I’m walking up the mont Royal, because I never saw a hill I didn’t want to walk up. Most of my international travelling is for work: if I want a holiday, a break, some rest, then I go somewhere in Scotland with hills and walk up them. A big part of me wants to learn how to walk up biggest and bigger hills, hills without trails and with risky ridges, that have names on lists that I can tick off, but mostly I’m satisfied just getting up somewhere where the air is clearer and I can see a long way. Anyway, I’m walking up [the mont Royal, which is wooded and has a few quiet trails and raccoons that come out at dusk, and I’m sweating a lot, because I’m Scottish and have a very fast metabolism and can’t stop buying books that I then have to carry around. I kid myself that I’m not trying to get to the summit, just following dirt paths through the woods, but of course they keep tending upwards and eventually I find myself on the pavement with the binoculars and the car parks and the big metal cross that, of course, is on top. The view is grand.

It feels good to be back in a big city. I’m from a tiny island (700 folk when I was growing up, 500 now), and big cities have always had mythical glamour for me: the places where everything happens. These days, Edinburgh is well big enough for me, but I still like being in the metropolis for a few days. Montréal, built on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) territory, has festivals, big museums, a European-style old town, a huge gay village with rainbow banners, a hipster quarter trying to take over a historic Hasidic neighbourhood, and lots of great vegan restaurants (and other kinds, but I like eating vegan here, because they do it so much better). It’s currently celebrating its 375th anniversary (i.e., 375 years since a beginning of genocide) alongside Canada’s 150th (i.e., 150 years since the major effort to legitimise land theft and genocide through the construction of a federal nation-state). Alongside the Outriders trip, I’m here for Metropolis Bleu / Blue Met, the city’s spring literary festival. I’ve performed poetry in an iconic gay strip bar (it was literally 5 minutes after the poetry until the boys started coming out), read literary smut alongside luminaries of Canadian literature (Ann-Marie MacDonald reading the censored bits of Anne Frank’s diary, George Elliott Clarke reading Judy Bloom), argued revolutionary theory with friends I met on the internet, watched brilliant people discuss important things about language and politics and life, struggled to reconcile the pleasure I’m having with the history that’s made it possible (hint: it’s unreconcilable), stayed up past my bedtime.

What I like best is being in a bilingual city again. It’s made me determined to learn or relearn a third language that’s more distant from English and Scots. I like sitting in public, and listening to people switch between languages, picking the language that can best express what they’re thinking. Often, especially on the busses, something else gets mixed in with the English and French. The longer I’m here, the more my brain tentatively switches over into my rusty French: by the time I leave, I can manage lurching functional conversations for a whole minute or two before resorting to “désolé, je parle seulement un peu français, parlez vous anglais?” What I most want British people to understand about language is that this, everywhere, is the global norm. The majority of the world’s people speak more than one language and switch between them with relative ease. Often there’s three or four; often, there’s a local language, a lingua franca for the region, and other stuff besides. It’s Britain (and to a lesser degree the US) that’s weird in being so hopelessly monoglot, a depriving situation that’s maintained by education and government policy.

The main event I’m at Blue Met for is a collaboration with the British Sign Language poet Paul Scott and the Scottish-based English language poet Rachel Amey. As part of an EIBF exchange with Blue Met, we’ve put together a performance of poems across our three languages, each speaking to the other about language, identity, and community. (Three performers, both Deaf and hearing, came to Edinburgh last year.) Our performance has a lovely and welcoming audience, mixed Deaf and hearing, with many languages of their own; I’m struck by how relaxing it all feels. The room is full of exciting language, so it’s not so much the periods of (to my hearing ears) aural quiet in Paul’s poems, but rather the space we’re all giving each other, literal and metaphorical. We alternate between performers and languages, which means that between each poem we have to move around microphones, stands and positioning of interpreters: it might look a little awkward, but it gives each poem room to breathe and the audience room to think.

We’ve planned the performance in a particular way: Paul’s signed introductions to the poems are voiced by an English language interpreter, but his poems are not; my Scots poems and Rachel’s English poems are signed into ASL by two different interpreters, but my Scots is not given an English translation. This means that the only audience who gets the full “text” of the poems is the signing audience, but as no-one in the room, not even us, communicates in all of English, Scots, BSL and ASL, no-one has full “access” the entirety of each poem in all its effects. This set-up also privileges the marginalised languages in the space over the dominant languages, with the signed languages taking the strongest precedence. In all this, we’re both attempting to address some social power imbalances and also invite the audience into our language: translation, in some contexts, provides access, but it can also erase a less powerful language, and you always have to ask who is being given access to what. We especially wanted to hearing audience to work hard to perceive the power and precision of Paul’s BSL poetry, without being given the ease of an English gloss that would lose so much of the poetry-in-motion and subtle linguistic work.

These subjects come up in the post-performance discussion, along with many others, animated brilliantly by Daz Saunders. The previous performance took a different approach, integrating the three artists into one show rather than weaving back and forth between them. But each played with how their works could provide points of access: poet and sound artist Kaie Kellough placed a speaker facing the floor so that vibrations could be felt; one poet, Pamela E Witcher, voiced a scream for another, Tanya Evanson, along with many other effects. Kaie described this as “opening and closing different doors for different people”. I agreed, trying to express something I’d been feeling for a while, saying: “I think universal access is a bit of a myth. Not everyone can access everything. Different people have different abilities and rights of access. And what English is, what European nation-state languages are, are universalising attempts to enable everyone to communicate with everyone about everything, to make all knowledge and experience open to everyone. But what that actually does is flatten things out, erase many types of language and knowledge, and disguise the face that many people are still left out. When i talk about access, I don’t want that: I want an approach that recognises the vital differences between us, not trying to close those gaps, but just to bridge them.” (I didn’t put it that fluently but.)

I was influenced in saying this by an event that I’d been to the previous day, the award ceremony for the First Peoples Literary Prize, won this year by the Ojibwe novelist David Treuer. He said several things in the discussion with Duncan McCue about his work that struck me powerfully. One was describing a previous novel in which he’d argued with an editor to keep vital sections of dialogue in Ojibwe without an English translation. “If Joyce can use Latin and Mann can use French, I can use Ojibwe,” he said. “If readers want to know the dialogue, there’s an easy answer: they can learn Ojibwe. It’s for my readers to come to where my novel is.” He also returned several times to his refusal to become what he described as a “Native Informant”, not wanting to be the white/colonising world’s window into indigenous cultural practices, not wanting to have to explain himself and his culture to that audience. “I don’t describe ceremony in my books,” he said. “That’s for us.” There are limits to what I have access to, to what I can know, to what I have a role in.

I carry these words while visiting museums in Montréal. The Musée de Beaux-Arts advertised recent work it had done with indigenous communities on the curation of both its Inuit and its early settler Canadian art collections. The Inuit art exhibition is very beautiful and diverse, interpreted with sensitivity, giving cultural and historical context to carving and print-work from the last century, both contemporary and traditional and blends of the two. In particular, the interpretation discusses the economic role of Inuit art, how it consciously negotiated between traditional practice and commercial demand, and how it has in part been shaped by the economic effects of colonialism, with art becoming an essential economic practice for many people. There are similar strains to be found in the beautiful Ashukan Cultural Space, an indigenous-run nonprofit space in the old town with excellent exhibitions. I find myself wishing that European and settler-American contemporary art were as conscious about its relationships with money: too often we don’t face up to the face that our practices are enabled, supported and shaped by concentrations of wealth. There’s a continuing false belief that art is supposed to be special and separate from commerce and business, which belief allows, essentially, rich philanthropists and central government policy to dictate what art gets made. By admitting your dependence on finance you can take a more conscious role in finding agency in your art, I think, and also know more clearly what it is you want and need to keep to yourself and your community, away from outside eyes and money.

The approach taken in the “Founding Identities” exhibition of early settler-Canadian art is to juxtapose these pieces by contemporary art and commentary from indigenous artists. These given critical insight into the (often highly colonial) work in these displays. A similar approach is taken in the Musée McCord, a cultural history museum with a significant collection of indigenous life and artwork from across Canada: the displays have been developed in consultation with indigenous communities, and are given critical context by contemporary indigenous artists. This is in line with new approaches to museum curation, sometimes called decolonising. (See, e.g. Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums.) I appreciate the approach, but am not in a position to judge its effectiveness. At its best, it seems crucial to bringing vital historical understanding to the art, craft and life of the colonial period (which is ongoing), as well as cultural sensitivity in what is displayed; more cynically, though, it enables white people like me to enjoy consuming the art and artefacts and knowledge while feeling a bit less guilty. I’m not trying to say it’s one or the other; it may well be both. When thinking about such things from my own political perspective and identities, I don’t think these questions are ever settled: the move is part of a process, and how much good that process does depends on ongoing organisation. (This insight in particular is drawn from Dr Darcy Leigh’s work, Post-liberal agency: decolonizing politics and universities in the Canadian Arctic, which has also extensively informed my approach throughout this project.)

In the Never Apart Centre, an LGBT+ and social justice-focussed gallery in the north part of the city, I find another approach again. One of their current exhibitions is Two-Spirit Sur-Thrivance, featuring a range of work from indigenous Two-Spirit artists. The exhibition is full of sex, subversion, mourning, anger, trauma, self-care, recovery and beauty. I walk around and around it loving and thinking. In particular I’m drawn to Kent Monkman, a multimedia artist known for large-scale canvasses in a traditional style which feature deliciously and wickedly subversive details, and to Dayna Danger, whose sexually-confronting work also displays an extraordinary will to care. In a split-screen video featuring strap-on caribou horns, I’m most struck by extended and not-particularly-explicit scenes of neck massage. My neck hurts. Here, the artwork is restlessly contemporary, and connects directly to communities I’m part of, while also highlighting the differences and intersections of race and marginalisation.

Back at Blue Met, I’m thinking through these questions again during a panel discussion on queer pasts and presents with Ann-Marie MacDonald, Kai Cheng Thom and Nick Comila. They each discuss their own practice and history, but conversation regularly turns to the role of art and literature in resistant communities, and the complexities that involves. In particular, queer or LGBT+ art is now at an odd cultural moment where it is, at least superficially, welcomed and often celebrated, though many (particularly working class, radicalised and disabled LGBT+ people) are deliberately left out of that celebration. Ann-Marie said, “What are you supposed to do, when everyone now loves you, but you still hate yourself?” — a hate that has come in part because the world hated you. And, loving this insight, I asked “What are you supposed to do, when everyone supposedly loves you, but actually the world is still trying to kill you? When you still get the impression that everyone still wants your people dead? And what do you do when you’re given a little bit of cultural space, but you know that’s all you’re getting, and it might reinforce those structures that want you dead?” One of the many wise things she said was, “You take that land you’ve won, you dig in, you build your bulwark there, and then you start to expand your territory.” Kai Cheng agreed and added, “And if that’s not working, you can take out a grenade and put it on that land and blow it up.” Similarly, a bit of wisdom I’ll treasure is Ann-Marie saying, “We need good manners or else we’d all just be stabbing everyone in the eye with a fork. And one of the great things about manners is that they give you time to work out who’s a friend and who’s an enemy.” Again, Kai Cheng agreed and added, “And then if you need to you can stab them in the eye with a fork.” In relating this, I don’t want to set up a false binary between the two speakers: they both agreed with and complemented each other, sharing the needed learning.

I want to bring to the surface what’s probably already clear: I’m trying to find ways in or parallels to decolonial politics from my own experience. I’m also trying to reflect back on the situation I’ve chosen in this project: to be a white writer travelling in colonised land and trying to learn about decolonial politics, to try to do something decent with that. To be driven by a desire to know and to be unsure what or how I can know. This is perilous business and I fully expect to make bad mistakes. And what I’m not trying to do is to say that different political struggles are the same, because they’re not. I remember something that Katherena said in one of our many wide-ranging conversations, that people coming from different political struggles can draw on that as a place of empathy. Not a way of claiming someone else’s struggle as our own, but of recognising shared difference and the necessity of solidarity. This is an old insight that many have won in different ways: it’s worth reading more of John Donne’s meditation on solidarity beyond the famous epithets:

No man is an island,  entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were;  any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors.  Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.

(from Meditation 17)

When listening to Layli Long Soldier discuss her book WHEREAS, which among many other things talks about the role of apology in the world, and about good and bad apologies, she suggested that what she’s looking for first from the colonising world is “freedom from denial”. I find this useful and necessary, this conception of freedom, and for me it ties into an insight that comes up again and again in different political struggles: that no-one is free until we are all free, and that my freedom depends on yours. To see and to try to heal the parts of my life which take life away from you is to work for freedom for myself; to struggle for my freedom is to struggle for yours, when that struggle recognises shared difference and the different things we share. But this work doesn’t end, and the answers aren’t that easy, and there’s always mistakes to apologise for and new learning to do. And it’s not for any of us to know everything.

I’m in a cemetery just outside of Mantayo Seepee / Churchill, Manitoba, on the edge of Kîhcikamîy / Hudson Bay, in Ininiwak / Cree traditional territory. The snow has drifted several feet deep in places, covering many of the stones and wooden crosses, but it’s packed and frozen enough that in most places I can walk on it. I try to step lightly. Just north, beyond the fence, across the snow-drifted rocks, are hundreds of miles of frozen ocean. It’s -15 degrees out, minus a few more for wind chill. Every body surface I can cover is covered, most with four layers, and my cheeks are stinging with cold. There’s a track of something leaving over the drifts — maybe an arctic fox, maybe a rabbit or hare. There are bird tracks too: snow bunting, I think, and maybe some from one of the big, human-sounding ravens that’s been flying overhead. I look down at the gravestones: the surnames are Flett, Oman, Sinclair, Spence. Names from home.

We’ve been here for three days, towards the end of the long freeze, well in the off-season, after the best polar bear watching and before the best beluga watching. The national parks are closed, and only a couple of guides are still available. It’s a bad time for tourism and a good time for social history: it’s easier to find folk with time to chat about themselves and about history.

But there’s plenty still here to see: We’ve visited the Itsanitaq Museum, which has an extraordinary collection of Inuit art collected by the Catholic church, and the Arctic Trading Company, which still serves as a traditional trading post for furs and artwork, and where we were shown the beadwork, tufting and slipper-making workshop, but which also sells cuddly polar bears and t-shirts. We ate at Gypsy’s, which does pretty spectacular fried chicken and apple fritters. (Full disclosure: that’s true, but I also got given a donut for saying that.) We drove out to the Northern Studies Centre, past shipwreck, plane crash, and abandoned rocket testing site. We visited the oldest prefrabricated building in Canada, an Anglican church with ornate stained glass. I rode around the boreal forest, right agaisnt the tree line, in a dog sled. We’ve hiked out through the snow to the very point of Cape Merry, where the frozen Churchill River meets the frozen bay, and where we can just see the snowed-in buildings of Prince of Wales Fort across the ice. If we had the energy, the gear and the company, we could walk there straight across the river.

In all the places we’ve visited, I’ve chatted to folk about my research. I’ve talked about Orkney, which, unusually for people halfway round the world, most folk here have heard of (there’s a street named Orcade Bay), about tracking the Hudson Bay workers and their descendants, about wanting to tell stories from here back towards my own home. Mostly, folk are cautiously curious. I grew up on an island of 700 folk, and Churchill has 900, so I’m assuming that word gets around about who the very tall person who’s chosen an odd time to come is.

And as I think about this, I realise what I’m sounding most like, with my too-big smile and my eagerness to talk about my project: the Americans and Canadians who would visit Westray, where I grew up, to look through the kirkyards and local history archives in search of their ancestors. I’m doing it the wrong way round, but it’s just as strange a pursuit, and my preconceptions are probably just as misguided. I start to feel embarrassed, and spend more time looking at the snow.

One big thing is different from when I was growing up, though: Facebook. I join the Churchill Online Bulletin Board, where folk post local events, lost and found items, and general news. At the encouragement of a couple of locals I met, I post there about my project, and soon the comments are filled with people descended from Orkney folk, amused to hear about their namesakes in Scotland. Patricia Sinclair Kandiurin wants her Sinclair castle back and to know what her tartan is; for once, I think, yes, go you, please take the castle, I’ll help.

At the same time, I’m posting about the project in various Orkney groups and reaching out to contacts on Facebook there. The two conversations are mirrors of each other: Orcadians sharing what they know of ancestors who travelled over; Churchill folk sharing what they know of ancestors who stayed. There are Métis, Cree, Dene and Inuit folk here with Orkney names. Folk on both sides of the Atlantic want to hear about their cousins. I’m starting to introduce them to each other, and I’d like to hear about the conversations that result: conversations across climates, communities, and colonisation.

I’ve been tracing some more historical connections, too. Pam Eyland told me about Alexander Kennedy Isbister, currently being celebrated during the 140th anniversary of the University of Manitoba. The Métis son of an Orkneyman, he was born on the Bay, but was sent to Orkney, to the school in St Margaret’s Hope, for a few years of education. (Do any Orkney folk know which building was the school in the 1820s?) He eventually worked for the HBC himself, but ended up quitting due to the racial discrimination he faced. He travelled back to Scotland for study at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and became a very successful lawyer working mostly in England. He became an outspoken advocate for progressive causes, particularly Métis rights. And the reason for the University’s celebration is that he left a major bequest for scholarships for students that was explicitly regardless of gender, race or creed: an early mission to diversify the student population and make education accessible to all.

I want to know so much more about this man. What it was like for him as a lawyer in England, yes, but even more so, what was it like for him as a child in the Hope? How was he received by the community there? What was the attitude of Orkney families to the HBC men’s indigenous wives? What was the men’s attitude? Most importantly, what were the experiences of the wives and children? I’ve been told that some of them came back to Orkney and stayed, although I haven’t found specific histories and biographies yet: I very much want to hear more. As well as Orkney folk having First Nations and Métis cousins and namesakes here, who from those people stayed in Orkney, or Scotland more widely?

I keep making comparisons to Westray as I walk around Churchill. There are many connections. The arctic terns that come here in the snow-free summer are in Orkney, especially Papa Westray, in spring: at home they are pickiternos; here one of their names is iniqqutailaq. Both are small communities on the edge of their country; both are now tourism-dominated economies, with the public sector the other major employer, plus folk working in traditional economic activity and a bit of larger industrial work. Both were once a major naval base. Both have a government allowance for distant living. There’s only two main roads. Everyone has a car. Folk have multiple jobs: you keep seeing the same faces in different places; some shops and businesses just operate out of people’s homes. There are locally-organised cultural events that bring everyone together

A lot of this is common to many small rural communities, but I think there are some elements that belong to places on the edge. I fancy, too, that I can see a link between the mannerisms and ways of talking: the driest and most deadpan humour I know, conversations that don’t waste words at all but seem to get everything organised very quickly, a quiet amusement at the things incomers get up to, keen observation, the habit of asking you questions until you work out how we’re connected and placed in relation to each other, which at home we call “speiran at”. As always, this could be as much preconception as reality. And for all those connections, there are enormous differences: bigger than the ice sheets, the two different legacies of colonialism, where the profit was made and where the destruction was enacted.

As with Winnipeg, I catch myself taking pride in the connections, and then think hard about in what that pride is based. Here, though, I’m finding more layers and complexities. Colonialism is many-layered and decolonisation can’t be centred around white consciousness and white guilt. There are some folk here keen to hear about Orkney, and who want to know about those ancestors too; there are some folk here who’ve already visited. There are folk like Alexander Selkirk who chose to stay in the UK, but remained attached to Métis identity and Métis rights. The stories are not one-dimensional. Though I’m part of it, how the story continues to be told is mostly not for me to say.

Why am I writing, then? I’m well aware that my own project has its own colonial layers: five Scottish writers exploring the Americas and bringing back tales. I have my own issues to work through and my own learning to do, but I don’t want to take up more space that I should. As I’ve written before, I think it’s vital for Scottish folk (for all folk from colonising nations) to be free from denial about how they have profited and how they continue to profit from ongoing colonial processes, and that involves doing some of this work. I want Scotland to recognise its part in this, and to know that colonialism is a huge and ongoing process (and one that’s different and more extensive, though related, to what the Gàidhealtachd went through), and to understand the extent of the damage and the necessity of reparation. I haven’t talked a great deal about the details of this, because again it’s not my story to tell. Here are three books I’m reading at the moment that I strongly recommend:

•  This Accident of Being Lost, knife-sharp contemporary stories and songs by Nishbaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Decolonial love stories and discomforting provocations
• A Two-Spirit Journey, the autobiography of a lesbian Ojibwa-Cree elder, Ma-Nee Chacaby, with Mary Louisa Plummer. An starkly and compassionately honest narrative of trauma and recovery.
• Voices from Hudson Bay, an oral history of Cree elders from York Factory, an HBC post and settlement just round the bay from Churchill.