42x81 presents: Melissa Adler x David Janzen

Waterways play a paradoxical role in Indigenous-settler relations. As Metis-feminist scholar Zoe Todd writes: ‘Rivers invited colonial movement into Indigenous territories throughout the historical colonial period in North America. And today, rivers also invite resistance to colonialism.’ We suggest that it is not only rivers themselves, but a particular technology, the canoe, that enables this dual relation of ‘invitation’ and ‘resistance’. This presentation uses an object—an aluminum canoe framed by visual, sonic, and poetic elements—to invite reflections on the nature of the canoe: its historical role in shaping Southwestern Ontario, its problematic symbolism in Canadian culture, and its complex meaning in the context of settler colonialism's ongoing destruction of waterways and the human and more-than-human lives that depend on them.

David Janzen writes and teaches about land, environment, and crisis. His creative work has been recognized by the EVENT Creative Non-Fiction Prize, the CV2 Young Buck Poetry Prize, the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award, and received an Honourable Mention from the National Magazine Awards. He lives in London, ON.

Melissa Adler is an Associate Professor at Western University (London, Ontario) in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies and the author of Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge, published by Fordham University Press in 2017.

"I wonder, what if all the people who live here felt like they belonged to the river? —Not as in owning or being owned, but as in being of and being with, as in honouring and trusting the queerness of the river's course, as in being delighted by being bewildered, and turning toward what the river knows about desire, agony, devotion, and place."