Paper short abstract:

Discussing Newfoundlanders memory of the Beothuk, this paper critically engages with the notion that past is enfolded into taskscape of the present. The theorisation of the immanent past deals insufficiently with alterity, in that it does not admit to another beyond our dwelling.

Paper long abstract:

This paper concerns how we may sense another in unfolding process of being within a landscape. It is based upon fieldwork in Newfoundland, Canada, concerning the ways in which the people of that island remember the Beothuk, an indigenous people who became extinct in the early 19th century. In particular, it is inspired by those who told me that, as they hunted, fished and camped, they felt a nearness to these other people who had lived on the land and in so doing left traces of their dwelling. The presence of Beothuk in the land is, therefore, not revealed as a series of signatures to be read from an abstract remove but in the actions of others who, years later, dwelt similarly on the land.

It will be suggested, however, that this approach to temporality as being immanent within the unfolding process of relational being, does not sufficiently deal with the fact of alterity. The problem is that such an approach enfolds difference into the same, and makes their past into our past, immanent in the process our dwelling in the world. In Newfoundland, where articulations of settler identity flourish in the absence of indigenous contestation and against the backdrop of a narrative of extinction, this enfolding of the past into the fabric of the living present also has problematic ethical implications. The paper will conclude by outlining a theorisation of a more-than-immanent past as a sense of that other which cannot be assimilated into the here and now.