By Zoe Todd
My research engages the relationship between people, place, stories and time. This manifests in my doctoral work with examinations of human-fish relationships in the context of colonialism in the Western Arctic. But closer to home, in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), my work examines people’s relationships to place through story and art — fish stories, land stories, stories of movement and sound and resistance in the face of settler-colonial aesthetics, architecture, planning and design. Revisiting the life’s work of my Dad, Métis artist Garry Todd, now that I am all grown up, is a huge part of my formation as a thinker, writer, scholar and activist.
In his paintings, my Dad makes tangible the landscapes, stories and aesthetics of the lands on which he was raised. My Dad taught my sisters and me about these lands through walking-lectures he offered to us as kids growing up in the heart of Edmonton. We walked through ravines and gullies and learned about complex place-based histories. About the ‘re-wilding’ of the river valley, about the places where coal seams were mined and hills now slump over their cavernous carcasses. I came to know Edmonton, as a place and an idea, through the intertwined action of my Dad’s stories about the city and through the paintings he made of Edmonton buildings and landscapes when I was a child. I have written about these relationships to place, story and art elsewhere.[1]
Painting by Garry Todd, photography by Zoe Todd.
Making sense of my relationship to Treaty Six Territory as a Métis woman is a major foundation of my ethical duties as an Indigenous scholar. Without an understanding of who I am and what I owe to my home territory, I cannot position myself ethically in relation to the Indigenous legal orders, stories and laws of the territories I move through, in other aspects of my personal and professional life. In thinking through, and enacting, the principle of ethical relationality that Paspaschase Cree scholar Dwayne Donald outlines in his own philosophical engagements with amiskwaciwâskahikan, I must position myself first and foremost as a citizen with reciprocal duties to Edmonton and its stories through space and time.[2] From this positioning as a citizen-with-duties, I can then imagine and build my ethical engagements with the academy and its operations. This ethical relationality is not just a duty for Indigenous people, but is something that settler Canadians must also engage in. What do the inter-related worlds of research, activism, art and politics look like when centre our roles as citizens with duties to one another (and centre our duties to the land(s) we inhabit)? Continue reading
