Unsettling Canadian Art History, edited by Erin Morton, is a significant contribution to the fields of art history and Canadian studies. The book’s stated goal is “to offer antiracist, decolonial, feminist, and queer, trans, and Two-Spirit standpoints on histories of colonialism that violently formed the white settler state of Canada” (6). Morton states, in the preface, that she originally intended to write a single-authored book on the subject but recognized that “certain critiques must be collaborative ventures” (x). She reflects on her own positionality as a white settler academic and argues that, as a colonial discipline, Canadian art history “advances itself nearly ‘racelessly,’ as if whiteness needs no confrontation, as if naming the category of ‘settler artists’ is enough to assuage colonial violence” (21). Of course, it is not as if the field of Canadian art history has been without resistors. Art historians such as Charmaine A. Nelson, Heather Igloliorte, Eva Mackey, and Alice Ming Wai Jim, among others, have produced ground-breaking work in scholarship, curation, and pedagogy, challenging the continued colonialism of the discipline. These scholars are all foregrounded in Unsettling Canadian Art history, with Nelson even contributing a chapter. While acknowledging these and other contributions, Morton points to the center/periphery model of Canadian art history and culture industries, noting that most survey texts in the field have relied on European art historical traditions, often addressing the specificity of Canadian diversity and colonial violence through the inclusion of token or peripheral chapters on racialized artists or visual culture.

Avoiding this “tactic of inclusion rather than disruption” (19) and opting for an anthology rather than a survey, Morton describes the orienting framework of Unsettling Canadian Art History as “studying the past through positionality” (6). Borrowing from feminist standpoint theory, Morton brings together authors with a variety of lived experiences, social locations, and situated knowledge to illustrate a matrix of “divergent but interconnected histories” (8). The book is divided into three sections: (1) “Unsettling Settler Methodologies, Re-Centering Decolonial Knowledge”; (2) “Excavating and Creating Decolonial Archives”; and (3) “Retracing Sexualities, Tracing Complicities.” While several themes are repeated throughout the book, the contributors and approaches vary, including single-authored academic texts on contemporary art and archival material (Robertson, Cheetham, Nelson, Svec, Gayed, Patel); cowritten and conversational pieces (Wysote and Morton, Dector and Taunton, Fraser, Danger and Huard); and first-person, testimonial accounts written by contemporary artists (McIntyre, Hamilton).

The first chapter, following the introduction, “White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies in Mi’kma’ki,” is cowritten by Morton and Travis Wysote, and contains a core concept of the book. The authors coin the term “pioneer lie” to describe colonial truisms that are reconfirmed through repetition, “despite clear and factual historical evidence and the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black and racialized people that easily dispel them” (29). Drawing on examples such as the representation of agriculture in 19th–century paintings as a means of naturalizing white settler nativism, to recent claims that “there is no systemic racism in the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police]” (29), Wysote and Morton summarize white settler tautologies as “things that seem to be true by the very nature of their repetition and their logical irrefutability under settler colonialism” (45). The authors argue the pioneer lie is so entrenched in Canadian consciousness that it is not only the purview of official narratives and state propaganda, but that ordinary people (settlers, arrivants, visitors), and even the land itself are enlisted to perpetuate the lie. Pioneer lies have contributed to the retelling of a sanitized story of Canadian colonialism, evacuated of racial violence, enslavement, and genocide, which Nelson argues in her contributing chapter, “can only be sustained by a dedicated and far-reaching national practice of forgetting” (162). Repetition and forgetting are thus two sides of the same coin. These national mythologies and historical erasures—repeated fabrications and wilful ignorance—are largely what Unsettling Canadian Art History attempts to confront.

The collection benefits from Wysote and Morton’s chapter being at the beginning of the book, as it provides a benchmark for readers to reflect on in subsequent chapters. It is, in fact, cited by several other contributors. In “Notes to a Nation: Teachings on Land through the Art of Norval Morrisseau,” Carmen Robertson describes how settler truisms have contributed to limited and romanticized readings of Indigenous art in the contemporary culture industry, arguing that settler ways of seeing are naturalized in Canada’s landscape art tradition, which “reinforce notions of possession” (70) and are unequipped to account for understandings of land as anything other than property. Lindsay McIntyre’s “Silence as Resistance: When Silence Is the Only Weapon You Have Left,” included in the same section, articulates the personal—individual, familial, and communal—repercussions of the pioneer lie. In her writing and films, McIntyre investigates her suppressed maternal lineage poetically expressing both disconnection and defiance. The chapter is particularly affective and nuanced as an exploration of understated resistance.

The chapters in part two cover a range of archival material and approaches, from site-specific art installations to the extractive practices of audio collection, the political potential of para-fiction, and the material culture of slavery in Canada. All four chapters in the section deal fundamentally with race, presence, and erasure. Mark A Cheetham’s “Truth is No Stranger to (Para)fiction: Settlers, Arrivants, and Place in Iris”; Häussler’s He named Her Amber; Camille Turner’s BlackGrange; Robert Houle’s Garrison Creek Project”; and Charmaine A. Nelson’s “Ran away from her Master . . . a Negroe Girl named Thursday”: Examining Evidence of Punishment, Isolation, Trauma, and Illness in Nova Scotia and Quebec Fugitive Slave Advertisements” are stand-out chapters, fundamentally different in their content and approach. Cheetham highlights “art’s capacity to reconstruct historical realities in the present” (144), as audiences often need fiction to face reality, particularly in a place with such a dedicated tradition of forgetting as Nelson describes. However, Nelson’s contribution to the collection, also demonstrates that tangible archival evidence of enslavement, dehumanization, and racialized violence in Canada, although under-studied, does exist and warrants greater attention. Nelson describes the fugitive slave advertisements that she studied as “an uncommonly ‘honest’ archive,” as they “functioned through the description of corporeal detail, which consistently pointed out the lie of the supposed homogeneity, inhumanity, inferiority, dependency, and lack of civility of the enslaved population” (163). These documents attest to both the perpetration of violence by enslavers and to the humanity, individuality and defiance of the “freedom-seekers” described in the ads.

Morton argues in the introduction to the collection that the combination of approaches in the book “not only radically looks away from Canadian art history’s imperial frame, but also works to re-establish shared radical visions for interrelation and futurity outside of colonial modes of being in white settler states” (26). This is perhaps most evident in the final section of the book. Dorian J. Fraser, Dayna Danger, and Adrian Huard’s collaboratively written chapter, “Bear Grease, Whips, Bodies, and Beads: Community Building and Refusing Trauma Porn in Dayna Danger’s Embodied 2Spirit Arts Praxis” eschews academic conventions in its conversational format, combining personal accounts with political reckoning and descriptions of aesthetic action. Responding in part to Eve Tuck’s open call for Indigenous activists, academics, and communities to move away from “damage-centered research” the authors point to the empowerment of eroticism, kinship, and collaboration, forcefully challenging the settler-centrism of Canadian culture industries (220). Unsettlement or the unlearning of imperialism also necessitates accountability. The presupposed whiteness and unchecked violence of Canadian art history are addressed in most chapters of the book, but Shaista Patel’s closing chapter broadens the issue of accountability to include the complicity—wilful or situational—of non-Black, non-Indigenous people of color in upholding systems of domination on settled Indigenous lands. Patel argues that “anti-Blackness is global but takes specific forms in different contexts” (270) and “for racialized, class-oppressed people of colour, finding a small place of life and hope for ourselves within the workings of the racial state often comes at the expense of the ongoing disposability of Indigenous lives and sovereignty in states that are foremost colonial and white supremacist” (272). Patel, in fact, reflects on her own errors inadequately accounting for Indigenous audiences and perspectives even when writing critically about colonialism. This chapter is unorthodox for the author’s self-reflexivity and for addressing the ways that settler colonial dominance and dispossession are reproduced even by marginalized peoples. It is a well-chosen final chapter for the book, as it also demonstrates the necessarily ongoing and inward-looking process of unsettlement or unlearning imperialism.

It would be impossible for a book such as this to be conclusive and there are noticeable gaps such as direct engagement with the specificities and layered histories of settler colonialism in Quebec and other French-speaking parts of Canada in which European-descended settlers of distinct linguistic origins continue to compete with each other’s nativist claims in occupied Indigenous lands. That said, Unsettling Canadian Art History is an ambitious and important book that should be looked to as a model for further analyses of Canadian (art) history and will make a strong impact on researchers and professors of both undergraduate and graduate courses.