the Park’s design signaled an ongoing connection to Britain and the valorization of the colonial project, while also modeling a unique ‘Canadian’ sensibility produced through the experiences of ‘pioneering’ the rugged West Coast (Helmreich 2002). In its amalgamation of quintessentially British features of landscape design with the topography and plant species of the Pacific Northwest, ‘Beacon Hill’ is indicative of how settlers strove to forge a unique national and regional identity that differentiated the emerging Canadian state both from local Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples whose land use was disparaged as ‘backwards’ or ‘unproductive’, but also from the imperial metropole which the emerging settler nation sought to distinguish itself (Stoler 2009). 94 Nascent Canadian aesthetics strove to incorporate local features, both ecological and cultural, into its own vision of the picturesque that laid claim to territory through landscaping and ‘improvement’ and sought to establish a distinctive Canadian subjectivity (Mawani 2004). The English Garden, understood as a form of harmonious and constitutional design, was an ideal means of achieving this and naturalizing colonial occupation. In ‘Beacon Hill’, manicured gardens and lawns with transplanted species and quintessentially British features like a cricket pitch, share space with native species like Garry Oaks, camas and yellow montane violet, telling a particular story about colonialism as ‘improvement’ characterized by ‘harmony’, drained of its bloody history (Casid 2005). Jill Casid (2005:9) garden as a functional integrity and a natural outgrowth of the landscape, even as this process required invasive and labor-intensive forms of land development. 94 In analyzing James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Tuck and Yang (2012:16) describe the series’ main protagonist, Natty Bumppo as a product of cultural hybridity fashioned on the masculinist frontier: his cultural hybridity is what makes him more ‘fit’ to survive - the ultimate social Darwinism - better than both British and Indian; he is the mythical American. Hawkeye, hybrid White and Indian, becomes the reluctant but nonetheless rightful inheritor of the land and warden of its vanishing people.” I argue we see this orientation in nascent attempts to construct regional and national identities, differentiated from metropole and periphery. 158 argues that colonial landscaping often presented itself, not as the violent imposition of settler occupation on Indigenous lands, that is, the overt and explicit exercise of power in rewriting the landscape, but rather as “an organic outgrowth in harmony with the place”. The transformation of the park from the managed food system of Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples to the curated landscaping of colonial power and settler leisure is made to seem natural and organic; stadial and evolutionary. Colonial landscape design that sought to integrate with local features and topography aimed to efface the exercise of power and quite literally naturalize occupation. Part of this effort was to normalize colonial presence on Indigenous land and territory through projects that rendered the landscape familiar by shaping the land to align with the georgic aesthetics of Victorian colonialism. This ideological maneuver is what Casid (2005) describes as the ‘domestication of the foreign’ into an already familiar model through the imposition of landscaping techniques and representational strategies legible to English settlers. Casid argues that this process captures the ‘exotic’, unique native species and topography, and brings them within the purview (and authority) of empire as domesticated and claimable. This allowed settlers to feel at home in occupied and foreign territories. Landscape design brought these new territories into the imagined geographies of the settler nation. Landscaping Meegan as an English garden or ‘pleasure ground’ according to the tenets of English landscape design is a proprietary act, but one that disguises itself as altruistic and harmonious (Hermer 2002). The park is rendered a symbol of the magnanimity of settler colonial projects, a beautiful space provided by the city and open to the ‘public’. The park and its careful manicuring work to establish settler attachments to place by rendering it familiar and emblematic of the legitimacy of settler colonial projects, their ability to improve the landscape through hybridity. As David Delaney (2014:253) argues, “feelings are constitutive of place and placemaking”. For settlers, if 159 it feels like home, it is. The development of the park encouraged these feelings of home fostering a powerful attachment to place. Seemingly benign practices like landscape design worked to naturalize occupation in ways that continue to resonate today as ‘Beacon Hill’ continues to exert a powerful affective pull for settler residents of Victoria. The ‘domestication of the foreign’ also included the appropriation of truncated forms of Indigeneity that could be incorporated into nascent Canadian subjectivities and productions of urban space. The Park also houses a Kwakwaka’wakw totem pole carved by Mungo Martin, David Martin and Henry Hunt. The pole was commissioned and installed in 1956 in a meadowed area of Park’s well-trodden southeast corner, visible from great distance and with commanding views of the Salish Sea. According to reports, over 3000 people attended the pole’s raising (Ringuette 2009). The pole was also mobilized as a resource in establishing a distinctive ‘Canadian’ national identity. Settler societies, while driven by a logic of elimination, also attempted to mobilize Indigeneity and local features as resources in processes of subjectivation which sought to construct a distinct national identity through processes of self-Indigenization (Tuck and Yang 2012; Morgensen 2011b; Leroux 2019). As Patrick Wolfe (2006:389) argues, “on the symbolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence— from the mother country.” Settler aesthetics then attempt to appropriate Indigeneity to naturalize occupation and shore up distinctive subjectivities differentiated from the imperial metropole. 95 The decision to site the pole at Meegan was understood as highlighting the ‘cultural heritage’ of the space. Yet, the Kwakwaka’wakw pole stands on Lək̓ʷəŋən territory in a space 95 Arvin, Tuck and Morrill (2013:20) put this bluntly when they state that “settlers played Indian because it helped illustrate their difference and independence from Great Britain”. 160 with little recognition of the Songhees and Esquimalt’s ongoing jurisdiction. The totem pole is a unique marker of Kwakwaka’wakw governance, but distinct from Lək̓ʷəŋən cultural production and expressions of political authority, law and governance, contributing to the homogenization of Indigeneity and to the continued erasure of Lək̓ʷəŋən authority in this place. 96 Incorporating aspects of homogenized Indigenous culture, like the Kwakwaka’wakw totem pole, detached from their political groundings and networks of meaning, worked to buttress settler claims to belonging by framing Indigeneity as a decontextualized and floating signifier, another unique feature of the landscape that settlers could stake a claim to. Indigeneity itself is appropriated as the cultural patrimony of settlers, a resource the settler nation can use to distinguish itself from the imperial metropole, and rendered as a picturesque part of the landscape, yet one which is detached from the laws and political authority of actual Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples whose territory the Park occupies. As Arvin, Tuck and Morrill (2012:19) argue “the non-Indigenous desire to “play Indian” may seem like a passing trend, but it is actually a fundamental condition of life within settler colonialism, as settlers continuously seek to capitalize on what they understand as their country’s own “native” resources, which include Indigenous cultures and peoples themselves”. Indigeneity is pressed into service as a resource through which settlers secure belonging and naturalize occupation. In this way, the foreground of Lək̓ʷəŋən authority is made into the background of a colonial picturesque, transformed into a homogenized representation of Indigeneity, aesthetically pleasing, yet not politically threatening. This ‘backgrounding’, the 96 Indeed, totem poles are not part of the legal or political traditions of Salish cultural production. As Musqueam scholar Jordan Wilson (2019:2), explains Coast Salish people carved house posts or house boards, “historically, house posts were typically part of the interior structure of Musqueam and other Coast Salish communities’ longhouses, used to support often-massive crossbeams.” These house posts “can perhaps best be understood as a type of monument, at once memorializing a specific ancestor, while stating the ongoing inherited rights associated with that ancestor (Wilson 2019:2). Totem poles are not a part of the lexicon of Coast Salish material production and are culturally and politically distinct. 161 forcible rendering of Indigenous peoples as part of the landscape, and the subsummation of Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction, turns forms of governance and political authority into expressions of ‘culture’ and divorces cultural production from the politics of governance. It is settlers who are framed as responsible for stewarding the cultural patrimony of Indigenous peoples understood as disappearing before a wave of colonial encroachment (Baloy 2016). Under this appropriative and homogenizing spatial imaginary, “the pre-existing cultural, social, and political relationships with these landscapes simply disappear” (Hunt 2023:23). The specificity and difference of Lək̓ʷəŋən or Kwakwaka’wakw modes of governance and relations, the actual relations which constitute Meegan as a place, simply do not matter before colonial uses of Indigeneity to establish belonging and control (Vizenor 1998). 97 The unique flora and fauna, topographical and geographical features of Vancouver Island, and truncated expressions of Indigeneity were rendered as resources which settlers could lay claim to in efforts to foster distinctive identities and root themselves in place. Thus, the valorization of native species in Meegan like camas, yellow montane violet and Garry Oak, and the circumscribed acknowledgement of Indigenous cultural production evidenced in the Kwakwaka’wakw story pole located in the Park, become important sites of transit through which settlers establish belonging and rationalize occupation as beneficent and harmonious (Byrd 2011; Hunt 2023). Paradoxically, the very species and habitat that the park had destroyed through its development and relandscaping, camas and Garry Oak, would be pressed into service as 97 Indeed, in 1933, a paradigmatic simulacrum, a replica ‘Indian village’ was suggested for the Park. An editorial in the Times Colonist argued that “such an exhibit could easily be erected in concrete and made so realistic that the materials of construction would deceive anyone at a casual glance...A tableau in concrete of the Indians, their homes and mode of life would give a realistic impression to visitors of the older forms of civilization on this continent, and would certainly be a unique exhibit” (quoted in Ringuette 2009). Similarly, the Royal British Columbia Museum, founded in 1886 during the Park’s first extensive development is also located nearby on a Lək�ʷəŋən village site. Part of the Museum’s draw is to showcase the many stolen possessions and belongings it holds from Lək�ʷəŋən communities and nations up and down the coast. Efforts to mobilize Indigeneity and Indigenous material production to distinguish and market the City have a long and troubled history here. 162 representative of a national and regional aesthetic that framed settler identity as hybrid, distinguished from the metropolitan subject by their knowledge of the unique landscape of the Pacific Northwest; a knowledge that was assumed to encompass familiarity with the flora, fauna, topography and Indigenous art and cultural production of the coast, if not actual Lək̓ʷəŋən people. 98 Highlighting local features like camas or Garry Oak in the Park’s design and incorporating circumscribed and decontextualized forms of Indigenous cultural production worked to frame settlement as organic and harmonious, naturalizing the violence of occupation. This protracted history of attachment means that the park is deeply tied up with settler constructions of self. The plantation of English botanical species and the narration of landscaping as harmonious and syncretic both mirrored and enabled the ‘plantation’, the rooting in place, of settler subjects, as both natural and desired. 99 This is how an urban park can become so deeply tethered to settler subjectivity, an identity predicated on particularly violent and dominating relationships to place and peoples and thus, prone to particular anxieties and existential crises (Kotef 2020; Carleton 2017; Storey 2016). Parks facilitate an identification with ‘nature’, seem to establish belonging (Goeman 2013). Through the veneration and sanctification of ‘natural’ spaces, settlers make claims to belonging that naturalize occupation and work to obscure the violence of settlement. Reuben Jentink (2022:59) describes this drive as a form of eco-nationalism in which settlers distance themselves from colonial complicities by “taking a great interest in the imagined neutrality of the support and cultivation of local native ecosystems”. The association with the preservation of native species or local ecosystems allows settlers to 98 Indeed, through the work of anthropologists like Franz Boas, Indigenous art of the Northwest Coast became globally recognized symbols of settler colonies (A.Simpson 2018). 99 It is no coincidence that other projects of colonization, like the colonization of Ireland and Ulster were also described as plantations. Colonizers are seen to root themselves in place through forms of ideological and material labour. 163 symbolically plant themselves in place. To align oneself with native species and to identify strongly with ‘natural’ spaces is to make a claim to nativity, to intertwine the figurative roots of settler belonging with the material roots of native species producing a hybrid but emplaced subject. In framing the Park as an ‘organic unity’ and staking a claim to the protection of camas, to yellow violet montane, to Garry Oak, and other endangered or threatened species, settlers position themselves as the rightful guardians of these species, simultaneously staking their own right to belong, erasing their complicity with the bloody colonial history that allows them to articulate such a claim in the first place (Bousfield 2020). Settlers often mobilize a connection to land or the environment to rationalize occupation through what Tuck and Yang (2012) describe as settler nativism or settler adoption fantasies. Tuck and Yang (2012:15-16) argue that “settler fantasies of adoption alleviate the anxiety of settler un-belonging.” This crafts a revisionist history in which settlers not only belong, but they also frame themselves as the rightful inheritors of Indigenous practices of stewardship, having ‘perfected’ the values that they associate with Indigenous land management through communion with a depoliticized and abstracted ‘nature’ (Nadasdy 2005). As Sarah Tlalilila'ogwa Hunt (2023:22) argues through these discursive moves, “settlers seek ways to identify themselves with nature without needing to confront the violence of Indigenous dispossession underpinning their mobility across these landscapes.” Identifying with ‘nature’ and associating settler subjectivity with it was (and is) a powerful means of naturalizing colonial claims to territory, affectively locating colonizers in place and disavowing Indigenous dispossession. As Hunt (2023:23) argues, “the spiritual identification with the nature of the forests affirms settler belonging through a type of selective amnesia, allowing the knowledge of Indigenous existence to suddenly fall away because of the good feelings that come from being one with the land.” Colonialism often extends itself through 164 just such ‘good feelings’ produced through a communion with nature. 100 The Park is embedded in the warp and weft of settler structures of feeling and can be seen as a mechanism for producing the ‘good feelings’ about colonialism which settler societies rely on to function through a kind of ‘selective amnesia’, the circumscribed remembering and celebration of particular cultural values, ‘nature’ or the ‘public’, for instance ((Belcourt 2018b; Hunt 2023). 101 However, when these ‘good feelings’ are unsettled or challenged, even remotely, by requiring settlers to unpack their relations to nature or questioning the systems through which settlers come to expect access to ‘natural’ spaces, the response can be immediate and severe. When Meegan became the site of an encampment during the Covid-19 pandemic, I argue that it was framed as an attack on a settler public because the Park had been so central in establish settler attachments to place and rationalizing occupation. Policy or movements that even appeared to unsettle or alter the physical or imaginative characteristics of the park or mediate unfettered access were experienced as deeply destabilizing to settler constructions of self and framed as assaults on the very fabric of urban life, the values of settler polities and the coherence of settler subjectivity (Mackey 2016). The struggle over the park was deeply emotive because of the site’s entanglements with settler identity and ideals. Any political process which threatened to dredge up these issues was forcefully refuted. I turn to the emotional responses to sheltering and the affects that undergird them below. 100 Of course, the production of ‘good feelings’ are not the only means through which settler colonialism is extended. Scholars have also noted how the production of ‘bad feelings’ and settler management of these feelings are complicit in the psychological rationalizations that buttress colonialism (Diabo 2019; Daigle 2019; Belcourt 2018b). This can take the form of ‘feeling good about feeling bad’, where feeling bad is seen as the sole political action required of settlers or be manifested in the solipsism and insularity that ‘bad feelings’ may produce in settler subjects incapacitating political action (Kizuk 2020). The performance or experience of ‘bad feelings’ can also work to foreclose transformative change when not engaged with critically. 101 This is the same process through which the city comes to value and celebrate its colonial history, its British character, its monuments to John A. MacDonald, Captain James Cook and Queen Victoria. 165 5.7 ‘Take Back Our Park!’: Revanchism, Ontological Security and Settler Entitlement “People with money get to have access to trees and ocean and cleaner air, and everyone who is poor will be removed one way or another.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). In The New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith (1996:227) evocatively describes the characteristics of the revanchist city, “it is a divided city where the victors are increasingly defensive of their privilege, such as it is, and increasingly vicious defending it. The revanchist city is more than the dual city, in race and class terms. The benign neglect of “the other half,” so dominant in the liberal rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s, has been superseded by a more active viciousness that attempts to criminalize a whole range of “behavior,” individually defined, and to blame the failure of post-1968 urban policy on the populations it was supposed to assist.” Smith (1996:211) argued that “an unabated litany of crime and violence, drugs and unemployment, immigration and depravity—all laced through with terror—now scripts an unabashed revanchism of the city”. Contemporarily, it is not only crime that is seen to threaten urban order, but also social movements for decolonization, housing justice or racial justice, that are seen as unsettling settler entitlements and patrimony and in need of policing and punishment. Revanchism then threatens these subjects and movements for the ways in which they seem to undo a whole host of privileges and expectations. In Victoria, we are witness to a similar kind of anger and rage, at those most marginalized and impoverished within urban space, who are framed as ‘ruining’, ‘stealing’ or contributing to the urban ‘decay’ of contemporary Canadian cities. The claims of both Indigenous people and people experiencing homelessness are seen to unsettle colonial orderings of urban space and make cities less livable for their ‘proper’ inhabitants. Under conditions of increasing precarity, urban residents from across the political spectrum have 166 become increasingly protective of the rights and entitlements derived from colonization and the unequal distribution of wealth, and vigilant in identifying, classifying and expelling perceived threats to settler colonial orderings of the city and the privileges that attend urban citizenship. All of these histories and meanings coalesced in the struggle over sheltering in Meegan. The issue of sheltering served to reanimate the meanings with which the park is imbued, resignifying and giving the space new meanings in the process. ‘Beacon Hill’s’ historic associations were called upon to rationalize displacement and reassemble settler authority by NGOs and settler citizens opposed to sheltering. As we have seen, ‘Beacon Hill’ is a highly affective space imbued with colonial desire and entangled with settler senses of self. The Park was described in local media as “a sacred and sacrosanct space, a park like no other” (Bartlett 2020). Janice Williams, who ran for city council and campaigned against sheltering in the park, stated in an ad that, the Park is “almost sacred. It is sacred! It’s Beacon Hill Park! It is part of the soul of Victoria” (Janice Williams 2022). It is explicitly made clear that Park is valued for more than its functionality or utility as green space, it symbolizes something else, something ‘sacred and sacrosanct’, in excess of what normative notions of urban green space can contain. What to make of this excess of desire and attachment? In his work on environmental populism, Kai Bosworth (2021) has developed a framework for distinguishing between a settler interest-in-land and a settler desire-for-land. Interest-in-land refers to the economic benefits and material privileges that settlers garner from occupation and Indigenous dispossession in the form of land, property or resources. Residents of the neighborhoods surrounding Meegan certainly had a vested economic interest in policing the space. The value of their homes is directly tied to the Park’s maintenance which works to inflate property values and produce their neighborhoods as economically desirable. Yet, in their 167 ‘advocacy’ NIMBY organizations were motivated by something in excess of strictly economic interest in the park. Bosworth describes this as the desire-for-land, “these are desires that exceed and condition their economic interests-in-land” (Bosworth 2021:666). The desire-for-land is characterized by the linkages between property, subjectivity and agency (Bhandar 2018; Silva 2007). Historically, to own property was to distinguish oneself as a subject; agentive, an actor, rather than as an object, acted upon, affectable, those cast as property themselves (da Silva 2007). As Brenna Bhandar (2018) argues the self-determining actor was seen as actualized through a relation to property. Property was seen as a requirement to be fully in possession of oneself. This is why Cheryl Harris (1993) described Whiteness as a form of property, a means of self-determining that was historically barred from Black communities through their vexed relation to property. Desire-for-land then is an aspiration to position oneself as in charge and self-determining in contrast to the affectability of racial ‘Others’ (Silva 2007) It is a claim to authority, to govern, to decide (A. Simpson 2016). For NIMBY NGOs, the battle was never solely about the Park itself, but what it signified about authority, possession and order. Again and again, opponents of sheltering framed the Park, not only as economically beneficial or utilitarian, but as central to their claims to urban citizenship, to their identity as Victorians. The Park was seen to be indicative of particular modes of ordering urban space and of authority within that space. As we have seen, the Park was understood to help secure settler attachments to place and establish a distinctive sensibility and subjectivity. Processes that were seen to unsettle this attachment, resignifiy the space through different uses, or in any way contest colonial authority were vehemently opposed. While Bosworth examines the private property claims of individual landholders, I argue that we see this same excessive desire in attempts to buttress ownership claims to public space like urban parks. A connection with ‘Beacon Hill’ was 168 part of how residents understood themselves as urban citizens. In staking a claim to the Park, NIMBY residents were articulating a broader political project that was in excess of the material space or its economic benefits. These NIMBY residents made claims to citizenship and authority through the park. Just like Bosworth’s (2021) ranchers who decried that the state treated them ‘like Indians’ in its use of eminent domain, NIMBY residents experienced being ‘acted upon’, a mode of governance associated with racial alterity, as deeply unsettling. Being acted upon was experienced as a form of governance associated with ‘Otherness’ that upset settler senses of self as determining subjects, what Silva (2007) describes as the transparent ‘I’, coding these communities as affectable ‘Others’. The Park became a terrain through which struggles over authority and belonging could be articulated. NIMBY residents expected to enjoy the Park without hindrance. Any impediment to use or access was seen as an affront, a denial of these subjects’ right or ability to self-determine. 102 A logic of possession, the idea that the Park was a colonial entitlement, characterized settlers’ relation to the space (Moreton-Robinson 2015; Kinney 2018). As AJ Withers (2021:34) argues in the context of Toronto, settlers understand themselves to “be entitled – based on the colonial and White supremacist class mythology – to this space and that vengeful pushback is appropriate to “reclaim” it”. 103 Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015: xii) describes this as the ‘White possessive’, “a mode of rationalization, rather than a set of positions that produce a more or less inevitable answer, that is underpinned by an excessive desire to invest in reproducing and reaffirming the 102 This links directly to how antivax movements assembled themselves around the notions that their freedoms were being infringed upon, that they were ‘acted on’, rather than self-determining, an experience alien to privileged White subjects perhaps experiencing this form of state power so explicitly for the first time. Both of these movements mobilized the same logics. 103 This framing inverts the actual process by which the space was transformed into a Park in the first place, through settler invasion and the dispossession of Lək�ʷəŋən peoples. 169 nation-state’s ownership, control, and domination”. Calls to take back the Park were simultaneously attempts to prop up colonial authority and settler entitlement that were seen to be under threat. Moreton-Robinson argues that settler subjects embody White possession. Understandings of ownership, of the right to public spaces like ‘Beacon Hill’ were central to settler subjectivity in Victoria. This unmarked nature of Whiteness and its normative association with possession is central in understanding the vociferous response to perceived challenges to it. For settlers, the assumption of possession is so internalized, so unremarkable, that it comes to be expected, the ontological grounding around which settlers construct a sense of self. 104 It was this ontological security which I argue was unsettled by alternative claims to or imaginings of the space engendered by sheltering. (Stein et al. 2017). This unsettling compelled revanchist responses to reclaim territory seen to be slipping from settler authority. This was captured in the consistent and aggressive calls of urban residents and NGOs to ‘take back our Park!’ Uses like sheltering threatened to make settlers strangers in public space, in the spaces they had (violently) claimed as home (Ahmed 2000). This ‘making strange’ in the places settlers had made home was untenable as it subjected privileged settler subjects to the same processes of racial governance that they had historically mobilized against the city’s ‘unruly’ racial populations. It was seen as treating propertied settlers ‘like Indians’, that is, subjecting them to unilateral forms of governance absent consent (Bosworth 2021). Through this discursive framework, NIMBY organizations and residents were able to frame themselves as the ‘victims’ of draconian even, Machiavellian government. The ironies of such a convoluted position should be evident. The entitlements that attend Whiteness and settler subjectivity under settler 104 In contrast, as Moreton-Robinson (2015:xiii) argues, “for Indigenous people, White possession is not unmarked, unnamed, or invisible; it is hypervisible. In our quotidian encounters… we experience ontologically the effects of White possession.” 170 colonialism and White supremacy were seen to be ‘slipping through their fingers’, a deeply destabilizing feeling which engendered projects of settler revanchism to reclaim both space and entitlement; the right to belong and the right to exclude (Mackey 2016; Bosworth 2021). Spatial projects, like those that aimed to ‘take back our Park’, were simultaneously attempts retrench notions of order and civility deeply informed by colonial logics and to stabilize already tenuous settler subjectivities predicated on violence and riven by anxieties around alterity and colonial illegitimacy. 5.8 Conclusion: Representing Meegan, Rehearsing the Frontier The contestation that ensued over the use of the Park speaks to deep anxieties about urban living and the stability and legitimacy of settler colonial occupancy established through Indigenous dispossession and the city’s constitutive racial exclusions. Increasingly, the ‘good life’ that settler colonialism promises to its normative subjects appears under attack on all sides, the moral basis of settler states challenged by Indigenous land back movements and movements for racial justice like Black Lives Matter, and the viability of settler colonial cities like Victoria threatened by skyrocketing house prices, the disappearance of the middle class and the precaritization of everyday life (Berlant 2011). The foundations on which the settler colonial city is built increasingly appear shaky. Particularly for White settlers, a normative understanding of the world and our place within it appears in jeopardy. 105 Movements aimed at racial justice and decolonization, alongside the ravages of neoliberal abandonment and the precaritization of 105 While never disappearing, scholars have noted how explicit manifestations of White supremacy are increasingly resurgent and normalized within ‘Canada’ in political parties like the People’s Party of Canada or in popular discourse and movements like the ‘Freedom Convoy’ and anti-vax movements (Wasi 2022). My contention here is that the ‘liberal’ version of popular politics has more in common with ‘conservative’ politics than is commonly recognized. What links these supposedly different political orientations is a common grounding in the naturalization of White supremacy and colonial order and ongoing Indigenous dispossession as the necessary precondition of settler polities. 171 everyday life, have destabilized the ‘ontological security’ of settler colonial order, producing anxieties and often leading to aggressive attempts to reestablish colonial order and retrench settler authority (Stein et al. 2017; Berlant 2011). 106 The Park served as a particularly potent and symbolic space for the rehearsal of settler authority against its imagined ‘Others’. 107 I argue that this is why the reactions of housed settlers were so rabid when their expectations of unquestioned possession were unsettled by unhoused people making claims to shelter or Lək̓ʷəŋən people exercising their ongoing jurisdiction through the management of traditional food systems, for instance (Mackey 2016; Corntassel and Bryce 2012). Control over urban space is so hegemonically vested in settler authority and citizens that challenges to it are experienced as shocking, unfathomable and deeply destabilizing. Alternative claims to public space like ‘Beacon Hill’ upset not only their assumption of control of the Park as a particular space, but also the normative ordering of colonial social worlds. If these entitlements can be challenged, what next? If I do not know how the world is ordered, how can I know my place within it? If I do not know my place, how can I know myself? These perceived attacks on settler order incite fears and anxieties of reckoning, revenance and ‘replacement’. 108 This leads to a kind of revanchism in which settler authority must be rehearsed to keep this threatening presence, the specter of disorder, at bay. I argue that this is exactly what was witnessed in the fervent attempts to evict people desperately in need of shelter from the park by local NIMBY 106 As noted, many opponents of sheltering freely admitted that they did not use the Park, what was important was the feeling, what has been described as the ontological security, that the Park belonged to them (Stein et al. 2017). This psychological privilege is one of stability, to expect the world and your place within it to be consistent, settled. 107 Even the City’s supposedly ‘liberal’ mayor, Lisa Helps, participated in this revanchist discourse, stating on her blog, “I wish we could wave a magic wand and give people their park back.” This statement both participates in discourses that framed the park as ‘stolen’ or ‘invaded’ by ‘unruly’ and ‘threatening’ communities and worked to establish and hail who the park actually belonged to; housed settler citizens. The supposedly ‘progressive’ mayor’s position was also revanchist framing the Park as ‘stolen’ by ungovernable communities. 108 Replacement, of course, is increasingly becoming a dog whistle term used by White supremacist groups to stoke hatred and fears. 172 organizations. The contestation over space becomes symbolic and requires expressions of settler colonial authority to pacify and mollify settlers whose understandings of order have been unsettled. Space becomes important not only for its lived materiality, but for what it represents, how it communicates a particular ordering of the world in which Whiteness is not only ascendant but unquestioned. As a ‘nomoscape’, Meegan is produced through the co-constitutive relation between space and law, and the practices of legal actors, Lək̓ʷəŋən women embodying law by tending kwetlal, colonial ‘explorers’ visually appropriating the space through the picturesque, landscape architects imposing colonial aesthetic framework and contemporary municipal bureaucrats governing the space according to parks management regimes. The relationship between these actors, or ‘legal technicians’, is what shapes Meegan as a place, and in turn shapes the practices that occur within it. These histories and practices accrete to render Meegan a ‘dense’ nomoscape (Delaney 2010). To understand how struggle unfolds within and over space, we need to understand the processes by which that space is constituted and the meanings with which it is imbued. Examining what the Park represents for settler residents; how and what it signifies, is critical in understanding how and why colonial authority attempted to retrench and reclaim settler entitlements in spaces seen as under threat from unruly bodies. The struggle over Meegan was about so much more than green space. It was about authority, legitimacy and jurisdiction. It was about how settlers respond when their expectations of dominance are unsettled and their entitlements questioned. It was about the very validity of settler colonial orders and the nature of public space. In this chapter, I have endeavored to lay out some of the ways in which Meegan or ‘Beacon Hill’ was ‘worlded’ as a complex and affective geo-legal space; how it came to have legal and spatial meaning through the erasure of Lək̓ʷəŋən legal orders and governance and 173 through the imposition of European aesthetic categories (Braverman et al. 2014). These factors would come to matter deeply in the tenor of anti-sheltering campaigns, a story to which I now turn. 174 6 With ‘Friends’ Like These: Greenwashing Displacement through Conservation Discourse 6.1 Introduction “These ecosystems are home to more plant species than any other terrestrial ecosystem in coastal British Columbia. Many of these species occur nowhere else in Canada. They are biologically significant and are being destroyed.” “This park is the gem of our city. Why are we spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this beautiful park while allowing the homeless to destroy it while stealing our possessions?” -Save Beacon Hill Park petition, Change.org. Opposition to the encampment in Meegan began to gather steam in the summer of 2020 as the city took half-hearted measures to address the crisis, and citizens groups, NGOs and local media targeted the space with vitriol. Groups like the Friends of Beacon Hill Park (FBHP) began to fundraise and advocate to end sheltering in the park citing both ecological and health and safety concerns. In July, the city sought an injunction to move campers from sites considered ecologically sensitive and into more developed areas of the Park. The FBHP jumped at this opportunity to pursue litigation arguing that banning sheltering in some areas implied that sheltering was legal in other areas, a position they contested. The organization retained legal counsel and prepared to bring a suit against the City. To counter the opposition that was coalescing, the City drafted a petition to the BC Supreme Court seeking clarity into its legal responsibilities under the Park’s trust. In the meantime, the FBHP and its allies pursued a campaign to vilify the community sheltering at Meegan and to seek their eviction. This campaign included numerous Op-Eds, a Facebook page, a Change.org petition, constant calls to police and bylaw, and the active surveillance and harassment of the community by local residents. The FBHP used conservation discourses to justify their calls to ‘take back our Park’ and evict people sheltering-in-place. Native species like Garry Oaks, camas, chocolate lilies and yellow montane violet, were framed as threatened by sheltering and the general safety of the residents of Fairfield 175 and James Bay was claimed to be jeopardized by ‘dangerous’ unhoused community members. In this chapter, I analyze the campaign against sheltering by turning to the ways in which a non-profit organization, the Friends of Beacon Hill Park, mobilized a deeply colonial conservation discourse and understanding of ‘nature’ to not only rationalize displacement of people sheltering in the park, but to present the eviction of the unhoused community as a moral imperative serving to protect both the ‘environment’ and ‘public space’. Identifying the ways in which the FBHP mobilized ecological discourse, I use the term greenwashing displacement to describe this process. This discourse relied on earlier productions of the settler picturesque, the aestheticization of space, and colonial understandings of ‘nature’, while extending and honing these logics in pursuit of ongoing colonial hegemony within urban space. What I am interested in here are the strategies that settler institutions utilize to reassemble colonial governance, rehabilitate colonial authority and pursue revanchist projects which attempt to reclaim material and conceptual territories seen to be under threat in the contemporary moment. Following Brenna Bhandar (2018), I understand contemporary strategies of displacement and control as attempts to reassemble racial regimes of ownership in relation to forms of property and subjectivity seen to be jeopardized by unruly bodies in public space. As Bhandar (2018:9) argues, “the juridical formation that I refer to as the racial regime of ownership requires continual renewal and reinstantiation to prevail over other ways of being and living”. Bhandar describes this process through the framework of ‘recombinant articulation’ to understand how existing structures of power; race, colonialism, gender and property, evolve, interact and reformulate in novel ways. According to Stuart Hall, established articulations of power, “can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to the dissolving of old linkages and the forging of new connections—rearticulations” (quoted in Bhandar 2018:12). 176 How then does colonial governance remake itself and maintain relations of domination in the city today? I argue that the management of public spaces like parks are characterized by emerging modes of governance that combine and interact with older articulations of race, gender, class and colonialism. Anti-poor, neoliberal and austerity governance is rearticulating with older forms of colonial and racial domination in the City’s administration and disciplining of unhoused communities, a disproportionate number of whom are Indigenous. The campaign against sheltering tethered together anti-poor and colonial modes of governance. As Bhandar (2018:14) argues, “recombinant forms of appropriation and ownership, and the racial logics articulated through them, produce uneven landscapes and scenes of dispossession.” Meegan is one such scene of dispossession, an uneven landscape within which the differential effects of reassembled governance produced unanticipated consequences sweeping marginalized subjects into recombinant regimes of racial ownership and rearticulations of the meanings of public space. In the struggle over sheltering at Meegan, older colonial logics and racial regimes; exclusion, settler exceptionalism, racial denigration, and biopolitical management, were reconstituted with emergent forms of neoliberal and austerity governance to rationalize and facilitate dispossession and the reinvigoration of settler grammars of place. In the FBHP’s anti-sheltering campaign, we witness attempts to rehearse and renew colonial authority through a revanchist project in which colonial and racial logics subtend processes of displacement and exclusion to punish and police marginalized subjects and reclaim public space. Revanchist calls to ‘take back our Park!’ were about much more than simply local ecology. They were also attempts to stabilize anxious settler subjectivities seen to be undone when expectations of ownership and unfettered access were unmoored by alternative claims to public space like sheltering (Moreton-Robinson 2015; 177 Bhandar 2018; Mackey 2016). As I will show, the FBHP’s campaign attached the issue of sheltering to projects that sought to reinvigorate colonial governance, reclaim public space and discipline the state’s unruly bodies. 6.2 The Friends of Beacon Hill Park: To (Pre)Serve and Protect The move to allow 24/7 sheltering at Meegan resulted in almost immediate pushback and vociferous opposition from many housed city residents, business associations and NIMBY non-profits who decried that the park had been ‘invaded’ by ‘undesirables’ or ‘squatters’. 109 The Friends of Beacon Hill Park (FBHP), a registered charity and non-profit under BC’s Societies Act, dedicated to the preservation of the park, spearheaded the opposition to sheltering. During the pandemic, this small group exercised a disproportionate influence on municipal politics and the governance of the park. Despite its diminutive size, the City took the group’s claims and the support they were able to mobilize very seriously, eventually filing a petition at the BC Supreme Court seeking clarity into its responsibilities under the trust to delay the FBHP’s proposed legal action. 110 The group began a GoFundMe alongside a Change.org petition and organized a Facebook group, SaveBeaconHill, to pressure the city to reverse its temporary amendment that allowed for deferred enforcement against sheltering in parks. The group used these avenues to garner support, pressure mayor and council, and to fundraise to bring litigation against the City for a dereliction of its duty under the terms of the 1882 trust. The FBHP argued that the 109 This included neighborhood organization and business associations like the Downtown Victoria Business Association whose president described encampments in Centennial Square as a ‘scorched earth policy’, stating that “having these types of encampments in the middle of your commercial area is a terrible decision” (quoted in Derosa 2020a). 110 In personal interactions with city officials, the threat of legal action against the city was utilized to justify the City’s draconian and harmful policies of abandonment. However, they still argued that this outcome was less harmful than what would occur if the FBHP and its supporters were empowered. The mere threat of FBHP litigation then served a regulatory and disciplinary function working to shape city policy and quell more active forms of direct action and dissent. 178 temporary amendment to the city’s bylaws was in contravention of the terms under which the park was conveyed to the city in trust and that 24/7 sheltering in the park would have a detrimental impact on the ecology and native species of the space. As per the group’s website and GoFundMe, “the terms and spirit of the Beacon Hill Park Trust are being compromised and the character and environment of the park is being badly damaged”. Throughout its campaign, the group would work to build an argument predicated on the need to protect the biodiversity, native species, local ecology, and cultural heritage of the space. The FBHP is a small non-profit established, according to its website, in 1989, “to promote and protect the natural & cultural history of Beacon Hill Park”. Its small membership is primarily drawn from residents of the affluent neighborhoods of James Bay and Fairfield that surround the Park and who have a vested economic interest in its preservation and maintenance. 111 The organization concerns itself with the ecological conservation of the park, particularly native habitat, and promoting the ‘cultural’ history of the space. 112 They host guided tours of the Park, facilitate restoration planting of native species, and map and catalogue wildflower species in the area. They also maintain a website with information about the Park’s local ecology, native habitat and colonial history. During the pandemic, they maintained a particularly high media profile, being asked to speak about their opposition to sheltering in almost every article written in the local press. Yet, by their own admission, most of the organization’s work is regulatory, defining and opposing ‘improper’ uses of the Park that could 111 Though it should be said, that not all of their supporters were local residents and often did not personally access the Park or even live in the city. 112 This ‘cultural history’ is almost exclusively colonial, charting the Park’s administrators, architects and superintendents, alongside momentous events like the visits of royalty. 179 be seen to jeopardize or threaten its local ecology and ‘character’. 113 The FBHP’s main role has been conducting advocacy to oppose any changes to land use or park governance that are seen to deviate from those established under the colonial land trust. This has meant opposing all profit-making ventures or any propositions that would alienate portions of the park from ‘public’ use. However, what defines ‘public use’ is often in dispute and the organization’s emphasis on an individual right to access has often conflicted with broader public imaginaries of the space. The FBHP’s members exhibit strong libertarian tendencies towards public use. Longtime member, Betty Gibbens, was noted for demanding ‘public’ access to every inch of the park, and opposing commercialism of any kind, including public festivals or events. Gibbens contested even signs or monuments, and the immensely popular children’s petting zoo, arguing that they impeded an individual’s right to access or enjoy the space. She stated that “the public is supposed to have free access to every part of the Park” (Ringuette 2009). Paradoxically, public amenities are seen to constrain individual access to public space. This orientation continues to characterize the organization’s membership who fervently argue for the individual right to access public space. This has often placed them in opposition to public events like a lantern festival hosted in the Park or a proposed folk festival. 114 Uses which even appear to threaten an individual right to access have been vociferously opposed by the organization. Yet, the public they invoke is most often an exclusionary and atomized one, produced through Indigenous dispossession and settler occupation and seen to be normatively comprised of the propertied 113 More recently, this has involved a shift from practices that jeopardize the ecology of the Park, to anything seen to be in contravention of the Trust. Ecology has become more and more anterior to what are framed as the canonical tenets of the Trust itself. The Trust has moved from being a mechanism that protects native habitat to something whose value is intrinsic, that must be protected itself. I return to this in the next chapter. 114 The FBHP has even contested development outside of the Park fighting against the development of high-rise buildings on its perimeter, arguing that it would alter the area’s ‘character’. 180 residents of the neighborhoods that surround the Park. The FBHP has shown itself to be particularly antagonistic to the exercise of Songhees and Esquimalt jurisdiction, opposing attempts to repatriate land to Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples or establish co-management regimes within the park. In 2015, they opposed the return to the Songhees First Nation of small parcels of land within the park for a proposed longhouse arguing that the transfer would entail the destruction of native plants and habitat and alienate portions of the park from public access (Poverty Kills 2020). It is no surprise then that the group was passionately opposed to allowing sheltering-in-place. The group framed sheltering as environmentally damaging, threatening to local ecology and impeding on individual rights to public access and was thus, an inappropriate use of the space. This led them to frame sheltering as a criminal and antisocial act, prohibited under the terms of the 1882 trust. These positions would guide their campaign and animate their efforts to regulate public space. Even in the exceptional circumstances of a global pandemic and absent other housing or sheltering options, the FBHP called for the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness, the immediate eviction of people sheltering in the park and a permanent ban on all camping in Meegan, a proposal which would likely be unconstitutional under rulings established at the BC Supreme Court. Within the calculus of the FBHP, the protection of certain flora for the appreciation and enjoyment of settlers, was valued higher, was worth more, than the unhoused community’s constitutionally-protected right to shelter and the basic amenities necessary to sustain a life. 115 In this formulation, to borrow Judith Butler’s (2009) framework, native species 115 We can see the settler picturesque at work here, in which the Park’s symbolic function as a marker of colonial possession, is upset by its use for a different utilitarian purpose, sheltering. The picturesque works to frame this land use as ‘unnatural’; as morally repugnant. The settler picturesque, and with it the security of colonial possession, becomes unsettled by the presence of ‘unruly’ communities’ forms of land use which parks management cannot entertain. 181 were ‘grievable’ by propertied settlers, while communities experiencing homelessness were not. The FBHP positioned the space as a ‘threatened landscape’ in need of securitizing through the logics and labour of conservation. Through conservationist discourse they sought to produce ‘Beacon Hill’ as a threatened and rare ‘natural’ ecosystem that required forms of settler stewardship to care for, protect and manage it. This explicitly meant evicting campers from this ‘natural’ landscape to protect native species, biodiversity and local ecology. To understand this orientation, I begin by examining the colonial foundations of conservation. 6.3 “Conservation is Colonialism”: Mapping the Roots of a Hegemonic Discourse “So many white people come to Indigenous solidarity work around the desire to protect wilderness and to prevent resource extraction and harm environmentally. trish 116 calls this ‘free Tibet syndrome’, where we don't actually do a lot of work on local nation relationship building, on support and solidarity.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). The FBHP explicitly relied on the concept of conservation to guide its opposition to sheltering and calls for displacement. Conservation, as a concept and practice, is deeply rooted in colonialism (Ybarra 2018; Vranich 2023, Eichler and Baumeister 2021; Schneider 2022; Whyte 2018). Conservation encodes particularly situated understandings of ‘nature’ that are predicated on Eurocentric divisions between nature/culture and normative anthropocentrism (Eichler and Baumeister 2021; Whyte 2018). Conservation’s objective has often been seen as maintaining an absolute division of nature from culture, “nature management has been seen as a project of protecting the wild against human encroachment (simply put: nature is good, humans are bad)” (Braverman 2023:127). Thus, conservation relies on and helps to produce a dualistic construction of nature as a space set apart, as the antithesis of culture and human activity that facilitates 116 trish pal, co-founder of IHRT and a long-time Indigenous harm reduction activist. 182 anthropocentrism, dominion and mastery (Plumwood 1993). This discourse would be useful as the FBHP sought to evict campers from the park arguing that were damaging ‘natural spaces’ and harming local ecology. While recent moves have been made to decolonize conservation, the outcomes of conservation as a practice have always been deeply uneven, benefitting some while disadvantaging others (Adams and Mulligan 2003; Brockington, Duffy and Igoe 2010; Schneider 2023; Braverman 2023). These practices continue to inform both popular logics and state governance. Recognizing this, Mollett and Kepe (2018:2) ask us to attend to “who is made to sacrifice in the name of sustainable development and biodiversity conservation.” Who benefits and who suffers in broader environmentalist and ecological discourses? In his Op-Ed, “It’s Time to Take Back Beacon Hill Park”, Stan Bartlett (2020) tellingly opens with a quote from environmentalist John Muir, to justify his call for displacement, “everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” Yet, the ‘places to play in’ for housed residents and ‘taxpayers’ (Bartlett chairs a group called Grumpy Taxpayers of Victoria) would come at the expense of people experiencing homelessness. Some peoples’ need for ‘beauty’ would trump others’ need for ‘bread’, the basic necessities to live a life. In the FBHP’s mobilization of the concept, conservation was clearly not a practice intended to benefit everyone equally as they sought to evict campers to retain the Park’s as an oasis for their leisure and enjoyment. Thus, as a practice, conservation is always entangled with questions of power and access. Conservation is not just about preservation of natural spaces, but about who has authority over these spaces, and what practices are seen as legitimate within them. As Mollett and Kepe argue (2018:1), “we can no longer ignore the underlying power relations that displace people and that re-entrench severe social inequalities 183 unfolding in the context, and in the name of biodiversity conservation.” Assuming the neutrality of conservation reproduces its violence. Yet, the perceived neutrality of conservation is exactly why it is such an effective discourse to mobilize. Conservation is normatively understood as a universally beneficial practice, making it difficult to contest and useful in staking claims to territory and authority. 117 Conservation discourse has long abetted Indigenous dispossession. As Megan Ybarra (2018:14) argues conservation regimes and practices evidence the logics of elimination. Conservation “begins with the settler’s wilderness imaginary. Protected areas rest on sedimented histories of settler colonialism that prefigure the death of the indigene from whom we inherit the land”. This ‘wilderness imaginary’ works to unstory and depopulate Indigenous places. The idea of the ‘wild’, the uninhabited territory free from human activity, that is central to conservation has worked to discursively erase and ‘disappear’ Indigenous peoples and abrogate their ongoing authority. Dispossession then is often the effect and even, the intent of conservation (Ybarra 2018; Duffy 2010; Jago 2023). Conservation continues to rely on and revivify narratives of terra nullius that are central to colonization in its drive to protect lands from human activity. Conservation has often been the means of staking a claim to land. From their very beginnings, conservation movements were both acquisitory and exclusionary, founded on ideas of terra nullius and working to claim and protect ‘wild’ lands from human encroachment. Conservation 117 Conservation has never offered a panacea to colonial occupation or the circuits of capital and has more often aided and abetted colonial projects and capitalist imaginaries. Indeed, conservation is understood to require full integration into regimes of capitalist production and circulation and colonial jurisdiction over territory to achieve its aims (Buscher and Fletcher 2020). Conservation regimes and conservation areas, rather than upsetting developmentalist logics, actually fit seamlessly into capitalist orderings of land, territory and people and participate in the erasure of Indigenous peoples. 184 served the dual purpose of claiming Indigenous territory and simultaneously rationalizing settler authority as benevolent through environmentalist discourse (Mollett and Kepe 2018). The establishment of Canada’s first national parks for instance, was a means of entrenching settler claims to territory and was often mobilized to displace and evict Indigenous peoples from their lands and criminalize their relations to place under reformulated management regimes (Loo 2007; Thorpe 2012). Far from preserving natural spaces, parks regimes often attempted to create ‘natural’ spaces of repose and recreation vacated of Indigenous presence in which settlers could escape the increasing industrialization and urbanization that attended rampant colonial and capitalist expansion and engage in forms of leisure through communion with the ‘wilderness’ (Hunt 2023; Jago 2023; Thorpe 2012). Conservation then produces ‘nature’ according to a set of colonial expectations of what ‘nature’ looks like (Cronin 2011). Environmentalist discourse typically rehearses and restages originary acts of dispossession vacating the land both imaginatively and materially of Indigenous peoples through the loaded concepts of ‘wilderness’ and ‘nature’. Conservation then ‘greenwashes’ Indigenous displacement, rationalizing Indigenous dispossession as ecological concern, and utilizes this discourse against Indigenous peoples enacting stewardship, being on the land and exercising sovereignty. It is often a means of protecting the material benefits of occupation, of guaranteeing access to a kind of manicured and consumable ‘nature,’ for settler enjoyment, not of unsettling colonial relations to land. Conservation then is not a disinterested and altruistic practice, it is a means of converting land into a different kind of resource, one which is still expected to provide dividends by prioritizing “ecosystem services for human development” (Santiago-Avilla and Lynn 2020). Contemporarily, conservation continues to hold an ascendant position within the moral economy of parks management (Miles 1995). Indeed, conservation is understood as the 185 very function of parks themselves; to protect natural environments from encroachment and development for the benefit and enjoyment of national publics (Miles 1995; Vranich 2023; Ybarra 2018). Conservation is imbued with a positive moral value; associated with sustainable governance, public access, and responsible relations to land and territory. That conservation will guide land use decisions within parks is understood as normative, its value rendered unassailable. Uses that seem to contradict the values of conservation then are read as incoherent or irrational, even immoral. The moral ‘good’ of conservation is seen to supersede other potential uses, eventually foreclosing the very possibility of imagining other uses or complicating conservation’s function. These logics are also evident in urban parks like ‘Beacon Hill’, where preservation of local ecology, biodiversity and native species was seen as paramount. In its campaign, the FBHP hailed a public that it expected to understand and support the importance of conservation in urban green space. Pitting sheltering against conservation was an effective way to ensure that sheltering became vilified in the imaginations of urban residents. The unquestioned moral value of conservation rendered it a powerful and useful discourse in pursuing projects that attempted to re-establish settler authority and banish ‘unruly’ communities from public space. In its mobilization of conservation discourse, the FBHP proceeded from a foundation that assumed Indigenous dispossession as an accomplished fact and naturalized the transfer of authority from Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples to settler polities. Positioning the Park as wild or natural elided both its highly manicured and managed state and ongoing Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and labour within the space. 6.4 Producing Urban Natures “My analysis could be wrong, but I thought, right from when I moved here [to BC from Ontario] ‘oh, all the activists are in the environmentalist movement.’” “It just feels to me like environmentalists, tenants, Indigenous activism, farmers, all of us. What we're fighting is the same thing. It's the privatization of land and the damage that's done to land and people and systems by those who seek to make profit from land.” 186 -Leslie Robinson (personal communication). The FBHP’s advocacy and anti-sheltering campaign relied on the coherence of the concept of ‘nature’ and the cultural values assigned to this concept under colonialism and racial capitalism. 118 The ‘nature’ that the group hailed was of the picturesque variety established during the City’s initial colonization, one that emptied the land, separated humans from their environment, and erased Lək̓ʷəŋən labour and presence in the territory. Conservation movements often assume the transparency of ‘nature’, without unpacking the ways in which it is socially constructed or the uses to which nature has been put, particularly within settler colonial projects. Instead, these movements frame ‘nature’ as a coherent and immutable object with consistent, objective and irreducible features. Yet, ‘nature’ is anything but asocial. The deeply social and economic ways in which ‘nature’ is constituted through capitalist and colonial relations has been described by Neil Smith (2011) as ‘the production of nature’. In contrast to prevailing logics that argued that “nature is generally seen as precisely that which cannot be produced; it is the antithesis of human productive activity”, Smith (2011:27) argued that ‘nature’ cannot be disentangled from the social and economic modes of relations that constitute society under late capitalism. Nature is not antithetical or distinct from society, but rather it is fundamentally entangled with modes of social relations and produced through labour, both material and discursive (Smith 2011). This was a scandalous contention in a context in which ‘nature’ was explicitly understood as that which was outside human activity. The production of nature thesis illustrates that in the context of the planetary globalization of capitalism, all ‘natural’ spaces are distinctly captured within material relations of production, circulation and value (Ekers and 118 Paradoxically, this conservation discourse attempts to remove humans from the ‘natural’ environment while still requiring intensive anthropogenic management to maintain its ‘natural’ appearance. 187 Prudham 2017). Under intensive systems of industrialization, climate change and environmental harm, there are no spaces untouched by human activity, by the social relations of labour or modes of production associated with capitalism. The production of nature thesis upsets the binary logics through which conservation movements approach their conceptual object: ‘nature’. ‘Nature’ is a discursive object imbued with a range of meanings and signifiers open to contestation and subject to change over time. It is a cultural project which has specific effects in the context of settler colonialism. To say that nature is produced is to destabilize the concept's normative meanings and to trouble conservation movements which rely on the stability and transparency of the concept. For my purposes here, the point is that nature works, it is produced through labour, both material and discursive, and is a form of labour mobilized to a variety of ends. Thus, it can be put to work in a number of differing ways. This production of nature thesis has also been influential in understanding the construction of urban natures, particularly within the field of urban political ecology (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw 2006; Loftus 2012). Scholars have increasingly turned towards theorizing the urbanization of nature and the role of ‘nature’ within urban space (Kaika 2006). 119 However, as Michael Simpson and Jen Bagelman (2018) argue, this literature has been less attuned to the specifically settler colonial characteristics of the urbanization of nature that parks are embedded within. The production of nature allows for the naturalization of distinctly settler colonial relations to land, territory and Indigenous peoples. Yet, the material and discursive creation of an untrammeled and pristine wilderness that aligns with settler colonial productions of terra nullius is less robustly pursued through the production of nature thesis (Simpson and 119 Indeed, this framework to some extent has become so entrenched that we now witness calls to move beyond the urbanization of nature (Tzaninis et al. 2021). 188 Bagelman 2018; Smith 2010). However, scholars are increasingly theorizing the production of urban nature through the analytical lens of settler colonialism (Van Lier 2023; Parish 2020; Van Sant, Milligan and Mollett 2021). In the context of Meegan, ‘nature’ was put to work to empty storied landscapes, to naturalize Lək̓ʷəŋən erasure and to effect displacement and dispossession of Indigenous, poor and unhoused communities. ‘Nature’, native species and ecological systems, had to be preserved from extensive human encroachment in the form of practices like sheltering. Normative ideals of what constitutes ‘nature’ compelled particular responses to social and political problems. Thus, ‘nature’ is not innocuous and cannot be left unexamined. The FBHP forwarded a set of particularly situated articulations of nature to make its case for displacement, namely that nature is a coherent conceptual category, that nature is ‘good’, that nature is threatened by extensive human interaction, and that measures must be taken to protect and securitize nature. These assumptions about nature allowed the FBHP to greenwash displacement, rationalizing eviction as not only necessary, but also morally righteous. The FBHP’s entire political project is grounded on understandings of nature that are left unspoken because of their hegemony. It was precisely the unexamined logics of how ‘nature’ is produced, valued and mobilized that the FBHP relied on to effect and rationalize displacement. For instance, the assumption that nature must be protected from extensive human activity and that relationships with land and the environment should be ones of studied detachment, encouraged the eviction of unhoused communities and the vilification of kwetlal harvesting within the space. Thus, ‘nature’, and the uses to which it is put require critical interrogation to understand the ideological work that conservation does and how environmentalist discourse was mobilized to greenwash displacement and abrogate Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction within Meegan. In pursuing projects of conservation, the FBHP relied on a 189 depoliticized notion of nature that allowed them to skirt the social construction of nature, particularly within an urban park setting, and the uses to which the idea of nature is put, in this context, displacement and exclusion. In constructing Meegan as ‘natural’, the FBHP also produce it as empty and open to appropriation through the claims-making labour of conservation. As Kwakwaka’wakw scholar, Sarah Hunt argues (2023:18), through environmental discourse, “the vision of nature being celebrated today… is, of course, a nature without us”. To (pre)serve and protect is also to stake a claim to both territory and authority, one that abrogates and overwrites Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and uses like sheltering that the unhoused community practiced in a time of extreme stress. 6.5 Securing Conservation, Securing Territory “Fire safety is still the main weapon of the state. You see it in the Downtown East Side, the street sweeps, it's all under the guise of fire safety. [At] Meegan, there was the same ridiculous fire safety and endangered orchids.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). In the view of the FBHP, conservation and recreation were seen to normatively supersede all other uses of the Park and to compel the extension of police power to secure the space (Braverman 2008). This rationale is evident in the FBHP’s promotional materials, press statements and internal documents where they work to justify their preservationist policies by framing the space as ecologically sensitive, that is, particularly vulnerable to degradation resulting from a host of differing land uses. 120 The landscape is consistently positioned as inherently threatened. On their website, the group establishes the Park and its ecosystem as fragile: “Beacon Hill Park, located in Victoria, British Columbia, is home to a diverse range of 120 It is worth noting here how the very imposition of a parks management regime and its historical development and contemporary maintenance have themselves been some of the most environmentally damaging and ecologically disruptive land use practices converting the landscape from a Lək�ʷəŋən food system to one of settler recreation replete with cricket fields, putting greens, a petting zoo, even a maintenance yard. 190 native plant species, some of which are at risk of becoming endangered or threatened. These species include Western White trillium, camas, blue-eyed Mary, and White-top aster. These plants are threatened by habitat loss and degradation, urbanization, and land use changes.” 121 They then establish conservation as a key modality of governance for protecting not only the local ecology but the character and cultural heritage of the park, “the conservation of these plant species is crucial for maintaining the ecological integrity of Beacon Hill Park and for preserving the cultural heritage and biodiversity of the area.” The FBHP discursively produce the landscape as ‘threatened’, ‘at-risk’ or ‘fragile’ to rationalize forms of not only ecological, but also biopolitical management, of the space. Within the FBHP’s online materials, biodiversity, conservation and cultural heritage are placed in ascendant positions within a moral economy that is expected to dictate proper land use. That biodiversity, conservation and cultural heritage will supersede other uses, other relations or jurisdictions, is already assumed. The production of the landscape as threatened works to entrench this. In particular, the Garry Oak meadows that the Park contains were highlighted as sensitive, unique and in need of protection. 122 The FBHP’s website states that “the Gary (sic) Oak Meadows located in Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, BC Canada are an important ecological feature of the park, and are considered to be one of the last remaining examples of this unique habitat in the region.” The group highlights the exceptional status of the Garry Oak in the global sphere of biodiversity, “Victoria is one of the few areas on Earth where the climate is right for 121 Irus Braverman (2017) has written about how law and surveillance converge in conservation movements and threatened species lists like Canada’s Species at Risk Act and how threats and risks to endangered species have been used to justify the intensified monitoring and management of threatened (and threatening) populations, here, the unhoused community cast as environmentally destructive. Conservation then is not neutral or value-free, but rather is intimately tied to the exercise of law, surveillance and policing of humans and human activity. 122 ‘Victoria’ is officially recognized as a ‘Tree City of the World’ for its commitments to the protection and maintenance of urban forests and for fostering ‘treefull’ urban space. 191 this tree.” These species and habitats are framed as under threat and endangered, “the oak savannahs that once covered much of this region have been largely lost due to urbanization and agricultural development, making the remaining patches of Gary (sic) Oak meadows and woodlands in Beacon Hill Park especially important for conservation efforts.” 123 Citing botanist and FBHP member, Dr. Christopher Brayshaw, they go on to explain that “the park is a historical treasure and one of the last refuges in Greater Victoria for some of the area's most delicate and endangered native plants and ecosystems. The Garry Oak tree and the Garry Oak meadow are two prime examples of the plants and ecosystems that the Friends of Beacon Hill Park Society are actively trying to preserve.” Having established the importance of these habitats at a global scale, the FBHP frame conservation as a necessary mode of governance and link themselves with this practice. Only through conservation and its advocates can the natural and cultural heritage of the Park be preserved, “the history of the Gary (sic) Oak Meadows in Beacon Hill Park is a story of conservation and restoration. These unique habitats are an important part of the region's natural heritage, and efforts to protect and preserve them will help to ensure their survival for generations to come.” 124 Through its online materials, the FBHP establishes the local ecology as significant, ties this ecology to the ‘cultural heritage’ of the region and urban identity of residents, and naturalizes the value of conservation as an ethic and mode of governance. The question of loss, of biodiversity, and of cultural heritage, haunts the FBHP’s online materials. These values and resources, which are associated with urban citizenship and settler subjectivity, 123 Yet, no mention is made about how the primary reason for habitat reduction of Garry Oak meadows is the process of settler expansion, or that the Park itself, with its manicured lawns cricket fields and other amenities is also directly responsible for the loss of native habitat. 124 We can note here how the FBHP protagonize themselves as the central actors in the story of Meegan, effectively erasing Lək�ʷəŋən peoples as relevant actors in the constitution of the space. The singular story of the area’s ecology, its sole reason for existence, is framed as conservation and restoration, practices which the FBHP makes authoritative claims over. 192 are understood to be under threat. 125 This notion of ‘threat’ and ‘threatened landscapes’ is a grounding logic for much of the advocacy of the FBHP. 126 These forms of governance rely on the expectation that environments (and their cultural history) like ‘Beacon Hill’ are in a state of constant state of jeopardy and need to be ‘securitized’ through a practice of conservation increasingly entangled with police power. 127 Having established the importance of conservation to not only local ecology but also to colonial order, settler subjectivity and senses of self, through the Park’s cultural heritage, the FBHP then pits conservation against other potential uses of the Park. They establish local features as unique, significant and valuable to both local residents and global biodiversity, and simultaneously jeopardized and threatened by sheltering, a practice that was consistently framed as antisocial, destructive, and disorderly, and by Lək̓ʷəŋən authority, jurisdictional claims that were seen to take the area out of ‘public’ control and are thus self-interested, illiberal and indicative of ‘atavistic’ land use practices and social organization. In reference to sheltering in the Park, the FBHP claimed that “these ecosystems are home to more plant species than any other terrestrial ecosystem in coastal British Columbia. Many of these species occur nowhere else in Canada. They are biologically significant and are being destroyed.” In a letter on their website, the group stated that “the Friends of Beacon Hill Park Society, whose foremost mandate is the protection of Beacon Hill Park, are extremely concerned about homeless encampments… 125 Increasingly conservation is a part of a regime of security governance that characterizes settler states. Conservation is perfectly suited to forms of colonial repossession and revanchism because it is oriented around notions of protection from threat, risk or endangerment (Braverman 2017) Yet, conservation as a part of security regimes and modes of governance is often left unexplored in the literature on settler colonialism. 126 There is a robust and evolving literature about the centrality of security to the settler state that is salient here (Greaves 2018; Pasternak and Dafnos 2018; Crosby and Monaghan 2018; Stanley 2021; Bosworth and Chua 2023). 127 Scholars increasingly note conservation’s intersections with securitization, militarization and police power (Ybarra 2018; Braverman 2023). 193 damaging the very sensitive ecological areas, especially during their most fragile time in the wet season.” This led the group to explicitly state that “our goal is to end 24/7 camping in Beacon Hill Park, and to protect the usability and access to the park for everyone.” This discourse was echoed on social media. On the Change.org petition which garnered 30,436 signatures, people also invoked ecology and conservation in association with the trust to rationalize displacement and draw a settler polity into alignment with the FBHP’s position and normative understandings of the uses of public space: “a trust-chartered park is not a place to house the city’s homeless. It is environmentally damaging both in terms of nature conservation and its function as a safe, clean & aesthetic haven”. FBHP member Janice Williams, who later ran for city council on an anti-sheltering campaign, also weighed in on the petition’s webpage, “use of Beacon Hill Park as a tenting or overnight camping site violates the restrictive covenant that was placed on the park when it was transferred from the province to the city, it jeopardizes ecologically sensitive areas, and poses a health and safety hazard for those using the park inappropriately AND the surrounding community.” Finally, the petition’s host, Cynthia Diadick, who consistently used inflammatory and dehumanizing rhetoric on the page’s updates, also justified displacement through reference to native habitat, “the City's decision has led to a disastrous destruction of the sensitive and rare ecological areas in the park. Some of the damage will take years to repair and some damage will be permanent.” Other users and signatories were blunter in their demands to evict people and critiques of the City’s decision to defer enforcement, with one signatory simply stating, “figure out your homeless issues without causing harm to sensitive environmental areas”. This concern for local ecology often turned to vitriol at Mayor and council illustrating the expansion of the anti-sheltering campaign’s populist political project, “the environmental consequence means the loss of a number of threatened plants and places in it. 194 Such disregard of laws, the Trust and environment is totally shocking!”. Claims to protect local ecology often barely concealed the violence and vested economic interest which underwrote calls for displacement “our parks are for everyone but mainly the Flora and Fauna (sic) who live in the parks…These transients should not be occupying Beacon Hill Park. Get them out, keep them out. We owe it to the Flora and Fauna at risk of being destroyed”. 128 Many signees of the Change.org petition also invoked the well-worn image of ‘Beacon Hill’ as Victoria’s Crown jewel to make their case for displacement, “unbelievable that they would turn the gem of Victoria where children played and seniors strolled into a sewer.” 129 One respondent claimed that city was casting its “treasures to be tromped on.’’ The aesthetic and affective value of the Park was seen to supersede other concerns and explicitly linked to the image of the ‘slum’ established during Victoria’s founding, “we need to be compassionate, and find solutions, but not at the cost of turning a city gem into a shanty town slum.” Finally, the maintenance of publicly accessible green space was also consistently mobilized, albeit through a circumscribed understanding of who constituted the ‘public’. Diadick once again participated in this framing, rallying the community to “demand to have the park given back to ALL the residents of Victoria -especially during the pandemic- when thousands have no backyard or other green space to share with their children and families”. 130 The rights of people experiencing 128 Clearly, the Park was understood to not really be for everyone, despite rhetoric claiming this. The public imagined by these supporters was constructed to decisively exclude particular communities and uses. This kind of discourse worked to construct imagined communities in which some subjects and uses were both ‘unexpected’ and ‘unwelcome’ (Ahmed 2019; Deloria 2004). 129 In their report on encampments Flynn et al. (2022:30) also note this trope that devalues people experiencing homelessness and invokes family values and the particular needs of families, children and the elderly, “some have expressed outrage that parks are being overrun by “criminals” and ‘thugs’ who are taking away the park from people who ‘deserve’ to be in it, namely children and seniors.” 130 Corey Snelgrove (2014) discusses these ‘our’ statements in settler stewardship movements, analyzing how they lay claim to territory as a form of patrimony, and I would add, that they are also understood to normatively exclude certain subjects. When opponents of sheltering argued that the City needed to maintain parks as publicly accessible, they implicitly understood certain people to be excluded from the category of the public. 195 homelessness with nowhere at all to go were trumped by the Park’s ‘proper’ subjects, families, seniors and children seeking aestheticized leisure spaces. These statements illustrate the ways in which people experiencing homelessness were not considered as a part of a broader urban public, subjects that might make a claim to shared urban space. Once again, we see the FBHP’s allies mobilizing a particularly liberal and exclusionary idea of the ‘public’, one predicated on constitutive exclusions and that emphasized an individual right to public space, rather than a collective one. Sheltering was framed as intrinsically antisocial, destructive or criminal, explicitly opposed to ‘public values’. Just as conservation could be used as a means of effecting displacement, the concept of the public and public use, could work to justify eviction. These claims would invariably culminate in the revanchist rallying cry to ‘take back our Park!’. This call was often tethered to nativist claims which attempted to establish forms of authority through the invocation of settler urban history, “give us back the Park that generations of Victorians, as well as visitors, have enjoyed and cherished.” As Samuel Stein (2019:182) argues “the relation between people and places can also take reactionary forms, from exclusionary communitarianism to blood and soil nationalism”. Claims to belonging which naturalized occupation were being refigured and deployed against unhoused communities positioned as threatening and alien. 131 Clearly, we can see possessive logics buoyed by colonial entitlement working here to reestablish racial regimes of ownership seen to be unsettled by sheltering; to reclaim a specifically colonial form of patrimony understood to be taken from propertied residents. From this analysis of social media and popular discourse, we can see how unhoused communities were disciplined and urban green space ‘reclaimed’ through reference to native 131 This, despite the fact, that Point in Time counts illustrate that the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness in Victoria are local, having lived there for more than 5 years, many of them for generations, and many since time immemorial. 196 species and habitat and the rights of the ‘public’ to urban parks. The protection of local ecosystems justified the eviction of marginalized communities in duress. I call this process as greenwashing displacement, rationalizing and rendering dispossession, spatial exclusion and racial banishment normative through the logics of green governance; conservation, stewardship and ecological protection. 132 Ecological management of native species and habitat facilitated forms of biopolitical governance that targeted subjects coded as unruly or disorderly (Parish 2020). In the FBHP’s approach to sheltering, it was to be plants over people, with plants holding a decisive edge in the normative calculus of value for most city residents. The FBHP participated in a practice of moral adjudication which served to prioritize forms of vegetal life and rendered unhoused communities as bare life and disposable. 6.6 Arboropolitics?: Tree Culture, Biopolitical Management and Urban Publics “Even if trees are good for the environment… they are not necessarily good for all people”. -(Braverman 2008:88) 132 As a term, greenwashing is not new and has become increasingly prevalent. Yet, it has not always been attached explicitly to practices of displacement and I use the term in slightly different ways. Scholars have used the term to describe corporate practices that attempt to establish consumer faith in practices or companies that might otherwise appear objectionable through a valorization of sustainability or environmental practices. (Vollero 2022). The literature on green gentrification connects practices of sustainability and environmentalism to displacement (Anguelovski et al. 2017; Martinez 2023). Attempts to ‘green’ urban spaces often result in rent increases and the displacement of poor communities through gentrification as neighborhoods become more expensive, but even advocates for gentrification do not normally explicitly make calls to evict people through environmentalist discourse, preferring to let the market’s violence effect displacement. At Meegan, the FBHP directly made the argument that eviction was necessary to protect and secure ecological diversity in neighborhoods already ‘gentrified’. This differentiates the practice somewhat from green gentrification. What I am gesturing towards here is closest to how scholars of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine discuss greenwashing as an attempt to dispossess Palestinians and secure and rationalize Israeli occupation (Hughes, Velednitsky and Green 2023). Thus, I do not see the term as innovative or novel, but rather as a means of thinking through how environmentalist discourse has been explicitly weaponized against marginalized peoples in urban space. In attaching ‘greenwashing’ and ‘displacement’, I am trying to render their connection explicit in local governance. 197 In the FBHP’S materials and in popular media, sheltering was consistently framed as antisocial, a wilfully destructive act. 133 This was certainly the case in relation to the Park’s famed Garry Oak meadows. Garry Oaks were particularly resonant symbols in the struggle over sheltering. 134 People sheltering-in-place were framed as vandals desecrating a public good, Garry Oaks, and in need of punitive or disciplinary measures. It is often taken-for-granted that trees represent a universal moral good, particularly as it pertains to city planning and urban health (Braverman 2008). 135 Yet, they can also be contentious sites of conflict and negotiation within urban space. As Jessica Parish (2020:263) argues “trees, as symbols of multiple and conflicting social values, are implicated in struggles over gentrification, displacement, and the right to stay”. Irus Braverman (2008) argues that the assumption that ‘everybody loves trees’ can obfuscate the disciplinary function that trees are often put towards. As she (2008:81) argues, “the attribution of morality to tree practices masks the clandestine project of governing the population”. Trees can function to entrench colonial notions of order, manage ‘vagrancy’ and discipline the conduct and presence of unhoused communities in public space. 136 133 This ‘antisocial’ framing was fostered, despite the fact, that the space and process of encampment is deeply and necessarily social and relational. It was ‘antisocial’ only insomuch as it upset established form of colonial order and sociality. 134 James Douglas and early colonizers had valorized the Garry Oaks of the region, invoking them as an “emblem of British strength and resilience” that communicated the area’s suitability for settlement, and even framed this settlement as natural and an imperative (Lutz 2020). Thus, protection of Garry Oaks is not just an environmental imperative, it is a colonial one. 135 Braverman (2008:84) lists a number of ways in which trees are understood by city planners to be beneficial to urban health and vitality: “trees provide a contrast to the harshness of the extensively built environment, thereby mitigating the effects of urban fatigue. Accordingly, urban trees are presented as positively affecting emotional health, enhancing job satisfaction, and increasing the overall quality of life in the city, as well as supporting the emotional attachment of residents to their neighborhoods.” 136 Trees, and green initiatives generally, can be instrumentalized as a rationale for policing particular communities in ways that dramatically impact their health, wellbeing and exposure to institutional violence. As Braverman (2008) contends, trees can be put towards the benefit of dominant groups under the guise of ‘universal egalitarianism’; the idea that everyone loves trees and that trees equally benefit everyone in society. 198 In Meegan, the management and protection of trees and native habitat was utilized by the FBHP to mask attempts to govern unhoused communities coded as ‘unruly’ and to bar or regulate access to public space located in affluent areas that carried significant affective value for urban residents. Calls to protect Garry Oaks worked to naturalize and effect displacement. The discourses around Garry Oaks, their unquestioned moral value, served to disguise the biopolitical uses they could be put towards. While the FBHP’s preservationist claims and ecological discourse were seemingly about managing the ‘natural’ environment of Meegan, in practice these efforts were distinctly about regulating ‘problematic’ populations and ‘disordering’ practices within urban green space. As Braverman (2008:117) argues, ‘tree culture’ “functions as a disciplinary mode of governance for managing urban populations in ways that hide these projects’ more obvious regulatory functions, “the management of trees not only enables, but also masks, the management of humans.” 137 This was certainly the case at Meegan where native species like Garry Oaks were instrumentalized to rationalize the policing, displacement and exclusion of people experiencing homelessness, framing the community’s ways of living, their very presence as ecologically damaging and in opposition to the cultural values of the urban public. Indeed, the very boundaries of the public, who belongs and who does not, were given meaning through such practices and relations to flora like Garry Oaks. In an address to council, Marg Gardiner, horrified, claimed to have witnessed someone sawing a limb off a Garry Oak in the park. Such (alleged) behaviours were seen to require immediate and punitive responses and to call for increased policing of the space. Gardiner went on to claim, “the Park is being lost to the public, the park is no longer safe and sensitive ecosystems are damaged”. Conservation was 137 In her work on the regulatory function of trees in urban space, Irus Braverman (2008:83) describes this as a ‘love of trees’ narrative which “activates and unites subjects, thus forming a collective identity that undermines any other relationship to trees by defining such a relationship as uncivilized, and at times even criminal.” Here, we see how trees are mobilized to cohere a polity that functions in opposition to other potential uses of public space. 199 inextricably tied to notions of security and the necessity for increased policing. ‘Improper’ relations to highly-valued native species like Garry Oak were indicative of the fundamental antisociality of the unhoused community, their unsuitability for admission into the category of the urban public and the necessity for increased policing and discipline. Urban publics are formed through these very practices. The FBHP’s instrumentalization of the Garry Oak united propertied settlers in an imagined urban polity aligned in opposition to sheltering, as a practice that runs counter to established community values of environmentalism, conservation and security. ‘Proper’ relationships to the natural environment based on an ethic of conservation dictate one’s position within urban publics and the ability to make claims to urban citizenship. These practices serve to coalesce the boundaries of the public, to determine who is inside and who is outside the category of the normative urban citizen. The contours of the imagined urban community are defined by this policing of its boundaries. Unhoused communities were framed as ‘antisocial’ for their failure to conduct themselves as proper ecological subjects in their need to provide for the basic necessities of life, like sheltering. 138 Many anti-sheltering advocates decried the ways in which the community engaged in survival strategies like camping in ‘ecologically-sensitive’ areas or using trees for functional purposes like tying off tarps or as protection from the elements. 138 Cultural values and expectations surrounding habitat like Garry Oaks legitimized forms of punitive governance and spatial exclusion for unhoused communities. As an organization, the FBHP took an active role in these forms of disciplinary governance working to police the boundaries of the category of urban citizen through conservation discourses. As Braverman (2008:117) argues “another important aspect of the governance of humans through trees is that it relies on the work of individual city residents and nongovernmental groups as much as it relies on authoritative control mechanisms.” Groups like the FBHP become deputized as legal actors and disciplinarians in the regulation and management of public space according to a set of cultural and colonial values about ‘nature’, land use, green space and the city. The City itself often seemed to ceded its governing power before this small NGO, essentially abdicating its role and governing by proxy, terrified of potential blowback. As Incite! (2017) notes, NGOs and non-profits are increasingly tethered to state power and function to police and manage communities deemed disorderly or in need of biopolitical intervention. 200 The need to protect endangered or vulnerable habitat, like Garry Oaks, was taken-for-granted by the FBHP and framed as incontestable. This logic is so hegemonic that to even appear to contest it renders one criminal, backwards or ‘barbaric’; outside of an imagined community of urban citizens and neighbours. 139 Garry Oaks and native habitat must be protected as ‘society must be defended’ (Foucault 2003). The FBHP hails a propertied and settler public, (indeed, calls this public into being by establishing and policing the boundaries of who can claim membership within the ‘public’ by defining what lies outside of it, the ‘antisocial vagrant’) calling it into alignment with conservation projects framed as morally desirable and opposed to other land uses or communities that would pursue such uses. The protection of Garry Oaks was understood to be indicative of ‘community values’ for local neighborhoods, in ways that excluded unhoused peoples who were seen to act improperly in relation to both sensitive Garry Oaks and the Park more broadly through their survival strategies. To act in improper relation to the set of cultural values that governed Garry Oaks was understood to be evidence of unhoused communities’ unsuitability within the shared category of ‘public’, a feature of the community’s fundamental antisociality. The community was barred from not only the space but also the very category of the public. What this makes clear is that the Park, far from being universally accessible or ‘public’, is actually structured by a set of foundational exclusions and norms around conduct and behaviour that work to define the inside and outside of the category of the public, that decide who matters and who does not, who can belong and who cannot. Not everyone could be considered a Victorian or a ‘neighbour’. Adherence to appropriate practices and behaviours surrounding conservation served to establish the boundaries of urban 139 The language of ‘barbarism’ and ‘savagery; was consistently invoked by the FBHP’s supporters drawing clear links to the racial and colonial undertones to its ideological project. 201 citizenship and who properly belongs within the space of the Park. Yet, structural conditions like homelessness, could make it impossible to adhere to these modes of ‘proper’ conduct causing people experiencing homelessness to be permanently barred from urban citizenship and public space. Basic strategies to stay alive under neoliberal capitalism utilized by poor people are enough to render them criminal, excluded from the category of the public, and banished form public space. For unhoused communities, established civil practices and cultural values surrounding relations to Garry Oaks and the environment did not supersede the importance of survival during the pandemic. This might mean setting up a tent under a Garry Oak for the shelter it could provide, rather than approaching the tree as an object of studied appreciation and aesthetic value. Thus, the structural condition of homelessness compels people into particular relations with ‘the environment’. Discourses surrounding conservation and ‘nature’ work to produce an antagonism to this mode of living; to criminalize or vilify daily acts of survival and to securitize public space against such perceived intrusions. Groups like the FBHP stake claims to membership within an urban polity by aligning themselves with a set of hegemonic cultural values, like the importance of green space, native species or the ascendancy of conservation as a mode of governance. 140 Those that are seen to deviate from these perceived cultural values, who must use and occupy space towards different ends or refuse to adhere to normative values around conservation are dehumanized and denied claims to shared humanity, urban citizenship or access to public space rationalizing expanded police power and punitive responses to precarity. 141 The 140 Yet, they also serve to recursively produce these values through their discursive strategies. 141 A ‘think’ piece written for Focus on Victoria, illustrates this logic that connects environmental discourse to cultural value and presumed superiority. In it, Gene Miller, the founder of the community arts hub, Open Space, contends with the effect that sheltering in Meegan has had on residents’ sense of the city and the ‘damage’ that was done not only to the park but this sense of belonging and emplacement tethering urban health to the space of the Park. He argues that ecological relations, our interactions with green spaces, are indicative of social relations. Writing in a sentimental style, he (2021) claims that the “the fight for ecological limits is really the fight for cultural maturity; and that fight is never won for long.” There is a lot to unpack here. We can begin by making the claim 202 FBHP’s position was clear. Conservation was to be the wedge to effect displacement, and it proved to be a powerful tool. 6.7 From Conservation to ‘Order’: Protecting Settler Entitlements “There's just some brittleness among many white people that I don't understand.” “It felt to me like people kind of imploded into their privilege and that people who had money and housing [said], ‘I'll bake artisanal bread and watch Netflix during the lockdown’. Whereas trish’s 142 first response was to get in their car, get a shit ton of bottled water, and go out onto the block in Pandora. So, that impulse of ‘protect yourself through your privilege’ versus, ‘this is a complete emergency, and even though we can't solve it, what can we do that's useful and needed?’” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). Despite the FBHP’s orientation towards environmentalism, other logics were also at work. Conservation was understood to protect not only biodiversity, endangered species and native habitat, but also an entrenched settler entitlement to appreciate and enjoy those species; to utilize the space for recreation and leisure, valuable resources in rapidly developing cities where ‘public’ green space is seen to be under threat (Parish 2020). Conservation was how a claim was made to space, but what was most often at issue were questions of authority and entitlement. This aligns with what Santiago-Avila and Lynn (2020) describe as the overarching paradigms of that Miller understands cultural maturity with cultural superiority. In Miller’s framing, ‘Ecological limits’ are how a society establishes ‘cultural maturity’, a stadial framing that is directly related to superiority and redolent of colonial rationales for Indigenous dispossession. This is a textbook Lockean and stadial discourse, which understood Europeans as superior through their relation to particular land uses, through their relation to agriculture through their relation to property which framed property and agriculture as the highest and best use of land, that denigrated Indigenous land uses, reformulated to argue that settlers establish their superiority, their righteousness, not through, agriculture through ecological limits conservation. However, the association with ‘cultural maturity’ superiority, with enlightenment, with civilization remains the same. As Miller argues, the fight for cultural maturity is never won for long. This claim indexes and anxiety around the boundaries between civilization and ‘barbarism’. Certain environmental or ecological practices, relations to nature, are how a society demonstrates its superiority. Environmentalism or conservation, the crafting of ‘ecological limits’ that are seen to exclude sheltering in place, are markers of cultural superiority. Thus, the City was seen to degrade its claims to cultural superiority through its allowance of deferred enforcement. What distinguishes a culturally superior society from ‘barbarism’ is seen as under threat in Miller’s framing. 142 trish pal, co-founder of IHRT and a long-time Indigenous harm reduction activist. 203 colonial conservation, the promotion of aggregate biodiversity alongside anthropocentric interests. Conservation does not function to preserve biodiversity alone; it also seeks to serve the interest and needs of human beings and is thus necessarily always a power-inflected process with uneven effects. The subtext of the FBHP’s conservationist discourse was one of entitlement and expectation; who had the right to access and enjoy ‘nature’, to benefit from the Park (Mackey 2016). Conservation satisfies forms of settler edification, to be able to enjoy the literal and metaphorical fruits of conquest and occupation. To smell the flowers, to recline in the shade of a Garry Oak, to relax in a meadow stolen from Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, these are the material benefits of colonial occupation and framed as the rightful patrimony of settlers through the exclusion of ‘unruly’ or dissenting bodies and behaviours from ‘our’ Park. Native plants and habitat were instrumentalized to protect settler enjoyment, not always for their own merits. The subtext of much of the emotional discourse around conservation was that settler enjoyment was often the privilege truly understood to be under threat. The FBHP and their supporters were often less concerned with the environment per se, than they were eager to establish who could continue to have access to the park and to what uses it could be put. This was made explicit in a Capital Daily (Thomson 2021) piece profiling the FBHP which illustrated that “most of the new members are not environmentalists or naturalists like the earlier members.” 143 New members’ concerns were less with conservation or ecological protection than they were with authority and control. These projects were understood to dovetail productively. 144 Yet, the FBHP’s claims 143 The article’s title gives a sense of the crossroads the FBHP finds itself at, “Once-Progressive Friends of Beacon Hill Park Used To Fight for the Marginalized. What Happened?”. 144 Indeed, as ‘concerned citizens’ interested in the preservation and governance of the Park, a group of local organizers attempted to join the FBHP as a public group. Yet, their membership was denied without explanation, in contravention of laws under the Societies and Charites Act that prohibit discrimination. The Board of the FBHP was primarily concerned with retaining power and managing dissent. 204 were still primarily articulated through the discourse of conservation to greenwash the group’s underlying objectives: displacement, exclusion and control. In this sense, biodiversity and conservation function as props within attempts to reanimate colonial orderings of urban space. In pursuing their case, the FBHP mobilized native species towards a different purpose, to protect their right to recreation and leisure space, one established through colonial occupation. This speaks to the breadth and extent of the FBHP’s cultural and political grievances and their distinctly revanchist orientation. 145 The FBHP’s anti-sheltering campaign was always about more than just native habitat even if this is how the organization chose to frame its grievances. The campaign was also indicative of broader political projects that sought to ‘reclaim’ the city, regulate and police public space, and stabilize settler colonial orderings. Sheltering was experienced as so affrontive by the FBHP, not simply because it allegedly jeopardized local ecology, but because it disrupted settler expectations of the space, challenged normative notions of urban citizenship and belonging, and upset settlers’ senses of certainty and possession (Mackey 2016). While not always explicitly stated, the FBHP’s position was fundamentally colonial in orientation, grounded in a deeply uneven set of social relations and shaped by the ongoing structure of settler colonialism and possessive logics of Whiteness (Kauanui 2016; Moreton-Robinson 2015). Sheltering was seen to inhibit settlers from enjoying the material benefits of colonial conquest and ongoing occupation undisturbed. Settlers expected to enjoy this ‘Crown jewel’ of Victoria’, to put the benefits of colonial occupation to use (Bhandar 2018). Sheltering made 145 I want to make note here that I am identifying the FBHP as an exemplar of broader forms of ahistorical revanchist discourses that frame the cultural values of settler society and the privileges accrued through Whiteness as under attack. These discourses tend to position dominant groups as ‘victims’ of shifting values and political landscapes. The FBHP evidence this orientation but are by no means unique. 205 ‘improper’ use of a space, Meegan, which settlers believe they have established a proprietary claim upon through both invasion and the labour of conservation. This understanding of conservation transforms the lively, storied and peopled landscape of Lək̓ʷəŋən territory, into a resource to be possessed and consumed by a settler public situated as its rightful inheritor through conquest, colonial law and everyday practices of recreation and stewardship. As Simpson and Bagelman (2018:565) argue, “the spatio-ecological formations of the city that are produced by, but also uphold and legitimate, settler colonial power must be routinely maintained and enforced by local authorities. Although these arrangements are often policed with overt force, they are even more commonly maintained through everyday acts such as the tending of urban greenspace and discursive acts of representation”. The FBHP understand themselves as rehearsing and re-enacting this claim daily through the labour of conservation and settler stewardship (Snelgrove 2014). The FBHP’s claim, like a proprietary right, was understood as exclusive even as it made gestures towards ‘public’ use. Recreation and leisure, as uses of the Park protected by the labour of conservation, were seen to supersede unhoused communities’ uses of the space and to render their claims to access and occupancy illegitimate. It was in this sense that groups like the FBHP could make the claim that people experiencing homelessness had stolen the park from the ‘public’ through their use of the space. Implicit in this framing, of course, is that people experiencing homelessness do not belong to a polity known as ‘the public’, that Lək̓ʷəŋən people have no authority in the space and that settler title and jurisdiction are completed and indisputable. The discursive production of a ‘threatened landscape’ was subtended by these anxieties around the fragility of settler colonial order, the sense that the entitlements to space, to safety, to smoothness, that accompanied settler subjectivity were no longer guaranteed (Ahmed 2019; 206 Tsing 2005). Eva Mackey (2016) describes this as a ‘settler structure of feeling’, the collective framework through which settlers organize emotion and experience the world. Mackey argues that these structures of feeling are animated by shared legal, ideological and affective logics that are based on senses of ontological security that work to constitute settler subjectivities. Such affects and emotions certainly characterized the FBHP’s campaign against sheltering which was often articulated on an emotional register. The group understood not only local ecology to be in jeopardy, but also the cultural values of colonial society and urban citizenship. The anxiety and fear around alterity in local media was palpable. Thus, while Beacon Hill was seen as a ‘threatened landscape’, vulnerable or endangered, for settlers during encampment, it also became a ‘landscape of threat’, hostile or menacing in the racialized and poor bodies it contained and the ways in which sheltering seemed to undo settler entitlement to public space. 146 In associating themselves with ‘nature’ and its ‘preservation’, groups like the FBHP made nativist claims to the space and positioned themselves as those rightfully responsible for and entitled to it. This right was seen as infringed upon by sheltering. The Park was then understood to be in jeopardy of moving outside of settler authority and jurisdiction and in need of reclamation. Their position then is fundamentally revanchist in orientation. This discourse established the Park as an urban ‘frontier’ and deputized the FBHP to serve a disciplinary and policing function to reclaim territory and re-establish forms of colonial order and orderly conduct within the park and the city as a whole (Safransky 2014; Launius and Boyce 2021). 146 The space was explicitly framed this way in an Op-Ed in local media outlet, Focus On Victoria, written by Gene Miller. In the piece, titled Sensing Loss, written after the encampment had been policed out of existence, Miller (2021) writes about the rehabilitation of the Park after the ‘violence’ of sheltering “the stated objective is to give the park two years to regenerate and free itself of the physical “scars” of intensive camping. What remains unknown is whether two years is enough to wipe the memory of the social occupation of the park from the public’s mind. The park, after all, is not just landscape, but mood, as well.” A sense of ontological security is understood to be unsettled by the mere act of having to share public space with people who are unhoused. 207 Like the ‘racial slum’, the landscape of threat that the encampment represented had to be domesticated to reestablish settler belonging and security. I argue that we need to understand conservation in this context as an instrumentalized discourse intended to mask larger projects of settler revanchism seeking to ‘reclaim’ urban spaces understood to be under threat or disordered by unruly communities and bodies, like the figure of the ‘Native’ or the ‘vagrant’. Conservation served to strengthen the political position of the FBHP, who, while concerned with native habitat, also had broader political aspirations and grievances around urban citizenship, the constitution of public space and the character of the national polity in the settler colony. Conservation was a convenient means of pursuing these broader political projects. This is borne out by the fact that as the trust became more legally defined and actionable, its meanings secured through litigation, the FBHP began to drop the pretence of ecological care, instead emphasizing the value of the trust on its own merits. As precedential jurisprudence was established that affirmed exclusionary interpretations of the trust as a legal mechanism, the FBHP moved from an emphasis on biodiversity and conservation to the language of law and order, claiming that the City had a responsibility to ‘uphold the Trust’. As the trust seemed to strengthen their position against sheltering, the FBHP began to invest more emotional importance into the document itself. The Trust became a site of cathexis, something worth protecting in and of itself and conservation began to wane in importance in the group’s materials. 6.8 Conclusion: Plants over People? “The settler support for anything land based. Like, environmental shit. This settler support is unreal. Like, fuck, dude. Settlers gotta step the fuck up and actually start taking care of the people within their communities.” -Shae Perkins (personal communication). 208 At Meegan, conservation provided a convenient and powerful discourse which could be productively instrumentalized by the FBHP to establish a claim to urban green space and to pursue broader political projects. Environmental discourse was utilized to mask questions of power, who had authority to govern the space; and belonging, who was seen as being legitimately able to access and use the space. As a concept, conservation was asked to do a lot of ideological work to smooth over the rough edges of colonialism and an ongoing war on the poor. In the axiology of the FBHP and its supporters, conservation as a governing rationale unassailably represents the ‘highest and best use’ of the space. Rather than a neutral rationale for the governance of urban green space, conservation was a means of entrenching a claim to that space, through a morally-freighted discourse that represents itself as apolitical and universally beneficial. It was the very incontestability of conservation discourse that enabled the FBHP to establish itself as an authority on issues seemingly outside of the purview of its mandate, the constitutional right of unhoused people to shelter and ongoing Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and sovereignty, for instance. In this sense, settler authority transits through conservation discourse and masquerades in the guise of ecology and biodiversity (Byrd 2011). These discourses then become ways to retrench settler authority in which the violence of occupation is less naked; naturalized as benevolent and common sense. Yet, at Meegan, it was no less devastating for marginalized communities due to this obfuscation. Identifying the ways in which colonial conservation discourse simultaneously targets Indigenous and unhoused communities is another reason for the necessity of thinking housing justice and anticolonialism in tandem. If conservation was more about entrenching forms of colonial power and austerity regimes than protecting native species or ecological habitat, we need a robust understanding of settler colonialism and precarity to combat it. In the end, both Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and the right to 209 shelter would be ruled subject to the logics of conservation and the rights of White settlers to leisure, recreation and enjoyment in the legal cases that followed. People with nowhere to go, were told to go there anyways. 210 7 “In Colonialism We Trust”: ‘Use, Recreation and Enjoyment’, and the Colonial Land Trust in the Courts147 7.1 Introduction “The Trust is in need of some maintenance.” -Janice Williams, FBHP Member, City Council Candidate “Considering the context of Meegan and its importance in Lək̓ʷəŋən history. And the fact that the trust was this, like, all encompassing, unfucking, unmovable force that it was I don't even have the words to fucking describe it. It was so whack. Like, how much that fucking document from, like, 18, fucking 60, whatever, had such an impact on our ability to just provide care for people where they were. -Shae Perkins (personal communication). If, as shown in the previous chapter, the Friends of Beacon Hill Park (FBHP) discursively justified the eviction of unhoused peoples through the rationale of conservation, it pursued its goals through law and litigation by invoking the colonial land trust under which the park was conveyed to the city. 148 The FBHP claimed that the City’s decision to amend its bylaws and temporarily defer enforcement against sheltering transgressed the terms of the trust under which ‘Beacon Hill’ was placed under municipal governance. After people began sheltering in the park, the FBHP immediately began organizing and fundraising to pursue litigation. An opportunity presented itself for a legal challenge when the City sought an injunction to remove campers from ‘ecologically-sensitive areas’ in the Park. The FBHP contended that by arguing that camping was illegal in some spaces of the Park, the city was implicitly stating that camping was legal in others. This would spark a legal saga that would last almost three years and produce 147 This title was used by the organization Poverty Kills (2020) to describe the situation in Meegan. 148 Of course, the Courts were not the group’s only recourse. They also continued to pressure the city, register complaints, call the police on people sheltering in the park, and even formed groups under the auspices of ‘cleaning up the park’ which in practice spent most of their time antagonizing, surveilling and threatening campers. These are other example of the ways in which law is made material, not only through the Courts, but through everyday practices like registering complaints, or calling the police and fire departments. 211 disheartening results for both Lək̓ʷəŋən and unhoused communities which I recount here through my observations as an organizer amongst those communities throughout the litigation period. 149 To cover its legal expenses, the FBHP began a GoFundMe which was able to raise $34,923 before it was shut down. They pursued public advocacy as well establishing a Change.org petition to pressure the City to ban camping in the park which garnered 30,649 signatures. The commentary on the GoFundMe, Change.org and Save Beacon Hill Facebook pages as well as through the Twitter hashtag #SaveBeaconHill was illustrative of these projects’ orientation and ideological foundations, framing the Park as the patrimony of a settler public and people experiencing homelessness as anarchic usurpers of public space. 150 To manage the FBHP’s potential litigation, the city filed a petition before the BC Supreme Court on March 2, 2021, seeking clarity into its responsibilities under the Trustee Act of BC. After an initial ruling was handed down on February 24, 2022, the case would be heard again at the BC Court of Appeals in 2022 with a ruling delivered on February 21, 2023. The rulings handed down would shape the uses to which the Park could be put infringing upon Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and severely 149 By its own members’ admission, the FBHP was happy to ‘finally’ have something to litigate after the City sought the injunction. They welcomed the process because it provided the legal grounds to bring a suit against the City. 150 The community guidelines on the Save Beacon Hill Facebook page are indicative of the level of discourse but also how the group’s concerns and grievances expanded far beyond the space of the park. The group attempted to manage the discourse on the page in broad and discretionary ways required that members and posters align with its particularly populist ideology using dogwhistle politics and catchphrases. There would be “no ‘SJW rhetoric” and “no "woke" rhetoric will be tolerated nor will comments that enable those who are addicted.” What either of these concepts actually mean ‘SJW’ or ‘woke’, is not expounded upon and left to the discretion of moderators. Of course, these concepts can be left unexplored because they are hollow, ready to be filled with whatever grievances local residents had. Woke or SJW rhetoric is a catchall for anything that unsettles or challenges the dominance and entitlements of White settlers. In practice, what this means is actually quite clear, anything that humanizes people experiencing homelessness, points to the injustice of such an experience or unsettles settler entitlements will not be tolerated. Pointing to the level of discourse the group also had a no screenshots policy, “what is said in the group stays in this group. No screenshots.” It is important for us to actually take stock here. This is the policy of a group nominally concerned with conservation and the ecological protection of an urban park. This policy was necessary because the page, and the struggle over Meegan generally served to coalesce a number of strains of populist and explicitly racist projects. 212 limiting the right to shelter which people experiencing homelessness were struggling for. The outcomes of this litigation entrenched colonial spatio-legal orderings, serving to dispossess both communities and buttress forms of settler authority enacted through neoliberal governance. 7.2 Signposting Us through Legal Geographies “The biggest part about this work that I'm doing is I'm constantly asking myself and trying to ground the work that we're doing by respecting the local nations and territories first and the local ancestors and the laws that belong to these territories” “Let's make sure that we're trying to enforce these laws that exist here already and that have existed. There are also other laws that we need to be following.” -Lacey Jones (personal communication). In this chapter, I argue that law was a mechanism deployed to refine notions of public space in ways that intensified racialized exclusion, entrenched notions of colonial order and naturalized settler occupation. This was accomplished, in part, through the legal narrowing of the concept of ‘use’ as it relates to public space, and the construction and mobilization of an exclusionary notion of the ‘public’ in the Courts’ decisions. The Court’s rulings worked to constructed Indigenous peoples and unhoused communities as improper users of ‘public’ space and helped to define what activities were appropriate in the park and what bodies would be admitted. Yet, I illustrate that the power of colonial law is not only expressed in the colonial courtroom or through litigation. Law is practiced and given meaning in the everyday (Blomley 2004; Hunt 2014). 151 It acquires force and significance through everyday engagements and performative embodiments. I argue that what was happening in the BC Supreme Court and Court of Appeals gave shape to, but also intersected with everyday expressions of law and legal practice in situ. What happened on the ground was not necessarily dependent upon or caused by 151 There is a robust literature on everyday expressions of law particularly as it pertains to law and society (Travers 2010; Valverde et al. 2021). I focus here, primarily in the subfield of legal geography. 213 the outcomes of the legal case. Campers were evicted and a moratorium placed on sheltering before the case had been resolved. In this context, everyday expressions of law, particularly, bylaws, policing, fire regulations and ordinance, came to matter as much as what was decided in the Courts. 152 Yet, the Courts’ decision served to retroactively rationalize the actions of legal actors on the ground. Meegan and the rest of so-called ‘Canada’ are legally plural, that is, riven by not only the interacting and multi-jurisdictional components of colonial legal systems, but also by a range of Indigenous legal systems that predate and subtend these forms of law (Borrows 2019; McKerracher 2023). Meegan is a legally pluralistic, if radically unequal space, constituted by ongoing expressions of Lək̓ʷəŋən legal systems, superimposed colonial legal systems constituted by bylaws, ordinances, Provincial and federal laws, and the interactions amongst these systems. While decisions made in the courts matter, the rulings of the colonial legal system have never served to entirely overwrite the spatio-legal plurality of Meegan. Communities have continued to practice their own forms of law, if under conditions of duress. Lək̓ʷəŋən women, for instance, continue to exercise their governance in Meegan, embodying law through practices of managing and caretaking for the land, particularly through the revitalization of camas and other culturally significant forms of life. Likewise, unhoused communities struggled against colonial bylaws and built their own systems of governance, community care and relation to Meegan. Despite this plurality, the Courts’ rulings would eventually give force of law to the ban on sheltering buttressing colonial authority and providing the forum in which the features of public space were debated and refined. The constitution and characteristics of public space were adjudicated 152 Yet, the court cases did work to retroactively deem legitimate the City’s draconian policies and allow for the extension of police power and carceral logics. 214 through an intrinsically colonial mechanism reliant on Indigenous dispossession, a land trust established by colonial writ in 1882. These legal decisions provide potent examples of how law is articulated within the Courts and its impacts on the production of public space. I am interested in exploring settler law as a mechanism for shaping and constituting public space in ways that rehearse colonial authority, reenact conquest and reinforce settler claims against both Lək̓ʷəŋən and unhoused communities. 153 Settler colonialism is an ongoing and evolving process expressed through everyday spatio-legal relations. Colonial regimes of ownership, property and conceptions of public space must be constantly remade according to changing conditions. As Brenna Bhandar (2018:24) argues, “settler colonialism as a structure, a continually unfolding process… requires flexibility in the legal devices and rationales it utilizes to maintain state control- and possession- of Indigenous lands.” The legal cases surrounding ‘Beacon Hill’ illustrate the ways in which settler colonial power evidences this flexibility, reassembling itself to maintain control and moral authority over contested spaces. In the cases against sheltering in the parks, we are witness to how colonial legal systems can shift (or ossify) to maintain control over Lək̓ʷəŋən space, reproduce spatial exclusion for unhoused communities and ensure ‘orderly’ settler futures. Justices at the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals took up and reanimated concepts like recreation and use that had been central to colonial jurisprudence in the 19th century to adjudicate upon the character of public spaces and entrench the dispossession of marginalized communities contemporarily. 153 As I argue, these communities are discursively tied together as unsettling colonial authority and conceptions of public space and order. 215 I understand the legal cases against sheltering in Meegan to be examples of what Bhandar (2018:24) describes “recombinant forms of appropriation and ownership”, flexible legal strategies to maintain settler hegemony, wherein institutions like the FBHP attempt to regain ownership of public lands seen to be under threat from ‘unruly’ communities through an engagement with colonial legal systems. The Courts adjudicated upon public space as a contested territory. Sheltering unsettled normative conceptions of public space and the Courts sought to stabilize public space by naturalizing colonial authority and orderings. As FBHP member Janice Williams euphemistically phrased it, the legal instrument utilized to establish settler authority, the land trust, was in need of some ‘maintenance’. What the trust meant and communicated had to be reformulated to protect settler authority and the constitutive exclusions of ‘public’ space. I understand the ‘maintenance’ that the Courts were involved with as part of what Bhandar (2018) describes as ‘recombinant forms’ of governance; novel and flexible rearticulations of race, class, gender, law and power that work to buttress settler colonial geographies under changing circumstances. Revanchist projects seek to rehearse, once again, the domestication of ‘disorderly’ space, and re-establish forms of colonial governance. The colonial legal system was a part of this process. To make their claims, groups like the FBHP invoked a particular understanding of ‘public’ space shaped around the overburdened concepts of recreation and use and engaged the Courts to affirm their exclusionary claims. Throughout this chapter, I explore how understandings of public space are shifting, sometimes building on to older colonial regimes of ownership, and sometimes evolving novel strategies and means of conceptualizing public space, to produce new forms of exclusion and naturalize colonial occupation. The legal geographies literature provides a robust avenue to pursue this analysis. Legal geography has proved adept at analyzing the intersections between 216 legal exegesis produced in colonial Courts and the lived expressions of law in shaping everyday spatial orderings (Braverman et al. 2014; Sylvestre, Blomley and Bellot 2019). Legal geography provides an avenue to not only understand the decisions surrounding ‘Beacon Hill’, but to spatialize this analysis. Law and spatiality are inextricably connected. As Braverman et al. (2014:1) argue in their outlining of legal geography’s analytical project, “the law is always spatial, that is, ‘worlded’ in some way.” Legal geographers understand law as constitutive of space, “the legal is not simply poured into preexisting spaces but rather is constitutive of spatialities, spatial relationships, spatial performances and experiences, as these, in turn, condition the lived character of the legal” (Delaney 2014:239-240). Spatio-legal analysis reveals that instruments like trust law were utilized by groups like the FBHP to entrench exclusionary productions of public space and reinvigorate settler claims to authority. This has everyday and embodied implications for how the Park is constituted as a social and political space and how it is differentially experienced. 7.3 Making ‘Public’ Space in the Settler Colony “I just go out of my mind, because the words are completely separate from the actions. The actions are opposite to the words.” -Leslie Robinson (personal communication). Interrogating the nature of public space has long preoccupied urban studies scholars. In particular, scholars who examine precarity have been deeply concerned with the production of public spaces in which people experiencing homelessness are forced to survive. These scholars often bemoan the increasing privatization of public space and shrinking of the public sphere under intensifying neoliberal regimes (Amster 2008; Mitchell 1995). Urban studies scholars can participate often argue that, beyond providing a material space to conduct the necessities of everyday life, the attrition of public space represents a tear in the fabric of social and political life 217 (Amster 2008). Yet, like ‘nature’ and ‘conservation’, public space can become a synonym for the best features of egalitarian governance and community without unpacking what the concept does and the uses to which it can be put. Urban geographers can participate in a romanticization of public space. Randall Amster (2008:45) defines public space as “the sole site of guaranteed access in the city [which] stands materially and metaphorically, as the essence of pluralism, political participation and personal freedom”. Understanding the political as bound to public space; that the very practice of politics requires public space to provide a forum, Amster argues that the attrition of public space disrupts the very practice of politics and impedes the robust development of social life (Amster 2008). Public space is imbued with a set of almost utopian values: pluralism, community, equitable access, and freedom. Foundational to these ideas is that public space is universally accessible, a site where urban citizens exercise their rights and freedoms. Public space then is seen as critical in providing the platform for liberatory politics and social movements. Yet, as critical geographers have shown in their longstanding engagement with the question of ‘the public’, public space is experienced unevenly, particularly in the settler colony (Blomley 2004; Koester and Bryan 2022; Porter and Kelly 2023; Fortier 2017). Public space has never been universally accessible and certainly not a space where all subjects could expect to exercise their freedoms. Indeed, racialized communities have often been disciplined through public space and in the interest of ‘public good’. 154 The ‘public’ of public space has never assured the safety or access of Indigenous or unhoused communities, for instance. 155 On the 154 We witnessed how public space was forcibly rendered inaccessible to Lək�ʷəŋən peoples in attempts to remove them from the city and police them in public space. 155 Forms of racialized exclusion have often been taken as normative, as what defined the boundaries of the public itself. Racialized bodies have been the constitutive exteriority through which settler publics produce the parameters of inclusion and come to know themselves (da Silva 2007). 218 contrary, the concept of ‘public’ space has often been the very mechanism through which to dispossess Indigenous communities, seize lands and bar access to space. Thus, we have to interrogate the concept of the public and examine the ways in which it has been weaponized against marginalized communities. The narration of public space as an almost mythical forum; a tabula rasa for the exercise of freedom, sociality and the practice of politics, paradoxically neglects the ways in which public space is shaped by politics, not just a platform for it. Constructions of race and gender for instance, have served to delimit access to public space and to shape the character of public space in exclusionary ways. Public space is deeply informed by race, gender, class and ability, often severely curtailing the range of possible actions and behaviours within it. Under settler colonialism, public space is shaped by ongoing occupation and the naturalization of settler colonial authority and the legitimacy of the nation-state. Very little of the literature around public space, homelessness or housing justice actually unsettles this narration; instead, reproducing Indigenous erasure even as it calls for equitable access to the public realm (Porter and Kelly 2023). What is not unpacked in utopian representations of public space is the way in which public space is always made through exclusion, that racialized communities have been restricted from public space, as witnessed in the attempted emptying of urban space of Lək̓ʷəŋən presence. Unruly communities or ‘bodies out-of place’ have never had ‘guaranteed access’ to public space. This is part of a myth which attempts to rehabilitate the settler colonial city and the racial state by advocating for a return to a public before violence, before exclusion. In the settler colony, public space has historically been constituted through structuring exclusions and the regulation of appropriate conduct which are distinctly tied to racial regimes of governance, propriety and respectability politics (Bhandar 2018; Collins-White 2019). 219 The enclosure of public space within private property regimes is normatively understood as deeply problematic and a pressing issue. However, this can efface the ways in which under settler colonialism, the discursive capture of space within the notion of the ‘commons’ or the colonial ‘public’, also represents a form of dispossession, erasure and exclusion (Fortier 2017; Coulthard 2014; Porter and Kelly 2023). As Tuck and Yang (2012:8) argue, “claiming land for the Commons and asserting consensus as the rule of the Commons, erases existing, prior, and future Native land rights, decolonial leadership, and forms of self-government.” Reclaiming ‘public’ space constituted through racialized exclusion does nothing to address Indigenous dispossession, it naturalizes it. Scholars have been slower to think through how structures of settler colonial power extend themselves, not just through public space’s enclosure, but through its extension. Public space is another site through which settler colonial power transits, an overburdened concept through which Indigenous dispossession is pursued and settler colonial authority is legitimized (Byrd 2011). Under settler colonial regimes the ‘public’ is as entangled with dispossession as the ‘private’. Attempts to reclaim the commons of public space also seek to normalize particular claims to public space, entrench settler colonial authority and rehabilitate the settler nation-state as benevolent (Kauanui 2016; Barker 2018). Public space is still nested within the geographies of the settler colonial nation-state, and when advocates invoke it, they most often take for granted the colonial state’s authority over such spaces (Barker 2015). Far from liberatory, calls to reclaim public space are one of the ways in which settler authority is rehearsed and reproduced. Thus, we need to unpack the ways in which concepts like the ‘public’ are used to pursue projects of settler revanchism. However, my argument here is not that struggles for public space do not matter, or that public space is not worth fighting for, but rather that we need to better understand how the 220 invocation of the ‘public’ and ‘public access’ facilitated not only the eviction and displacement of unhoused communities, but also the further derogation of Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and the reinvigoration of settler authority. Far from guaranteeing access, the mobilization of the concept of the public worked to ensure that some communities would have restricted access, would be dispossessed or criminalized. The category of the public needs to be more robustly troubled for its normative exclusions, for what it is expected that it will not contain, namely, unruly or unproductive bodies or the racialized figure of the ‘Native’. The public, just like nature or conservation, is a discourse which can be put to many different uses. It is never inert or passive and requires ongoing interrogation. Next, I turn my attention to the ways in which public space was given shape through the colonial legal system, municipal governance and the intercessory measures of groups like the FBHP. 7.4 ‘Uphold the Trust’: Fighting the Right to Shelter and Lək̓ʷ əŋən Jurisdiction through the 1882 Trust “We had to fight for the basic human right to sleep and it's still not really considered a human right. Like, it's almost a catchphrase. Housing is a human right. Well, yes, it is, but how many people actually live by that rule?” -Niki Ottosen (personal communication). ‘Beacon Hill’ is held in trust by the city. The area that would become the Park was not parceled out into individual titled lots during the City’s founding, but rather set aside as a preserve by the Governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island, James Douglas. It remained Crown land and not under the City’s jurisdiction at incorporation in 1862. The area was initially used by settlers as a commons to graze livestock and to harvest timber. It was not until 1882 that an order-in-council conveyed the area from the Province of British Columbia to the City and established the space as a park under a land trust agreement. The City would act as trustee according to a set of legal obligations outlined in the land trust document. While the City has the 221 ability to enact bylaws which facilitate its capacity to fulfill its obligations under the Trust, failure to abide by the tenets of the Trust, could result in the park reverting to Crown land held by the Province. Thus, the City enjoys a kind of conditional jurisdiction over the space. The statutes, bylaws and governance it enacts must align with the covenants of the trust through which the park was conveyed. This is the arrangement that continues to govern the Park. It was this trust document which the FBHP invoked in its litigation against the City claiming that it expressly prohibited temporary shelter from being established in the park. The attempt to ban sheltering would then pivot around the legal interpretation of the trust document. However, the trust document itself is brief, ambiguous and open to a wide array of legal interpretations. The document is a single page. The critical clause in the document on which conveyance of the park to the city hinged, states that the park must be preserved for “the use, recreation and enjoyment of the public”. What use, recreation and enjoyment entail, and who constitutes the ‘public’ that the trust hails are never clarified. Thus, normative discourses and understandings of use, recreation, enjoyment and the public formed through colonial jurisprudence have come to shape how the space is constituted, what uses are deemed appropriate and who may access the Park uninhibited. This would impact unhoused communities and have wide-reaching implications for Lək̓ʷəŋən governance of the space. Under threat of legal action from the FBHP and their donors, on March 2, 2021, the City filed a petition to the BC Supreme Court seeking clarity around their obligation as trustee of the Park. 156 The petition sought the advice of the Courts on whether the Trust prohibited sheltering 156 It should be noted that a process of ‘decampment’ was well underway by this point. The City had already indicated that it planned to revert to enforcing the 7-7 bylaw. What was at issue was if sheltering in the Park would be allowed at all in the future. The immediate outcomes of the case would be the City’s liabilities and any future uses of the Park for sheltering. People who were sheltering there at the time were already being pressured to 222 and if the city had acted in accordance with its tenets in its decision to temporarily defer enforcement. Was sheltering a legally conceivable use of the space under the conditions of the Trust? This question pertained not only to the legality of the temporary deferral of enforcement, but also to the issue of legal sheltering sites at any time. It also worked to undermine Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction by naturalizing the land trust document as a legitimate legal instrument representative of settler authority. 157 Thus, not only was 24/7 camping in jeopardy but the constitutionally-protected right to seek shelter established in the Adams decision that allowed for 7-to-7 camping as well. Groups like the FBHP had found a backdoor to undermine earlier BC Supreme Court rulings and further claw back the rights that unhoused communities and their advocates had won. Arguments were heard by Justice Robert Punnett from September 20 to the 24th, 2021 with legal representatives from the FHBP, the City, the Provincial Attorney General’s office, two campers sheltering in the park, Shea Smith and Dennis Davies, alongside the legal advocacy group Together Against Poverty Society (TAPS), acting as respondents. Justice Punnett delivered his ruling on February 24, 2022, finding that sheltering was not a conceivable use of the Park under the terms of trust, and that as trustee the City was compelled to govern the space in accordance with that decision. In short, the constitutionally-protected human right to shelter was prohibited within the space of ‘Beacon Hill’. The FBHP touted a legal victory and a moral vindication. However, after Justice Punnett’s ruling, the BC Attorney General’s Office appealed, worrying about the constitutionality of the Court’s recommendations under Section 7 of the decamp and did not expect the ruling to immediately effect their status as the expected to be displaced by the time a decision was received. 157 In recognition of the Shantz and Adams decisions, Victoria’s bylaws allow sheltering in parks overnight if other reasonable spaces are unavailable with a few notable exceptions and limitations. 223 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which protects the right to life, liberty and security of the person. The Province recommended the case to the BC Court of Appeals seeking a more qualified answer to the legality of sheltering, claiming that the original ruling had inadvertently dredged up a constitutional question. By ruling that sheltering in the park was not permissible under the conditions of the Trust, the Province argued that Justice Punnett had not qualified his response in ways that would protect the basic constitutional rights of individuals to safety in the absence of other practicable options. This basic right had been established in the Adams decision. The Province therefore wished the answer to the question of: ‘is temporary sheltering allowed in the park?’, amended and qualified from simply ‘no’; to ‘no’ “except to the extent that an individual experiencing homelessness has a need to fulfill a basic necessity of life by erecting a temporary overnight shelter in a public place and has nowhere else to go but the Park.” This appeal was filed July 9, 2022. Legal counsel again represented the BC Attorney General’s Office, the FBHP and Shea Smith, the camper heard in the original petition. The Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations had not been included in the initial petition, despite the fact, that the petition had the capacity to severely delimit or open potential land uses on territories over which Lək̓ʷəŋən people retain jurisdiction. This time, the Songhees and Esquimalt, understanding that decisions were being made that deeply affected their exercise of self-determination, applied for intervenor status. The FBHP attempted to block them from being granted this status arguing that it would contribute undue delays and needlessly complicate the question before the courts. While the FBHP mobilized token gestures of recognition towards Lək̓ʷəŋən history and culture to strengthen its position as arbiter of rights in the Park, when the Songhees and Esquimalt attempted to meaningfully exercise their jurisdiction, or even note their interests, the FBHP were adamantly 224 opposed and worked to block their participation. In the end, Songhees and Esquimalt were granted intervenor status in the case despite protestations from the FBHP. Arguments were heard on November 14 and 15th, 2022, and a ruling was handed down February 24, 2023. The Appeals Court reframed the Province’s request and refused to answer the question of the constitutionality of banning sheltering in the park. Instead, it strictly addressed the question of whether sheltering was a contemplatable use under the terms of the Trust. Affirming Justice Punnett’s decision, it returned that it was not. Chief Justice Hunter ruled that it was not necessary to qualify the answer to the question of whether sheltering was allowed within the park, because the Court’s role was merely to interpret the trust, not to adjudicate on claims that may be made based on constitutional or Indigenous rights. In its petition, the city had sought clarity into its responsibilities under the trust, not, strictly speaking, the constitutionality of banning sheltering. This allowed Justice Hunter to severely delimit the scope of the appeal. The ruling states, “it is neither necessary nor appropriate to qualify the trust conditions that have been interpreted according to their terms and the context of their enabling legislation to include the possibility that a specific group of individuals may have constitutional rights in certain circumstances that conflict with the terms of the trust under which the Park is held. Other possibilities of conflicting uses may arise… How the trustees will respond to assertions of constitutionally protected rights that are inconsistent with the terms of the trust can only be determined when such assertions are made, based on the facts and law at the time” (British Columbia v. Friends of Beacon Hill Park, 2023 BCCA 83). This ruling left the door open to a constitutional challenge to the legality of bans on sheltering-in-place, but affirmed the ruling that the Trust does not allow for temporary sheltering as a legitimate use of the park. This left the broader questions of whether denying people the right to camp in parks under conditions in 225 which they had no practicable access to adequate shelter was constitutional or just, unanswered, focusing instead on the minutiae of the trust, the distinctions between use, enjoyment and recreation, and whether the trust constituted a grant or an enactment. 158 Justice Hunter stated, “the Court was advised throughout argument that the purpose of the proceeding was not to exclude the Park from the potential exercise of constitutional rights by individuals experiencing homelessness, but rather to obtain a definitive view of the scope of the trust under which the City holds the Park for the benefit of the trustee” (British Columbia v. Friends of Beacon Hill Park, 2023 BCCA 83) The question of justice then, was never to be the 158 Both the BC Supreme Court and Court of Appeals rulings contained specific assumptions and elisions that guided their decisions. Both the Courts took for granted that adequate shelter space is available within ‘Victoria’ thereby seeming to blunt the edge of any constitutional challenge that relied on the rights of people to shelter when adequate options were not available. In the appeal, Justice Hunter uses this assumption to differentiate the context in which the Adams decision was handed down in 2009, where the City had documented over 1000 people experiencing homelessness with only 104 available shelter beds, from the current climate where available sheltering options are seen to be plentiful. As per the ruling, “it is common ground that the conditions that led to the declaration of invalidity in 2009 no longer apply. The City now has sufficient shelter space to ensure that those who are experiencing homelessness can be housed without the necessity of sheltering in the City’s parks” (British Columbia v. Friends of Beacon Hill Park). The absence of practicable options justified the sheltering-in-place ordinance in 2009, whereas it is now claimed that available sheltering options meet the needs of those experiencing homelessness and by implication negate the legal grounds for constructing a claim predicated on the abrogation of individuals’ constitutional rights by refusing the right to shelter. However, for people experiencing homelessness and frontline workers, this claim is very much in dispute. What constitutes adequate housing or sheltering options is not clarified or unpacked. The city has claimed that everyone sheltering in parks was offered housing prior to the process of decampment that unfolded on May 1, 2021. However, many of these options were absolutely inadequate and substandard, retrofitted hotels and hospitals without running water, hastily equipped seacans, and cramped congregate shelter space in which social distancing was not possible. Further, many people experiencing homelessness complained of the coercive conditions and draconian policies that governed the housing that was made available. Residents in the shelter-hotels that served as the bulk of the housing stock made available had no rights under the Residential Tenancy Act, were subject to no-guest policies and could often not even have cooking appliances within the buildings. Many people complained of targeted or arbitrary evictions for minor infractions. Residents of these housing options describe them as forms of soft incarceration where they are highly policed and surveilled leading to either eviction or voluntarily leaving the premises. Once evicted, or even leaving under their own recognizance, it becomes increasingly difficult to access housing or shelter options. Finally, many, if not most of the housing made available was explicitly temporary. Thus, in the absence of adequate housing many people chose or were eventually forced to remain in parks and face further ostracization and criminalization by bylaw and police. These conditions challenge the notion that available housing options are safe, secure, adequate and accessible to everyone. To claim that all people experiencing homelessness within Victoria have practicable recourse to available sheltering options is disingenuous at best, or explicitly deceptive and obfuscating, at worst. 226 objective of the court which chose to favor a technocratic ruling on the functioning of law and the legal meaning of the Trust, not the question of right. The FBHP immediately issued celebratory press releases claiming the ruling as a win that permanently banned sheltering and allowed residents to reclaim ‘their park’, stating that the appeal upheld Justice Punnett’s original decision and brought the long saga of litigation to a close. However, it may be more accurate to state that the Appeals Court had simply declined to answer the question whatsoever, leaving the specter of a constitutional challenge looming. Regardless, for the moment, the campers had lost their case in court. 7.5 Seeking Precedence: The Legal History of the Trust “There was so much community support for the care tent and so many people contributing. Both people that lived in the park and people in the wider community contributing to this. It was possible to take care of each other. What made it so fucking hard was the city trying to stop us because it didn't fall within whack colonial bullshit legislation. Like the fucking Beacon Hill Park trust.” -Shae Perkins (personal communication). Unpacking these cases reveals much about colonial law, the narratives and ideologies on which it rests and its impacts on the material and imaginative spatio-legal ordering of Meegan. To do this, we need to historicize these legal decisions and place them within a legal genealogy of cases surrounding ‘Beacon Hill’. Justice Punnett and Hunter’s decisions relied for precedence on two prior rulings about the park, Anderson v. Victoria in 1884, and City of Victoria vs. Capital Region Festival Society in 1998. The 1884 case was brought before the courts to adjudicate whether or not a proposed agricultural building being built within the Park by the BC Agricultural Society was legal under the conditions of the Trust, while the 1998 case sought to rule on whether a proposed folk festival was a legally conceivable use of the Park. While seemingly rather innocuous rulings, they would both have deep impacts for the exercise of 227 Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and the right to shelter. These cases both sought to define what constituted legitimate use of the park, who comprised the City’s public, and to clarify the City's obligations in accordance with the Trust. To do so, these cases attempted to define the legal meanings of ‘use, recreation and enjoyment’. These cases would lay out in utero the tensions that animate current legal interpretations of appropriate access and use of the Park: what is the legal character of public space? What constitutes a legitimate public use? Who is understood to be a member of the ‘public’? These questions are now 140 years old but are currently being reformulated to entrench colonial authority and displace communities deemed unruly from urban green space. The 1884 case, Anderson v. Victoria, was critical in establishing legal precedence that later cases would follow, thus helping to define the character of the Park for the next 100 years. In 1884, a mere two years after the Park was conveyed to municipal governance, the City allowed the BC Agricultural Society to erect a set of buildings intended to house cattle and model farms within the Park. In response, private citizens brought a case against the City claiming that this development would alienate portions of the Park, over 20 acres, from public access and was thus, in contravention of the trust. The case was heard by Chief Justice Matthew Begbie. In his decision, Begbie would establish the legal ground over which further rulings would travel. Begbie ruled against the construction of the Agricultural Building in the Park finding that it would, indeed, alienate a proposed 20 acres from public access and that this was in contravention of the trust agreement by which the City held the Park. What was at issue in Begbie’s ruling were questions of appropriate use and public access. Begbie highlighted, first and foremost, a need to separate use, from recreation and enjoyment and attempted to define the parameters around legitimate public access. Uses of the Park, even public ones, that were seen to infringe on a common, but individualized right to recreation and enjoyment were ruled as 228 contraventions of the Trust. Begbie argued that the City had a responsibility as trustee to ensure that the Park was maintained as a ‘pleasure ground’; a site of recreation and repose. Begbie relied on the concepts of recreation and enjoyment to make his ruling, stating that “the park, alias the pleasure ground, is to be used for recreation and enjoyment; and therefore, I think, in no other manner; not for general purposes of profit, or utility, however great the prospect of these may be” (Anderson vs. Corporation of the City of Victoria 1893: 110). Begbie separated the question of use from recreation and enjoyment. Thus, Begbie argued that the proposed agricultural buildings were in contravention of the trust, not because of their public or private character, but because they transgressed a common yet, individualized right of recreation and enjoyment understood to be held by individual members of a settler polity described as the ‘public’. Begbie provided theoretical examples in which recreation supersedes public utility. While he argues a university, a sanatorium, a cemetery or a barracks would be a utilitarian and public use of the space, and one which ‘Beacon Hill’ would provide a practicable site for, these uses of the space are not conceivable under the trust which provides for the recreation of the public through the maintenance of a ‘pleasure ground’. Begbie states, “none of these are objects of pure recreation” and thus, are not in accordance with the conventions of the Trust. These developments while ‘useful’, are not consistent with the provisioning of a ‘pleasure ground’ in that they may alienate some sections of the Park, restrict access for some members of the public or alter the character of the Park (Anderson v. Corporation of City of Victoria 1893:110). 159 Culturally-informed ideas about recreation then work to circumscribe the contours and uses of 159 This ruling illustrates that while the Park is understood as public space, it is intended to be enjoyed as atomized and individual liberal subjects, not as a collective or community. Community use, even for public utility, are seen to interfere with the public’s right to individual enjoyment. 229 ‘public’ space. Thus, while Begbie’s arguments seem to be founded on a valorization and championing of ‘public’ access in requiring that the Park be maintained for public benefit, in its construction of what behaviours are appropriate within the Park; recreation and enjoyment, the ruling served to create categories of legitimate use and legitimate users that produced and maintained spatial exclusion, privileging the propertied recreational subject and denigrating those who would use the space in differing ways, for harvesting, vending or general utility, for instance. Some subjects are hailed into Begbie’s notion of the public, while others are definitively evicted from the category according to racialized modes of conduct and relations to land. 160 According to Begbie, not ‘one inch’ of the Park could be appropriated or alienated for uses that would infringe upon liberal conceptions of recreation and leisure. Recreation then was to be the hegemonic logic which governed appropriate use of the Park and to supersede all other uses. Begbie ruled that “the Corporation should be forbidden to appropriate any portion of the park for any erection or building not needful for or incidental to the maintenance and use of the parks as public walks or pleasure grounds” (Anderson v. Corporation of City of Victoria 1893:111). In ruling against the development of the proposed agricultural hall, Begbie emphasized the inalienability of the park from ‘public’ purview, but entrenched normative assumptions of what public use, recreation and enjoyment entailed, and sought to protect the ascendancy of these uses and the dominance subjects associated with them. 160 Exclusion from the category of the public is not new under settler colonialism and White supremacy. Scholars like Alexander Weheliye (2014) and Zakiyyah Jackson (2020) argue that racial formations serve to vacate Black communities from not only the public, but the very category of the human. The settler polity that Begbie addressed through his ruling would have taken-for-granted the structuring exclusions foundational to conceptions of the settler public. It would be common sense that the public that Begbie referred to excluded Indigenous peoples, and to some extent poor settlers. 230 The 1884 case loomed large in Justice Punnett’s delivered ruling. Justice Punnett worked to negate and omit the critical clause ‘use’ entirely from the legal interpretation of the document, finding that, “in my view, “use” does not have a meaning different than the words “recreation and enjoyment”. To attribute to “use” an expansion of the activities permitted by the Trust is contrary to the plain reading of “use, recreation and enjoyment of the public” (Beacon Hill Park Trust (Re) 2022:37). Punnett framed ‘use’ as a kind of rhetorical flourish that actually indicates recreation and enjoyment, not as signaling any potential rights outside of these frameworks. Use outside of recreation and enjoyment has been utterly abandoned in the delivered ruling and recreation has become entirely naturalized as the primary use of the park. This small semantic maneuver drastically narrowed the scope of allowable practices within the park, who came to constitute the Park’s legitimate subjects, what uses to which the Park could be put, and which bodies would be admitted to the space. Those who sought to use the space for purposes other than narrowly framed recreation and leisure were legally defined as improper users that the City had a responsibility to bar from accessing the space. This definition of use produces ongoing exclusion by delimiting appropriate use, confining it to forms of recreation associated with propertied residents. In ruling that the Park is solely a space for recreation, the Courts hailed particular subjects and enforced norms around conduct and comportment. Legitimate users become those who use the park for leisure and to no other purpose. Justice Punnett’s ruling hinged on this interpretation which collapsed use entirely into the frameworks of recreation and enjoyment already established as appropriate within the Park. Punnett followed Begbie in prioritizing particular modes of comportment, recreation and enjoyment, over the more capacious meanings suggested by use and utility. Recreation had an assumed value that simple ‘use’ did not. Indeed, use was framed pejoratively as threatening 231 established social order, implying rights to public space that were understood to be restricted when it came to particular communities, people experiencing homelessness and Indigenous peoples, for instance. Use seemed to imply too public a character for public space and needed to be conditioned or restricted in some way. The implications for the right to shelter were clear. While sheltering could certainly be seen as a ‘use’ of the park, it was harder to make the argument that sheltering would fall under the legally-protected categories of recreation and enjoyment. This semantic maneuver to erase ‘use’ as legitimate severely limited the unhoused community’s ability to make claims to a right to shelter under the conditions of the Trust normalizing the presence of subjects who used the space for recreation and criminalizing those who might seek to use it for other purposes. 7.6 The ‘Uses of Use’ Under Settler Colonialism “That's the way the court balanced the rights of housed normies to go throw a frisbee during the day, they would limit the number of hours that you were allowed to sleep.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). What do these decisions tell us about the rationales that subtend the production of public space? I historicize ‘use’ in relation to Indigenous theory and critiques of settler colonialism to illustrate the ongoing coloniality of such legal interpretations. The question of ‘use’ has recently been productively interrogated by Sara Ahmed (2019) who asks how ‘use’ is put to work pursuing an interrogation of ‘the uses of use’. This leads me to ask two questions. First, what is the history of use as a concept under settler colonialism? Secondly, what spatio-legal work was ‘use’ performing in ‘Beacon Hill’? Each successive legal decision sought to collapse the use of public space guaranteed in the land trust to the more limited concepts of recreation and enjoyment. We might ask who benefits from such semantic and discursive maneuvering. I 232 examine this question by historicizing the concept of use under settler colonial regimes of governance. Use has a sordid history under settler colonialism. The uneven valuation of use, particularly land use, has long been a rationale for Indigenous dispossession and colonial occupation and served as the basis for both the doctrine of discovery and terra nullius (Miller 2010; Newcomb 2008). Denigrating Indigenous practices of land use as incapable of representing a claim to governance was one of the ways in which colonial power cast Indigenous territory as terra nullius, unpeopled, ungoverned and unclaimed. Denigrating Indigenous jurisdiction as simple ‘use’ is how colonial states made their own claims to authority. Indigenous occupation was seen to establish only usufructuary rights, never authoritative ones. In contrast, colonial land uses including agriculture, cultivation and ‘improvements’ were seen to establish proprietary and exclusionary rights to land and territory. These practices were placed in a hierarchy of value in which they represented ‘highest and best use’. Use, and its differential valuation, has often been the structuring logic for rationalizing settler colonial projects Settler colonial projects hinge on this differential valuation of land use. Rendering the land ‘productive’ through cultivation and agriculture was how colonizers staked a claim to territory, how property was fashioned through a Lockean mixture of labour and land (Bhandar 2018). Indigenous peoples’ ‘failure’ to cultivate or ‘improve’ the land in ways recognizable to settlers was the basis for the legal fiction of terra nullius and the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and jurisdiction (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Within colonial epistemologies, it is the constructed ‘misuse’ or ‘improper’ use of land that renders it available for colonial appropriation. Thus, there is a distinctly colonial interest in defining use, in valuing particular kinds of use, agriculture or later, conservation and recreation, over others. Framing some forms of use as 233 ‘backwards’, ‘wasteful’ or ‘antisocial’ has been central to settler colonial projects of occupation. Defining ‘proper’ and productive use has always been a means of legitimizing occupation and rationalizing dispossession and exclusion. It should come as no surprise then that colonial courts would be preoccupied with questions of use as it pertains to public green space. Settler legal systems continue to be shaped by this history of colonial jurisprudence, property regimes and understandings of authority. ‘Use ‘is one of the techniques through which colonial power rationalizes, retrenches and remakes its claims to Indigenous space, recapturing territory seen to be under threat by unruly bodies by denigrating some forms of use and valorizing others. This utilization of use is not simply historical but is being mobilized in the present to further dispossession of communities coded as threatening, antisocial and unruly and to retrench colonial occupation. The colonial ‘uses of use’ are alive and well. There is a distinctly colonial through line in the court’s legal definitions of use. Settler organizations like the FBHP seek to retake public green space seen to be used improperly and in ways that are seen to upset established colonial order and mappings of urban space. Taken-for-granted in the Courts’ rulings is that ‘uses’ such as sheltering intrinsically infringe upon uses with a higher moral value like recreation and enjoyment. Recreation and enjoyment, as presented, are exclusionary rights. In his ruling, Justice Punnett never explains why sheltering and the continued recreation and enjoyment of the park by housed residents are irreconcilable. It is taken-for-granted that sheltering as a use of public space imposes upon the rights of the ‘real’ public. During the hearings, campers Shea Smith and Dennis Davies queried the assumption of incommensurability between sheltering and recreation. Yet, this is never addressed in the ruling. The mere presence of people sheltering-in-place is seen to somehow negate the possibility of use for recreation and enjoyment and infringe on housed subjects’ rights 234 to the space. The very presence of some bodies is seen to compromise others’ ability to ‘enjoy’ themselves: joggers, families, tourists. Housed people are seen to have a right to the space vacated of that which distresses them, the troubling and unsettling presence of poverty and bodies coded as unruly. It is assumed that unhoused peoples’ very presence is disruptive of social order, that homelessness cannot exist alongside the ongoing enjoyment and leisure of propertied and respectable subjects. Contrary to Justice Punnett’s arguments, that the city has responsibility to protect the interests of an inclusive ‘public’, the ruling actively stakes an exclusionary claim against particular subjects and communities. The very presence of people sheltering was seen to be expropriative of public space, to alienate the Park from its rightful users and from its proper use, recreation. If my ‘enjoyment’ of a public space is predicated on your exclusion, then your very presence may be framed as infringing upon my rights to public space. This move, of course, can only be understood if certain subjects are seen to be normatively outside of the category of the ‘public’. The notion of recreation presented through the Court’s ruling forecloses the possibility of particular uses, as it affords others. In doing so, it accommodates particular users, particular subjects, while expelling others, producing space according to a set of colonial, classed and racial logics. Yet, this expulsion and exclusion is disavowed by invoking the ‘public’s’ right to recreation and enjoyment and discursively associating enjoyment with the very function of parks. In the technocratic exercise of law, the material consequences of jurisprudence are effaced and the fact that this emphasis disproportionately impacts marginalized communities while privileging propertied settlers is disavowed. Emphasizing the rights to recreation and enjoyment over use, privileged certain subjects and had a deleterious effect on others, namely those who must make their claims through the language of use rather than the propertied and classed discourses of 235 recreation and enjoyment. Prioritizing recreation over other uses clearly rendered the space less accessible for unhoused communities. Yet, this obvious outcome is framed as apolitical and unintended through claims that the ruling acts to protect the ‘public’s’ right to space through recreation and enjoyment, aligns with the tenets of the Trust and represents the disinterested functioning of law. Modalities of urban governance increasingly eschew policies and practices that explicitly target poor communities in favour of seemingly neutral policies that seek to regulate public space through technical or bureaucratic management, of public flow or belongings, for instance (Cacho 2012; Blomley 2010; Blomley, Flynn and Sylvestre 2020). Tania Murray Li (2007:279) has described this mode of governance as “anti-politics” where assemblages of governance “re-pose political questions as matters of technique”. In taking the function of public space and urban parks for granted, to provide for recreation, city bureaucrats and legal actors can evade questions of politics, justice or ethics and render governance a strictly technical exercise (Li 2007; Withers 2021). Yet, nothing in the trust document outlines the legal meanings of recreation and enjoyment. What these terms mean is assumed, informed by a set of cultural values deeply shaped by colonial relations to land, Indigenous peoples and the poor. The question becomes recast from the unavoidably political, ‘who is entitled to use and access public space and to what purposes’ to a matter of technique, ‘how best to provide for recreation within public parks?’ In taking for granted the meanings of recreation, this modality relies on a normative conception of public green space that is designed to meet the needs of particular subjects while appearing to be apolitical and strictly technical. Nicholas Blomley (2010) argues that these practices produce exclusion through technocratic governance cast as common sense, while appearing to not target individual subjects or communities directly. Blomley (2010:8) argues that these modes of 236 governance are at least “facially apolitical” and are “less immediately interested in the directly ethical or political dimensions of public space than in more functional concerns”. Engineers of public space then understand themselves as operating “in the realm of the technical and practical, rather than the ideological” (Blomley 2010:8). These technocratic forms of governance, aim to regulate public space itself, rather than the subjects that people it and understands the municipality’s role as that of neutral and impartial arbiter between parties understood as equal or equivalent that seek to access and use a common resource, public space. In its technocratic governance, the Courts and the city take for granted that public parks are to be used for forms of recreation, leisure and enjoyment that have been shaped according to colonial histories of conservation and the needs and desires of particular subjects. This putatively apolitical discourse ensures that the desired outcome, a ban on sheltering in parks, is established while providing the facade of recourse to a putatively just and fair legal framework. Poor, unhoused and Indigenous people are not expressly targeted, but are still subject to the ruling’s disciplinary and regulatory effects most strongly when they seek to use the space in ways that do not align with prevailing and hegemonic logics of recreation (Blomley 2010; Levy 2021). The Courts clearly saw their role as delineating the meanings of a particular legal instrument, the trust, while attempting to sidestep ‘political’ issues, like Indigenous or constitutional rights that would unduly influence the technocratic management of public space. They framed themselves as neutral arbiters attempting to define public space according to the logics of recreation, eschewing the perception that they were targeting particular communities, even as their rulings would disproportionately affect specific communities. The primary function of ‘Beacon Hill’ established through its history of legal rulings is to provide for the recreation and enjoyment of the public. Following Blomley’s articulation of pedestrianism (2010), we 237 might describe the governing rationale that surrounds the space as recreationism. Providing for the recreation of the public within urban green space was seen as a normative and common-sense objective of governance. Establishing recreation as the pre-eminent governing logic encourages technocratic forms of management that sidestep any uses which might complicate this overarching rational or politicize the space in any way. Any obstacles or obstructions to recreation, no matter their ‘inner life’ or public utility, for instance sheltering, must be cleared from public space. Like pedestrianism, the consequences of pursuing recreationism, displacing people experiencing homelessness or erasing Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction, are considered secondary to the objectives of urban green space governance: facilitating the recreative enjoyment of the space. In Meegan, the effect of recreationism was to functionally ban people experiencing homelessness from the space in the service of the ‘public’ interest. Sheltering was presented as a problem to be resolved within the framework of recreationism leading to outcomes that impacted people experiencing homelessness subjecting them to further regulation and policing, yet simultaneously rendered apolitical, merely a technical interpretation of the law according to a taken-for-granted logic of recreationsism. 7.7 Technocratic Governance and Recreationism “It shucks all accountability and all responsibility. Because they can say ‘oh, it's not our decision. It's in the bylaws. It's bylaws. You know, we have to respect the bylaws.’ We're not gonna acknowledge that we literally create the bylaws.” -Shae Perkins (personal communication). Within the internal logics of pedestrianism and recreationism all people are seen as equally subject to the dictates of public flow, or ‘enjoyment’ and the responsibilities compelled by public space. Everyone is seen as having an equal right to use sidewalks to transit or to use parks for the purposes of leisure. Yet, some communities may choose to or are forced to use 238 sidewalks for purposes other than transit and parks for purposes other than recreation. 161 If sidewalks are understood as space for the public to transit, parks are understood as spaces for public recreation, the practice of leisure and the activities associated with it. Yet, some people are compelled or choose to use parks for differing purposes. These communities then are framed as impeding a public right to recreation and upsetting the norms around which public green space is organized. Structural conditions and the necessity to ‘make do’ with less, often make it difficult to embody norms of behaviour and comportment, to enact ‘proper’ use of public space, for transit and recreation, and nothing else. These communities are then portrayed as impediments to flow or leisure and disruptive of public space and subject to management and regulation. As a logic, recreationism effaces how these communities are disproportionately poor or racialized through its emphasis on technocratic governance. In the end, recreationism does end up targeting specific communities while providing a veneer that all subjects are equal under the law, uniformly responsible to adhere to the norms of public space and that municipal governance simply seeks to regulate public space for the common good. Yet, structural conditions can make it impossible to embody or enact the norms associated with both public flow and leisure space. The problem is that the abstract public that the Courts and city hail is constructed around the normative figure of the housed settler resident and their requirements of urban space. The function of urban spaces like sidewalks or parks, is to accommodate a particular kind of subject, someone using sidewalks to transit from one point to another or someone using parks to recreate and relax. People seeking to use public space for other purposes, to shelter, to protest, are framed 161 Pedestrianism and recreationsim are not exactly the same. While pedestrianism revolves around a singular logic, transit, recreationism is a broader category encompassing a broader range of practices associated with leisure, jogging, playgrounds, picnics, the studied appreciation of nature. Recreationism then does not have as defined an object as pedestrianism does. 239 as ‘obstacles’, not through any ideological basis, or what Blomley (2008) describes as the ‘inner life’ or motivation of pedestrians, but simply because their uses contravene the governing rationale of sidewalks, ‘public flow’ and parks, recreation. Yet, this technique of governance obfuscates the ways in which these strategies do disproportionately target specific communities, perhaps even from its practitioners (Blomley 2010). This allows urban governance to be seen as common sense and value-free while effacing that those disproportionately affected by such modalities of governance are those most marginalized within urban governance. Pedestrianism and recreationism then can be seen as examples of ‘antipolitics’ and the rendering technical of urban governance. Certainly, sheltering, as it came before the Courts, was understood as a technical issue, rather than an ethical one. What pedestrianism, recreationism and similar modes of governance refuse to address is how the normative use of a sidewalk or a park, transit or leisure, are framed around the needs of particular subjects, of their expectations of the function of public space, while foreclosing or erasing other potential uses; to panhandle, shelter or rest, for instance. This norm ‘fits’ some subjects more than others (Ahmed 2019). It accommodates some uses while inhibiting others. The specific needs of particular communities are universalized as ‘public’ use and protected through the operation of governance and the mechanism of law. This is what occurred in Meegan when what was considered legitimate public use was shaped around the practices, requirements and desires of a particular class of subjects, propertied White settlers to use the space for recreation alone. As AJ Withers (2021:30) argues “while public space is supposed to be open to everyone, in the Canadian settler state public space is already predicated, at least historically, on the understanding that some people are not persons.” Structural conditions force certain communities to use public space in ways that are vilified and subject to criminalization (Ahmed 240 2019; Isaki 2011). ‘Improper’ use of public space is then mobilized by municipal authority to rationalize the spatial exclusion of ‘unruly’ bodies, reproducing cultural norms and retrenching settler control. This produces a de facto exclusion from public space, which operates as a form of ‘antipolitics’ seemingly not targeting people because they are poor, for their status or membership within a particular community or class, but because they individually fail to adhere to norms of comportment that would allow entry into the category of public citizen, using sidewalks for transit or parks for recreation, for instance. This form of police power does not seem to target poor people as a demographic, but rather concerns itself with the individual conduct of urban residents, effacing structural injustice in the process (Neocleous 2021). However, the effect is the same, the exclusion of poor and unhoused people from public space and the reproduction and naturalization of certain governing rationales. This tactic of governance is useful because it frames improper use as the product of individual moral failings, and not the effect of structural inequality (Chapman and Withers 2019; Mitchell 2020). Yet, as Don Mitchell (2020:31) argues “homelessness is a condition of society, not a characteristic of individuals”. In redressing improper use, apparatuses of governance target the individual for biopolitical management and improvement and evade structural changes that would upset the hegemony of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. In this framing, the ‘problem’ of homelessness and improper use of public space is not the conditions under which you struggle, it is you, yourself. This erases, of course, that a failure to embody norms around public space is often predicated on what AJ Withers (2021) describes as ‘ruling relations’. If I sleep in a public park, or wash in its washrooms, out of necessity, because I do not have a home or cannot access sanitary facilities, I am seen to use public space improperly, yet my ‘improper’ use is a product of the structural conditions in which I am forced to survive; precaritization, 241 austerity and the housing crisis. The uses that are deemed proper are those associated with proper/tied subjects. Other uses become deviant or aberrant because of their disassociation with subjects coded as normative. This is how municipal authority can valorize public space while simultaneously producing exclusions and barring certain communities from public space. Municipal authority increasingly frames its governance as serving the benefit of the public while disavowing how this public is normatively understood as encompassing particular subjects and excluding others. Thus, it is often through the language of ‘inclusion’ and ‘public’ space that some communities are evicted from space, as their uses are deemed to infringe on the ‘public’s’ right to space. Some uses are taken as aberrant and some as normative. The housed, White, able-bodied and settler subject is coded as the unmarked and normative subject of public space. Their uses establish a barometer and metric for proper use of public space, proper embodiment of urban citizenship. People experiencing homelessness are ‘welcomed’ into public space so long as they can conduct themselves according to a normative set of behaviours and modes of comportment, a condition which is often made structurally impossible because the terms of ‘welcome’ are established according to the norms of these unmarked subjects’ uses of public space. These norms fit these subjects through usage, they come to accommodate some and inhibit others through everyday use and continued naturalization (Ahmed 2019; Blomley 2023). As Ahmed (2019:212) argues it is through “small acts of use that possibilities become restricted”. Parks were made to ‘welcome’ a broader public through the unwelcoming of people experiencing homelessness (Withers 2021). The concept of the ‘public’ was often the tool to used to displace and dispossess marginalized communities and as such, we need to continue to interrogate the uses to which the public is put (Porter and Kelly 2023) 242 7.8 Conclusion: Life and Death Effaced: The Technocratic Functioning of Law “It's this constant, weird paradox and tension; these are all colonial laws, so inherently they're harmful. And fighting to change them using their tools is a bit of a reinforcement of colonial bullshit, really. But are there ways to use the law to hold back the colonial state?” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). The rulings handed down from the BC Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals evidence exactly such practices of anti-politics and the rendering technical of governance and law. In both decisions, the Justices favored a narrow reading of the scope of the petition and limited their rulings to whether temporary sheltering was prohibited under the terms of Trust, not whether people had a constitutional right to shelter or the legal basis of the Trust in relation to Lək̓ʷəŋən rights and title. This allowed them to elide protections afforded under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and affirmed in the Adams decision and to avoid entering the unsettling legal terrain of Indigenous rights and title. To the extent that the Courts did take up the question of public space, they did so through the naturalization of the ordering framework of recreationism, taking for granted that the rights of a particular class of subjects to recreation would dictate legitimate uses of the park. Such a framing naturalized colonial authority as indisputable and evaded even the colonial framework of rights guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, entrenching recreationism as the space’s overarching governing rationale. The legal framework established by the trust and the ascendancy of recreationism are understood as rigid and fixed, a fait accompli. This severely delimits alternative expressions of governance, taking for granted as accomplished the erasure of Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and foreclosing other possible uses of the Park not structured entirely around the needs and desires of propertied settlers. 243 The legal basis through which the Province could convey Lək̓ʷəŋən territory to the City is never questioned. A structuring erasure, the precondition of Lək̓ʷəŋən dispossession, is operative, yet unacknowledged. The land trust is conjured as an incontestable document over whose meanings the Courts must struggle to adjudicate. In this calculus, the trust document is naturalized as authoritative and solutions to public use of park space must be found through alignment with the document, within its own racist logics and groundings in dispossession. The idea of troubling the foundations on which the trust stakes its authority, conquest and Indigenous dispossession, cannot even enter the frame as the problem is rendered technical, to be resolved through the internal logics of the trust document and the colonial legal system. The basis on which settler jurisdiction is conjured ex nihilo does not trouble the courts; that other legal orders are operative in Meegan is left untended. The fundamental legitimacy of the land trust is taken for granted, and weaponized against those experiencing homelessness, a disproportionate number of whom are Indigenous or Lək̓ʷəŋən. Yet, the legal framework in which such processes unfold provides a veneer of legitimacy and obfuscates its effects, the ongoing and targeted displacement, criminalization and policing of Indigenous peoples and unhoused communities. This process is deemed justifiable because it does not explicitly target them as Indigenous or poor peoples but rather through their ‘improper’ use of the park. Never mind that many people access the Park for sheltering because of centuries of dispossession, targeted policing and state intervention into Indigenous homes and communities. The pressing questions of whose land ‘Beacon Hill’ occupies, how the park came to be a colonial possession (the ‘Crown jewel of Victoria’) and to what extent people have a right to shelter under settler regimes would not even be asked. Sheltering could only be discussed in the rigid pre-existing container of colonial legal systems and governance as though the trust were immutable and eternal, and not the contingent 244 product of a particular historical moment. The unsettling aspects of ongoing Lək̓ʷəŋən sovereignty or the moral and ethical implications of denying someone the basic right to shelter and sleep were never broached. In this way, the City and the Province were able to sidestep the fundamental questions as to how the Province had come to claim the authority and jurisdiction to convey Lək̓ʷəŋən territory to the city in the first place, and to the constitutionality of restricting the right to shelter and the legality of city bylaws that disproportionately target poor, homeless and Indigenous communities. In emphasizing the technical question before them, the Courts refused to take up the ethical question: on what grounds may people in need be refused the right to shelter? Is it humane to prohibit someone from seeking respite with no other adequate or viable sheltering options? On what basis of authority do the City and the state claim authority over Meegan? The Courts refused to return an answer on these questions of justice. Instead, the Courts addressed the technocratic functioning of law. How does the unique apparatus of the trust function? Is it a simple conveyance or a statutory enactment? Does the Trust contemplate practices like sheltering in its condition for conveyance? Never addressing the law’s entanglements with justice: is it right to refuse communities in dire need of shelter the ability to provide for themselves? While this framing has the same functional consequences for people experiencing homelessness; they cannot shelter in Meegan and are denied the barest forms of care and respite, discursively it allows the ruling to appear apolitical or value-free, by limiting it to a bureaucratic question of legal interpretation pertaining to a unique apparatus of governance. This discursive maneuver erases the stakes involved. During the pandemic the answer to this ‘technical’ question of legal exegesis of a somewhat obscure legal document could be life or death for those in desperate need of shelter. 245 This is clearly an example of the ‘anti-politics’ and rendering technical of governance that Withers (2021), Li (2007) and Blomley (2010) outline. ‘Antipolitics’ is a tactic of limiting the agenda and seemingly the scope of governance. Governance and law, become purely technocratic, divorced from the ideological at all. In this sense, the answers and forms of redress are already foregone. In Justice Punnett and Justice Wilson’s circumscribed rulings the political question of ‘is it right to refuse some shelter in the absence of available options’ is subsumed within the strictly technical question; does the Trust contemplate sheltering as a legitimate use? By rendering governance technical the Courts do not even approach the question of ‘justice’, in any way that might be recognizable to people experiencing homelessness. The Courts mobilized the rationale of technocratic governance to actively obfuscate how power is operative in the exercise of law and the workings of the colonial legal system. This allowed them to deflect criticism and frame their decisions as apolitical, divorced from questions of power. This means that the question of ‘justice’, as campers being impacted by the City’s policies might imagine it, would not even be on the table. If people experiencing homelessness in the Park, thought that the Courts would be a forum for ‘justice’, they were quickly disillusioned. The Courts’ rulings would be mobilized to deny people the right to shelter having a material and potentially deadly impact on the lives of those most marginalized within the city. Far from being technocratic exercises, the legal decisions around sheltering would further exclusion and work to reshape Meegan as a space aligning it with reinvigorated form of settler authority and control. As a result of the City’s petition and the Province’s appeal, not only was 24/7 camping deemed an inappropriate use of the Park, even the sheltering protected under Adams was deemed in contravention of the Trust. On June 4, 2021, the city declared a two-year moratorium on sheltering in the Park in order to ‘remediate’ the space. The delivery of the 246 Appeals court’s decision seems to solidify the ban as permanent. Local media certainly trumpeted the ruling as permanently banning all forms of sheltering in the park, despite the constitutional rights provided for in the Adams decision. Unhoused people’s rights to shelter were actually clawed back during the course of the pandemic. While people continue to have an abstract or theoretical right to shelter, municipalities are increasingly making it difficult to render this right actionable, redzoning parks due to ecological, public health and safety concerns and bylaws that produce loopholes to ban sheltering. Beacon Hill is not the only park that has been subject to this process. In the past four years, all but three of Victoria’s 138 parks have banned sheltering through technicalities and loopholes, despite constitutional protections. Councial has indicated a desire to eventually redzone these remaining parks as well. Increasingly, the ‘right to shelter’ is a right in name only. 247 8 Tensions and Erasures: Conducting Solidarity on Lək̓ʷ əŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Territory 8.1 Introduction “In coalition work, tension is generative and needed. In my experience, you can't work across lines of power and privilege without there being tension. And so you have to navigate that and figure out how to deal with that in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than breaking it.” “I have had to really question, what am I doing? And is it more harm than help?” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). “Without building those relationships, we're going to consistently, in any type of movement work we do, we're going to consistently bring more harm and more silencing to local people. -Lacey Jones (personal communication). Drawing together the preceding historicization of the settler colonial city via the spatio-legal production of gardens and green space, I now turn to the ways these processes, discursive, legal and affective, shaped the contours of solidarity work in encampment support I was involved with during the Covid-19 pandemic. I examine how encampment support was conducted, the possibilities that it opened up, as well as some of the limitations of both housing justice and encampment support as they are currently practiced. Encampment support at Meegan was both influenced by the space and time in which it unfolded and, in turn, worked to shape that context in the midst of a global pandemic and heightened organizing in solidarity with Indigenous land back movements. In the previous chapters, I examined how settler NGOs, the city and the courts produced and exacerbated exclusion, justified the eviction of people experiencing homelessness from city parks and shaped the constitution of public space. In what follows, I interrogate how community organizers responded to these actions, in ways that were sometimes effective and transformative, but also in ways that could unwittingly reinstate settler colonial relations and the stigmatization of poverty. To do so, I introduce the broader political 248 context in which encampment support unfolded. Encampment support in Meegan occurred in a specific place, as I have shown, but it also took place at a specific time. Significantly, conducting mutual aid occurred not only in the shadow of a global pandemic, but also in the wake of large-scale coalitional land back movements that rocked the settler state during the winter of 2020. This shaped how encampment support was conducted and illustrated the, at times, stark relief between forms of housing justice and decolonization that were often seen as qualitatively different. Attending to the minutiae of solidarity work through my situated viewpoint helps to better understand how settler colonialism, municipal politics and antipoverty work intersect and interact, but also how settler entitlements and White supremacy continue to shape these spaces and the politics that unfold within them. I explore this history and story my own involvement below to ask: how are housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty kindled and given life on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories? In the winter of 2020, the settler state of Canada was shaken by a wave of actions in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation in their struggles against TC Energy’s development of the Coastal GasLink (CGL) pipeline through their territories. These actions arose in response to the militarized police invasion of Wet’suwet’en territory to enforce an injunction that CGL had obtained to displace community members from the Gidimt’en and Unist'ot'en camps built on their territory and in the path of the pipeline. Hereditary chiefs and communities opposed the pipeline and maintained that Canada, the Province and CGL were infringing on the sovereignty of their unceded lands. 162 Matriarchs who had established thriving communities at Gidimt’en 162 The question of who has the authority to govern land, who can make legitimate claims to sovereignty, animates all actions in the territory. This struggle is well-worn within the context of settler colonial Canada and even settlers understand as pivoting around the question of sovereignty. While this particular assertion of sovereignty allows us to understand some settler colonial dynamics, as we will see, it also forecloses more robust understandings of the complex ways and the differing scales in which settler colonialism unfolds. 249 and Unist’ot’en were arrested and forcefully ripped from their lands. Community members witnessing this violence shared their experiences through social media which inaugurated a wave of solidarity actions across so-called ‘Canada’ animated by calls for land back and a refusal to further participate in the state’s degraded frameworks of recognition and reconciliation (Coulthard 2014; Cherry 2021). In cities like ‘Vancouver’, Musqueam, Tsleil Waututh and Squamish territory; ‘Montreal’, Kanien’keha:ka territory; and ‘Toronto’, the shared territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Anishinaabeg, including the Seneca and the Mississaugas of the New Credit; direct actions targeted both the symbolic sites of colonial power and its economic heart aiming to ‘shut down Canada’ through blockades of highways, rail lines and deepwater port facilities. Sit-ins occupied government offices and banks funding the project, disrupting business-as-usual while hashtags such as #AllEyesOnWetsuweten ensured that police violence perpetrated in the territory was not allowed to go unnoticed. On Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory, a coalition of Indigenous and settler organizers blockaded the Swartz Bay ferry terminal and occupied the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources. 163 After the success of these initial actions, organizing coalesced around the BC Legislature building as a delegation of Indigenous youth occupied and held its ceremonial entrance calling for the Province to respect Wet’suwet’en law and sovereignty and for the RCMP and CGL workers to leave the territory immediately. 164 The Legislature is a symbolic and material site of governance; both a highly visible and affective site within the 163 These actions illustrated the thin veneer separating everyday life in ‘Canada’ and overt expressions of masculinism, settler vigilantism and police violence. As an individual inconvenienced by the Swartz Bay blockade made clear, “Now this… makes me extremely frustrated, and the fact… I guess it’s not politically correct, but I’d like to see Mounties grow some balls” (Kolsuts 2020). The tacit invocation of masculinist violence is telling. 164 Direct actions also targeted infrastructure in attempts to disrupt the smooth functioning of settler economies and senses of daily life, namely the Johnson and Bay Street Bridges and the Pat Bay Highway, the primary access point connecting ‘Victoria’ to the BC Ferries system and the mainland. 250 urban space of ‘Victoria’s’ downtown core and waterfront, and the tangible site from which governance is conducted and violence against the Wet’suwet’en directed. 165 Decisions are made there that matter; that manifest materially in the lives of Indigenous peoples. In an act of symbolic political performance, Indigenous youth chose to occupy the steps of the house of settler governance to contest the ways in which police had broken into and ripped land defenders from their homes and homelands. 166 Occupying the gates of the Legislature then was a symbolically and ceremonially charged gesture. While the occupation was led by Indigenous youth, settlers also came out in solidarity, providing support and helping to manage logistics. Signs and banners proclaiming that “Reconciliation is Dead”, calling for the government to “Respect Indigenous Law” and noting the unceded nature of Wet’suwet’en territory illustrated that organizers and supporters understood solidarity actions as pivoting around questions of sovereignty, law and who could wield legitimate authority on Indigenous territory. 167 In the absence of any legal foundation for settler sovereignty on unceded territory, the state had invaded Wet’suwet’en yintah, to push through an environmentally destructive pipeline without the consent of the nation’s hereditary leadership and many community members. This action was 165 Although Premier John Horgan, in statements since proved false in a brief released by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, claimed that the province had no oversight or involvement in directing police action to enforce the injunction against the Wet’suwet’en. The brief illustrates that the BC Solicitor General was authorized to divert resources to assist in the RCMP deployment in Wet’suwet’en territory. The Province’s hands were neither idle nor clean in regards to directing police violence against the Wet’suwet’en. 166The symbolism is fitting, Indigenous youth occupied the threshold of governance, but experienced its edifice as impermeable. Access to the seats of power within the house of governance was strictly policed and Indigenous youth were framed as illegitimate petitioners scrabbling on the steps of power. In contrast, the thresholds of Indigenous peoples in Wet’suwet’en territory were seen as porous, permeable, and intrinsically violable. As we will see, this construction of the Indigenous home and domestic space as transgressable, as hardly a home or sanctuary at all, is a long-standing and deeply entrenched colonial narrative. Political performance at the Legislature drew attention to this discordant construction of space. 167 Other discourses were invoked as well. During an action in which supporters used chalk to tag the edifice of the Legislature, the imperative address ‘Haunt Horgan’ was painted across the Legislature’s face. This exhortation conjures other histories and practices for understanding colonial power, racial violence and the ghosts that haunt the settler state (Gordon 1997; Tuck 2013). 251 framed as an invasion, an intrusion upon the sovereign territory and governing authority of the Wet’suwet’en nation. 168 ‘Allies’ thus, understood and framed their own actions as mobilized in support of Wet’suwet’en legal orders and sovereignty struggles to angrily ask: on what basis of authority does ‘Canada’ intrude into unceded Wet’suwet’en territory? 169 With support from ‘allies’ in solidarity, Indigenous youth occupied the Legislature’s gates for weeks disrupting Lieutenant Governor Janet Austin’s throne speech, shutting down local infrastructure and ensuring that police and environmental violence in Wet’suwet’en territory be recognized. During the occupation, organizers asserted that there were over 1000 people on the grounds of the Legislature in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en in defense of the integrity of their lands, waters, communities and homes and many more voicing support on social media and in the streets. 170 Indigenous youth were able to hold the space of the Legislature and draw attention to colonial violence on Wet’suwet’en territory after injunctions and mass arrests had dispersed blockades in cities like Vancouver, for instance. The moment was politically galvanizing for many in Victoria, with organizers claiming that the city had rarely witnessed such large-scale political mobilization and coalitional solidarity in support of Indigenous sovereignty. The delegation of Indigenous youth at the Legislature had made sure 168 This framing is captured in the powerful short film Invasion (2019) by Michael Toledano, Sam Vinal and Franklin Lopez documenting experiences at Gidimt’en and Unist’ot’en. This framing resonates with Tiffany Lethabo King’s recent intervention that seeks to reframe experiences of colonialism as involving invasion or conquest, rather than settlement, a term which she argues invisibilizes the violence, domination and subjection of these processes. Certainly, within solidarity movements, the raids were understood as invasion, an attack by one nation on another. The presence of highly militarized police in combat and tactical gear aiming automatic weapons at community members served to enforce this understanding of aggressive intent and sovereign transgression on the part of the Canadian government. 169 Not all ‘allies’ articulated their support through the lens of sovereignty, however. Many understood the issue as one of environmental justice and mobilized discourses that centered on climate change or environmental degradation, rather than Indigenous authority. 170 This is not to say that there wasn’t opposition. Virulent expressions of White supremacy and violence were widespread, constant and came to be expected. 252 that colonial violence would not be ignored or subsumed, forcefully inserting sovereignty into public discourse and the functioning of everyday life through their political actions. In response, settlers had heeded the call and showed up to offer forms of solidarity in support of Indigenous sovereignty explicitly organized around an ethic and practice of decolonization and land back. However, as witnessed in the previous chapters, in March 2020, another battle against settler colonial power was being waged in almost the exact same place, but without the broad base of support. Just a few weeks after solidarity actions at the Legislature, political mobilization coalesced around the city’s widespread housing precarity and in support of those experiencing homelessness within the city, a disproportionate number of whom are Indigenous (Fiorentino, Gibson and Pauly 2020). 171 The city was already facing a housing crisis, with rents skyrocketing and the number of people experiencing housing insecurity and absolute homelessness increasing, when the full onset of the Covid-19 pandemic saw a widespread shuttering of social services for unhoused communities. Street sweeps and displacements were conducted in the name of ‘public health and safety’. The Pandora corridor, a longstanding hub for unhoused communities due to its proximity to services and sheltering options, was amongst the first areas targeted. The city moved to immediately erect construction fencing throughout the street to block access to the small areas of median green space where people had been sheltering. Following the sweeps, the unhoused community sheltering there were forced outside of the more visible areas of the downtown core and into Topaz and Royal Athletic Park as the pandemic’s severity became apparent and shelter and service providers continued to shut down or limit access. Under the 171 The National Bank of Canada recently designated Victoria, Canada’s least affordable city, surpassing Vancouver and Toronto. In fact, Victoria is one of the least affordable cities in the world, ranking above Hong Kong and San Francisco. 253 guise of public health and safety, people were being displaced and forced into new, far-flung and unfamiliar spaces. The city’s largest and most iconic park, ‘Beacon Hill’, often described as the ‘Crown jewel of Victoria’, had been selected as a third site for temporary ‘relocation’ but was initially rejected due to the local pressures of neighborhood organizations and pervasive NIMBY discourses. However, after a sanctioned encampment in Topaz Park was closed, bylaws restricting sheltering in ‘Beacon Hill’ from 7pm to 7am were temporarily amended to allow 24/7 camping, unhoused communities began to occupy the park in the absence of any other options demanding housing for everyone currently sheltering in parks and displaced at the beginning of the pandemic by citywide sweeps conducted in the name of ‘public health and safety’. 172 Unhoused community members argued that the pandemic was being instrumentalized to effect projects of gentrification, displacement and dispersal that the city had long sought and increased their calls for the right to dignified housing as well as attendant calls for safe supply, decriminalization, and access to badly needed resources and services, particularly for those with disabilities or facing complex health needs. 173 The pandemic served to surface political struggles with deep roots and make visible (in fact, hypervisible and surveilled) communities marginalized, devalued or dehumanized within popular discourse and practices of neoliberal 172 The city had housed some of those displaced from the Pandora corridor and elsewhere but claimed that they lacked the infrastructure or resources to house all of those sheltering outside. 173 The Pandora corridor is a highly vilified and policed space within Victoria. The rapid erection of construction fencing on the corridor seemed to affirm that the city was instrumentalizing the pandemic to displace communities long framed as undesirable in the city's core. Construction fencing prohibited people from reoccupying spaces that were more convenient and familiar to those living outdoors. 254 governance. In response to city policies of negligence and disregard, a strong and motivated movement for housing justice developed within the parks. 174 The city had amended the bylaws prohibiting camping in parks due to a recognized absence of adequate options for shelter, yet consistently impeded and inhibited any attempts to make these spaces actually livable. As unhoused communities were pressed into urban green spaces in the absence of any other viable housing options, a range of issues arising from the city’s ad hoc plan emerged almost immediately. Services that unhoused community members had often accessed in ‘storefront’ locations now had to be coordinated through outreach and a logistical infrastructure had to be established to deliver these services placing an enormous burden on outreach workers and often leading to disruptions in critical forms of care for unhoused communities. Staying warm and dry was difficult under bylaws which prohibited the construction of any ‘permanent’ structure which was not seen as mobile or capable of being broken down quickly. This bylaw was mobilized at the discretion of police and bylaw officers to contain and manage the belongings of unhoused community members in ways that made it difficult to construct or maintain adequate shelter (Blomley 2020). 175 While ‘Beacon Hill’ had been opened for 24/7 camping, much of the park had been ‘redzoned’ for ecological protections, making it more difficult to find a place to set up adequate shelter and contributing to overcrowding and conflict in spaces in which sheltering was allowed. Redzoning also served to try to segregate people to less visible or trafficked areas of the park so that the leisure of 174 This movement was, of course, not new, with some local organizers pursuing projects for housing justice for decades and responsible for bylaw amendments allowing 7-to-7 sheltering in the first place. However, it was taking shape in new ways and under different circumstances. 175 Campers often noted the arbitrary enforcement of this statute which seemed to rely on the discretionary power of bylaw or police. Their judgement on the size or area of one’s shelter could often lead to impoundment. Many campers felt that the exercise of this discretionary power was based on police and bylaw’s personal opinions about campers leading to accusations of ‘favoritism’, ‘cronyism’ and stigmatizing enforcement that also worked to sow division and foster conflict within the camp. 255 ‘legitimate’ park users would not be affected, increasing safety concerns for those sheltering there (Sylvestre, Blomley and Bellot 2019; Couture et al. 2018). Harassment, threats and violence from housed neighbors became regular occurrences that led to folks feeling unsafe and under attack for simply seeking shelter in the absence of other options and in the face of intransigence by the city and the Province in providing solutions that met the community’s needs. Campers had tents set on fire, were threatened and attacked during the middle of the night and faced a barrage of microaggressions from housed residents of James Bay, Fairfield and Cook Street village, some of Victoria’s richer neighborhoods. As Flynn et al. (2022:30) argue people sheltering in encampments are often “placed at further risk for violence and harm by community members attempting to enforce who is allowed to occupy public space.” Finally, bylaw, police and the fire department made routine stops to impound belongings, ticket, harass or even arrest those sheltering in the park leading to even deeper feelings of being surveilled and under siege. Tensions from this uncertainty, a lack of services and constant policing could lead to conflict amongst campers during times of duress and extreme stress. 176 To address the pressures that the community was facing, their evolving needs as they related to aid and service provision and some of the conflicts that were developing within the park, unhoused residents and their ‘allies’ began convening weekly circles, where the community could call for support from advocates, articulate their needs and have frank discussions about tensions within the park and how to resolve them. As local organizer Niki Ottosen (personal communication) explains “Monday circles started off as a way to strategize against bylaw because they were being brutal. We created the circle so that people could all get together and all 176 In interviews with people experiencing homelessness in Victoria Nicole Chaland (2021) was told about the toll that these experiences had and how they could lead to conflict, “some days you might have a short temper because you haven’t slept. People need to understand how stressful it is to live outside.” 256 have a chance on getting hot food and meeting with community and telling us what they needed. That was really important about the Monday circles, because then we could hear from them, ‘what do you actually need?’ And they would say, ‘well, I need this, I need that.’ And then the next week we would bring it, and it would give them hope that somebody's listening.” These circles were normally facilitated by Grandma Losah Henry, a Tla’amin elder with decades of lived experience organizing for housing justice. Circles were open to housed and unhoused community members to facilitate connections that could be mobilized to meet the needs of those sheltering in parks. The unhoused community sheltering in the park described the deep crisis and structural abandonment that they were experiencing and called for more political attention to be paid to housing and their experiences during the pandemic. Yet, outside of a core community of dedicated advocates, this rallying cry never coalesced into the critical mass of support that had been so recently witnessed at the Legislature. 177 Many of those experiencing homelessness in the parks were Indigenous, and many of the determinants for experiences of housing precarity and absolute homelessness are directly linked to historical and ongoing experiences of settler colonial violence and dispossession. 178 Ongoing colonization produces homelessness and housing precarity (Thistle 2017). As Jesse Thistle (2017:14) argues, “Indigenous homelessness in Canada today can be explained, and solutions to it envisioned, only if we pay attention to the broader legacy of marginalization and displacement created by settler colonialism.” In short, homelessness is an issue foundationally tied to settler colonialism. Yet, it proved difficult to ‘translate’ the solidarity 177 Discussions about experiences at the Legislature continued to shape the landscape of ‘Victoria’s organizing community for years afterwards. It was critical and defining moment for all those involved. 178 A Point-in-Time survey conducted in 2020 to ascertain the extent of homelessness within the city illustrated that over half of the Indigenous people surveyed had experience with the child welfare and foster care system. Likewise, 75% of respondents had at least one grandparent who had been incarcerated within the Indian Residential School system. 257 at the Legislature to systemic and pervasive issues around housing, immiseration and impoverishment. 179 Advocates expressed dismay and confusion about the discrepancy, As Joshua Goldberg (personal communication) explained, “it was so weird because there was the stuff at the [Legislature] where massive mobilization happened, and then, bam, nothing.” 180 In my experience as a community member in both spaces, the struggles at the Legislature and ‘Beacon Hill’ were seen by many ‘allies’ as qualitatively different, addressing different issues and struggles. At times, it felt as though organized abandonment and colonial disregard were too ‘slow’, messy and lacking in spectacle to garner sustained White settler attention (Gilmore 2007; Nixon 2011; Daigle 2019; Stoler 2021). It was challenging for White settlers to understand disregard and abandonment as morally and politically equivalent to invasion even if these processes are active, organized and involved similar forms of intrusion and displacement, as with gentrification, for instance. Indeed, it was hard for White settlers to understand housing justice as linked to settler colonialism or as an Indigenous concern at all, one which they were implicated in as settlers. 181 It seemed like settler solidarity only extended so far. This is the complex context 179 To be fair, this particular narration does not account for the question of ‘burnout’. The experience at the Legislature had been deeply exhausting at best, and traumatic or alienating, at worst. Many organizers at the Legislature did not immediately participate in subsequent actions and community work because they were recovering from the emotional toll of their experiences . The experience had been seismic, and many organizers needed to convalesce, ground and recalibrate. 180 Nic Olson (personal communication) shared that, “I would see the organizing around the [Legislature] with the Indigenous youth and I was involved in it in some ways for sure, and it was incredible. And then maybe whatever two months later is when Covid happened and everyone was in parks and I really wondered how to get that much kind of support around the things I was seeing in parks. And I think part of it is that there's a disconnect between people organizing in the housing justice stuff and not doing well enough to include and, center Indigenous voices.” 181 These statements need to be conditioned in a number of ways. Some supporters did link their praxis to both housing justice and Indigenous jurisdiction. A practice of enframement which detached mutual aid from settler colonialism and Indigenous jurisdiction was a prevailing discourse, not the only means of understanding mutual aid, harm reduction and housing justice. Yet, a normalized distinction between housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty did exist, and while some community members participated in both actions, in general these movements were seen to hail different communities and different subjects and take place within differing ideological and discursive terrain. My point here is that the ways in which these struggles were conceptualized and distinguished was not always black-and-White, consistent or even coherent, but that there was distinctive tendency to bifurcate and disassociate these movements. 258 in which encampment support was conducted in Meegan. Settler support could not be guaranteed outside of moments of crisis and the spectacle of colonial violence. Housing justice often questions how to politicize precarity and poverty, to render them structural rather than individual issues. Samuel Stein (2019:180) argues that we have to search for ways to “these life and death matters legible as politics.” I would want to extend this by asking how we can make these struggles legible as a kind of anticolonial politics? What would it take to more fulsomely draw these struggles together? 8.2 Placing Ourselves within the Story “The Legislature was probably my first real experience of mutual aid and people doing shit together, completely independently of any organization or anything like that.” “It was really surreal to see the disconnect in these movements. And, I kept wondering, how do I make these connections? How do I connect these movements, these communities? Like, how do you draw people into movements? Seeing the amount of support for all these different things and then seeing the void in these other movements and, wondering how to make those bridges.” -Shae Perkins (personal communication). Here, I want to place myself within this story to illustrate how I came to be involved with solidarity organizing and encampment support and how this has shaped how I understand the intersections between housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty. In February of 2020, I was living in Stz’uminus territory in the small town of Ladysmith about an hour and a half north of ‘Victoria’. Raids on Gidim’ten and Unist’ot’en had become an almost annual exercise and the Wet’suwet’en and their supporters had been preparing themselves for the raid that they expected to occur to enforce the injunction the Province had granted CGL. Anticipating a raid, I had been looking for ways that I could support. When the delegation of Indigenous youth occupied the Legislature, I decided to travel to Victoria to offer support in whatever ways I could. While I didn’t live in Victoria at the time, I had connections and community in the city that I knew were already organizing in solidarity. Heeding calls for support by Indigenous youth organizing the 259 action, I showed up and camped on the Legislature steps during the occupation. Organizers had placed call outs for 24/7 support, with a particular need for a united presence overnight. 182 I decided that this was the way that I could contribute in some small way. Camping mostly consisted of trying to stay warm and somewhat alert for police drive-bys or local White supremacist groups like the Sons of Odin and the Proud Boys intent on threatening supporters and Indigenous youth. Overnight, I would sleep by the steps, warm myself by the fire and walk around the grounds. I spent most of my nights and mornings on the grounds before heading to family or friends’ homes to rest in the early afternoons. During the day, Indigenous youth who organized the occupation forcefully articulated their dissent, calling on politicians inside to stand up and be accountable, on sound systems that echoed across ‘Victoria’s’ Inner Harbour and into the depths of the Legislature, a monument to colonial power and occupation. They led the group of supporters assembled in the space in chants and drumming that literally and metaphorically shook the foundations on which the Legislature rested. The space also fostered a robust and caring community. During the day, there were speeches, skills workshops, and the general business of maintaining the camp and providing for supporters and organizers. Meals were provided, either made on site or delivered by supporters. There were art builds and teach-ins and speakers travelled across great distances to talk to the community gathered there. 183 Conversations about solidarity, organizing and sovereignty animated the space. The films Invasion about Wet’suwet’en struggles against CGL and the state, and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance were even projected onto the edifice of the Legislature. There were also political performances announcing the death of reconciliation 182 Organizers worried that if there was a police raid, it was most likely to occur at night when fewer people were on the Legislature grounds. In this way, police might break the occupation with fewer resources and with less media attention and spectacle. 183 BC Grand Chief Stewart Phillip spoke to the community gathered there, for instance. 260 dyeing the grounds’ central fountain red. The space was always lively and bustling and explicitly oriented towards Indigenous sovereignty, law and public dissent as well as crafting an infrastructure of care to support those who participated under constant police surveillance. The experience at the Legislature had a deep impact on me personally alerting me to the possibilities of coalitional organizing within the city that I had spent much of my adult life. Witnessing the strength of community in action was one of the reasons I decided to move back to Lək̓ʷəŋən territory, hoping to participate and contribute to local organizing that felt vibrant and impactful. The occupation of the Legislature was a political action which communicated specific meanings. Occupations and blockades have a deep history in Indigenous political organizing utilized at Kanehsatake, at Aninicabe Park and across so-called ‘BC’ in the 90s (Blomley 1996; Rutherford 2020; L. Simpson 2021). Placed in this longer history, the occupation signified a particular kind of political grammar. It was understood as an explicitly Indigenous-led space, drawing on the deep lexicon of Indigenous resistance but representing an emergent political movement led primarily by youth or a younger generation of Indigenous organizers. The movement was seen as in support of Wet’suwet’en hereditary governance, oriented around land back politics and explicitly in opposition to frameworks of recognition and reconciliation. These movements did not look to the state or seek equity or parity within ‘Canada’, instead calling for land back and the resurgence of Indigenous political traditions and laws (L. Simpson 2011). The occupation worked to conjure sovereignty as a tangible political object, and one worth fighting for. Speeches and organizers framed Indigenous law, sovereignty and land as relationships that could orient and ground broader anticolonial and resurgent projects (L. Simpson 2011). For White settlers, this framework was affectively compelling and felt actionable, especially within the exceptional moment of ‘shut down Canada’. There was a particular kind of affect to this 261 organizing which settlers could take up and appreciate. Settlers experiencing solidarity politics for the first time were galvanized and came to associate sovereignty and public expressions of dissent as the normative mode of both Indigenous politics and solidarity work. For these supporters, occupation became the language of dissent. Yet, the political form of the occupation also produced tensions which gestured towards the necessity for fostering other complementary means of imagining political movement. In their visioning of the occupation, organizers sought to ‘bring the fight home’ by ‘shutting down Canada’ and disrupting business-as-usual on Lək̓ʷəŋən territory. However, home itself was a subject of contestation. How ‘home’ was conceived and who had authority within it could be a source of friction. While the occupation had Lək̓ʷəŋən support, some local families felt that the actions did not take place with enough consultations or leadership from host nations, that is, on their home territories and homelands. Bringing the fight home to Lək̓ʷəŋən homespace could be contentious. Not all Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples supported the explicitly antagonistic and oppositional character of the occupation on their territory. Some felt that the large-scale solidarity actions ignored this form of Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and authority and occurred without proper local consent or protocols. Support of Wet’suwet’en sovereignty then, could be seen as abrogating or erasing Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and authority through solidarity actions that could be understood to disregard Lək̓ʷəŋən governance and authority over their homelands. Racialized community members also worried that explicitly oppositional actions like the occupation could result in exacerbating structural tensions with police, lead to targeted policing of marginalized communities and serve to strengthen calls for increased police funding. In particular, people of colour, worried that after the occupation, White settlers would retreat to their homes and expect Whiteness to act as a buffer to any fallout or state and interpersonal harm 262 that could ensue from the actions, while communities of color would not be afforded this option. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Simpson and Maynard 2022:226) argues in the context of large-scale and coalitional mobilizations, “there is always a backlash in mobilizing against racial capitalism, and the White liberal “allyship” primarily motivated by guilt is fickle and unreliable and disingenuous at the best of times.” Struggle was not a territory that Black, Brown and Indigenous communities thought that they could ‘visit’, before returning to the safety of home. 184 Local organizer Shae Perkins (personal communication), discussed this tendency to see mutual aid and political work as something exceptional, outside of the space of the everyday, noting a tendency amongst many supporters to understand mutual aid as something “you do, like a vacation or something. You go out and go to Fairy Creek, do your work, and then come back and do your normal life.” Some communities live in struggle while others can choose when and how to engage. The repercussions of explicitly oppositional organizing and direct action were weighed and worried over and could also produce friction or dissensus as different communities or factions advocated for escalation or caution. Yet, for local organizers, something had to be done. Victoria’s organizing communities have long-standing connections to the camps at Gidimt’en and Unist’ot’en. Local community members have friends and family there and many had visited and supported the camps. They witnessed their relations being ripped from their home and learned that the RCMP had authorized lethal overwatch against communities simply occupying their territories. While Wet’suwet’en struggle could be seen as geographically distant, it was often experienced as affectively close and the occupation was deeply personal and embodied for many organizers. 184 I’m reminded here of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘abolition is life in rehearsal because freedom is a place.’ Likewise, struggle is a territory and one which is inhabited differently by different subjects. Many of these concerns turned out to be prescient as Black, Brown and Indigenous communities bore the brunt of White settler rage that resulted from the movement to ‘shut down Canada’. 263 Solidarity was a sticky proposition and figuring out how to respect Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and Black and Brown communities’ concerns, while also standing up for friends, family and kin was a delicate balance. In the end, solidarity at the Legislature was galvanizing for local organizing communities, but also deeply exhausting and at times, divisive, as different communities with sometimes divergent political strategies and objectives attempted to come into conversation and relation with one another. Yet, multiracial coalitions learned and exercised skills, witnessed the power of mass movement, and experienced the challenges of coalitional work. Organizers and supporters still talk of their experiences at the Legislature as a monumental and transformative endeavor. The enormity of what became a global movement for Wet’suwet’en solidarity, the feelings and movements it generated, cannot not be underestimated. As Robyn Maynard (Simpson and Maynard 2022:121) argues, “the Wet’suwet’en blockades midwifed our world – or at least those of us in North America- into the next phase of struggle, from one transnational anticolonial nexus to another”. For folks involved in these actions, like me, this did not feel like hyperbole. Yet, the enormity of the experience of occupation could condition White settlers to expect solidarity to look and feel like what they had experienced at the Legislature in ways that could serve to foreclose other political strategies or horizons; other means of practicing care or imagining political space. Solidarity work was seen as public, as oppositional, as loud. It involved speeches, marches, occupations and blockades. While it might be challenging, for settlers it was expected to feel good. This experience could make it harder to conceive of solidarity, of political movement as being quiet, everyday or intimate, as taking form outside of the political grammar of occupation, confrontation and fiery public dissent (Hunt and Holmes 264 2015; Leeuw 2016). 185 This is not a critique of occupation as a political grammar, but an observation of the ways in which in engaging the ‘good feelings’ engendered through this vernacular, settlers could participate in reproducing divisions between political and ‘apolitical’ spaces, between care and dissent. Why did this kind of action appeared so engaging, so enticing and so legible, while other movements which involved quieter work could not even be seen to operate on the same discursive register? This is where I argue that settlers in particular need to reflect on our own investments, complicities and responsibilities. This matters because normalization is how these divisions between movements, how the valuation of one kind of political action over another are reproduced. What I am concerned with here is how these political vernaculars are taken up in ways that can work to erase or marginalize the other kinds of work that are already happening, most often led by Indigenous, Black and Brown communities. The division between housing justice and decolonization, between public and intimate forms of caretaking is not inevitable, itis actively re/produced when we ignore or silo different expressions of care and dissent as politically meaningful. While the occupation of the Legislature was both galvanizing and exhausting for local organizers, the energy and momentum that it produced was inhibited with the full onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. While local communities remained emotionally and politically attached to Wet’suwet’en struggles, the pandemic led to social distancing and isolation interrupting the momentum of organizing. However, by the summer of 2020 between one of the many ‘waves’ of the pandemic, local organizers were keen to support the 185Of course, conducting solidarity at the Legislature was also everyday and prosaic. It involved dishing out soup, finding blankets, handing out gloves and hand warmers, and picking up garbage. A lot of quiet work had to be done to make the public-facing and visible work of the occupation possible. My point here is that this work could be effaced in White settler interpretations of what solidarity work entailed or that this work was conducted only in the exceptional moment of political spectacle. 265 Wet’suwet’en in their struggles once more. In August, organizers who had supported Indigenous youth at the Legislature were eager to continue providing support to the Wet’suwet’en. Acting at the direction of community leaders at Gidimt’en, we began organizing a ‘tiny home build’ that would take place in Victoria and be transported to Wet’suwet’en territory. The Tiny House movement evolved through the work of Secwepemc communities organizing under the banner of the Tiny House Warriors in opposition to the TransMountain pipeline across Secwepemc territory. The Tiny House Warriors have constructed 10 Tiny Homes along the route of the TMX pipeline. Tiny house builds have provided a means of offering infrastructural support for Indigenous communities to be on their territories and foster ongoing relationships to land and water while obstructing and inhibiting the construction of nonconsensual and extractive resource projects. Tiny homes may be used to access hunting, fishing areas or traplines or they can house the volunteers who provide labour for the further buildout of infrastructure as at Gidimt’en, for instance. Tiny homes provide what Winona LaDuke and Deb Cowen (2020) describe as ‘alimentary infrastructures’, systems that provide for the sustenance and health of communities and the reproduction of social life in opposition to the structures of colonialism and capitalism. For grassroots opposition and Indigenous nations, homes are infrastructural. They are a means of imagining and fostering alternative relations, modes of production and understandings of social life. A loose collection of supporters within Victoria have participated in building several of these projects, initially in support of the Tiny House Warriors and Secwepemc communities but expanding to support the construction of a Little Big House intended for Ma’amtagila territory and in opposition to commercial fish farms, and the construction of Tiny Homes for the Gidimt’en checkpoint on Wet’suwet’en territory. 266 To support the build, we fundraised through arts auctions, clothing sales and grassroots donations. We relied on local community members with carpentry and construction skills to not only plan and build the home, but also to share these skills with supporters and volunteers. The build provided an opportunity to not only support Wet’suwet’en communities but also to learn and share skills and hone organizing practices. Like the Legislature occupation, the project received robust support in terms of volunteers, resources and donations. Space had been provided to us to conduct the build in an empty lot just off Pandora Street near some of the last remaining options for low-income housing in the city and a host of support services for precariously-housed communities. 186 During the week that the build was conducted, this lot on Balmoral Street became a community space with food, drinks and nightly teach-ins open to all. The build attracted a lot of attention, mostly positive, with neighbors inquiring who we were, what the house was and where it was going. Many of the most curious were unhoused community members who were keen to know about the home and whose needs it would serve. However, explaining that the home was destined for a territory thousands of kilometres away in the midst of a pandemic, a housing crisis, street sweeps and displacements, and increasingly draconian police powers through bylaws brought into sharp relief the ways in which everyday experiences of colonialism and neoliberal governance within urban space continued to be elided within much of our organizing. 187 Many people lamented the fact that this was a critically important infrastructure that was also needed within Victoria where hundreds of people remained 186 Pandora, like the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, is a space coded as impoverished. It is the site of many support services and supportive housing and thus, has been the target of heavy policing, intrusive municipal governance and vitriol from housed Victorians in the media and on the streets. 187 Again, this is not to imply that the build or solidarity with Wet’suwet’en are not important. They are critically so. Rather, it is to gesture towards the necessity of connecting these struggles and to remain responsible and accountable to the Lək�ʷəŋən peoples on whose lands this work took place. 267 houseless and sheltering in parks, many of whom were Indigenous. We had very little to offer in the way of adequate responses to these concerns. While multiple communities showed up in support and were generous with their time and resources and the project was successful in fundraising, building and delivering a home to Wet’suwet’en territory, this still occurred within a space in which certain bodies, experiences and struggles were, to some extent, invisibilized or not seen as communities to whom we could provide support and mutual aid under the rubrics of solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty and jurisdiction. 188 In fact, I argue that unhoused community members were not seen as part of a shared political community at all, despite their ongoing, persistent and vociferous critique of conditions under settler colonialism and racial capitalism and their housing justice advocacy during the pandemic. The exercise of sovereignty and the practice of decolonization was too often understood as something that happened ‘out there’ or in exceptional moments, rather than within intimate, domestic or urban space. This understanding of our responsibilities to Indigenous sovereignty worked to undermine our accountability to Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and the struggles that animate this place. As Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes (2015) argue, forms of everyday decolonization begin by ‘starting where we stand’, in the intimate, affective, and physical spaces in which we are located, and through the everyday relations that constitute our social lives, and this was the initial impetus for further organizing and this research. 8.3 ‘Starting Where We Stand’: Emplacing Struggles for Justice “The laws of the coast are that we all have a home and we all have good food to eat, to be healthy and strong and recognizing, too, that that's not being upheld. Those laws aren't being 188 This distinction was rendered even more anomalous by the fact that many participants and organizers, already conducted antipoverty work or provided mutual aid. However, the space of solidarity organizing for Indigenous sovereignty, could be understood as distinct or separate from that work in unspoken ways. 268 upheld. And so many of our relatives, especially from this island, are so just displaced and facing violence constantly.” “I think that often [local nations] are left out in different types of movements that are happening all the time. It's just almost like a forgetting whose territory we're in.” -Lacey Jones (personal communication). In their piece, Everyday Decolonization: Living a Decolonizing Queer Politics, Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes (2015:156) seek to “highlight the intimate and everyday practices of allyship and decolonization that are often made invisible when we focus solely on social action strategies taking place in more public spaces.” They continue that, “while large-scale actions such as rallies, protests and blockades are frequently acknowledged as sites of resistance, the daily actions undertaken by individual Indigenous people, families, and communities often go unacknowledged but are no less vital to decolonial processes” (Hunt and Holmes 2015:158). In a series of articles, Sarah de Leeuw (2007; 2014; 2016) has also argued that home, domestic and intimate space, the ‘tender grounds’ on which colonialism unfolds are oftentimes invisibilized in favour of more public or spectacular acts of resistance. These arguments are relevant in how we conduct solidarity in the varied homespaces which we inhabit. Aligned with feminist geographers (Moss and Donovan 2017; Wilson 2016; Leeuw 2017; Hunt and Holmes 2015), I take these interventions as calls to orient ourselves to the intimate spaces, the invisibilized struggles and labour and the devalued subjects and communities effaced in “more visible activist sites”. Starting where we stand is an ethic of emplacement, of situating ourselves on the land, in our relations and within structures of power. As an ethic and a praxis, it is a means of fulfilling our responsibilities to the lands, waters and relations that sustain us and allow us to craft senses of home by attending to place by firmly locating ourselves in place, both social and geographic. For me, this has involved a deeper understanding of what Maynard and Simpson (2022) describe as ‘homespace’, the prosaic and everyday spaces in which our struggles 269 for justice are emplaced. Home is a site of struggle, and we need to attend to that in projects of solidarity and liberation, but we also need to be attentive to the struggles which animate our broader homespaces. For me, this has meant attending to Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ jurisdiction and supporting those I share homespace with who are subjected to harm through structures of settler colonialism, neoliberal governance and White supremacy. In making home in Metulia, I am called to perform acts of quiet decolonial praxis in my most intimate and personal relations as Hunt and Holmes (2015) describe, but to also conceptualize home in broader ways beyond the physical structure of my (tenuous) home and nuclear family, in order to extend care to those whom I share homespace with. In conducting solidarity work oriented elsewhere, our organizing could contribute to producing the local and the urban as what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2008) describes as ‘forgotten places’ inhabited by ‘forgotten people’. It could also function as a ‘settler move to innocence’ in displacing my responsibilities and complicities with settler colonialism in the place where I make my home (Tuck and Yang 2012). 189 In this sense, I understand the ‘local’ as the place in which we make home and are called upon to enact our responsibilities through what Jessica Danforth (2011) has described as ‘consensual allyship’. This activation of our responsibilities does not mean that we do not have obligations and affective ties to other places, other homes, however (Hunt 2013a). As Hunt and Holmes (2015) make clear approaching solidarity work can be done through and orientation of both/and rather than the binary thinking of either/or that characterize colonial epistemes. This both/and orientation is something that I have sought to bring into my organizing work more 189 Tuck and Yang (2012:29) argue that “the anti-colonial turn towards the transnational can sometimes involve ignoring the settler colonial context where one resides and how that inhabitation is implicated in settler colonialism, in order to establish “global” solidarities that presumably suffer fewer complicities and complications.” As we see here, this orientation can occur within the borders of the settler state as well. 270 intentionally since my experiences at the Legislature. This requires that we acknowledge and act upon our responsibility in intimate and local spaces, that we attend to the complex politics that animate the spaces where we make home, and that we situate ourselves within our entanglement with structures of power. For me, this means recognizing my complicity with and oftentimes, investment in projects of White supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy and settler colonialism that privilege me and shape my ability to make home on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. More broadly, as organizers, I felt that we had not meaningfully connected sovereignty and self-determination to the struggles of community members within ‘Victoria’ or adequately worked at developing relations with local Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ people that would allow us to properly understand housing as connected to Indigenous sovereignty and what obligations we had to local nations through our very presence in these territories. 190 Solidarity and sovereignty were seen as struggles ‘set apart’ from the housing crises, toxic drug supply and proliferating criminalization and expansion of police power that many people in the city were confronting even though the build itself took place in one of the spaces where these struggles are most evident, just off of Pandora. Solidarity work, while incredibly important, could serve to erase local struggles and Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction, if not practiced with immense amounts of care. In this way, our work was not always attentive to the places where we made our homes or to our responsibilities to local nations and communities, orienting itself instead to the spectacle of colonial violence and more visible struggles elsewhere. 191 This research work has been an attempt to understand these assumed orientations and where our responsibilities lie. I have come 190 This isn’t to say that local nations weren’t engaged. Tsartlip Elder May Sam opened the space and shared teachings. However, I believe that the full implications of conducting solidarity work on WSANEC and Lək�ʷəŋən territory, what responsibilities that entailed, remained under-investigated. 191 The project did attend to the everyday in meaningful ways, as well. It was oriented around building homes for Wet’suwet’en supporters, spaces of intimacy and domesticity wherein community relations could be fostered and cared for. 271 to understand this ethical orientation as being shaped by circumscribed understandings of sovereignty, internalized forms of stigmatization, devaluation and dehumanization, settler desires to distance ourselves from complicity with ongoing colonial projects, and the ways that some forms of solidarity have elicited more affective pull for settlers because they provide more emotional ‘payout’ (James and Mack 2020; Sullivan-Clarke 2020). Public and oppositional resistance aligned with what White settlers expected organizing, solidarity and sovereignty to look and feel like and provide more opportunities for White edification and public performances of ‘allyship’. This has led me to think more critically about the ways in which these spaces and the struggles within them have been conceptualized and unevenly valued which has in turn reoriented my organizing praxis according to ethics of both/and; enacting our responsibilities to pursue decolonial praxis in intimate space and relations while also attempting to pursue broader projects of solidarity, oppositional organizing and direct action. If anticolonial settler solidarity has struggled locally to attend to intimate space and local jurisdictions, at times replicating the devaluation of multiply marginalized subjects, housing justice movements have likewise, struggled to adequately account for the distinctly settler colonial foundations of housing precarity and homelessness. As a political project, housing justice often utterly erases the territory on which it takes place ignoring Indigenous jurisdiction and the settler colonial context of its articulation in its calls for a return to the ‘commons’ and valorizations of public space and public housing (Fortier 2017). Housing justice may have distinctly different goals than land back or Black liberation, oftentimes attempting to reclaim public space and social housing for a ‘public’ that is normatively understood to be White and under the jurisdiction of the settler state; a notion of the ‘public’ that has historically and contemporarily been the very vehicle of Indigenous and Black dispossession. In housing justice 272 movements, the fact that the reclamation of public space can further Indigenous dispossession is often left unexplored. This came into sharp relief as our group tried to transition some of the solidarity work done for the Wet’suwet’en into more local and emplaced forms of support and mutual aid. 8.4 Mutual Aid and Community Showers “Whatever the movement's about, there should be people who are living it, who are leading it, and not just the odd person, who you cherry pick to bring forward your research. If we're talking about drug users, there better be drug users here. And actively, consistently.” “You have to network people, network them, no matter what. How can we network people to each other, share information to allow people to lead themselves. Speaking to the community base who are doing community care and mutual aid, I'm often saying, look at the people over here, we need community care and mutual aid to help build up and network The People here. No one's coming to rescue us or save us, sorry to say, no, it's all on us. Peers have to network with everybody, even across visible differences, and share that information with everyone and we need to do that together.” -Kym A. Hines (personal communication). “People don't just need socks at Christmas time. They need help. They need mutual aid. And the word was coming around more and more back then, but it really hit home for me when I was helping people at Meegan in Beacon Hill Park. Then I started to really understand what the word mutual aid meant. For me, it means giving people the basic necessities for human survival so that they can advocate for themselves.” -Niki Ottosen (personal communication). The Tiny Home Build had also generated energy and momentum within Victoria’s organizing community. Seeking to build on this and apply some of the lessons learned through the project, a small group of local organizers began thinking of ways that we could ‘start where we stand’ and offer more grounded and local support, particularly to unhoused communities, who were by this point experiencing extreme levels of crisis. The group was an informal alliance of around 10 local community organizers who had primarily been involved with conducting solidarity work in support of Wet’suwet’en sovereignty but were keen on working to support local communities and issues that were animating Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. The group 273 was primarily students or folks who worked in service provision. People came and went throughout the process of organizing around the showers which took several months in the end, but a core group of around 10 supporters participated throughout. 192 Taking seriously what we had heard at the Tiny Home build, our group sought ways that we could support people locally through frameworks of solidarity, consensual allyship, mutual aid and harm reduction. Some members of our group were already involved in conducting forms of mutual aid in the city and suggested we attend the weekly talking circles that were being held at Meegan. At weekly circles hosted by Tla’amin elder Grandma Losah Henry, we heard from community members about the desperate need for access to sanitation facilities in the park. The right to access public infrastructures like showers and bathrooms has long animated homeless peoples’ struggles but the issue was particularly acute during the pandemic (Speer 2016). The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic led to closures or reduced hours for essential services and the lack of accessible sanitation facilities within the park was seen as a large concern. While Meegan had bathrooms, these were often locked at night. 193 Showers at local housing and service providers were quite distant for people who had to pack their belongings or who experienced mobility issues. 194 Finding a place to simply shower and wash, was a major struggle and a deep health concern during a global pandemic. 195 During the circles we attended, the need for showers was brought forward multiple times by people sheltering in the park. This tracked with other unhoused communities across so-called Canada’s experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 192 Importantly, all of the supporters who helped organize the project were housed at the time. This shaped what support would look like, as we wanted to ensure that we did not take any actions without the explicit consent and support of the community at the encampment. 193 Handwashing stations were set up around the park, but the water was controlled by the city and in the end these stations were primarily unused. 194 Most service providers are clustered around Pandora, quite a distance from Meegan. 195 Even when parks had shower facilities, like at Topaz Park or Royal Athletic Park, these were not opened up as the city claimed they would need wrap-around services that they could not provide. 274 their overview on encampments during the pandemic, Flynn et al. (2022:62) found that “residents expressed that accessing hygiene facilities, such as showers, washrooms, and sinks, has become exponentially more difficult since the onset of COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns. In some cases, cities and organizations have responded to these concerns by providing showers in trailers or porta-potties, but many encampment residents are left without.” How to provide adequate sanitation was often ignored by municipalities, requiring that encampments residents and their supporters improvise solutions. After attending several circles and hearing from the community, we decided to try and support the community in meeting their expressed needs. Taking direction from the community, we set out to use the fundraising and building skills obtained through the Tiny Home build, to hold the city accountable and to construct infrastructure in the form of community showers that could work to make life more livable at Meegan. The community had identified a tangible need and stated that this was one way that housed community members could provide concrete forms of aid. Following this guidance and recognizing the severity of the issue, we decided to fundraise to build showers that would be placed within Meegan to provide the community sheltering there with direct access to the units. We came back to circle and garnered consent to pursue a project to build and install showers in the park. After soliciting donations from the local community, we hosted a clothing sale, managing to raise, alongside a crowdsourced fundraising page, enough money to build two shower units. With the community’s help, the showers were completed over a weekend. 196 We planned to place the showers in the park immediately. They would access city water through pipes being utilized for handwashing stations in the park. This seemed to provide a 196 Building the showers was also an opportunity to teach carpentry and building skills, and we placed call outs to the local community to learn and come out and help. 275 certain synergy, hosting some of the community’s primary sanitation needs in one place. At this point, the project began attracting local media attention with a generally supportive response. However, both the City and its largest institutional service providers were opposed. 197 Placing the showers in the park was against city bylaws and park regulations, and service providers tethered to city funding decried the lack of ‘wrap-around services’. 198 Indeed, sanitary facilities were available within or in proximity to many parks, including Royal Athletic Park, near to the sanctioned encampment at Central Park. However, the city refused to open these facilities, again citing a lack of resources to contract operators or the ability to provide wrap-around services. They cited health and safety concerns for their continued inaction completely effacing the health issues that arose by refusing to allow people access to available sanitation facilities. Concerns were also raised about the safety of the showers regarding their construction. Since we could not access power, they ran on propane and the city used this as another reason for justifying their closure. The fact that the showers locked, an absolutely standard feature of all 197 The city announced in a statement, “We understand the desire of individuals to want to assist people sheltering in the park, however we cannot allow structures without permits in parks, especially ones that are using gas generators and that pose fire risks, health and safety risks, and are damaging the environment” (quoted in Derosa 2020b). Fire regulations and public safety concerns were some of the main rationales that the City relied on to delegitimize the project. Flynn et al. (2022) note that concerns over fire safety were commonly invoked throughout ‘Canada’ to rationalize the displacement of encampments. Yet, in the conditions in which encampments emerge, people rely on fire or propane to keep warm and cook meals. The Office of the Federal Housing Advocate also noted how fire safety was weaponized against encampments in a report from 2024, “People living in encampments face life and death risks throughout the year, but in the winter months, these risks are heightened dramatically. Efforts to stay warm without access to appropriate shelter, clothing, and heat sources greatly increases the risk of fire. This risk is often cited as a reason to forcibly remove encampments. However, as noted earlier, removal from one site, without provision of adequate alternatives, only causes further disruption and harm to the lives of encampment residents while doing little or nothing to reduce the risks they face. In fact, if encampments are pushed to more isolated locations, the risks may be further increased” (Houle 2024:14). 198 This position was articulated by Grant McKenzie, the Director of Communications for Our Place, the largest service and housing provider in the City, “people don’t want to travel,” he said. “people are split up around the municipalities and so people don’t necessarily want to travel to Our Place to get a shower” (CTV News 2020). Yet, even recognizing that the facilities that Our Place offered were not meeting the community’s needs, McKenzie goes on to state that in regard to providing showers, “the big part with that is getting enough staff in place, which is why it is easier to do it inside Our Place because we have all the staff”. The services being provided literally did not meet people where they were at and were thus ineffective at meeting the community’s needs. 276 showers, was also cited, because of a potential risk of overdoses. This is a part of infantilizing unhoused communities to justify forms of restrictive governance. In the position of the city, people experiencing homeless were seen as dangerous or incapable of caring for themselves and thus requiring constant surveillance. Yet, this position was disguised by the invocation of the necessity of ‘wrap around services’. This is not to say that people would not need support. As a group, we had plans in place to have the showers be peer-operated with people from the community in place to assist. These folks would then be compensated for the work that they were providing for the community through money that we had crowdsourced. The city refused this plan, even though they offered no other solutions. As local organizer Gina Mowatt argued regarding the city’s health and safety concerns, “showers aren’t the risk. Not having housing during the winter, during a pandemic, is the risk” (CTV News 2020). This was the group’s position in response to disingenuous dog whistle calls that consistently invoked the potential harm of overdoses. We had protocols in place to both monitor and clean the showers and were developing frameworks through which they would be operated peer to peer, but in the end our response to the question of overdoses was another, what if someone overdosed in their tent? The situation was already unsafe and affecting the community. The ability to access showers would not make it any more so. Through principles of harm reduction, we argued that at the very least, people would have the opportunity to be warm and clean. It was the City’s disregard, active policing and kettling of the community into inadequate spaces that produced ‘risk’ and deleterious health outcomes for the community, not small-scale projects that sought to mitigate that harm through meagre resources and grassroots actions. Harm reduction tactics were framed as the danger, not the harmful conditions that the community was forced to live under that had been produced and exacerbated by the City’s 277 actions. This is a tired and pervasive trope that surrounds many efforts for decriminalization and safe supply. The city consistently rationalized its inaction by claiming that such projects were against municipal bylaws. Yet, council itself had voted to defer enforcement of its bylaws around sheltering in the exceptional moment of the pandemic. When it came to the showers, however, the city acted as if these bylaws were immutable. Hiding behind bylaws as a supposedly neutral feature of technocratic governance, was politically advantageous for the city. Bylaws, while understood as relatively innocuous, are often tools of displacement and abject terrorizing of homeless and BIPOC communities. Flynn et al. (2022:16) argue that “municipal bylaws have become a powerful instrument used against encampment residents and street-involved people. Indeed, while considered a “low-level” law as compared to provincial or criminal statutes, they nonetheless seem custom-made to be used against those who shelter in public space.” Bylaws often render merely existing in public space illegal for people experiencing homelessness and are often described as criminalizing survival, the basic functions of life; sleeping, eating going to the bathroom, finding a place to wash (Herring, Yarbrough and Allatore 2020). These are practices which most people take for granted, but that people experiencing homelessness must find ways to do in public space, often subjecting people to intensive forms of surveillance, stigmatization and criminalization. While most housed residents experience bylaw enforcement as an inconvenience at most, and more likely as a service structured around their needs, for those experiencing homelessness they can be one of the primary ways in which the violence of state governance is experienced. As local organizer Joshua Goldberg (personal communication) explained, “when you're unhoused and you live your entire life in public space, those rules get 278 applied in a very specific, relentless kind of way that are constantly interfering with your ability to survive.” Despite the scale of the global pandemic and the city’s own admission of the ad hoc ways in which it was being addressed, the showers were deemed dangerous, unsanitary, and illegal. 199 It was clear the City would not condone their installation or support the project in any way. 200 City Manager of Communications, Bill Eisenhauer stated “these shower structures are not authorized to be in the park. We understand the desire to want to assist people sheltering in the park, but there is a proper way to go about it to ensure the safety of vulnerable people and the environment” (Duffy 2020). What that ‘proper’ way was, was never explained. Wrap around services, the bureaucracy of service provision and explaining that there was ‘proper’ way to do things, justified the City’s ongoing inaction and neglect. The city employed the buzzy ‘wrap-around services’ as a rationale for not providing care at all and as a tactic to demobilize our group which had made strides in providing badly-needed services in a short amount of time and with scant resources. Neither city bureaucrat addressed the ongoing safety issue of denying the community access to sanitation and water. The city decided to not only refuse to provide basic amenities to those sheltering-in-place, they would also obstruct and criminalize local community members who were attempting to craft infrastructure that could provide the barest levels of care. 201 These decisions directly 199 Victoria City Mayor Lisa Helps, had stated that the city tried to open facilities but was unable to muster either the staff or resources to do so. That is, the city recognized the problem, they neglected to prioritize it, and instead actively criminalized community members seeking to do so. 200 This, despite the fact, that it was their stated position, that showers were required with the contentious issue being one of resources and staffing. Yet, when grassroots-funded community infrastructure showed up on their doorstep, they refused. 201 This approach was common across so-called ‘Canada’. As Flynn et al. (2022: 53) found “cities across Canada have not only failed to directly provide basic services, they have made extensive efforts to prevent the provision of humanitarian aid to encampments by community groups and other allies, including through ticketing and the destruction of property.” Marie Josee Houle (2024: 13) describes these efforts as “a misguided attempt to force encampments to disband.” 279 contravene a number of international human rights frameworks, that Canada, British Columbia and the City of Victoria have affirmed. In The National Protocol for Homeless Encampments in Canada, the UN Special Rapporteurs, Leilani Farha and Kaitlin Schwan focused particularly on sanitation and access to water for encampment residents, stating that, Canadian governments must ensure, at a minimum, that rudimentary adequacy standards are ensured in homeless encampments on an urgent and priority basis, while adequate housing options are negotiated and secured. Government’s compliance with international human rights law requires: i. “Access to safe and clean drinking water Water and sanitation are critical to health for all people. Through Resolution 64/292, the United Nations explicitly recognized the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a “human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”88 The Resolution calls upon States and international organizations “to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all.” This obligation extends to those residing in homeless encampments. ii. Access to hygiene and sanitation facilities Homeless encampments must be provided with sufficient resources and supports to ensure access to hygiene and sanitation facilities – toilets, showers, hand-washing stations, for example – within the encampment, or within very close proximity. Using existing facilities that remain open to the general public will not be appropriate. Facilities should ensure the hygiene and dignity of all residents irrespective of needs or identity. Peer-led hygiene and sanitation facilities have worked well in some contexts.” - (Farha and Schwan 2020:25). 280 Yet, the city still refused to provide for the sanitation needs of the community despite international human rights frameworks. 202 The city has a positive obligation under international law to ensure that, absent of any other practicable options, residents of encampments have their basic human rights met, the right to housing, shelter, safety, clean water and importantly, sanitation. The City was failing in its obligations under international law to provide for these basic human rights and criminalizing groups that sought to fill in the gaps in services and critical infrastructure that the City harming people who were unhoused. Indeed, the City would actively limit access to clean water as a punitive and preventative measure to deter mutual aid and peer-led responses to precarity and abandonment, and refused to pick up garbage in the park citing concern for city workers’ safety. Community members thus, called for the city to honour and uphold the legal frameworks and rights-based approaches like the right to housing which they claimed to adhere to. In engaging the city about the project, we also encountered a number of jurisdictional gaps in the apparatus of municipal governance (Valverde 2015; Withers 2021). We had conversations with city councillors, parks management and bylaw about finding ways to have the showers remain in place. Yet, the differing arms of the city bureaucracy tended to displace jurisdictional responsibility for people’s lives across departments to evade accountability. We had met with City Councillor Sarah Potts about finding ways to permit the showers. We were told that while city council establishes bylaws and ordinances (it was council that voted to defer enforcement of the 7-to-7 bylaw), they did not oversee or direct the daily operations of bylaw, police or parks management. In collaboration with the VicPD, bylaw acted with its own 202 Indeed, it actively limited access to the water it was providing as a punitive and preventative measure to deter mutual aid and peer-led responses to precarity and abandonment. 281 discretion about how to enforce statutes. 203 The bureaucratic structure of municipal governance that allowed for the evasion of responsibility through jurisdictional gaps made negotiating compromises untenable. Securing an agreement with one arm of the city, would not guarantee that this was abided by others, as we were soon to discover. With these obstacles to collaborating with the city appearing insurmountable and nothing of consequence offered by the city to address the crisis, we chose to disengage from official channels yet were framed as intractable by city representatives for refusing to participate in its dead-end delay-and-dissimulate tactics (Withers 2021). City Spokesman Bill Eisenhauer claimed that the city tried to reach out to us and that we were unwilling to cooperate, “their insistence on unilateral action leaves us little choice but to enforce the existing rules” (Fagan 2020). Yet, we had initially engaged with the city, consulting with city councillors and the manager of Parks, but stopped communicating once it became clear that they City sought to simply route this vibrant work through established channels and charity models that were already proving ineffective. In the face of the City’s intransigence and alarmist rhetoric around health, safety and wrap-around services, organizer Gina Mowatt stated “it’s not safe for un-housed people to not have access to these basic hygiene facilities. If policies and laws are harmful, then they need to reassess and adapt. It’s their jurisdiction and that of the province to provide these services” (Duffy 2020). Likewise, local organizer Shae Perkins succinctly stated, “it's a tragedy that the city would rather uphold colonial bylaws than allow the community to care for each other” (van der Zwan 2020). The city actively attempted to frame our tactics as 203 This would prove to be strikingly obvious when bylaw and police raided the showers and community care tent. City Councillor, Sarah Potts took to social media to claim that not only did she not condone the action, she had not even been informed of the planned raid in which police officers were called in at great expense from neighboring municipalities. Negotiating with the city had been pointless when bylaw and police acted at their own discretion and with impunity. 282 illegitimate and indeed, dangerous, while positioning themselves as compassionate and caring (a tactic that Withers (2021) describes as ‘constructing innocence’, a common trope in justifying the ‘benevolence’ of colonial governance, in the face of all evidence to the contrary and from the expressed opinions of the community sheltering in the park (Gebhard, McLean and St. Denis 2022). With the increased media attention brought on by the project, the city attempted to a strategy of conciliation and managing dissent (Withers 2021). The project had illustrated clear gaps in the city’s provisioning of care and essential services which had been highlighted in local media. Under pressure due to media attention broadcasting the dire conditions within parks, the city attempted to manage optics. After stating that resources were not available to adequately provide wrap-around services for the sanitation needs of people experiencing homelessness in parks, the city was suddenly able to muster funds to extend the hours in which showers were open at the housing provider, Our Place, one of the only places in the city where people could have a shower. While this extension was welcome, it did not fully meet the needs of people sheltering in parks in that it literally did not meet them where they were at, the whole point of building accessible showers in the first place. Likewise, the city preferred this expensive and inefficient means compared to other options like a mobile shower unit. It was reported that the city would pay Our Place 15,000 dollars a month to extend operations by two hours. This orientation towards established non-profit service providers to demobilize grassroots campaigns would become a common theme. 204 Routing services through organizations enmeshed within the 204 Joshua Goldberg (personal communication) described the evolving investment that service providers have in the status quo, “it's been this shift where social service agencies that used to be grassroots and very much connected to advocacy are now raking in millions of dollars. Other organizations in the nonprofit industry have, I'm going to say this really in a harsh way, have sold out… there's organizations who in the past might have been on the leading edge of really pushing the envelope around policy shifts, who now are [asking] ‘how can we maintain our relevance so that we get government money and keep our jobs?’” 283 bureaucratic structure of municipal politics ensured that the city could retain control and demobilize more unsettling grassroots projects. Withers (2021:65) describes this as a common strategy of municipal governance that redirects “protest activity to more legitimate and less disruptive forms of political behaviour”. The City was much more comfortable routing funds through established service providers beholden to government authority for funding and with an established bureaucratic infrastructure that ensured the maintenance of prevailing power relations and models of ‘care’. This could be described as a process of what Withers (2021:60) describes as ‘managing failure’ wherein bureaucratic relations which are normally quite rigid and hierarchical suddenly become “flexible in the face of disruptive protest”. The city offered concessions to contain and manage the dissent sparked by the showers project. As Withers (2021:60) states, “managing failure means granting an individual request in order to demobilize a growing campaign and to delay or dissuade the need for a policy change that could ultimately be seen as an admission of failure”. Extending the hours for showers through funding meant that the city could seem proactive when, in fact, they had been intransigent and unwilling to find solutions. ‘Managing failure’ would be a tactic that the city resorted to time and again (Withers 2021). Discussing these tactics, Shae Perkins argued that “the way the ways in which the structural systems that were forced to operate within create such shitty environments and shitty situations that cause conflict and cause ruptures and rifts in community and movements and disband movements. It breaks up movements and breaks up groups so that they don't have the capacity or the people to organize anymore and impacts their ability to do that.” 8.5 Installing ‘Alimentary Infrastructures’ “The people living in the park keep each other safe, they keep each other alive…. It’s so appalling that the city is then going to tell us, and tell people in the parks, ‘We’re the ones that keep you safe and determine what’s safe for you.’” 284 -Gina Mowatt (Ottenhoff 2020) “Proving that the city isn't necessary to do shit and we can actually just do shit ourselves. That's scary to these power structures that rely on manufactured poverty and manufactured dependence on the system.” -Shae Perkins (personal communication). With no other options and after discussion with people sheltering in the park, the showers were installed anyway, in one of the areas in which camping was permitted, a large open gravel pit on the Park’s Southwestern edge. 205 However, the City had anticipated their installation and shut off the water main to not only the showers, but also its own handwashing stations, leaving people with no access to desperately-needed sanitary facilities, while the showers sat empty, unused and vulnerable to impoundment. 206 While we were disheartened, we were also undeterred. We invited the community anyway, hosted a gathering, provided food, showed off the showers, and called on the city to stop actively inhibiting the basic necessities of life within the park. To fend off the potential for impoundment or vandalism, we camped with the showers for the days in which they were installed in this location. After this setback, we decided to provide the water ourselves as well, purchasing a 1000-gallon cistern from which to run the showers. The next week, the showers and the cistern were covertly placed in a parking lot in the center of the park to afford the most accessible option. City bylaw officers tagged them for impoundment within a day of the showers being placed on site. 207 Yet, the showers still went 205 Not all campers supported the installation of the showers, with some worrying that they might bring heightened police presence and unwanted attention to the space (Lake np). After consulting again with the group at Monday circle and receiving strong support, we decided to proceed. I share this to illustrate some of the messiness of consensual allyship (Hunt 2013a). While most campers strongly supported the shower project, that support was not unanimous. Figuring out how to proceed and enact our responsibilities in the face of necessarily complex and contradictory community demands was one of many difficult decisions that we encountered during the organizing of the showers. 206 In inquiries to the City, the water stoppage was claimed as a ‘coincidence’ or city bureaucrats simply evaded the question stating that it was not their jurisdiction. 207 Our group had been in conversation with city councillors to obtain a permit for the showers or to run showers in an alternative location. 285 live that day providing a place for people to warm up, wash off and access sanitary supplies which we distributed. We operated the showers personally affording us an opportunity to meet community members, foster relations and ensure safety. During this time, a community care tent had also been erected in the center of the park near the showers by a coalition of housed and unhoused community members. The care tent was intended to be a space that would provide for the needs of people sheltering in the park and help to foster a sense of community. It distributed some of the necessities for life in the park; harm reduction supplies, blankets, sleeping bags and tents. It also distributed water, snacks, warm food, tea and coffee. The tent was a ‘safer’ community space where people could go to rest, use substances with supervision or just hang out. Tents or spaces like this were also witnessed in encampments across so-called ‘Canada’. Flynn et al. (2022:53) found that “in the absence of basic services, many encampments have self-organized to meet their basic needs and fill gaps in services (e.g., by establishing centralized tents for harm reduction supplies, water, or food). Encampment evictions frequently undermine these efforts and result in the loss or destruction of these resources and self-established mutual aid systems that meet basic needs.” However, the tent was also against city bylaws. It was a garage tent, larger than bylaws allowed and considered a ‘standing structure’ by the city. It was also tagged for ‘impoundment’. 208 Four days after the showers were installed, dozens of police and bylaw stormed into the park, blockading the entrances to prevent media access, emptying the cistern, throwing the tent and showers into construction garbage bins, impounding supplies that had been donated in support of those 208 According to city bylaws, the city can seize and impound possessions in contravention of the bylaw. An individual then has up to 28 days to reclaim their possessions. In the end, neither the tent nor the showers were impounded. They were summarily destroyed by police and bylaw, thrown into dumpsters and trucks brought to Meegan for the purpose. This mirrors the experience of people sheltering in parks who often find that their possessions have been lost or destroyed and are irretrievable. 286 sheltering there and making arrests. 209 The care tent would have a second ‘permitted’ life within the park, but the showers were destroyed after less than week in operation and months of planning, fundraising and working on them. 210 We were never able to retrieve the showers and most of the care tent’s donations were returned weeks later, mouldy and unusable. However, the project had received local media attention (both positive and negative) and served to publicly shame the city into enacting some of its responsibilities. 211 After being told that there was no city money to provide the wrap-around services that would be needed to operate the showers legally, a grant was suddenly made available for $100,000 which could be directed towards mobile shower units. 212 Our group put together an application for a mobile shower unit that would utilize these funds. However, the Salvation Army also put together a grant for the newly accessible funds. Unsurprisingly, our application was not accepted. Instead, the funds went towards the Salvation Army, who would staff and operate the mobile shower 209 Weeks later we would be able to retrieve these supplies that local supporters had donated, blankets, food, art supplies, either broken from being handled so roughly or molded from being stored outside in the rain. 210 This same practice of managing failure and demobilizing movements was used against the community care tent during its second, permitted life. As Shae Perkins (personal communication) described, delivering services legally in collaboration with the City shifted the project from mutual aid to what he felt was under-resourced service provision, “all these fucking stupid little things that we had to adhere to that took it out of the community's hands. The vibe from when we were in the park to when we were on Cook Street was so drastically different. It went from this really beautiful, community led, community-driven thing where people in the park helped out all the time to such an incredible degree… to having such a fucking official feel. We had so many things that we had to adhere to according to the permit of. It felt so like nonprofit, corporate bullshit that no one in the park felt like it was theirs anymore. They felt like it was now service provision. It wasn't mutual aid, it was service provision. So, no one in the park actually, like, contributed in the ways that they were, because they didn't feel like they could. It didn't feel like theirs or it wasn't accessible to them.” He went on that, “so much of the autonomy got taken from us when we had to fucking operate with the city…that created such, like, fissures in community.” Perkins concluded that “I just felt like it turned into such a charity thing instead of a mutual aid thing, you know?...it's such a good example of co-optation of movements.” 211 In particular, the City’s ‘liberal’ mayor and council did not like the optics of destroying community-built infrastructure and making arrests. This, of course, did not prohibit them from following through with these actions, rather they wanted to manage how the destruction of alimentary infrastructures and antipoor harm were perceived by offering certain accommodations that would retrench their jurisdiction and authority over an unstable situation. 212 Mobile shower units are converted or specifically built trailers or RVs which are outfitted or retrofitted with showers and washrooms. We had made initial contact with an organization in the States, Lavamaex to purchase and operate one of these units. https://lavamaex.org/ 287 unit. 213 I have never personally seen it in operation in the years since. The work of grassroots organizers operating under an ethic of mutual aid was funneled back into NGOs and charity organizations functioning through a non-profit industrial complex and charity models that allowed the city to direct and regulate what forms of aid and political organizing were deemed legitimate, delegitimizing both our organizing and the stated solutions from the unhoused community itself (INCITE! 2017). In this way, the city and NGOs reinscribed their authority for addressing (or disregarding) the problem of homelessness once again relegating those experiencing homelessness to subjects who are ‘acted upon’ rather than political actors themselves. This worked to buttress the legitimacy of municipal authority and its NGO proxies, that had been undermined by the ability of small groups of marginalized peoples working with very limited resources to address the needs of those sheltering in parks more adequately and more efficiently than the city itself. The City’s actions were taken even though Canadian governments have a legal responsibility under international law to provide for basic standards of living in encampments in circumstances where a lack of viable or adequate shelter or housing options are available. Numerous reports issued during the Covid-19 pandemic have illustrated municipalities’ legal responsibilities under international law to provide basic amenities that will ensure the safety and security of the person (Farha and Schwan 2020; Flynn et al. 2022; Houle 2024). In attacking community-built infrastructures the city was abrogating these responsibilities. In the City of Victoria’s Housing Strategy Plan, it has recognized housing as a human right. Homelessness is 213 Watching city council, debate and decide on this application was particularly disheartening. With an absence of questioning or exploration, council summarily granted the money to the Salvation Army, despite our efforts and investment into the project, and in the face of the Salvation Army’s less-than stellar reputation due to its transphobic and homophobic positions, within communities of service provision. After months of organizing the grant was given to the Salvation Army in mere minutes. 288 often described as a prima facie violation of the right to housing. The city has both a positive obligation to ensure housing is accessible and is restricted from pursuing measures which would inhibit communities from creating the necessary shelter and infrastructure in the absence of other practicable options. As Olson and Pauly (2023:134) convey, “in the absence of adequate housing, providing encampments with the necessary public health resources such as water, sanitation, food storage, and outreach supports emerges as the more ‘humane and cost-effective response’ to encampments.” Yet, far from providing adequate amenities, the city attacked community-built infrastructure designed to ensure the heath and safety or residents forced to shelter in Meegan. International law and the work of the UN Special Rapporteur and the Federal Housing Advocate support the ways in which we took action to provide basic amenities for folks sheltering in the park, “the precarious situation of encampments is made much worse when municipalities deny residents access to the essentials of life, including clean water and sanitation, or add to the insecurity of encampment residents through forced relocation and other punitive responses” (Houle 2024:7). Yet, the city’s response was swift and punitive. It would be easy to read the shower project as a failure in hindsight, as waste of time, effort and resources. They were operational for such a brief time. Yet, I refuse to look back on them like this. First, because they pressured the city to address the crisis and made crystal clear the violence of colonial governance; the punitive responses that municipalities are most likely to pursue. Part of the showers’ strength, as I read it now, was in their ability to shame the city, draw attention to the crisis unfolding and force the city to produce funds to address the problem. Even more than this though, I am proud of the ways in which the showers allowed us to build community, to practice care, and to be together with a diverse array of communities. They showed us what robust 289 politics of solidarity could look like, how we could work together across the differing shorelines that we occupy. For me personally, it meant working with and coming to know people who were experiencing homelessness, people who are so often rendered invisible, even in my own organizing practice and political orientation. To return to Gina Mowatt’s (personal communication) words, the project ‘made us brave’, and it made us brave together. 8.6 Naturalizing Colonial Authority and Producing ‘Needy’ Subjects “I realized the problem was colonization, divide and conquer. Us, right? Because of our naivete, our ignorance.” -Kym A. Hines (personal communication). What I have attempted to understand since these events is how local service providers and grassroots supporters understood and framed antipoverty work and housing justice, and how this led to practices of solidarity that often worked to reinstantiate colonial authority. If we can see clearly how groups like the FBHP that adamantly opposed sheltering and meaningful recognition of Lək̓ʷəŋən sovereignty worked to reproduce settler authority, it is sometimes more difficult to see how nominally supportive organizations like service providers, neighborhood associations, or grassroots groups can also internalize the compartmentalizing logics and limited reformism of settler colonialism. In differing ways, organizations like Our Place and the FBHP worked together to legitimize the authority of the city, to naturalize its function and authority on Indigenous lands and to devalue political work that took place outside of the bureaucratic structures of municipal governance. Yet, as a community, I argue that local organizers could also participate in practices that delinked housing justice, antipoverty and decolonization, and that produced unhoused peoples as inagentive subjects, worthy of charity perhaps, but not equal political subjects in struggles for decolonization and liberation. 290 During the shower project, our group reached out to several neighborhood associations and community organizations to solicit support. While some organizations understood our reasons for taking direct action outside of city bureaucracy and worked to support us, others could not fathom why our group did not want to work with the city (Spade 2020; INCITE! 2007). 214 We were often told that the governance of parks and service provision were the city’s jurisdiction and responsibility and that we should either defer to city policies or attempt to work with the city. 215 This was claimed in direct contravention to what people sheltering in parks were asking for, and a stated inability of municipal governance to adequately address the needs of people experiencing homelessness during a pandemic. Tellingly, municipal and nonprofit actors recognized that the city could not adequately fulfill its obligations of care, that its model of service provision was not working, yet advocated for pursuing these avenues anyways. There was an entrenched assumption that conducting politics outside of established municipal avenues was either wrong or unlikely to be successful. For these organizations, direct action was not an imaginable strategy for addressing the needs of the community. Charity could be offered but not a solidarity that might unsettle the very conditions which people were forced to endure. In this way, these organizations could be deeply invested in maintaining extant social relations. 216 The city or, at the provincial scale, BC Housing and the Vancouver Island Health Authority, were seen as the natural and unquestioned sources of authority to which supporters should appeal. This framing worked to erase settler colonialism as an overarching structure and 214 Unsurprisingly, responses tended to be structured by organizations’ relative proximity to the city in terms of funding, staffing and other logistical factors. The more enmeshed with municipal governance organizations were, the more antagonistic they were to projects that took place outside of those frameworks. 215 Local neighborhood associations wonderingly asked us over and over why we would not work with the city, stating that parks are the city’s jurisdiction. The question of who authorizes that jurisdiction was never broached. 216 This contrasted with the occupation at the Legislature where direct action and public dissent were political performances that made sense, that registered as coherent and effective for participants. 291 the ongoing presence and saliency of Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction. These organizations explicitly did not understand housing precarity, its uneven distribution or the disproportionate number of Indigenous people experiencing homelessness as an effect of ongoing settler colonial dispossession and racial capitalism. Instead, homelessness was naturalized as an expected part of the normative ordering of a liberal city operating under racial capitalism and an often-lucrative object of non-profit governance (INCITE! 2007; Singh Kelsall et al. 2023). Service providers saw their role as ameliorating the crises of capitalism and settler colonial urbanism without attending to foundations of what produces (racialized) housing precarity in the first place. A naturalization of municipal authority served to foreclose other imaginings of jurisdiction and nested authority and effectively erase ongoing forms of Lək̓ʷəŋən governance towards which we might orient ourselves. Questions of self-determination and community governance are unthinkable from within this position that naturalizes settler governance and authority as essentially benevolent and incontrovertible, and which frames the ‘clients’ that NGOs serve, not as self-determining subjects, but rather as ‘broken’ or ‘dysfunctional’ subjects unable to adequately take care of themselves (Chapman and Withers 2019; Gebhard, McLean and St. Denis 2022). 217 For the NGOs which directed us towards appeals and petitions to the city’s authority, settler authority was seen as already perfected and Indigenous dispossession a completed project. 218 Unhoused communities then could only expect charity and White benevolence, never liberation, flourishing or community governance. NGOs that are increasingly tethered to municipal and provincial funds, thus participate in a revanchist apparatus, functioning 217 This orientation led to intercessory politics, attempts to rehabilitate ‘broken’ or ‘damaged’ subjects, rather than politics that addressed the foundations of housing precarity and poor health outcomes themselves. 218 Shae Perkins (personal communication) spoke scathingly about this kind of orientation, “so many people told us when we first set up the tent, like, you need to go through the official channels. The official channels. The official channels. You know why they tell you to go through the official channels? Because the official channels don't fucking exist or they have control of them.” 292 as proxies for forms of state and municipal power, even as they genuinely and honestly seek to ameliorate some of the conditions that unhoused people experience. Yet, while nominally working in support of people experiencing homelessness, these practices serve to entrench colonial authority in their deference to institutions of settler power and their production of people experiencing homelessness as incapacitated subjects (Clark 2016a; Puar 2019). The naturalization of homelessness, the pathologization of those experiencing it and the presumed legitimacy of municipal and state governance meant that ongoing colonialism could not enter the picture within this enframement of the causes and potential avenues of redress for housing precarity. The histories of Lək̓ʷəŋən dispossession and displacement and the effects of racialized policing and welfare interventions could not be addressed from the position that the city was a neutral arbiter of an unfortunate but inevitable problem: homelessness (Bhandar 2018; Maynard 2017). This framing erases the ways in which the city itself is an effect of colonial power and histories of dispossession (Simpson and Hugill 2022; Dorries, Hugill and Tomiak 2022; Dorries 2023; Cowen 2020). Instead, homelessness consistently became framed not as a structural problem entangled with the City’s settler colonial history and ongoing governance, but rather as an individual failing. People experiencing homelessness became the site of therapeutic or carceral intervention. The goal becomes to heal or reform individual subjects, rather than understanding and dismantling the conditions under which they struggle (Million 2013). People experiencing homelessness once again were seen to need ‘help’ or ‘charity’, never solidarity or justice, and the city’s active role in producing precarity was effaced. The City’s largest housing and service providers, like Our Place, the Portland Hotel Society and Pacifica Housing, are beholden to municipal and Provincial funding and also operate under neoliberal logics that placed the responsibility for homelessness on the individual through 293 forms of pathologization and thus directed their efforts at change towards the rehabilitation of ‘unruly’ or ‘irresponsible’ subjects. Organizations often reproduced notions of ‘deserving and ‘underserving’ poor through the coded language of ‘needy’, or ‘unruly’ subjects (Chapman and Withers 2019; Mitchell 2020). These descriptors of individuals and communities compelled differing yet, complementary strategies. Those who are ‘needy’ must be provided for under the rubrics of charity governance and those who are ‘unruly’ must be punished through the extension of police power. Thus, they were invested in a particular understanding of the ‘problem’ of homelessness that detached it from the ongoing histories of White supremacy, racial capitalism and settler colonialism. By individualizing struggle, naturalizing poverty and identifying the person experiencing homelessness as the locus of intervention, advocates themselves were often responsible for effacing settler colonial histories and relations as contributing to housing and tenancy crises. Neighborhood organizations and NGOs were invested in the figure on an incapacitated and ‘needy’ subject and in a vision of an essentially benevolent municipal authority and settler state. These advocates might concede that municipal governance and the settler state required reforms but could not countenance the assertion that these authorities were fundamentally illegitimate and unable to solve the problem of homelessness because of their imbrications with racial capitalism and settler colonialism (Mitchell 2020). Their position was in fact deeply conservative and revanchist, to rehabilitate and retain colonial authority and ameliorate the harms of racial capitalism through models of charity that leave intact extant relations of power, injustice and inequality. Thus, these organizations could be protective of the objects of their paternalistic governance: people experiencing homelessness. Claiming expertise in the issue of homelessness is how organizations and their leaders derived social capital and relative power. These organizations were invested in an incapacitated, needy and helpless 294 representation; a controlling image, of the very people they were putatively intended to serve and could not brook differing forms of providing aid that sought to unsettle this representation and mode of governance (Collins 2000). Organizing which seemed to unsettle the balance of municipal and non-profit power by taking direction from those with lived and living experiences of homelessness and providing directly for the needs of those experiencing homelessness in the park outside of a bureaucratic structure was framed as either dangerous or naïve (Hynes personal communication). 219 What I am curious about how these normative logics are internalized not only by service providers but also by solidarity movements involved in projects of decolonization and housing justice. This orientation towards philanthropy was not unique to service providers but could be internalized by grassroots movements as well, who could work to separate housing justice from decolonization through our own organizing practices. For local organizers who had become politicized at the Legislature, care work and mutual aid in the park did not always place within a political grammar that settlers could recognize as anticolonial politics or pertaining to Indigenous struggles. Anticolonial politics were seen to have particular forms: a blockade, an occupation. Antipoverty work, harm reduction or a community care tent, for instance, were not seen as the form which anticolonial solidarity could normatively take. The notion that housing justice could be anticolonial in orientation and invoke sovereignty, that decolonization might involve people who were unhoused, who used substances or engaged in sex work, did not seem to resonate or track locally. 220 Some conversations were less prominent in either space; how specifically colonial modalities of power structured the housing crisis and what responsibilities movements for housing justice might have to Indigenous 219 Zapatistas have described this model of consensual allyship as ‘lead by obeying’ (Reyes and Kaufman 2010). 220 This could be different for Indigenous organizers. Quw’utsun community member Ella Martindale (personal communication) described the mutual aid work that she conducted at Meegan as simultaneously a form of ‘land defense’ and housing justice. 295 jurisdiction and local nations. 221 Housing precarity was naturalized to seem less invasive and more pervasive than what was witnessed on Wet’suwet’en territory. Yet, the consequences of precarity and impoverishment are no less dire for Indigenous peoples, often representing the ways in which settler colonialism is experienced and embodied (Belcourt 2018a). 222 The struggles unfolding in these spaces were not always seen as equivalent, in political or affective importance. Movements contesting settler colonial invasion and violence elsewhere, were able to garner more traction, more visibility and more support than struggles situated at the local level and in the space/time of the everyday. 223 Local struggles for housing were not often seen as compelling, as resonant, as affective. This worked to actively produce a division between public, oppositional action in support of Indigenous sovereignty and encampment support which was seen as prosaic and detached from broader struggles for decolonization. It has also worked to validate public expressions of oppositional dissent and to marginalize or erase the kinds of intimate community care work that are being conducted in the city; to erase care work as political at all. 8.7. Conclusion: Navigating Our Sea of Islands “Maybe we're taking different approaches or we have different points of reference or interest or investment. But we're in this together. Because we're dealing with the same thing, right? Either way, we're dealing with the oppression of police violence. So, whether it's you showing up at the 221 This is not to say that these conversations were never had. Indigenous youth organizing the occupation of the Legislature debated whether or not to demand that the space be ‘dry’ cognizant of the ways in which their decisions could work to exclude community members. Likewise, organizers at Meegan sometimes attempted to connect their work to Songhees in order to respect their jurisdiction and laws. Referring to the space as Meegan, rather than ‘Beacon Hill’ was one of the means in which organizers attempted to acknowledge that their work was conducted on Songhees territory. These conversations, however, were not always central to the overall drive in both spaces. 222 We might add that police and environmental violence are also pervasive on Wet’suwet’en territory, that is, they make up the texture of everyday life for land defenders. Harassment and surveillance are not exceptional, they are the norm. 223 This can be seen as a distancing tactic and a ‘settler move to innocence’ on the part of ‘allies’ who selectively choose which struggles to support, often affectively investing in ones in which they feel less unsettled by (Tuck and Yang 2012). 296 Legislature supporting me there, or me showing up at the park and supporting you there, we're just dealing with police violence together. And we know that.” -Casey Lake (personal communication). My intention in sharing my experiences organizing is to highlight the ways in which boundaries between housing justice and decolonization are established and normalized. White settlers could take away very circumscribed notions of the political projects being undertaken at the occupation of the Legislature, the building of the tiny home and through community work at Meegan. Many settlers came away from their experiences at the Legislature expecting sovereignty and dissent to look and feel a particular way, I argue that this is one of the reasons that the community struggled to translate forms of solidarity from the Legislature to Meegan, from one political space to another. This understanding of politics and the space of de/colonization led to a withholding of support and the production of an economy of moral value, wherein certain political expressions were valued over others. My own organizing work on the Tiny Home also relied on a particular understanding of the ‘where’ of sovereignty that involved questions of value. Neglecting our responsibilities to local and everyday struggles was also a means of adjudicating and determining what mattered and who had value. This framing served to invisibilize both Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and the struggles of unhoused and marginalized community members, many of whom are Indigenous on Lək̓ʷəŋən territory. It marginalized the kinds of intimate community care work that were already happening in the city, often led by Indigenous communities and organizations. Unintentionally, we could become a part of projects that spatialized sovereignty elsewhere, devalued care work as political and neglected to think adequately about the ethical orientation to start where we stand (Hunt and Holmes 2015; Daigle and Sundberg 2017). Likewise, dominant framings of housing 297 justice worked to abstract it away from an emplaced understanding and the context of settler colonial power and Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction in which it unfolds. By individualizing precarity and rendering the city or province the unquestioned authority through which to appeal for housing justice, local organizers and community organizations undermined Lək̓ʷəŋən jurisdiction and naturalized the settler colonial city and municipal authority (Simpson and Hugill 2022; Porter and Kelly 2023). In their implicit and explicit devaluation of unhoused communities as knowledgeable and creative political actors, these organizations worked to further entrench controlling images that discursively fixed people experiencing homelessness in place and dismissed the validity of their political claims and organizing, of their very personhood. Conducting mutual aid with those experiencing homelessness in the park, did not have the same affective draw as solidarity at the Legislature and we struggled to have the same widespread support when police and bylaw raided the park, for instance. 224 The communities that antipoverty and housing justice movements hailed were often understood to be different than those hailed by land back and anticolonial movements. What I am primarily concerned with here and what I turn to in the next chapter are the ways that nominally-supportive community organizations, NGOs and local citizens understood their roles through certain entrenched logics that worked to efface colonial relations of power by normalizing colonial occupation and its attendant regimes of tenure and tenancy, naturalizing municipal and provincial authority and entrenching controlling images of people experiencing homelessness as incapacitated, inagentive and incapable. Once again, this could include our own group. What I hope to illustrate are the 224 I am also wary of creating a false impression that showers or community tent were not supported. Many people offered their time, donations, encouragement and financial support. These folks also provided encouragement and advocated for the projects online and on the street. However, we did struggle to have people contribute time and labour or to show up en masse to prevent arrests. People power or boots on the ground was a large part of what made the action at the Legislature successful. In Meegan, support while offered took a different form, it looked different. I am still thinking through the full implications of this. 298 ways in which movements for Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice remain disconnected at certain critical junctures, particularly within settler solidarity organizing. This is particularly important because organizations like the Indigenous Harm Reduction Team (IHRT) and QomQem in Victoria, did make these connections in their own work, yet, reductive understandings of settler colonialism and Indigenous political movements worked to marginalize this work and to render housing justice and decolonization distinct in the minds and organizing of service providers and settler-led solidarity. 299 9 Toward Shorelines of Settler Solidarity: Unpacking Dominant Discourses of Sovereignty and Value in Local Organizing 9.1 Introduction “It's almost confusing as to why there's not more of a connection because, Indigenous sovereignty work and housing justice work, I think they're both so entirely rooted in challenging existing property notions and colonial property notions, and like the destruction that those do to certain populations.” -Nic Olson (personal communication). “When Covid started, I talked with other people who I had organized with in the past and said, ‘people don't have water or a place to take a shit. We need to do something.’ And most people were very overwhelmed and didn't want to organize.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). As the culmination of this project, this final section draws together the historical, spatio-legal and political analysis of the previous chapters to examine how housing justice and Indigenous anticolonialism come to be understood as discrepant struggles within everyday practices of solidarity in Lək̓ʷəŋən territories. Having examined how Meegan was constituted and governed as a space, it is vital to ask how housing justice came to be framed as outside of, or beyond the terms of, Indigenous anticolonialism, sovereignty and self-determination in solidarity work conducted there. I find Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s framework of ‘friction’ (2005) useful in analyzing how Meegan, the BC Legislature and the movements that they contained ‘rub up against one another,’ productively unpacking the friction that is produced in this contact. As I have shown, Meegan and the Legislature are deeply connected and relational spaces, not only as the shared territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples but also as sites of anticolonial struggle. Yet, rather than being characterized by connection or flow between struggles and spaces, too often, a certain kind of friction worked to bound and delimit these spaces, rendering passage between them difficult for both ideas and communities. Even as the spaces of Meegan and the BC Legislature 300 lay in proximity with one another, certain discourses, affects and histories mean that they do not occupy shared ideological space in the political imaginaries or organizing praxis of settler publics, thus creating friction in movements that seek to connect them. Tsing (2005) asks us to attend to friction, to inquire into what produces angularity, discomfort, or awkward fits. She argues that attending to friction can be generative as it illustrates spaces of incommensurability, or unresolvedness; the political in motion, but also the possibility that these experiences mark, how they can point us in different directions. I take up Tsing’s framing to attend to sites positioned as politically distanced, despite occurring proximally within Lək̓ʷəŋən territory. Attending to friction, then, can be generative in kindling more robust analyses of settler colonialism, solidarity and home. Here, I engage with the underlying rationales which positioned questions of Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice as occupying different conceptual and political space, examining how this disconnection was reproduced through local organizing practice in Lək̓ʷəŋən territory. If the City and NGOs have been guilty of producing and exacerbating housing precarity and racialized dispossession, I ask how movements against these processes are also complicit in establishing binaries, constructing a normative calculus of value and constraining more expansive and inclusive practices of liberation. What ideas subtend the work of solidarity and what effects do they produce? Below, I approach these ‘frictions’ through the concepts of sovereignty and value—revealing how these two concepts structured local organizing and unpacking how they bump up against one another in the work of solidarity. I explore the tensions between the spaces of Meegan and the Legislature to argue that the friction between housing justice and anticolonial solidarity is generated around two questions. First, around the question of sovereignty and its normative terrain; when sovereignty is seen to be operative and where sovereign struggle is seen 301 to take place. Secondly, around questions of value, what struggles are seen as politically and morally worthwhile and exactly who comes to matter in movements for decolonization, justice and structural change. Having collectively sought to enact solidarity across and beyond these sites, and having experienced them as deeply interwoven, I argue that a renewed approach to these questions could serve to reorient and broaden our critiques of settler colonialism and our pursuit of housing justice. I conclude by highlighting forms of solidarity and care work that might orient organizing praxis towards what Christina Heatherton (2022) calls ‘spaces of convergence’, sites where diverse communities are drawn together and in which shared struggles intersect to craft new political visions that are not based on the relegation of Indigenous politics to circumscribed spheres in the minds or organizing of settler publics. This could allow perspective on how to more meaningfully broach struggles for housing justice and Indigenous anticolonialism within settler solidarity movements by being attuned to the affective, intimate and relational scales of solidarity work. Speaking to local organizers and alongside Indigenous and unhoused communities advancing self-determined movements for justice, I ask: how do we move from sites of friction to shared shorelines? I begin by exploring how the concept of sovereignty contours what is seen as ‘properly political’ and the spaces in which Indigenous politics are seen to emerge. 9.2 Sovereignty: Conditioning the ‘Properly Political’ “Housing justice is intrinsically connected to racial justice. It's connected to everything. It's obviously completely tied into class and for me, very much tied into disability justice too, and very tied into ageism and cisheteropatriarchy. You name it. Housing is about all of those things about culture and who we relate with, who we want to live with, who we consider family and how we relate to land. So, how could it not be foundationally premised on whose land we're on?” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). To better understand how housing justice and Indigenous anticolonialism are rendered discrepant, how friction is produced and what this tells us about colonial power, we need to 302 examine the concepts that animate the work of settler solidarity. I provide a brief discussion of key conceptual knots as they are useful in understanding sovereignty in contexts of settler colonialism and Indigenous self-determination. Westphalian articulations of sovereignty understood it to refer to the exclusive or absolute authority to govern (and exercise violence) within a given or bounded space (Elden 2013). Some definitions of sovereignty emphasize its territorial foundations and others its imperatives of governance and rule, geos and bios. 225 Sovereignty is both territorial, about the production and maintenance of boundaries and the space within which legitimate authority is exercised, and biopolitical, about the governance of subjects and relations within that given space. These definitions rely on (and recursively produce) particular understandings of difference, governance, authority, and territory which came to be naturalized as normative, or, even, universal over time (Elden 2013; Shaw 2008; Branch 2014; Benton 2010; Blomley 2022). For Indigenous political movements, sovereignty is a pressing concern and a central orienting logic that conditions political expression, even resistance and solidarity, in settler states. Indigenous theory has long contended with sovereignty and offered nuanced and situated analyses of the concept, particularly among Indigenous feminist theorists (Monture 2008; Moreton-Robinson 2015; A. Simpson 2018; Kauanui 2018; Dennison 2012; Barker 2005; Trask 1999). Movements for decolonization have often been understood to pivot around the question of sovereignty with Billy Ray Belcourt and Jas Morgan (2018) describing it as a ‘charismatic’ and structuring concept within Indigenous Studies. Yet, the concept also has a torrid and troubled 225 We might note Audra Simpson’s (2020:686) definition here for its pithiness that characteristically cuts to the heart of the matter: ““Sovereignty”—the notion of jurisdiction over territory and people, of a monarchical power to kill, in Schmittian terms to possess such an increase of power and have absolute arbitrariness at one’s disposal, is summarized blithely as a power defined as the one who may make the decision”. Here, however, Simpson leaves untended the question of who or what authorizes the power to authorize; to decide. 303 genealogy that intersects with conquest and contains a host of unworkable colonial values about possession, authority and subjectivity (King 2019; Harney and Moten 2021; Kauanui 2018). Belcourt describes how sovereignty has served as an uncomfortable ideational home for 2-Spirit and queer Indigenous communities, in particular, whose embodied knowledge requires political imaginaries that account for more expansive and fleshy epistemologies. Further, scholars like Jared Sexton (2014) and Frank Wilderson (2010) have questioned sovereignty’s utility for Black communities, suggesting that movements for Black liberation work to unsettle both colonial and decolonial forms of sovereign political power. Sovereignty, then, is not always seen as a hospitable home that diverse subjects can equally inhabit or ‘dream through’ (Million 2011). Yet, sovereignty continues to loom large within political theory, contemporary geopolitics and articulations of land-based Indigenous anticolonial resistance, with good reason—it has been one of the primary mechanisms of dispossession and conquest in the settler colony. The settler state extends and materializes its authority through the legal concept of sovereignty. As Audra Simpson (2020) argues, Indigenous communities have often felt that the concept can simply not be left alone. Because of its centrality to settler colonial practices of governance and conquest, it is seen as a conceptual territory that cannot be ceded. 226 As Kara Shaw (2008) argues, sovereignty conditions what counts as ‘properly political’. The knot of sovereignty is there whether we choose to disentangle it or not. However, we avoid it at some risk as sovereignty continues to shape the ways in which both settler and Indigenous politics are understood, embodied and enacted. The concept of sovereignty is so naturalized in the ordering of global geopolitics that for theorists of Western political traditions, sovereignty has come to be seen as foundational to 226 The sheer number of monographs that contain the word ‘sovereignty’ in the title illustrate this. 304 politics itself; “to serve as the precondition for politics” (Nadasdy 2017:3). As Paul Nadasdy (2017: 3) argues “since the seventeenth century, the European concept of sovereignty has played a key, if sometimes implicit, role in nearly all theories of political life.” Thus, how we understand sovereignty matters immensely as it contours the ground on which politics are seen as legitimately exercised; what actions and practices are legible as politics. To make a claim to sovereignty is to make a claim to political agency, value and subjectivity. Thus, bracketing sovereignty from particular struggles and spaces has been a colonial strategy for determining what is seen as meaningful and important, as ‘properly political’ (Shaw 2008). This is especially true for Indigenous communities whose experiences of political life are overdetermined by the concept of sovereignty and the material worlds it calls into being. 227 Determining the spaces and moments in which sovereignty is understood to be operative is a politically meaningful practice with real-world material consequences, as we will see. 228 Recognizing the hegemony of the concept, Indigenous communities have both contested and claimed sovereignty in land-based and decolonial struggles developing nuanced political frameworks of what constitutes ‘Indigenous sovereignty’ (Barker 2005; A. Simpson 2020; Stark and Stark 2018; Mowatt 2023). Yet, the concept can also produce an ‘impasse,’ in Morgan Mowatt’s (2023) terms, unable to capture the 227 There are echoes of Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007) and Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) work in this overdetermination. Both scholars argued that Europe’s racial ‘Others’ were overdetermined by the racial orders that enslavement, colonialism and Enlightenment thought called into being, for da Silva by affectability and exteriority, and for Wynter by dysselection and their constitutive exteriority from the category of ‘Man’. A ‘sovereignty of the (European) self’ is invoked as a structuring and exclusionary logic in both scholars' work. Since sovereignty was foundational to how European thought understood the human, it is no wonder that Indigenous and Black communities have been compelled to engage an overdetermination which worked to categorically exclude them from sovereignty’s exercise. 228 As Sium, Desai and Ritskes (2012:x) argue that “Indigenous peoples are expected to protest and organize but it comes as a shock when they enter the hallowed halls of academia, the place where theory is reported to live.” I argue that this logic also contours the exercise of Indigenous politics when it appears it places in which it is unexpected. There are places where Indigenous peoples and Indigenous politics are expected and there are places where they are not. Indigenous peoples and Indigenous politics are subject to colonial logics which attempt to materially and discursively fix them in place, to constrain the places in which Indigenous governance is seen to be operative or salient. 305 breadth of Indigenous modes of governance. Sovereignty, then, can work to constrain and reduce the scope of Indigenous politics, governance and authority when it encourages an investment in notions of possession and hierarchical authority or when it becomes naturalized as a strictly territorial modality of governance (Simpson 2020). 229 The meanings of ‘Indigenous sovereignty’ can also transit uneasily when taken up and interpreted by settler polities. As colonial epistemic frames are applied to Indigenous governance, key aspects can be bracketed out in translation leading to misapprehension or disfigurement of Indigenous legal and political orders (Nagar 2019; Pexa 2019). The container of sovereignty is often inadequate to encompass the capaciousness of Indigenous governance. Indigenous politics are often reductively framed as not only pivoting around sovereignty but exclusively concerned with the concept and its associations with land and territory. This political imaginary functions as an epistemic frame that can constrain and circumscribe the breadth of Indigenous spatio-legal relations, particularly as Indigenous sovereignty is taken up in political movements led by settlers. In the minds of settlers, sovereignty is often seen as synonymous and isomorphic with Indigenous politics as a whole. This makes it difficult to imagine an Indigenous politics that takes place outside of the terrain of sovereignty, outside of the spaces in which sovereignty is seen to be active. In this way, sovereignty can function as a horizon line for Indigenous politics, conditioning what Indigenous politics are normatively understood to entail. As Indigenous feminists have argued, Indigenous ‘issues’ come to be seen as those that clearly 229 Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) pushes us to ask what is lost in the emphasis on territoriality and how this overarching orientation might actually efface the ways in which settler colonial power operates and extends itself contemporarily. White settlers can internalize a normative distinction and calculus of value between ‘land-based’ and ‘people-centered’ movements for justice, coming to frame land as hegemonic in expressions of solidarity politics, at the expense of more capacious conceptualizations and enactments of sovereignty. As King (2019) argues, this may obscure the ways in which colonialism is structured around violence, genocide and conquest rather than solely land or ‘settlement’. 306 involve sovereignty, Indigenous rights and title, land claims or treaty, to the exclusion of questions of gender justice, for instance (Hunt 2016; Barker 2005; Million 2013; Kauanui 2018) or, as I argue, housing precarity, for which the concept is also an uneasy home. Sovereignty becomes the ideational box in which the entire breadth of Indigenous politics is expected to be contained. Sovereignty’s association with ‘territory’ and a specific kind of masculinist authority can render other political projects less valuable or even, politically unintelligible within the framework of Indigenous or solidarity politics and analytics (Leeuw 2016). This has critical implications for movements which are not commonly articulated through the language of sovereignty. Projects for housing justice, abolition or decriminalization, while contesting structural violence, coercion, and genocide—the very substance of settler colonialism—are not typically routed through the concept of sovereignty. 230 Political movements that struggle to articulate themselves in the land-based grammar of sovereignty, can find their projects rendered illegible through the framework of anticolonialism because of the established association between sovereignty and decolonization, for instance. 231 Movements for housing justice tend not to articulate themselves through the charismatic frameworks of sovereignty, or collective self-determination, and thus can find themselves situated as distinct from movements for decolonization, a shore apart. The expectation that sovereignty is the mode of Indigenous politics, can work to marginalize and devalue movements not seen to comfortably align with its hegemonic logics. It becomes difficult to understand these movements as contesting specifically colonial relations without the concept of sovereignty (Simpson 2020). 230 While acknowledging that land as a grounding relation informs all projects of anticolonialism and Indigenous flourishing, these projects do not necessarily take land as their primary or immediate object of concern. 231 This can lead to Indigenous peoples finding themselves more closely aligned and oriented towards coalitional movements like substance use or sex work movements in which Indigeneity and sovereignty are not the central ordering concepts or experiences. 307 We might understand this conceptual bordering of Indigenous sovereignty to particular scales, spaces and struggles as a strategy of containment. Delimiting the breadth of Indigenous politics has been central to colonial modes of governance. Delimiting the scope of Indigenous politics, the places where Indigenous legal orders are salient and actionable, is central to colonial projects of capture, containment and compartmentalization that seek to fix Indigenous peoples in place and to limit the reach of Indigenous politics (Hunt 2014; Tomiak 2016; Dorries 2023). Materially and imaginatively confining Indigenous peoples to spaces like the reserve (Hunt 2014) or the inner-city ‘slum’ and casting Indigenous peoples as out-of-time, antithetical to modernity (Rifkin 2017), has also served to corral Indigenous political expressions. The confinement of Indigenous peoples within discursive containers works to delimit the material spaces in which Indigenous legal and political orders are seen to be operative or salient. The spatial demarcation of Indigenous politics to places ‘out there’—the reserve, the ’slum’ or the traditional territory—renders it difficult to understand the city as a storied space of Indigenous governance and law, right here, right now, or to see homelessness as an issue structured by extant colonial relations, a pressing issue of self-determination. This enframement naturalizes the confinement of self-determination to specific spheres and encourages the truncated expressions of settler solidarity that were witnessed in tandem at Meegan and the Legislature. The where of Indigenous politics and laws, its segregation to spaces that are easily understood and managed as ‘Indigenous space,’ is replicated and made tangible in everyday organizing practices. In taking up calls for solidarity with Indigenous land defenders, settler organizers at the BC Legislature inadvertently reproduced notions of where and when Indigenous politics can be located or where and when settler colonialism is seen to be operative. This was noticed by local housing justice organizers, and made evident in the responses to calls for tents, 308 food, clothing and other supplies to set up the occupation of the Legislature. These calls were responded to much faster than longstanding calls made for similar supplies by organizers among the unhoused community. While housing justice organizers and unhoused communities had worked locally for decades to establish self-determined spaces in which to increase safety and foster care, wellbeing and harm reduction in the face of state violence and neglect—arguably a project seeking to advance self-determination—these calls did not see the kind of large-scale response from settler activists. Conversations among housing justice organizers then led to questioning how mobilizing resources for a temporary encampment could inadvertently devalue similar calls being made for tents, food and supplies for unhoused communities (in which Indigenous people have long been overrepresented) who did not have the luxury of going home at the end of the day, unlike most folks temporarily sheltering at the Legislature. These frictions thus reveal how colonial relations are remade through the rendering anomalous of Indigenous politics from struggles like housing justice. Within local organizing communities, it was assumed that the struggle at the Legislature would be structured by questions of self-determination and sovereignty, yet at Meegan, questions of sovereignty and settler colonialism were often not the starting point. Organizing practices that ignore or elide homelessness as an issue of self-determination work to naturalize spatial and political imaginaries that confine Indigenous politics to particular times and places, rendering calls for solidarity to be of less political significance or disconnected from the techniques of dispossession outlined in the previous chapters. This imaginary was rendered normative and made material in local organizing practices that ignored the extent of either Indigenous jurisdiction or the reach of settler colonialism, thereby reifying the boundaries and containers in which self-determination or decolonization could be seen to be operative. 309 The hegemony of sovereignty as the primary discourse for contesting settler colonialism can lead to the foreclosure of other political grammars that seek to orient and forward anticolonial projects. When Indigenous sovereignty is seen to have normative features, then, spaces and struggles that are seen to fall outside of the concept’s boundaries become devalued and positioned as ancillary to the ‘real’ business of governance (Barker 2011). Land defense can be articulated through the prism of sovereignty or jurisdiction, is legible as a sovereign struggle and mode of governance, whereas safe supply or gender justice, for instance, can seem anomalous within the concept. 232 I argue that this is one of the primary reasons housing justice has struggled to be seen as a key platform of anticolonialism within settler solidarity movements, as it often does not look or feel like the political form that is normatively associated with Indigenous politics and governance: sovereignty, and the oppositional or spectacular forms that sovereignty is seen to take. The affective and relational work of housing justice cannot fit into the frame that settlers apply to Indigenous politics and governance. In the process of being bounded as distinct and external to struggles for sovereignty, housing justice develops in friction with it. I observed that for White settlers politicized at the Legislature, it was difficult to imagine handing out smokes or other practices of community care as being of the same political importance or in the same register, as spectacular expressions of resistance, such as claiming jurisdiction and territorial rights like those witnessed at the Legislature. The association of sovereignty with movements for land back rendered them affectively more appealing to White settlers and certainly more legible as acts of decolonization. 232 I’m thinking here of the ways in which the gendered discrimination of the Indian Act in relation to status was considered as ancillary or secondary to land rights by the primarily male Indigenous leadership in the struggle to amend the Indian Act in the 1980s. As Barker (2008:260) argues, Indigenous women’s pursuit for gender justice was “dismissed as not only irrelevant but dangerous to Indian sovereignty.” 310 Concepts of sovereignty, jurisdiction and self-determination animated solidarity at the Legislature. In this space, at this moment, the concept was understood to make sense and solidarity easily mobilized around it. Yet, the concept could transit in troubling ways, working to condition the spaces in which settlers understood themselves to be responsible. I argue that settlers engaged sovereignty in circumscribed ways that spatialized and temporalized its exercise as elsewhere and elsewhen, in order to distance themselves from the deeply troubling implications of more robust, expansive and inclusive conceptions of sovereignty in their everyday lives and intimate spaces; in their very practice of making home (Hunt and Holmes 2015; Tuck and Yang 2012; Povinelli 2011; Rifkin 2017). Sovereignty was framed as happening ‘out there’ and in particular moments, rarely in the time of the everyday or in the space of our very homes—thus obscuring the violence of dispossession underpinning the creation of Beacon Hill Park, downtown ‘Victoria’ or the Legislature, evidenced in previous chapters. White settlers evade responsibility and complicity by rendering sovereignty exceptional and spatializing struggle elsewhere, in distant spaces, or elsewhen, in spectacular or exceptional moments in time. The draw to this spatialization of the political is powerful and functions as a ‘distancing tactic’ (Tuck and Yang 2012). It was more palatable and affectively appealing to support Wet’suwet’en communities from which most settlers had a certain amount of emotional and physical distance, than to address our own privileges and complicities in the places that we call home. This allowed settlers to engage the question of sovereignty in ways that did not produce discomfort or ‘bad feelings’ or transgress the sanctity of our homes, everyday lives and intimate spaces (Ngai 2005; Diabo 2019; Belcourt 2018b; Kizuk 2020). 233 This spatial ordering is comforting to White 233 This framing also works to encourage a reformist, rather than revolutionary politics. If violence is exceptional then we need only address the unique and exceptional moments (here, read as ‘crisis’) in which it occurs in order to rehabilitate the settler nation. Whereas, if violence is seen as foundational and intrinsic to projects of settler colonialism, deeper structural change is called for. 311 settlers who can enter into or visit ‘political space’ under terms of their own choosing, engage politics in ways that serve to edify rather than trouble White subjectivity and just as easily exit politicized space to return to the terrain of a depoliticized and untroubled everyday. 234 This framing of political space understands settler colonial power as spectacular and helps to buttress a vision of colonial violence as exceptional, rather than foundational to settler colonial projects. Sovereignty can work to encourage this spatialization and shape settlers’ attendant political commitments. Friction between anticolonial solidarity and housing justice, then, was often caused by a reductive understanding of the concepts of sovereignty as the horizon of Indigenous politics, and an unwillingness of White settlers to entertain differing political grammars or responsibilities that brought solidarity home, to our very doorsteps. Encampment support at Meegan often found the concept of sovereignty an inhospitable place to make a home. Situated outside the frame of sovereignty, housing justice organizers had to find other political grammars to operate from in order to be seen and heard; care, mutual aid or harm reduction, for instance. However, these framings made it difficult for folks on the ground to understand these practices within the umbrella of ‘decolonization’. Encampment support could be articulated as ‘empathetic’, ‘charitable’ or through the more politically-inflected framework of ‘care’, but still struggled to be seen as a collective act of political will or self-determination that contested specifically settler colonial relations of power. Rather, these discourses and practices rubbed up against one another—even as settler activists took up calls for solidarity between the two sites, they used different language, took up different roles, and understood their political orientation across the two spaces to be distinct. For those who did participate in encampment 234 This is also predicated on normative understandings of the home as apolitical. One wanders into the public world of politics but can always return to the private space of the home where the political does not intrude. This distinction is, of course, a fallacy and not the lived experience of most people living under conditions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. 312 support, the concept of Lək̓ʷəŋən authority could seem ancillary or inconsequential to the work of housing justice. Thus, both movements struggled to adequately attend to each other’s claims or their shared connections. For instance, the cries for ‘land back’ that animated the Legislature risked being read as illegible at Meegan, as being an errant grammar, in Tiffany Lethabo King’s (2019) terms. Of course, land back matters to questions of homelessness. Why do we think people don’t have a home? Yet, what also matters is how such an articulation can come to be read as aberrant, ‘surprising or ‘unexpected’ by not only the agents of settler colonialism, but by those of us who claimed to stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples at the Legislature (Deloria 2004; McKittrick 2006). In conversation with housing justice organizers, we continued to question: Why does the rallying cry of ‘land back’ make sense in one space but not another? My argument here is not that sovereignty has no utility, nor that it is intrinsically harmful. What I am trying to identify are the ways in which reductive understandings of sovereignty and the frames that are imposed on Indigenous politics and governance worked to render practices like housing justice and anticolonialism discrepant, to constrain and confine the exercise of Indigenous politics to certain spaces which then come into tension with one another. These ideas continue to shape how settlers practice solidarity in Lək̓ʷəŋən territories, how and where we show up in support of Indigenous peoples. Finally, it is important to recognize that work that connects housing justice and decolonization, work that refuses the containerization of settler epistemic frames, is already being done, primarily by Indigenous and Black communities, and people of colour, as well as feminist and queer anti-violence activists. Coalitional and intersectional movements may mobilize sovereignty in ways that elude capture within settler colonial logics that attempt to delimit anticolonialism’s horizon and discursively fuse Indigenous politics to territory in ways 313 that do not allow for political movement or fugitivity (Kelley 2002; Martineau and Ritskes 2014; Recollet 2016; Vizenor 1998; Simpson 2020). These movements working across differences, bridging the shorelines between struggles and communities, articulate robust and hopeful political projects. I hope that these movements represent our futures and that we may work together in shared struggle. Yet, despite this work, on the ground, sovereignty continues to be taken up and understood, by White settlers in particular, in ways that work to delimit their understanding of Indigenous politics, and thus, how and where, they practice solidarity. This is the process that I critique, calling on settlers like myself to unpack the ways that we can participate in Indigenous erasure in our organizing practice and community work by positioning movements in friction with one another. If we were to actually acknowledge, listen to and take guidance from political movements with whom we work in solidarity, we would begin to see that we are, in fact, working across a number of shorelines. I next seek to interrogate sovereignty in motion, how it moves across space and across communities, and what changes in this transit. I argue that questions of value serve to lay the bounds and conditions of sovereignty’s mobility, determining what kinds of movement and labour are seen as meaningful, valuable or worth while, and what spaces are rendered as ‘properly political’. Why are White settlers inclined to show up and shout at a rally for Indigenous sovereignty, to post about Palestine or Wet’suwet’en, to march and chant that ‘reconciliation is dead’ or to call to ‘shut down Canada’, but unlikely to look at or even consider an Indigenous person sheltering on the street in front of our very homes outside of these ‘exceptional’ moments of spectacle? How is such a calculus of value produced? 314 9.3 Producing Value: Normative Subjects and the Valuation of Struggle “Honestly, though, it is so interesting to see the disconnect between these movements because they are so inherently linked. I mean homelessness, colonization and capitalism and the fact that these colonial systems that literally thrive and survive on land stolen to be used as commodity and manufactured poverty to enforce power structures. These are the origins of homelessness, and they only exist because of colonization. And you can't talk about one without talking about the other. But there is such a disconnect. It's so interesting seeing the huge amount of support for the Legislature, the huge amount of support for Wet’suwet’en movement. The huge amount of, it's problematic as fuck, but the huge amount of support for Fairy Creek. There's so much support: people, resources, money, time and energy that gets put towards all of these things and so little towards local mutual aid organizing, like, local housing justice, and outreach and support for unhoused community. And there's so little recognition of the inherent links between them in community. Like, you can't have one without the other. You can't have decolonization, you can't have indigenous sovereignty when there's still Indigenous people fucking living on the streets, on their own land being fucking criminalized and stigmatized and traumatized on a daily basis.” -Shae Perkins (personal communication). If sovereignty has worked to condition what is seen to be ‘properly political’, the question of value works to shape who is seen as ‘properly human’, whose lives and concerns come to matter. Value contours the ways in which housing justice is taken up, who is seen as a valued subject, and what life is worth living and supporting (Butler 2009). 235 Here, I use the concept of value to unpack the ways in which certain forms of solidarity come to be understood as more appealing to settlers than others, revealing the central role of value in creating frictions across sites of solidarity. Within regimes of White supremacy, racial capitalism and settler colonialism, some lives are coded as worth more, meaning more and some lives are framed as worthless, meaningless. Scholars have variously described this ascription of value as a form of disposability (Pratt 2006; Razack 2016; Tadiar 2013;), precarious life and grievability (Butler 2009; Dean 2015), remaindered life (Tadiar 2022), surplus populations or ‘waste’ (Gidwani and Reddy 2011; Li 2010), desubjectivation (Edelman 2016; Hartman 2022) or simply, 235 While these projects have distinctive features, housing justice is deeply shaped by the war on drugs, the prison industrial complex, ableism and the medical industrial complex, especially as they pertain to homelessness. 315 dehumanization (Wynter 2003; Jackson 2020; Silva 2007). People who use substances, engage in sex work, are disabled, experience bodymind difference or are unhoused are often seen as ‘affectable’, lacking self-determination and less-than-human, particularly so, for those experiencing multiple and overlapping forms of marginalization and perceived ‘deviance’ from the norms of liberal humanism. The question of value, not only of political issues, but of the subjects who people these movements themselves, contours how social movements are taken up. What politics matter is always linked to what bodies matter. The concerns of subjects cast as disposable are framed as politically unimportant, without value or cachet. Significantly, housing justice ties together the concerns of several marginalized and intersecting communities. Deep and abiding stigma exist around issues that intersect with experiences of homelessness: substance use, sex work, disability, mental illness, criminalization and impoverishment. 236 These stigmas serve to dehumanize and devalue communities and their concerns, to place them outside of a sphere of mattering and meaning (Tuck and Ree 2013). The intersection of precarity, substance use, disability, mental health, criminalization and incarceration, has led housing justice to become entangled with projects of abolition, gendered justice, accessibility, decriminalization and safe supply. Scholars and activists within these movements have long theorized and experienced these projects as deeply interwoven with anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Yet, these projects are often treated as ancillary to forms of decolonization predicated on land and territory and pursued through the normative framework of sovereignty. Within settler solidarity movements people who use substances or engage in sex work, for instance, are not seen as leaders of movements for 236 People who use substances, who are disabled and who experience mental illness disproportionately experience housing precarity and homelessness. Likewise, queer, nonbinary, trans and 2Spirit communities are also exposed to higher levels of housing precarity due to organized abandonment and a range of intersecting social factors from interpersonal family violence and homophobia and transphobia in the housing market. 316 decolonization due to latent and explicit frameworks of respectability. Chanelle Gallant (2021) notes how respectability politics shape how sex work movements are understood by roader publics, “most people don’t envision sex worker communities as incubators for transformative politics, solidarity and mutual aid”. In the political imaginaries of local organizers contoured by latent respectability politics there are certain issues that sex workers can speak to, like decriminalization, but it is it harder to imagine sex workers as leading broader movements broader for decolonization, for instance. Yet, as Gallant (2021) argues, “beyond decriminalization, sex worker movements offer so much more. They invite us to envision political liberation that includes our sexualities” These movements are about “a culture shift that changes all of our relationships” (Gallant 2021). Yet, this expansive politics is exactly what is bracketed out in solidarity organizing that does not imagine sex work and decolonization as tethered, for instance. The capaciousness of sex work movements is reduced and the value of sex workers themselves is denigrated in movements that cannot countenance these shared shorelines. Stigma around sex work or substance use, for instance, serve to devalue the movements these communities lead and to exclude them from broader movements for decolonization. This stigmatization could be internalized by settler organizers with few relations to the street community. Stigma could be expressed in tacit and explicit ways. Settler organizers could be paternalistic or patronizing in interactions with folks experiencing homelessness, either dismissive or condescending. Both behaviours created a barrier to more meaningful relations. When community members active in organizing spaces encounter one another in spaces like the Legislature there is an expectation of some kind of affinity, a shared political lexicon as well as expectations about carrying oneself in public space. Yet, I have witnessed these spaces be palpably unsettled by the presence of unhoused community members and the ways in which the 317 articulate their own political projects. There is not a smoothness here, the path is not always well-worn. While overt expressions of paternalism are rare, I certainly witnessed feelings of unease or discomfort in local organizers interactions with unhoused community members. This was not often spiteful nor malicious, but rather a product of the gulfs that continue to exist between communities and experiences. People could simply find it difficult to relate to another. To imagine themselves as participating in shared communities. Again, I do not exempt myself from this. It can be hard to find shared affinities or connections. The fact that this could be so difficult to imagine is precisely the point, the friction that I am noting. There were often very different ways of situating oneself in relation to struggle and politics. Expectations around conduct, how political demands were understood and articulated, differed between the encampment and the occupation. In trying to bridge these gaps, I have often been made painfully aware of the divisions that still exist between communities. In groups I organize with now, a priority has been placed on having people with lived experience be centered in spaces which have historically been rendered exclusionary, political occupations in support of Palestine, for instance. This presents challenges. First, it has made me acutely aware of the daily privations and stresses of experiencing homelessness. Having someone come to the university or a community center for instance, requires planning and support so people’s possessions are not taken when they are gone, so that people can get back to somewhere safe to shelter for the night. Yet even as efforts are made to imagine shared communities, the ‘energy’ of such spaces remains palpable. In bringing folks to lectures, to film screenings, to occupations, I have witnessed people make self-deprecating or disparaging remarks about themselves, to downplay or discount their knowledge, to explicitly state that a space like an encampment in solidarity with Palestine ‘is your space not mine’. 318 People who are multiply stigmatized and marginalized feel palpably their exclusion within such spaces. Even when nothing is said, an energy once again conditions these spaces that unhoused community members consistently note and remark on. These spaces could feel unwelcoming at worst and uncomfortable at best. Likewise, I have encountered resistance from people experiencing homelessness in attempting to bring the question of settler colonial occupation and Indigenous dispossession into the space of the encampment. A friction certainly remains, even as everyone tries to bridge gaps. A politics of respectability, in which certain behaviours, conduct and modes of comportment are denigrated as immoral or ‘wrong’, continues to shape solidarity work on stolen Lək̓ʷəŋən land. Respectability politics orient settler solidarity movements in particular directions, towards some spaces and away from others—creating new boundaries, edges and limits to the elsewhere and elsewhen of sovereignty. Who comes to matter shapes what comes to matter. This orientation served to recursively reproduce certain economies of value through everyday practice at Meegan and the Legislature. In showing up in support of some communities, settlers made a claim to the value of those communities and struggles, to their grievability. In orienting away from others, solidarity movements adjudicated on the value of human life that these spaces contained. Devaluation was reproduced through the frictions embodied in everyday organizing and solidarity practices. Stigma around certain experiences or behaviours work to shape what communities are seen to matter and by extension, what communities can expect forms of political support and solidarity under the umbrella of decolonization. In conducting solidarity work, choosing where and where not to show up, settler ‘allies’ make ideological decisions on what has political and moral valence, who or what is seen as worthwhile and deserving of 319 protection, compassion or empathy. Understandings of who can be seen as human, as valued and mattering, condition where support is directed. 237 Settler ‘allies’ come to solidarity work with prefigured expectations of Indigeneity and Indigenous political orders that condition how they understand their responsibilities, the communities they stand in solidarity with and the spaces in which they offer support. Environmental discourse, alongside racist and romanticized visions of Indigenous cultural and political traditions, shape how settlers understand and practice solidarity (Nadasdy 2005). In practices of solidarity, settlers often construct an idealized subject, the ‘ecological Indian’, who embodies the values of environmental sustainability, one who conforms to their expectations of Indigeneity; cultural, spiritual, and righteous. White settlers may consume and identify with this figure in the exercise of solidarity without being too threatened or destabilized. These idealized conceptions of Indigeneity are ‘exalted’ forms of ‘properly’ expressed subjectivity against which actual Indigenous people are then measured (Thobani 2007; Deloria 2004). 238 The construction of this ‘exalted’ subject serves to further denigrate and vilify those that find themselves outside of settler norms and the construction of a truncated Indigeneity that settler power expects (Nadasdy 2005; Thobani 2007). 239 The idealized conception of Indigeneity then is a ‘controlling image’ through which more robust and nuanced expressions of Indigenous political agency, 237 Many solidarity movements instrumentalize Indigenous jurisdiction in the service of previously established environmental concerns and ‘green’ politics. In the moral and political calculus of White settler activism, a river or a forest may be more ‘grievable’ than a person who is unhoused or a person who uses drugs (Butler 2009). 238 And, of course, found wanting or inadequate as this exalted subject is the impossible production of settler desires and expectations, not an actual subject. 239 My use of ‘exalted’ here is in reference to Sunera Thobani’s (2007) work. However, this utilization represents a refiguring of Thobani’s concept as here it is the Indigenous subject who properly embodies settler expectations of sovereignty who is held as a barometer and in contradistinction to Indigenous subjects framed as debased and abject through improper conduct or behaviour. Yet, this properly embodied Indigenous sovereign subject can not be fully exalted in Thobani’s sense since Whiteness and acquiescence to settler colonial formations are critical components of an exalted subjectivity. The Indigenous figure imagined here neither acquiesces nor makes moves towards Whiteness. Yet, they may still be upheld in order to debase and devalue alternative modes of subjectivation and more capacious articulation of sovereignty as deviant or of negative value. 320 experience and subjectivity are circumscribed and constrained (Collins 2002). This controlling image works through forms of respectability politics to legitimize the extension of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples seen to fall outside of established expectations of Indigeneity and Indigenous politics (Higganbotham 1993; Mackey 2016; Deloria 2004). The iconicity of this ‘noble’ figure makes it more difficult for actual Indigenous peoples to live their lives or forward alternative political imaginaries as White settler solidarity works to constrain these expressions through its support of movements that match their expectations. In this sense, settler solidarity can work in collaboration with state violence to delimit the horizon of Indigenous politics and contribute to the policing of Indigenous subjectivity. In friction with Indigenous sovereignty, settler solidarity becomes a vehicle for violence in adjudicating what matters through internalized respectability politics conditioned by racist productions of Indigeneity. Sex work and substance use, for instance, may not fit settlers’ expectations as they pertain to the ‘noble’ Indigenous subject and may work to discomfit how settlers understand solidarity work and the objectives of sovereignty movements (Mackey 2016). Many occupations have zero tolerance drug or alcohol policies, for instance. This is a very complex issue and there may be legitimate reasons for such prohibitions (for instance, police may use drugs or alcohol as a pretext to raid). In practice, however, this can mean that people who use substances may be implicitly or explicitly not welcome in these spaces. Regulating substances also has the effect of regulating people. These frameworks serve to produce idealized conceptions of Indigeneity from which Indigenous peoples who use substances, are incarcerated, do sex work or otherwise fail to adhere to settler expectations of Indigenous subjectivity and modes of conduct, may find themselves evicted. These behaviors are positioned as antithetical to romanticized settler 321 constructions of Indigeneity and ‘good Indians’ (Miranda 2013). As Hunt (2013b) has argued, these rationales can be reproduced within Indigenous communities as well, as Indigenous anti-violence movements seek greater cache within settler matrices of value. Solidarity movements may flatten complex personhood by requiring that Indigenous subjects strike particular poses in order to garner their support (Vizenor 1998). 240 In short, substance use, sex work and impoverishment are most often not a part of settlers’ aspirational and romanticized vision of proximity to Indigeneity through solidarity. Within anticolonial movements, behaviours deemed ‘deviant’, particularly sex work and substance use, are often stringently regulated because they are seen to muddy the political projects of decolonization. A politics of respectability has often required marginalized subjects to adhere to normative modes of comportment to garner political support (Higganbotham 1993). The concerns of people who use drugs or conduct sex work are not seen to be of collective value in the same ways as access to land, or hunting and fishing rights, are. This process is evident in grassroots solidarity movements led by settlers conditioned to expect sovereignty (and Indigeneity) to strike particular poses, be concerned with a particular object, land/territory, and importantly to be led by particular subjects who model ‘proper’ conduct and adhere to settler expectations of Indigeneity and respectability (Vizenor 1998). Settler expectations of what sovereignty and anticolonialism look like can work to invisibilize or devalue subjects who cannot or will not strike these poses and who participate in movements with differing political forms and objectives. These expectations can serve to reduce Indigenous politics to environmental or ecological concern in ways that do not allow for a complexity of experiences, emotions, subjectivities or political projects. 240 Settlers may then consume this flattened production of Indigenous subjectivity to edify their own romanticized desires for Indigeneity and a latent hunger to self-Indigenize, that is, to appropriate the cultural trappings, spirituality and good feelings of Indigeneity absent the political violence and harm that attends Indigeneity in the settler colony (Morgensen 2011a; Gaudry and Andersen 2016; Leroux 2019). 322 Stigmatizing representations work to marginalize the political acumen and participation of unhoused people within broader political movements through the abrogation of their agency. 241 The negation of marginalized people’s political capacity is a primary modality of settler and racial governance. These discourses serve to effectively sideline marginalized people sideline as political actors. 242 As disability justice, and the work of substance use and sex work organizations illustrate, ableism and stigma also function to negate marginalized subjects’ agency thereby justifying paternalistic, coercive and ultimately carceral forms of governance (Menzies, Reaume and LeFrancois 2013). Popular discourse frames these communities as lacking agency over their very bodies and minds and thus, incapable of embodying political subjectivity or exercising collective forms of self-determination (Schalk 2022). Marginalized people come to be seen as incapable of forming legible political communities and exercising forms of autonomy associated with political subjectivity. Thus, it becomes difficult for settlers to imagine themselves as part of a shared political community with people who are experiencing homelessness because these communities are framed as incapacitated. Within this framework, charity, empathy or even care may be provided, but solidarity, which relies on some common interest, shared sense of mutuality or political community, is harder to imagine and envision. At a base level, it can be hard for ‘allies’ to recognize sex workers, people who use substances or who experience bodymind difference as political actors because dominant discourses work to render it difficult to recognize these communities as people at all, as 241 Indigenous sex workers and their allies have clearly articulated the necessity of sex worker agency in Indigenous anti-violence and self-determination struggles. See Indigenous Sex Sovereignty Collective: https://indigenoussexsovereignty.tumblr.com/ 242 Sylvia Wynter (2003) made this connection explicit in her work, arguing that Indigenous, Black and mad communities were ‘dysselected’ under the emergent logics of Man2, the rational economic subject. The logic that devalues and dehumanizes Indigenous, Black, mad and poor communities is not only similar it is the same, the effect of the construction of Man as an exclusionary category through White liberal humanism. 323 constituting legible communities to which housed settlers might place themselves in relation. 243 People experiencing homelessness are often seen as incapable or passive subjects, needing ‘charity’ or ‘goodwill’ (pejoratively ‘handouts’), rarely as political agents themselves in addressing their own experiences of organized abandonment and targeted policing (Dozier 2022). In this way, people experiencing homelessness are often the objects of governance, rarely provided the resources or lack of interference to be subjects of governance. Many unhoused people have described this as a feeling of being ‘acted upon’ (Boilevin et al. 2019). 244 This framing of incapacity can be replicated when anticolonial and solidarity movements do not make space for housing justice or fail to understand these communities to be agentive political actors. Local organizers often internalized a representation of unhoused communities, as an aggregate of traumatized, struggling or incapacitated individuals, rather than as a cohesive political community with clearly stated goals, ethics and political claims that we might stand in relation and solidarity with (Dozier 2022). Solidarity movements could reproduce paternalistic ideas that framed unhoused communities as ‘incapable’ and rarely as active political subjects involved in complex and nuanced critique of capitalism and precarity. Indeed, it was not often expected that housed residents and supporters were actually a part of a shared community with 243 We can note the resonances with the abnegation of marginalized subjects’ agency and the governance of Indigenous peoples cast as ‘wards of the state’, incapacitated and incomplete subjects, in order to justify coercive forms of control. These paternalistic logics are not only parallel; they derive from the same foundations. Productions of race, gender and disability are deeply intertwined (Cowing 2020; Puar 2017; Schalk 2022). Historically, racial discourses have centered on the perceived biological difference between White, Black, Brown and Indigenous subjects. These productions of race have understood Indigeneity as a form of biological debility, incapacity and deficiency. Indigenous peoples were pathologized as intrinsically inferior to White European subjects, predisposed to addictions and substance use, lacking mental faculty and governed by emotion and sensuality. Discourses of substance use, ‘improper’ expressions of sexuality and forms of bodymind difference have a long history of being associated with and weaponized against Indigenous, Black and Brown peoples. Understandings of disability, substance use and sex work are deeply racialized and have a shared genealogy with the construction of a global racial order that da Silva articulates. That is, it is no coincidence that these forms of devaluation seem to align and have shared resonances, rather they originate in a shared genesis, in the negation of Europe’s ‘Others’ agency and humanity through colonial encounter. 244 Countering this logic has been central to rallying cries such as ‘nothing about us, without us’. 324 encampment residents or struggling against the same systems. This was often illustrated in the awkward and tentative attempts that were made to broach communities, to hail one another across expectations of difference. This often meant that the support that was offered to the community at Meegan was subtended by paternalism and charity models, ‘helping’ people understood as less-than, rather than constructing shared ground on which solidarity might be crafted. Projects of mutual aid could exhibit these tendencies and much of the support that was provided to the community at Meegan continued to pivot around philanthropic models that rendered people sheltering ‘clients’ of supporters’ benevolence. 245 9.4 ‘Choice’, Affect and Solidarity “The machine wants us all to work and be in houses and pay our taxes. And, if you don't do that, they say, ‘well, you're not trying hard enough.’ Well not everybody fits into those boxes. You know, that was one thing Chrissy [Brett] told me. Not everybody fits into those boxes.” -Niki Ottosen (personal communication). The ascription of value also intersects with neoliberal logics of choice, rationality and responsibility that works to render some communities as ‘undeserving’ of care or solidarity. The logics of neoliberalism with their emphasis on ‘responsibility’ work to position impoverishment as an individual moral failing, rather than a structural inequality and consistent feature of life in the settler colony under racial capitalism. This is a politically useful etiological discourse. If housing precarity, homelessness and displacement are the result of individual choices the state is absolved from its obligation to ensure care to its ‘citizens’. Instead, it encourages them to simply work harder to overcome any barriers one might encounter. This logic can inform solidarity work as well. Entrenched neoliberal logics serve to condition how some struggles are framed as 245 This is why the community care tent was such a vital and robust space, in which volunteers and peers shared the space, housed and unhoused, and were able to imagine themselves as part of a shared community, as what they actually were in most cases; neighbors. 325 collective concerns and explicitly involving concepts like sovereignty or justice, while others have been individualized and seen as the product of personal choice or pathology. The devaluation that attends impoverishment is represented as a product of unhoused communities’ ‘bad’ or ‘irrational’ decisions. As Don Mitchell (2020:12) argues, “the distinction between deserving and undeserving locates pauperism, beggary and homelessness within the individual, as a characteristic of that individual”. Within this framework, poverty becomes an individual, rather than collective experience that requires not solidarity, but rehabilitation and intervention. 246 This logic shapes where movements for housing justice and antipoverty organizing are located within the discourses of anticolonialism and decolonization—the elsewhere of sovereignty. The struggles of people who are poor, use substances or sex workers, for instance, are often located in their individual choices or ‘pathologies’, rather than the systemic nature of White supremacy, gendered violence, repressive and moralizing sexual regimes, ableism, racial capitalism and settler colonialism that structure their experiences. 247 Likewise, the struggles of poor and disabled Indigenous peoples are seen as the moral failing of individual subjects rather than the institutions and structures they must operate and survive within. When we understand homelessness and housing precarity for Indigenous peoples as the effect of colonial discipline 246 We can recall the ways in which even Indigenous scholars have limited the meanings and normative exercise of sovereignty by distinguishing between individual struggles for civil ‘rights’ and collective struggles for sovereignty. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn saw struggles for gendered justice (and presumably housing justice) as questions of civil rights not having to do with sovereignty because all subjects are positioned as equal in relation to civil rights. Sovereignty was invested solely in institutional tribal polities (as defined by settler states) and sovereign issues are those over which tribal nations might exercise authority. This works to delimit sovereignty to the rights of governance affirmed by or invested in Indigenous nations by settler governments. This framing has the paradoxical effect of sometimes hailing the settler state as an individual citizen and sometimes as a member of a sovereign collective. 247 Substance use and sex work, of course, may also be a personal inclination and does not necessarily index struggle. The point here is a well-worn one; that these choices do not occur in a vacuum and that systemic disregard and policing work to make these practices more difficult than they ought to be whether or not an individual is participating in them under conditions of duress or personal preference. 326 and regulation in the home and a sundering of the relations and communities on which people rely, we can see it as more clearly as a collective issue of self-determination, autonomy and jurisdiction over one’s body, home and community (Harjo 2019; Deer 2015). When homelessness and precarity are seen as the result of ‘poor’ individual choices, as neoliberal frameworks encourage, it is difficult to tie this experience to ongoing colonialism and structural violence. 248 Settler solidarity movements often struggle to tie impoverishment and housing precarity to the ongoing histories of colonization, gravitating instead to the more immediate and spectacular images of invasion and resistance that we were witness to in the winter of 2020. Organized abandonment often unfolds ‘slowly’ (though no less violently) and in the prosaic space of the everyday (Belcourt 2018a; Nixon 2011). 249 This could make disregard difficult to visualize or comprehend as the effect of settler colonial power in spaces like Meegan in ways that more spectacular forms of violence are not. A militarized attack on a community is more visible and legible as the effect of state power and governance than 150 years of municipal policy and bureaucratic governance that have impoverished entire communities and foreclosed or circumscribed viable housing alternatives. Yet, they are both the products of settler colonial violence. ‘Choice’ always occurs in a field contoured by historical and contemporary experiences of power. While violence can be lost in the longue duree of its unfolding, when we look at the cumulative effects of housing policy and biopolitical governance of the home, it 248 Importantly, even when precarity and homelessness are seen as systemic and structural, as many housing justice and Marxist frameworks do, when settler colonialism is omitted from analyses, we arrive at a similarly skewed reading that can replicate ongoing processes of Indigenous erasure and dispossession (Porter and Kelly 2023; Blatman and Sisson 2023). 249 Yet, it is important to note that slow violence is only perceived as unfolding imperceptibly. For subjects who experience forms of slow violence, its effects may still be traumatic and immediate. Not having enough food to eat due to the slow grind of employment insecurity or suddenly facing eviction due to the attritional wages of poverty, are experiences of pressing immediacy that unfold within the slow violence of austerity and dispossession. 327 becomes easier to see housing precarity as the effect of settler colonial governance and dispossession (Nichols 2020). 250 There is a specific kind of affect at work here. For settlers, resistance to forms of violence that are immediate and spectacular, like the militarized raids on Wet’suwet’en territory, are more appealing, offering immediate edification through the exercise of recognizable, masculinist and oppositional politics. Sovereignty and resistance are associated within the settler imaginary with these forms of spectacle and visible counteractive resistance, not the grinding and debilitating forms of prosaic violence that also constitutes life in settler states. Poverty, substance use and homelessness, can easily slip into the category of the personal, under logics of neoliberalism, even though these issues also deeply impact Indigenous communities, their ability to sustain and care for their members or their very capacity for social reproduction. Modes of ameliorating these experiences can problematically range from forms of charity within a ‘non-profit industrial complex’, paternalistic expressions of solidarity or forms of coercive care, rather than the reparations, redress and rebuilding of communities deeply shaken through experiences of conquest, genocide and colonial violence (INCITE! 2007; Spade 2020). How the ‘problems’ of poverty and homelessness are understood then, can lead to vastly different means of addressing them. These political imaginaries often meant that the people who support land defense and 250 Rob Nichols’ (2020) work is helpful in introducing an analytic method for addressing how systemic and structural dispossession may unfold in ways that become invisibilized as forms of settler colonial violence (see also Nixon 2011). Nichols argues for an analysis which offers an understanding of structure that follows its historical effects, rather than the individual intentions of policies or events (Nichols 2020). This perspective shines a light on not only spectacular forms of violence but also on the cumulative effects of colonial governance and organized abandonment. Irrefutably, the outcome of 150 years of urban development, housing policy and settler colonialism in ‘Victoria’ has been the disproportionate experience of homelessness and precarity by Indigenous and racialized communities and the utter abandonment of those coded as non-normative or unproductive under the logics of colonial racial capitalism (Koshy et al. 2022). Attending to power’s effects allows us to understand housing justice’s linkages to land defense, rather than its disconnections. This might help to render more transparent forms of quotidian privation as the result of colonial power and bind more closely together struggles which are oftentimes seen as discrepant. 328 people experiencing homelessness could be drawn from different communities and motivated by fundamentally different ethics and objectives. ‘Solutions’ to homelessness often involve an intercessory targeting of the individual subject themself, rather than the structures that produce or shape these experiences. If sovereignty is the ‘procedural sign’ which gathers togethers Indigenous politics (Byrd 2014), neoliberal formulations that work to individualize struggle and rationalize inequality and violence, serve to locate the problem of homelessness in the individual, in deviant, dysfunctional and irrational subjectivity, in ways that efface the question of sovereignty and detach housing justice from larger collective struggles against colonial power and for Indigenous flourishing. Anticolonial settler solidarity movements have struggled to adequately address this process and include antipoverty and housing justice platforms in their work. Value is also produced through associations with affect. Settler structures of feeling shape what kinds of politics feel good and are more likely to be valued and pursued (Mackey 2016). Struggles that are seen to ‘feel right’, or ‘feel good’, to edify White settlers through their participation, are more likely to be valued and championed by these communities (Diabo 2019; Kizuk 2020; Daigle 2019). White settlers are drawn to particular struggles, experiences and subjects that align with their expectations of what solidarity and Indigeneity entail, what these experiences and subjectivities look and feel like. Prevailing stigma and deeply entrenched feelings about ‘bad’ subjects and ‘deviant’ practices shape the ways in which settlers participate in solidarity movements (Miranda 2013; Diabo 2019). Solidarity work is conditioned by moral economies with roots in cisheteropatriarchal authority, ableist logics of productivity and neoliberal ideological formations of rationality, choice and responsibility that serve to determine what and who is seen as politically valued. Articulations of value and the affects they engender 329 shape the forms of solidarity that settlers offer (or withhold). Housing justice and antipoverty work may not ‘feel good’ or have the same affective draw as forms of solidarity predicted on the protection of ‘land’, ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’ as the subjects it seeks to serve are often framed as ‘undeserving’ of solidarity, care or and support due to forms of respectability politics and deeply entrenched economies of value (Diabo 2019; Daigle 2019; Gaertner 2020). 251 This kind of solidarity may not ‘pay off’ in terms of emotional investment. It may not result in the feelings of absolution that settlers engaged in solidarity can desire. The ways in which discourses of value are internalized and expressed are complicated. Settlers likely do not make conscious decisions to openly view some people as less deserving of care and support. Rather hegemonic discourses circulate in ways that make some issues and struggles appear as affectively more appealing and discursively more coherent from the perspective of White settlers (Ahmed 2014). 252 Struggles for land may have more moral and affective weight for many White settlers drawing them into solidarity movements in which sovereignty is often reductively understood as being solely about ‘the environment’ or ‘territory’ in ways that obfuscate how they actually center around questions of jurisdiction, authority and governance, or what Audra Simpson (2018) describes as ‘the right to decide’ at the scale of the territory, but also of the community, home, family and body (L. Simpson 2017; Wilson 2015; Harjo 2019). 253 251 In contrast, forms of solidarity centered on land, or ‘the environment’ may instrumentalize Indigeneity towards settlers’ own greenwashed objectives and desires, in this way it may serve as an edifying rather than unsettling practice for White settlers. 252 Framing struggle as revolving around ‘the environment’ also allows White settlers to retain authority and positions of leadership within political movements and institutions in ways that framing struggle as revolving around Indigenous sovereignty or jurisdiction would disallow. In this way, Indigenous sovereignty can be instrumentalized without destabilizing existing structures of power. 253 Many settlers and environmental movements simply gloss this question of authority, focusing instead on questions of the environment and how Indigenous struggles can be instrumentalized to effect ‘conservation’ or climate justice. 330 9.5 Making Connection across Shorelines “It just confirms why we need to decolonize the conundrum we're in. Like, it's just that we're not taught any of it. We're taught so many lies that it's very difficult to go through that gulf, you know, the divide that's created between us.” -Kym A. Hines (personal communication). “We shouldn't work in silos. We should all come together and not be fighting over the crumbs… We are stronger together.” -Niki Ottosen (personal communication). I conclude by turning to the metaphor of the shoreline as a response to friction, to erasure and to the compartmentalization of Indigenous politics in the political imaginaries of settler publics. While settler solidarity and everyday practice could work to distinguish and differentiate the struggles that unfolded at Meegan and the Legislature, there have always been people working against this decoupling of interwoven struggles for justice. While I make the argument that housing justice and decolonization are often rendered disparate in the everyday practices and political imaginaries of local organizers, this does not mean that there are no organizations or communities that contest this framing or address the connections between colonization, precarity, or homelessness. Many passionate advocates and community members work tirelessly to tie housing justice and decolonization together in the city. Indeed, historically, housing justice and anticolonialism have been understood as sharing deep connections and shared genealogies within many Indigenous movements for decolonization (Kake 2021; Ramirez 2020; Dorries 2023). Organizations like the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society or the Lu’ma Native Housing Society on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh territories, have pursued the intersections between harm reduction, housing and colonization for decades. Locally, these traditions were carried on by the Indigenous Harm Reduction (IHRT) team active until 2023, and are still practiced by organizations like QomQem, 331 and the Indigenous Outreach Workers (IOW) network, ey stelnexw, that explicitly link experiences of colonialism and precarity and platform the knowledge, acumen and experience of the Indigenous street community in Victoria. Likewise, many people working in outreach and service provision for organizations like AIDS Vancouver Island, SOLID or PEERS, skilfully drew these connections. Yet, the work of these organizations and community members is often marginalized and depoliticized within the work of broader settler publics to participate in anticolonial solidarity politics or practices of reconciliation. There is a particular kind of dissonance at work here, as settler communities claim to stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities at the Legislature or in other spaces in the city, yet, simultaneously ignore, devalue or sideline the work of Indigenous harm reduction organizations and the experiences of the Indigenous street community. I argue that this marginalization is produced by confining representations of Indigenous peoples and unhoused communities that normalize an expectation of incapacity and victimhood and sequester Indigenous politics to particular spaces and issues. I have witnessed how this important work has been sidelined as settlers, with preconceived notions of what Indigenous politics can contain, move to take up and practice solidarity, conditioning, and often delimiting, the political spaces in which Indigenous harm reduction organizations can operate. Far from being exceptional, these discourses, ideologies and spatial imaginaries are reproduced in the everyday ways in which solidarity is practiced and political space imagined by the broader non-Indigenous organizing community. The concerns of the Indigenous street community are produced as somehow separate and distinct from those of Indigenous peoples that settlers claim to stand in solidarity with. A story that IHRT shared on social media illustrates this dissonance. On Truth and Reconciliation Day 2022, often known as Orange Shirt Day for the bright shirts that the public 332 wears to signal their ‘allyship’ and recognition of the harms of the residential school system, IHRT’s storefront location, from which they delivered programming and distributed harm reduction supplies, was accosted for 3 hours by a man blaring a diatribe of residential school denialism on a loudspeaker. IHRT reached out to the many people wearing orange shirts and congregating downtown in anticipation of the day’s event but found very few willing to intervene. People could signal that they opposed Canada’s history and the violence that it perpetrated against Indigenous people, but they would not go out of their way to prevent actual Indigenous peoples from experiencing violence right in front of them. These people could travel to a public event in which the spectacle of Indigenous trauma and suffering was aired and consumed but would not actively intervene when witnessing harm (Daigle 2019). This is representative of the ways in which settlers can take up solidarity and support for Indigenous communities in circumscribed ways predicated on producing the good feelings of reconciliation, not in addressing the structural conditions under which Indigenous people actually labour (Edmonds 2016). Despite a lack of broad base support, a small yet powerful network of community members did move across the spaces of Meegan and the Legislature, robustly participating in both communities. Local Gitxsan community member, Gina Mowatt, was a key organizer at the Legislature and during the showers project. Gina highlighted the connections that could be fostered between these spaces, explaining that the Legislature provided a gateway for folks to participate in community and to transfer the skills learned there into other spaces. Mowatt (personal communication) describes their organizing work as a practice of politicized care, “showing up against a suffering that is palpable”. They explain that the division between these struggles seemed arbitrary to them, “I have family on the Downtown East Side, and I have 333 family who are land defenders.” All of these relations are engaged in struggles that are understood as shared and mutually constitutive. They stated that the connections between substance use and homelessness and people fighting for their land appeared self-evident to them as issues stemming from colonization. Yet, the experience of occupying the Legislature still catalyzed a different kind of politics and organizing for them, because while the issues seemed self-evidently connected organizing around them did not emerge ‘naturally’ because of the divisions of organizing in the city, the siloing of ‘Indigenous issues’ from broader political concerns. Colonial productions of the proper terrain for the exercise of anticolonial or Indigenous politics still hampered efforts at solidarity. 254 Even though, Mowatt felt these struggles to be connected, in local organizing, it was still a challenge to make these connections clear and actionable because of prevailing logics that worked to separate them. Intersectional organizing or community work that refused fixity, that was characterized by a kind of fugitivity, could trouble settler practices of enframement and categorization. The work that Indigenous community members like Grandma Losah Henry conducted with people experiencing homelessness, for instance, could be interpreted by settlers as charitable or kind, but was less often considered as a politicized expression of care irrevocably tied to self-determination, a vital act of decolonization and mutual aid. In contrast, her work supporting the community at Fairy Creek could be articulated through the language of self-determination and sovereignty and was legible to settlers in support. In her practice and work, Henry herself did not create distinctions between these spaces, understanding her work at Fairy Creek and Meegan as simultaneously about care for people, land, and self-determination. Yet, this could still be 254 However, as Mowatt articulates it, the experience at the Legislature did inaugurate a new momentum for some community members. It “made us brave”, allowed some community members to not only see the connections between struggles but to act on them. 334 confusing for settler organizers who attempted to categorize her work and situate it in ways that reduced its capacity. The ways in which Henry’s work overflowed and spilled over these imposed boundaries could be read as either illegible or anomalous by local organizers committed to one space or the other. There is a particular spatial logic and work here that attempts to contain and manage the exercise of Indigenous politics. Organizers could participate in this, by understanding the exercise of Indigenous politics as expected in some places and surprising in others. The activism of settler advocates like Niki Ottosen illustrate that nuanced and politicized care work was being done even if it did not always fully translate into a robust understanding of settler colonialism within broader housing justice and anti-poverty organizing. In the work that Niki and Nuxalk activist Chrissy Brett conducted together supporting folks in encampments in Victoria and up and down the Saanich Peninsula, they practiced robust forms of solidarity politics that refused the containerization of Indigenous politics and made space for the messy practice of solidarity that encouraged the fostering of deep relations across difference. In the work they did together, impoverishment was always linked to colonialism, and the solutions they pursued involved the resurgence of Indigenous law, governance and ceremony. Brett passed away in 2022, and Niki has every year since organized an annual march for justice in her honour. Niki’s work is based on a robust notion of politics that does not flatten or erase difference, that thinks critically about how to take up and practice housing justice in alignment with Indigenous self-determination, how to honour Chrissy’s legacy. In talking with Niki about her understandings of housing justice, it is clear the influence that Chrissy has had on her life, the ongoing importance of this relationship across difference, and how it has shaped Niki’s understandings of the connections between settler colonialism and experiences of homelessness. 335 Niki continues to tend to and care for her relationship to Chrissy, even after Chrissy has passed, by continuing Chrissy’s passion for justice and community, by honouring that relationship and Chrissy’s work, and by continuing to care for the community in a thousand different ways. The care that Chrissy and Niki showed one another has blossomed in a multitude of directions. Niki is a person then who understands her work as political, as responsible to Indigenous self-determination, who palpably feels a responsibility to Chrissy and the unhoused community, and who doggedly pursues community care in all of her work. Snuneymuxw scholar and harm reduction practitioner Lacey Jones explains some of the ways in which Indigenous organizations like QomQem have made connections between colonialism and forms of precarity, arguing that an Indigenous harm reduction approach explicitly addresses and mitigates the harms of colonialism and does so through an engagement with Coast Salish culture, law and protocols (Jones 2021). In Jones’ articulation, care work and harm reduction always simultaneously involve contesting colonialism, respecting local protocols and practicing Indigenous culture, law and governance. Jones articulates this in an interview with the Addiction Practice Pod (2024), “for Coast Salish people some of the foundational forms of our laws and governance are based around… relationship and holding one another up, supporting one another in times of grief, in times of happiness and times of rebirth and with colonialism we can think about things like the residential school systems taking our children and trying to sever that connection”. Jones understands the solution to both precarity and colonialism as the revitalization of Indigenous culture, understood to encompass, law, political systems, gender roles and governance and the dismantling of colonial structures of harm. Jones emphasizes connection and relationality in her work and understanding of self-determination, and I read her arguments as working to undo the compartmentalizations and carcerality on which settler 336 colonialism is founded, the distinctions between deserving and undeserving subjects, between individual and community care, between the cultural and the political. Likewise, Indigenous scholars have worked to extend the concept of sovereignty to encompass a multiplicity of scales and spaces, including the community and the body where colonial violence is also enacted. As Alex Wilson (2015:4) argues, “Indigenous sovereignty over our lands is inseparable from sovereignty over our bodies, sexuality and gender self-expression.” Wilson makes clear that authority over territory is indivisible from self-determination over one’s body, home and family. These spaces and scales intersect and overlap. They cannot be divorced from one another. These scholars do not claim that we need to foreground particular spaces, scales or struggles over others. On the contrary, they guide is to understanding space and struggle holistically, as deeply enmeshed and indissoluble and call us to value and platform the work of Indigenous community members and organizations already practicing these nuanced forms of solidarity. Land as connected to home, national territory to domestic space, the body politic to the corporeal body. Attending to home/lessness allows for more robust understandings of land and territory, it does not detract from, but rather nuances, our understandings of settler colonialism’s territorial and landed axes. Indeed, the distinctions between home and territory, land and bodies are often arbitrary within Indigenous movements themselves with many community members recognizing their interdependence and mutual importance (WEA and NYSHN 2017). Wet’suwet’en communities, for instance, have framed their struggles to protect their lands and waters, assert sovereignty and exercise jurisdiction as distinctly about notions of home. The territory that the Wet’suwet’en work so hard to protect is home. This is made explicit in many land defenders’ articulations of their struggles and motivation. Matriarchs such as Freda Huson have been adamant in their 337 framing of the camps, not as ‘blockades’, but as homes for many. As Huson explains, “we’re not a protest camp; this is our home. And they are coming to invade my home today, and that gate is my door” (quoted in Hosgood 2020). For Huson, Unist’ot’en is not strictly an oppositional space, but is also generative, about creating and protecting forms of home and connecting people to place. This is evidenced in the structures that have been erected on the land such as a prominent healing center at Unist’ot’en (Powell 2020). Yet, the state and police made no distinction in their violent invasion into the territory because making home, deepening connection to place and asserting sovereignty to land are all equally threatening to settler sovereignty and capitalist modes of production. Both blockades and Indigenous homes are equally threatening to settler orderings. This points us towards settler discourses that have sundered home and land in the first place. For many Indigenous land defense movements, the distinction between home and land is arbitrary. Land and home are not simply connected, they are the same. In this sense, struggles for land defense can also be understood as a form of housing justice, rather than simply an intersecting or parallel struggle. Recognizing all of this organizing and scholarship, conducted primarily by Indigenous women, my aim with this project has been to show the work that is necessary to produce housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty movements as disconnected. This disconnection is produced in discursive and everyday ways. As a settler organizer working alongside diverse movements for justice, I try to respond to calls for solidarity by refusing to participate in the further marginalization of the primarily racialized and gendered labour that powers this work. Yet, as I have illustrated, for a broader community of White settlers in particular, these issues often remained distinct, imaginatively unmoored from one another. The work of Indigenous organizations like IHRT, IOW, QomQem or community members like Gina and Grandma Losah 338 Henry who moved across both spaces was often marginalized or ignored in favor of the good feelings produced by forms of public activism and normative assumptions about the where of struggle and the responsibilities of settlers. The nuance with which advocates like Jones, Wilson and Huson discuss concepts like sovereignty, care and home, could be lost as settlers took up and practiced solidarity. What is striking and what I ask local organizers to attend to is how this work could be sidelined and erased, how the broader organizing community continued to be oriented towards particular spaces and understandings of decolonization, even as some advocates forcefully argued for the community to attend to the connections between colonization, housing justice and harm reduction. Organizing communities participate in actively imagining and producing housing justice and decolonization as shores apart, despite this vital work occurring right in front of us. This work was pushed out of view in the everyday practices of settler organizers oriented to other issues and spaces. The fact that this work is already being done makes the limited uptake by the broader organizing community more notable and pressing for the fact that it was immediately in front of people, yet still bracketed out of view. As local organizers, we need to reflect on our responsibilities and how we may participate in the reification of divisions between certain kinds of struggle, labour and spaces. As I have made clear, White settler organizing communities could imagine housing justice and decolonization as shores apart. Despite the gendered labour of Indigenous community members who move between these spaces and work to draw them together draw them together. We need to value this work and to reflect on our own practices of solidarity, on where we will show up and when. As I have argued, what requires attention then is how concepts like sovereignty and value are produced, communicated and turned into everyday action and practice by a non-Indigenous 339 public that is varied and diverse, and how this conditions how the spaces in which solidarity politics are practiced. Noting the incongruences between how movements for housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty have been taken up; between the struggles at the Legislature and those at Meegan, is not intended to create a hierarchy of value, to argue that one movement supersedes the other in political importance. Rather, I draw these spaces and struggles together to note their connection, not their difference. The struggles that unfolded at Meegan and the Legislature were related, inextricably so, if not always seen as such within settler organizing. Colonial dispossession is the common feature which both movements struggle against. As Margaret Marietta Ramirez (2020:682) claims we need to understand projects to “take the houses back, take the land back” as indivisible struggles. Projects of self-determination must address the dispossession of land and water alongside the dispossession and attempted dissolution of Indigenous homes and families. Settler discourses and the truncated forms of solidarity on offer, work to segregate and silo these movements in ways that can disfigure and contain the expansive capacity of Indigenous political projects, articulations of home, and imaginings of potential futures. These forms of settler solidarity erase or invisibilize the forms of embodied labour, the fleshy work that Indigenous organizations like the IOW, IHRT or QomQem conduct. White settlers often sidestep the material question of home, the violence involved in stealing someone else’s home, in favour of either abstraction or political projects which do not unsettle our sense of being-at-home in the world, our entitlement to a kind of home that necessarily comes at the expense of others. And still, work that emphasizes connection, relationality and share struggle across shorelines, continues to be practiced, if marginalized, illustrating a pathway to more livable futures. We can take up the call. 340 9.6 Conclusion: Surfacing Friction “Daily acts of care I find very invisibilized in this town. And I've really seen how, because trish 255 has been doing that work for quite a number of years, and they don't get treated as a credible activist by white people in particular.” -Joshua Goldberg (personal communication). In this chapter, I have illustrated some of the ways in which housing justice and Indigenous anticolonialism can be rendered discrepant through practices of settler solidarity. My intervention questions the ways in which struggles which share so much and contest colonial power, can be divested from one another in solidarity organizing. Yet, as the work of many advocates and organizers makes clear these struggles are inextricable, housing justice cannot be disentangled from Indigenous governance As my friend and local Quw'utsun organizer, Ella Martindale (personal communication), reminds me, struggles in support of land and people cannot be disentangled from one another within an Indigenous understanding of place, “if the people who are living in place are well, then that place will thrive”. Martindale understands protecting and providing for people as a form of intertwined land(ed) defense, “I know that people living on the land should be okay, that is my ethical concern”. Martindale’s conception of political work is not dichotomous, either/or, protecting land is a component of providing for people and protecting people is integral to providing for the land. Martindale’s ethical orientation is wholistic, explicitly predicated on an understanding of land and people as irrevocably intertwined. Housing justice, land defense and Indigenous flourishing cannot be detached from one another. Our critiques of settler colonialism, precarity and abandonment must be tethered to one another in our pursuit of an emancipatory, care-centered and justice-oriented politics. Settler colonialism's role as a structural field is obfuscated through discursive frameworks and modalities of power that separate these struggles. Part of the violence of settler colonial 255 trish pal, co-founder of IHRT and a long-time Indigenous harm reduction activist. 341 governance is epistemic; the effacement and naturalization of colonial power and the erasure of that same violence as violence (Leeuw 2017; Hunt 2014; Kuokkanen 2008) The violence that colonial power produces and is predicated on is framed as somehow ‘natural’ or inevitable’, just as a distinction between housing justice and Indigenous anticolonialism comes to seem like ‘common sense’ or ‘reasonable’ within settler practices of enframement (Hunt and Starblanket 2020; Rifkin 2014). As Tsing (2005) argues, we learn a lot about the functioning of power by examining the frictions that its hegemonic discourses produce. Examining where these movements rub up against one another (and where they are bracketed off from one another) can provide insights into operations of settler colonial power and the shape of movements for justice themselves. The friction that emerges when attempting to bridge the gulf between housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty in settler organizing illustrates that the path between them is not well-worn (Ahmed 2019). Thus, I have spent extended time on this delinking and the structuring concepts that I argue enable it: sovereignty and value, as they affect how movements for justice are enacted and how space is produced within Lək̓ʷəŋən territory. A caesura between housing justice and Indigenous anticolonialism was evident at Meegan and the Legislature and one which I attempted to unpack by tarrying with the practice of solidarity and how the concepts of sovereignty and value come to orient political projects and shape who and what matters. 342 10 Conclusion: Care Work and Reimagining Solidarity 10.1 Introduction “As Coast Salish people, we come together and work together to hold up one another and especially the most vulnerable folks within our nation. So, thinking about, you know, long ago, it would have been our children and our elders, you know, pushing those folks to the center of what we're doing. -Lacey Jones (personal communication). “Look at how I got all joyful getting together and having those conversations, having those moments, being with peers. No matter how hard it is, we always feel better.” -Kym A. Hines (personal communication). FIGURE 5 KYM A. HINES SPREADING JOY IN THE COMMUNITY CARE TENT. PHOTO BY SHAE PERKINS. USED WITH PERMISSION. 343 It is now June of 2024. I am writing this conclusion at the 11th hour as is typical. Some of the events that I have outlined in this dissertation feel distant. Organizers and friends have moved away or burnt out. The local community has new faces, new struggles. My life has also changed, cascaded forward. Yet, as I write this I have just returned from a ‘block meeting’ at Irving Park. Some local organizers have banded together to form a group called Stop the Sweeps ‘Victoria’. We host block meetings on Pandora once a month to check in with the community sheltering there, share food and strategize about stopping the City’s ongoing seizure of people’s belongings, the community’s ‘spacing out’ through the theft of the items that make life livable, tents, sleeping bags, medicine, bikes, animals. Irving is the latest park to be redzoned for camping and placed on the City’s no sheltering list. By next month, there will only be three parks in the entire City of Victoria where sheltering is allowed. Two friends have recently gone to assess how many people these parks could physically accommodate, by measuring them. Whatever they find, these parks certainly won’t be able to shelter the number of people currently experiencing homelessness in the city. The city is literally leaving people with nowhere to go. It feels like so much has changed since I began this project, but so much has also stayed depressingly the same. People continue to get displaced, people continue to have their belongings stolen and destroyed. I often describe this work as occurring in waves now, and it can be tiring to be buffeted by them. I have supported people as I watched them being evicted in parks across the city, in Meegan, at Stadacona, Topaz and now, Irving. It can difficult moving from island to island. These waves can dash you to pieces. There was an uncertainty at Irving. The Park will officially be on the no-sheltering list tomorrow. People were unsure what this meant, when bylaw and police would arrive. The violence of displacement is looming. And still. And still, people were happy. Happy to see us, 344 happy to chat, smoke cigarettes and eat food together. A woman calls her partner down to the Park so he can access a sleeping bag. People hang out and chat. In the midst of it all, and with a violence of displacement looming, it felt nice to gather together. If colonial logics attempt to spatialize struggle elsewhere and elsewhen, if they try to render care work as not mattering, as not political, to encourage us to understand our responsibilities as located somewhere else, today has brought me right back to the stories I share within this dissertation, reminding me that these struggles do not occur on some distant shore. They are right here, right now. Settler colonialism works to bracket this out, this place, these people, this work., to render it meaningless. Yet, the ‘work’ of solidarity is ongoing; there in front of us, we just have to take it up. **** I’m thinking of the shoreline again. I began by framing the struggles at Meegan and the Legislature as occurring on distant shores, separated from one another and distant, when they did make contact there was a friction, disjuncture, an impasse that indexed something discomfiting. Yet, there are other ways to think with shorelines, shorelines have other capacities. I think of the community who peoples this work, who are in it and who are behind it, behind me; my family, my friends, the community I have built on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory. I think of how shorelines can provide an answer to friction, the uncomfortable rasping that is produced by the container colonialism slots us in. How to counter this? I think again of my friends who moved between ‘distant’ shores, who refused the compartmentalization of the colonial frame, of colonial mappings. I think of the work and care of people who refused borders like the one that cuts across the Salish Sea. I am grateful for the people who have imagined the shoreline not as a boundary, but an opening, a source of connection and relation. Through this work, I have come to think of the shoreline as a space of 345 relation, tying us together rather than rending us apart, islands in a connected sea rather than a distant shore. Learning alongside the land, water and extended networks of collaborators, I also think of the shoreline as a space of diversity and indeterminacy, and in-between space, between sea and land. The shoreline is necessarily a place of flow, a place of communication, and messy tidal changes, of relationships, but most of all it is a relational space, a space where different beings come into contact with one another; mingle together, like I was today with the community that I am glad to be a part of. Thus, I want to finish by highlighting some of the joy of being together, in movement, social and otherwise. How might this space model how we move in solidarity with one another? Recognizing the ongoing nature of struggles for Indigenous sovereignty and housing justice, I want to finish by sharing some stories of community members who have helped me think about how I move, how I carry myself in and with community, about how we visualize care and connection and reimagine justice. I want to finish by thinking about the kind of work that moves us from ‘distant shores’ to islands in a connected sea (Hau’ofa 1994). I do this partly to honour the ways in which people were generous with their time during interviews and in conversation, how they encouraged me to pivot and reorient my questions and work. How they pushed me to see the work that was happening right in front of me. I want to finish by holding up the people I have worked alongside for the past 4 years, honouring what they shared with me and trying to do justice to their incredible work. This entails more deeply valuing everyday spaces and relations of care as sites in which seemingly distant shores are brought into deeper relation. Thus, below I highlight forms of labour and care, that are not seen as on the same spectacular scale as the occupation of the Legislature or violence of tearing down encampments, are not valued as having the same importance as these moments. This is the everyday and invisibilized work on which community 346 functions, what happens in between (and during!) the rallies, the actions, and the occupations. These are the everyday acts of decolonization and care in which liberation also takes seed (Hunt and Holmes 2015). 256 Here, turning away from the colonial rationales, ordering and spatio-legal relations that structure dispossession and homelessness, I briefly return to stories about intimacy, care and work; these stories call us to question what kind of work gets valued, what kind of work is seen as political and thinking through this work’s relationship to the spectacle of resistance to ask, as a community, where are we when the ‘work’ of solidarity gets messy, gets hard, gets intimate? 10.2 Scenes of Care, Intimacy and Reimagined Solidarity Summer 2020, Meegan It is the end of summer. The weekly circle facilitated by Grandma Losah Henry is about to start. Local organizer and community member, Casey Lake, and I have been asked to let people know that the meeting will be starting. We walk through Meegan, checking on folks, offering cigarettes and granola bars and chatting. We approach people’s sites tentatively not wanting to wake anyone or bother folks who aren’t interested. For those who do respond, we offer our little snacks and let people know that there will be honouraria for attending the meeting. We try to make time to visit and listen. There is a tent set up by a massive cedar that has blown over in a recent storm and we ask the residents what happened. Were they in their tent when it blew over? Are they okay? They shrug it off and ask about the circle. They are looking 256 Recently, there has been an explosion of literature on care and care work is also moving into the center of organizing spaces as a central component of what it means to organize and conduct solidarity politics ethically (Piepzna-Samarsinha 2018; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017 Hobart and Kneese 2020). Yet, this valuation of care has not always translated into these spaces and much care work continues to be invisibilized or rendered marginal to broader political projects. This kind of care work is, of course, deeply gendered, and it’s no surprise that much of this work was done by women, femmes and trans and non-binary community members. The gendered construction of care work is partially why it is so devalued. 347 forward to it excited by the prospect of gathering together and speaking their mind. I try to imagine the everyday trials and fears of folks who have been camping in this space for months by this point, and likely longer in other places. I marvel at how they still have the capacity to keep going and to care for one another, to plan and strategize and imagine something different. We make sure that everyone else is okay after the storm, make our rounds and then head back to where the meeting will be held. The circles are an opportunity to check in and strategize, but they are also an opportunity to simply get to know one another, to understand how we can better care for one another. While they are often about planning, they are also simply about building community, about being together. Most people in the park have been forced there, ‘forced to be a community’, yet, the circles provide the opportunity to get to know one another, to do the hard work of being together under very trying circumstances (Olson and Pauly 2023). And it is work, it is difficult to be together under these conditions, when people’s needs are not being met, when everyday is a struggle just to survive, and when people are subjected to not only abandonment but daily harassment and vitriol, but people find a way. They discuss how to resolve conflict in the encampment, what resources are needed, and what steps can be taken to pressure the city to address the situation. This is governance, this is political. Renee Beausoleil describes this community work as ‘practical governance’, the work of being together., making decisions together, collaborating ethically. Yet, this kind of care work was not valued as political, did not necessarily fit comfortably in the frame produced through local organizing oriented towards ‘events’ or ‘actions’. This kind of work won’t make the news, and isn’t often understood as transformative, or even political. Visiting with folks and listening likely won’t be remembered by anyone other than Casey and I, 348 but this kind of care work is what I have found sustains me in continuing to organize around housing justice and sovereignty struggles, in the oftentimes difficult work of maintaining community. Yet, it is in these spaces of intimate relation that change really can occur. I know I was changed by the experience of working with Casey, a tireless and passionate community advocate. I was changed by building relations with folks camped in Meegan. I was changed by watching Grandma Losah Henry hold that space with kindness and compassion and righteous anger, by witnessing advocates like Kym A. Hynes, who has shown up in these spaces and in support of the community for decades, people like Niki Ottosen, who witnessed how people on the streets were suffering and dedicated herself to help mitigate this, to meet people’s basic needs through the Backpack Project, practicing harm reduction before the term was commonplace, when advocates were more than likely to be vilified for ‘enabling’ people using substance or experiencing homelessness. . This kind of labour is what Joshua Goldberg described a ‘heart-centered work’, These relationships and this kind of witnessing compelled me to ask after my own responsibilities as a settler on stolen land, as a person fortunate enough to have a home to return to during a storm. Advocates like Kym, Grandma Losah and Niki, explicitly articulated their work in relation to Indigenous governance and decolonization, understanding the explosion of homelessness as a direct result of colonial policies and governance. Yet, this work felt distant from that at the Legislature a stone’s throw away, a shore on a distant horizon. It felt invisible, like it occurred in an imagined space which literally could not be seen by most of the settler community hailed at the Legislature through fiery speeches and the flush of raw energy the occupation produced. As Hunt and Holmes (2015) ask, what happens the day after the rally, after the action? Who is expected to carry on with the work? Who takes care of these people? How 349 might we value these quiet forms of care and the people like Losah Henry, Kym A. Hines and Niki Ottosen who have determinedly done this work for decades, even when no one shows up, even when feels very bleak, kicking against the pricks. October 2020, Fernwood Several members of the shower group are in a driveway in Fernwood. here. A local community member has allowed us to use the garage in their rental unit to store the clothes we have been soliciting as a fundraiser to build the showers. This is done primarily through our personal networks, asking friends and family to donate and explaining why it’s important. We rely on the relationships we already have and bring people into the work whenever we can. We are here bright and early to organize and sort clothes and set up for the clothing sale that we are hosting as a fundraiser to construct the showers. We set up tables, lay out the art that folks have donated, sort and fold clothes. I am not good at the folding and am gently ribbed. Logos out! In an hour, folks will start to arrive, we will try our best to explain why we are fundraising, to describe the City’s harmful policies to people who may or may not be aware, who may or may not be supportive. However, for now, we chat and laugh and do the million and one tasks that are required for the day to run smoothly. In the end, we raise thousands of dollars that will go directly to the showers. This is thanks to the labour of people like Ella Martindale, Casey Lake and Gina Mowatt, a kind of labour that while rewarding, is tiring, is conducted in the interstices and demands of life at work, life as a student, that does not have the same cachet as more public-facing events. Yet, Ella, Casey and Gina do this work quietly, determinedly and with enormous amounts of care. Perhaps, decolonization looks like folding and refolding clothes, running around to find clothes hangars, being with one another. Late October 2020, Esquimalt. 350 We are in Esquimalt. With the funds garnered from our various fundraisers we are building the showers in the driveway of local organizers. I have always been clumsy and slow to comprehend direction, (I fell through a roof on my first day at a roofing company). The nail guns and saws required intimidate me. As members of our group work on the showers with volunteers, Gina Mowatt and I contact local organizer Nic Olson to discuss the project. Nic is a tireless and humble community organizer, he is away and busy but makes time to Zoom in with us and listen to our concerns around the showers and city policies and to provide what guidance he can. The sound of saws, drills and hammers fills the air as a small but dedicated group of volunteers works to construct this ‘alimentary infrastructure’ (LaDuke and Cowen 2020). The sun is shining as the physical work of solidarity continues. As I look back, it pains me to think about the sheer amount of effort and care that went into these showers that would soon be rubbished. My last image of them is sticking out upside down of a city garbage bin, but for now people chat, laugh and call for supplies. November 2020, Meegan. The showers have been installed in their first location at the ‘gravel pit’ in Meegan. The City has shut off the water, but we still make a day of it, serving food, offering coffee and hosting local media. The story will run in the local papers in the next few days. The public facing portion of our day is finished. However, there is still a lot to be done. Fearing that the showers will be impounded by the City if we leave them, we intend to camp with them overnight. Some supporters have brought a large canopy tent and a small gas-fire pit. We get busy setting up our tents then sit around and talk with the small group of folks who have come to support, sometimes about why we are there, strategizing and preparing for what the City might do, but also checking in with one another, telling jokes and laughing, fostering relationships and building community, 351 doing the business of taking care of one another and preparing for the night ahead. Later, Casey, Ella and I once again walk through Meegan letting people know about the showers and that we will be camped in that area, but mostly chatting, listening to people talk about their experiences, getting to know people. People generously tell us that they will watch out for us as we camp in the Park. They remind us to bundle up and keep warm. They extend us care. People are generous with what they have, with their time. We are mutually supporting one another and what organizing looks like in this moment feels lateral, mutually supportive. If even for this brief moment, we are in community. Residents, so often the ‘objects’ of therapeutic intervention, rendered incapable, share with us their knowledge, their expertise, how to stay warm, what to look out for (Million 2013). Solidarity, at this moment, was not one-sided and was truly a practice of mutual aid. They extend us care and are happy to share their hard-earned expertise. Grandma Losah is planning to raise a teepee in the space, hoping to have a ceremonial fire that will be tended by folks sheltering in place. She sees this as an important gesture for the large number of Indigenous peoples (an others) in the space. I read this as another way of marking the space, of contesting colonial claims and presencing Indigenous peoples. February 2021, Cook Street. After bylaw destroyed the initial care tent and impounded its donations and harm reduction supplies, the community care tent was relocated to Cook Street on the perimeter of the park. Here, the tent provides a local hub where people can drop off donations of clothes, tents and survival gear, harm reduction supplies and food and water. There is a space where folks can rest and warm up and supplies that people can freely access. The care tent is volunteer and peer-run. I take a volunteer shift as often as possible. It is hard work and there is much to do. Donations must be received and sorted. There is often mediation work between housed residents 352 using the path by which the tent is situated. Conflict resolution between campers who are tired and frustrated with the City’s inaction also arises. The Victoria Fire Department arrives to check if combustibles are being used and that the tent meets municipal fire codes. Bylaw and police also make constant visits. Local residents call the cops or harass people using the very public space. The City is vigilant in policing the space alert to any infractions. Yet, people still bring food and donations and stop to chat. The space is always busy. The tent has been running in this location for a few months and volunteers are getting tired. Local organizers like Shae Perkins, have been with the tent almost 24/7 for these months. Shae is a passionate harm reduction advocate and has been tirelessly dedicated to providing people in the Park with badly-needed resources. He has waded through reams of city bureaucracy to establish and protect this space. It is an amazing project, but a stressful time, particularly for the campers and organizers like Shae who are responsible for the space. Shae offers his time and labour, and does so with compassion and care, but the project takes a toll on people’s mental and physical health. I am staggered by the effort, care and acumen Shae puts into community. Shae always makes clear the connections between colonization and impoverishment, in his work as a harm reduction educator and in relation to the space. The first tent had been emblazoned with two slogans that illustrated this connection, ‘colonial law kills, community care saves lives’ and ‘end the war on the poor’. Yet, the care tent still runs on the labour of small group of peers and volunteers. People are getting tired, and it can be hard to muster adequate support. 10.3 Returning to the Shoreline What connects these stories? Why finish here? 353 I share these stories and more intimately introduce you to this community because I see us all participating in a kind of work and labour, a particular kind of politics, a spatial imagining of the where and when of politics that refuses to silo the political from the everyday; precarity and poverty from colonization. I choose to close with these experiences to highlight my relationships to community members who embody an everyday politics of solidarity, who have taught me about and helped me to theorize the connections between colonization and precarity; housing justice and liberation, what care as a political framework can look like. None of these community members and advocates saw struggle as exceptional, as moment outside of the everyday temporality of daily life. These people brought struggle home with them, did not understand it as occurring in exceptional spaces or times, and practiced care for their communities daily. Yet, the vibrant care work these folks do is often marginalized, invisibilized or erased within popular imaginaries of the political. Despite decades of feminist interventions that aim to politicize care work, intimacy and reproductive labour, this work is often still not understood or valued in the same ways that forms of public activism are, particularly as it relates to settler colonialism Yet, this is political work, this is community work. This devaluation is an active process, it is continuously reproduced in everyday ways. The devaluation of this everyday kind of work is part of how movements for housing justice and Indigenous sovereignty are rendered discrepant in the everyday practices of the local community. What we will show up for shapes what is understood to have value. In conducting solidarity work in this city for the past 5 years, I have witnessed the obstinacy of ideas that establish a division between the intimate and the political, and between movements like housing justice and land back. All of these stories, exhibit forms of care as a political practice, yet might struggle to be read as contesting specifically settler colonial forms of power. This kind of care work is too often sequestered from 354 larger projects of decolonization, not seen as of the same order. Even frameworks which politicize care, like mutual aid, can struggle to place it in relation to broader projects of decolonization, collective self-determination, and Indigenous governance. We need to center care, refuse its depoliticization, while still using concepts like sovereignty and jurisdiction to surface the violence of settler colonial governance and recognize the ongoing relevance of Indigenous governance to all social struggles and movements for justice. These stories illustrate a practice of care. They politicize intimate spaces and forms of emotion and domestic labour, but they also understand these practice as situated within broader movements for decolonization. For me, spaces like Meegan or Irving Park represent shorelines, where diverse communities, different concerns and struggles are drawn together. As I bring this thesis to a close and head out to Irving Park to support unhoused friends, I orient towards these practices, towards these shorelines, looking out towards a sea of relation rather than separation. This work has been an attempt for me to think through my own organizing practice, to unpack, reflect on and critique how I have conducted this work, and to imagine transformative ways that we could meaningfully connect housing justice and decolonization, to bridge our shorelines and connect our islands. I have written this dissertation with my multiple communities in mind. It is both inspired by these communities and intended to speak to them. It is a result of the relations that I have here on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories, of the teachings and inspiration that the community here provides for me everyday. It comes from a place of anger, with the prevalent conditions that we live in, of outrage with the normalization of grinding forms of normalized violence, but mostly it comes from a place of care and gratitude, for my community, for the lands and waters that house me, for the constant acts of care and compassion that I am lucky to witness from my community everyday. I am in awe of people’s capacity to care in these conditions, and to care passionately. 355 Settler colonialism encourages us to think in siloes, to imagine ourselves as disconnected, isolated islands in distant seas. I hope that these stories inspire readers to value care and to rethink the spaces in which we pursue our projects of liberation and to imagine ourselves on connected shorelines in a sea of islands. This requires that we understand ourselves as in relation as we look out from the shoreline, that our struggles are intertwined, that housing justice and decolonization, for instance, swim in the same waters. It asks that we imagine something different. This a call that we can take up. So many communities are already pursuing work that draws connections, that values care. I’ll be at the shoreline, will I see you there? *********** 356 Bibliography Aalbers, Manuel B. 2016. The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach. Oxford: Routledge. Abbotsford (City) v. Shantz. 2015. BCSC 1909. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/pivotlegal/pages/939/attachments/original/1445459740/Chief_Justice_Hinkson__re_Abbotsford_(City)_v._Shantz__10-21.pdf?1445459740. Retrieved December 13. 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Thesis/Dissertation
Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver, B.C.)
eng
Geography
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Hunt, Sarah E.
Coulthard, Glen Sean, 1974-
Across distant shores? : bridging housing justice and decolonization on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories
Text