Welcome to my Relational Infographic Time Machine! On this page you will find a representation of the Nisga’a Pole of Sag̱aw̓een. The idea of deconstructing the pole in this digital representation is delineating the cultural and social destruction of indigenous peoples by colonial genocide. The image of the pole bouncing around the screen is meant to show the pole existing in uncertain space, untethered from the people and land that it came from.
Please continue to scroll through this webpage, where you’ll find the rest of the time machine, orgainized in sections from page to page.
Shown on this page is the Royal Ontario Museum being built around one of the totem poles in the 1930s (1).
(1) Royal Ontario Musuem. https://twitter.com/ROMtoronto/status/580028945774571521.
George Baird et al., “The Future of Ontario Place,” Future of Ontario Place, accessed April 22, 2024,
https://futureofontarioplace.org/explore/archives.
The linkage between the totem poles at the Royal Ontario Museum and the demise (and potential resurgence) of Ontario Place is not one of obvious similarity. The totem poles are objects taken from their place of origin on the west coast, historical objects that are the bounty of colonial appropriation. In contrast, Ontario Place is an urban recreational hub, existing both as an architectural object and ecological construct. Referencing the map shown on the above page though, they both can be categorized in a position that is informed by state control, capital, urbanization, and environmental destruction.
First and foremost for the totem poles is their relationship to colonization. This almost need not be said, considering that the only reason for their location in the ROYAL Ontario Museum is the forced displacement of indigenous objects from their home into centers of colonial power, as in the ROM. A useful lens for looking at the totem poles in the context of the ROM is Glen Couthard’s Red Skin, White Mask. This positioning of the totem poles in the ROM precedes the concepts outlined in Couthard’s text by thirty or forty years, but nonetheless in viewing them in a contemporary context Couthard’s ideas on the “politics of recognition” becomes relevant[1]. Proponents of liberal pluralism might argue that the location of the poles in the ROM is a showing of representation of indigenous culture through artefacts in a canadian cultural hub. Through the lens of Red Skin, White Mask that assertion is problematized by the reality of the poles being representations of the genocidal assimilationist policies of the canadian state prior to 1971[2]. Looking at the diagram from the previous page again, the aspect of state control in relation to colonization becomes apparent.
The current location of the totem poles, both temporally and spatially can be viewed through the context Henri Lefebvre’s Urban Revolution as a rendering of something not necessarily made obvious in his text. While he creates the signposts of the ongoing process of urbanization, from the political city-mercantile city-industrial city-critical zone with the transition from agrarian to urban mixed in between mercantile and industrial, it feels like there is a gap where the process of colonization is not accounted for[3]. When settlers came to North America and began the process of settlement, displacement, and genocide indigenous people were not occupying cities in the same way Lefebvre conceptualizes the urban fabric of europe[4]. Couthard refers to indigenous structures as “place-based, non-state modes of self-sufficient indigenous economic, political, and social activity”[5]. These conceptions seem to fall outside of Lefebvre’s hypothesis of the process of urbanization. The power structures central to the urban are not present in the same way, and thus it is unclear where the totem poles fit spatially in the urban fabric. Clearly as objects they are in the ROM, in the center of a city that is somewhere inbetween the industrial city and the critical zone[6].But temporally and in a more esoteric sense they exist outside of Lefebvre’s linear delineation of the urban. The totem poles were in a sense ripped from their true place then placed in a colonial institution that is either perversely assimilationist or a perverse attempt at liberal pluralism.
The development of Ontario Place is an example of a failed combination between state-funded recreational infrastructure and private capital. With this context, Ontario Place can be interrogated with an eye to the development happening in the global south that Lukasz Stanek discusses in Architecture in Global Socialism.What might have happened to Ontario Place if there was an injection of nonaligned Yugoslavian architects and development? With the struggles faced by Ontario Place in the 1980s with lack of funding that forced it into a position of pivoting towards a waterpark 1992 and demolishing and replacing the Forum with the Molson Amphitheater in 1994, maybe something similar to Non-Aligned infrastructural assistance could have been leveraged to prevent the current predicament of an expensive, ecologically destructive, privately owned spa being built on the landscape that Michael Hough designed as utopian public space[7] [8].
[1] Couthard, 3.
[2] Ibid, 4.
[3] Lefebvre, 15.
[4] Lefebvre, 3
[5] Couthard, 11.
[6] Lefebvre, 15.
[7] Baird et al.
[8] Stanek 6.
In the introduction to “Architecture in Global Socialism”, Lukasz Stanek provides an overview of the role that socialist architectural expertise played in the Global South during the Cold War. Stanek emphasizes the respect shown towards local architectural heritage and the agency of local architects, seen in the quote from the first page: “I remember very well these Eastern European architects, because it was the first and last time that a white man had an African boss in Ghana”[1]
Stanek begins by introducing the key players and geopolitical context, with the involvement of architects and planners from Eastern European socialist countries, particularly the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Poland, who offered their expertise to nations in the Global South seeking alternatives to Western models of development[2]. This expertise flowed along the routes of the world socialist system[3].
The chapter focuses on five cities, Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. The involvement of Eastern European architects offered a means to achieve emancipatory aspirations, providing technical knowledge and an alternative model for urban development[4]
Stanek provides insights into the complex geopolitical landscape of the time, discussing the Non-Aligned Movement and how it intersected with the interests of socialist Eastern European countries[5]. The pursuit of independent paths by countries like Ghana and Yugoslavia is highlighted, showcasing their desire to navigate between the capitalist West and the socialist East.
[1] Stanek, 1.
[2] Ibid, 2
[3] Ibid.
[4] Stanek, 4.
[5] Ibid, 7.
In “From the to Urban Society” Lefebvre lays out his hypothesis for the movement from agrarian society to full urban society. To Lefebvre, urban society is “a society that results from a process of complete urbanization”[1].
He goes on to discuss the temporal, and spatial nature of urbanization, which is represented as an axis from 0 to 100%[2]. Zero represents complete absence of urbanization, or “pure nature” while 100% is the completed process of total urbanization[3]. This leads to the establishment of “sign posts” to the “urban phenomenon”[4].
The first sign post in Lefebvre’s movement towards urbanization is the political city, which he contends is the first incarnation of the urban, following the historical “establishment of organized social life, agriculture, and the village.”[5]. The political city is administrative, and occupied primarily by priests, nobles, royalty, military leaders, etc, but also workers that allow the machinations of the political administration (taxes, laws, material goods) function[6].
The next sign post is the merchant city, which emerges as trade and exchange make their way into the city from the peripheries[7]. Lefebvre characterizes this as a class struggle of sorts, with the existing power structure of the political city resisting the coup of merchants beginning to subsume their administrative regime[8]. In this process commercial exchange becomes a central structural and formal organizational logic of cities, and struggle for power with political centers proliferates[9].
The industrial city is the successor to the merchant city, and like the struggle between the political city and merchant the industrial city is in conflict with merchant city[10]. Lefebvre characterizes this as the necessity of industrial production to locate labour and capital, which exist in abundance in the city[11]. An important aspect of this transition is what Lefebvre refers to as “implosion-explosion”, meaning: “the tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth,goods, objects, instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space.”[12].
The Industrial city leads to what Lefebvre calls the critical zone. The critical zone is as Lefebvre calls it, “a black box” where we see what goes in and sometimes what comes out but what happens within is a mystery[13]. The urban proliferates in a theoretical sense, subsuming everything, with the city just a typological object within the urban.
[1] Lefebvre, 1.
[2] Ibid, 7.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid, 8
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, 9.
[8] Ibid, 10.
[9] Ibid, 11.
[10] Ibid, 13.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid, 14.
[13] Ibid, 17.
Glen Couthard’s Introduction of Red Skin, White Mask begins with a declaration of the from the Dene of the NWT regarding their self-determination, in the context of the positioning of indigenous self-determination in the “language of recognition”[1]. Couthard is analyzing the canadian state’s positioning of assimilationist policy (pre-1969), and the subsequent language and policy that is in the “vernacular of mutual recognition”[2].
Couthard’s criticism is focused on the aforementioned recognition, which is now purposed as a liberal pluralism that attempts to reconcile indigenous nationhood within frameworks of legal and political systems within the canadian nationstate[3]. This is characterized by a shift in the modus operandi of the canadian state after its failed implementation of the “white paper” in 1969, a legal document that was proposed “deployment of state power geared around genocidal practices of forced exclusion and assimilation”[4].
Couthard delves into three watershed moments of indigenous resistance that led to the shelving of the “white paper” in 1971:
1. Indigenous rejection of the proposals in the “white paper” by the Assembly of First Nations (then the National Indian Brotherhood) – “We view this as a policy designed to divest us of our aboriginal. . . rights. If we accept this policy, and in the process lose our rights and our lands, we become willing partners in cultural genocide. This we cannot do.”[5]
2. The 1973 Supreme Court Calder Decision, in which the Nisga’a hereditary chief Frank Calder made legal claims to the un-extinguished territories of his nation in British Columbia, and while it was technically defeated in the courts, three of the six justices presiding ruled that the Nisga’a did indeed hold land rights to the contested territory prior to contact[6].
3. A cluster of events, consisting of but not limited to resistance by Metis, Dene, and Inuit peoples in the 1970s to a Canadian Government proposal to build an enormous natural gas pipeline across their traditional territories, as well as Northern Quebec Cree people’s resistance to massive hydroelectric dam development in the James Bay region[7].
Couthard then goes into the connection between Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation and its relationship to settler colonialism, both critiquing its scope and showing its potential value in analyzing canadian colonization[8]. Marx’s excavation of the transition from feudal society to capitalism as a parallel to colonization is of interest to Couthard[9]. He also looks at Kropotkin’s critique of Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation, where Kropotkin says the justification in developmentalist terms the violent dispossession of indigenous people[10].
Couthard also discusses Franz Fanon’s ideas of the maintenance of settler colonial hegemony requiring the production of colonized subjects[11]. Fanon proposes, in line with Couthards criticism of liberal pluralism, the regime of identity, culture, and recognition by way of it taking away focus from full class and liberation[12]
[1] Couthard, 1.
[2] Ibid, 2.
[3] Ibid, 3.
[4] Ibid, 4.
[5] Ibid, 5
[6] Ibid, 5.
[7] Ibid, 5.
[8] Ibid, 7.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid, 11.
[11] Ibid, 16.
[12] Ibid, 18.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis ; University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
George Baird et al., “The Future of Ontario Place,” Future of Ontario Place, accessed April 22, 2024,
https://futureofontarioplace.org/explore/archives.
Henri Lefebvre. “From the City to Urban Society.” In The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Royal Ontario Musuem, Totem Pole construction. https://twitter.com/ROMtoronto/status/580028945774571521.
Stanek, Łukasz. Architecture in Global Socialism : Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
With this assignment, I attempted to draw together concepts of resistance to colonization (Couthard) with the larger more theoretical concepts of the urban (Lefebvre), as well as some conceptions of global socialism that I find interesting (Stanek). Urbanization and Stanek go together pretty obviously, but I wanted to try and draw some parallels between Couthard’s ideas of the politics of recognition and the insidious nature of liberal pluralism in relation to Lefebvre’s hypothesis of the process of urbanization. Visually, I felt that the flow of this webpage allowed for some fun experiential qualities, as well as an opportunity to explore a new medium to express ideas and concepts.