No abstract

Geographic engagement with Indigenous peoples remains inextricably linked to colonialism. Consequently, studying Indigenous geographies is fraught with ethical and political dilemmas. Participatory and community‐based research methods have recently been offered as one solution to address concerns about the politics of gathering, framing, producing, disseminating, and controlling knowledge about Indigenous peoples. In this article, we critically engage with the emergence of participatory and community‐based research methods as “best practice” for undertaking research into Indigenous geographies. We articulate four concerns with this form of research: a) dissent may be stifled by non‐Indigenous researchers’ investments in being “good”; b) claims to overcome difference and distance may actually retrench colonial research relations; c) the framing of particular methods as “best practices” risks closing down necessary and ongoing critique; and d) institutional pressures work against the development and maintenance of meaningful, accountable, and non‐extractive relations with Indigenous communities. We then contemplate the spatiality of the critique itself. We consider the ways in which our longstanding friendship, as researchers invested at multiple scales with Indigenous geographies and identities, provides its own distinct space of practice within which to confront the political and ethical challenges posed by research with/about/upon Indigenous geographies and peoples. While not arriving at any concrete template for undertaking research about Indigenous geographies, we suggest that certain friendships, established and situated outside research relationships, may be productive spaces within and through which research methods may be decolonized.

The concept of story draws attention to the relationship between personal experience and expression, and the broader contexts within which such experiences are ordered, performed, interpreted, and disciplined. In the past, particularly through the ‘cultural turn’, geographers were predominantly concerned with the ways in which story and storytelling were implicated in the production of cultural, economic, political, and social power. Today, this approach to story is being re-examined and new approaches to story are being explored. Geographers have been re-imagining the concept of story as part of a relational and material turn within the discipline, as part of a renewed focus on the political possibilities afforded by storytelling, and as a mode of expressing non-representational, (post)phenomenological geographies. This paper contextualizes recent work within broader disciplinary trends and critically evaluates the intellectual and political stakes of these new geographies of story and storytelling. It questions whether a shift away from understanding stories and storytelling in terms of power, knowledge, and difference (as was emphasized through the cultural turn) has opened new understandings of political, social, and cultural life, or risks abandoning crucial insights into the role of stories in geographical formations.

Colonial projects in Canada have a long history of violently intervening into the personal lives and social structures of Indigenous peoples. These interventions are associated with elevated rates of addictions and mental health issues among Indigenous peoples. In this paper we employ an indigenized social determinants approach to mental health and addictions that accounts for the multiple, intersecting effects of colonial discourse upon the health of Indigenous peoples, and particularly the health effects of colonial interventions into the lives of First Nations Indigenous children in Canada. We focus on both historic and contemporary discourses about Indigenous peoples as deviant, discourses that include particular ideas and assumptions held by government officials about Indigenous peoples, the series of policies, practices, and institutional structures developed to 'address' Indigenous deviance over time (including contemporary child protections systems), and their direct impact upon healthy child development and overall Indigenous health. From a discursive perspective, addictions and mental health issues among Indigenous peoples can be accounted for in relation to the ideas, policies, and practices that identify and aim to address these issues, something that the social determinants literature has yet to incorporate into its model.

International audienceThis essay considers the politics of describing Indigenous peoples as ghostly or haunting presences. Focusing on the history of haunting tropes in Canadian cultural production and the recent re-emergence of the spectral Indigenous figure in, among other places, a wilderness park in southwestern British Columbia, I argue that the mobilization of haunting tropes to make sense of contemporary settler-Indigenous relations reinscribes colonial power relations and fails to account for the specific experiences and claims of Indigenous peoples. At a time when cultural geographers are contemplating the possibilities of a `spectral turn', this essay asks what politics are involved in deploying a spectro-geographical approach to studies of the colonial and postcolonial