Becomings-Unsettled? (Un) Braiding Settler-Treaty Life Writing

Abstract

Rather than viewing this abstract as a simple outline of the main ideas, the nuts and bolts, the meat and potatoes, the name of the game, and the bottom line, I consider it a story. It is another moment for practicing life writing as research. On an early December morning, a large group of Canada geese gather on Pasqua Lake in the Qu’appelle Valley, near a brief narrowing of the lake in the southwest. The lake ice is thick except for a peculiar patch of open water, an oddity for the season. Here the geese float and flap mostly at the edges together, preparing for the day ahead. Nearby some ice fishing huts perch atop the frozen surface, fires lit, rods hovering over drilled holes, awaiting a catch. We have gathered too, for a scholarly writing retreat. This abstract is one of my writing tasks. While it’s positioned first, I have left it for last, wrestling with its objectives and function. What is the story of this thesis? This thesis is an altercation with academic writing, linearity, form and format, educational research, data, multiplicities of mistakes, goodness, and settler-colonial normative narratives. It stories theory by braiding, unbraiding, folding, and unfolding problematic normative narratives in turns and tangles, in the middles of mistakes. As a collection of textural braidways, it illustrates White settler-Canadian treaty responsibilities to land, water, air, and treaty partners—both human and more-than-human kin. These responsibilities include disrupting White, settler-colonial systems of supremacy and individual settler-Canadian good intentions. Such life writing plays with how becomings- (tearful, humble, ethical, unsettled) work while risking Indigenization of education and settler-treaty life writing as research. The offered self-stories are prayerful openings for living treaties with truthfulness, reciprocity, and humility. In the afternoon, the geese take flight overhead as I walk along the shore, slipping and falling, in awe of the ice lifting at the edges while meeting the sand and rocks, green algae suspended in frozen formations. With each season, the water melts and flows and freezes again and again. Like algae, the self is suspended, both fixed and fluid, in life writing stories. Like geese, the self sometimes floats and flaps at the edges, part of a pack, and moves in lines of flight. Like fish, hunted, the self gets caught, hooked and tied to normative narratives, pulling taut-taught on the line. And the fish resist. The geese honk. The algae blooms. The self slips and falls.