"We Need to Talk About Settler Colonialism" with guests Emma Battell Lowman and Adam Barker

Content Note: This episode makes reference to the use of racist language/slurs.

This is what a walrus sounds like (righteousness unconfirmed).

“Columbus was a Dick” is a song by Princess Goes.

Here’s the McMaster University Indigenous Studies programme.

See the Decolonial Atlas’s map of the Six Nations Reserve.

Read more about Idle No More.

Emma uses Gerald Vizenor’s (Minnesota Chippewa) term “survivance.”

Check out Adam and Emma's book Settler (2015) .

Paulette Regan's book is Unsettling the Settler Within (2011).

Adam mentions an article he wrote on the War of 1812.

Listen to January Rogers’s poem “Forever."

Read more about residential school history in Canada on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation website. On residential school denialism, see Sean Carleton and Daniel Heath Justice’s “Residential School Denialism Is an Attack on the Truth.”

Patrick Wolfe writes “Settler colonialism destroys to replace” in “Settler colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (388).

Read more about Haudenosaunee governance here.

Thomas King’s short story “Borders” appears in One Good Story, That One: Stories (1993) and as a graphic novel (2021) illustrated by Natasha Donovan (Métis).

For more on the Haudenosaunee Lacrosse Team’s issues with border crossing, see Sid Hill’s 2015 Guardian article.

For more on treaties, British Columbia, and the Supreme Court, see, for example, the Calder case.

Alan Taylor’s War of 1812 books include The Civil War of 1812 (2010) and The Divided Ground (2006).

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the University of Leicester's School of Arts, Media and Communication for use of recording equipment; to India Downton for her invaluable expertise; and to the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Content Note: Please be aware this transcribed conversation makes reference to the use of racist language/slurs. 

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali 

Gillian Roberts: and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands from different countries with multiple passports.

Zalfa Feghali: Today, we need to talk about settler colonialism, and we have with us two fantastic guests, and we're actually thrilled that you've agreed to come and speak with us on Borders Talk: Adam Barker and Emma Battell Lowman. Adam Barker is a settler Canadian from the territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe people, and he's currently a research assistant in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. Adam is a brilliant scholar of settler colonial studies and is the author of the incisive 2021 book, Making and Breaking Settler Space: Five Centuries of Colonization in North America. He is also co-author with our second guest, Emma Battell Lowman, of the 2015 Settler: Colonialism and Identity in 21st Century Canada, and we've just learned that the second edition is on its way in English and French. Adam is part of the Institute of Commoning and an all-round capital G Good capital D Dude. So our fun fact about Adam is that he can do, as far as I'm concerned, an unbeatable impression of a righteous walrus. In fact, Adam and THE Righteous Walrus have never before been seen in the same place at the same time. Coincidence? I think not.

Adam Barker: Oh, we still have that walrus suit somewhere.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh no, I don't know what you're talking about.

Gillian Roberts: Emma Battell Lowman is a historian, sociologist, and trade unionist. She is the author of many articles on settler colonialism, including one that Zalfa commissioned back in 2021 on teaching settler colonialism in the age of COVID-19. With Sarah Tarlow, Emma is the author of the 2018 Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse. And with Adam Barker, she is the co-author of the aforementioned Settler: Identity, and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada. Emma is a woman of many talents, and her passion and zeal are infectious. Her research is concerned with settler colonialism, Indigenous-settler histories, Indigenous research methodologies, decolonization, North America, language, story, and punishment and the body. She's currently a consultant at Trade Sexual Health in Leicester, as well as being part of the Institute for Commoning.

Zalfa Feghali: Fun fact about Emma: she can be heard yelling on a live recording of a song by the band Princess Goes. The song is called “Columbus Was a Dick” and Emma yells, “Columbus was a dick!”

Zalfa Feghali: Amen to that, sister. 

Gillian Roberts: Maybe we should reconsider the title of this episode.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, I think we may. We need to talk about settler colonialism. Open parentheses:

Adam Barker and chorus: “Columbus was a dick.” Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: So thank you both for being here. As I said, we're really delighted. And for those of you who are listening, many months later, it is a very warm day here in Leicester. So we have the windows closed for podcast recording purposes. It's a real commitment.

Adam Barker: We're suffering to bring you this content.

Zalfa Feghali: Suffering for your art. Thank you very much. So we playfully, you know, we referenced the title of this episode already. We need to talk about settler colonialism and that's a joke, but it's also true. Can you each tell us, in however much detail you'd like, what brought you to settler colonial studies from your different disciplinary positions as geographer or historian, sociologist, or different experiences that influenced that move?

Emma Battell Lowman: For me, the interest in what I would now call settler colonialism came before disciplinary decisions. So I was very lucky to have access to an undergraduate program at a university in Canada that was four intensive years of mixing the hard sciences, the social sciences, the humanities. This program Adam was in as well. So I came out of that with some capacity across a few different areas. And it was when we were living in British Columbia, and I was casting about for ways to understand the place that I was living. I'd moved to the West Coast of Canada, several thousand miles from where I'd grown up, a very different political context around Indigenous peoples, around the visibility of land struggles, a feeling that this was closer to frontier, maybe, than where I'd grown up in sort of more corporate Ontario. And it was as I was looking for a master's program that I was, I was just sort of, I wanted to figure out why was it different here? Why was it happening like this? What were the opportunities people were identifying? Why was there such a, I think a frisson of political possibility and contention? And that took me into studying history in my master's to look at the histories around particular moments in settler colonialism. Some of the less sexy moments. I'm using that very weirdly. But so the mundane, the everyday, but the still extraordinary. And that really got me, it was that problem: How do I figure this out? How do I understand it? And how do I do something about it? And then that took me into disciplines that I thought would be useful. So history, sociology, thinking about knowledge and power, and that idea of history in the present. You know, what do we do with the pasts we think we know?

Adam Barker: I think that the thing that you said about it being driven by how do I do something about this and trying to understand it? Understand the problem of settler colonialism more, understanding your own role in it. That was what brought me into it as well. I was very lucky that as a teenager I had a high school class that was on Native Studies and it was a one-off, one-year thing. The teacher, never forget him, Mr. Hall. 

Emma Battell Lowman: Shout out to Mr. Hall. 

Adam Barker: Mr. Hall, good man, had won basically the district's teacher of the year and his reward for this was that he was allowed to design and run a course on anything he wanted.

Gillian Roberts: For one year. 

Adam Barker: For one year. So he did a Native Studies course. The textbooks were all binders with stuff that was photocopied, some of it from newspapers, some of it from journal articles, stuff like that, that he basically put together himself. And by the time I come into that program, I already was a quite justice-minded young person. I wanted things to be fair. I wanted things to be right. That went along with my perception of myself at the time as a Canadian and being, you know, a proud Canadian and this is how Canadians act. We are fair people, you know, we're the peacemakers in the world and so on.

Zalfa Feghali: And... We can talk about that.

Gillian Roberts: There’s plenty to say about it.

Adam Barker: But, well, it was, you know, I was 18 years old, taking this high school course and having a lot of that immediately disrupted and unsettled. And when I went to university, I ended up doing a minor in Indigenous Studies, partly because at the time the Indigenous Studies program was constantly fighting for survival, and they were only allowed to offer a minor. And so I want to shout out the McMaster University Indigenous Studies program here, who are now accepting master's students and PhD students, so they've absolutely killed it. But going and spending time on Six Nations, which is the reserve that's near the university, also the nearest one to where I grew up, realizing that there's a whole bunch of people whose reality of this country is totally different than mine. The more you kind of, you have those sort of national narratives that you base your personality around, fractured, the more you have to fill that space in with something else. And I just kept going further and further and further in the research, in studying, because I'm trying to figure out now, who am I in this place as part of this society? And it ended up being, especially once we moved out to the West Coast, I moved out there to do a master's in Indigenous governance. It ended up being something that we've done together for many years to try to figure those sorts of things out. I ended up going into geography for my PhD, because it was one of the only disciplines that I could identify that allowed me to range widely enough to really think about these things and act on them the way that I wanted to.

Zalfa Feghali: That's fascinating. I guess the natural question that I have afterwards is, how did you come to write Settler? And we'll move on to borders, or move back to borders, in a minute, but they are just here under the surface of everything.

Adam Barker: Yeah, absolutely.

Emma Battell Lowman: Absolutely. And that experience, you know, that I had growing up in, um, well, we both did, in proximity to the US-Canada border and border in a place that was sort of iconic. It's the Niagara River, it's Niagara Falls, it's these bridges going over, in the most populated area of Canada, you know, so I think part of that difference for us from being there versus going to the West Coast of Canada. And so we had exposure to Indigenous peoples and issues in writing a little bit, you know, in Ontario, and then in a very different way on the West Coast. And it was that I think that experience had a lot to do with it. So learning with and in Indigenous contexts, you know, and as non-Indigenous people, as settler people, who stick out a little bit that way. What we learned in the context of those relationships, in those efforts, the things we were involved in, the ways we failed. Oh, the staggering rainbow of fail that helped us learn and the people who sort of held the doors open for us so we could come back after and keep working. It had a lot to do with that journey. And this is not just an intellectual sort of understanding journey or an analytical one, but very much that heart, very much those deep places of vulnerability that get touched by doing some of these things. It was that combination of lived experience, but then also because Adam and I come from academia as well, and this drive to critically understand, putting those two things together, that sort of personal up and down journey and intimate experience, along with that analytical piece, that's what we tried to do in Settler, because we were trying to I sometimes say these things just to make you happy, Adam, “map out.” We “mapped out.” Is that working for you? Sort of a journey that others might want to follow, at least the story of our journey of understanding. You know, moving through the different stages of getting your head around what is settler colonialism, this invisibilized thing for settler people in Canada. How do we deal with it? How do we understand it? But then also, how do we feel it? Because you can't fix this with just thinking your way out of it. It's not a problem that works that way. So that's what Settler was about. We want to really thank our editor at Fernwood at the time, Candida Hadley. Candida is a brilliant activist and sort of animator in this kind of work. She came to us and she said, look, it was 2014, I think she said, ’13-14. And you might know that there was that protest movement, Idle No More, as it was sort of conceptualized in Canada in 2012-13. So we saw in Idle No More the insistence of Indigenous presence and, you know, survivance in the present. So we had round dances happening at the major intersections in Toronto and in Canada's big city. 

Adam Barker: Inside shopping malls.

Emma Battell Lowman: Absolutely. So there's this push of visibility and there's this uptake of using the word “settler” to talk about these people who are not Indigenous people.

Adam Barker: And that kind of insistence on it sometimes where people were like, oh, that makes me uncomfortable. And Indigenous folks were saying, well, that's unfortunate. It's the word.

Emma Battell Lowman: So. So we'd used various terms and imprecise terms and ideas for a little while. We'd come into this possibility of “settler” as a useful term and something much more specific and direct and active than saying what you're not, say, you're non-Indigenous, you're not something else. And also gave us a sort of position from which you can make choices from whiteness, you can't really, you know, kind of choose your way out of whiteness, the way things work right now. But that settler colonialism is something where there are some different choices you can make. And the term highlighted that. So the terms are getting used more through Idle No More. People were picking up on it. Some people were using it because they wanted to use a not offensive term. What is the most up-to-date not offensive term? Some people were using it as a tool because of what it meant or what it could do, the way that it could destabilize or make a little bit of discomfort. Folks were using it as a way to just insist on the presence of colonization in Canada, which is something we want to absolutely, my people want to subsume this and just do happy slappy, you know, maple leaf mittens and swigging, you know, maple syrup as you canoe down a river. Again, all Indigenous technologies, people. So insist on that visibility. So people were using it. And Candida said to us, she said, well, you guys, you know, we’ve read your stuff, you’re in the know. We need something on this. And Fernwood is a press that, you know, does academic rigorous work, but in a way that is supposed to be accessible to folks. Accessible in terms of cost, in terms of production, everything. So she said, can you do it? And we went, absolutely. She said, can you do it on this deadline? And we went, absolutely. And then the deadline came, we're like, oh crap, we need more time.

Adam Barker: Oh, we forgot about the deadline.

Emma Battell Lowman: So thanks to Candida's excellent help and rigorous review process, that's how we came to Settler in 2015. We're now almost 10 years on.

Adam Barker: I think that one of the first things that we noticed before Settler was an idea was we've been, since we started looking into Indigenous histories and Indigenous geographies and geographies of colonization, we've been talking about this stuff much more than most people we knew, annoying everybody at dinner parties, relentless downers. 

Emma Battell Lowman: We are. We have a very open social calendar. 

Gillian Roberts: Solidarity. 

Adam Barker: It was in 2005 we first heard someone identify themselves as a settler and that was Paulette Regan who wrote the great book Unsettling the Settler Within. Absolutely love Paulette, she's amazing. She kind of, especially with me, she took me on a little bit and gave me a lot of guidance over the next few years. So in the aughts, we're getting ready to do our PhDs, and we're still using the term, but it wasn't very widely taken up. Then as Emma mentioned, Idle No More occurred. And a big feature of that was the way that it spread online. One of the things about it as a movement that was so fascinating was the way that these very dispersed communities of people coordinated. One of the other things that I think is really interesting and doesn't get paid as much attention to is the way that in those spaces certain kinds of vocabulary become normalized, and they become normalized quicker than they do out here in the physical world where we're speaking to each other. And all of a sudden it was settler, settler, settler, settler colonialism, settler colonizer, settler. And people are now coming to us, you know, people who normally we had to like corner them and talk to them. They're like, God, those weirdos again, are actually coming to us going, okay, so what's this settler thing? Some of it was friends, some of it was family, and then we came and did our PhDs around the same time and became very convinced that this term had utility, not because of its inherent meaning, but the combination of that it had purchase at the time and that it really messed with a lot of the assumptions that people made about what it meant to live on those lands. And so we just kept talking about it, we kept saying it more, we kept exploring it further, and it has kind of become a thing.

Zalfa Feghali: It's so interesting to see how differently it's become a thing. I mean, I think, three or four years ago, I submitted an article to a journal and got reviews back. And one of the comments from whichever one of the reviewers was, you know, she was, oh, yeah. OK, so double blind review? You know it's a she. She draws on Battell Lowman and Barker's book, which is controversial even here in Canada. And I remember thinking, I remember thinking—

Gillian Roberts: Was this Reader 2 by any chance? 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I mean, there were—

Adam Barker: Reader 2!

Zalfa Feghali: I decline to comment. But what was interesting was that I thought, okay, I'm enjoying not agreeing with you. It is right. You know, I'm not going to take your advice. I'm not dropping this. And in fact, I just added more in my response. But it is really interesting to see the, I guess, prickly responses that are still a major response that you will get to this book and to and to the term. 

Emma Battell Lowman: This is it, it's that that prickliness that that discomforts that's something we get into in Settler because it's the way that that when you 

Zalfa Feghali: Ironically, they just don’t get it, right? 

Emma Battell Lowman: Well it because we're challenging one of the fundamental Canadian myth, which is we were the nice colonizers. We came with the, you know, spreading the gifts of treaty and education and collaboration. And we're definitely not like the Americans with the Indian wars. We're definitely not like the Spanish. We're the nice ones. We're the good guys. You know, Adam sort of said peacemaker, that peacemaker myth that Paulette writes about so well. It's a destabilizing thing, and it's very interesting to hear that that was coming out just a couple of years ago. Oh, we're controversial? I'd like some pearls to grasp, please. I didn't bring pearls because they’d clank on the microphone. But this is part of the reason Adam and I ended up in the UK is that when we were looking around for ways to continue doing work that we thought was useful and important, Adam was for sure wanting to be back in the academy. When we were looking around in Canada in 2008-9, people's backs would get up so much that you could very rarely get to a critical conversation or anything productive. And that emotional sort of rejection would really get in the way. So there's some people's big feelings, there's some academic big feelings that made us sort of go, all right, if we go to the UK, we can sidestep that a little bit and actually pursue the work and push it on a bit more.

Adam Barker: Yeah, I didn't see how you could actively carry out a PhD research program in an environment where every single person you're speaking to, you're having to go back to the fundamentals and try to convince them of the very basic points.

Emma Battell Lowman: And that's something we've been a little uncompromising on is we're not re-arguing that colonialism is a thing in Canada. We rely on great Indigenous, usually Indigenous or Indigenous and allies, sort of work that established that a long time ago. So we're not rehashing that. What we're doing is trying to take next steps on from there and make that accessible, because it is messy and there is, you know, everything tells you not to do it. But it's funny also hearing it's controversial considering that, you know, we've been recruited in the last year to do deliver training for, you know, parts of 

Adam Barker: the federal government of Canada 

Emma Battell Lowman: So we've got government interest now in talking about these things because they realize that it's useful and that actually efforts towards, you know, oh, we've got to like work on Indigenous reconciliation. No, settlers need to sort themselves out. 

Zalfa Feghali: Correct.

Adam Barker: Yeah, well I just wanted to emphasize one of the things that you said very early on in the process of discussing the book and what we wanted it to be. Emma used the term, we need to set a higher bar and what she meant was some of this stuff, it's proven. We know. The only reason it ends up becoming an argument is because people come with bad faith critiques, right? “Well, you know, the residential schools weren't that bad.” No, they were genocide, guys. We're not going to argue about that anymore. And the book I think was in, there's very clearly parts of it where I can see, having just recently reread it for the second edition, this is one of those spots where Emma's wanting to set a bar. We're not arguing about this anymore. This is just, this is the fundamental. And if you're not on board with that, you have some work to do.

Gillian Roberts: Can we circle back to your point about moving to the UK to pursue your work and what this space has meant for you in terms of your positions, your perspectives, and also how does the UK figure in this matrix? 

Adam Barker: Oh, wow. That's a great question. It's been a fascinating learning process, being here and doing this kind of work. Among other things, I have discovered that the average British English person that I meet around here is very willing to accept the facts of colonization. It's kind of like a, oh yeah, we did all kinds of horrible stuff. I didn't know about that one in particular, but yes. Way less resistance to those kind of historical points being brought up than in Canada, where it connects to a deeper anxiety about national identity and things like that. But also, that even admitting that the vast majority of people that I meet around here also sort of think that it's an over issue, like, well, the Indigenous people aren't really like around anymore, are they? The number of people who I've met who legitimately think that well, they're all gone, they were wiped out and that's horrible, but it's happened, right? Whereas, you know, we're coming from contacts in Canada where we literally worked with these communities of people. Come on, guys. It's like it. No, they're not some strange mythical, you know, however you've constructed in your head They're human beings. So that distanciation from where the problem is actually occurring, on one level, it allows you to have other kinds of conversations that are harder to have in Canada. But on the kind of the double-edged sword of it all is that people don't have to know and care. They don't actually have to have an opinion. They don't have to be passionate about it in any way. And you have these conversations so frequently that people will be like, oh, man, that's really terrible. Anyway, so you going the rugby this week, right? Like it's and that's fine, we don't all have to dwell in the horribleness all the time. The last thing I'll say, though, is that I've very recently been working on thinking about how the myth of Canada as a good country and as a treaty-making, peacemaking nation is very heavily invested in in this country. And I believe that a lot of it has to do with this feeling that Canada was the successful colony. It's the one that kind of proves that British imperialism wasn't all that bad. If it went bad in those other places, it's well, maybe that's because of the people that were there, right? So there's this flipping it around onto the colonized that you just weren't you know ready to be part of the empire, I guess, but that you know Canada was so peaceful and it was so prosperous, and even now it tends to be this place that people in this country think of as a way to get your problem solved like “ah man, you know, the job market's not working out but you know maybe I'll go….” 

Zalfa Feghali: Have you tried Canada? 

Adam Barker: Have you tried Canada? But um Boris Johnson when he was prime minister and you know taking the country through the hard Brexit trying to drum up some you know vision for people yeah it comes up with his super Canada deal, which was never a thing and didn't exist, but there's this tendency to look at Canada as like that's where the resources are that's the problem-solver, and we made that. And when you start getting deeply into well where did settler colonization come from, not just the settler people, where did where did the impetus for it come from, where did the infrastructure come from where'd the power come from? Oh right so you guys did a bunch of genocides, and you are gonna have to deal with that at some point and us using the term “settler,” once you get over that kind of that initial inertia of being disconnected from the issue, it can make people really uncomfortable once they start to get the the kind of the the connection to right from there to cross the Atlantic to here to oh, no! You know?

Emma Battell Lowman: I was thinking about, and you sort of said that, about that experience of coming here. So where I grew up in Canada, and sort of where Adam did as well, was an area that's sort of populated today still by the heritage of the events of the War of 1812, which was Britain v. America, sometimes called America's Second War of Independence, and therefore quite close to some spaces that are very Englishy. They were burnt during those conflicts, they were rebuilt, they've been sort of maintained as heritage. So, you know, the places I lived were quite inflected by sort of English Britishness. And when we lived on the west coast of Canada, as well in the city of Victoria on Coast Salish territory.

Gillian Roberts: My home town!

Emma Battell Lowman: All right, so Gillian knows this, right? Again, there's that quite direct English inflection. There's the history of the Hudson's Bay Company as sort of the predecessor to the colonies and the colony system. Yeah, this would be the center of the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia located there. And so I think moving from places with those connections and those being home to me, to the UK, I had this real sense of how the UK was active in Canadian imagination and heritage and life and from, again, places really impacted by that. And then coming to the UK and getting a little bit of that kind of the opposite experience, how do people here conceptualize Canada? And I think Adam alluded to it a bit with some of the connections people have, but you know walk around, so my accent still sticks out. It's changed a little bit here and there, but I definitely don't sound like I'm from here, eh? So people will have the chat with you, and it's that fantastic, hey, oh, you're from which part of America are you from? You go, I'm from the Canadian part. They go, oh, that's nice. And I'm like, yes, it is. 

Gillian Roberts: And they apologize profusely…

Emma Battell Lowman: Yes, yes, yes. I'm so, so sorry. But then there's, and I feel like two of the three people in the room are going to back me up on this, but then you get into the, Oh my God, my brother, nephew, cousin, neighbour lives there. Um, and then sometimes I, sometimes I just, I don't know, there's a bit of a pleasure in it, but it's also sometimes it's just a bit on, um, like going on autopilot. I go, Great, well, where do they live? And they go, oh, they live in named Canadian city. And I go, oh, what a great place to be. And oh, have you visited? And it follows a sort of stock script. But it's because there's so many connections here. And like Adam said, people for folks here that we encounter in England, where we live, and then the UK more broadly, there's this really positive connection with Canada. It is this escape place to go to. There's usually the ha, ha, ha, why'd you come here, which is—

Gillian Roberts: I had a border guard ask me that.

Adam Barker: I have as well! At Heathrow!

Emma Battell Lowman: And it's like, yes, I last lived on an island in the Pacific, and now I've moved to the Midlands. Yes, yes, the critical decision-making faculties of academics are ripe for indictment. You know, so these are the kinds of things that happened. So being here, we weren't having those immediate, always day-to-day conversations around settler colonialism and Indigenous sort of pieces, but yet the way those things are present here as well. You know, in kids' entertainment and toys, we see when you meet folks and in sort of especially non-academically or sort of activist-connected contexts, and they go, And you sort of say a little bit about what you do and you try to tell a story and they go, do you mean the “Red Indians”? You're like, oh, man! OK. No. Yes, but no. And like Adam said, the sort of putting things in this idea of past and present as well. And I think because for me, my experience of Canada is a place that and the Canadas that I experienced very much about defining themselves in relationship to the England and the UK, and the US. And so those kinds of moving between those spaces, I think, is always really interesting. Because you get that sort of outside-inside view, then looking back and going, Oh, what did they do to you?

Adam Barker: I wrote an article back in 2018 on these memorial landscapes around the area that I'm from that were all connected to the War of 1812. So there's burial sites and this big war monument and things like that. And while I was writing that article, one of the things I came across was a newspaper editorial by a guy who was a member of provincial parliament, I think. Saying they wanted to do this new re-internment at this big ceremony, and he was advocating for it and he was saying that, “Those bodies there, you know, they're brave Canadians. They're the first Canadians.” And I was like, “Canada did not exist in 1812. It was not a term, a concept that anything used. Those guys were British soldiers who were probably hoping to make it through the war and go back to Britain, right? So they're very much not Canadian settlers. That's not what they were.” But that history has to serve two masters, right? It's part of British history, but it's also part of Canadian national history. So a lot about us being here, it sort of sits in one of those grey areas, right? Where the work is, it's relevant, it's connected here, but not necessarily in the way that people would think.

Gillian Roberts: How do we talk about settler colonialism and borders simultaneously? And how do you see the relationship between the two working?

Adam Barker: I want to start by talking about our friend, Mohawk and Tuscarora poet, January Rogers, whose poem “Forever” opens our book. And in contrasting her people's way of doing things through the Haudenosaunee Confederacy versus our way of doing things as Canada and the United States, she talks about how her people had boundaries, not borders, right? And to me, it's this really brilliant line that sums up so much that is different between the systems, the ways of organizing a society, the way of thinking about how people can or should move through territory, all those sorts of things. That a boundary is about an active respect right, something you can violate but you choose not to, whereas borders are, they’re fences and guards and you know they're they're something that not only shouldn't you violate it but we're going to do everything to ensure that you can't right and it's all that's that's about that centralizing power and control and one of the things settler colonization does is essentially it destroys to replace in the words of Patrick Wolfe, so it's going and collecting up bits of actual physical land, loyalty of people, key resources, right? And then, as it's collecting these things, as it's aggregating them, you have to have some way of governing those exclusive to you, because you've already stolen them, right? So otherwise somebody else might come and steal it, too. We have to nip that in the bud right away. So that's where you have to have the state, that's where you have to have the borders, that's where you have to have the rule of law. And the Haudenosaunee governance, by contrast, one of the ones that I always look to for examples, radically democratic, radically inclusive form of government that ultimately chose not to have borders because that would have been antithetical to the ideology of what the government does. And then when you look at, oh, I read a great book by a historian named John Parmenter called The Edge of the Woods, Iroquoia, the area that we're from in the 1600s and 1700s. And one of the first things he talks was just how far people moved and how safe it was to travel, right? We get told that when we're crossing the border, you know, we have to tolerate somebody pointing an assault rifle at us. Or if we're going onto an airplane, we all have to like take off half of our clothes and have all of our bags searched and all the rest of it. Are these borders really making us safer, when you can look at examples where you have none of that, and people were very safe to travel, very free to move around. And of course it's all very relevant because in the area we’re from the Canada US border goes right through the middle of Confederacy territory, and so many of their struggles against both the Canadian and the American state over the years have been about whether or not they can cross the border in their own territories, right? To me, that's the fundamental issue here is that we're a society that's organized around putting things into boxes and claiming them exclusively that has taken advantage of systems that are much more fluid and much more relational.

Emma Battell Lowman: I've been sitting here musing on this idea of settler colonialism and borders. And I just keep having a strong sense memory of experience crossing borders in North America, which was a really normal thing when I was a kid. It changed a bit after 9/11. But when you're going through border spaces, and again, most of my crossings were land-based because of where I lived, what happens in that border space is one doesn't feel very powerful. One may have been too enthusiastic speaking to the border guards about why one was making a trip and basically promoted a local play to the border guard, then had the border guard and his friends search the car with machine guns. So one has to be careful in these spaces. But one—

Adam Barker: That's all very carefully in the third person. No one's going to ever guess who it was.

Emma Battell Lowman: But these were spaces where, you know, you could in no way challenge or counter the dominant story that this is, you know, this was the meeting place between Canada and the United States that, you know, as someone going into the United States, you're going to be checked, you're going to be vetted, could be excluded for various reasons. But there was no space for Indigeneity. There was no space for, you know, Indigenous sort of movement rights. There was, I think, questioning settler colonialism in any way would be seen as an act of provocation in those spaces. So in those spaces, you have to play good Canadian if you want to cross, right? And good Canadian means being, you know, not talking about those things, not sort of, pushing on those kinds of areas and stories. And I, because it's not my experience, I really liked the story by Thomas King about, you know, think of a woman who's crossing on Indigenous passport, but in the prairies, I think, which is also a land crossing. Is she Blackfoot? Yeah. You read about the stories of, you know, the lacrosse teams who are traveling on Haudenosaunee passports. You think about what a different experience it is and just what it must take to go and not play settler in those spaces. And I think lots of us, you know, lots of settler Canadians or Americans will do that, just sort of, that's just what you do in those spaces. But I find them to be spaces where you can't question any of those things. It would be taken very wrongly.

Adam Barker: The settler state kind of assumes its own ultimate authority. And so the closer you are to the unbridled power of that structure, the less it tolerates any kind of questioning of that, right?

Emma Battell Lowman: And those borders, you know, I think they turn attention away from settler colonialism a lot of ways and absolutely normalize it, because they are the one that's where the power stops. And if anything, you'd focus on any contention maybe between those bordering nation-states and not Indigenous issues or, you know. And again, as somebody who has a fair amount of privilege in crossing borders with a Canadian passport, you know, and my middle-class averageness, whiteness, whatever, in Canada, and still how powerless you are made in those spaces, I think is one of the things that hits home as well, that you could still get it wrong, I think.

Adam Barker: I mean, talking about the War of 1812, as you do. It was... 

Emma Battell Lowman: Invite us for dinner!

Adam Barker: We'll talk about the War of 1812. It was after the conclusion of that war, now Britain and America are no longer antagonistic towards each other. 

Emma Battell Lowman: They settled the border. 

Adam Barker: They settled the border. That was kind of the first part of what is now, you know, and people are very proud of this, the longest undefended border in the world. I don't mean “undefended” is a really interesting way to describe something that is absolutely riddled with, you know, officers of the state, border guards who are armed, right? What they mean is there's not a military there, but it's still very heavily armed space. That border gets driven westward basically because, all right, we're no longer competing for this same territory that requires us going, you know, north and south over this boundary line. Both powers just sort of reorient west and run westwards. And as they do, the border goes with them, right? Essentially.

Gillian Roberts: Like literally in a straight line.

Adam Barker: Yeah, yeah. And we have the province of British Columbia, which the vast majority of it does not have any treaties. It should not be part of Canada. Canada's own Supreme Court has basically recognized we have no idea how legally to justify this. That all happens because there are American miners flooding up into British Columbia because of a gold rush. And the Crown literally goes, “These guys are self-organized into communities that essentially have governments. They're settlers. They're going to claim that land. We have to bureaucratically claim it first.” So it's the Alan Taylor wrote about how after the war of 1812, neither Britain or America won, but Indigenous people lost.

Emma Battell Lowman: And I think that's the point that I was gonna come back to since we're talking about the War of 1812. But it matters because one of the big outcome, like Adam was saying, was the settling of borders, having a settled border, more or less, between these two sort of empires on the continent, between America and Britain. And that was of course a major turning point in the settler-colonial development of those places because we go from a situation where the empires were absolutely engaging in settler-colonialism in some places, but also still in need of Indigenous allyship in other places. There was still some impetus to sort of deal with Indigenous peoples a little more carefully because you couldn't fight potential threats on all side, right? You couldn't fight the British and Indigenous peoples. However, that border gets settled and those two empires start turning inside in a very different way. And I think we see the sort of intensification and I think settler colonialism overtaking then after that, right? Because it's working to settle within the borders and less of a sort of frontier mentality. You know this this line this iconic line driven drawn across the continent which in grade 10 Geography had to draw so many flipping times and drawing a straight line. You know, I think the drawing of that border and the shift then that happens are really important, you know, because the idea that, you know, Adam and I come from a place where the border has been the same our whole lives. Lots of people in the world don't have that. So for us, border is also something static. It's static. You know, the crossings, you know, the kind of how you do it here, how you do it there. Sometimes Adam does it wrong, though. I mean, he might tell you about that. But it was a very kind of quotidian thing. My dad used to go shopping on his lunch hour in the States. So he'd drive from his office in Niagara Falls and go over the border and buy 

Gillian Roberts: Gas?

Emma Battell Lowman: Gas, petrol. It was gas, it was beer from a drive-thru beer place in the ’80s. And –just drive through and they put it in your boot. 

Adam Barker: “Trunk”

Emma Battell Lowman: And some groceries. Yeah, thank you. We speak both languages here, at least we speak Canadian on this podcast, apparently. And so that was part of the everydayness of it. And so as a settled, stable thing, that's the other thing. It was settled and stable for a long time. And throughout my lifetime, the only major change was 9/11, after which you have to have a passport to cross.

Adam Barker: But the way that those borders affect people differently really gets into some of the markings of the hierarchies within settler colonial society as well. So I'm thinking of one of the things we learned when we were in British Columbia was the way that the border there, so the part that completes it out by the Pacific, the effect that it had on traditional trade routes, which all ran north-south because there's three consecutive mountain ranges that all run north-south. 

Gillian Roberts: They’re hard to get over; they’re pretty big.

Adam Barker: Yeah. Or going north and south up and down the Pacific Coast, you know tons of islands and inlets and places to trade and stuff. But you're mostly going north and south. That border comes through and now both states are trying really hard to connect East-West, right? So the railway that goes through the Trans-Canada Railway in Canada, and obviously, you know, several versions of the same thing in the United States. That's part of a nation-building project. It's also dependent on the disruption to the nations that are already there. So the drawing of the border is not an innocent thing, and it gets talked about as like this good positive outcome of America and Britain ceasing hostilities, but it was more like the two colonial powers agreeing, listen, let's not fight each other because there's all this empty land all the way out to that ocean that we can just take for ourselves. And that's basically what they did.

Gillian Roberts: So we'd like to come to our segment, “Borders I Have Known.” Maybe Adam should start.

Emma Battell Lowman: Because as I may have alluded to, my enthusiasm has gotten me into hot water at the border where you get asked some question, “Where are you going today?” And I respond back with a great list of things to do in your area for free and that are culturally enriching. 

Adam Barker: Should I tell your story and you can tell mine? 

Emma Battell Lowman: Well, so I'm just going to say, so Adam brings this up with some regularity and to most people we meet. So I'm very pleased that you're holding space. Thank you for holding space to talk about the time that Adam really messed it up.

Adam Barker: OK, so we were living out on the West Coast on Vancouver Island. And one of the favourite things of mine to do when we were living out there was to go camping, camping all the time. So as you do, you end up leaving some of your equipment in the trunk of your car because—

Zalfa Feghali: Totally reasonable.

Adam Barker: Totally reasonable. Then at one point, I mean, we lived in this really small apartment and I think Emma was was culling her wardrobe. So we had some more space and she taking these bags, huge bags filled, stuffed with women's clothes.

Emma Battell Lowman: And you know what you do? You clear out stuff and you put them in bags and then you put them in your car or hallway for several months.

Gillian Roberts: And one day they go somewhere else.

Emma Battell Lowman: By osmosis. So we were in that stage of the process.

Adam Barker: So we were in that stage of the process. So we've gotten things as far as the trunk. Then I think we were going to, I was going to a conference on, uh, near Bellingham, Washington on the Lummi Nation Reserve. I've done this, three or four years I went and did this conference, the Vine Deloria Memorial, uh, conference. And I'm crossing at a land-based crossing near Vancouver and, I don't know if the guy was just bored or what, but the border guard, you know, I pull up and he's like, “Where are you going?” I tell him.

Emma Battell Lowman: Because you're shifty, Adam Barker.

Adam Barker: I look so shifty. I tell him where I'm going. He's like, “Right, I’m going have to take a look through your car,” which doesn't normally happen at this border crossing, right? Especially not when you are a white academic. You know, I hate to say it, but I'm not usually the person getting pulled over. This guy decides to start searching through my car, flips open the trunk, and the first thing he sees is a gigantic axe and bags of women's clothing.

Emma Battell Lowman: I believe you also had some rope?

Adam Barker: Yeah, rope, um, firewood. Just all looked really awful. 

Zalfa Feghali: Bleach? 

Adam Barker: No, weirdly enough, like a bag of empty tin cans, which just looks like, oh, I don't even know what he's going to with those. What kind of a monster has like 40 tin cans and women's clothing and an axe? So.

Emma Battell Lowman: This is the time Adam got taken away for a wee chat.

Adam Barker: Yeah. And in the end, the guy is just laughing. He's like, like, literally, you're just coming down for a conference and you forgot all the stuff was in your trunk. Yes. 100%.

Gillian Roberts: It's like performance art, right?

Adam Barker: Yeah, so that was my border experience.

Emma Battell Lowman: Oh dear. You see you just looked like you were doing some, you know cross-border shopping, a little cross-border murder.

Adam Barker: It's a little cross-border border murder a little cross-border murder and body removal. 

Gillian Roberts: But he let you through, though, so he wasn’t that scared.

Adam Barker: No the the same border crossing another time we were crossing there with our friends from Belgium and so we had to get out and go into the building because they had to do their visa and all the rest of it. That's totally normal, but we got this really grumpy, gotcha kind of border guard. 

Emma Battell Lowman: With a gun. 

Adam Barker: With a gun that he rested his hand on the entire time. And so I go into the building with them because they both speak decent English, but sometimes there's technical things or people are talking fast, so I'm there to kind of just help make sure that we can get everybody through the border in one piece. And the guy says, “So what country did you say you're from?” “Belgium, right?” “So which which language do you want your form in?” They said “French,” and he says, “I thought you said you're from Belgium?”

Gillian Roberts: Oh my god!

Adam Barker: “Do you think they speak Belgian in Belgium?”

Emma Battell Lowman: You can't say that because they have a gun and they will exclude you from the country.

Adam Barker: No, so we had to say, “Yes, they are from the French-speaking part of Belgium” and then look at each other like “Wha???” The guy behind him so like one of the other border guards heard him say “Ohh!!!”

Emma Battell Lowman: But you can't point out the stupid or they'll take you away. Yeah, so this guy, he thought he was really going to get us. He was like, “Fine, I'll give you the French ones. See if they can do it.”

Adam Barker: “See if you can fill it out properly.” Yeah, of course they can. They're fluent in French. What’s your…?”

Emma Battell Lowman: And that's my dear friend Cynthia always said, every time, so this is from Belgium, every time she has to cross in the United States, they ask her the same questions. And she said, the two that always seem to come together are, “Do you have any bananas?” and “Do you plan to kill the president?" And so she's always just assumed those are the same level of threat. 

Gillian Roberts: With the banana?

Adam Barker: I think it's implied.

Zalfa Feghali: I think it's a sort of slip-and-fall potential situation. Oh, yeah. Oh, the cartoony soundtrack.

[various cartoony sounds]

Emma Battell Lowman: Do you know what? I mean, it would bring down American empire once and for all if when the president slips and falls on a banana peel.

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, just... I mean, anyone, really. There's so much damage that can be done with... 

Gillian Roberts: Be careful of bananas, people. Be careful.

Emma Battell Lowman: Be careful of bananas. Also, look into the genetics of bananas. You'll be surprised.

Adam Barker: Terrifying stuff.

Zalfa Feghali: We'll put that in the show notes.

Gillian Roberts: Emma, did you want to say more about the alleged incidents of border crossing that one may partake in, perhaps? In the third person? In the third person.

Zalfa Feghali: Or would one prefer not to talk about one's experience?

Adam Barker: Oh, I'll tell you all about it if she doesn't want to.

Emma Battell Lowman: Okay, so—

Adam Barker: Good start, good start!

Emma Battell Lowman: No, but I would I would say that I have sometimes had luck getting things done by being Canadian at people and and I call it that probably after the experience living in the UK for a while now where you activate your Canadian so you smile and you make eye contact and you apologize for things. 

Gillian Roberts: Say “Have a great day!”

Emma Battell Lowman: Absolutely.

Adam Barker: It's like giving them the Care Bear stare of a maple leaf.

Emma Battell Lowman: Exactly. Just like shooting maple love at them. Because sometimes you can move through spaces a little more easily. You can get a lot done that way. And it's definitely a persona to pull out at the border. But you have to dial down the enthusiasm. 

Adam Barker: You've got to rein it in a little. 

Emma Battell Lowman: So we had a friend called Susie who worked for Canadian Border Services. This would be 15, 20 years ago. And we knew her when she went through her training. And we're like, oh, so we've crossed the borders all the time. And they'll ask you different things, random stuff sometimes. And she said, yeah. So apparently, what she was taught was there was no set of questions that you had to do. You did have to look at, does the person's ID match up, check the car reg, because then you know that they're a person with enough money to have a car and therefore are more trustworthy. That's what they teach them. But otherwise, they said what they were taught was to engage with people crossing the border and see what happens. Because you want to see if somebody reacts in a way that would display that they're nervous, anxious, up to something. At a border. 

Zalfa Feghali: At a border.

Adam Barker: So you just ask random questions or point something out about their car.

Emma Battell Lowman: So they might say, oh, who plays baseball if they see a baseball glove in your car? And then the way that you answer that or don't answer that.

Zalfa Feghali: Sounds so scientific and definitely, definitely not inappropriate.

Emma Battell Lowman: Definitely not 

Gillian Roberts: Open to abuse…

Emma Battell Lowman: … riddled with cultural biases, racism, classism. 

Zalfa Feghali: That's definitely not what I think.

Adam Barker: Running our border on vibes. Straight vibes. 

Emma Battell Lowman: I mean, Susie did say that, you know, the biggest and like only bust of any kind of, you know, sort of size that she had was illegal cheese.

Adam Barker: Huge wheel of cheese.

Emma Battell Lowman: I think it was unpasteurized and being smuggled.

Zalfa Feghali: Wow, raw cheese!

[chorus of wow!]

Gillian Roberts: This is something the border needs to defend.

Emma Battell Lowman: Protect our cheese.

Adam Barker: I was very much about open borders until I heard about the cheese smuggling. I was like, nope, crackdown.

Emma Battell Lowman: So I think that sort of like you learning how to perform in those spaces, how to be nice enough that you're read as non-threatening and competent enough, but not too competent. And that ability to perform and the willingness to do it, I think really influences how folks can move through border spaces. You know, do you put on your camo and just try to look like, you know, not actual camouflage, but sort of like… that will get you picked up. But do you try to look a certain kind of normal? Are you trying to play or pass for something? And the way that that, for me, helps manage some of my feelings and anxieties. So again, I'm someone who has had very easy border experiences through my life. And the times that it has not been easy have just brought home to me just how, so for a smaller upset being so destabilizing or upsetting, just what it's like for so many more people. And so I feel much more differently about borders, I'm less cavalier about crossing international borders now than I used to be.

Adam Barker: So that being said, one time we're coming back from Buffalo, and we've got Emma's mother in the car, because we've all gone to see Shakespeare in Delaware Park, which is one of the things that Emma and her family introduced me to. They absolutely love doing this. So it's late at night because we've seen the play and it's dark out. We're coming back across the border and pull up to our turn at the border thing. 

Emma Battell Lowman: You stay in your car; they talk to you. 

Adam Barker: Yeah, so the lady leans out of her thing and goes, “Where have you been?” The correct answer here is, “Just to Buffalo.” “How long have you been gone?” “Four or five hours. Now we're heading home, just tonight.” That's the way to do this. She says, “Where have you been?” And Emma says, “We just saw the absolute best version of Macbeth in Delaware Park, and I absolutely think you should go see it. It's on for at least another two weeks. But then they've got another production after that. If you go early enough, it is just—” 

Zalfa Feghali: This is actually the Emma I know. 

Adam Barker: Yeah. “…If you go early enough, you can do a little walk down by the river. It's really beautiful. There's this museum.” And the woman's kind of like, just taking all of this in.

Emma Battell Lowman: To be fair, I probably, at this point, had also added in talking about Olmsted as the creator of the park system in Buffalo.

Adam Barker: Oh, yeah. Oh. Yeah, we got there. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, my goodness me. 

Adam Barker: We got there. But so the border guard isn't actually the issue. The issue is the heavily armed Marine standing next to her, who listens to all of this and then goes, Okay, this one. And she's like, can you open up your trunk and put your hands on the dashboard, please? So the guy searches our entire car. And after that—

Emma Battell Lowman: It's not pleasant. They don't make it pleasant. 

Adam Barker: After that, we had a rule that when we crossed the Canada-US border: Emma, no talk. You're going to get us killed. 

Emma Battell Lowman: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: This is a manual of what not to do. What not to do.

Emma Battell Lowman: Exactly.

Zalfa Feghali: When you mask up. Figuratively speaking.

Adam Barker: You went to put on your camo and you grabbed the wrong thing and you put on like full clown suit.

Zalfa Feghali: More like light reflecting.

Adam Barker: Yes, yes. So that's our Canada-US border story.

Emma Battell Lowman: You see, I was better when I was a kid. See, when I was a kid, and it was in the ’80s and my parents didn't have a lot of money, and so what we'd do is you would put on your oldest stuff, and then you would drive over the border and buy your new school shoes and a new dress or whatever and then throw out your old stuff and drive back and not, you know, you’d smile politely. So you don't look like you've been shopping because you don't want to have to pay the duty or anything. As a kid I was better. I shut up and I did the thing, and that's how I had some shoes and I was very excited about that. But I mean, yeah, I also once just got a little lost. I was probably like 22 and driving and ended up accidentally just getting, you know when you get stuck on a motorway, and you can't get off the motorway? Well, I ended up kind of crossing over the border. And they said, “what's your reason for crossing?” I'm like, “I want to turn around.” 

Adam Barker: “I don't know, I'm trying to leave.”

Emma Battell Lowman: I might have been less than 22. I was probably a fairly new driver. I'm like, I don't want to be here. They're like, oh, you can just go. You have to go over and then come back and then come back in. Like, how long have you been away? I've been away. I never left. I never left. This is before Google Maps, people, OK? You had to navigate with your brain. And I was very lost.

Gillian Roberts: Those are some amazing cautionary tales. 

Emma Battell Lowman: Oh, we're good at cautionary tales. I mean, yeah, I think we've had less success talking about success.

Adam Barker: No, no. We are all cautionary tales all the time. Think of it this way. We make all the mistakes so that you don't have to.

Zalfa Feghali: Speaking of failure. 

Adam Barker: Yeah. A huge subject in my most recent book. I decided to just lean in and write a whole chapter on failure.

Zalfa Feghali: No, I think that's a major strength and a reason that that book is so important, just as a final thing to maybe plug. Thank you for it, and thank you both.

Gillian Roberts: Check out the book.

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you both for this conversation, for the work that you do and that you keep doing, and for your cautionary tales, without which our listeners will surely… get themselves into loads of trouble.

Adam Barker: Become lost in the borderlands.

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you both very much indeed. This has been wonderful.

Adam Barker: It’s been a blast.

Emma Battell Lowman: Thank you so much for having us. Just thrilled to be with you guys.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.