Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The role of cities in colonial land politics in Canada is an underexplored field of study. Although deeply implicated in colonization, cities have been characterized as spaces of modernity and progress while the complex realities of urban Indigenous peoples have remained on the margins. In this paper, I draw on early findings from my collaborative, ethnographic fieldwork that took place at two sites of study within an organization headquartered in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. I explored how one organization that assists Indigenous peoples in the justice system counters colonizing structures by building community through culturally-relevant practices. Official city plans have long characterized Indigenous peoples as impediments to urban planning. Harland Bartholomew's 1928 Plan for Vancouver tapped into the Zeitgeist of the "hygienic city," arguing for procurement of land in the interest of public health. My research is interested in the intertwining history of public health and planning in the city of Vancouver and its complicity in ongoing colonial dispossession. The impacts of Indigenous dispossession from homelands is manifest today in the high numbers of Indigenous peoples in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, and the social suffering evident in massive health disparities. Indigenous organizations that operate at the nexus of multiple dominant systems (legal/medical/social) engage in active resistance to institutional ideologies that often render invisible those who live in neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside. This research looks at how that work is bound up with the socio-legal frameworks in which Indigenous peoples must constantly navigate.