Re-routing Settler Colonial Movement

The paper illustrates ways I seek to become accountable for, and also delink from, my recreational/sporting settler movements on Turtle Island with my historical colonial-familial subject positioning as Sykes and the 1916 Sykes-Picot mapping of Palestine. The paper is informed by concepts of settler colonialism as erasure and elimiation (Lloyd & Wolfe, 2016; Smith, 2006; Cavanagh & Vaercini, 2016), settler-Indigenous relations (Lowman & Barker, 2015; Morgensen, 2010) and delinking from coloniality/modernity (Mignolo, 2011). The paper is a work-in-progress based on a coursework assignment developed for a new course in Settler Colonialism and Pedagogies of Opression.
    Mapping has been central to Indigenous-settler negotiations and treaties, and, of course, colonial betrayals. Formal decolonization involves re-drawing colonial boundaries, re-negotiating Indigenous-settler treaties, acknowledging inherent Indigenous Title to the Land. Decolonial mapping and app development (NativeLand.ca, Visualizing Palestine) can re-route colonial subject positions to re-imagining settler-Indigenous to place and Land in ways that support Indigenous resurgences. This paper depicts my autobiographical process of re-routing settler logics in my outdoor physical activities (kayaking, mountain biking, camping). Starting with maps and apps (Google Maps, Windy, Trailforks etc.) I write how maps produce, and are produced, my settler subjectivies as traveller/paddler/rider and as anti-colonial activist/allies/learner. Maps and apps can be entry points for a decolonial approach to bio-geo-graphical writing, posing questions such as: ‘Who do I become using this map? How does the map position me?’