Edinburgh Napier University

  As a white, Scottish woman living on violently acquired, never-ceded Gadigal land on the east coast of what we now call Australia, I came to see that I was part of a big, unresolved problem. I understood this through engagement with Indigenous people and Indigenous scholarship, certainly. But it was mainly through hiking that I came to feel most viscerally what it means to be in place or out of place. This understanding, in turn, led me to leave the last of the “homes” I’d imagined for myself in twenty-five years of living overseas. Earlier this year (2019), I came “home” to Scotland, where my ancestors go back tens of generations, maybe more.

This chapter considers the idea of organization in two ways. First, I discuss the tangible organization of how one comes to hike and camp in the wilderness as a woman who goes alone. Second, I interrogate the rather less tangible organization of my own identity through hiking in places that are conceptualized as either colonized and/or colonizer. That is to say that hiking in Australia and then later in Scotland was how I organized my thinking about my own identity, its place in the world, and how this brings me to a sense of where I feel at home.

Using embodied, walking methodologies (Springgay & Truman, 2018), I consider the notion of homeland through a lens of decolonization. Hiking on stolen Aboriginal land feels very different from hiking in the Scottish Highlands, even though it, too, was ‘cleared’ of its original inhabitants. In this chapter, then, I present insights from walking in both contexts as a way of coming to understand my own place in two very different de-populated homelands.