The settler garden: Gabrielle Doiron, ‘The settler garden: Tending settler-colonial innocence: Pioneer garden exhibits and colonial grammars of conservation in Toronto’, EPF: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler garden: Gabrielle Doiron, ‘The settler garden: Tending settler-colonial innocence: Pioneer garden exhibits and colonial grammars of conservation in Toronto’, EPF: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, 2025

01Aug25

Abstract: In open-air museums and restored historic sites in Toronto, Canada, the pioneer garden exhibit is an integral part of creating a “pioneer setting” and attracting visitors. Since the 1960s, following a boost in public funding for heritage projects to celebrate the Canadian Centennial, groups and conservation authorities in Toronto have devoted time and resources to researching, implementing, and maintaining these garden exhibits. Taking for granted that the pioneer garden is a non-innocent site that was not only crucial to colonization, but continues to produce and maintain settler ecologies, this paper asks what work the pioneer garden exhibit does today. Using the analytic of “colonial grammars” and paying special attention to the history of settler colonial gardening, ongoing claims to settler innocence, erasures of settler complicity in ecological crises, and attempts to invoke contemporary ecological sensibilities, this paper describes how the pioneer garden exhibit re-narrativizes colonial planting in a way that territorializes white, settler-colonial belonging on contested Indigenous lands. This paper builds on work in political ecology, anti-colonial geography, and Black and Indigenous feminisms that clarifies the insidiousness and everydayness of white supremacist landscapes in settler-colonial places.

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