What Do I Hear, and How Do I Listen? Thinking with Sound on the Lachine Canal

This chapter offers an attunement to the multilayered sounds of the Lachine Canal. Focusing on this historically pivotal human engineered waterway in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), I explore the ways in which critical forms of listening are often constrained and obscured by past and present listening practices, which have been fine tuned by systems such as settler colonialism. Moving through a series of provocations that emerged while hearing, listening, and thinking on the Lachine Canal, the chapter grapples with questions of positionality in order to ask how to enter into critical discourse surrounding settler colonialism and coloniality in Canadian urban spaces today, especially as a white settler. Drawing on practices of sonic-inquiry influenced by anti-colonial scholarship and Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism. I develop the concept of sensing-in-motion and the technique of amplifying (a) place (via listening), approaches to ask “what do I hear, and how do I listen?” in turn provoking encounters that unsettle my own settler colonial tendencies of hearing and listening.