“You Can Make a Place for it”: Remapping Urban First Nations Spaces of Identity

Contemporary research on migration, particularly those studies drawing upon theories of transnationalism, demonstrates the ways in which social relations are stretched across spaces, allowing individuals to disrupt boundaries and create identities of belonging to more than one place. This research focuses on the disruption of state boundaries through migration and identity construction. In this paper we utilize elements of transnational theory and stories of First Nations migrants to explore the ways that First Nations urbanization also disrupts boundaries. Colonial perspectives and practices that confined First Nations cultural practices and identities within the physical boundaries of reserves and defined all other spaces as settler spaces created a framework for the construction of the contemporary Canadian nation-state. We present the results of eighteen in-depth interviews conducted with urban First Nations migrants. The interviews focused on understanding how migration to cities shapes relationships to the land (an important element of indigenous identity), the challenges cities present to maintaining connections to the land, and the strategies First Nations migrants use to preserve those connections. By resisting the assignment of First Nations cultures and identities to reserves, First Nations migration to cities challenges the identity of the modern state by disrupting its internal borders and boundaries.