Settler Colonial Place-Making in Alberta

Our research examines the intersections of sexualized violence, extractivism, and cowboy culture in Alberta. To do so, we work with one concept in particular: haunting. However, instead of engaging haunting as merely a metaphor for ongoing settler colonial violence, we take haunting in new directions—or rather, we let haunting, and the experience of being haunted, take us in new directions. We write alongside Suzanne Vail, the protagonist of Katherine Govier’s 1987 novel, Between Men, to consider our own implicatedness in settler colonial violence. We interrogate the culture—and, in many ways, violence—of the Calgary Stampede in order to name what we call Alberta’s transient white guy problem. And we turn and face haunting itself, as a concept, asking: what might haunting do?