Research
Deadly Entanglements: Resource Extraction, Cowboy Culture, and Sexualized Colonial Violence in Alberta
Amber Dean, Kara Granzow
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Volume 46, March 2023, pp. 302-328
Drawing connections between an extractivist economy, the forms of cowboy culture (and rugged, white, working-class masculinity) that have a long history of entanglement with extractivism on the territory now defined as the province of Alberta (in western Canada) and the high rates of sexualized colonial violence against Indigenous women in the province, the authors argue that Alberta has a transient white guy problem. By analyzing the Calgary Stampede as a case study of forms of white masculinity that are supported, encouraged, prioritized and, at times, glorified in Alberta, the authors demonstrate how this transient white guy problem is proving exceedingly dangerous to many Indigenous women in particular (as well as to women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people more broadly) and diverse local communities, the land and the environment. Their analysis aims to unpack how settler-colonial logics of extractivism and cultural practices of placemaking, too often viewed as innocuous and as central to an Albertan identity, come to be deeply implicated in ongoing violence against Indigenous women.
En établissant des liens entre l’économie extractive, les formes de la culture cowboy (et la masculinité rude, blanche et ouvrière) depuis longtemps enchevêtrées à l’extractivisme sur le territoire maintenant désigné province de l’Alberta (dans l’ouest du Canada) et les taux élevés de violence coloniale sexualisée contre les femmes autochtones dans la province, nous soutenons que l’Alberta souffre d’un problème « d’homme blanc de passage ». En nous servant du Stampede de Calgary comme d’une étude de cas sur les formes de masculinité blanche qui sont soutenues, encouragées, priorisées et parfois glorifiées en Alberta, nous montrons que ce problème de l’homme blanc de passage s’avère extrêmement dangereux pour de nombreuses femmes autochtones en particulier (ainsi que pour les femmes, les filles et les personnes 2ELGBTQQIA en général), et diverses communautés locales, la terre et l’environnement. Notre analyse vise à comprendre le fonctionnement de la logique de l’extractivisme et des pratiques culturelles de création de lieux du colonialisme de peuplement qui, trop souvent considérées comme inoffensives et essentielles à une certaine identité albertaine, en viennent à jouer un rôle fondamental dans la violence continue faite aux femmes autochtones.
Ghosts and Their Analysts: Writing and Reading Toward Something Like Justice for Murdered or Missing Indigenous Women
Kara Granzow and Amber Dean
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 2016, Vol. 16(1) 83–94
We arrived late. We were doctoral students who took up as our study the “public secret” (Taussig, 1999, pg. 2) behind the contemporary disappearance of Indigenous women from the midst of the Western Canadian cities in which they, and we, were living. Suzanne Vail was there before we were, having arrived in 1987. She is the protagonist of Katherine Govier’s novel Between Men, a young historian obsessively studying the 1889 murder of a young Cree woman named Rosalie in Calgary, Alberta. Reading Between Men in 2010, we found ourselves anticipated in form and obsession. That Suzanne Vail is a fiction and we are nonfiction does nothing to quiet this shock; rather, it prompts us to engage (with) her as we think through crises of ontology and epistemology in relation to what haunts contemporary efforts to frame historical remembrance of “settling” the Canadian West as a time of conquest (over land and people) and nation-building, a time of progress and development. In this article, we argue that Suzanne’s obsession with Rosalie in Between Men can help us understand just how we, as scholars, are implicated in these contests over history, and explore why this might matter as we struggle toward something that might resemble justice for murdered or missing Indigenous women in the present.
Notes Towards a Methodology of Haunting
Kara Granzow, Amber Dean, and Angela May
This paper considers the methodological implications of Avery Gordon’s work on haunting for memory studies scholars, arguing that the field of memory studies has not sufficiently grappled with the implications of haunting and what they might mean for our collective approaches to knowledge production. The forms of positivist social-scientific research with which Gordon takes issue—that is, those which fail to even acknowledge let alone reckon with ghosts (e.g., forms of research wedded to empiricism, objectivity, and rationality)—are thoroughly ensconced in Euro-western knowledge paradigms that rationalize colonialism. It is therefore not surprising that Indigenous Studies scholars have also critiqued these onto-epistemologies (Watts, 2013; Hunt, 2014) and even expanded Gordon’s approach to haunting (Tuck and Ree, 2013; Morrill, Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, 2016; Tuck and Recollet, 2017; Tuck, 2018). As Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt (2014) asks: “How do we come to know that which is rendered outside the knowable world?” (31). How can we know how violent pasts are present, when we are so often still trained and train others in strategies for knowing that specifically render the past and present discrete? By bringing insights from Gordon and from Watts, Hunt, and Tuck to bear on the field of memory studies, we aim to provoke a wider conversation about haunting’s usefulness, and its risks and limitations, as an approach to producing knowledge about violent pasts and their ongoingness.
Haunting as a Methodology: An Annotated Bibliography
Angela May
“While we hope that this annotated bibliography is useful to a wide range of readers, this annotated bibliography was created for (and through the funding of) one specific research project: Settler Colonial Place-Making in Alberta: Sexualized Violence, Extractivism, and Cowboy Culture, run by Drs. Kara Granzow and Amber Dean. The main goal of the project was to establish and expose the connections between sexualized colonial violence, an extractivist economy, and the celebration of cowboy culture in Alberta, Canada. The main way that Granzow and Dean, as the project’s Principal Investigators, sought to achieve that goal is by engaging haunting as a decolonial methodology. This annotated bibliography, compiled by Angela May, one of the project’s Research Assistants, is one expression of efforts to understand what it might mean to engage haunting as a decolonial methodology.
Angela compiled this annotated bibliography working part-time for about several months, from late summer 2022 to early March 2023. There were no strict inclusion or exclusion criteria per se (at least, not in the sense that a scoping or systematic review would demand), but given the goal of the larger research project, certain kinds of texts were prioritized. These included texts that used haunting specifically as a research methodology and emerged out of the legacy of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and/or Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters.
To gather these texts, Angela experimented with different approaches, but finally developed a consistent search, which she conducted using the Advanced Search function in the McMaster University online library system. She used two terms (“ghost” and “haunting”), set the language (English), and set the time period by decade (e.g., 1990-1999). For each decade, Angela performed this search twice: once for books and once for articles. Each time she performed one of these searches, Angela sorted the results from oldest to newest, then read each result at the title and abstract level, noting texts that seemed to fit the project. Then, she read those books and articles. At that point, any books and articles that seemed to not fit the project were excluded. While every effort was made to ensure all relevant texts were included, it’s possible (likely) that some were missed. With that in mind, we encourage readers to think of this annotated bibliography as a starting point for learning about haunting as a methodology rather than a definitive guide.
Texts included in this annotated bibliography were published between 1990 and April 2023. They reflect the complicated relationship between methodology and knowledge production. They are also listed chronologically (by year), rather than in alphabetical order (i.e., the traditional format for annotated bibliographies) and organized into four sections, by decade (the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s). Each section begins with a summary of major trends in scholarship from the decade that it introduces.
Each entry includes the following:
- citation information
- annotation
- highlights (i.e., direct quotes)
- notes
- rating of the extent to which the text engages haunting as a methodology
- indication of how the text engages haunting as a methodology
In the annotated bibliography that follows, if nothing else, one thing that becomes clear is this: haunting as a methodology is underdiscussed and undertheorized. While there are good reasons to be suspicious of a focus on method/ology (that is, if we are to truly take up the spirit of haunting that Derrida and Gordon set out), there are good reasons to think seriously about and pay close attention to haunting as a methodology, too. Several of the scholars and researchers herein raise important questions about ghosts, haunting, and knowledge production.
As you read, we invite you to consider how you understand haunting as a methodology, and especially as a decolonial methodology. If haunting as we now know it was primarily theorized by Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, both of whom are white thinkers, then to what extent can haunting function as a decolonial methodology at all? If it can’t, then what can? In what ways are those methodologies similar to, different from, or otherwise caught up in the language and notion of haunting? Alternatively, if haunting can function as a decolonial methodology, then how so? What makes it decolonial?
While we ourselves feel some hesitation about getting too caught up in method/ology, we also recognize its importance. We choose to tread lightly, and hope this annotated bibliography can make it possible for others to take a few steps, too.