Abstract
Contributions:
Geographic writings form worlds that need unsettling.
Poetry and poetic forms hold potential to unsettle taken for granted lines of geographic writing and, thus, geographic thought.
Footnotes
This paper would not have been possible without many people. Dydia DeLyser,thank you for your care throughout it ALL,in allaying my fretting and for talking with me about our dogs. Harriet Hawkins,thank you for the initial invitation and for friendship across oceans. Thank you too,Mark Jackson,for the observation that now,more than ever,the world needs poetry. Thanks too to two not (!) anonymous reviewers. Your kind provocations and invitations for new openings took this paper,and my thinking,to places I’d have not been able to dream alone. I am deeply thankful to fellow geographers Sarah Hunt and Onyx Sloan Morgan for their kind patience in listening to and providing feedback on early drafts of this work. Also,to Shelley Wood,Shelley Pacholok,Blaze Rose,Sarah McCorquodale,Teresa Marshall,and Briar Craig for showing up and listening. Lastly,many thanks to Samantha Macpherson for the scrubbing.
Author Note
Writing is always made in place. See for instance S. de Leeuw,S. Hunt,‘Unsettling Decolonizing Geographies,’ Geography Compass. 12.7 (2018):e12376. This is not an abstraction. Writing. Is. Written. In. Place. See also: S. Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa,M. Farrales,Against Abstraction: Reclaiming and Reorienting to Embodied Collective Knowledges of Solidarity,Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 42.3 (2024),pp. 422-41. With this in mind,this paper was written on (and thus relied upon and was informed by) the unceded territories of Sylix and Dakelh (Carrier) Peoples. While this paper is written in colonial English,a language violently imposed upon many peoples and places,I live on lands once (and still) governed and understood and cared for in and through Dakelh (ᑕᗸᒡ) and nsyilxcən . I am grateful for the insight of Will Georgelin,a Ts’msyen/Tsimshian youth learning to speak Sm'algya̱x who,last year in a workshop for pharmacists interested in decolonizing biomedical sciences,reminded a large group of us (mostly white) settlers in so-called northern British Columbia that,if we were traveling to,for instance,Spain or France,we would likely make effort to learn at least a few words of Spanish or French. Since we were everywhere and always on unceded Indigenous lands in colonial British Columbia,he said,the very least settlers could do would be to learn a few words of the languages we are complicit in working to (but thankfully failing at!) make extinct. Hadih and W-ay (thank you) for these reminders,Will.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR): Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Humanities and Health Inequities. CRC-2021-00538.
ORCID iD
Sarah de Leeuw 
Author biography
Sarah de Leeuw is an award winning poet,essayist,feminist anti-colonial queer-informed geographer,and Canada Research Chair in Humanities and Health Inequities. She is a professor in the Division of Medical Sciences at the University of Northern British Columbia’s (UNBC’s) Northern Medical Program,a site of the University of British Columbia’s (UBC’s) Faculty of Medicine.