**1. Introduction and Context**

It is the strangeness of difference—the unfamiliar space of not knowing—that is so hard to tolerate for the colonizer, whose benevolent imperialism assumes both herself or himself as the centre of knowing and that everything can be known. For the colonizer– settler engaged in critical inquiry, there is an inevitable and disturbing moment when the Indigenous teacher or informant speaks. It is a moment of recognition—perhaps unconscious—that some things may be out of one's grasp [1].

How can we, as non-Indigenous people, unsettle ourselves to name and then transform the settler—the colonizer who lurks within—not just in words but by our actions, as we confront the history of colonization, violence, racism, and injustice that remains part of the IRS (Indian residential school) legacy today? [2].

We have to examine the system itself, because the systems were created to reflect the society that put them in place. This means that we put in place laws that reflected what we believe about Indigenous people. What I want people to understand is that even those who support doing away with racism are themselves caught up in a system that almost forces them to continue to adhere to policies and beliefs that come from a history of racism [3].

In *Smallest circles first: Exploring teacher reconciliatory praxis and agency through drama and theatre education in Canada* [4], the experiences of pre- and in-service teachers in Quebec, Canada are examined in order to understand what is possible when seeking to integrate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's [5] (p. 7) Calls to Action for education (#62 i and #63 i, ii, iii and iv) into Canadian classrooms. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada was officially launched in 2008 as a part of the Indian Residential Schools Agreement. Intended to be a process that would guide Canadians through the discovery of the facts behind the Residential School system. *Smallest circles first* uses posthuman autophenomenological underpinnings [4] and curricular understandings to consider the importance of teacher agency, creativity, and risk taking when centering collaboration with/in communities of belonging. *Sing the brave song: This isn't over!* (STBS) [6] was a play that was created by four volunteer actors as a part of the larger research project

**Citation:** Carter, M.R. Unsettling the Settler: An Arts-Based Exploration. *Societies* **2022**, *12*, 46. https:// doi.org/10.3390/soc12020046

Academic Editor: Ranjan Datta

Received: 5 January 2022 Accepted: 24 February 2022 Published: 9 March 2022

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written about in *Smallest circles first*; it articulates the importance of starting with the self when considering one's responsibilities for redress in the decolonizing project in settler societies [7]. In this devised theatre example, arts-based counter-narratives were a way to shift personal positions and values, and to disrupt ideas of national identity and colonial ideologies. Findings from this devised research play indicated that deconstructing one's positionality is an essential first step for understanding antiracist solidarity processes that create belongingness, care and responsibility. In *Smallest circles first*, participants (i.e., preand in-service teachers) in the various research projects discussed between 2015 and 2019 consider the privileges they hold as a result of the body/position/identity they inhabit, and how this may be re-inscribing difference in decolonizing/anti-racist work [8]. In this way, a deeper understanding of how systemic racism and oppression in Canada are a politics of positionality [2] become clearer for settler and newcomer participants who experience sitting with discomfort and accepting that there are no easy solutions [9] when they are committed to reconciliatory praxis.

The bounded nature of the play format for STBS provides a mechanism for participants to work within, and a purpose for grappling with the topics being considered. In this context, the participants had to come to some sort of consensus about what needed to be learned and how to present the explorations in a respectful way for an audience. Ultimately, the synthesis of these conversations and explorations is prompted and guided by the playwright/director from STBS, who offers a blueprint for the ways in which other educators who want to take up similar work in their own classrooms might do so. Based on the feedback from the participants that took part during the play creation process, the following steps were deemed to be important when using devised theatre for anti-racist work [4]:


By researching the experiences of the actors, playwright, stage manager and audience members during the creation and production of *Sing the brave song: This isn't over!* my journey (blinded for peer-review) into understanding how colonization has affected me as a white, cis-gender, able-bodied woman of settler (Scottish-Presbyterian, Irish, Welsh) emerged, and I realized that it needed to be examined and deeply reflected on. In Sherry Bie's [10] PhD dissertation *Unsettling actor: Reading the 94 calls to action out loud*, Bie focuses on Paulette Regan's consternation that "non-Indigenous people (must) unsettle ourselves to name and then transform the settler-the colonizer who lurks within-not just in words but by our actions, as we confront the history of colonization, violence, racism, and injustice that remains part of the IRS legacy ... " [2] (p. 11). Bie takes this direction to unsettle the settler within by creating a decolonizing space for Indigenous history, as told by Indigenous people themselves, by bringing together professional actors to read aloud the TRC's 94 calls to action (2015) using storywork as a methodology.

When thinking about the original intent of the STBS research-based play, to explore research data from phase one, which explored how drama education with pre-service teachers could explore the educational aims in the TRC, I did not expect to be challenged. However, while observing the participants make sense of their own experiences with white fragility and white tears [11], among other topics as a researcher, I was prompted to seek out more information around race and the triggers that white people experience that cause emotional reactions such as anger, fear or guilt. In order to understand what I was researching, I had to read more about how to (in this example) move reactions that can

reinstate racial equilibrium and maintain racial hierarchies to productive spaces [12–16], so that the audience talk-back session post-performances could lead to generative conversations. Simultaneously, as I learned more, I began teaching about these concerns in my graduate classes for the first time, despite not quite knowing exactly where or how to begin. Byrne [17] refers to this decolonization process of the "white" subject, as one that is different from other decolonizing projects, such as the one described by Smith [18] that focuses on social change. For the white subject, deformation/reformation needs to happen to the "I" or "autobiographical subject" (p. xvii), one that, for white women, addresses hegemony and colonization. The decolonization of the white subject is thus best seen as a subset of a larger project of decolonization: "If a field of 'white studies' exists at all, it is at most a subset of other concerns around 'race' and identity" [19] (p. 117).

As Allan Vicaire, Mi'kmaq from Listuguj and the former director of the First Peoples' House at McGill University, reminded me during our collaborative work using reader's theatre with pre-service teachers to explore Indigenous topics from pre-contact to the present day, we all need to "do the work". "Doing the work" meant (for me) committing, on a continual basis, to accept that actively listening, feeling challenged, uncomfortable, and struggling, is an essential part of engaging in anti-oppression work. Personally, this meant that I had to place myself in a continual state of (un)becoming, and to listen and dwell betwixt and between. I had to learn to unlearn, and be accepting of my own intersectional identities, which sometimes forced me to confront difficult lived experiences, i.e., to experience an "unsettling process", as Paulette Regan [2] describes in *Unsettling the settler within: Indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada.* Following Regan's [2] example, I have drawn on autoethnographic writing [20,21] in the form of a monologue (which uses playwriting as a form of reflection) and scripted analysis to draw implications. This monologue unearths my own settler colonial heritage as a response to my process connecting to Chamberlin's provocation: If this is your land, where are your stories?
