Summary

The colonial-capitalist production of space leaves little room for other spatial understandings. In Vancouver, European settlement, and cultural collision resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous people’s land. Though historical planning resulted in the imposition of an imagined history, entangled with the attempted erasure of the Squamish Nation from the landscape of Kitsilano, their presence becomes visible in the struggle over space, through disruption to the urban fabric. New Squamish Nation’s development now uses capitalist tools to seek justice in the city.

Introduction

The land that in Indigenous ontology “is never owned” was taken, seized by settlers, through various “questionable treaties and illegal real estate deals” in Canada (Haig-Brown, 2009, p. 6). Injustice started with the colonial gaze over the landscape and its people. It rendered it mismanaged, underused, full of potential – a rationale for dispossession to master the land and convert it into capital (Dang, 2021).

Thus, the city developed – a product of power struggles through which patterns of exclusion and inclusion are defined and negotiated. Many are rendered “out of place,” forced to the urban margins (Routledge, 2010, p. 1165).  I seek to explore justice, and the relationship between the settler state and Indigenous people played out over colonized land (Dang, 2021) through a framework of memory and vision. The ‘politics of forgetting’ is operationalized to create urban landscapes, where certain “places and the sense of place” are rendered forgettable, and certain social groups are “rendered invisible” within the dominant nationalized culture (Routledge, 2010, p. 1165). Through this logic, many are displaced by the “demand for land” defined by views on proper land use (ibid, p. 1165).

I argue that in the context of historical and ongoing dispossession, the Squamish Nation is making claims to the production of space within Vancouver through the mobilization of capitalist tools in the pursuit of justice, rupturing the colonial urban fabric.

…

The colonial view of aesthetics, Vancouver’s curated self-image – beautification put on steroids, in the years leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics, was disrupted by the installation of a towering digital billboard alongside the Burrard Street Bridge in 2009 (Kitsilano, 2009). With a city-wide billboard ban in place since the 1970s (CBC, 2007), it was met with outcry from residents, who unsuccessfully petitioned for its removal (Kitsilano, 2009). The land on which it stands does not belong to the City of Vancouver, nor is it governed by it (FCS, 2020). Though only a small segment of the original Kitsilano Reserve n. 6, the land was reclaimed by the Squamish Nation in 2002 (ibid). Vancouver witnessed a disruption in the colonial urban fabric, a “spectacular expression of sovereignty” (Baloy, 2016, p. 226), a moment of visibility – in a city that rendered them forgotten.

Just east of the billboard, struggle over place blends into the “vandalism” of a park sign.

“Sen̓áḵw” – scribbled in black marker. Another disruption, a moment of Indigenous visibility, less formal, more ephemeral than the billboard – yet a sign of the presence of memory of a place, before Vanier Park, with its green lawns, managed nature, strongly reminiscent of the colonial metropole across the Atlantic. Here is a representation of how the colonial imaginary has denied space for “Indigenous histories and societies” (Dang, 2021, p. 1010) – but history can never be packed away so neatly. This is our invitation to look to the past before we shift our gaze to the future.

In this photograph, we see Senákw in 1890. Twenty years later, and it will be unrecognizable. For millennia, Coast Salish people fished and gathered around False Creek (Baloy, 2021). Sen̓áḵw was the site for a Squamish village, an important hub for “trade, commerce, social relationships, and cultural practises” (Senakw, 2020a). It was not till the1860s that Europeans began to settle the area (Harris, 2017). The state constructed the reserve geography and defined the extent of the Kitsilano reserve allocated for the residence of the Squamish Nation in 1877 (Roy, 2009). Over the years, emerging resource extraction industries, mainly lumber, and growing residential areas, began to encroach on the Indigenous settlements (Harris, 2017).

Dispossession for the state is often a “natural and necessary upgrading, where one form of property rights is replaced with something better” (Porter, 2014, p. 394). Systematically, European planning produced a space in its own image, and through the exclusion of those whose worldview did not align with its agenda, pushed them to the margins of the urban (ibid). Soon after the construction of the transcontinental railway that expropriated a large portion of the reserve (Senakw, 2020), city officials “pressured the Squamish to ‘unsettle’” the land altogether (Baloy, 2016, p. 226). In 1913, the provincial government illegally seized the Kitsilano reserve (Senakw, 2020a). No resident was permitted to remain (ibid). The last of them were packed onto a barge and moved to other reserves (Harris, 2017).

As they watched, the land to which they looked for sustenance was “transformed for industrial use” and, more recently, reworked into a “gentrified waterfront residential development” (Baloy, 2016, p. 226). In the 1970s, they launched a court case for the reclamation of the Kitsilano reserve (Senakw, 2020a) in pursuit of self-determination, a struggle for social, economic and environmental justice (Routledge, 2010).

As justice is sought in a colonial city by those it dispossessed, a hand in the production of its space is fundamental (Routledge, 2010). Though it generated income for the Squamish Nation, the billboard will not stay.

Less than a kilometre away from it today, the enormous Vancouver House stands beside Granville Bridge across False Creek. This feat of engineering introduces yet another actor to the stage. Westbank. “Canada’s leading luxury residential and mixed-use real estate development company” (Westbank, 2018). A beacon of capitalist development, shaping the colonial urban landscape.

Structures of the settler-colonial regime thus become tools at the hands of the Squamish Nation in a project for justice. Nch’kaỷ, the “economic development arm of the Squamish Nation” is partnering with Westbank to develop a massive housing project called Sen̓áḵw on the oddly shaped 11-acre lot (Senakw, 2020b).

In the architectural rendering, Sen̓áḵw towers over Kitsilano, a predominantly low-rise neighbourhood. Undoubtedly, this project is “a capitalist endeavour” (Dang, 2021). But it is also an act towards self-determination, working through the colonial regime to ultimately begin decolonizing the landscape. After years of oppression and dispossession, justice through the opportunities presented by a “sustained multi-generational revenue stream” from the development for improved Nation wellbeing in terms of access to services, housing, education, employment, and health care, among other things (ibid, p. 1013). Sen̓áḵw also has the potential to fund “length and expensive land claims” in the future (ibid, p. 1013).

As Routledge proposed, if justice is to be pursued, people must act through place, but also on it, and in it – to make and remake it (Routledge, 2010). The Squamish Nation act on their right to the city, a portion of it, for now, to make possible a “dignified life for all individuals, families and communities” (Zarate, 2015), while rendering their presence visible through a now major disruption to the urban fabric of Vancouver (Dang, 2021).

Conclusion

Social, economic, and environmental justice is being sought and achieved by the Squamish Nation through the logic of the colonial-capitalist regime. The politics of forgetting and erasure is being contested, as the struggle over space reveals itself in moments of memory and visibility, such as the graffiti in Vanier Park and the billboard. Vancouver is full of such disruptions. First Nations are incrementally gaining grounds by which to enact their right to the city – the Sen̓áḵw project will be one of the loudest expressions of Indigenous sovereignty and presence in Vancouver’s cityscape to date.

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