Born Again Urbanism: New Missionary Incursions, Aboriginal Resistance... by dwhugill

Born Again Urbanism: New Missionary Incursions, Aboriginal Resistance and Barriers to Rebuilding Relationships in Winnipeg’s North End1

David Hugill Owen Toews Abstract This paper examines the controversy that emerged as the City of Winnipeg debated committing public funds to an evangelical Christian group seeking to build a youth centre in an urban neighborhood with a large Aboriginal population. It traces the emergence of a coordinated opposition to the project and demonstrates why many felt that municipal and federal support was not only inappropriate but also worked to recapitulate longstanding patterns of disregard for the needs and aspirations of Aboriginal peoples. In an era where it has become common for Canadian governments to 1 The authors would like to thank the eleven people that agreed to be interviewed during the preparation of this article. We’d also like to thank Stacy Douglas, Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, Stefan Kipfer, Setha Low, Patricia Wood, Audra Simpson, Eva Mackey and participants at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography weekly colloquium for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts.

Department of Geography, York University, Toronto CUNY Graduate Center, New York speak of “reconciliation” we demonstrate how such ambitions continue to be impeded by pervasive logics of governance that work against genuine processes of decolonization. We argue that events in Winnipeg reveal the persistence of longstanding colonial dynamics and demonstrate how such dynamics are exacerbated by the regressive tendencies of the city’s neoliberal orientation. We insist that colonial practices and mentalities not only permeate the present but also that they interact with, and are shaped by, the exigencies of actually existing political economies. Ours is an attempt to show how insights about the form and content of urban neoliberalism can be productively engaged with insights about how colonial relations have been reproduced and transformed in the contemporary moment. It is also an effort to demonstrate how such mentalities and practices are being resisted and challenged in important ways in contemporary Canada. Our observations are based on a range of interviews with local activists, politicians and

Born Again Urbanism

service providers as well as a close reading of a range of political documents available on the public record.

como también en la lectura detallada de numerosos documentos políticos de acceso público.

Key Words: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Aboriginal Peoples of Canada, Urban Neoliberalism, Settler Colonialism, Evangelical Christianity, Aboriginal Non-Aboriginal Relationships, Postcolonialism.

Palabras clave: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Pueblos Originarios de Canadá, Neoliberalismo Urbano, Colonialismo, Cristianismo Evangélico, Postcolonialismo.

Urbanismo renaciente: Nuevas Incursiones Misioneras, Resistencia de los Pueblos Originarios y Barreras a la Reconstitución de Relaciones en el Noreste de Winnipeg Este artículo analiza la controversia surgida del debate acerca del financiamiento con fondos del Municipio de Winnipeg de un grupo evangélico cristiano que planeaba construir un Centro para Jóvenes en un barrio con una numerosa población aborigen. Acá se rastrea el surgimiento de una oposición coordinada al proyecto, y se demuestra por qué muchxs argumentaron que el apoyo municipal y federal no solo era inapropiado sino que además reinstituía viejos patrones de indiferencia hacia las aspiraciones y necesidades de los pueblos originarios. En una era en la que es común que los gobiernos canadienses hablen de ‘reconciliación’, acá demostramos cómo estas ambiciones continúan siendo incitadas por lógicas de gobernanza que en realidad funcionan en contra de los procesos genuinos de decolonización. En nuestra visión, los hechos en Winnipeg revelan la persistencia de viejas dinámicas coloniales y demuestran cómo esas dinámicas son exacerbadas por las tendencias regresivas de la orientación neoliberal de la ciudad. Insistimos en que existen prácticas y mentalidades coloniales que permean el presente pero también interactúan con (y son moldeadas por) las exigencias de las economías políticas realmente existentes. El nuestro es un intento de mostrar cómo los aportes acerca de la forma y el contenido del urbanismo neoliberal pueden ser relacionados con los aportes acerca de cómo las relaciones coloniales han sido reproducidas y transformadas en la actualidad. Se trata también de un esfuerzo por demostrar cómo esas mentalidades y prácticas son fuertemente resistidas y desafiadas en Canadá. Nuestras observaciones se basan en una serie de entrevistas con militantes locales y con políticos, así

Introduction On June 11, 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in the Canadian House of Commons and officially apologized for the federal government’s role in the construction and management of the Indian Residential School system. For generations, Aboriginal children were taken from their families and incarcerated in institutions explicitly aimed at interrupting the reproduction of Aboriginal cultures, languages, and forms of life.2 The schools were typically administered by religious organizations but the federal government played a central role in coordinating and financing their operation (Milloy 1999). The Prime Minister’s apology was intended to mark a clear break with this troublesome past and proclaim unequivocally that the federal government now considers forced assimilation to have been a misguided use of its sovereign power. “Today we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country,” he announced. His short speech then concluded with a nod towards a brighter future in which the Canadian state would be committed to “moving toward healing, reconciliation and resolution” and to “forging a new relationship between aboriginal [sic] peoples and other Canadians” (Harper 2008, emphasis added). Less than two years later an evangelical Christian organization called Youth For Christ (YFC) approached the City of Winnipeg, Manitoba with a proposal to build a multi-million dollar youth recreation complex in an urban neighborhood with a large Aboriginal population. The organization had already secured a federal grant of $3.2 million CAD and there were 2 In Canada, the term “Aboriginal” is used broadly to include people of First Nations, Inuit and Métis descent. Winnipeg’s large and diverse Aboriginal population includes members of all three of these groups.

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indications that the municipality was willing to follow suit. In early 2010 the City’s Executive Policy Committee (EPC) passed a preliminary motion to provide a grant of $3.375 million CAD over fifteen years to aid in the construction of the project. If the deal were to go forward YFC would also be gifted a vacant city-owned parcel of land at the intersection of Higgins Avenue and Main Street in the city’s North End, valued at approximately $0.5 million CAD (City of Winnipeg 2010). The EPC motion was placed on the agenda for the following week’s City Council meeting (an exceptionally quick turnaround) where councilors would vote on the proposal. News of the deal stirred immediate controversy. Initial media reports foregrounded concerns about the union of church and state but it wasn’t long before a different sort of apprehension would begin to overshadow them. Diane Roussin and Tammy Christensen, executive directors of Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre Inc. and Ndinawemaaganag Endaawaad Inc., respectively, had begun to advance a critique grounded in the experience of Aboriginal-run youth service providers in the neighborhood. Given that the proposed location of the development was in the heart of a neighborhood with one of the largest urban Aboriginal populations in the continent, and citing information on YFC’s website explicitly identifying Aboriginal youth as a “prime area for development,” Roussin and Christensen (2010) argued that the provision of public funds for the project would reproduce the assimilationist dynamic of Indian Residential Schools, whereby the Canadian state sponsored religious organizations to “Christianize” Aboriginal children. They insisted, moreover, that taking millions of dollars for YFC from a cashstrapped municipal purse would diminish funding opportunities for organizations already working in the neighborhood, including community-based, Aboriginal-run youth service providers. Neighborhood activists quickly mobilized to fill the council chamber in opposition. Speakers voiced a rich historical account of Aboriginal experience in Canada, tracing the impact of Residential Schools through present efforts to establish Aboriginal-based

youth programming with a decolonizing mandate. They expressed that the proposed site for the project was particularly significant to the city’s Aboriginal population and articulated a desire to pursue an agenda of self-determination through that space. Many positioned a publicly funded YFC development as antithetical to such aspirations. Harper’s apology figured prominently in the testimony. Nahanni Fontaine, Director of Justice for the Manitoba Southern Chiefs Organization, for example, invoked it directly: As a result of this apology, Aboriginal peoples were assured that these sort of strategic and infringing policies and practices would never occur again, and despite this assurance, we’re gathered here today debating the construction of a Youth for Christ recreational facility which is entirely founded on Christian world views and practices...[if the project is approved] this council will be doing nothing short of reinstituting and state sanctifying another more contemporary, altered form of the Residential School experience, mentality and practice all under the guise of helping at-risk Aboriginal youth (City of Winnipeg 2010). Such objections were not enough to sway Council and after a lengthy debate the project was approved. YFC’s Centre for Youth Excellence opened its doors less than two years later. The impressive resistance mobilized against the YFC initiative is the inspiration for this article. So too are the interventions of postcolonial scholars such as Césaire (1972) which remind us that colonialism degrades universally, that colonial violence dehumanizes both colonizer and colonized, and that decolonization is necessarily a shared project from which both parties stand to benefit. In what follows we highlight some of the arguments made by Aboriginal and community activists that opposed the YFC project because we think they go a long way in revealing key political and epistemological barriers that continue to stand in the way of building accountable relationships between non-Aboriginal settlers and Aboriginal peoples in twenty-first century Canada. We take a close look at the YFC controversy because it offers an important

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opportunity to think through some of the ways that Aboriginal claims continue to be either disregarded or rendered illegible in the context of mainstream Canadian political life. We argue that two pervasive logics of governance are at the centre of what unfolded in Winnipeg and demonstrate how both impede the promise of reconciliation articulated by Harper and others. The first is a neoliberal logic that understands successful public administration as the championing of supplyside innovation, the undermining of social security infrastructure, and the privatization of land and public services, among other things. Geographers and urbanists have demonstrated the central role that cities and urban regions have played in these processes of socio-spatial transformation both as local “laboratories” in which neoliberal policy experiments have been aggressively carried out (Brenner and Theodore 2002, Peck and Tickell 2002, Hackworth 2006) and as the environments in which their most deleterious consequences have been experienced (Keil 2002, Herbert and Brown 2006, Boudreau et al 2009, Walks 2009, Hugill 2010) and resisted (Leitner et al 2007). We argue that in the context of contemporary Winnipeg, where such a logic is dominant, YFC was able to mobilize its political connections, organizational strength and economic leverage to present its project in a form that would be consistent with the imperatives of key decision makers. Their initiative offered opportunities to a range of interests: a municipal government driven by an agenda of austerity, a development authority with a mandate to privatize hard-to-sell parcels of land, and a federal government allied with evangelical organizations (and in need of infrastructural outlets for its stimulus initiatives). Yet there is more to this controversy than questions of political economy. In what follows we also demonstrate how a distinctly colonial logic grounded in denial, disregard, and violence is also inseparable from the very urban story that unfolded in Winnipeg. While geographers and urbanists have, since the 1990s, contributed to a burgeoning body of postcolonial scholarship “concerned with the impact of colonialism and its contestation on the cultures of both

colonizing and colonized people in the past, and the reproduction and transformation of colonial relations, representations, and practices in the present” (Gregory 2000 quoted in Blomley 2004), their recognition of the city as a key site of ongoing colonial contestation has been profoundly limited, with but a few notable exceptions (especially Jacobs 1999). Following Blomley (2004: 108), we argue that “the colonial encounter continues even within the city” and demonstrate how two manifestations of a colonial logic were mobilized to rationalize support for the YFC initiative. First we argue that a problematic politics of time works to quarantine colonial violence in a historical past, obscuring the ways that colonial structures continue to shape contemporary relationships. We demonstrate how such conceptualizations promote the sense that Aboriginal people are merely one ethnic group among a broad Canadian plurality rather than people with specific legal rights and a relationship to the Canadian state that is fundamentally different than other groups. Second we argue that a colonial politics of space works to circumscribe and limit where, precisely, settler governments understand themselves as having an obligation to consult and negotiate with Aboriginal people as Aboriginal people. We show that the YFC events in Winnipeg reproduce longstanding dynamics through which Aboriginal spaces are seen as inherently violable. Ultimately, we are keen to show how the insights of recent scholarship on the nature and effects of urban neoliberalization can be productively merged with insights about how colonial patterns are still being played out in the North American urban present. Ours is an attempt to heed Cole Harris’s (2004) suggestion that researchers should not only focus on colonial practices and mentalities in the abstract but also trace their functioning in specific times and places. Pursuing such an endeavor in the context of contemporary Winnipeg requires that we pay close attention to how neoliberal economic logics intersect with (neo)colonial logics, and how the former often exacerbates the effects of the latter, further straining relationships and working against a politics of reconciliation and healing. This article is divided into three sections. The first establishes the geographical and historical context in which these events unfolded and demonstrates how

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Winnipeg’s North End has long been stigmatized and perceived by outsiders as a dangerous and disorganized zone in which outside intervention should be welcomed. The latter two sections are dedicated to unpacking the logics described above. Our observations are based on eleven interviews conducted with local activists, politicians, service providers and development workers in late 2011 as well as a close reading of a range of political documents and transcripts on the public record. Before we proceed, however, we want to stress that our objective is not to dismiss the Harper apology as mere rhetorical posturing, in spite of the evident contradictions between rhetoric and practice that have followed in its wake. We want to recognize the important contribution of those activists that not only worked for decades to make the apology happen but also ensured that it would be bolstered by a series of compensatory and commemorative measures.3 Indeed, in the YFC case the apology was used strategically – if ultimately ineffectively – to embolden anticolonial resistance.

2006 census (Statistics Canada 2006) counted slightly fewer than 70,000 Aboriginal residents in Winnipeg (roughly 10% of the city’s total population) but some community leaders believe that the actual number is closer to 80,000 (personal interview 2011). While this population is dispersed throughout the urban region, the largest concentrations of Aboriginal residents continue to live in the inner city. The 2006 figures reveal that more than 20% of Winnipeg’s inner-city residents identified as Aboriginal but in some Census Tracts (CTs) the degree of concentration is much higher. The CT immediately north of the YFC development, for example, has a self-identified Aboriginal population of nearly 62%.

Part 1: Geographical and Historical Context Significant numbers of Aboriginal people began migrating from remote and reserve communities to western Canadian cities in the period after 1960. Assaults on Indigenous economies and the failure of the federal Indian reserve system to provide livelihoods for growing First Nations populations pushed Aboriginal people into cities where labor market exclusion and post-industrial restructuring made it difficult to secure stable employment in the same way that Eastern European migrants had during the city’s boom period (Silver 2010). By the 1980s a large number of Aboriginal households had located in Winnipeg’s centre, finding shelter in small, aged, relatively lowcost housing. The city is now home to the largest urban Aboriginal population in Canada; nearly twice as many Aboriginal people live in Winnipeg’s centre than do in the country’s largest reserve community. The 3 These include modest financial settlements for individual Residential School survivors, the formation of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a range of commemorative activities.

Figure 1: Winnipeg, Manitoba (Adapted by David Hugill)

Winnipeg’s centre – now viewed as encompassing both the commercial downtown and the residential inner city - has long been described by the city’s elites as a place in need of intervention. Fear of the ‘other’ has defined such descriptions since the area’s inception. The xenophobic attacks on North End workers that were used to justify violent repression of the city wide 1919 general strike are only the most famous example. Since the city centre was dramatically hollowed out by successive waves of post-war suburbanization, however, city leaders have often been concerned with redeveloping the area’s built environment,

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describing it as blighted, declining, and inferior. Yet such characterizations have never been confined to discussions of the built environment alone. Local residents have often been conflated with decaying landscapes or deemed responsible for them. These characterizations frequently highlight the street-level drug and sex trades, reinforcing the sense that the inner city is not only composed of dangerous places but also overrun with dangerous people. Such articulations have reinforced what Dara Culhane (2003: 595) has called a “regime of disappearance,” a mode of articulation through which certain categories of people are “selectively marginalized” through a complex of prevailing representational strategies. Writing in the context of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Culhane argues that the experiences of Aboriginal women in particular have been rendered invisible through a media preference for the exoticism of drugs, violence and commercial sex. The result, she argues, is that the “mundane brutality of everyday poverty” as well as the organizational capacity of those who live in such neighborhoods are regularly eclipsed. Culhane’s observations could certainly be applied to Winnipeg’s inner city where a steady stream of fear-based popular narratives have often coupled with racist assumptions about the capacity of Aboriginal peoples to ensure their own survival in urban environments. These consolidate a “regime of disappearance” in which danger and dissolution emerge as the defining features of the area. Such discursive formations have been mobilized in Winnipeg – as elsewhere (Weber 2002) - as a means to justify particular urban economic development strategies, stigmatizing existing landscapes and heralding the urgency of intervention. The corner of Higgins and Main – where the YFC Centre sits today – is among the most aggressively stigmatized places in the city. The area is perceived by outsiders to be the epicenter of North End danger and decline. These characterizations were on display at the City Council debate about the project and several of its proponents used the language of danger and emptiness to make the case for supporting the centre. “That place has been empty for many, many, many years”, one proponent remarked (City of Winnipeg 2010). While one councilor commented:

I have looked at this, I have talked to people about this, and I know for a fact, Higgins and Main is a bad place. People will not venture from Tuxedo, from Transcona, [they] say “don’t go there because it’s a bad place.” Big open space. You’ve got transients hanging out. It’s a place that should not be visited (City of Winnipeg 2010). These and other statements reveal an interesting contradiction. The urban spaces of the North End are routinely described as empty, vacant, decaying or dead, yet simultaneously bustling with the activities of transients, criminals, sex workers, gang members and street people. The language of emptiness only makes sense if those that actually spend their time in this part of the neighborhood are camouflaged behind a “regime of disappearance” in which they are conflated with criminality and transience, in other words, legitimate targets for contempt and removal rather than legitimate users of the space. These sorts of stigmatizations consolidate the impression of a wasted, disorganized, or unused space, a characterization that helps legitimate and rationalize particular forms of outside intervention. Without this stigmatization, we contend, YFC would have had a much harder time presenting themselves as legitimate interveners. It is critical to consider what kind of intervention Youth for Christ will offer. As we discuss below, the organization’s explicit objective is winning youth to its brand of evangelical Christianity. It is distinguished, in this sense, from some other community-oriented religious organizations – the Salvation Army, for example – in that it interprets its spirituality as an injunction to recruit rather than an obligation to serve (although, the latter is frequently a means of achieving the former). The organization quantifies its recruitment successes explicitly. Its 2010 annual report, for example, discloses that YFC Canada made contact with 188,097 youth, presenting 25,184 of them with an opportunity to become a follower of Jesus Christ. More than 2500 are reported to have responded “positively” to this opportunity while more than 4,000 were involved in ongoing discipleship programs (Youth for Christ Canada 2010). The claims of some supporters that YFC is not primarily a recruitment-

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driven organization are contradicted by the centrality of these figures in YFC publications. Indeed, the organization uses the language of “strategy” explicitly in describing its efforts to reach the 5.4 million young Canadians enrolled in elementary and secondary schools. They reason that investment today will pay dividends tomorrow; a rationale made plain by their vision statement: “…YFC Canada aims to take the gospel to the youth of the nation and trust God to surface leaders for the future who can become part of His plan for our nation” (Youth for Christ Canada 2006b). In one sense, then, focusing on youth is a demographic calculation; and the organization has begun to pay heed to the growing number of Aboriginal young people. While the Aboriginal population as a whole accounts for only 3.3% of the Canadian population, Aboriginal children account for 5.6% of the country’s children (Statistics Canada 2001). This demography is not lost on YFC recruiters who describe Aboriginal youth as “a prime area for development” (Sinclair 2010). The provision of excellent facilities is understood as the central mechanism through which this strategy of soul accumulation can be carried out. Part 2: The Logic of Urban Neoliberalism The YFC initiative did not, of course, emerge in a political-economic vacuum. The project owes its existence in part to a neoliberalized political climate in which privately delivered services were particularly attractive to elected officials. In many places, including Manitoba, the restructuring of cities since the 1980s as self-contained “competitive units” has driven local governments to take on an increasingly entrepreneurial hue (Harvey 1989; Brenner and Theodore 2002). In spite of the view that the city’s “slow-growth” economy might afford certain strategic advantages (Leo and Anderson 2005; Leo 2006) the City of Winnipeg has continued to promote economic expansion as its core definition of success. Municipal plans dating back to the 1950s reveal a consistent local appetite for growth (Milgrom 2011) but this trend has been particularly pronounced in recent years. Under the mayoralty of Sam Katz, now in his third term, Winnipeg has emerged as a city that spends less on services and collects less from its residents than almost any other

comparably sized municipality in the country (Lett 2012). The City has also managed (until very recently) to extend a local property tax freeze for 14 consecutive years while aggressively seeking to reduce (and in some cases eliminate) municipal business taxes. These policies have exacerbated already existing funding gaps and infrastructural deficits, ensuring that austerity would prevail in municipal spending. Yet while researchers have often stressed the destructive side of neoliberalization, it is critical not to overlook the ways in which it also functions as a process of creation (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Hugill and Brogan 2011). Actually existing neoliberalism tends to manifest first as the unraveling of existing institutional arrangements and later as the production of a “new infrastructure for market-oriented economic growth, commodifcation, and the rule of capital” (Brenner and Theodore 2002: 15). This latter “roll-out” phase is defined by an active process of “construction and consolidation” of new state forms, instruments, and initiatives (Peck and Tickell 2002). Two of these mechanisms, in particular, helped spur the YFC development: An urban enterprise zone called CentreVenture (a bounded district where local and provincial governments make available a number of development incentives) and its provision of tax increment financing (TIF) (a financing arrangement whereby the state provides grants to private interests for the development of specific properties based on a perceived future increase in property tax revenues that would not otherwise have occurred). By early 2010 YFC did not have access to enough capital to begin its project, and after talks with the provincial government fell through the organization approached the city for funding and was directed to CentreVenture. As part of its enterprise zone mandate CentreVenture generally makes TIF available only for projects in areas it defines as “downtown” or “inner city”; therefore, in order to meet the time-sensitive requirements of its federal stimulus grant, and without an alternative funding source, YFC needed to build its project in the city centre. A source close to CentreVenture told us that the parcel of land at Higgins and Main was the organization’s “last big obstacle” and that in order to sign on to the project,

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“the city’s condition was that this is the piece of land it’s on.” By going through CentreVenture, therefore, YFC was essentially forced to build at Higgins and Main. This is significant because much opposition to the project was centered on the choice of location. The particular politics of urban “revitalization” practiced by CentreVenture was a key condition of possibility for the YFC project. The city council proceedings of February 24, 2010 reveal a contradiction between CentreVenture’s inability to dispose of the land at Higgins and Main prior to 2010 and the strong community attachment to it expressed by those who proposed alternative visions for the site. If so many local people and organizations were so interested in what happened on the land, why was CentreVenture unable for so many years to find someone to take it for $1? The answer to this question lies in the fact that CentreVenture makes land and financing available only to those who demonstrate a certain level of - primarily financial – ‘competency’ to develop it, a standard practice in a neoliberal context. North End community members had previously appealed to CentreVenture for assistance in developing an Aboriginal-run credit union on the site but were turned down due to a lack of financing. Within the narrow “entrepreneurial” frame of CentreVenture’s eligibility standards, YFC emerged as the only actor both willing and able to own the land at Higgins and Main and to receive TIF to develop it, and therefore represented the only possible solution to what CentreVenture perceived as the crisis of the land’s vacancy. The YFC project was also the progeny of another crisis: the global economic meltdown that jolted most national economies after 2007. Canada was not immune to this turbulence and, after some initial reluctance, the ruling federal Conservatives rolled-out Canada’s “Economic Action Plan” (EAP), a stimulus program that would commit roughly $40 billion CAD to a mix of infrastructure and program spending, improved access to financing, an extension of unemployment benefits, job protection measures and tax cuts. In this climate, “shovel ready” projects were given preference as were non-public initiatives that were able to present themselves to the state as

‘competent’ and self-sufficient partners, generally by demonstrating access to outside sources of funding. In 2009 it was revealed that YFC would be among the best funded of the nearly 70 Winnipegbased projects approved for EAP funds. The group was promised a sum of $3,193,515 CAD, exceeded only by investments in water treatment, an arterial roadway, floodway expansion and a new headquarters for the United Way (Infrastructure Canada 2010). It is believed that the organization benefitted from its close ties with federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who represents a rural constituency just outside of Winnipeg. This helps, in part, to explain why the federal government would be interested in supporting YFC. But how do we explain the city’s equally generous commitment? First, it is critical to point out that Canadian municipalities are cash-strapped; cities take in less than 10% of revenues generated by taxation but are expected to shoulder a significant service delivery burden. Given these realities, city leaders are likely to show interest in any opportunity to leverage outside support. As one Councilor put it: “…when we get the opportunity to leverage, to get money out of the private sector, to get money out of the two levels of government, we’re going to move quickly and seize the opportunity” (personal interview 2011). In this context, it is clear that the city’s leadership cast aside any reservations it might have had about the religious and ideological commitments of a group like YFC in order not to squander the infrastructural and financial opportunities that the project presented to the city. By investing in the construction of a centre that would be run by a group with a track record of raising private money and mobilizing an army of volunteers, the city could further rationalize and defend its withdrawal from service provision and youth programming. It was in this context that YFC, an outside group with no substantial ties to Winnipeg’s inner city, was able to leverage its influence and financial stability in order to secure substantial financial commitments from two levels of government. This is a striking accomplishment given that church attendance has been in sharp decline for generations in Canada and a significant majority

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of Canadians do not consider religion to be an important part of their lives (Boswell 2012). While the NGOization of service delivery under neoliberalism has opened up avenues for Aboriginal non-profits working towards healing and decolonization (Silver 2006), the YFC case suggests that such a framework can similarly empower organizations with very different objectives. Broadly speaking, it demonstrates how political pressures specific to neoliberal capitalism are implicated in the persistence of colonial patterns and practices in contemporary Canada. With this in mind we now turn to a set of logics, which we characterize as colonial, that were mobilized by proponents of the YFC project.

Figure 2: YFC Centre for Youth Excellence under construction (Photograph: Owen Toews)Part 3: Colonial Logics of Time and Space

Figure 3: YFC Centre for Youth Excellence (Photograph: Owen Toews)

Part 3: Colonial Logics of Time and Space Colonial Time Many Canadians accept that Aboriginal peoples endured periods of mistreatment and dispossession in the past, but few acknowledge that such violence continues in the present. There is a tendency to quarantine colonial violence in an abstract and hermetically sealed past, reproducing a politics of denial that divides the lives of contemporary Canadians from those of their predecessors. However, following Patrick Wolfe (2006), we are interested in the ways in which the relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples has morphed, transformed, and been reproduced as it has become embedded in the (often mundane) functioning of institutions and everyday life. As Wolfe reminds us, settler colonial invasion “is a structure, not an event.” So it is critical for scholars to pay close attention to links between past processes and policies of colonization and present modes of rule, and to avoid the trap of an imagined epochal break between colonial past and non-colonial present. In response to the proliferation of official apologies in the present period, Mackey (2013, 49 in press) has noted their tendency to create “pastness” by delineating a present in which “the crime” is absent. With this in mind, it is important to ask whether Harper’s act of apology – a widely reported and discussed event in Canada – actually works to undo patterns of disempowerment or whether it forecloses on such opportunities by reinforcing the view that the time of colonial conflict is now past. Proponents of the YFC project, because they could not totally ignore the anti-colonial critiques voiced in the city council chamber and elsewhere, mobilized an understanding of colonialism as a past event (an “indiscretion,” in one Councilor’s words) to help rationalize their support. On a number of occasions city leaders sought to position the Residential School system firmly in the past - as an isolated episode the government must be careful to avoid repeating, rather than a manifestation of a persistent colonial power structure that must be actively dismantled. While the project’s opponents identified the continuity between the YFC Centre and Residential Schools – i.e. state-

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sponsored religious conversion of Aboriginal children - its proponents worked hard to separate the two. The latter often relied on a circumscribed understanding of what constituted the truly unacceptable qualities of Residential Schools in order to differentiate YFC from them, emphasizing the consensual character of YFC’s Christianization process. When questioned by the Mayor about the organization’s “prosthestizing [sic], preaching, trying to convert,” YFC CEO John Courtney (City of Winnipeg 2010) responded: We do it with full disclosure to parents, permission of their being involved in the program, but it’s a never manipulation or pressure thing. It’s an invitation. It’s an encouragement to say if you haven’t pursued a faith journey we think you should consider that… This notion of consent was integral to the apparent legitimacy of the project. Yet it ignored opponents who argued that cash-strapped governments should prioritize funding the existing infrastructure of Aboriginal-run, community-based youth programming in Winnipeg’s Aboriginal neighborhoods in order to reverse the harms caused by assimilationist policies. This opposition was grounded in an understanding of colonization as a process that continues to affect Indigenous peoples, and therefore requires concerted reversal or dismantling in the present. Marileen Bartlett, for example - speaking as the executive director of an Aboriginal employment development organization located steps from Higgins and Main - called for the land to be used in a way that reflects “a promise to our people that we are developing and we are moving forward” (City of Winnipeg 2010). This view contrasts sharply with that of the Mayor and others whose primary concern seems to have been that the past event of Residential Schooling need simply be avoided from now on. Proponents of the YFC project drew a sharp distinction between a historic moment of intolerant assimilationism and a contemporary moment of multicultural peace. Indeed, the view that contemporary Canada is encouraging of non-Western value systems, spiritualities, customs, and languages, that it promotes the right of distinct groups to practice and preserve their cultures as part of a broad mosaic, is a vociferously defended national pretension (Mackey

2002). Through this prism Aboriginal peoples are often understood as distinct cultures to be celebrated and valued alongside settler migrants from an array of homelands. Yet this view is contingent on a willful ignorance of the distinct status of Aboriginal peoples as the bearers of particular rights brokered through nation-to-nation treaty negotiations. As Mackey (2013, 52 in press) points out, Indigenous views of these treaty-defined partnerships tend to foreground “ongoing relationships of respect and mutuality” whereas interpretations by representatives of the settler state tend to insist primarily on the sovereignty of the Crown. The conflation of Aboriginal peoples with other Canadian ethnic groups helps to reinforce the latter through a process of leveling that defines all Canadians as equal, as the bearers of the same entitlements and assurances from the state. Not only does such a move work to erode the Canadian state’s legally enshrined obligations to Aboriginal peoples, it also reduces difference to a question of culture and ethnicity. In this schema a “politics of recognition” (Coulthard 2007; Fraser 1995) takes precedence over a politics of redress and equity. A pluralist logic of this sort was repeatedly used to justify the YFC initiative against the wishes of the leadership of Aboriginal community-based service organizations. Some of these groups were even reprimanded for having the audacity to request undue influence over government-funded services delivered to children in their neighborhoods, since that request supposedly infringed on YFC’s right to access government funding as a distinct cultural group. “Where are these voices when public dollars are pigeonholed for Aboriginal-only programs?” asked councilor Justin Swandel facetiously (City of Winnipeg 2010). “We fund many organizations in our City of Winnipeg,” insisted Mayor Sam Katz, “and I hope that most people know we fund the Aboriginal organizations as well” (City of Winnipeg 2010). Indeed, City Councilors seemed guided by a sense that no group possessed a unique claim to the land at Higgins Avenue and Main Street or to the city’s North End in general. When pushed in an interview to respond to claims that the new centre’s location was of particular importance to Aboriginal peoples, one Councilor (personal interview 2011) invoked the

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city’s motto, unum cum virtute multorum (which he translated as “one city with the strength and blessing of many”) and his own experience as an “ethno-cultural” settler to help explain his position. For me, being an ethno-cultural person, coming here when I was three years old from the Philippines, [the City’s motto] means that we’re now in one city with the strength of many cultures, and you know, beliefs, and that’s huge. So all I can say… is this area, Higgins and Main belongs to all of us, I think, it’s open to all groups… Because Winnipeg started from Higgins and Main, that’s the railroad tracks, and that’s where everyone took their first steps off the railroad tracks and they settled around the South, North Point Douglas area. Of course, not everyone arrived in Manitoba by train but it wasn’t through a formal Indigenous claim to the land that opponents of the YFC project voiced their concerns to City Council. Rather, they made the case that the corner of Higgins and Main is part of a predominantly Aboriginal place-based community and requested that the government recognize their unique status as colonized peoples with a rightful claim on governments to fund only culturally appropriate community-based programming in their neighborhoods. This demand was asserted above and beyond a mere right to exist and to have their own cultural institutions funded alongside settler groups within a liberal multicultural framework. Citing the Indian Residential School system and other “experiences of being colonized”, for example, Lucille Bruce, Executive Director of the Native Women’s Transition Centre, demanded that the City prioritize funding for “Aboriginal organizations that promote culturally relevant programming” over other modes of service delivery (City of Winnipeg 2010). This nuance, however, was either illegible to, or willfully ignored by the project’s proponents who relied on a construction of present-day Canada as a neutral non-colonial time space to help rationalize their investment. Colonial Space Winnipeg’s North End may be home to a large and diverse Aboriginal community but the area has

never been formally recognized as Aboriginal space. Government planning documents and initiatives have often informally noted and responded to the strong Aboriginal presence in the area but have never extended their recognition much beyond that. In general, the only spaces in contemporary Canada in which Aboriginal jurisdiction continues to be recognized are on its network of Indian Reserves (sometimes called First Nations), districts defined by the Indian Act (1985) as “tract[s] of land, the legal title to which is vested in Her Majesty, that [have] been set apart by Her Majesty for the use and benefit of a band.” This circumscribed division of space has obscured the idea that there are other places within the boundaries of the national territory in which governments might be obligated to negotiate with Aboriginal peoples. The view that reserves are the lone spaces where Aboriginal peoples are to have special jurisdiction has worked to render other spatial claims illegible or illegitimate. Indeed, the long (and continuing) process of territorialization by which the Canadian state has carved out a “spatial ontological separation” (Wainwright 2008: 21) between its space and the space of other sovereign entities is a process by which its hegemony over that territory has been secured and rendered commonsense. Within the field of that claimed territory it is generally only on spaces explicitly defined as Aboriginal that this state sovereignty understands itself as required to bend, albeit in limited ways. The YFC controversy demonstrates the potency of the view that outside of reserve territories, state and private actors are under no obligation to consult with Aboriginal peoples even before proceeding with projects that will bear directly on their communities. It is, of course, strictly speaking true that groups like YFC, CentreVenture and even the City of Winnipeg are not required to seek the explicit consent of area residents (Aboriginal or otherwise) before proceeding with a given development. It is also true that it is only on reserve lands that Aboriginal sovereignty carries any legal weight in Manitoba, since Métis title was extinguished by the Manitoba Act of 1870 and Cree and Ojibway title was extinguished by Treaty 1 in 1871. Nevertheless, since at least the 1970s, Winnipeg’s adjacent North and West Ends have developed as the single largest geographical concentration of Aboriginal

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people in the country. Today the district is home to a vast range of Aboriginal organizations and institutions, including as many as 70 community-based Aboriginal run or affiliated organizations (Silver 2009).

organizer reported that “Youth for Christ has still – to this day – not called any of us. The city has never come calling. The developer has never come calling. Nobody has ever come calling” (personal interview 2011).

Therefore, in many ways, a geographically and historically unique “structure of feeling” (Williams 1961) has emerged since the 1960s to produce the space as distinctly Aboriginal. The Indigenous character of Winnipeg’s Main Street, for example, is well established in Aboriginal cultural production, including at least two novels regularly included in Canadian high school and university curricula (Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s April Raintree and Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen). At the City Council meeting in which the YFC iniative was debated, nearly everyone who spoke against the project articulated a sense of ownership over the area and constructed a representation of an urban Aboriginal community attempting to reverse the harms of colonization through the production of a network of place-based Aboriginal-run institutions. The corner of Main and Higgins was repeatedly described as the geographic centre of these efforts. Both in interviews and council testimony, many described the corner as synonymous with a history of suffering but voiced optimism that positive investment had begun to mitigate the intensity of that association. The arrival of two major institutions at the intersection Thunderbird House (an Aboriginal spiritual centre) and the Aboriginal Centre of Winnipeg (in a repurposed Canadian Pacific Railway depot) [see figure 1] – was often described as a kind of Aboriginal reclamation of the area, as material evidence that different sorts of futures have begun to be brokered through these spaces. The sudden announcement that an outside group with ambitions to ‘reach’ Aboriginal youth would be moving in alarmed those who subscribed to this vision and expected that government-funded services there would be “culturally relevant” or at the very least respectful of Aboriginal cultures and accountable to Aboriginal people.

We think it is important to ask why YFC and its allies didn’t feel the need to consult with local Aboriginal constituencies. It is plausible that as an outside group – with few if any ties to the area – they were only passively acquainted with the institutional and service-providing landscape of the North End. Certainly the “regime of disappearance” that we describe above shapes conceptions of the area and it is conceivable that YFC officials were informed by a vision of the neighborhood as unruly, disorganized and dangerous rather than home to an impressive range of youth-serving agencies and programs or as a place where various Aboriginal constituencies had begun to articulate a sense of ownership. Yet it was not only YFC who did not consult with Aboriginal organizations or populations. There is abundant evidence that other players involved in bringing this project forward, including government officials, understood this place as a kind of urban wilderness, emptied of legitimate activities, overrun with danger and criminality, a place, in other words, where essentially nothing good was happening. With the field of intervention defined in this way it becomes possible to rationalize any kind of investment as improvement. This sentiment was articulated, for example, by one Councilor who acknowledged his unease with aggressive evangelism (“I think too extreme isn’t healthy”) but ultimately suggested that some form of intervention, however flawed, would be better than no intervention at all (personal interview 2011).

Yet neighborhood organizers told us that none of the tightly knit network of North End Aboriginal service agencies were consulted about the development before it was announced nor had any been contacted by the time we conducted interviews in late 2011. One

This inability for non-Aboriginal people to imagine an organized community and their apparent obliviousness to the need to gain community consent, cannot be separated from the historical production of the North End as a distinctly Aboriginal space within Winnipeg’s normatively white settler landscape. There is a long tradition of spatial negotiation in which “imperial eyes” (Pratt 1992) have gazed upon Native spaces and imagined emptiness, waste and the absence of a community with a legitimate interest. In North America and elsewhere, the Lockean view that land

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which had not been broken or cultivated (according to European definitions) was essentially land that was wasted and unpossessed, provided a compelling means for settlers to justify the seizure of Indigenous lands (Hall 2003). But Andrea Smith (2005) argues that the rendering of Native bodies and lands as inherently violable – in such a way that usual concepts of consent do not apply – is a continuous process under settler colonialism. Smith’s contention is interesting to ponder in the context of the YFC development where, as we’ve suggested, the marking of an area as at once Aboriginal, disorganized, and available, helped relieve the project’s proponents of the burden of asking for consent. The activists and organizers who stood up against the installation of the YFC facility articulated a politics of decolonization with a distinct territorial dimension. Their resistance reinforced a claim to the spaces of Winnipeg’s North End in general, and the corner of Main and Higgins in particular, to insist that in these spaces the old colonial pattern of assuming entitlement would not be tolerated. Through their claim to this space they began to demonstrate that any new process of “healing, reconciliation and renewal” would be contingent on Aboriginal peoples being treated as full partners and old colonial habits being acknowledged and unraveled.

1165) draws on the writings of one the MIR’s key intellectual leaders, Sadri Khiari, who insists that “territory is not pure materiality, a parcel of land which produces vegetables, a few watermelons, and zinc... territory is also a social relation, a mediation between humans.” Thus for Khiari, the assertion of a territorial claim is also a means of staking a claim against exclusion from the “history and civic life” of a society, a way of building a rampart against the demand that post-colonial migrants “integrate into a different history while forgetting their own.” Thus the pursuit of “a ‘territory’ of historical memory,” Kipfer summarizes, is a “key ingredient in the fight against the exclusion from history and politics”. Aboriginal people in Winnipeg’s North End have a decidedly different relationship to the national territory than do postcolonial migrants to France but Khairi’s assertion that territorial re-appropriation can be more broadly understood helps us think about how territory can also be thought of as lived space, as space that overflows the conventional boundaries of property and legal tenure. This is not to distract from the seriousness of largescale dispossession at the heart of settler colonialism, nor to replace a materialist politics of decolonization with a shallow politics of inclusion and recognition, but to call for a nuanced and expanded understanding of what a materialist anti-colonial politics of space and place might look like.

Their resistance also demonstrates that territorial claims of decolonization can take a variety of forms and need not be restricted to questions of land tenure. Fanon’s (2004) understanding of decolonization was rooted in a fundamentally materialist commitment to territorial re-appropriation (Kipfer 2011); decolonization, in his view, was contingent upon the re-seizure of occupied territory by the colonized and the eviction of the colonizer. But the moment of resistance we examine, while thoroughly anticolonial and materialist, does not seem to imply such a politics. Interesting in this context is Stefan Kipfer’s (2011) discussion of the politics of the Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) – an organization of post-colonial migrants in contemporary Paris – and their insistence that territorial “re-appropriation” as a strategy of decolonization need not always take the form of direct territorial seizure. Kipfer (2011:

If Aboriginal claims to Winnipeg’s North End lay outside of the boundaries of formal land tenure, how might a process of territorial appropriation, a particular kind of claim to the city, begin to be brokered? The fierce resistance mounted against the YFC project is one important indicator that such an appropriation of territory as lived space is already being manifested in contemporary Winnipeg. The insistence of neighborhood residents and leaders that they be participants in decisions about the kinds of things that happen in the spaces they inhabit is an important disruption of processes that have so often excluded them. Moreover, their refusal to tolerate the reinscription of well-established colonial patterns – be they missionary incursions, a failure to seek consent, or an inability to see districts occupied by Aboriginal people as organized and used space – offers an important opening for all of us to think about what

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decolonization might actually mean in the context of contemporary Canada. Conclusion We have shown above that state support for the Youth for Christ project in Winnipeg’s North End illustrates that persistent barriers continue to impede the process of “healing, reconciliation and renewal” promised in the Prime Minister’s apology. In contrast to Harper’s optimistic rhetoric we’ve shown a few examples of how a persistent climate of denial, disregard, and violence continues to shape relationships between Aboriginal peoples and settler Canadians. We’ve also shown how these processes are exacerbated by current neoliberal strategies of governance that enshrine redistribution, austerity, and privatization in the name of progress. And so, in this context, we think it is incumbent on all of us to ask what, precisely, is intended when representatives of the settler state call for a process of reconciliation and renewal. If the answer that we get – couched as they always are in diplomatic niceties - is that Aboriginal constituencies ought to reconcile themselves to the imperatives of the settler state then we ought to look elsewhere for ways to contribute to a process of rebuilding relationships between Aboriginal and settler constituencies. We think that genuine processes of decolonization can only begin once persistent colonial dynamics are acknowledged, interrupted and reversed. It seems to us that the resistance that emerged to confront YFC in Winnipeg is an important example of what such interruptions look like; the task for the rest of us remains to identify and support these interventions wherever they emerge. References Blomley N (2004) Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York and London: Routledge Boswell R (2012) Religion not important to most Canadians, although majority believe in God: poll. National Post April 7 http://life.nationalpost.

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