As in years past, we acknowledge that CAPCON takes place on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. In the spirit of this conference’s focus on history in the present, we hope to practice a respectful relationship with the land and our host nation, the Musqueam, and to acknowledge the structural conditions that continue to perpetuate the complicity of settler scholarship in ongoing forms of colonial injustice, violence, and unknowing.
Attendees of CAPCON 2022 will notice many papers and presentations at this year’s conference reckon with the force of history as it makes itself known in our lives, our physical bodies, and our work. Shortly after CAPCON 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, an interior Salish nation with close ties to Musqueam, used ground-penetrating radar to identify 215 unmarked graves on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Although Canada’s First Nations have been investigating sites like these since the 1970s, the findings were a call to action and a reminder that our colonial history is alive and demands to be re-learned, re-known, and re-encountered in the present. This last year of reckoning with the fresh hells that the history of residential schools continues to produce reminds us in CAP that the work of knowing and unknowing colonial violence is a constant process and necessary practice for scholars in all disciplines, and at all levels.