Indigenous Movement, Settler Colonialism: A History of Tlicho Dene Continuity through Travel

Abstract

Since time immemorial, Indigenous Dene Peoples have traveled ancestral routes throughout what is currently northern Canada and interior Alaska. Tłįchǫ Dene have continued to cultivate an identity as travelers throughout a history of ecological change and the settler ideology of Canadian colonialism. In this article, I aim to contribute to scholarship on Tłįchǫ travel and history by focusing on an additional dimension of movement: materiality. I have previously written about Tłįchǫ ecological ontologies relating to Indigenous conceptions of personhood in a more-than-human-world. In this article I apply my understanding of Tłįchǫ ontologies to the material dimensions of movement on the land, past and present, revealing an ontological, ecological, and spiritual continuity despite—although adapted in response to—settler-colonialism and climate change.

Keywords: :

• materiality
• travel
• pilgrimage
• Indigenous religion
• ontology
• settler-colonialism
• Catholicism
• Indian Residential Schools
• Climate Change.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David S. Walsh

David S. Walsh is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on Indigenous religious traditions, religion and the environment, colonialism, and method and theory. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Arizona State University and an MA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is currently completing a book manuscript pertaining to his ethnographic research with Tłįchǫ Dene on their traditional environmental relationships, spirituality, and foodways in the era of climate change. [email protected]