Interrupting the Settler-Colonial Sensorium

The saguaro cactus is a significant part of the iconography of the American Southwest. Popular representations of westerns, cowboys, and Tex-Mex culture often include its image, presumably following Hollywood western director John Ford’s choice to place the plants in his depictions of Monument Valley, beginning with Stagecoach (1939). Film critic Edward Buscombe writes that the image of the cactus first circulated via Edward Curtis’s 1907 photograph Saguaro Fruit Gatherers—Maricopa.1 The photograph depicts three Maricopa women standing next to the tall (up to twelve meters high) cactus. The cactus’s height in this photo is stunning, accentuated by the women standing beside it. Given that, perhaps it is unsurprising that Ford extracted and popularized the image of the cactus, but not the Maricopa women. Yet, Curtis was a portrait photographer, and the title of the photograph suggests that it is indeed the women, not the cactus, whom Curtis intended as its primary subjects, as does his caption: “Like their Piman neighbors, the Maricopa gather large quantities of the fruit of the saguaro, or giant cactus, which they relish in its natural state as well as in the form of wine or preserve.”2 Joanna Hearne notes that Curtis’s tendency to leave his subjects nameless, particularly female ones, left them vulnerable to forms of empty signification.3 Ford’s extraction and isolation of the cactus from this photograph—and the de facto excision of the Maricopa women—completes the erasure that Curtis begins in order to repeat a settler-colonial pattern of constructing a frontier imaginary evicted of meaningful Indigenous presence. In this instance, as in Ford’s larger oeuvre, the suppression of Indigenous bodies, relations, and experiences amplifies settler people, stories, and places; it makes settler relations and aesthetics visible.

Ford’s vision is an iconic one whose ideological transfer has taken place many times over, sedimented so as to become normative and banal. They become sites of attachment because we become accustomed to such ways of perceiving the world. Making settler relations and aesthetics visible across independent Asian diasporic film and art—in works such as Sunny Lee’s Cowgirl, David Attwood’s Wild West, as well as in works by multidisciplinary artists Shani Mootoo and Vivek Shraya—likewise makes clear that settler modes of being and relating to land are also sources of desire, longing, and belonging for those excluded from them. Such desires are understandable insofar as they emerge from a set of historical and political circumstances. There is pleasure associated with seeing oneself projected on screen, in spaces and places that are familiar and comfortable, particularly in the face of marginalization and exclusion. Yet settler aesthetics and representations also regenerate the everyday colonial violence that is so essential to settler colonialism. Other worlds become possible when such normative visions are revealed. Parallel to Kānaka Maoli feminist scholar Maile Arvin’s insistence on naming normative white feminisms as settler feminisms, exposing settler positionalities and perspectives not only constitutes a form of critique but also serves as an invitation for committing to ending settler colonialism and crafting new, decolonial worlds.4

These alternate forms of worldmaking are happening as we speak, many of them—as in the work of Ali Kazimi, V. T. Nayani, and Catherine Hernandez—through cinematic experimentation. The work of these artists is not prescriptive. These are not the dictates of closed or fixed futures. Rather, they are examples of imaginative possibility that gesture to the labor and experimentation involved in making new worlds that are oriented toward Indigenous land, bodies, and (hi)stories. Film and moving image media provide the occasion to momentarily inhabit new worlds, to feel and sense them. These works remain marginal and ephemeral, their audiences small. Yet it is precisely the smaller scale of these works that has allowed these artists to not only engage different kinds of representations and aesthetics but also cultivate these alongside Indigenous collaborators and comrades. As a hub of QTBIPOC community that has fostered diasporic–Indigenous relational conversations and projects, particularly in the wake of 1990 resistance at Kanehsatake (also known as the Oka Crisis), Toronto has been paradigmatic in this regard.

Settler Attachments has, in part, gestured to the limitations of “knowing better” as a means for addressing diasporic entanglements in settler colonialism. In chapter 4, I discussed the imperfect but generative experimentative work of the films This Place and Scarborough as raising questions and working through alternate possibilities for diasporic–Indigenous futures. As I close out this book, I pause to reflect on how we might navigate the structural impasse of diaspora–Indigeneity through other forms of knowing or—more precisely—sensing. If knowing better does not lead us out of the impasse, where might feeling and perceiving the world differently take us? What new possibilities are opened up through new sensory pathways?

Here, I turn to the pathbreaking work of Korean-born, Vancouver-based artist Jin-me Yoon’s 2020 video and interactive art project Untunnelling Vision. The project might be read as the logical culmination of Yoon’s decades-long art practice that has persistently offered critical interventions into questions of nation, identity, land, and militarism, through a transnational lens.5 In Untunnelling Vision, Yoon meditates on the connections across Indigenous and diasporic histories and experiences vis-à-vis sensory disruption. By actively engaging participants in the filming itself, the project also attempts to activate an attunement toward such connections: to “untunnel” vision. Shot with a 360 camera, the twenty-one-minute experimental short toys with our expectations by distorting the audiovisual field: it juxtaposes and alternates between a range of frames, perspectives, sounds, colors, and hues, shaking us out of our comfort zones. Its nonlinear arc heightens our awareness of the video’s audiovisual elements, taking viewers on a journey that is disorienting and unexpected.

The video’s opening scene is shot from below. As we look onto a sunny, grayish-blue sky and scattered clouds, distorted sounds play, and the camera tracks across delicate reeds, eventually approaching the ruins of a wooden structure. Playing with perspective and point of view, it is jarring and unsettling, showing us the world from a different place. The distorted sounds fade into a carnivalesque soundtrack, as the video then abruptly cuts to its next scene—still from this perspective from-below—the top of a colorful spinning carousel covered in quaint, folksy landscape paintings, possibly depictions of Canadian sites. These are visions of early settler-colonial imaginaries. Diminished in size and positioned atop the rotating carousel, the images invite us to consider the nostalgic pleasure of an old amusement park ride—and, perhaps, the way such nostalgia generates commonsensical attachments to hegemonic imaginaries. As we follow the circular repetitions of the carousel, we hear the sound of a train, and the video cuts again, this time to a black-and-white close-up of the bottom of a passing train, our eyes now directed to its linear movements from left to right. The train departs the frame to reveal tourists wandering through an old-timey village (Calgary’s Heritage Park Historical Village). The camera now remains stationary as people walk in and out of frame, some visible in the distance, and others visible right up close. It is a slow depiction of settler space and its histories that are mundane and everyday, generally taken for granted, and a nod again to the colonial histories that shape and live on in our present. As one individual pauses in front of the camera to take a photo, cymbals suddenly interrupt the scene as another jump cut takes us to a jarring close-up of Rubble the Clown, a figure who frequently and erratically appears in Untunnelling Vision. An amalgam of Asian clown and cowboy, Rubble dons a painted face complemented by a ribboned wig of Korean saekdong colors that emphasize harmony—and (in the context of the project) symbolize relation and difference—and a crocheted off-white cowboy hat (Figure 29). Rubble appears momentarily, in fast time, teasing and confusing our expectations: Who is this strange figure, and what are they doing in the video?

Untunnelling Vision switches focus here, but the sound of crashing cymbals persists, suggesting that Rubble has introduced an interruption to the previous scenes. We are now in a dark tunnel—symbolic of modernity, progress, and development—and our vision is about to become untunneled. The camera wobbles and shakes before finding focus again, showcasing again a perspective from below.

We are still in the tunnel, but it is no longer dark. We see the fine granularity of sand on the ground, and, in the distance, the light at the end of the tunnel. Two figures soon appear: Yoon’s son, Hanum Yoon-Henderson, and multidisciplinary Tsuuti’ina artist seth cardinal dodginghorse (Figure 30). The tunnel is, in fact, Calgary’s southwest ring road, part of a decades-long project to create a road to circle the city and facilitate transport.6 The construction displaced members of the Tsuut’ina nation off their land, including dodginghorse and his family.7 Yoon-Henderson and dodginghorse begin to experiment with making a musical soundscape using their bodies and various found objects, countering the “sonic dissonances” generated by “colonial cacophonies.”8 Their repurposing and reclamation of space momentarily interrupts the progress of construction, serving as a reminder of the histories, lives, and experiences that linger and remain. Yoon-Henderson and dodginghorse’s site-specific intervention is thus especially meaningful as it responds to ongoing processes of dispossession and primitive accumulation.

Yoon-Henderson and dodginghorse walk through the Heritage Park together, now empty. We see the park in full color, devoid of tourists. There are occasional, fleeting glimpses of people in nineteenth-century clothing, relics of the past. An antlered deer saunters by, taking up space in the new emptiness. The shift to color along with the emptiness of the tourist site invites audiences to ponder on the possibilities that Yoon-Henderson and dodginghorse’s bodies signal, particularly as they take up space laden with colonial significance, recoding it as a space of potential diasporic–Indigenous relation.

The subsequent segment of the video was shot on Tsuut’ina Nation land that was leased to the Canadian Armed Forces’ Calgary base from 1910 to 1998. The military used this land extensively as a site for “manoeuvre training that included land and air launched rockets and grenades”; thus, when they returned the land to the Tsuut’ina, it was filled with unexploded munitions.9 Some of those munitions were subsequently cleared in order to shoot the 2008 feature film Passchendaele, about a Canadian soldier in World War I; in the Canadian settler imaginary, Passchendaele is significant as a battle in which Canadian troops established themselves as culturally and nationally distinct from Britain. The set for Passchendaele was left in place in the hopes that the site might be transformed into a tourist destination. Yoon—an artist whose oeuvre has been engaged with the intersections and entanglements of militarism, tourism, and colonialism—chose this site for Untunnelling Vision to further probe those connections alongside a group of invited participants. The video pauses to gaze at the rubble and decaying structures. Equally, the camera directs us to the wild grasses and flowers growing amid the ruins, reclaiming the land anew, emphasizing possibility in the wake of wreck. Rubble reappears in their blue-collared shirt with patchwork adornments and matching patchworked pants. Their assemblage of excess, particularly in relation to the subdued hues of the ruins and landscape, invites us to consider the cacophonies of colonialism and the entanglements that it generates.

As in the films of Kazimi, Nayani, and Hernandez, the work for Yoon’s video—and this second segment in particular—extended beyond the frame. The filming process was incorporated into a multiday workshop that Yoon organized in 2019 for BIPOC artists entitled “Relation Making in the Context of Racism and Settler-Colonialism.” Inspired by Martiniquais scholar-poet Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, Yoon cofacilitated the workshop with her sister, the activist and community organizer Jin-Sun Yoon, with graphic recording by artist Tiaré Jung.10 Writing from and through the specificities of Martinique and the Caribbean, where cross-cultural encounters have emerged through violent histories of conquest, colonization, slavery, and imperialism, Glissant proposes that

relation is learning more and more to go beyond judgments into the unexpected dark of art’s upsurgings. Its beauty springs from the stable and the unstable, from the deviance of many particular poetics and the clairvoyance of a relational poetics. The more things it standardizes into a state of lethargy, the more rebellious consciousness it arouses.11

Glissant theorizes relation here as poetic, imaginative, chaotic, and risky, as it creates space for new and unexpected possibilities. The first day of Yoon’s workshop, which focused on deepening participant understandings of racism and settler colonialism, likewise delved into the chaotic and unexpected. It was concerned not just with deepening intellectual awareness, but also with considering how participants “experientially embody and name what it is like to carry these experiences.” Filming itself took place on the workshop’s second day. Participation was optional; volunteers were instructed to “carry out a series of simple actions at the site,” which included

looking for a piece of rubble, carrying a small piece of rubble and placing it in a pile, then passing it around with the group. Such simple gestures are performed in front of a camera, in a group context, using both a conventional camera and a 360 camera. More gestures will be devised by Jin-me Yoon and included once she has experienced the workshop alongside the participants.12

In the video, we see the participants sit together in a circle on the grass with their found pieces of rubble and begin to make sounds (Figures 31–32). This segment of musical improvisation was facilitated by Yoon-Henderson and dodginghorse and culminates in the video as a musical composition in which distinct elements retain their unique qualities while at the same time forming harmony with other elements.

Leading up to the filming of Untunnelling Vision, Yoon led a workshop at the 2018 Mountain Standard Time Performance Arts Festival in Calgary entitled “Relaxing into Relation,” in which participants were invited to float in sensory deprivation tanks in order to alter their perception and compel the formation of new neural pathways that would facilitate the group discussion on Indigenous and people of color relationality and decolonization. Plunged into the “unexpected dark of art’s upsurgings,” the emphasis here was on the sensory and affective—rather than the intellectual—as modes of mobilizing different ways of being and seeing in relation.13 Artist and writer Ashley Bedet, who participated in the workshop, reflects on the shift in group feeling and discussion tenor following the sensory deprivation experience:

Upon reuniting with the group our discussion expanded further. People felt calmer and could clearly articulate similar territories to those I had been meditating. Our understandings of place however still jarred all of us. . . . Gentle and tentative conversation timidly moved forward as our group clumsily conversed about our experiences, discoveries, and then ultimately our fears and anxieties.14

If, as Glissant suggests, “The highest point of knowledge is always a poetics,” the experience of sensory deprivation compelled workshop participants toward dwelling in the feelings, affects, and sensations of the impasse, including its awkward, clumsy, or uncomfortable aspects.15

In the video’s next segment, a group of seated Korean and Tsuut’ina elders observe participants pass colored pieces of rock to one another (Figure 33). These rocks, placed on site by Yoon, are painted in traditional Korean saekdong colors that emphasize harmony and (in the context of the workshop) symbolize relation and difference. Interjecting these scenes of group bonding is, again, Rubble the Clown. In the final shots of the video, Rubble’s movements intensify, moving at hyperspeed. There is a heightening of distorted sounds; our vision becomes muddied. Images blend and meld together: we see the grass, we see the sky; they are upside down, they are painted fantastical colors. They form a tunnel-like shape that the camera moves away from in backward spirals, echoing Manu Karuka, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein’s provocation to consider thinking with nonlinear spatial forms such as circles and spirals (Figure 34).16 As Untunnelling Vision concludes, the screen fades to black and we are plunged into darkness. Just as participants in “Relaxing into Relation” suspended their perception as they floated in sensory deprivation tanks, our visual perception here is flipped, turned inside-out and on its head. We are floating in the water. Speculating on what could be, the video’s conclusion invites us to consider seeing differently.

Holding space for the insights from Untunnelling Vision, I return to the example of the saguaro cactus. I wonder: What is made possible when we delink the saguaro cactus from Curtis’s and Ford’s settler imaginaries? I dwell on what might open up when we see the saguaro cactus as embedded in dynamic webs of human and nonhuman relation, no longer extracted from its relationship to Maricopa women: the saguaro cactus not as a majestic plant from which value can be extracted, but as a plant whose past and future is bound up with Indigenous people, places, and stories. I would like to not only know and remember this connection, but also reach the point where we collectively feel and perceive this. Whereas attachments and investments in settler colonialism are ultimately narcissistic, centering Indigenous modes of being and knowing opens onto new portals and worlds, inviting us to differently move and inhabit space, in ways that are attuned not only to survival under a settler capitalist regime but to something wholly different. What stories might Maricopa peoples have to share about the saguaro cactus? How do we see and perceive plants when they are recognizable, not just through their taxonomic classifications or their extractive value, but through these other stories?

Even as I dwell in such possibility, I return to that impasse of diaspora/Indigeneity that is still unresolved. I remember, too, that reckoning with impasse and impossibility is generative. Work and experimentation is required here. That work will be incomplete and imperfect, but also profoundly necessary. I end Settler Attachments with a nod to the difficult task of holding onto hope and possibility as we wrestle with impossibility and impasse. I wonder what sights, scents, textures, and sounds could we be attuned to in decolonial futures, and I think about the work ahead, somewhere on that distant horizon. Let’s go.