Imaginative Intimacies: An ethnography of Black and Indigenous relations and place-making on the prairies

Savannah Kosteniuk leads this Master's Thesis research. In a time of accelerated racial and ecological disaster, brought on by slavery, genocide, and settler colonialism, Black and Indigenous communities play a key role in resisting systemic violence and imagining futures beyond current conditions. The relationship between Black and Indigenous communities on the Prairies in so-called Canada, in particular their co-resistance and collective re-imagining through mutual aid and community-based practices has received little anthropological attention and existing scholarship outside of the discipline is often theoretical and abstract, rather than grounded in local realities. Much of the scholarship on Black and Indigenous relationality has assumed either solidarity, or opposition, or “incommensurability,” which fails to account for the dynamic, complex and indeterminate “process of relation” (King, Navarro, and Smith 2020, 1-2). This thesis responds to the absence in research that attends to the process of Black and Indigenous relation-making, by examining the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles of Black and Indigenous community members in Regina, Saskatchewan, to better coordinate collective freedoms without replicating anti-Black and anti-Indigenous logics and practices. Bringing together Black feminist anthropological praxis, Indigenous feminist theory, anticolonial and decolonial theory and methods, this project asks: What kind of relational intimacies are being created outside of colonially structured relationships between Black and Indigenous communities? What do “good relations” and ethical attachment to place look like in an urban context on Treaty Four Territory? To answer these questions, this ethnography focuses on: (1) Black and Indigenous conceptions of place, identity, and belonging in Regina; (2) the dynamics of how relations connect to respective and collective struggles for freedom and relationality; (3) how distinct political traditions, local lands, and histories come to bear on co-resistance and co-imagining.

RESEARCH TEAM

PI: Savannah Kosteniuk (Master Research, PI)
Master’s Supervisor: Fiona P. McDonald, PhD (UBCO)

Committee Members: Jemima Pierre, PhD (UBC Vancouver), Anita Girvan (UBCO Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies), and Tania Willard (UBCO Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies)  

FUNDED BY