Subverting Colonial Choreographies of Memory: Drag the Red and the March for Tina Fontaine

Winnipeg, Manitoba is located on the sacred territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene, and the Métis Nation. Like most Canadian cityscapes, though, these unceded lands are the grounds on which Jets hockey, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (RWB) take centre stage. Punctuating the city’s skyline from the historic downtown Forks site, the CMHR marks Winnipeg’s rising sense of self as a tolerant multicultural centre. However, as Indigenous-led choreographies of assembly continue to demonstrate, these sites of settler life are the same sites where Indigenous women and men are brutalized. In this essay, I specifically move with the February 2018 March for Tina Fontaine and the annual Drag the Red initiative as my objects of analysis. Looking closely at gendered racial violence, performativity, and necropolitics, I discuss how these public assemblies spotlight settler space as always already ghosted and constituted by Indigenous bodies. In particular, I explore how the March and Drag the Red subvert the sweeping grand narratives of human rights and liberal multiculturalism rehearsed by the CMHR, The Forks, and the Red River, where colonial violence is reiterated as an ever more insidious, moving target. The march and Drag the Red underscore how Indigenous people continue to fall from the national story. However, the rigorous physical labour performed by those who march and dredge is a form of radical care for those disappeared and site of Indigenous resurgence.