“Breathing forests and fields”

Reading “History Lesson” Within and Beyond the Crises of Settler Colonial Power

Abstract

Indigenous literary scholarship and teaching in the Canadian university often involves a simultaneous and sometimes conflicting obligation to foreground settler-colonial relations of power while also emphasizing sovereign Indigenous intellectual histories. I offer a discussion of two very different texts through which I have approached this dilemma in my own teaching practice: the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) advertisement for Vancouver 2010 winter Olympic-wear, “Timeline,” and Syilx writer and philosopher Jeannette Armstrong’s poem, “History Lesson.” While the HBC advertisement supplies an instructive example of settler-colonial tropes arranged according to a linear-progressive view of history and time, Armstrong’s free-verse poem storytells colonial exploitation and violence outside of traditional Western practices of chronology and the naturalization of progress narratives. That is, “History Lesson” centers Indigenous thought in its engagements with settler-colonial history and time, and asserts balanced and regenerative lifeways for the health of Indigenous futures.