by Michelle Daigle

About Michelle Daigle

Michelle Daigle (she/her) is Mushkegowuk (Cree), a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9, and of French ancestry. She is Assistant Professor in the Centre for Indigenous Studies and the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She is the author of “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and “Resurging through Kishiichiwan: The Spatial Politics of Indigenous Water Relations” in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society.

Space

Summer 2020 was a moment of mass reckoning. The pandemic amplified inequalities already existing across the globe, and the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers reignited a movement for Black lives that has reverberated across North America and well beyond. As we weave a conception of “space,” we sit with the significance of monuments aggrandizing the “founding fathers” of genocide, slavery, and conquest being torn from their pedestals and dragged through the streets. To topple these figures along the same waterways where colonial ships once departed and arrived, on the same streets where Black and Indigenous lives have and continue to be massacred, calls attention to the importance of space, both in how power functions and in how relations between peoples emerge.