About Us

Settler Colonial Place-making in Alberta: Sexualized Violence, Extractivism, and Cowboy Culture is a research project that seeks to establish and expose the connections between sexualized violence, an extractivist economy, and the celebration of cowboy culture in Alberta. In many ways, this project is a response to Indigenous scholars, who have long emphasized the connection between the theft and/or destruction of land, on the one hand, and sexualized violence against Indigenous women, on the other. At the same time, this project is a response to reckoning with our own implicatedness in settler colonialism, specifically as white women and settlers who grew up in southern Alberta. Drawing on notions (and, to some extent, method/ologies) of haunting, we ask: what is everyday life in Alberta (and especially Calgary) telling us? How does settler colonialism manifest here? In what ways are extractivist practices (e.g., oil sands), celebrations of cowboy culture, and (sexualized) violence against Indigenous women rendered “everyday” and even seemingly normal, in this part of Canada? What is at stake in such a rendering?

Project Team

Kara Granzow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Iniskim, or the University of Lethbridge, on the lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Treaty 7 territory. Granzow is the author of the book Invested Indifference: How Settler Colonial Violence Persists (2020) and continues to investigate to intervene in these processes with her work.
Amber Dean is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where she is also appointed University Scholar (2021-2025). Her research focuses on public mourning, violence, and cultural memory. She is also interested in how creative forms of cultural production (fiction, art, photography, film, performance) disrupt and reframe common-sense understandings of whose lives (and deaths) matter to wider publics. She is the author of Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance (University of Toronto Press, 2015), and with Chandrima Chakraborty and Angela Failler, she has also co-edited Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning (University of Alberta Press, 2017), a collection that investigates the 1985 Air India bombing and its implications for current debates about racism, terrorism, and citizenship.

Angela May (she/her or they/them) is a mixed Japanese Canadian (gosei [fifth generation]) PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University studying under the supervision of Dr. Amber Dean. Originally from British Columbia, Angela has familial and community roots in Vancouver’s Powell Street neighbourhood (Paueru Gai / パウエル街), the largest historic home of Japanese Canadians—which is also a central part of the present-day home of the Downtown Eastside community. Angela’s doctoral work thus focuses on the Japanese Canadian and Downtown Eastside communities, particularly as they overlap. Examining the last decades of the twentieth century, Angela interrogates established narratives in the Japanese Canadian community—about returning to Powell Street (1970s), about federal Japanese Canadian Redress (1980s), and about trauma, pain, and drug use (1990s)—to ask new questions about what it means to be a good neighbour in the Downtown Eastside today.

Angela holds a BA in English (University of Victoria), an MA in the Socio-Cultural Studies of Health (Queen’s University), and a Creative Writing Certificate (Simon Fraser University, The Writer’s Studio Online). Her academic work has been published in the Urban History Review, the Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, and Canadian Literature. For more, see www.angelamarianmay.com.

Artists

Tania Willard (www.taniawillard.ca) is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities. Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing).

Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. In 2023 BUSH Gallery was named as a Future Studies recipient from Ruth Foundation for the Arts.

Tania created Colonial Stampede on the home page and the popgun revolver artwork and motif.

Hali Heavy Shield created Blood Tribe (working title) on the home page.