At The Edge Of Canada: Indigenous Research
February 12, 2018
Today our guest is Cree PhD candidate in Indigenous Literature at the University of British Columbia and Instructor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba: Dallas Hunt. We host a special hour-long LIVE! broadcast of At the Edge of Canada in the UMFM studios to discuss the fallout and response to the acquittal of Gerald Stanley in his second degree murder trail in the death of Colton Boushie from Red Pheasant FN in west-central Saskatchewan. Dallas is an established voice on Indigenous issues in the Indigenous intellectual community, in the institution and on social media. We work backwards form the present day, addressing critiques and alayses of the acquittal that are focused on the juicdical proceedings to the protests of the verdict to the defense counsel’s strategy to the state of Indigenous/Non-Indigenous relations pre and post trial. We dig into the social actions that took place in Canadian urban centres and First Nation communities in response to the astounding not-guilty verdict on Feb. 10, including the march on the law courts that transpired in Winnipeg. We dish about the case: the preposterity of Stanley’s defense, the hang-fire theory, settler-colonial biopolitics since Treaty 6 was made, and we intellectualize the spectral boundaries of the Canadian settler imaginary and the sites accorded to Indigenous youth that constitue real violence for imagined threats.
Dallas and his colleague in the Department of Native Studies, Dr. Gina Starblanket, also penned an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail on Feb. 13 that discusses similar ideas.