Heritages of (de)colonialism: Reflections from the Pacific Northwest Coast, Canada

Abstract

Heritage is power. To realize the potential of heritage in decolonization, it is necessary to first decolonize and broaden the concept of heritage to enable meaningful, action-based connections between past, present, and future that further anticolonial efforts.Heritage is powerful because it is used as a way to define and identify. It is about who we as humans think we are, based upon where we believe we have come from and where we intend to go. It is what is maintained from the past, by the present, for the next generation to inherit (in-heritage): from objects, buildings, land, resources, status, power, values, ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, environments, and ecosystems. Current conceptions of heritage are imbued with human agency, as a "discursive construction" (Smith, 2006, 13) with "material consequences" (Harvey, 2008, 19) that is "constituted and constructed (and at the same time, constitutive and constructing)" (Wu and Hou, 2015, 39). As such, heritage has the potential for