“[Within settler colonialism], land is what is most valuable, contested, required, both because settlers have made Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.“
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, No. 1 (2012): 5.
This is a public history project, undertaken by a settler. It aims to make the colonial history of Victoria visible to settlers, and show how violent land dispossession still shapes the city and its inhabitants today. Instead of passively knowing that Victoria is/was Lekwungen land, the viewer is confronted, in-situ, with exactly how colonial officials appropriated the place that they are standing in. The viewer may be uncomfortable, and make connections between historical land dispossession and the tactics used by settler-colonial authorities today. Every place in Victoria has a history of land dispossession from Indigenous peoples, whether it’s named after a surveyor or a place explicitly appropriated. Settlers have a responsibility to be honest about how they came to be in this place, and what allows them to remain here today.
The stickers are not placed by an institution or an organization, but by the public. The files for each sticker are here on the website, where anyone is free to take them and place them around the city. What the public does with this knowledge and this project is up to them.
This project is undertaken by a settler with the knowledge that it is not perfect, and may require editing, or rethinking in consultation with others. But it is also undertaken with the understanding that settlers have a responsibility to tell the stories of their own people and do something in the face of everyday colonialism, even if that action is imperfect.
háy̓sxʷ q̓ə.