“Fording the River on the Oregon Trail” critiques the colonial context of possession through the analysis of Gregory Sherl’s book, The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail. Sherl presents two journeys in his text: the historic travel along the Oregon Trail and the navigation through play in The Oregon Trail computer game. Through the lens of his male character, the reader can assume it's Sherl himself, as he hopscotches between his present identity and his character as a settler on the trail. His present-self and settler-self interact with land and people as consumables. It is impossible to unstick the two while they indulge in the world.

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The act of sculpting clay—shaping it—impacting it—dragging my fingers across it, performs the act (or perhaps the crime) of holding a feminine presenting body. I find myself retracing common encroachments enacted on bodies as I draw the lines of the figure. The line of consent is muddy, like a disturbed river, amongst the pages of the Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail. On the trail “a thief comes in the middle of the night, steals 37 bullets & the rest of your innocence." Here to Sherl, a right to one’s body is just another alert that comes across the screen as one plays to win The Oregon Trail game. In this framing, the body is understood as “a one-sided  object of desire,” as detailed by Belcourt in his paralleling experience of his body being settled as a queer NDN in the gut-wrenching pages of A History of My Brief Body. It should be noted that the patriarchal encroachment on bodies does not exist against a single gender and it does not exist within a binary. Binaries are created to sort and make sense of the settler’s world and of their conquests. They organize their pillages in separate binaries, like the wings in their museums. In this act, bodies become encroached on and settled like land—and colonial society settles for this.

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In my making process, I create the figure in an act of care but also in an act of mourning my body and the bodies that are my kin. Verónica Gago’s theses on “body-territories” haunt me through the performing act of sculpting. “The term body-land-territory emerged from women’s fight for freedom from patriarchal and capitalist oppressions. It emphasizes the connection between gender-based violence and the dispossession of territory. Rape, abuse, femicide, and being stripped of land are related in that patriarchy and the destruction of natural elements are all part of the same system of thinking and domination."