The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation ed. by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall (review)

gabrielle l’hirondelle hill and sophie mccall’s edited collection The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation begins not with official, state-sanctioned statements of reconciliation, but with a photograph of a work created by the artist Rebecca Belmore in the aftermath of the standoff between the Mohawks of Kanehsatà:ke and the Canadian armed forces, commonly known as the Oka crisis. Belmore’s work, a giant wooden megaphone, was taken from blockade to blockade in 1992, inviting Indigenous peoples to speak to the land they wished to protect. The Land We Are takes up this invitation more than two decades later, as artists and writers work in collaboration to center land and art as a means to position reconciliation as a contested discourse.

In the Canadian context, the editors situate the emergence of the politics of reconciliation not with the 2008 Harper apology, but as part of the official government response to the Oka crisis, suggesting that this form of reconciliation consistently “diverts attention from the underlying question of land and also aims to produce a cooperative Indigenous subject” (9). Insisting that Indigenous land rights must be central in any discussion of reconciliation, The Land We Are looks to the role of art, its powers of subversion as well as its potential for cooptation, in order to probe the limits of the politics of reconciliation.

This temporal situation of reconciliatory discourse does not, however, preclude some contributors from critically responding to Harper’s residential school apology (Garneau and Yeh), or Obama’s signing of the Congres sionalResolution (Long Soldier). Part 2 of the collection, “‘Please check against delivery’: The Apology Unlocked,” includes the poetry of Jordon Abel, a collaboration with none other than Stephen Harper himself, as Abel reorganizes and problematizes the Harper apology.

Along with land and art, the integral role of collaboration is at the fore-front of The Land We Are. Each of the contributions in the collection’s four sections is an act of collaboration. Whether between differently identified Indigenous peoples, first-generation settlers of colour, or multigenerational settler-Canadians, each chapter emphasizes collaboration as necessary for a critical engagement with discourses of reconciliation. Key to this endeavour is critical self-reflection on the collaborative process.

This collaboration and critical reflection is best highlighted in the final section of the collection, “Insurgent Pedagogies, Affective Performances, Unbounded Creations.” In particular, the chapter “Touch Me” brings the reader into the personal correspondence between artists Skeena Reece and Sandra Semchuk regarding a video shoot for an upcoming exhibition on reconciliation in which an Indigenous woman (Reece) bathes a “white matriarch” figure with the utmost care (Semchuk). The intimacy of this encounter is interrupted by the women’s decision to include the collection editors’ revisions to their letters in the margins. This piece, perhaps most complexly, illustrates the ongoing negotiations that attempts toward reconciliation must entail—not just between committed individuals, but between form, content, institutional guidelines and pressures, and a whole system of actors with different aims and motivations.

Section 1, “Public Memory and the Neoliberal City,” contains one of the collection’s strongest and most critical essays on the function of art in relation to reconciliation. Dylan Robinson and Karen Zaiontz challenge how we constitute and engage with Indigenous lands, interrogating Vancouver’s integrationist reconciliatory framework that threatens the assertion of sovereign Indigenous rights, calling instead for a “civic infrastructure of redress” (22).

Parts 3 and 4 of the collection focus heavily on Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration and how to reconfigure settler relationships to the land and Nation state through encounters with iconic symbols of Canadiana (see contributions by Dector, Isaac, and Goto), and the ways in which violence to Indigenous bodies persists through uncontested Canadian nationalism (see contributions by Dewar, Goto, and Morin). Allison Hargreaves and David Jefferies conclude the collection by reminding readers that reconciliation...