[What follows is a paper I presented at “Learning to Listen: Listening to Learn” a community event about further understanding Settler Colonialism in Canadian-occupied territories. Much love and respect to the other presenters, Vanessa Gray and Jordan Williams White Eyes. It was an honour to learn from them.]

A Crash Course on Settler Colonialism in Canadian-Occupied Territories:
in which a 152 year long, all-encompassing, ubiquitous, and ruthlessly brutal war of extermination is summarized in a few hours

Introduction

Boozhoo. Dan Oudshoorn nidizhinikaaz.  Zhaaganash endaaw (Dutch, Scottish, and British).  Deshkan Ziibiing ndoonji. London ndinda. Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Lenape, Wendat, Attawandiron Aki.  Mizhiike Minisi.

Hello, my name is Dan Oudshoorn. I’m a White person of Dutch, Scottish, and British descent. I was raised by the Antlered River and London is where I live. I live there because my people—the Canadians—have stolen this land from the Anishinaabe, who also share this territory with the Haudenosaunee and Lenape, while recognizing that the Wendat, and the Attawandiron continue to be a part of this land in ways not immediately obvious to those of us who operate within Eurocentric systems of power and knowledge.

As land thieves, Canadians occupy land that is not theirs to claim on Great Turtle Island. As a Canadian, I participate in this illegal, brutal and, as we will see today, genocidal occupation. In this context, the Indigenous statement that “existence is resistance” is fully appropriate. In a settler colonial state premised upon the erasure and extermination of sovereign Indigenous peoples as sovereign Indigenous peoples, those who continue to exist as such are literally the living embodiment of resistance. However, if we agree that “existence is resistance” for Indigenous people, we need to ask ourselves: what is existence for those of us who are Canadians? The answer to that question should be clear by the end of this morning.

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I am falling through time-space. I have been falling for a very, very long time—the falling feels eternal, as though it originated before and outside of time-space proper as we know it. I pass through a long series of lives like a cannonball falling through tautly-held sheets of tissue paper (with each sheet representing the span of a single life). But always, outside of all these lives, I am in space and I am falling. And I am alone and I am suffering. Ever since the beginning, a very, very long time ago, I have been falling and I have been alone and this falling-loneliness, this lonely-fallenness, has caused me to feel a seemingly endless amount of pain and suffering. I pass through another long series of lives. Many of these lives take non-human forms and exist prior to the formation of the earth. I am a star, a rock, a plant, something non-material. But in the span of time-space that I have fallen, none of these is longer or thicker than a single sheet of tissue paper. Before all of these lives, I was and am.

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We are those who aspire to sleep through the night.
…..Untroubled by the stress of our jobs
…..our ever-growing debts
…..the bullies at our children’s schools
…..the nightmare-shadows of men who hurt us as children
…..and the fact that the world and everything in it is dying
(and, apparently, this is all our fault).

We are those who aspire to okay-ness.
…..A coffee on the porch in the morning
…..a night out at the movies
…..small gifts that makes our kids happy
…..an afternoon nap
…..and a pill for everything else
(no more anxiety, no more depression, no more sorrow, no more dread).

We are those who aspire to make it through the day.
…..Without suddenly crying
…..without having to call a friend to rage and rage about the latest injustice
…..without losing time because we are overwhelmed and exhausted
…..without relying (overly much) on screens
…..and without saying or doing things we know we will later regret
(I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry).

We are those who aspire to remember.
…..What it is to love and be loved
…..in a world that is full of wonder
…..where everything is going to be alright in the end
…..because we’re all in this together
…..and I’ve got your back, like you’ve got mine
(that would be nice, that would be so nice).

We are those who aspire to be forgotten.
…..we are aware of our superfluity
…..we are aware of our complicity
…..we are aware of our limits
…..we’re so woke
…..that we haven’t slept in days
(“Going three days without sleep profoundly limits the ability to think, especially executive functions such as multitasking, remembering details, and paying attention. This level of sleep deprivation can make it difficult to see even simple tasks through to completion.Emotions are also affected. People who have undergone this level of sleep deprivation may be easily irritated. They may experience a depressed mood, anxiety, or paranoia. Research has also found that sleep deprivation makes it more difficult to process others’ emotions. In one study, participants with 30 hours of sleep deprivation had difficulty recognizing angry and happy facial expressions. Finally, several days of sleep deprivation can significantly alter perception. You might experience hallucinations, which occur when you see something that isn’t there. Illusions are also common. Illusions are a misinterpretation of something that’s real. An example is seeing a sign and thinking it’s a person.”)

We are those who aspire to die in our sleep.
…..Because we’ve done enough hurting
…..in our waking hours
…..and we’ve done enough fighting
…..in our lives
…..and now we aspire to not aspire
(to fall asleep and never wake up).

At night, I read until my eyes are heavy and then turn off my lamp.
Rolling over, I kiss you between the shoulder blades, smell the small of your neck, feel your heat mixing with mine, your skin against my skin.
I follow the curve of your side, your ribs down to the valley of your waist and the sudden, impossible rise of your hip.
I press my face into your hair. You shift slightly, pushing back towards me. Mixing up where I end and you begin, who is you and who is I, and whatever makes us think we are anything more than one.
I massage your thighs, loosen the tightness in your hamstrings, run fingers across the lines that mark out new shapes where your legs meet your body.
A single person’s body is an endless space of curves and edges, risings and fallings, textures and smells. Here a swoop, there a dropping off, and there again a
sudden stop.
We are skin and bone and hair and blood and breath. We are earth and stars and water and light. We are yesterday, today, and forever.
Side by side. My arm between the fullness of your breasts. Your fingers entangled in mine.
We fall asleep.

My dog pulls hard on her leash
She wants so bad to be free
Free to run into traffic
Free to run and never look back
(A ten year old boy chasing her, tears streaming down his face, heartbreak in his voice as he calls her name)
She wants to be free to run after squirrels, after cars, after people, after other dogs, and most especially after the big tractor trailers that rumble down wellington road, pitching around the curve by our apartment, sounding like they are full of bones and scrap metal
My dog wants her body to be found by the side of the road with most of her broken and blood from every orifice coagulating on the pavement
Like that woman I found on pender street in vancouver one night around eleven pm
Between two parked cars
I thought she was a rolled up carpet someone had thrown in the gutter
But then I saw mini skirt and halter top and a mouth covered in sores
No response no breath no pulse
Me wondering if I should let her die or risk getting herpes
(and wondering what wondering about that said about me)
Her suddenly shuddering and gasping and rising like a corpse from the grave
No ambulance, no ambulance she said as she tried to run away
To run and never look back
To run into traffic
She wants so bad to be free
She pulls so hard on her leash

1. Introduction: Masculine Totalities

Ce qui y tombe et qui y vit c’est une sorte d’ êtres laids qui me font mal et qui viennent de je ne sais où.
~ Guillaume Apollonaire, “Dans L’Abri-Caverne.”

In the second volume of Klaus Theweleit’s Males Fantasies series—wherein he examines the devastated and devastating masculinity that came to the fore in Germany after the First World War, as Freikorps of embittered Veterans formed and roamed the Weimar Republic, while the Sturmabteilung and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei began to take shape on the horizon—Theweleit examines the “soldier male,” who had been shattered by the betrayal that came from far behind the lines, giving birth to the loss of the war on June 28, 1919 although “the German Army was never defeated.” This male, Theweleit argues, is constantly driven to avoid the experience of fragmentation by “fusing himself into a unity” (“the troop, the Freikorps), “in which he remains on top. Only this can make him whole.” Here, a relationship of hierarchical domination is experienced, by the soldier male, as “wholeness.” The soldier male both experiences wholeness in the company of his fellows and in society divided into two parts: those above who possess power (the soldier male), and those below who are required to sacrifice (e.g., the “good woman”) or die (e.g., “the Jew”). Therefore, and this point is critical, “[t]he harmony of the whole is never harmony among its parts; it is a harmony imposed by hierarchical orderings.” Furthermore, if this (oppressive) social harmony is not maintained, if “diverse social organizations and groups split the wholeness” of the arrangement, the soldier male experiences this as a rupture within his own totality. It is existentially and very intimately unbearable.

It is hard not to think of Joseph Ratzinger, who grew up in this milieu and who joined the Hitlerjugend at the age of fourteen before briefly serving in the Luftwaffenhelfer and the German infantry, when reading this description of violent men whose fractured sense of self leads them to pursue any and all forms of violence in order to maintain an always precarious sense of wholeness, both within one’s self and within society.

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