Reconciling personal narratives with the truth

 

On vacation recently, my extended family and I attended an annual celebration at Pioneer Acres, located close to Irricana, AB.  We've been to this event several times in the past.  There are many things about it that I enjoy and that I'm even comforted by.  For example, this GMC grain truck is an exact replica of my grandpa's--it looks and smells the same and inspires a wide grin of reverie when I see it.  This is the truck that I learned to drive in, and that I zipped around in on the dirt roads to find whatever section of land my dad was harvesting on and required a pick-up from.  I was maybe thirteen or fourteen at the time, and this truck represents a cornerstone of my burgeoning young adulthood.  

This year, however, I carried my own warm emotional responses alongside a steadily deepening problematic brewing in my brain.  I have realized that my personal narrative of youth on the farm is nested in a surreptitious, ubiquitous, and toxic colonial narrative.  Until my most recent visit to Pioneer Acres, I had not fully registered how violent the representations of colonialism were or how thoroughly erased Indigenous people had been from this place.  The crowd at the event was glaringly homogenous.  Not only was there not a single Indigenous person in attendance, but there were just one or two brown bodies in a sea of whiteness.  Clearly this is not a very inviting space for anyone but white folks.  

I no longer find sights like the one pictured here, taken at Pioneer Acres just a couple of weeks ago, neutral.  In fact, the image now provokes a deep-seated discomfort, anxiety, and pain inside me, both physically and cognitively.  I'm not sure how bystanders could fail to see the parallels between this imagery and that of colonial violence in countless other circumstances (such as the Boer War, below, where British colonizers perpetrated horrific violence on South African Indigenous people over a century ago).  The perception of colonizer dominance is reproduced over and over, well into the current day.  

So how do I reconcile this in my mind? Can it be reconciled?  Or, should I hold on to the positive associations of my childhood, knowing that they are deeply problematic yet still mine?  As I walked through Pioneer Acres contemplating all of this, it occurred to me that there was a subtlety at play that I had not acknowledged, one indicative of my settler reliance on binaries to make sense of the world.  In the past, I think I have implicitly considered the comfort--even joy--I experience when immersed in settler narratives as a reason to avoid unpacking them, problemetizing them, or contradicting them.  I have used my personal experience as a crutch that helps me avoid delving into the unpleasant.  

So, I'll draw on Vanessa Anderiotti's language again when I say, the buck stops here.  My childhood was not bad, but colonialism is.  My memories are not violent, but the settler colonial narratives they are nestled in are.  The way I have been damaged by these narratives is by their encouragement of uncritical acceptance, comfort, and security.  I was damaged by colonial narratives because, for most of my life, I believed that my reverie associated with them was normal--some weird kind of unthinking colonial loyalty.    

I'll retain my good memories.  They will stay good.  But I will not retain an uncritical acceptance of colonial norms.  I will question them vocally, and loudly, and in the most uncompromising way possible.  It is time for disruption.