Sebastian Harmon Hutchings

Self situating

I come from the Canadian Rockies. My family, the Harmon family, has had the privilege of claiming belonging to this beautiful place for four generations. This wild space is a thin veil to other worlds, to other experiences, to other ways of thinking, and has shaped my entire being. I have profited from the generational wealth made possible by descending from a family that landed here at the right place and the right time as the descendants of settler-colonial families coming to North America in the wake of systematic genocide committed by the imperial power Great Britain, from which we originate. I acknowledge that my family profited from the segregation and forced exclusion of the peoples who made pilgrimages to these mountains long before we arrived, who lived, gathered, hunted, and made ritual here since time immemorial. These peoples include but are not limited to the Îyâxe Nakoda (Bearspaw, Chiniki, Goodstoney), the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), and the Tsuut'ina nation. Though we all now live in territory commonly referred to as Treaty Seven, I recognize that this treaty was not signed in good faith by the British crown, and that the terms of this treaty were never met or upheld by the government authorities of the occupied jurisdictions of the country known as Canada and the province known as Alberta.