Against the Current and Into the Light: Performing History and Land in Coast Salish Territories and Vancouver's Stanley Park (Volume 95) (McGill-Queen's Indigenous and Northern Studies)

Performance embodies knowledge transfer, cultural expression, and intercultural influence. It is a method through which Indigenous people express their relations to land and continuously establish their persistent political authority. But performance is also key to the misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial societies. Against the Current and Into the Light challenges dominant historical narratives of the land now known as Stanley Park, exploring performances in this space from the late nineteenth century to the present. Selena Couture engages with knowledge held in an endangered Indigenous language's place names, methods of orientation in space and time, and conceptions of leadership and respectful visiting. She then critically engages with narratives of Vancouver history created by the city's first archivist, J.S. Matthews, through his interest in Lord Stanley's visit to the park in 1889. Matthews organized several public commemorative performances on this land from the 1940s to 1960, resulting in the iconic yet misleading statue of Lord Stanley situated at the park's entrance. Couture places Matthews's efforts at commemoration alongside continuous political interventions by Indigenous people and organizations such as the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, while also responding to contemporary performances by Indigenous women in Vancouver that present alternative views of history. Using the metaphor of eddies of influence - motions that shape and are shaped by obstacles in their temporal and spatial environments - Against the Current and Into the Light reveals how histories of places have been created, and how they might be understood differently in light of Indigenous resurgence and decolonization.

Literature & Fiction

Couture, Selena

Dramas & Plays

McGill-Queen's University Press

Parks are importantly fertile places to talk about land. Whether its big national parks, provincial campgrounds, isolated conservation areas, destination parks, or humble urban patches of grass, we tend to speak of parks as unqualified goods. People think of parks as public or common land, and it is a common belief that parks are the best uses of land and are good for everyone. But no park is innocent. Parks are lionized as "natural oases," and urban parks as "pure nature" in the midst of the city -- but that's absurd. Parks are as "natural" as the roads or buildings around them, and just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism everyday. Furthermore, parks are not private property, but while they are called 'public', they are highly regulated spaces that normatively demand and closely control behaviours. Parks are a certain kind of property, and thus creations of law, and they are subject to all kinds of presumptions about what parks are for, and what kinds of people should be doing what kinds of things in them. Parks -- as they are currently constituted -- are colonial enterprises. On This Patch of Grass is an investigation into one small urban park -- Vancouver's Victoria Park, or Bocce Ball Park -- as a way to interrogate the politics of land. The authors grapple with the fact that they are uninvited guests on the occupied and traditional territories of the Musqueam (x&#695;m&#601;&theta;k&#695;&#601;y&#787;&#601;m), Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (s&#601;li&#318;w&#601;ta&#660;&#620;) nations. But Bocce Ball Park is also a wonderful place in many ways, with a startling plurality of users and sovereignties, and all kinds of overlapping activities and all kinds of overlapping people co-existing more-or-less peaceably. It is a living exhibition of the possibilities of sharing land and perhaps offers some clues to a decolonial horizon. The book is a collaborative exercise between one white family and some friends looking at the park from a variety of perspectives, asking what we might say about this patch of grass, and what kinds of occupation might this place imply.

On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land

Politics & Social Sciences

Hern, Matt

Couture, Daisy

Couture, Sadie

Social Sciences

Fernwood Publishing

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Couture, Selena. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Couture, Selena