The Uncanny Doubling of Sovereign and Citizen: Anti-State Narrativity In

THE UNCANNY DOUBLING OF SOVEREIGN AND CITIZEN: ANTI-STATE NARRATIVITY IN ALBERTA Vanessa McCuaig McGill University, Montreal August 2019 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in Anthropology

Contents Abstract ...... 2 Acknowledgements ...... 3 Introduction ...... 4 Context and method ...... 15 Horror and the Uncanny: A Groundwork for Shifting Positionality ...... 20 Chapter I: Resonance ...... 26 Resonant Definitions and Publicized Histories ...... 31 The “Sovereign Citizen” Paradox ...... 46 How do Sovereign Citizens Identify Themselves? ...... 50 Conclusion ...... 51 Chapter II: Speaking Refusal and the Uncanny Story ...... 54 Fact, Fantasy, and the Uncanny ...... 58 Refusal ...... 65 Conclusion ...... 71 Chapter III: Pseudolaw and Performance in the Court Room ...... 75 Setting the Stage: The Courtroom as Space-Time ...... 81 Language in the Court ...... 90 Conclusion ...... 99 Conclusion ...... 102 Works Cited: ...... 113

Abstract English: Over the last decade, Alberta, Canada has been the site of several highly publicized events focused on individuals labelled as “sovereign citizens”. From the occupation of homes and traplines claimed as sovereign territories (CBC 2013a, 2013b) to larger than life court cases with wide public audiences (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571), sovereign citizens capture the Albertan imagination with their unusual beliefs and practices. Asserting discourses of freedom, liberty, and self-governance, these individuals surface at the junctures of everyday life, challenging state authority through obscure and obtuse interpretations of law. Whether they appear through hegemonic state classificatory schemes used by the media, in stories narrated by Albertans trying to understand the movement, or in legal courts, sovereign citizens are entangled with the worlds they seek to reject. A doubling—the sovereign and the citizen—thus emerges and remerges as individuals challenge the state and its assumed duties, laws, and expectations, all the while they move, transgress, or realign themselves in relationship to the state. Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork between May to September 2018, this thesis thus explores the relationship between sovereign citizens as an elusive and slippery category and Albertans, asking: how do sovereign citizens and Albertan citizens narrate their own (and others’) challenges to the Albertan state?

French: Au cours de la dernière décennie, l'Alberta, situé au Canada, a été le théâtre de plusieurs événements très médiatisés axés sur des individus qualifiés de «citoyens souverains». De l'occupation de maisons et de terrains de piégeage revendiqués comme territoires souverains (CBC 2013a, 2013b) à des procès plus vastes que jamais, impliquant un large public (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571), les citoyens souverains captivent l'imagination des Albertains avec leurs croyances et leurs pratiques inhabituelles. Affirmant des discours sur la liberté et l'autonomie gouvernementale, ces individus font surface au tournant de la vie quotidienne, défiant l'autorité de l'État par le biais d'interprétations obscures et obtuses du droit. Qu'ils apparaissent à travers des schémas de classification étatiques hégémoniques utilisés par les médias, dans des récits racontés par des Albertains cherchant à comprendre le mouvement, ou devant des tribunaux, les citoyens souverains sont empêtrés dans les mondes qu'ils cherchent à rejeter. Un dédoublement - le souverain et le citoyen - émerge et resurgit alors que les individus défient l’État et ses devoirs, lois et attentes assumés, tout en se déplaçant, en transgressant ou en se réalignant par rapport à l’État. S'appuyant sur quatre mois de travail ethnographique sur le terrain entre mai et septembre 2018, cette thèse explore donc la relation entre les citoyens souverains en tant que catégorie insaisissable et glissante et les Albertains, demandant: comment les citoyens souverains et les citoyens albertains racontent-ils leurs propres défis (et ceux des autres) à l'état albertain?

Acknowledgements This thesis glimmers and shines with all those who have shared so much with me along the way. Know that I am eternally grateful to you. Your love, encouragement, and support makes these words sing, even now. To my interlocutors, now friends who shared with me part and parcel of your lives, past, present, and future: it was a pleasure to be with you, whether online or in person. I cannot thank you enough—I hope these words do you justice (no pun intended). A tremendous thank you is required to Diana Allan, my supervisor and mentor, who has forever altered how I think and write. Despite frantic emails in the early morning or terrible first passes at a chapter, your generosity and attentiveness motivates me at every turn. It makes me a better academic, thinker, and writer. I really cannot thank you enough. Additional gratitude must also fall upon my committee members, Katherine Lemons and Samuele Collu, who challenged me at every turn. It was great to think alongside you and I am humbled in everything you have taught me. I would also like to thank Sabrina Perić and Charles Mather, my supervisors away from home. Your kindness (and verbal poking and prodding) remind me what a master’s thesis is: it is just that. Your guidance and wit keeps me grounded. The support staff, Olga Harmazy and Connie Giuseppe, also deserve a round of thanks. Both of you manage to keep me calm when bureaucracy makes it feel impossible to do otherwise. I might not be writing this acknowledgement if it wasn’t for your final hour assistances throughout my degree. Donald Netolitzky: whose eager and willing openness to share this space with me indelibly altered the course of this project. Much of this research could not have happened without your assistance. I am forever indebted. Steve Kent and Gordon Drever: thank you for your support and allowing me access into your archives. You have both been wonderfully accommodating, even when the archive is less than able. Richard Warman: your immense personal archive has opened the door to more questions than I can possibly answer in this thesis. Together, we paint a vibrant future for research in Alberta. To my ardent readers, co-thinkers, and motivators alike… in no order, Leila Vaziri, Cristina Yepez, Carmen Umaña-Kinitzki, Mathieu Lamontagne-Cumiford, Elya Myers, Heather Anderson, Zachary Scalzo, Amy Donovan, Nicolas Rasulius, Melanie Wittes, and Zachary Raymond. Thank you for breathing together with me. I am in awe of your attentiveness and interest, from hounding me to share my work to showing up to my presentations. Your support makes this thesis breathe. I am also indebted to the writing group comprising of John Galaty, Kariuki Kirigia, Klerkson Lugasa, Qiuyu Jiang, Graham Fox, Justin Raycraft, Lisa Rail, and Laura Rosenoff. Receiving feedback from you has made this thesis more than I could have ever hoped. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and my brother, Ross, Fe, and Josh. You have put up with me and my elusiveness longer than anyone else.

Introduction There are traces of a someone who escapes me in the world I pass through, once more again once familiar, now obtuse and odd a black heron in an empty field crooning its neck to drink the oil it bobs back up to creak a cry a pumpjack amid the waving grains twilight, and the wane of ownership over subsurface property rights the farmer shakes his fist at the dinner table, trying to explain why the government wants his land hundred-so kilometres away a turtle (island) with an eroding back digs a mine at its feet and forests of smokestacks exhale along an oily beach the train tracks are a site of protest: for coal power, no government interference in the shadow of an election season, up and coming steamrollers sit with spray foam in the ignition papers fall across the floor across the province, someone says, “Alberta’s a hotbed” others answer: “of the bizarre strange uncanny unusual extremist entitled” and from beyond the fence, the gravel at our feet in the still of the summer, we run our mouths over what we’ve seen: Ads for arming oneself—calls for revolution (de)coded letters aimed to government offices Trials over small affronts to our liberties autonomy over one’s body in the name of knowing best and white out license plates. We ask, What does this all mean? Why here? Why us? Why now? Is it something in the way we live or something in who we are? Albertans

A spider’s web grows in the night and by the morning, it catches more than flies 4

Figure 1. A field of canola with a pumpjack. 5

At the confluence of personal history and research objectives, there are people who filter in and out of grasp, elusive and slippery. Even as I attend to them through my poetry, they flicker between the lines, surfacing and submerging without consistency. Growing up in Alberta, Canada, they sound remarkably like people I know, like my grandfather who fusses over what the government owns of his land or an acquaintance who pickets against provincial carbon taxes and green energy on his lunchbreak in downtown Calgary. In many ways however, they are not like anyone I have ever met. At times, I doubt that I have ever really encountered them. From my desk in Montréal, Quebec, newspaper articles, online forums, and local gossip from the west all entangle these figures in a discourse unlike here, three thousand or so kilometres away. In a way larger than life, despite their small numbers, they populate and occupy the Albertan imagination with vivid imagery, even at times, running alongside the province’s own historical political processes.

Little ethnographic, anthropological work has been done on this group beyond public observation and its attached scrutiny on Albertans and their actions, behaviours, or beliefs. When approached with a litany of different research techniques and tools, they still elude academic attention. Whether this is by choice or otherwise, I cannot help but be magnetized by their secretive presences. In some moments, they are incredibly visible: they may appear in news articles, blogs, and videos. Public trials and road side traffic stops. In cafes around coffee cups and on fertile farm fields. Their faces, their words are inscribed alongside events of public interest—or public safety.

They are the periphery spectres of a unique political discourse. They are the phantoms of a something else altogether.

This is a thesis about sovereign citizens, a group of people who challenge various degrees of local and federal state authority in favour of their own conceptions of liberty and freedom. Those

who reject citizenship and state sovereignty go by many names: freemen, sov cits, detaxers, sovereigns, flesh and blood persons, living persons, vexatious litigants, or organized pseudolegal commercial argumentative (OPCA) litigants, to mention only a few. Some may even refuse being called sovereign citizens altogether; they might not use any title other than their birth names1, yet intelligence agencies group these people into the sovereign citizen movement regardless (CSIS

2012; FBI 2011). Beyond identity, others have suggested that sovereign citizenry is an ideology arranged and interspersed within larger categories such as “anti-authority” (Perry, Hofmann and

Scrivens 2018), or “right-wing extremism” (CSIS 2012). The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, defines the sovereign citizen ideology as “a belief system that leads adherents to reject their US citizenship and government authority. The ideology is based upon a conspiracy-laden view of the past and interpretation of historical documents fundamental to American history”

(2015: 3, emphasis mine). This is but one way to define sovereign citizens. In a legal setting, sovereign citizens are best known for their perplexing ideologies and practices that take place around encounters with law enforcers called pseudolaw: an understanding of law that is not based in any recognized legal system. While they may be most visibly represented in the United States, especially through the histories they draw to inform their discourses (FBI 2015), there are also several recorded movements in Ireland (Barry and Ó Drisceoil 2017), New Zealand (Bloy and

Grierson n.d.), Australia (Lattas 2005), the United Kingdom, and Canada (Kent 2013; Netolitzky

2016, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2019). In short, sovereign citizens are a global phenomenon with mixed cohesion, ideology, and membership.

1 Some sovereign citizens argue that their birthnames are their only legal names. John Doe for example, is their only name, not DOE, John, as it may be spelled in legal documents. This is called the strawman argument, allowing its adherents to reject legal protocol regarding naming under the premise that if their name is not noted correctly, then it is invalid. For further detail, please see Chapter 3: Pseudolaw and Performance in the Court Room. 7

One of the places sovereign citizens reside (or occupy) is Alberta, Canada. A province with historical discourses of free enterprise, political alienation, and self-dependency2, Alberta emerged in the early 2010s as the site of several highly visible sovereign citizen events. The seizing of apartments and traplines as well as media-covered challenges to the law by sovereign citizens punctuated the decade and were well covered by news outlets, legal scholars, bloggers, sleuths, and law enforcers alike. These events, detailed further in chapter one, suggest a particular kind of correlation between Alberta and sovereign citizens: something inherent to the politics of the state that allows or perhaps even encourages its contestation. This correlation, however, is also tenuous and fragile, laden with the assumptions of what a state and subjecthood is. Upon my arrival to the field, I asked Andrew, a prominent legal and sovereign citizen scholar, if he thought Alberta was one of the dominant sites of sovereign citizens. Drinking his beer, he bluntly answered, “It isn’t.”

His three words stunned me. “There isn’t anything special to Alberta?” I replied.

“Quebec is actually the hot spot for sovereign citizens in the country right now. And then there’s British Columbia for indigenous sovereign claims. But if you wanted to study sovereign citizens, you picked the wrong province.”

Andrew’s casual statement stuck with me. I could concede that legally, there might be little happening in the province. Yet, my own memories and experiences eagerly rose to counter his argument. As a child, I grew up listening to my grandparents talk about the government surveying

2 Historical documents such as Canada’s Suzerainty Over the West – An Indictment of The Dominion and Parliament of Canada for The National Crime of Usurping the Public Lands of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta contrary to Canada’s Constitution and the Law of the Land (Thompson 1919) and Alberta has the Sovereign Right to Use and Issue its Own Credit (Smith 1937) suggest that tension between local governance and federal sovereignty has existed since the establishment of Alberta as a province in 1905. For further reading, Palmer and Palmer’s (1982) account of Alberta’s political identity details the province’s historical political alienation from the Canadian core (Ottawa or more largely Eastern Canada) alongside oil extraction as the dominant economic resource and mythos of the western “frontier” or the “last best west”. 8

and taking potable water from underneath their land. During games of cribbage on hot summer days, they argued that their land was theirs alone. I was also an undergraduate student at the

University of Calgary when the Freemen-on-the-Land, a more closely defined and uniquely

Canadian sovereign citizen movement, first became visible beyond the courts. They captured my attention through their rhetoric of liberty and freedom as they seized property and fought off police in tense standoffs. Closer still, I found myself inundated with images of contestation running alongside my fieldwork. At the train tracks, people contested the widening of the VIA Rail line—

Canada’s only country-wide public train transportation—by spraying concrete foam and other liquid hardeners into the ignition of machinery that lay along the tracks. Others came together in town halls to fight off a provincial carbon tax as a proxy for saving their livelihoods in the coal industry. Elsewhere, gun shows attracted staunch libertarian interest groups who handed out papers saying, “[The government’s] targeting us law-abiding citizens with these new laws, not criminals!”

To me, these discursive punctuations have always prompted increased scrutiny of Alberta as a tenuous political landscape. I am trying to be attentive, attuned to the phantasmic, ears pressed to the ground of the spectral, the blurry, the fleeting, drumming along Alberta’s political landscape.

After all, I am inundated by the province. It is not only a physical site of my own history, a place where I was born and spent most of my life, or a genealogically elongated, geographical synonym for “home”. One might call me an Albertan; I take this political category to mean someone who consensually and willingly resides within these predetermined, inflexible political boundaries, engaging, sharing, and contributing to everyday life in such a way that reifies larger, perhaps even at times disparate, histories, beliefs, and practices, inherent to a collective word denoting belonging. While sovereign citizens may challenge and contest these statuses, sovereign and non- sovereign alike still make up Alberta together. More than one backdrop of the movement, it is a 9

space that occurs alongside and shapes what sovereign citizens are and are not, regardless of the lack of their legal cases in the province.

Rather than acceding to Andrew’s assertion that Alberta was not the place to study sovereign citizens, I ground myself in this uncertain territory of absent presence. I seek to question some of the normative assumptions about sovereign citizens in Canada, and more specifically, in

Alberta. I suggest that boundaries between citizens and sovereign citizens are not so easily drawn.

In fact, sovereign citizens are entangled with the worlds they arguably reject. Neither can they be readily separated from those with (and/or who use) recognized legal statuses such as citizenship or residency. Sovereign citizens share in similar discourses of law-abiding residents––those

“inside” the state, who obey, reify, and even perpetuate state power. This thesis is thus also about

Alberta, or the space we call Alberta, located within a larger geopolitical framework of Canada. It considers its residents and citizens, those who reject categorization, and everyone in between, moving, volatile, and chaotic. Hutterites. Mennonites. Dukhobors. Evangelicals. These are a few of the starting points offered by interlocutors in their descriptions of the sovereign citizen movement. Some also reference Proud Boys. III%ers. Neo-Nazis. Squatters. Ranchers. Then detaxers. Freemen. Sovereign Men. Moorish. CERIs. A litany of others, both in the capital “O” sense and otherwise: a thousand lines of inquiry bundled together as the grass is rolled into a haybale. The prairies are populated with these figures. They live between the stalks of corn, in the groans of pumpjacks and coal stacks, alongside busy city streets and within governmental fortresses. Through my discussions with interlocutors, friends, and family, these others appear alongside the “sovereign citizen”, sometimes, even as masquerading as one, even if they do not call themselves as such.

But why should any of these people be related or grouped together? Is it because they share the same home, the land that has many names, one of which is the province of Alberta? Do they share similar characteristics such as beliefs or practices? This is the primary start and challenge of this research: who exactly is the sovereign citizen? Definitions introduce significant problems of their own. Can a single definition capture such a diverse and elusive phenomenon? And are not definitions coercive––do they perpetuate the power of the state in naming potential subaltern threats? As one counter to these concerns, I hold parallel the image of sovereign citizens alongside

Albertan and/or Canadian citizens. These two groups do not always neatly align, nor are they perfect opposites. At times, they overlap or disconnect, and may even share the same concerns, aspirations, and identity as they put forward claims against the government. As I will argue, a doubling—the sovereign and the citizen—emerges and re-emerges as individuals challenge the state and its assumed duties, laws, and expectations, all the while they move, transgress, or realign themselves in relationship to the state. From this starting point, I ask: how do sovereign citizens and Albertan citizens narrate their own (and others’) challenges to the Albertan state? This question raises a second, more methodological one: how do we study something (or someone) that is, in many ways, in flux, constantly shifting and changing?

This thesis thus explores Alberta as one site of sovereign citizen activity alongside a broader swathe of concerns raised by Albertans. I chose this site for several reasons: first, this research was initially framed as a study on the Freeman-on-the-Land Movement (FMOTL), a smaller, Canadian based sovereign citizen movement. It was estimated that in 2012 there were over 30,000 Freemen on the Land within Canada alone (Law Society of British Columbia 2012:

11). The large population suggested to me at the time of proposing this project that there was something unique in the movement and its presence in the country. Moreover, within the last 11

decade Freemen headlined Albertan news: several events made provincial news and drew public interest beyond the legal settings in which they took place. Despite their intriguing beliefs and practices, it ultimately proved difficult to study only the Freemen. Much like other sovereign citizen movements and/or ideologies, Freemen are deeply entangled with others, both other sovereign citizen groups and Albertan anti-state discourses. The limited scope as well as the small and hard-to-locate population prompted me to broaden my research. As my research progressed, it also became more and more important to explore the political landscape of Alberta as the site of sovereign citizen activity.

Despite these discursive and categorical overlaps and ambiguities, I make a distinction between the Freemen and sovereign citizens. Although the FMOTL are a subsection of the sovereign citizen movement, individuals may move between the FMOTL and other movements.

They may not adhere to its ideology or self-identify either. For the purposes of this study I retain the usage of sovereign citizen as an identificatory framework for some of the interlocutors I encountered over the summer. It is my hope that in maintaining this term, its generalities as well as its paradoxes facilitate the many diverse processes and ideologies that coalesce within it. In other words, I widen my scope to include interrelated phenomena that might otherwise not be recognized within the framework of “Freeman”. I am also careful not to call anyone a term which they do not self-ascribe to. One could counter this by saying that even including this data within a thesis about sovereign citizens is identifying that person, idea, or practice with the movement. It is sound logic. For the same reason, I have also chosen to include individuals who had already been pre-identified by public and legal media as sovereign citizens to discuss how the movement is constructed not necessarily by the people engaged in it, but by its observers and detractors. These forms of identification and categorization are critical when those who have the power to label the 12

individual are, often times, state actors. Maintaining how legal actors and the Albertan public talk about sovereign citizens thus allows me to scrutinize these categorizations without necessarily reifying them.

Regarding naming, I also anticipated encountering indigenous sovereign citizens who I assumed might not also use either term “sovereign citizen” or “Freeman”. While I did not encounter anyone like this, I asked my Métis and Stoney Cree interlocutors if they had heard of sovereign citizens or of people who reject the state. To my surprise, they instead replied with references to the assumed whiteness of a sovereign citizen. Olivier, for example, writes, “As far as I know Treaty 7 First Nations3 wouldn’t enter into separationist movement because of that would mean giving up Treaty. Based on what you’ve told me, [i]t sounds like non-indigenous people trying to exploit and appropriate indigenous cultural language, ideology and avoid paying taxes”. Another person, Dana, laughs at me and adds, “That’s a white person thing”. These answers are telling in their own right. They imagine what kinds of people participate in sovereign citizen movements. They are inflections of the double standards held to Canadian settlers and indigenous communities and critiques of whose subjecthood is at stake.

Though I am often reflecting on this relationship between sovereignty and indigeneity, I have made the choice to focus specifically on non-indigenous individuals, as the practical limitations of fieldwork make further investigations of indigenous claims not possible at the time of research. I should also underscore, at the outset, that I do not view the struggles of sovereign citizens as in any way comparable to those of indigenous struggles for determination and sovereignty. The luxury to reject the state is not afforded equally to those within the boundaries of

3 Treaty 7 First Nations covers all of southern Alberta. There are also seven signatories: Bearspaw First Nation, Chiniki First Nation, Kainai Nation, Piikani Nation, Siksika Nation, Tsuut’ina Nation, and Wesley First Nation. 13

what we call Alberta or Canada, and indigenous communities occupy a radically different positionality. The stakes of membership and inclusion for indigenous communities, struggling to secure cultural livelihoods, traditions, and knowledge cannot be underestimated, while settler sovereign citizens benefit from their non-indigeneity in their dealings with the state. Settler colonialism is however, the privilege that allows non-indigenous claims of liberty to occupy the

Albertan political imagination. A focus on these sovereign citizen assertions of determination and freedom is to then also critically observe and reflect upon Alberta’s own anxieties of citizenship and statehood.

As I continue to ruminate on my fieldwork in relation to the larger legal and academic discourse, I write this thesis from my own space on the side of the road (to borrow from Kathleen

Stewart (1996)). Often times, it feels that the role of anthropology is not only to provide a critical perspective on its subjects but to enact change, whether this is knowledge-based or policy-based.

In light of this project and its own entanglements, I cannot offer more than the complications that emerge from this endeavour. While some scholars regularly engage sovereign citizens as threats, producing knowledge to better dismantle this movement, I consciously avoid this framework. I aim to let my ethnography wander along the side of the road, dwelling in stories that “narrativize a local cultural real” (Stewart 1996: 3), rather than attempting to provide specific quantitative data.

At times, this roadside opens up fertile space for discussion. Other times, it is a hard closure–– an enjambment that picks up another time, from another place. From these difficulties, my thesis contributes to the wider knowledge about the movement, but it is also acutely conscious of how it can turn into a tool of power itself, something that can be utilized by the state to better administer control over the very subjects of its text. I remain conscious of my duties as an ethnographer, but

also wary about how my research might be used––alert to the ethical dilemmas such research raises.

Context and method Geographically, Alberta is nestled against the Rocky Mountains to its west and open to the vast prairies to its east, at its largest width, is over 600 km wide. From its southern border with the

US state of Montana all the way to the Northwest Territories, is over 1200km tall—over thirteen hours of driving time. In this expansive area, there are two major cities, Calgary and Edmonton, each with over a million residents. The corridor that runs between them is only roughly 300km but an estimated 75% of the population of the province lives here. Alberta’s main source of wealth comes from its large endowment of natural resources. Oil, coal, and gas as well as vast agricultural area for both farming and ranching have made the province financially successful compared to other provinces. At the same time, environmental degradation, the dropping price and value of these natural resources, and climate change all have negatively impacted Alberta within the last decade. The financial bust of the 2010s and its lingering depression—a rhythm Albertans know intimately—sets the backdrop of this project. Amid hopes and anticipations of another economic boom, there lies a real and painful stagnation. From the rising costs of living to lost jobs and unemployment even several years later, people have turned to the government, whether this is municipal, provincial, and/or federal as one source of their ills.

I carried out fieldwork across Alberta between May to September 2018. During this period,

I accessed several archives: The Provincial Archives of Alberta in Edmonton, the personal collection of Gordon Drever and Stephen Kent at the University of Alberta, legal depositories at the Alberta Courthouse in Edmonton, and the digital, declassified communiques of legal actors

Donald Netolitzky and Richard Warman4. These archives, a mix of public and private collections, arranged the basis of a historical sociopolitical topography of Alberta.

While participant observation is a core method of anthropology, I was largely unable to engage with sovereign citizens in this way. All the sovereign citizens I approached lived in extremely remote areas which might pose dangers to a solo anthropologist. Additionally, my abilities as a researcher were fundamentally shaped by my academic affiliations; I could not be trusted as an “unbiased” observer. As one interlocutor noted, because I attended McGill and was funded by the government of Canada via a SSHRC research award, I was therefore a “serf of the

Queen”. Despite identifying and anticipating this concern previous to fieldwork, any counter to these arguments did not work. Highlighting active consent, my own positionalities as a researcher, and even disclosing my own opinions about the state did not work. My approach to fieldwork then required unique attentiveness to distance and limitation, both to the relationships between my interlocutors and myself, as well as to my own complicated relationship with Alberta. Drawing from Robert Desjarlais, I develop a phantasmographic lens to the “the imagined, the possible, the conjectured, the feared and dreamed of, specters of memories and apparitions, within the flow of thought and expression” (2016: 401). This ethnographic attunement allows for the subjects of this thesis to emerge and submerge, to punctuate and to blur alongside the complexity of fieldwork “at home”, and its inextricability of the researcher from pre-existing entanglements. It is not necessarily the argument for autoethnography, although one may learn more about one’s field site through observing and recording the experience. Rather, I take cue from Favret-Saada’s call to purposely open spaces in fieldwork that allow the ethnographer to be “affect-ed” by our

4 Again, an acknowledgement is not enough to thank these people who made possible my entry into the field. I am continually grateful for your support and encouragement. 16

experiences and interlocutors (2012: 437). In allowing the field to affect us, we must be double researchers: “malleable, modified by our experience in the field” as well as continue to “record the experience in order to understand it, and to make it into an object of science” (Favret-Saada 2012:

443). Despite my inability to conduct participant observation in many instances, Favret-Saada’s method of being affected allows me to become an instrument or tool of perception, despite potential distance between myself and my interlocutors.

Affectivity also shapes how I write my research. Throughout this thesis, I experiment with poetry, prose, and image as ethnographic methodologies of representation, particularly attentive to non-physical encounters. Ethnography grapples with fidelity to its sources; its drive for both a sensitive, humanistic approach to the subjective at times, conflicts with a “scientific”, data- producing objectivity (Jackson 2017: 54-55). Coupled with what is at stake for our interlocutors, representation becomes not only a singular, flattened image as it is written and presented but also one that is denied its ability to shift, change, and transform. While I do not pose a hard counter to this challenge, poetry and prose instead offers one way to open spaces of interpretation for my audience, just as my experiences ask of me. As McLean beautifully writes, poetry can “evoke through writing a time-space of virtual simultaneity and coexistence in which pasts and presents, history and mythology, the human and the other-than-human might interact and reciprocally transform one another” (2017: 167). This sensorial and evocative multilayering of experience opens the possibility for data—in whatever form it purports to take—to surface, submerge, slip through our fingers, and to be caught, all at once. It is affectively generalized and deeply localized.

Photographs too, are punctuations—they force the reader towards a specific horizon. I have been careful as to what pictures I have selected to present herein. No photograph in this thesis

contains a person. It is intentional. When I focus on landscapes, I question Alberta as a geography of latent affect, embedded in infrastructures like oil rigs and roads. Paying attention to my surroundings questions the tenuous emergence of sovereign citizens as something (or someone) specific to Alberta. However, the medium of photography is also a deeply intimate space between the photographer and the subject. On one hand, never providing an identifiable face perpetuates the uneasy image of the sovereign citizen as one not necessarily seen but encountered nonetheless.

On the other hand, I was kept at arms length by many of my interlocutors. Despite talking with them online for months at a time, I never met many of them in person. Their profile pictures, usually a default silhouette of a man without a face, are the only images I know.

Due to limited direct access to sovereign citizens, I relied on personal communication through online messaging rather than formalized interviews in order collect data. I utilized digital research as secondary data to account for the lack of physical access to the field. Quatloos.com and Reddit.com/r/amibeingdetained were the two primary sites from which I engaged in correspondence with several individuals of diverse backgrounds (legal actors, citizens who had previously encountered sovereign citizens, and former sovereign citizens). Using this method, I was able to find people who may have left the province or currently live in remote areas. In addition, digital research opens up a different discussion of identity construction and membership; while these two topics are unfortunately out of the scope of this project, they constitute the digital world as an extension of the human experience (Boellstorff 2008). While I was able to carry out five semi-structured interviews in person, this format proved almost impossible online. First, the nature of personal messaging means that there is no defined limit to what an interview is and is not. As I chat with Mike, for example, in a sovereign citizen forum, I do not need to follow a one question, one answer format. When Mike writes: 18

…pretty much everyone involved in freeman type stuff is for one type of alternative

therapy or another. i have extensively debunked much of it. and tbh5 its part of why i

left the whole shmozzel. drinking bleach was the big one for a while. fluoride in the

water. anti-vaccine bs. colloidal silver. and on and on. and i have had a million

discussions about the failure of organic food.

I can easily ask back, “What do you mean, drinking bleach? Like mixing it into water and drinking it? What was it supposed to do besides corrode your insides? Did you ever come across people who talked up "pig pills" as a cure all? […] Did you ever meet people looking to grow their own food instead?” The format of discussion is that by which I can ask as many follow up questions as I would like while also following new lines of inquiry. This departure from more traditional approaches to interview–– such as standardized, structured questions––frames the discussion in my second chapter on storytelling.

Second, many interlocutors were suspicious of being recorded. Legal and political actors, for example, would only speak with me on the condition that they self-report their own omission and retractions. They would still speak with me, but would purposely add, “don’t write this down” or “you’re bound by ethics and confidentiality not to disclose this.” While these statements often coincided with non-public information, interlocutors were more worried about being discovered as participants. Participation in this research appeared to my legal interlocutors as adversely affecting their standing as public servants or arbitrators of justice. In cases where it was not feasible to speak to potential interlocutors, I would draw on their self-produced texts such as blog posts, pamphlets, and books for analysis. As some individuals leave disclaimers in their writings, it can

5 To be honest. 19

be extremely difficult to examine them in great detail. While I will only paraphrase it here, for one example, an individual opens their book with the warning that it cannot be reproduced in any way unless the author gives permission to those who plan to use the text for a just cause, excluding academics. To respect these concerns, I choose herein not to not draw directly from these texts.

Such disclaimers not only remind me of who is represented in this thesis, but the stakes for each of them.

Horror and the Uncanny: A Groundwork for Shifting Positionality “Do you ever feel unsafe doing your research?”

I email this question out of curiosity to Kerry, another legal scholar of sovereign citizens in the Alberta Courts. I am a little anxious about starting research. Part of this, I think, must be because I have been unintentionally scared by friends and family with their lines of questioning.

Someone asks me if I think I will be okay by myself. Another asks to track me via GPS if I go out alone. No doubt these come from real places of concern and love, but they pile in my stomach and make me uneasy.

So, when Kerry replies back to me with a quote from Apocalypse Now (1979), I am not sure what to think:

“‘It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know

what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror.

Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be

feared.’

…Horror is my friend. I deal in horror - and I don't think I lie to myself about it. But

it doesn't trouble me.”

I do not think I feel relieved to read this answer. Instead, I am prompted by confusion.

The undercurrents of my research are suddenly exposed and bare, asking for stakes to be drawn and representation made clear. While I recognize that I am not attempting to produce policy changes or inform legal actors such as intelligence agencies or the court, I feel myself slipping blindly into territory that reifies sovereign citizens as a dangerous “Other”. The irony of quoting Apocalypse Now (1979)—a film loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—as an anthropologist is not lost upon me. At once, it is a useful reminder that for some legal scholars, sovereign citizens are the literal other who threaten legal order and reason. For Kerry, horror is innate in the world around her, including in her interactions with sovereign citizens. To dispel horror is, in Kerry’s words, to “address” the problem as an intellectual exercise rather than as an affective, sensorial experience. At the same time, the reference to Apocalypse Now signals to me a potential to repeat or reify our colonialist roots as a discipline, well after our initial induction to the field, through our writing, our aims and goals. I acknowledge the state’s interest in this kind of data: it is to better define, control, mitigate, and manage its subjects, whether citizen ascribed or otherwise.

It must also be acknowledged at the outset that a gender dynamic, at times, puts me at odds with my interlocutors. Legal scholars suggest to me that sovereign citizens are almost evenly split between male and female. However, throughout my fieldwork, I exclusively encountered men.

There are several possible reasons for this: men more frequently and visibly use social media and forums. To use forums, a person does not have to disclose their gender; yet, those I did work alongside identified as male. The second possibility is that men are overrepresented in media reports—whether this is because the most exceptional and visible events were undertaken by men is difficult to say. There have been several instances of female sovereign citizens or those who use 21

its tactics in court (Perreal v Knibb, 2014 ABQB 15; Toronto-Dominion Bank v Leadbetter, 2018

ABQB 472). However, despite this legal presence, I never interacted with a female sovereign citizen. This movement’s visibility is also affected by media representation. Almost all of the media attention in Alberta has been focused on men, especially men who have harmed others.

While the majority of my interlocutors were respectful and non-threatening, there were others who were less accommodating. Lewd and unwanted comments surface in many of my interactions. And yet sometimes, it felt necessary to play the young and incapable young woman. It proved beneficial if something needed to be explained. People tended to be more patient and generous in their repetitions. Yet, there remains a tacit feeling that I could be in danger. In this tenuous space, confronting the “horror”, to draw from Kerry’s guiding comment, is more than that which threatens us with violence, real or imaginary, physical or emotional. Horror itself is a construct of the worlds we inhabit. It is based on otherness, a fear of the unknown that may rapidly transform, just as

Colonel Kurtz, into violence of its own. And, at times, it feels inescapable to write of sovereign citizens without it. This tension in representation prompts me to pivot “horror” as a reflexive method. It is at once, a counter to the potential of possibly re-othering on my interlocutors, as well as a way to think through why the term and its affects still appears regardless, unsettling as it underscores my conversations with Albertans.

Freud writes that horror and the experiential tenors of dread and terror that it evokes are intimately tied to what we have already known (1919: 1-2). It is this state of unsettling that Freud calls the uncanny: the familiar yet strange. If this strikes you as similar to the repeated mantra of an introduction to anthropology class, that anthropology makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, then you are on the right track to ask: what kind of a relationship can anthropology have to this in between? It is not enough for me to say that I am an Albertan anthropologist working in 22

Alberta, nor should we as an audience be satisfied with the inherent assumptions of familiarity by the researcher. It goes without saying that identity is a complex, transformative, and negotiated process: it allows us to have presence, to be recognized as holding (or taking up) space. The qualities we assume to be fixed are contingent on who and what surrounds us. The rupture of the familiar as now strange and the resulting uncanniness of identity lays at the core of this thesis. It underscores not only my theoretical arguments, but it informs how I structure my thesis.

As such, this organization has two primary goals in mind. First, each chapter reflects a particular methodology and framework. The inherent difficulties and limitations of the research force alternative approaches to ethnographic fieldwork, which in their own ways, open new sites of investigation. The second goal is that the thesis should act as a doppelganger itself, producing its own form of uncanniness. I have tried (wherever possible) to pair reflections of sovereign citizens with that of Albertan citizens in order to give this ethnography a dual, if somewhat paradoxical, voice. Contradictions, enjambments and pauses texture the narratives of my interlocutors.

Another methodological problem is delimiting the extent to which someone is engaged in sovereign citizen practices. In other words, what practices, beliefs, community engagements and identifications make up a sovereign citizen? When I began this project, I soon realized the lines between various communities, including neo-Nazis, alt-righters, and otherwise were not exclusive.

As Perry, Hofmann, and Scrivens similarly observe, “…it is a Sisyphean task to provide a singular, immutable definition of the groups and individuals who comprise the Canadian anti-authority movement” (2018: 5). Its members have the ability to move within and towards different movements, ideologies, and paradigms depending on their goals. And so, if someone wishes to

identify as a sovereign citizen, they do so in a specific context: the other facets of membership are no less relevant but shift according to several factors, including who is listening.

To address the question of overlapping and fragmented identities, Chapter one seeks to untangle the overlaid thematics that make possible engagements to specific terminologies. I question the choice by government authors and media outlets to use “Freeman” as a synonym for

“sovereign citizen”. My goal is not to provide a better or more encompassing definition of sovereign citizens—if anything, the current language used is often mobilized by law enforcement and I do not wish to further contribute to its power. Rather, I want to take seriously how definitions themselves such as “sovereign citizen” and “Freemen” contain their own contextually situated discourses and, as they are employed, identify Others within a wider Albertan public. With this in mind, I critically examine several prominent events within the last ten years and their representation in mainstream discourse.

Chapter two focuses on narratives and unusual stories. More particularly, I focus on the question of “what?” and incredulous reactions to the uncanny that surface in the storytelling of

Albertan citizens as they encounter sovereign citizens. How people tell and lend meaning to these stories informs what spaces they occupy within the Albertan imagination of the other. I ask what it means to tell stories of challenging the state.

The third and final chapter describes a face-to-face encounter with a sovereign citizen.

Following the court case of Edward Robin-Jay Belanger, a minister of a religious church that uses sovereign citizen techniques in court, I focus on the gravity of the encounter: how do sovereign citizens use legal language to challenge not only the court, but assumptions of legal language itself?

This chapter also examines court language and the use of narration as performativity in a legal setting.

Chapter I: Resonance

Figure 2. Late July, high noon on Highway One, otherwise known as the Trans-Canada.

Let me start backwards.

It is late August when my fieldwork ends. It ends not with a bang, but with the sound of the minute hand ticking against a watch face. The summer dwindles down—days in single digits now—and the preciousness of time is palpable. Today, I say goodbye to Laura, an old friend. As we exit her car, the restaurant parking lot shifts into an accidental scenic viewpoint. Overlooking a series of other big box chain stores, shiny slick cars, and sparse trees, a large, metal fence separates Calgary from the Tsuut’ina Nation, its yellow and green brush, tiny wooden homes and taupe mountain ranges. Most of this is barely visible under a dense smog but we still look out. It isn’t her intention to make this urban sprawl a tourist destination; we are going to dinner, but sightseeing is a small bonus.

As Laura closes her car door, she says, “I thought of you the other day. Did you hear about the Holy Fire in California?”

Coloured like a ruby grapefruit, the sun lolls along the edges of a long haze before settling into a muted twilight. The air is dense with smoke. It hurts to breathe. Still, it sweeps from over the mountains. The wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, indistinguishable from one another, continue to burn brightly along the ridged horizon. Its gray ash falls from the sky, onto our windshield. (Laura later reminds me to put this in my fieldnotes: “It’s apocalyptic,” she says, “but that’s climate change for you.”) From afar, the red light of the sunset over the mountains mimics the blaze. It doesn’t matter where we are; regardless of our mountainous insulation from the threat of destruction, the moment feels precarious. But what are we really threatened by?

Amidst my pondering, Laura puts a hand to her brow to shield herself from the sun. She adds, “I read that a sovereign citizen did it.”

I hum in acknowledgement.

Forrest Gordon Clark started the fire. A resident of Holy Jim Canyon—one of the areas destroyed by the fire—Clark dominated the news with screencaps of his anti-government rhetoric on Facebook and YouTube. Amid a state emergency and the hundreds of other forest fires across

California, the Holy Fire struck provoked ire: it was not accident but arson. This sentiment crystalized in Clark’s own words. Before the fire, he threatened the Holy Jim Volunteer Fire

Department: “It’s all going to burn like you planned” (Cosgrove, Reyes-Velarde, & Tchekmedyian

2018). At the same time, it pointed to something else behind its utterances. Media and spectators alike turned to Clark’s social media pronouncements to find context and meaning. According to

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, Clark had been a member of a sovereign citizen group called the “Restore America Project” as well as a Kansas sovereign state movement (Johnson 2018). His hatred for the state became palpable in his fervor—his threatening messages to legal officials and his increasingly radical posts online. The small accumulation of data connected one topic to another, a spider’s web of conspiracy: QAnon6, NESARA7, and r/The_Donald8 are all interrelated and inseparable from the larger story unfolding in the public’s discourse. To the watchful spectators and to the various media outlets reporting on this event, these details suggested that

Clark was a “sovereign citizen”, despite never directly calling himself one (Johnson 2018,

McDonell-Parry 2018, Nestel 2018, Thomas 2018).

6 QAnon is a movement that believes in a deep state, or a shadow state beyond that of the current institution that controls or conspires to control the government. Particularly rooted in the United States, it visibly emerged during the Trump campaign of 2016, and is sometimes connected to anti-Semitism and the alt-right. 7 NESARA (the National Economic Security and Reformation Act) was a historic United States proposal for removing income tax and instead, using a national sales tax. It was later adopted into a conspiracy theory that argued that NESARA had passed and was hidden from the public. 8 A sub-Reddit once dedicated to trolling supporters of Donald Trump pre-2016 United States presidential election cycle but has since quickly become a pro-Donald Trump forum. Many posts use subversive humor, trolling, and conspiracy theory to legitimize their views in relation to Donald Trump. 28

This cross-border detour to Forrest Gordon Clark should not be read as extraneous material, nor as a momentary distraction. Rather, these fleeting conversations under the red summer sun continue to point elsewhere, not only to Clark but to something beyond him. It is this elsewhere that surfaces in the sardonic wit of Pete, an Indiana transplant now living in Edmonton. He hears the story of the Holy Fire only to answer, “Of course it had to be some guy in the States who set a fire to get back at the government. Makes perfect sense. God, I hate my fellow Americans sometimes.”

And Ed, his Canadian partner, shares a look across the table adding, “If there are Freemen setting fires, it doesn’t surprise me. This is one of the smokiest summers we’ve ever had, even up here in Edmonton …but these are the people you wanted to study. They’re insane and it’s fascinating.”

These short moments frame the extensive permeations of my research. All three people had never met a sovereign citizen before, but they tacitly understand something by this term and its associations—including Freeman—to a degree that they felt emboldened to use it. Though their intentions in telling me this are different from one another and arguably, the 2018 Holy Fire has little to do with Alberta, something about this incident resonates with each of them. In their own ways, they are listening to the news as if to notice a pattern or attune to a familiar rhythm. Just as the fire burns precariously outside our line of vision, we remain enveloped by the smoke that points to something else seen and unseen, something palpable and ephemeral, and perhaps even dangerous. It can be felt with the smouldering sunset, the cloying heat, the laboured breathing, in the distant destruction of earth and the fleeing of bodies; threat and precarity. At the same time, the what is being felt across several levels is strange—a kind of absurdity that escapes through

these reflections of environmental disaster. We, my interlocutors and I, are searching for the traces of something (or someone) that cannot readily be found.

My eyes are drawn to these vague traces, caught for a moment before they slip into something else. The fire is out of sight but the smoke alerts us to its presence. Yet, unlike smoke, throughout my encounters, interviews and emails, traces of sovereign citizens are sparse and at times, undetectable. As my interlocutors talk about their engagements with the state, the news they read, the lives they live as citizens of Alberta and Canada (or not) more broadly, they allude to the figure of a sovereign citizen whether by term or by action. But what conjures the “sovereign citizen”? How are traces constructed and homogenized into traits, characteristics, beliefs, and practices? How can imagining this “other” limit and contain what is slippery, illusive, a something

(and someone) that may want to escape these very same frameworks?

These chance moments with Laura, Pete, and Ed suggest that there is a potentiality for individuals to become attuned to sovereign citizens and their processes through patterns, signs, and similitudes across temporal, geographic, state and civil discourses. This attention, which Susan

Lepselter calls “resonance” or “the intensification produced by the overlapping, back and forth call of signs from various discourses” (2016: 4), draws events, people, ideas, and moments together in parallel to form patterns; they come to offer ways of engaging with a world and its inhabitants which otherwise might be tenuous and uncanny. It is that one sign is perceived the same or same enough as the comparative sign. This similarity with an “Other”—whether this is an alternative world, idea, or person— (Wikan 1992: 463; Messeri 2017: 140), is momentary and fleeting. More than willfully engaging with that symmetrical Other, resonance requires us to be susceptible to its possibilities, to become vessels and containers of affectual capture, recalling and recapturing it.

On a larger scale, the population of Alberta may also act as its own resonance reservoir. A collective “mass-mediated subjectivity” or our propensity to be cultivated and repetitive receptors of particular affect by the media that surrounds us (Mazzarella 2017: 204), can bring also together these diverse resonances.

If there are points of resonance and overlap in the way sovereign citizens are conceptualized and encountered by Laura, Pete, and Ed as civilians and citizens of Alberta, we must also think of resonance as potentially boundless in reach but curated in form. This chapter seeks to interrogate one source of resonance through the language used by the Albertan, Canadian, and American state, bringing together several discourses—such as governmental documents, media reports, and academic reviews—into a homogenous image: “the sovereign citizen”. It is not only that diverse phenomena are coalescing to forge a category of person, but that despite the unique properties infolded into those phenomena, they are instead understood as synonymous with otherness itself. In other words, the term “sovereign citizen” conjures a cultivated assemblage, a relationality structured largely through the discursive language of the multistate: a superstructure of threat and antagonism.

Resonant Definitions and Publicized Histories As noted in my introduction, the Freeman-on-the-Land (FMOTL) Movement, a smaller,

Canadian-specific sovereign citizen group created by Vancouver comedian Robert Menard in the

2000s, was to be my original research topic. Part of this interest was related to being Albertan: I was an undergraduate at the University of Calgary when several major Freeman events occurred across the province. Articles such as “Calgary home declared 'embassy' by Freeman” (CBC

2013a), “Judge's scathing ruling against Alberta ‘freeman’ could signal clampdown on anti- government movement” (Bell 2012), or “Freeloaders on the land – American-style anti-

government eccentrics take root in Canada” (The Economist 2013) captured not only my attention and curiosity but others’ too. Friends and professors circled around unusual sovereign embassies and occupied spaces in Alberta. These stories seemed to encapsulate a uniquely Albertan form of tongue-in-cheek: an over-the-top, hyper-emphasized stereotype of liberty and freedom that pitted local discourse against centralized governance. Even Robert Menard’s writings, which play with conceptions of Canada as a “free society”, became a way to legitimize his independence from state itself. He writes, “the simple fact is if this is a free society, we have the right to leave. If we do not have that right, it is neither free, nor by definition, a society” (Menard n.d.: 11).

Returning to Pete’s earlier statement, “Of course it had to be some guy in the States who set a fire to get back at the government. Makes perfect sense”, one might argue that these events happen where they do because there is an internal, local logic that allows for similar movements, ideologies, and tactics to emerge. However, several problems arise: (1) Freemen are not necessarily sovereign citizens nor are all sovereign citizens Freemen. (2) Freemen are more likely to self-identify with this term but not necessarily “sovereign citizen” and sovereign citizens may not self-identify with “sovereign citizen”. (3) The diverse socio-political, environmental discourses from which these events arise are homogenized into a singular image of “sovereign citizen” or “Freeman”. (4) These terms, while not necessarily self-ascribed, come to reiterate tropes and characteristics that are transborder in scope. They are often informed by governmental bodies in order to better regulate borders, and citizens and non-citizens alike.

In conversation, most of my interlocutors (Albertan, non-legal actor citizens) tend to favour

“Freemen”, or “Freemen-on-the-Land” as a synonym for “sovereign citizen”—a term rarely employed, if ever. “Freeman” continues to hold particular place in the Albertan imagination over

other terms9. It was (and arguably still is) a local idiom for “sovereign citizen”. So, when Sherry, a woman I am living with out in the woods says to me, “The Freemen are idiots. They have to pay taxes like the rest of us,” I don’t know who she is referring to. Is it truly a Freeman, someone who self-identifies with the FMOTL Movement or does it point to something else? Even more problematically, within the context of my research, contemporary individuals who might be called—or who have been called—a “Freeman” or “sovereign citizen” reject these terms altogether without a replacement. For example, in one court case, self-represented litigant Edward-Jay-

Robin; Belanger10 speaks directly to the judge (who was not discussing sovereign citizens previously) and emphasizes, “I am not a sovereign citizen or a freeman or an O-P-C-A11”. Another interlocutor, John, notes that he is not a Freeman nor is he part of the FMOTL movement in an email: He writes, “…I'm not Albertan or even Canadian as those are feudal constructs created by kings who used violence and coercion to ensure their existence. My dedication to peace and non- violence dictates that I cannot participate with those constructs”. If these terms are not necessarily self-ascribed and are—as John astutely observes—constructed, then what perpetuates their usage

9 There is a compelling argument to be made here about the historical manifestation of liberty and freedom via the foundation of the Albertan state post-1867 confederation. The limitation of provincial sovereignty in 1905 (when Alberta (and Saskatchewan) were incorporated as provinces from the Northwest Territory) directed legislative powers not to the provinces themselves, but to the central government. Additionally, natural resources were not owned by Alberta or its residents, but also held by Canada. The discourses surrounding these clauses within the Alberta Act of 1905 led to subsequent protests and its eventual change in the 1920s-1930s. There is an additional argument of the role of religious sovereignty and liberty that must be addressed. If, as archival evidence suggests, that between 1890-1910, the Canadian government was advertising Alberta (and Saskatchewan) as the last frontier through capitalizing on American perceptions of manifest destiny and seeking out “desirable” immigrants (fundamental Christian groups who had previously demonstrated their willingness to cultivate and “make productive” poorly fertile lands), then there must be additional examination of the extent to which fundamentalist religious groups actively contributed to Albertan discourse of liberty, self-governance, and freedom. The limitations of this project constrain me from making further claims, but these historical considerations deserve further attention. 10 Stylized as such via Belanger’s website, allcreatorsgifts.com (n.d.). For a larger discussion of Belanger’s techniques and performance of identity, please see Chapter three: Pseudolaw and Performance in the Court Room. 11 Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argumentative [litigant]. 33

by the Albertan citizen public? Why does “Freeman” resurface? How do these labels work? What do they do?

To answer this question, I turn to the last decade of Albertan history, 2010-2019 as the period of several distinct movements, events, and people who all resonate under the assumed core principles of the FMOTL movement12. Netolitzky’s (2016) case study of OPCA movements covers a detailed history of sovereign citizens in legal contestation across Canada from the 1930s onwards. Given that the historical trajectory of the movement, Netolitzky argues, there is permeation and “cross-pollination” by both similar and interrelated movements in the United

States and Canada, albeit the spread is largely from the United States into Canada (2016: 613).

The nature of my research in relation to this established history however, is limited by the lack of user-generated sovereign citizen data from 1980s-201013 and thus, I choose to exclude this dataset from this analysis. As I focus on the last decade, I purposefully recapitulate an interrelated point: why does this movement visibly appear now? Why does it take on this name? What does naming do?

In this next section, I compare two different medias and the images they produce: legal cases and their subsequent documents, and traditional news media. These two types of media have different languages, audiences, and stakes. At the same time, particular elements have merged with

12 Given the scope of this project, I am limiting my discussion of Albertan history to the 21st century. This is not to say that the FMOTL Movement was not active earlier—Menard was active in the early 2000s—nor that 20th century Albertan politics do not matter in this context. The Social Credit Party of Alberta, for example, allowed anti-Semitic discourse a public audience, which attracted many of the precursor Freemen. 13 During my fieldwork, a large swath of digital data via webpages, forums, and videos from this time period were deleted. Several reasons for this are possible: the website’s domain expired (whether it is a self-owned website or a company driven one), the user willfully deleted their data, or that it was deleted by another user (in the case of forums, this can be because the original user was banned or that the content was not suitable for the thread or forum). Without even a basic record of what user said or did what, tracing out their ideological genealogies is not feasible. 34

Albertan discourses. While there have been several notable sovereign citizen cases brought to the

Albertan court, two specific trials produced significant rulings. The first of these two cases is

Meads v. Meads, 2012 ABQB 571.

In this decision, litigant Crystal Lynn Meads asked the court to step in when her estranged ex-husband, Larry Dennis Meads, failed to disclose financial records required as part of their 2010 divorce settlement. While throughout the following year Larry Meads did pay the required matrimonial and child support to Crystal Meads and their six children, the records he submitted to the court were legally unintelligible, making the calculation of further payments impossible. In one example, the presiding judge, Justice Rooke, notes the following document:

“Mr. Meads filed a one-page notarized document, printed in black and red ink, and

marked with what may be a red thumb print. It also bears postage stamps in three

corners on front and back, and includes various declarations including that “::dennis-

larry:meads::” is a “living flesh and blood sentient-man”, a postmaster general, and

that Barb Petryk, a clerk of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench, is appointed his

fiduciary and is liable for “all financial damages and bodily harm against myself

::dennis-larry:: of the meads-family::”(Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571).

Such documents were not accepted as financial records. Their language such as “living flesh and blood sentient-man” or a red thumb print furthermore had, in the law’s eyes, nothing to do with his finances. Unable to move forward, Crystal Meads requested a court intervention.

On June 8th, 2012, both litigants met with Justice Rooke for a case management hearing.

Justice Rooke described the opening submission by Larry Meads in the following manner:

“…[Larry Meads] was not Dennis Meads, the “corporate identity”, but was present

as Dennis Larry Meads, “a flesh and blood man”. […]

Mr. Meads launched into an explanation of a number of things. He said that when he

was born, he was given a register of birth, “a corporate identity”, bonded and

registered in the Bank of Canada and in the state stock exchange, and that registration

had an imputed income” (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571).

But what does this mean? Larry Meads contended that he was unwillingly made double: there was him, “a flesh and blood man” and then there was another him. This other identity was an economic-political construct, “a corporate identity”. The corporate identity was created by the government and in Larry Meads’ case, made him an object rather than a person. In court then, despite his presence as the physical Larry Meads, he was not the Larry

Meads who could be held accountable to state law. The corporate Larry Meads was the only person obliged to pay support: it was his name on the documents because the flesh and blood

Larry Meads was not “Larry Dennis Meads” as it was written on paper, but ::dennis-larry:: of the meads-family::.

This discrepancy in naming and identity, however, was only one aspect of the hearing. Larry Meads later told Justice Rooke:

This is an admiral court, your jurisdiction is on water, it’s not on land; I am a freeman

on the land, and for you to play down some of the statements I am making is not

acceptable unless you prove it to me in law, and just saying it to me is nothing. (Meads

v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571)

These court vignettes are crucial to understanding Meads v. Meads. An impressive

130+ paged judgement, the document is just as much a recording of this case as it is an analysis of the accumulation of similar litigation strategies. The flesh and blood and corporative fiction, as well as “admiral law”, are but two examples of a particular kind of strategy that Justice Rooke argues wastes the court’s time. Whereas in previous cases these arguments would have been considered vexatious—a term denoting malicious intent to injure or spur others in the court process—Justice Rooke, through his observation of Meads v. Meads created a new, specific terminology: Organized Pseudolegal Commercial

Argumentatives (OPCA). Defined as strategies and arguments that stem from a single person called a “guru” who “commercially” sells or promises these ideas, OPCA “disrupts” court process and frustrates legal action (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571: 1). It is not accepted as a legal defense and constitutes an abuse of the court system and those within it, whether judges, lawyers, clerks, or other litigants (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571). Furthermore, the term encompasses not only the legally-perplexing behaviour of Larry Denis Meads, but also visible sovereign citizens (those processed by the court), detaxers (those who refuse to pay taxes), and other vexatious litigants, into a court-recognized term later used as identification in a court of law.

Justice Rooke writes that OPCA is a classificatory scheme “to functionally define them collectively for what they literally are… What remains is to categorize these schemes and concepts, identify global defects to simplify future response to variations of identified and invalid OPCA themes, and develop court procedures and sanctions for persons who adopt and advance these vexatious litigation strategies.” (2012: 1, emphasis mine). In Justice

Rooke’s writings, defining “what they literally are” brings together diverse practices and 37

beliefs under a state-sponsored classification: it is a form of forced resonance in order to create the sameness necessary for these phenomena to be intelligible and manageable to the state.

Another way of approaching this definition is to scrutinize its performativity. Judith

Butler (2007) argues that performativity is more than speech acts or the capacity for speech to have power. Rather, these claims of identification as subject or non-subject to law reproduce norms. “Indeed,” she writes, “there is no reproduction of the social world that is not at the same time a reproduction of those norms that govern the intelligibility of the body in space and time” (Butler 2007: x). Terms and definitions reify the legal norms of the subject litigant through who can be made visible (and invisible) to the law at and in differing times and spaces. When a litigant expresses themselves within these preestablished norms, codified in the definition, they become recognizable to the law. This is not to say that without the term, they would not be charged or held accountable for their actions. Rather, this act of naming and normativity further makes those identified peoples recognized deviants to the law.

Meads v. Meads has been cited over 180 times, making it a significant precedent called forth in other trials. In one instance, Justice O’Donnell in Ontario used the OPCA definition to summarily dismiss a traffic court case over which he presided. The litigant,

Matthew Duncan, had failed to produce his driver’s license when requested by a police officer in a parking lot, and when the officer tried to arrest him, an altercation occurred, resulting in an additional charge of alleged assault.

For Justice O’Donnell, this court case is bemusing, humorous, and annoying. His disdain for OPCA tactics is manifest in his description of the case. He compares Duncan to a roomful of monkeys writing Shakespeare on a typewriter, explaining that “[s]adly, when human beings are let loose with computers and internet access, their work product does not necessarily compare favourably to the aforementioned monkeys with typewriters” (R. v.

Duncan 2013 ONCJ 160). However, in his verdict, he writes:

Justice Rooke’s comprehensive judgment on what he labels “Organized Pseudolegal

Commercial Argument Litigants” (of various iterations), wonderfully frees me from

having to address any more effort to the jurisdictional arguments raised by Mr.

Duncan... Such arguments are a waste of the court’s time and resources, a selfish

and/or unthinking act of disrespect to other litigants and deserving of no further

attention, energy or comment” (R. v. Duncan 2013 ONCJ 160).

The verdict however, was an acquittal—based on the evidence, it could not be proven within a reasonable doubt that Duncan had committed either crime, despite the aggravation Duncan had caused the court. While Justice O’Donnell emphasizes how the trial could have ended sooner had Duncan not used OPCA, the litigant’s arguments did not have a bearing on the overall outcome of the trial. Rather than using OPCA as a way to additionally charge the litigant for disrupting the court process, the term is used by

Justice O’Donnell to dismiss particular lines of questioning and, ultimately, to discredit certain tactics and ideologies for future court cases.

Meads v. Meads is often held up as a model case that mounted a successful challenge to the idea of the sovereign citizen. Maclean Magazine, for example, describes the court case

as a masterpiece and triumph: “[f]or those who missed it, Meads is the Alberta Court of

Queens Bench’s definitive take-down of the so-called “sovereign man,” or “Freemen-on- the-Land” movement” (Gillis 2013). Reframing the court case as a “take down” is another way to further portray the deviant as subject to the law. It also implies that a “Freeman” has some kind of social capital—that the public is aware of this term and knows its connotations.

At the same time however, I encountered very few people who were familiar with Meads v.

Meads. Those who had heard of the case were primarily legal actors or scholars. Outside of the court house, interlocutors recognized OPCA as tactics rather than as definition. Jeff, when he hears that I’m interested in sovereign citizens exclaims, “Omg. Sovereign citizens.

Are these like landlocked people going by maritime law? AM I BEING DETAINED?” As to why individuals may not be familiar to OPCA, there are several possible reasons. OPCA is a legal term framed around technical legal language. OPCA is also a set of beliefs and arguments—it doesn’t necessarily ascribe to a person, although it can. Traditional media, as

I will argue, does not use OPCA terminology in reference who engage in its rationales.

Juxtaposing Meads v. Meads (2012) is a more publicly reported case entitled R. v. Boisjoli

(2018). In 2016, Allen Boisjoli, a self-titled Freeman was the first person in Canada to be charged with “paper terrorism”: a term describing the vexatious abuse of the court through the submission of large quantities or improper paperwork (Lamoureux and Snowdon 2016). Boisjoli’s incessant questioning of authority resulted in him being charged under Section 423.1 (1) of the Criminal

Code14. In one example, given in the Memorandum of Decision, Boisjoli addressed the judge directly:

14 “423.1(1) No person shall, without lawful authority, engage in conduct referred to in subsection (2) with the intent to provoke a state of fear in (a) a group of persons or the general public in order to impede the administration of 40

“THE ACCUSED: I am sorry that I am rude, but you know what? It’s not

against the law to be rude.

THE COURT: No, it certainly isn’t.

THE ACCUSED: And I think that you are the rude man because you are

proceeding without any evidence. […] So as long as we’ve got our feelings out on the

table here, you’re not only rude, you’re a criminal. Let the record show that the Judge

is proceeding with criminal intent, relieving the prosecutor of her burden of proof.

THE COURT: Well, not only are you rude, you show a complete

ignorance of the criminal justice system in this country. That’s all I can say Mr.

Boisjoli.

THE ACCUSED: I don’t even want to be in this country Sir. I am being

held under duress.” (R v. Boisjoli 2018 ABQB 410)

Nowhere in this document does the court call Boisjoli a “freeman” or “sovereign citizen”.

Neither does Boisjoli self-identify with either term. Rather, the memorandum instead uses

“OPCA” to encompass several differing techniques and attitudes:

Thus, Mr. Boisjoli chooses to opt out of a government and legal apparatus he identifies as

illegitimate. He refuses to consent to a law that he rejects. This perspective and Mr.

Boisjoli’s ideas are associated with and characteristic of a population of persons who hold

legally false concepts, Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments” (R v. Boisjoli

criminal justice; (b) a justice system participant in order to impede him or her in the performance of his or her duties; or (c) a journalist in order to impede him or her in the transmission to the public of information in relation to a criminal organization” (emphasis mine) (Canadian Criminal Code 2019). 41

2018, ABQB 410: 9). OPCA is only referred to twice in this document, its usage did not

extend into public news coverage. Instead, the media at this time almost exclusively

referred to Boisjoli as a “freeman” or “paper terrorist. (Citation).

This attention to terminology even drew Boisjoli’s criticism, so much so that he himself commented, “[The media has] been trying to label me as a Freeman so that they can detract from the very real issues I bring up” (Fiest 2016).15

Boisjoli raises an interesting point regarding why labelling him is both targeted and misleading. Freeman and Freemen are the words of choice by Albertans. In several newspaper articles cited below, it is the only term used to describe people who use OPCA tactics. One of the first times Freeman enters public discourse via the news is in 2013—one year after Meads v.

Meads. In Calgary, Andreas Pirelli16 seized his rental home and occupied it under the claim of the

“The First Nations Sovran Embassy of Earth”. As a “Senior Chief Justice at Tacit Supreme In Law

Court for Sovran Nations Embassies”17, Pirelli had allegedly yelled at his landlord, “‘I’m a

Freemen-on-the-Land’ […] This is an embassy house now and it’s mine and you have no rights”

(McIntosh 2015). Later that year, self-described Freemen Paul Fiola and Shauda Petrova were arrested for illegally occupying a trapline near Grande Prairie—around five hundred kilometres away from the capital city, Edmonton (Lazzarino 2013). The media called them “Freemen” too.

In neither of these cases were the words “sovereign citizen” or “OPCA” used.

15 Two years later, in 2018, Boisjoli’s charges were stayed. 16 His real name is Mario Antonacci. 17 Unbeknownst to Canadian intelligence agencies at this time, this group had attempted to set up their own state outside of Calgary. As part of this group’s plan, they were allegedly stockpiling weapons and money. They were ultimately derailed by Pirelli’s arrest. 42

At the time of both events, I was completing my undergraduate degree in Calgary. My friends and I were glued to the news. We talked about Freemen because this was the term with currency at that point. The word “sovereign citizen” did not mean as much as “Freeman”; it wasn’t what they called themselves. To us, these cases also seemed banal, sort of funny. I remember my friend Dave laughing and saying, “They’re just so ridiculous! Only in Alberta could this happen!”

With all of these different terms and events, it resonated: we interpreted that there was some kind of relationship, even if we did not know why then, between Alberta and Freemen.

In a more recent example from 2015, Walter Raddatz shot and killed a police officer and himself after a standoff in his Edmonton home. While police argued that Raddatz was not a

Freeman, the National Post argued that his Facebook page proved otherwise: “‘Yep, we are used as collateral by way of the all capital legal FICTION name,’ Raddatz wrote in August 2014. ‘We have been brainwashed and lied to, into thinking that a natural human being is liable for fees, fines, penalties, and taxes accumulated by a corporate legal fiction. (the all caps name)’”

(Postmedia News 2015).

Josie, a retiree living in Edmonton remembers this event. When I ask if she has ever heard of Freemen, she answers, “There was that guy who killed those police officers.” She shakes her head. “It’s a tragedy.” Many of my interlocutors mention the occupied embassy in Calgary, or the shooting in Edmonton as points of shared reference; they know Freemen because they were there, they lived through the event. The coverage of these events in the media captures the attention of

Albertans. At once, these crimes are considered curious and absurd. The language employed by the “Freemen” spins a captivating and unusual narrative of a challenge to the state18. However,

18 For a more thorough analysis of the language used by sovereign citizens in relation to the state, please see Chapter 3: Pseudolaw and Performance in the Court Room. 43

why are these Freeman stories and not something else? Why do people deploy the language of

“Freeman” rather than “OPCA” or “sovereign citizen”? What associations does the term

“Freeman” conjure? Who uses what word? Why do these words coalesce and resonate? Why do they take on and lose meaning as they traverse diverse landscapes and contexts? How do words retain semblances of themselves while also transforming into something else altogether?

One reason that “Freeman” has emerged as the dominant catchall term is due to governmental discourse. In a 2012 CSIS Threat Report, Freemen are named a Canadian anti- governance counterpart to sovereign citizens (2012: 9). In contrast, the RCMP’s Terrorism Violent

Extremism Awareness Guide describes the FMOTL Movement as follows: “Freemen on the Land

(FMOTL) or sovereign citizens, is an anarchist movement with extreme right tendencies” (RCMP n.d.: 60) emphasis mine). Several things are incorrect in these two statements. First, it is worth reiterating that according to academic scholars, Freemen are one particular subgroup of sovereign citizens (and even this is debatable). They are not necessarily the same thing, nor do they refer to exactly the same things, either ideologically or otherwise. Second, the FMOTL movement is also not necessarily either anarchist or extreme right. Robert Menard, for example, describes his stance on governance as a broken relationship of political representation, writing:

Why should I have to let some goober represent me? He or she will most likely be more

concerned with their own political power then my concerns. What ever they are voting

on, why can we not vote on the issues ourselves? If they claim that we are not qualified

to do so, then how can we be qualified to elect someone who is? I am my own best

representative. All others are a poor second choice. …We can have a population that

no longer mistrusts the Law. We will have accountability in our government; we will

have bureaucrats who are responsible for their actions. We will have far less fear and

far more control. We will have more freedom. (Menard n.d.: 88)

In this claim, Menard argues against the current structure of governance, not against governance in general. This position is further corroborated in his work to promote a specific interpretation of the law. Further within the description, the RMCP equate the Oklahoma

City bombing as a Freeman activity. This statement is a gross misrepresentation of the attack by creating a false equivalent; suggesting that the FMOTL movement shares a similar violent trajectory to a US counterpart undercuts the contextual underpinnings rooted in local struggles for legitimacy. This is not to say that there is no cross-fertilization of ideology or technique—as we will see next, there has been extensive influence between Canada and the

United States in particular—but rather, the homogenization of terminology and ideology is a discursive entrapment of anti-governance into bite-sized rhetoric.

Forrest Clark and the “sovereign citizen” moniker is not limited to a California-US discourse. In part, by using this moment of naming Clark within my ethnography of Alberta, I suggest that select state frameworks create a codified understanding the Other and threat that carry powerful resonances, temporally, spatially, and affectively, not limited by geographical or political borders. Rather, these grammars attempt to systemize events and ideologies rooted in American law and history and in doing so replicate a kind of universal category of “sovereign citizen” outside of the contexts through which they first emerge. In other words, such terms carry the circumstantial weight of identification across diverse settings. As these terms are then used by the state, they must be homogenized in order to be effective.

The “Sovereign Citizen” Paradox As I have argued, “Freeman” is a Canadian-specific term that, as it circulates in Alberta, encapsulates a wider variety of movements within it, whether purposely or otherwise. Its usage in the Alberta context is derived from a series of events directly viewed by a citizen public—a public made of not only people who live in Alberta, but those who identify with a citizenship. Their membership to the state (whether that is Canada or otherwise) shapes how they see those who willingly transgress or reject that which they maintain. Yet, for the purposes of this thesis, I retain the word “sovereign citizen” in order to allow diverse engagements with the state to coalesce without having to be directly identified with a specific ideology or movement. It still remains, however, that “sovereign citizen” as it is employed to encapsulate a particular set of people and beliefs, must be interrogated. Where does it come from? What does it signify? What about the term makes it usable?

Many scholars cite the possible origins of this term as stemming from the Posse Comitatus movement in the United States (Berger 2016; Kent 2015; Netolitzky 2016, 2018; Pytyck and

Chaimowitz 2013). What these scholars fail to address however, is whether the term is self- ascribed or denoted by alternative power structures including intelligence services or academic thinktanks19. One probable root is suggested by a scholar who paraphrases the following from an uncited, possibly sovereign citizen source: “In a democracy, contended the Posse, the majority was sovereign… but in a republic, stated the Posse, the individual was sovereign and the government had no power to enact laws that ‘will loot and plunder the wealth produced by the sovereign individual’” (Corcoran 1990: 26, emphasis mine). Further, when read in combination with the

19 I do not wish to suggest that these scholars neglect the term out of ignorance or maliciousness. Rather, the term itself is so accepted in the wider literature that it almost escapes the need for interrogation itself. The word’s banality is precisely the problem I am trying to address by unpacking its unclear etymology. 46

Posse Comitatus Act of 187820 from which the movement draws its name, the group’s comprehension of their movement appears rooted in larger questions of sovereignty in the face of a non-just state. Yet, if the term does originate with the Posse Comitatus movement, the group had not explicitly called themselves such in their writings. Neither were its contemporary scholars particularly interested in the term’s etymological genealogy. For reasons unknown, the name

“sovereign citizen” appeared, and it was intricately entangled to Posse.

While groups and individuals who have sprung up in the wake of Posse Comitatus may call themselves sovereign citizens without directly reference to Posse Comitatus, usage of the term appears broad and fluid. Michael N. Colacci uses an all-encompassing definition. He writes, “…a sovereign citizen believes he or she is above all law… Sovereign citizens umbrella a variety of loosely organized groups or individuals, but they all share one basic ideological principle: that they are beyond the jurisdiction of the law” (2015: 153-154). Similar definitions can also be found across legal texts. Yet, if the agreed upon limitations of the term relate to the individual as beyond state law, then already there is an othering connotation to its usage. How the term is used and by whom reifies larger, hegemonic concerns of the “Other”; its trickling down into public discourse not only finds purchase as it resonates, but allows the term itself to become a stable, fixed concept.

In explaining the diverse terms that attempt to capture different facets of phenomena, I stress that the rooted historicities and affectiveness of the terms “sovereign citizen”, “OPCA”, and

“Freeman” continue to vibrate within the more general image of the sovereign citizen. Legal precedents, actors in and out of sync with the state, conspiracy theories, and threat are all woven

20 This law, which has been amended several times, states: “ Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both” (18 U.S. Code § 1385 - Use of Army and Air Force as posse comitatus). 47

into the term itself. These qualities not only mediate a particular kind of image but also the affects that come to bounce against, radiate from, and absorb the image. The term “sovereign citizen” thus attempts to condense and contain the entanglements of discourse, history, and difference that would otherwise escape classification. It does so because it requires specific parameters to be functional to the state, academic scholars, the public, and even those who are called sovereign citizens themselves.

It is important to also note that law enforcement agencies between the United States and

Canada have vastly different interests in classifying sovereign citizens. As one report highlights,

“Although many of the forms of resistance promoted by the group are nonviolent and most violent incidents are likely to be opportunistic small-scale attacks on law enforcement officers, the followers of the estimated 300,000 strong movement are also vulnerable to radicalisation and have contributed to mass-casualty terrorist attacks in the US” (FBI 2015: 1). While I do not want to paint sovereign citizens as an entirely peaceful movement, I also do not want to approach them as extremists. First, homogenizing the group for the sake of classification does no favours for anyone involved. If law enforcement wants a better term by which to engage with this alter-public, then threat is not necessarily the first (or best) choice. Second, there are very real actions with consequences for those who encounter violent sovereign citizens. I do not condone the killing or injuring of others and I do not want to argue that this violence is necessary or legitimate. To relate sovereign citizens as one ideolog or another attunes everyone to a resonant threat, regardless of whether or not that affect is reflective of the situation.

The term “sovereign citizen” is also paradoxical. A sovereign, as Carl Schmitt (2005) argues, has jurisdictional power over its subjects and can establish norms via rule. In his

introduction to Definition of Sovereignty, he writes, “[s]overeign is he who decides on the exception” (2005: 5). This person, not only a ruler or an authority, is someone who can traverse beyond the limit of the norm; in an emergency, they are able so suspend law in order to act in the interests of self or state protection (Schmitt 2005: 7). A sovereign’s subjects such as citizens then, are those who act in accordance to a sovereign and whose lives are defined and maintained by this relationship. A citizen cannot, within Schmitt’s framework, rule or transgress law without facing punishment. This contradiction—the ability to be an authority as well as to act beneath the proscribed ways of a sovereign—is at the heart of the term “sovereign citizen”; they are not necessarily without state, nor are they without citizenship yet they attempt to act as sovereign.

This paradox is essential to the doubling of the citizen for the sovereign citizen—on one hand, citizenship implies a set of power relations that one is subject to, both willingly and unwillingly. A citizen is granted rights and privileges, such as driving, travelling, or residency.

Sovereign citizens engage in these practices regardless of rejecting the state. On the other hand, willingly rejecting citizenship is othering but not fully possible. Sovereign citizens may reject driving licences, but they still use roads and they might obey other traffic laws. This paradox is what also allows a sovereign citizen to be uncanny: it is precisely because of the inescapability of the citizen category (within the possibilities of rejecting the Canadian state) and its power upon the individual that sovereignty cannot be fully maintained. Sovereign citizens will always have their sovereignty limited when they encounter the state within which they reside because they are still known to the state as “citizens”. They are entangled in larger processes of expectations ad other forms of service or care and cannot easily be excised from these relations.

How do Sovereign Citizens Identify Themselves? I stress that Albertan public discourse uses a different term in lieu of (and often as a synonym for) “sovereign citizen”: “Freeman”, “Freemen”, and “OPCA”. As I have explained,

“Freeman” and “Freemen” are terms are directly derived from the Freeman-on-the-Land

Movement, which started in, and is mainly localized to, Canada. “OPCA”, for example, is derived from an Albertan court case used to define vexatious litigants (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571).

These terms are more readily used by both the citizen public and legal apparatuses than “sovereign citizens”. Most of my interlocutors were immediately familiar with the word “Freemen” and use it as a synonym for “sovereign citizen” and vice versa. Although usage is changing, I retain the word “sovereign citizen” over “Freeman” because my sovereign interlocutors specifically make a point not to be addressed or understood as “Freemen” or “OPCA”. They are not Freemen, but they fall into the larger category of “sovereign citizen” as defined by the state. Additionally, while some individuals may self-identify with Freeman or sovereign citizen, others do not and continue to engage with the state without these terms.

I pause here to caution against approaching “sovereign citizen”, “freeman”, and “OPCA” as only accidental equivalents. The deployment of these terms can be strategic and specific, even when groups or bodies mistake one term for another. The RCMP, for example, in their handbook,

“Terrorism and Violent Extremism Awareness Guide” (n.d.), classifies the Freeman-on-the-Land

Movement as an overarching term for all sovereign citizen groups in Canada. In this guide, they write, “Freemen on the Land (FMOTL), or Sovereign Citizens, is an anarchist movement with extreme right tendencies” (n.d.: 60). Rather than to describe differences in terms, it is equally important to note that each of these terms resonates with one another at various times and

discourses: they are seen as “same enough” to be used interchangeably, regardless of perceived difference by a general Albertan public.

These terms additionally do not resonate equally or at the same tone across a heterogenous population. They might be employed for example, in a newspaper article, but only some individuals will be able to see a resonance. As a public or an audience, we have to first be receptive to affect in order to feel its resonance. However, there are ways to cultivate a particular response to a particular affect. In William Mazzarella’s work on mass advertising (2017), he argues that an audience can become susceptible to particular affects via our mimetic archive. He writes, the mimetic archive is “the residue, embedded not only in the explicitly articulated forms commonly recognized as cultural discourses but also in-built environments and material forms, in the concrete history of the senses, and in the habits of our shared embodiment” (2017: 8). This is where affect as residue lingers and can be recalled in various contexts and encounters, sometimes reinterpreted.

If affect is stored, it can be recalled. However, if the same affect is recalled and expressed over a series of seemingly unconnected phenomena, then resonance is not only affect in repetition or pattern, but it is a way to make sense of something else altogether—not necessarily understood but felt.

Conclusion Linking the fires across the Pacific Northwest to one sovereign citizen in the United States is more than an interesting anecdote. The threat of destruction could be felt in Alberta not only by its physical force—our shortness of breath, irritated lungs, a supressing heat—but in its resonance with other grammatical forms of state-keeping that allow individuals to resonate together in similar frequencies. These terms, “Sovereign citizen”, “Freeman”, and “OPCA”, are at times used interchangeably, as classifications, identifications, and as synonyms for something not necessarily

encountered. Like the perceived real dangers from the fire you cannot see, there is something also dangerous about the sovereign citizen: it is the anxieties expressed through this approximated threat that pushes us to reify the Other, to call it a name. These terms attempt to explain facets of the sovereign citizen movement that otherwise defy legal classification. The genre of experience, of paranoia, fear, humor, or otherwise, is bound within the words we use to label and classify phenomena. As words circulate in a given population, they take on discursive meanings, relative to their original signifiers. It is also a form of magic21—in the Weberian sense (1948), the detangling of public discourses of sovereign citizens and its terminologies is one of disenchantment itself. We are delimiting difference in order to control others.

However, this is not limited to state discourse. It can be mobilized by people in the media, online, watching the sunset; all who encounter the uncanny can understand its power when they feel its resonances across their daily lives. As an anthropologist, I find myself ensnared in these linguistic webs. At times, it feels impossible to work against them. Words like “sovereign citizen” and “pseudolaw” for example, appear and reappear in my notes. Their repetitions are concerning— the influence of law and state knowledge, with its hegemonic grammar of the Other, inescapably influence my own writing. While it can be challenging to disentangle oneself from this language, it is also crucial to recognize that I am not alone. Lavigne-Desnoyers, in her dissertation on Quebec sovereign citizens writes similarly: “Automne 2013. J’entends « citoyen souverain » pour la première fois. À partir de là, tout change. Ces deux mots, je les vois et je les entends partout. Est- ce que c’est nouveau? Non, mais maintenant mon esprit le remarque” (2016: 1). Resonance is not

21 In a personal correspondence with Nicolas Rasiulis, he eloquently describes magic as “intentional manipulation of symbols for practical purposes; where there is magic, there is already overlapping interests …there is friction”. 52

maintained by borders of the state or its language. These words stick with us, they resonate within us, even if we try to work outside of them. They continue to haunt.

Chapter II: Speaking Refusal and the Uncanny Story

Sitting in a coffee shop, James leans forwards in his seat with a hint of a smile. He is a sergeant in the Calgary Police Services, but I wouldn’t have spotted him if it wasn’t for his badge laying open and exposed on the table. In the busy corridor of haphazard lounge chairs and their respective revellers, this is the first time I have met James in person and I hardly know what to expect. After all, he is the one that contacted me. This is our first—and only—meeting in person.

Wearing a grey suit—he tells me he’s been in meetings all week—James is intensely animated. While he only has this short lunch break to meet with me, he is eager to tell me a little bit more about the Thompsons, Daisy and Joseph, a sovereign citizen couple living up near Wood

Buffalo National Park. He’s known them for over a decade and also knows of my failed efforts trying to reach out to the family previously. The Thompsons didn’t want to speak to me; in their words, I was a McGill student who was therefore a “serf of the queen”, a shill of the state.

Complaining to Lucy, a legal scholar in Edmonton, I had expressed my loss as to what do to next.

And so, as I confronted this dead-end line of inquiry, James serendipitously appeared in the form of an email. Lucy, with all of her connections, sent James a message asking for help. It is promising, but it is caveated with expectations. James writes to me, “I am a huge supporter in gathering as much data and doing as much research on these loons as possible in order to make all our jobs easier.”

James is eager to tell me what he knows. He is even more eager to tell me a story: “Daisy was out working in the garden. They grow their own crops out there. So they also had these sheep they were raising for meat, and while she was out there, planting carrots or something, this sheep came up to her, and mounted her.”

James has said this last part loud enough that others in the coffee shop notice. They turn to face us, and James is half smiling. I’ve stopped writing in my notebook. Flabbergasted, I muster,

“…What? She fucked a sheep, Vanessa!” Another pause: “So Daisy goes back home and finds out she’s pregnant.” He says it as if I didn’t already understand what he meant. “She’s pregnant with this animal baby so she does what any mother would do and gets ready to have a kid. And when the baby comes, it dies, either from childbirth or it was a stillborn or whatever. Now they have a dead baby. So instead of telling the police and the hospital, ‘hey I had a baby but it died’, they do the next best thing and bury it on their property.” James raises his brows. “It sounds ridiculous, it’s not even physically possible to have a sheep-baby! Genetics doesn’t work like that! It’s bestiality!

This story sticks to me, even now. In my audio recording of the interview and in my notes, there is a figurative record scratch—a moment where time, conversation, and presence are immediately flattened together by a sharp interruption: a surprise utterance that is heard in full clarity, whether it was meant to be caught or not. In written form, it manifests as several large question marks scribbled on my page. From the nebulous chain of events that welcomed James’ arrival in my fieldwork to his own story of someone else I have only known online, I am left perplexed. It feels fitting that the only word left in my toolbox is: what?

The emphasized what is the catalyst to the exceptional and if anything, stories such as the one James shared with me are nothing less than that—they are hard to pin down to any one meaning or significance. They transgress the normative structures of narration by resisting easy explanation.

Instead, they open what Kathleen Stewart calls, “the space in the side of the road” at the margins of a culturally imagined “real”, both remembered and desired (1996). The subjects of these

narrations, an “Other” pieced together by fragments of encounter, are contextualized by local power relations and are contingent on audiences and narrators (Stewart 1996: 139). In other words,

James’ story cannot simply be summarized as an account of bestiality and child loss. Its utterance also opens sites of discourse over life itself. They invite speculation onto the meaning of civil duties, responsibilities, and norms as they blur the boundaries between fact and fantasy. At the same time, exceptional stories (including their “characters”, “setting”, and “plot”) demand to be taken seriously. These stories gesture to something—or someone—beyond ephemeral storytelling.

When sovereign citizens remain elusive—whether by choice or otherwise—traces of their presence remain embedded in the accounts told of them by others, pointing elsewhere. As partial spectres, they manifest in chance encounters and stories as objects of curiosity, resonating with larger, localized discourses. This slippery presence requires attending to their traces in text as they are recontextualized through the speech of Albertans, including in stories similar to that told by

James.

Much of my fieldwork over the course of 2018 relied on stories told by Albertan citizens, both legal and non-legal actors. As I hear these stories, I treat them as ethnographic encounters of subject formation. They offer a window onto us how the teller views and inhabits the world and how they regard others. James, Daisy, and Joseph Thompson become different kinds of subjects altogether: they are reflections of what an audience wants to hear and know. These stories also introduce different layers of datum, whether it is the personal stakes for James as he tells it; the meta-narrative of politics, self-sufficiency, and mistrust; or the story itself as fabula. However, it must be explicitly noted that many of my interlocutors were not sovereign citizens and some, unlike James, had never even met one. Many of the conversations I had across central Alberta attempted to surface someone never encountered. Through storytelling, Albertans can 56

contextualize and express otherness situated in a wider political discourse rather than sharing experiences of sovereign citizens as defined categories. Stories, as Stewart describes, are productive; they are “the continuous imagining of the ‘real’ through the mediation of stories of things that happen” (1996: 27).

This chapter opens a space between narration and event, signifier and sign, object and audience, sovereign and citizen. When stories are told, they are more than narratives of experience: they are negotiations of cultural processes. The substance of the story is made visible through the selective modes of communication that allow a contingent something (or someone) to emerge.

Drawing from Carl Schmitt’s work on the exception as that idea or action that falls outside of— and refuses to conform to—a codified legal system and seeks to counter a threat or danger to the state (2005: 6), I argue that exceptional stories too challenge preconceived assumptions of narration and the story. These stories ask us to suspend disbelief, to find neither truth nor fiction in their claims. They are objects: theories and discourses of how the world works (Lepselter 2016:

17-18). At the same time, these narrations are imaginative approximations of an “Other” whose very existence exceeds the real itself through the evocation of disbelief. As they surface at junctures of uncertainty, spaces in the side of the road, exceptional stories reveal not only the excess and desire inlaid within its images but authority as its narrators organize and relate themselves to the sovereign citizen (Stewart 1996: 37). They are also, as Schmitt evocatively described, dependent on the “sovereign” to decide the exception (2005: 5). Those who have the power to tell these stories create spaces or tensions of exceptionality as discursive ways to control an “Other”, both imagined and uncanny.

Exceptional stories do not have to be as bluntly captivating as James’ tale. The exceptional is not necessarily spectacular or mythical either. The exceptional overflows with possibilities as it also resists the hard closures of analysis and critique even in utterance. Like an iceberg whose mass is mostly comprised of what’s below the water’s surface, the tendrils of these stories connect one narrative to the next, not only in apophenic, parallel resonance to one another (Lepselter 2016:

19). They become constitutive of encounters—they provoke and activate what Mazzarella terms the mimetic archive: an enfolding of residue from engaging with the world itself, as material, discourse, sense, or embodiment that can later be recalled (2017: 8). In other words, we re- encounter things we have already experienced, through their activations, whether purposeful or not.

Following several stories that emerge from diverse interlocutors across the province, I argue that their stories emphasize difference between the interlocutor and the sovereign citizen as expressions of a larger concern regarding membership and productivity in a citizen society. These stories are also ways of reaffirming the teller’s own position in the world in relation to the state and state identity via expectations of citizenship. Some stories tap into the mimetic archive; it is not only that certain elements of a narrative draw on external context and signifiers, but even in this reawakening or resonance of the archive, the localized real—that space of encounter with the sovereign citizen—also finds resonance across several other, disparate discourses.

Fact, Fantasy, and the Uncanny The act of imagining inclusion and relationality is not new. In Benedict Anderson’s work on the nation as an imagined community, Anderson suggests that despite its members never knowing one another, they are linked: “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson

2006: 7). This “deep, horizontal comradeship” unites individuals through relationality based on commonalities that are imaginatively shared and propagated within the group. Yet, while diverse groups of people who inhabit this community together imagine their relationship to one another, they are also fantasizing an ideal relationship, not only with one another but with the state and its apparatuses.

Begoña Aretxaga argues through Laplanche and Pontalis, defines fantasy is “a form of reality in its own right” (2001: 4). It is the preservation of idealized ways of how the world works

(Berlant 2011: 2). It is also the positivistic relationship with the world, an enfolding of morality and potentiality in which imagination becomes the device to envision a something otherwise.

Fantasy is also tied to the morality of the subject as it moves through circumstance and event. The fantastic as it emerges through various social spaces such as in the workplace or in occult economies allow individuals to contextualize the global processes of modernity to their localized circumstances (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999: 284). The fantasy is the juxtaposition between lived reality, expectations and anxieties of the future, and precarity. When people fantasize about their relationship to the state—for instance, their subjectification to state power or how the state can benefit them—and their pre-emptive assumptions are rooted in their status as citizens. A driver’s license for example, is a lens of plastic, shiny foil, and ink. It is a physical object, a proof of membership; it is both a real and imagined entry point to a collective and law. When sovereign citizens discard or decry these proofs of citizenship, they make perform their detachment from an imagined polity.

The post office offers another example of a site of fraught engagement with the everyday infrastructure of state is mail, an index of state infrastructure. Resting under the umbrella of a café

patio table, Pete describes his encounters with individuals who use the post office. As a clerk behind the counter, he tells me he can spot a sovereign citizen (or in his words, a Freeman) based on stamps alone. He says,

“[Y]ou’d always know the Freeman package from a regular package

because it was done up in what I would say is code-speak. You would see

perhaps stamps that had already been cancelled, if they used stamps at all…

they weren’t pleased with that kind of government interaction. They felt very

much like, “if I stuck this in a post box, it should just go where it’s going”

…Many of them, I think, have adapted to the fact that if they want to use the

post office, they pay the bill, but they will do everything in their power to avoid

having to interact with the system to the utmost, I think. But certainly, they

have no means to mail it themselves; they eventually have to engage with

society in one respect or another. I don’t know if it kills them inside or what.

But they really do make a pomp and circumstance out of it. …[I]t needs

to get there as soon as possible but [the package] needs to be registered so that

they can follow it to make sure it got there… And they take the numbers in that

[tracking code] and distill it… I’ve definitely met one that has a code-speak

and if it doesn’t ascribe to the coding then it is not valid [to them].”

Figure 3. One kind of code-speak called QUANTUM-LANGUAGE-PARSE-SYNTAX-GRAMMAR. Developed by :David-Wynn: Miller, it is meant to be applied to any government document to verify if it is a legal document through following a specific order and pattern in grammar. This is one example of code speak that appears to public servants. 61

As he reminisces over his experiences, he reinterprets their actions based on what he thinks

I want to hear, linking his memories to what he already knows about sovereign citizens. At the heart of Pete’s story is a contradiction. Regardless of whether his customers are sovereign citizens or not, Pete thinks they are based on how they send their packages. He perceives sovereign citizens as people who are against using the state’s apparatuses but are compelled to do so in order to engage in practices of everyday life. The usage of the post office despite its governmental affiliation is not only contradictory but deviant. These encounters with the person behind the counter are also images of deviant relationality, formed in the expectations and fantasies of how an individual should interact with post offices (and more broadly, the state). We learn this through

Pete’s story: “if they want to use the post office they pay the bill… they have no means to mail it themselves”. When an individual does not easily conform to the bureaucratic processes of the state, they rupture a fantasy of a particular kind of relationship. There is an expectation of how the post office will run, what rules and customs one must obey in order to send mail, and what the outcome will be if the mail is sent properly. Yet, sovereign citizens must have some knowledge of this system in order to challenge it. When Pete evocatively details how sovereign citizens must still go to the state post office to send off their mail, he knows that those mailers must make strategic choices of what to contest and refuse in order to receive service. At the same time, these people do not conform to a typical post office encounter. Their fantasy of the state, while using the post office, is one of limited to no state interference at all.

Pete’s ability to imagine a sovereign citizen is made clear as he interprets these interactions at the post office. At the same time, he is highlighting an otherness that makes these interactions not only unique, but unusual or uncanny. As I argued in the previous chapter, the figure or image of the sovereign citizen is uncanny–– that which is both familiar but also terrifying (Freud 1919: 62

1-2). It is this unheimlich that mimics the real through it its uncertainty. Through inhabiting both the familiar and the unknown, this doubling becomes both a reflection of the phenomena and a question of authenticity in its liminality: an image is replicative of its object but as it is doubled through its uncanniness, it is not entirely recognizable as familiar or true (Rahimi 2013: 456). In other words, the details of the image may not perfectly map onto the original object; its imperfect, uneven, or unequal representation is not always clearly apparent, but at times, can be tacitly felt as a neutral to negative reaction. In James’ story, the circumstances of Daisy Thompson’s pregnancy elude us. While the story may be true for Daisy herself as she comes to know the event, it may not be real for the audience. Daisy “fuck[ing] a sheep” and the subsequent outcome of a deceased sheep-human baby are made uncanny through the subversion of expectation, captured by James’ exclamation, “It sounds ridiculous, it’s not even physically possible to have a sheep-baby! Genetics doesn’t work like that! It’s bestiality!” It is in this language used by the story teller that the uncanny sovereign citizen emerges as cultivated affect. And as we come to imagine the sovereign citizen through the stories told by others, we are not only confronted with an image but an image that acts.

It elicits a response: the what, that captures some affect while allowing others to escape.

In his work on the uncanniness of spirit encounters in Mongolia, Gregory Delaplace describes the sensorially experienced presence of ghosts as incomplete precisely because they exceed our ways of knowing and engaging with the world (2013: 65). He writes, “the possibility that the world might not be perceived by everybody in the same way—and no human society seems to ignore such a possibility—prompts the charting of a specific regime of communication, a distribution of possible and impossible sensations and actions” (Delaplace 2013: 67). This is not to say that sovereign citizens are akin to spirits or to shed doubt on their corporeal presences as unknowable. Rather, it is that sovereign citizens are imagined in relation to the limitations of the 63

individual’s own modalities of experiencing the world. And, within this modality, is the primacy of citizenship and citizenry: the cut that frames relationality between those within the folds of community and the other. As Pete tells his story about code-speaking Freemen, he is also telling a story about the expectations of “standard” procedure: an individual should not be suspicious of the post office and the state. At the same time, someone who is suspicious (or paranoid) becomes a marker for an “Other”. The act of telling stories about sovereign citizens thus becomes an ontological claim about one’s relation to the world, as well as how one communicates with an ontological reframing that might exceed one’s own understanding of that supposedly shared world.

Narrativization mediates that localized, imaginary “real”, making palpable these partial encounters all too exceptional (Stewart 1996: 32).

It may be argued that the stories told by James and Pete are examples of gossip that render how moral values are imagined, deliberated, and contested through social banter (Pietilä 2007:

14), or strategic acts of expression—a kind of fable making to convince the audience of a particular truth claim. However, Jerome Bruner, through Todorov, writes that text itself has no meaning until the audience gives it such; a cohesive meaning is made through “interpretive communities” who share similar discourses (1986: 156). Whoever comes into contact with the story must also be interrelated with others, drawing from shared or unknown context but also making meaning within a larger realm beyond the self. As he describes the role criticism plays in constructing and understanding stories, William Cronon writes, “We tell stories with each other and against each other in order to speak to each other” (1992: 1374). Scott and Gluckman also argue that narrative discourse functions to solidify social cohesion (Pietilä 2007: 7). This Bahktinian heteroglossia presents meaning as nebulous and polyvocal. The manifold meaning-making occurring as we tell and experience stories also suggests that utterances are motivated. While I argue that the uncanny 64

ruptures the fantasy of a stable, civil life, I also recognize that these stories serve to position the speaker in relation to the world. Bruner, Todorov, and Cronon highlight this interconnectivity of the story: we, the audience, the storyteller, and the people of the story are all affirming, cultivating, or even breaking relations amongst ourselves. The exceptional story becomes the site of possibility, a reorientation or entrenchment of oneself within the uncanny.

Refusal Thus far I have highlighted how sovereign citizens as uncanny others emerge in the stories

Albertans tell as a way of reframing positivistic citizen-state relations. For many of my Albertan interlocutors, their own sovereign citizen encounters are often interwoven with their negative discourses about the state––indeed the story provides the occasion for subtle forms of critique. My discussions with Duke, a gun trader who often travels across the province for his work, offers an example It is his mother, Nancy, who tells me to talk to him. “He’s met those Freemen,” she says as we wash dishes in the kitchen, “He’s always working in the bush so he’ll be a good person to talk to.”

While we warm up at the beginning of the interview, I ask him about his line of work and the kinds of guns he processes. One particular category catches my attention: antique firearms.

You don’t need a permit to use or to own one, I’m told. It is legal to carry and use them. As Duke explains, “[antique firearms are] a handgun that you can take camping with you, which is bizarre

‘cause most people in Canada don’t even know it’s a law. Most law enforcement officers don’t know it’s a law.”

“Have you ever gotten in trouble from the law for this?” I ask.

“Uh, well I’ve had a gun pulled on me a few times [by police officers and the

RCMP]. I carry a copy of the law with me—I’m not breaking any laws. …You get

the odd [officer] that says, ‘you’re not supposed to be carrying it anyway’ but I have

to explain it to him, ‘Well no, I’m not breaking any law. I am well within my rights to

do so’ […] The simple fact is that when you carry a copy of the law with you, it’s like,

this section of the criminal code, what it says is that I’m not breaking any laws. If you

try to confiscate the firearms, you have to prove I’m doing something wrong. I’ll stand

here, and you can call your superior officers, but I’m not giving it up.”

After a few more minutes of pondering laws and antique firearms, we meander back to the question of Freemen. From his perspective, Duke tells me the history of the movement as the entitlement of owning and using weapons from British common law. “Firearms have always been seen as a privilege as opposed to a right, you know licencing and it can be taken away... In the

Magna Carta—of course they were talking of bows and swords at that time—it was the idea of self defense and that any free man, not being an indentured servant, had the right to own a weapon and provide for himself.”

Figure 4. Advertisement from an Albertan gun trading magazine. This ad calls for Albertan gun owners to challenge tightening Canadian gun laws. As Duke explains to me the relationships between people, states, and guns, I am struck by how closely he mimics the language that my other interlocutors have used to describe their own encounters with sovereign citizens. While Duke’s relationship to the law is different from that of a sovereign citizen—for one, he makes it explicitly clear that he knows and obeys the law—he still foregrounds the inadequacies of state governance in his narration. When he says, “I carry a copy of the law with me—I’m not breaking any laws”, he expresses his own expectations of state relations through having this legal document with him despite knowing that the state’s own misrecognition and application of the law could unfairly punish him. In the conflict of what law does for Duke (and more largely, the question of how law governs its subjects), he asserts his own knowledge of the law in order to secure his livelihood and interests. At the same time, through explaining the Magna Carta, he draws out similar themes between himself and a Freeman. Both

Duke and his understanding “Freemen” draw from the same legal framework to legitimize gun ownership, but in different intensities. Whereas Duke challenges the state to live up to its promises

of upholding gun privileges, sovereign citizens contest this very promise itself. When confronted with injustice, Duke asserts his own knowledge of the law to claim what he can and cannot be subject to, including taking away his weapons. Sovereign citizens, in juxtaposition, argue that there is no legal basis at all: they cannot be subject to laws that they do not believe in.

To further widen the ambiguous space between citizen and sovereign citizen, Duke does not necessarily show empathy to Freemen either. Later, he says, “The vast majority of Freemen are single men. They don’t fit into society. Many of them are neckbeards or incels22. They’re devoted to their cause, but they need to give up; they need to pick and choose what they contest.”

As he paints his experiences of Freemen as “neckbeards or incels”, he is not only highlighting their lack of sociality but reinforcing their differences from himself. Even though Duke sees himself and Freemen as having some legitimate grounds for challenging the state, on a personal level, he argues that Freemen are not socially compatible with Albertan society, not only through their behavior but who they come to resemble: the socially awkward, marginalized male23.

In Duke’s story, he indicates that he is unlike a Freeman. Even if he may share similar discourses about the state and its control on personal freedoms with them, he sees himself and his actions differently. Duke does not refuse citizenship or its frameworks—he is instead, hyperconscious of the extent to which he has rights and freedoms afforded to him by the state. His own refusal to be understood as breaking the law stands is similar to the previous stories in which

22 Neckbeards is a term to describe men who have little to no social skills. While not necessarily self-ascribed, those who are “neckbeards” tend to argue that men (including themselves) should display high levels of social etiquette and chivalry, especially towards women. Incels is shorthand for “involuntary celibate”—it is commonly self- ascribed by men who see themselves as undesirable sexual partners. These two terms are often used together on online communities to describe toxic male users who aggressively target women. 23 While news reports in the last decade over-represent men, some legal interlocutors have suggested that sovereign citizens are not largely comprised of men. They argued that women are more likely to engage in alternative economies (such as homeopathy) in order to maintain their lifestyles. For further commentary on gender and sovereign citizens, please refer to the introduction: methodology section. 68

refusal of citizenship or citizenry express an implicit relationship of the speaker to the duties and expectations of the state. Just as Pete’s post office mailer rejects the tracking number on their package or Daisy and Joseph deliberately choose not to involve doctors or morticians, people find and express their relations to the state through reshaping the parameters of civil engagement to a fantasized polity and community. Duke’s method of challenging the state is resistance; sovereign citizens, on the other hand, refuse.

In Audra Simpson’s work, she highlights refusal as the rejection of the “gift” of citizenship

(whether in its physical manifestations such as passports and licenses or as social categories)

(2014). She writes, “What happens when we refuse what all (presumably) ‘sensible’ people perceive as good things? What does this refusal do to politics, to sense, to reason?” (Simpson 2014:

1). Within the framework of a story, the gift of citizenship is “sensible”. As sovereign citizens come to reject, refuse, or contest elements of the state, I argue that the fantasy of civil life is reoriented to express concern over the fundamental expectations of the state’s accountability to its citizens. Daisy and Joseph Thompson burying their deceased child on their property without informing the police, the unnamed mailer who wants to send a package without being traced by the state, or as we will see in the following sections, even the assumed dangerousness of the sovereign citizen engaged in illegal activity, suggest that refusing “the gift” upsets civil life itself.

It is not only that these individuals are acting unusually and are thus expressed in narrations as uncanny, but that refusing the state itself can be uncanny.

At another coffee shop, on another summer day, I meet with Dan. He is curious about my research. As someone also with a significant wealth of knowledge on firearms, he is assured, and almost too confident when he talks about Freemen. I explain that I’ve had trouble getting any

Freemen to talk to me. Dan seems to have an answer. “There’s a couple of Freemen living on crown land [in the mountains]. They buy a lot of guns [from me]. I’m not going to introduce them to you though; they’re scary guys.”

“Why are they scary?” I ask.

“I don’t want you to get involved with them. They’re into the illegal gun trade. Even I don’t feel comfortable around them and I’m a big guy.”

Without mentioning names or any further details, Dan shakes his head. It reminds me of another friend, Tracy, who tells me that she can get me in to meet some Freemen, if only I “want to”. The invitation is extended by another friend of Tracy’s, from a former RCMP who heard of my research. I don’t know his name, but the message gets passed along regardless. “They’re at the penitentiary,” Tracy says on behalf of this unnamed RCMP, “If you want to interview them, it can be done but I’ve been told to warn you that they’ve been known to stalk people.”

Despite this great opportunity to interview sovereign citizens at the provincial prison, I decline the offer. I am not enthusiastic about the potential consequences of stalking, even if I have no idea if it is true or not. Fear is powerful; it stops me in my tracks. What Dan and the unnamed

RCMP tell me through their concern for my safety is that refusing to act within the parameters of the law and breaking the law, is itself deviant, even if it is speculative. Yet, they are also quick to point to out that sovereign citizens, in fact, do exist; they are real, physical people, especially so when they are within the parameters of the justice system. My interlocuters remind me that even if I am kept at a distance from sovereign citizens, it is not necessarily because they only inhabit the peripheries of the state. For some of my Albertan interlocutors, sovereign citizens are dangerous, especially because they can be encountered outside of these margins. They are real

because of the negative consequences of engaging with someone who refuses the state, potentially or actualized.

Conclusion Returning to James and his own exceptional story, I pause, mouth open. I can’t tell if James finds this funny. He’s still half smiling but that doesn’t mean that there was a joke or a punchline.

“She fucked a sheep, Vanessa!” he says, and its emphasis reverberates in my head. Inside, a nervous laughter is building in my chest, I think to myself: what is humorous about child loss and bestiality? What elicits a non-response in the form of a vague question? What did I expect?

Mouth agape, I slowly ask, “How do you know this?”

“Daisy told me.” James answers. He leans back in his armchair. He’s known the family for years, so it strikes me as well within the realm of possibility that Daisy would confide in him. Still, he adds, “I saw her when she was pregnant, but I don’t believe it.” He doesn’t believe the sheep- human hybrid detail of the story because, to him, it isn’t scientifically, biologically possible. He does, however, believe she had a baby.

“And you as a police officer, what did you do?”

“It’s not my jurisdiction so I passed it off to the RCMP. They didn’t do shit about it. Didn’t even want to go check it out. They probably think [this family’s] stockpiling weapons, just waiting to start another Mayerthorpe24. No RCMP wants to go check it out if they think they’re going to get shot.”

24 Mayerthorpe is a reference to the Mayerthorpe incident in 2005 where four RCMPs were shot and killed on the farm of James Roszko while searching his property. Despite the incident taking place over ten years ago, some of my legal interlocutors make passing reference to it as they talk about the dangers of working in rural Alberta. 71

The story teeters off here—there are follow up questions on weaponry, the RCMP and their relationship to local, municipal police, fears of domestic extremism, and the limitations of police work itself. Yet, James’ story resonates with me. Just as the question of “what” frames my line of inquiry, the word still hangs between these lines, provoking a non-committal answer. I have argued that the sovereign citizen emerges in stories as an uncanny figure. Their archetypal presence stands to highlight the fluidity of their marginality, whether self-imposed or otherwise, in relation to the identity of the citizen. As Albertan citizens come to tell stories about the uncanny sovereign citizen, they are imagining what constitutes inclusion and exclusion from the state; they are mapping out their own uncertainties through narrative.

These exceptional stories, the stories that come to brutally remind us of our stakes within a larger ontology, also come to be polyvocal stratigraphies of meaning. As different themes, ideas, and arguments are enfolded into a narrative, they are made of and limited by, James Clifford argues, “specific historical relations of dominance and dialogue”, perpetuated by the ethnographer via their own representational texts (1983: 119). If, representation, text, and image, are thus explicitly bound in power, then is it possible to work with the story rather than on it? What might surface if we forego the destructive extraction of content and meaning? What can form tell us?

This brings me back to the word at stake. When I ask “what”, this severely reductive question, it overflows and interrupts: What did I just hear? What is a sheep-baby? What makes this story unbelievable? What would make someone bury their child on their property without telling someone? What is this story? These questions highlight the uncertainty of narrative territory. Its topography are its ridges, elevations, contours, and textures, smoothed by a second-hand account of something unseen but known through its traces. We are attempting to make sense of

assemblages—such as personal historiographies of each of the people involved in the story, or how a lived experience of birth and death becomes a larger metaphor for citizen/state relations. At the same time, resisting analysis can be also be a resistance to discursive attempts of holding authoritative power over knowledge.

However, a “what” is also personal a judgement call, a reflection on morality, an opening that eludes to the questioner’s expectations and perceptions of the world. It is not only a moment of capture—the researcher as caught, somewhere between reality as stranger than fiction and fiction that transcends reality, as well as the image of the sovereign citizen as caught—but it is the moment of leakage, an unsettlement of the self, displaced. My startled response was not because I didn’t understand what James meant. I was disbelieving, perhaps even in shock. I couldn’t understand why James chose to tell me this story, or the circumstances that would lead someone to have a hybrid baby, or where the line of conversation could possibly go next. His account forged a space of interaction and relationality between James, the Thompsons, the story, and me. All I could do was sit with the story, even if I also tried to resist it. My relationality to James and to the people in the story was momentarily fractured and I could not understand how to make sense of the story. When I ask “what” then, it is not only the start of the subject itself as it comes to know itself but the expression of its being. It is the “I” in relation to the “you”, both in the narrativized sense, referring to actors in stories as characters, as well as to the teller and the audience.

James’ story for example reminds me of a similar story from the 1990s; Weibo Ludwig and his family made headlines fighting to remove sour gas wells from their property. These wells, they argued, were polluting their property and causing severe birth defects and death in their livestock as well as in their family. Ludwig’s story would also resurface in other ways; sovereign

citizens would talk about meeting Ludwig at detaxation conferences, or Albertans would reference the reclusive family as “loons” for not working with the state to solve their ills. The exceptional story thus can both pull in these discourses but also rupture our mimetic archive and its generative possibilities. We reveal our own incapacities to make meaning from what we knew previously to what we now come to know.

So, should we stop making sense of stories? Should we refuse hard analysis of their actual content? Alternatively, as ethnographers, do exceptional stories keep us from making sense of our subjects––fixing them in the shadow of their former selves? I have tried to suggest in this chapter that momentarily pausing symbolic narrative analysis in favour of rethinking what it means to be an audience to a story of an uncanny other can instead, reveal our own pre-existing conceptions of citizenship, refusal, and fantasy. I do not wish to suggest that we should forgo analysis altogether, however. Rather, some notions tied to our relationship to the state are so deeply embedded in our everyday lives that we might end up repeating state discourses of otherness, even in our questioning. Through staying with these stories on the side of the road, we can envision our own entanglements with those whose deviance challenges our fantasies of a good civil life.

Chapter III: Pseudolaw and Performance in the Court Room

In August 2018, Edward-Jay-Robin; Belanger25 was arrested and held in custody at the

Edmonton Remand Centre. A self-titled paraclete and “Minister of Christ” for the Church of the

Ecumenical Redemption International (CERI)26, a Christian, pro-marijuana movement, Belanger was standing inside his house when the police came.

It was by coincidence that Edmonton Police Services (EPS) arrested Belanger. They had passed by a backyard growing 5-6ft tall marijuana plants—so much that when dried and totalled for evidence, it surpassed seven hundred grams—and were unaware that Belanger lived there.

Upon entering the home to search for the owner and co-accused James Keating, they found

Belanger. At the time of his arrest, he had six outstanding warrants, three provincial and three city- wide, from various activities including driving while prohibited and marijuana possession.

While several keen observers had kept tabs on Belanger for years, the idea of the minister in court renewed interest in CERI. For some users online, they only found out about these court cases after they had happened—once they had been uploaded onto CANLII.org, a non-profit collective of legal documents from across Canada. Word of mouth relied on knowing someone in the courts, chance sightings on Facebooks, Twitter, and other small-time social media sites.

Belanger was in court twice for two different charges, but, as many of my interlocutors stressed, being present at the court house was more entertaining than reading about it online. “If you wanted to watch a trial that is a full-fledged pseudolaw show,” Andrew, a prolific legal scholar on

25 Stylized as such via Belanger’s website, allcreatorsgifts.com (n.d.). 26 Previous to CERI, Belanger had been a member of the Church of the Reformed Druids and who, in the 90s, had petitioned the Alberta government to widen the criteria of sacramental wine in liturgy to include beer and hard liquor. They succeeded. 75

sovereign citizens wrote back to me, “This is it. Most gurus are smart enough to keep themselves out of court”.

This chapter follows the proceedings of Belanger’s drug possession trial and examines the collective performance of “pseudolaw” in a court room setting. As defined by Netolitzky, pseudolaw are “rules” that appear as judicial law but are in practice invalid, whether because they are bad interpretations of the law itself or do not produce the same results as conventional law

(2018c: 2). Pseudolaw, he writes, is “‘law’ not drawn from recognized sources. Instead, these are an alternative, different set of rules that mimic or ape the structure and language of ‘conventional’ law… it superficially appears to be law, or related to law, but is otherwise spurious” (2018c: 1045).

Sovereign citizens are often linked to this practice, especially in a court room setting. Andrew’s

“pseudolaw shows” are not uncommon. Numerous other court cases similar to Belanger’s took place in Canada in 2018, and CERI members have historically been an active presence in Alberta’s courts. What distinguishes Belanger’s trial, however, was the element of spectacle, as the public watched him perform what he preached as a minister on and offline.

In the previous chapter, I suggested that exceptional stories are one way of making sense of the uncanny for Albertans as they narrate their experiences to a localized, imagined “real”.

Through resonance, they see parallels in behavior, ideology, and language not only amongst those considered as “sovereign citizens” but also between themselves and sovereign citizens. This chapter thus builds upon these spectacles of storytelling, however, this time from the perspective of those associated with the sovereign citizen movement. Their language is a different narrative: one where the stakes of punishment push its speakers towards particular kinds of arguments grounded both in and outside of state law.

Working through the arguments evocatively employed by both Justice Sharpe and litigant

Belanger, I draw from Austin’s theorization of speech acts to discuss the reterritorialization of law from two seemingly opposing sides. Austin contends that constatives are not only that which are said but are also events of performative action contextually defined and socially understood (1975:

8). In other words, certain utterances perform an action (Austin 1975: 6-7). As the court case unfolds, Belanger’s verbal contestation of Canadian law goes beyond the court’s own understandings of legal defense and pseudolaw. In the context of this case, pseudolaw appears not as incomprehensible tactic or incorrect interpretation. Rather, it reflects a wider public’s inability to fully understand law and legal language itself. When legal language is opaque or obtuse, individuals must rely on their own interpretations in order to “make sense” of the justice system.

It is also crucial to note that during the trial, at no point was the term “pseudolaw” used by any legal party. The term is instead employed by public spectators as well as other legal actors outside of court to characterize Belanger’s actions as belonging to a larger phenomenon occurring in the court known as OPCA: Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argumentatives.

In treating the court room as a space of performativity, I aim to move beyond the critiques of sovereign citizens utilizing OPCA and its associated pseudolaw or “otherlaw” practices as something beyond the realm of Canadian law itself. Rather, I argue that sovereign citizens work within the pre-existing framework of the law to challenge and subvert its proceedings and outcomes through a verbal performance. Through their speech and narrativization, sovereign citizens divert particular elements of law to establish doubt, confusion, anger, hope, and faith to a diverse audience. However, as a non-legal observer of this trial, I also argue that the way litigants, including Belanger, challenge the Albertan judicial system––through legally incomprehensible

verbal engagement–– is not pseudolaw at all. Neither are they “misunderstandings” divorced from law.

Furthering Janet Cotterill’s socio-linguistic critique of “the trial as storytelling” (2003: 19),

I also focus on two additional elements of performativity to elucidate narrativity as strategic practice: the space-time of the court room and spectatorship. Both the space-time of the court room and spectatorship shape how any given actor will utilize the moment. As court evidence and documents are also interwoven through testimony, examination, and argument, I refer to these elements only as they are mentioned. Because this court case was not publicized nor is it currently publicly accessible via legal documents, more substantial observations are not possible.

Conley and O’Barr describe their approach to conducting research in a courtroom as an

“ethnography of discourse” based on the analysis of impromptu dialogue by litigants to uncover hidden motives (1988: 184). While I also navigate the court room through discourse, the assumption of an underlying “hidden agenda” (to use Conley and O’Barr’s terminology (1988:

182)) detracts from the present and very real resistance that users including those flagged by the law as sovereign citizens, express through pseudolaw itself. Symbolic meaning does not preclude the textual performativity of speech but rather they unequally coalesce in the power matrix that confines the event. In other words, an ulterior motive, whether unexpressed or not, is fundamentally underpinned by the possibility of threat (failure to win the litigation, punishment) or success. These conditions are then upheld by a precise, rigorous, and replicable framework such as the Canadian legal system. Pseudolaw thus presents a unique challenge to the court as its relationship to threat and success is unclear. While all litigants want to avoid threat, adherents to pseudolaw use its tactics despite the risks, knowing that the court may not necessarily accept their

arguments. It could even potentially add extra charges to their sentencing. In this sense then, for legal actors, pseudolaw is arguably irrational because the risk of threat from using it is extremely high as it has “no basis in law” (Netolitzky 2018c: 1045). However, in order to have their concerns recognized and legitimized, sovereign citizens and other pseudolaw adherents must have an understanding of the legal system in order to challenge it, even if it is perceived as irrational.

As two final notes, first, Belanger does not call himself a sovereign citizen and I refrain from using this terminology to describe him. Similarly, in other legal documents, both Belanger and the court also appear to refuse this label. Within the seminal legal text Meads v. Meads (2012), an “Asseveration/Affidavit of Criminal Complaint” written by Belanger appears. Belanger writes,

“[e]ven though I am not a Canadian citizen, I am a man born upon, standing on, living and ministering on the geographical land mass known as Alberta” (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571§

135). My intention with using Belanger as a case-example here is fraught with many of the same concerns I tried to unpack in chapter one, namely referring to or implying someone is a sovereign citizen. As pseudolaw is a crucial aspect of sovereign citizen expressionism in the legal system, I have chosen to carefully map out Belanger’s court case as this was, at the time, the only major pseudolaw case during my fieldwork tenure. Additionally, Belanger recognizes Canada (and

Alberta) as states while simultaneously distancing himself from the state’s authority, which reveals a fertile paradox akin to other sovereign citizen cases. It is my hope that the analysis presented herein can later be read in conjunction with self-ascribed individuals.

Second, Belanger also utilizes religious ideology to claim which laws he can be held accountable by. In his Facebook biography, he describes himself as, “[a] Christian minister who exposes the fraud of Romans 13 teaching” (Facebook 2019). This bible passage reads, “Let

everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God” (Romans: 13). While this chapter does not delve deep into the religious convictions upheld by Belanger or his church, and the use of religion by sovereign citizens more broadly is not consistent or predictable, I suggest that his beliefs and practices become tools to challenge the legitimacy of the court on the grounds that it claims to be a secular authority.

Setting the Stage: The Courtroom as Space-Time

Figure 5. The Edmonton Courthouse from the south side. 10:30am. I arrived at 8:30am and little has happened in the last two hours. According to the docket, Belanger’s case was supposed to take place at 9:00am. Yet, on the electric posting outside the court room, Belanger is not the only one at this time: he one of thirty some people whose case will be heard today. Belanger is not here. The crown prosecutor, who barely looks up 81

from his work says, “He’s in transport,” so when they repeatedly call his name, there is only silence. The sheriffs are transporting him from the Edmonton Remand Centre, a correctional facility for those awaiting trial. Belanger was not able to post bail. The dwindling list marches forward without him. Case after case proceeds, names are crossed off, reports are written.

In the two hours waiting for him, the crowd in the public gallery grows anxious. Those who are here for Belanger sit next to me, including (unbeknownst to me) the other co-accused,

James Keating. A woman with a deep frown sighs, “They’re wasting my time, I have to go to work.”

Another tense hour comes and goes. While waiting for Belanger’s arrival, we are shuffled into a new room, identical to the last one but one floor directly above. Another case is finishing up in the room and so we loiter outside. We are all strangers, cross-armed, frowning, and checking our watches impatiently. The woman has been looking at me all this time with a straightened lip.

She asks me, “So what are you, like a student or something?”

“I study anthropology,” I answer quickly. The woman gives me a firm stare and offers no reply.

When the time comes, we herd into the room. Belanger has also arrived. He is escorted into the court room via a small wooden door on the right and is dressed in florescent orange prison garb. He wears thin glasses and his hair is stringy grey along the nape of his collar. In his hands is a black bound bible.

The court clerk tells us to rise for the judge. Along the wooden pews of the public gallery, the audience in attendance—a mix of academics, court employees, law students, other litigants

waiting their turn to see the judge, and Belanger’s family—all stand. I have seen this on TV and read this in the court etiquette handouts by the court’s front doors.

In Dahlberg’s work in a Swedish courtroom, he notes that the court exudes heterotopic suspensions of social structure, while contradicting dominant ideology in favour of its own (2009:

182). In the space of the court, traditional roles and practices are suspended and a variant relationality is established between all those physically present. This reshaping is structurally similar to both ritual and theatre. Beeman suggests through Van Gennep and Turner that these performative moments in theatre “involve a break with the ‘normal’ structures of ongoing life, the entrance of groups of individuals into liminal transitory states, and the reincorporation of the liminalized individuals into a reconstituted social order” (1993: 379). The court room is not only a physical demarcation of the transgressional liminal through its trialing process—whether someone is found guilty or not guilty, the specialized roles of legal actors whose civil responsibilities are elevated, or otherwise—but within itself are further boundaries and limitations that make up separate spaces. The court is like a stage. Court observers, like spectators in the theatre, must sit in the public gallery and may not engage with the trial unless specifically called upon. Belanger’s encounter with the other legal actors on the floor is also directly constrained by his inability to leave his post. However, the bible, his source of law, is outside the litigant box. As

Belanger leans over the railing with his hands clutching the bible, he fragments the legal space permitted to him. It is this small transgression—whether it is Belanger’s intention or not—that will set the tone for how Belanger will later verbally break with court etiquette. In order to be legible to the court as a litigant, he must obey court procedure by showing respect or deference to the judge as he waits his turn to speak.

Court etiquette is a performative ritual, integrally tied to the functionality of the courtroom as it enforces its legal authority (Martin 1993). “In its symbolic function,” Martin writes, “etiquette provides a system of symbols whose semantic content provides for the predictability in social relations, especially among strangers” (1993: 354). Court etiquette, as embedded kinds of social interaction, specific and predictable, also takes on a renewed importance within theatre. Beeman describes performance and spectacle as revealing rituals (including etiquette), relationality, and engagement between several distinct actors that comprise a theatrical event (1993: 386). If the court is physically structured to maintain a cultivated set of relations, then those who use pseudolaw attempt to disrupt it through their seemingly irrational legal practices.

On several occasions including these preamble formalities, it is the judge who shapes the time of the courtroom and who determines when the court will begin and end through their presence. A judge can decide whether a courtroom will adjourn for the day, take a break, or even when they themselves will appear in the room itself. Before the proceedings start, the court clerk telephones the judge and the recorder is turned on—moments before the judge will appear. It is at this moment that the court room’s time is rendered traceable by its documentation; because the judge is present that time itself is registered as productive and valuable.

While Belanger and other litigants cannot formally challenge the recording time—in the sense that litigants cannot dictate when recordings begin and end—they find creative techniques that employ the court’s time in their favour. These techniques are enacted at many crucial (and yet extremely limited) transitions from non-court time to court time. For example, the court clerk turns on the recorder in anticipation of the judge’s arrival. In these liminal moments, Belanger finds creative ways to circumvent these power relations, even if only fleetingly.

In this span of thirty seconds—just before Justice Sharpe enters the room, leading until she takes her place at the top seat—Belanger will declare: “I open this court in the name of Jesus

Christ, as defended by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, Defender of the Faith, for the record”. This does not happen the first time the court is opened. Belanger is silent the first handful of times

Justice Sharpe enters the room. It is only later in the trial, when it becomes clear that it is not in

Belanger’s favour that he begins to use this phrase to assert his own jurisdiction in the court over the legal actors around him. Having his statement on the record, even before he has been solicited by the judge to speak, assures that he is not only heard, but that his testimony is recorded: it becomes part of the record. Belanger’s illocutionary act of “open[ing] the court” also establishes his own legal jurisdiction and subverts the authority of the judge. Yet, as Butler notes via Bourdieu,

“the one who is invested with legitimate power makes language act; the one who is not invested may recite the same formula but produces no effects” (1997: 146). While Belanger can declare court open, the actual process of court time hinges solely on the judge. Her power overrules the imperative declared by Belanger. Then, this statement is a “misfire” or a failed speech act for the legal actors in the room. It does not elicit a response from anyone on the court floor. In fact, each of the legal actors ignores it completely and proceeds to continue their work as if it had never been uttered ins the first place. Yet, the misfire is still recorded and noted. It is made legally visible by the very same tools and methods of the law that remain otherwise impenetrable. At the same time however, thus utterance might not be a misfire for those in the audience. Some of Belanger’s followers are present in the public gallery; they may hear this utterance as an assertion of the rectitude of the bible as law over Canadian law.

It is also crucial to consider what is being said: the court, or more specifically, the trial, begins with faith and the necessity of upholding it alongside law. Belanger, self-titled minister of 85

Christ, is reaffirming his arguments by strategically taking up time. He is the one that opens court but he does so because of his conviction of what law is itself. If Canada is a constitutional monarchy and its figurehead Queen Elizabeth II, then we (as an audience and legal actors) must obey her laws. And, if Queen Elizabeth II swore to uphold the Bible and its beliefs, then therefore the Bible is Canadian law itself. These are the arguments that Belanger will later use as part of his defense but they are also a reminder of whose laws are in effect. His argument is not necessarily anti-statist but pro-religious authority as the hegemonic force that gives Canada its laws.

Belanger and other litigants can also “filibuster” time. The National Center for State Courts in the United States highlights this practice as intended to “stall, disrupt, or render literally impossible the operation of the courtroom” (1999: 51). During interventions with judicial authorities, Belanger will speak obtusely and use complex language that mimics the question. As he takes time to explain the rationale of his line of questioning, he exploits recorded time to lay the groundwork for his later arguments. At the same time, it can be argued that for the professionalized judiciary actors present, that this action is not only wasting time, but it is also evincing “contempt” through ignoring court etiquette.

As she takes her place at the center of the room, beneath a modest emblem of the Canada

Coat of Arms, and at the tallest table, the judge, Carrie Sharpe, sits alone. “You may now be seated,” she says. From over her glasses she peers at the co-accused, Robin Edward-Jay Belanger, who stands off in a box to the right.

During a summary of the charges—possession of illicit drugs and growing marijuana27—

Belanger tells the court, “I am guilty to the facts. I am incarcerated, intimidated, and not of my own free will”.

“I understand this is your choice of language,” Justice Sharpe answers, “Mr. Belanger, are you pleading guilty?”

“Involuntarily,” he replies.

“By pleading guilty, you would be, voluntarily. If I accept your guilty plea, there will be no further trial.”

Belanger looks to the judge directly. “I would like to speak. It is my full faith and belief… and it is my full evidence in the belief that,” he pauses to hold up his bible, “the only law I understand is this book.”

“Mr. Belanger,” Justice Sharpe says, fingers interlaced on the table, “I am going to sentence you according to the law. We are going to give you time to decide whether you would like to plead guilty”.

Without the clear assurance from Belanger that he is pleading guilty, or that he knows (or doesn’t know) what it will mean to enter that plea, the court cannot proceed. As Belanger is self- represented, he must provide his own counsel on how to plea. An adjournment here is thus required: first, time must be given to allow him to form a clear decision. If Belanger cannot demonstrate to the court that he understands his plea, whether guilty or not guilty, then he has the right to consult with his legal team and make an informed answer. However, without the legal

27 Belanger also had an additional charge of driving without a licence. His trial date for this charge was a week later. 87

team, the court risks challenging or denying Belanger’s rights and appeal. Second, the court cannot wait for Belanger to deliberate while the judge is present because the judge is not his legal representative: she cannot give him advice or further information on how to proceed. What is within her power is to confirm his position through asking, “Mr. Belanger, are you pleading guilty?”

On the other side, Belanger claims he is “guilty to the facts”. Whereas guilt in a legal sense refers to an acknowledgement of committing a criminal act, Belanger is careful not to use the word

“plead” in his statement. To plead is a performative act of submission to the court. The word itself holds him accountable to the law. Belanger is instead, guilty to the facts in so much that he agrees that the evidence places him at the scene of the crime, possessing marijuana, and as we will see, this is not a crime within Belanger’s logic.

Returning to the question of time, it is unclear whether Belanger is purposefully

“filibustering”. As Belanger fills the recorded time with statements that—for the court—are illegible as admissions of guilt or innocence, his arguments are still being heard outside the typical court procedure. The kinds of arguments that Belanger is making (religious freedoms, intimidation) do not directly address Justice Sharpe’s questions. If, in fact, it is Belanger’s goal to adjourn the session, he can only influence the suspension of court time; it is still very much in the control of the judge to decide who gets what amount of time and when. Although Belanger can challenge this authority, the judge ultimately can use her judicial power to decide the limitations of the court. She can decide whether an adjournment is necessary, how long it will be, and who can talk to Belanger during this time.

While this precise and formal arrangement of timed events occurs, the court room is also structured to grant the judge a physical advantage. The judge sits on the highest point of a raised platform; underneath, the court clerks, and then on the main floor, lawyers and litigants. This literal power differentiation shapes how a judge’s power is perceived as well as how different legal actors express their narratives within the court process. The judge physically looks down upon the court proceedings28. The theatrical aspects of the judge’s role, even in how they face the rest of the room, not only expresses the segregated roles of legal from non-legal, but the inherent imbalance of power between the various actors in the court room.

The judge, much like other legal actors in the room, is engaged in a performance of law as it is used to reify power and discipline. Their job is to oversee the court, both literally and figuratively. The power inequality expressed through the disparity in height as well as lack of permeability between different spaces in the court room sediments hierarchical social norms.

Belanger, by virtue of being a litigant, can at any point be charged for contempt of court—an offense of disrespect for court processes and actors, which can carry a punishment decided by the judge. It as at the discretion of the judge to make that decision.

In this way, the structure of the courtroom can be seen as theatrical via its physical manifestation of space as in action. Time also serves a role demarking performance— adjournments enforce the power of the judge without being present, or different actors wait for others to proceed. Controlling not only the space but time and tempo can be a way to exert power otherwise not explicitly spoken.

28 Hannah Arendt noted similar in her observation of Adolf Eichmann’s trial: “[y]et no matter how consistently the judges shunned the limelight, there they were, seated at the top of the raised platform, facing the audience as from the stage in a play” (2006: 6). 89

Language in the Court As Sullivan notes, sovereign citizens (or those who employ sovereign citizen, pseudolaw, otherlaw, or OPCA techniques) appear to have a wide breadth knowledge of the law, despite the tendency for their documentation to be “ungrammatical, the style overexcited, and the logic presented in a confusingly non-linear pattern. The resulting pleadings are dense, complex, and virtually unreadable” (1999: 795-796). Several court cases in Alberta corroborate this analysis from a legal standpoint; written from the view of the court, judgements, memorandums, and responses, utilize similar language to describe difficulties engaging these litigants (Potvin (Re)

2018 ABQB 652; Re Boisjoli 2015 ABQB 629; Fearn v. Canada Customs 2014 ABQB 114). Even evidence submitted by these litigants is incomprehensible to the court. Because the court is dependent on how the litigant presents their evidence and testimony, those who manage to irritate the judiciary can be labelled as vexatious litigants: a term that encapsulates “frivolous” claims that can be rejected by the court or be the cause for contempt (Meads v. Meads 2012 ABQB 571).

However, while these arguments are rooted in the legal framework of the Canadian court itself, they also rely on an audience and their reactions to strengthen their point. Some gurus facing litigation may draw in their adherents to watch the case unfurl. In Belanger’s case, there were several of these figures in the public gallery box. One man for example, sits beside me and nods his head every time Belanger speaks. Each time Justice Sharpe enters and leaves the room, he sits completely still, not participating in courtroom etiquette. I later find out from a lawyer in the room that this man is one of Belanger’s followers. If Belanger can show that his tactics work, the result is twofold: Belanger can maintain his following and his followers receive confirmation that these practices do work.

Drawing on Butler’s reading of Foucault, language’s performative practice is a contestation between sovereign powers, such as between hate speech and state legal language (1997: 81). In a similar way, pseudolaw as a legally confusing and incomprehensible defense is also a contestation to the state. Whereas the law can potentially only legible to itself and its enshrined legal actors, pseudolaw counters traditional expectations of language, accessibility, and knowledge through what is uttered in a court setting. As Conley and O’Barr write, “If the law is failing to live up to its ideals, the failure must lie in the details of everyday legal practice—details that consist almost entirely of language” (2005: 3). In other words, to understand the court, one must understand the law’s linguistic structure, its grammar, and word choice. Without this knowledge, litigants are left to interpret the law as best as they can within their limits, especially if they are self-represented.

This discrepancy in understanding the law between trained legal actors and non-legal actors thus opens a space for pseudolaw as a way to make sense of legal language. The following ethnographic vignettes thus explore the politics of performance in court, and how recontextualizing or reasserting sovereignty through speech acts constitutes not only a radical challenge to the Canadian legal system but also reveals a more nuanced politics of recognition: identifying citizen, litigant, subject, authority, and criminal for a public.

As the court case starts, Justice Sharpe speaks directly to Belanger. She says, “I am aware that you were briefly represented, Mr. Belanger, and that you chose to represent yourself. Do you have disclosure, sir?”

Belanger cryptically answers, “Will you take note that that sounds to be a good understanding of what you said?”

Off to the left side, the crown prosecutor shares a look with the judge—I overheard him telling the judge earlier that Belanger had a public defender: he was fired by Belanger after an undisclosed argument. The defense counsel representing the other co-accused, James Keating, has a hand to his temple and leans down into his writing, as if trying not to notice.

“Mr. Belanger,” repeats Justice Sharpe, “That is a riddle. I am trying to ascertain whether you understand that you are self-representing yourself as a person in the court of law. Do you have disclosure?”

Belanger now stands upright. Keating, who sits next to me in the public gallery, leans onto his cane. “My faith and beliefs mean I am not supposed to respect persons.” Pausing for a brief moment, he continues, “My name has been altered by financial schemes. Even though the law says it cannot be altered for financial purposes, it is being used as surety for the stock market.”

“Mr. Belanger—” Justice Sharpe starts. This is the first time Belanger has brought up an issue with his name—I have read from online commentary communities that he is particular about how his name is spelled and who it refers to—but the significance of the point he is making is not clear to me. What is the relation between the stock market and his name?

“Only one person from your court has checked this! One police officer did the research and agreed with me, that there has been an illegal alteration of my name.” Belanger holds forth the bible firm with two hands.

“Names are a part of our system of law, Mr. Belanger.”

This disruption of the court etiquette, particularly Belanger’s refraction of the judge’s question into an alternative line of argument, is obtuse and cryptic. The references to previous

legal precedents—like the illegal alteration of names—or to previously established (but not yet admissible) testimony—such as the police officer agreeing that Belanger’s name was altered— further muddy the waters. Though Belanger is attempting to challenge the court, it is not a legal argument until it is recontextualized through the court’s legal language itself. Belanger is careful to not necessarily agree with the judge’s question—rather, he is framing his response as a question to avoid giving a direct response. What Belanger means by this statement, however, is debatable.

Beyond speculating how he arrives at this kind of argumentation, using this language can be a form challenging the legitimacy of the judicial process via working within the very text of the law.

Belanger’s usage of “persons” is a well documented practice by legal scholars called the

“strawman” argument (Bell 2016; Ehrett 2015; Evans 2012; Kent 2013; Netolitzky 2016, 2018a,

2018b, 2018c, 2019). This argument is tied to the rupturing of a person into two separate entities: the human person and the legal person, sometimes known as a fiction or strawman. While the reasoning for this separation can be widely different across litigants, Belanger himself describes this strawman as both being used for financial purposes (particularly taxes) as well as being an arbitrary division of himself into dead and alive. On his website, he writes, “If you fail to pre- notice these government agencies to remove any assumption that you are a person or a part of their government, by the rules of tacit consent you are a person in law and subject to their corporate rules. The ‘person’ in their law is a legal fiction and an entity, a natural person being a fiction by their man-made definition” (All Creator’s Gifts n.d.).

One root of this division comes from Black’s Law Dictionary. It defines “judicial persons” as an “[e]ntity, as a firm, that is not a single natural person, as a human being, authorized by law with duties and rights, recognized as a legal authority having a distinct identity, a legal personality.

…Also refer to body corporate” (2019). However, the separation of natural from judicial personhood appears to have a logical basis within the grammar of the law itself and is, in its most basic premise, a social construct to facilitate courtroom procedure. In other words, the court must be able to make the distinction in order to differentiate between various kinds of potential litigants.

At the same time, however, the way that Belanger uses the concept of “person” makes it near impossible for the court to engage with him; it has little to no understanding of what he is referring to, particularly because this terminology stems from an American-centric, historically situated text.

The legal premise for differences in personhood, from human person to “legal fiction”, are further complicated by the manner in which Belanger applies it in his engagement with law enforcement.

One witness, police constable Panter, is asked by Belanger, “How did you write my name in your documents?”

“Written, then typed, in English.” Panter replies.

“And what typeface was the name in? What case? Was the last name [written first] in capital letters, then the first name in lower case?”

“Yes, that’s how we write names.”

Belanger nods his head. “Would you be surprised to know that capitalizing all the letters in a last name is a corporative fiction? That it is fraud? Officer, you are not a competent witness.”

This exchange, based on uncontested challenges to personhood, becomes a way for

Belanger to call into question the veracity of the witness. As the judge had declared earlier that

“names are part of [the] legal system”, Belanger is working from inside the very construction of how names are used in court (as well as what symbolic meaning they represent) to subvert its power. If his name is not written according to the legal system (as Belanger understands its rules 94

and etiquette), then it does not have the influence and power necessary to hold him accountable as a litigant in this particular court room. At the same time, the speech act attempts to make Constable

Panter feel “surprise”; it is he who has committed the crime, not Belanger, and therefore he cannot be a competent witness nor an upholder of the law. Perhaps in an attempt to inspire a momentary crisis in the witness, Belanger is also subtly asking: if a legal actor cannot (or does not) intricately know the law, then how can they uphold it?

When it is Belanger’s turn to cross-examine the witness, he holds the bible out. “Did you pledge allegiance to the Queen?”

Constable Panter is stunned and momentarily silent. “I don’t understand.”

“Valid allegiance. Did you take an oath of allegiance to the Queen to uphold the Queen’s laws?”

“I don’t know. I know I pledged to uphold the laws of this country.”

[…] “Would you be surprised to know that the Queen is a Christian monarch? When she was coronated, she swore an oath on the King James’ Bible to uphold the laws of God.”29

“Mr. Belanger,” The judge interrupts, “That is an argument, not a question.”

29 In Re: Potvin 2018, Chief Justice Rooke writes: “There is clear Court authority that the Coronation Oath is meaningless to the operation of Canadian law: Claeys v Her Majesty, 2013 MBQB 313 (CanLII) at paras 10-11, 28, 300 Man R (2d) 257; Law Society of British Columbia v Crischuk, 2017 BCSC 531 (CanLII) at paras 25, 28, 30-32; R v Crischuk, 2007 BCPC 470 (CanLII) at paras 10-11; R v Lindsay, 2011 BCCA 99 (CanLII) at para 31, 302 BCAC 76, leave to appeal to SCC refused, 34331 (6 October 2011)” (2018: 106) 95

Belanger shakes his head. “How can I be satisfied that you are a competent witness? May it be noted that the witness does not know the oath?30” He continues, without noticing the lack of noting by the judge, “Is that a King James Bible that you swore on?”

“I don’t know,” Panter says. He flips the pages of the bible in front of him. “It says it’s the

New Kings James Bible.”

“May it be noted that the bible that you swore upon is not the Queen’s Bible.”

Justice Sharpe interrupts again. “That is not a question, Mr. Belanger.”

“‘May it be noted’ is not a question?”

“No, it is not.”

“When I was a boy, I was taught in school to ask questions with a ‘may I’. Don’t I get a full defense when I use ‘may I’?” Moments pass. The court is tense. I sense that Justice Sharpe’s patience is running out. The timing for her entering and leaving the court grows shorter with each hour that passes by. Her momentary silence allows Belanger to continue, “Were you aware that you gain authority from the Queen? That the Queen was granted power by God through the King

James Bible? In that Bible, it has information on that herb, that seed [marijuana] which is God’s gift. Therefore, Officer, you must uphold the law of God.”

30 The Oath of Office taken by police officers in Alberta is the following: “I, ______, swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors, according to law, in the office of ______for the ______of ______and that I will diligently, faithfully and to the best of my ability execute according to law the office of ______, and will not, except in the discharge of my duties, disclose to any person any matter or evidence that may come to my notice through my tenure in this office, so help me God.” (Police Act 2000: 59). 96

If Belanger can undermine the credibility of the witness, he may move towards a voir dire—for the evidence presented against him to be dismissed as inadmissible. By convoluting the history of Canadian law via its relationship to monarchic power, Belanger is attempting to subvert the court’s power as a whole. It is, if he was correct, the Crown that receives precedent—to prove that in court could challenge the independency of Canadian law from its colonial roots itself. The

“may it be noted” here is also a way to have his argument made into legal data. Through mimicking the language of a Canadian law official (despite not truly recognizing their power over him), he annotates the witness’s testimony, and attempts to curry power in his performance. At the same time however, there is a risk that he may undermine himself in the process, in the eye of the legal actors and to his own followers in the public gallery. He is trying to convince both groups in attendance that he knows the law just as well or better than the system. If he does not cast enough doubt or suspicion onto the witness’ credibility, then the basis of his argument falls apart.

As Conley and O’Barr highlight, lawyers and other legal actors use diverse linguistic methods in order to control or dominate others within a court room (2005: 24). Of these methods, the question form can limit the scope of an individual’s answer. In order to be legible as a cross- examiner to the court, Belanger must adhere to specific question forms. Though Justice Sharpe sees these questions as statements, Belanger utilizes his own question form in order to establish his own argument and evidence: that the witness is incompetent. Belanger knows the oath that a police officer would have taken and is directly questioning that knowledge. In the oath, officers are asked to “swear that [they] will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen

Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors, according to law” (Police Act 2000: 59). Within the oath itself, while there is a lack of direct reference to the King James Bible, Belanger has assumed that this pledge to the Queen is concurrent with the Queen’s coronation on the King James 97

Bible. While Officer Panter cannot directly recall the exact phrase of the oath, he more precisely does not understand either the question form or its intended outcome.

“Mr. Belanger, do you want to testify?”

“I want to submit the King James Bible as evidence. I want it authorized as evidence.”

“This is exhibit 26.” The bailiff takes away the bible from Belanger’s hands and gives it to the judge.

Justice Sharpe rises while Belanger cries out, “I object! I object! I have more evidence!”

She turns her back on him and leaves through the back door. “I object! I demand the accommodations!” Belanger looks to the sheriffs who attempt to escort him out. They have a hand on both of his arms. “Wait, I want my bible back!”

“You can’t have it back,” the court clerk flatly replies, barely looking up from her paperwork on the table, “You submitted it for evidence.”

Belanger struggles with the sheriffs. “How can I prepare a defense when I don’t have my legal texts? You are prohibiting me from defending myself!” The sheriffs guide him through the door and he is gone.

The court room goes silent as people filter out the door. Standing in the lobby, I frown. The court case will resume the next week—perhaps, I think to detain Belanger and find him in contempt for not obeying the court’s procedure—along with a second trial for driving without a licence, but by that time, I will be back in Montréal. I will not see the trial to its end. Dismayed and now leaving the city for good, I feel caught at the climax of a drama without resolution. What will happen next?

There is a looming possibility that this trial will not be submitted to CanLII.org31 and that any direct insight from this case might remain closeted within the court house. What is clear, however, is that whatever ending befalls Belanger will not be favourable.

A week or so later, I receive an email from Andrew in the court house. He tells me he saw

Belanger’s other trial, driving while prohibited. “He was found guilty and sentenced to 30 days.”

Andrew writes, “Since he’d been in pre-trial custody, that time was deducted, and Belanger went home. He is still facing the remainder of his drug trial next week.”

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have highlighted the dual nature of pseudolaw as both a formalized system of claim and statement via its contextual legal underpinning in the judicial system, as well as a speech act that aims to challenge the power of the court itself. Using pseudolaw is a form of recapturing sovereign power beyond the restrictions set by court etiquette.

Furthermore, the nuances that allow Belanger to verbally contest state practice, while not unique, are peculiar for their emphasis on showmanship and spectacle. With some of Belanger’s followers present for parts of the trial, speech acts become not only performative but politically generative, irrespective of whether they are ultimately successful or not32. These speech acts also show that power and its ability to identify, recognize, and legitimize is an “everyday reality” rather than “a distant abstraction” (Conley and O’Barr 2005: 2). When the language of the law and pseudolaw meet, they open up sites of contestation beyond the formalized procedures of court.

31 Depending on which level of court the trial occurs within, its case summary and decision may not be uploaded to the website. In the case of Alberta, it appears that most cases uploaded tend to be from the Alberta Queens Bench. As CanLII is a non-profit organization created and maintained by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, there is also no governmental legislation to require them to upload any or every document. As one of my legal interlocutors also pointed out, it is up to the judge to write these documents. 32 What measures success in this case is not if Belanger is guilty/non-guilty but whether he succeeds in arguing his viewpoint. 99

In a surprising turn of events, another court case emerged at the same time as Belanger’s trial. Alfred Potvin was tried in Calgary only a few days earlier in front of Associate Chief Justice

J.D. Rooke—the penman and presiding judge of Meads v. Meads 2012. The case, which was called to restrict Potvin’s access to the Alberta Court due to his history of vexatious litigation, is unusual in this context specifically because Potvin is also a member of CERI. In the memorandum, Chief

Justice Rooke details the relationship between Potvin and Belanger with a speculative insight into

Belanger’s trial. He writes,

In fact, Mr. Potvin’s guru, “minister” Edward Robin Jay Belanger, has spent the

past several months in the Edmonton Remand Centre, and on September 20,

2018 was convicted of operating a motor vehicle while disqualified and

sentenced to 30 days incarceration, despite “minister” Belanger’s complaints

that him being required to have a motor vehicle licence would “intimidate” his

ability to practice his faith, since he is no respecter of persons: R v Belanger (20

September 2018), Edmonton 180222747P1 (Alta PC). Perhaps Mr. Potvin

should ask his teacher for a refund (Potvin (Re), 2018 ABQB 834, emphasis

mine).

It is striking to see Belanger’s name appear in another court case without him physically present, three hundred kilometres away in another city, and at a similar time. On one hand, Justice

Rooke’s decision to include Belanger here gives us closure on his trial when other sources of data are not publicly accessible. At the same time, this end passage also reveals the court’s humour in dealing with similarly related litigants and their pseudolaw tactics. Even if trial documents are available or not, the outcome will most likely end with the litigant charged. In other words,

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pseudolaw will not work against the court. The legal system’s hegemony will render these failed arguments as irrational litigation regardless of how the law is understood by non-legal system actors. Belanger appearing in another court case then only further highlights that these tactics, while intricately woven into the law’s own language and epistemology, could never have the same power or capacity to act as that of the law.

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Conclusion Who drives with white out licence plates, black tint windows, back end bumper stickers; “passive aggressive ecclesiastical pursuit chariots?” is it the man who wants to go unseen but noticed stuck a feather in his cap and called it none of your business or the man whose paint wore thin in the night leaving his neglect a relic, patting the hood of his car “to be fixed later” he rolls down his window, cigarette stubs away in the rear-view mirror, guns a red light, I spot you caught at the intersection of causality and contradiction I don’t know who is who what makes the difference between the man and me the rules we play or the words we say are you like me or am I like you is this just an assumption or is this paranoia the truck speeds on, manes of exhaust on fresh paved asphalt doesn’t look back at what’s been broken if laws even existed for this the city is a hippodrome without winners waiting in their lanes and caught in the kick up of dust and gravel are those who walk the yellow line: who are

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Figure 6. A truck driving within city limits. Its red registration numbers have been whited out.

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At the confluence of personal histories, made tangible by their public utterances, and evolving imaginings of a tenuous and uncertain future, Alberta surfaces as a present-day conundrum. The spectre of the Other, not always a sovereign citizen, but always a figure enfolded in uncanny modes of identity, continues to trouble the province’s political expectations. In the last decade, Alberta has occupied a pivotal place in the fashioning of the sovereign citizen. Whether it is because of legal cases witty judges, taken up by the media and scholars for broader consumption; the strange and unusual events that purposefully disrupt everyday life on TV screens and newspaper pages; or even law enforcement’s drive to identify, contain, and restrain the movement alongside other “extremist” groups, Alberta as a geopolitical state is unsettled in its relationship to those who live within—but deny recognition of—its borders.

These people who I have called sovereign citizens are not easily captured by boundaries, political or ideological. As I have strived to show in this thesis, sovereign citizens submerge and resurface in the cracks of various discourses including state critique, conspiracy theories, and law, at once startlingly visible and defiantly elusive. At times, they are organized: some individuals follow gurus and adapt their ideologies of contestation to this chain of command. In other moments, however, sovereign citizens act independently, living according to their own knowledge and experience of governance. While they may be influenced by others they meet on and offline, they adhere to their own ideas. Pete’s example of code speak is drawn from David Wynn::Miller and although he gives concrete tactics to his followers, it is really up to them to decide when and how they use it, whether in a court room setting or at a post office.

Behind the slippery category of ‘sovereign citizen’ lie a great diversity of people. Each in their own way, they navigates expectations of a life lived in tandem with a pervasive state. Through

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action, they balance, negotiate, contest, refuse, uphold, and subvert underlying assumptions of subjecthood under the state through embodying the contradictions therein. However, it is really this vacillation between rejecting and embracing parts of governance that makes difficult the possibility of identifying and researching sovereign citizens as a distinct and isolated research group. The fundamental tension between visibility/non-visibility, citizen/non-citizen, singular/group is integral to what they are and how they function in society. It also makes them, in many ways, inseparable from us as citizens or subjects of the state.

As I have argued, sovereign citizens are ––inevitably–– entangled with the worlds they reject. The state is omnipresent in everyday life; paved roads direct the paths we take, enforced laws limit our behaviour. This tacit as well as overt presence in our lives is inextirpable from how we live, inhabiting and sharing the space we call Alberta. Together, all of us are bound by the hegemony of the state as its subjects, whether we accept it or not. Yet, sovereign citizens purposefully negotiate these relations, selecting, upholding, and refusing expectations of citizenship in order to assert their own visions of governance. Their encounters with the state and its discourse are contradictory, confusing, and even at times, completely opaque to others; they emerge and disappear. They are invisible not necessarily because they desire to be, but because in other moments, they appear aligned with ordinary citizens and residents. Sometimes, sovereign citizens are our neighbours, friends, family. They may be blue collar workers and farmers, or doctors and lawyers. In certain moments they may be Albertans, in others Canadian citizens, as they come into and out of contact with the state. Interrelated and enmeshed in complex processes of narrativity, a sovereign citizen’s legibility—their ability to be identified and recognized—is fluid and dynamic precisely because of the knotted relations they have with the worlds around them, legal and non-legal. 105

I have suggested that identity is not only about self-recognition but resonance: how identificatory terms such as “sovereign citizen” categorize diverse peoples, practices, and beliefs into classificatory matrixes that later link disparate phenomena together. While not uncommon,

Albertans find parallels between terms they use such as “sovereign citizen” or “Freeman” to what they experience in their every day lives. Laura, Pete, and Ed, for example see the smoke on the horizon, and they relate its origin from an arson in the United States to what they think I am looking for in Alberta. When they tell me a “Freeman” did it, they make a connection or see resonance of what is happening locally to the global.

At the same time, Albertans narrate their encounters with sovereign citizens as parallel to their own relations to the state. Through storytelling, sovereign citizens emerge as a distant foil for larger, shared concerns regarding state encroachment and power. The exceptionality of these stories captivate, throwing the listener into spaces of uncertainty and pause. Within these narratives, images of the sovereign citizen as an uncanny boogeyman prevail: on one hand, disruptive, bizarre, and potentially violent, and on the other hand, humorous and spectacular.

James’ narration of the sheep baby or Duke’s explanation of gun law in Canada points to their exposed, local “reals” now mediated by the exceptionality of their stories.

In their own accounts, sovereign citizens offer another set of optics. Though their audience exists primarily within court settings and among their peers and followers, they narrate their own experiences of governmentality, challenging normative legal practice through pseudolaw, a legal term that has come to be associated with the sovereign citizen movement. Belanger’s performance through questioning how the law is understood and operates contests the everyday language and expectations of the court, regardless of whether he self-identifies with or is identified by the term

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“sovereign citizen”. These strategic and performative deployments of pseudolaw attempt to subvert the law’s processes from within, reconfiguring its own standards and theory.

In concluding, this thesis raises methodological questions that endure and evade closure: what kind of strategies can ––and should –– we deploy when working with dynamic groups whose identities are contingent and constantly shift? While it may be argued that this is the case for all people, when group solidarity is already tenuous at best, how can we deconstruct belonging, inclusion, and identity? How might work on sovereign citizens inform larger discourses of citizenship and sovereignty? To what extent does this kind of research with “anti-authority” individuals reify authority itself, whether state or academic? Can we deauthorize the language of academia, as one that is supported by state funding?

Legal actors and sovereign citizens have opposing views on what research such as this thesis can contribute, and what potential risks it might present. Whereas the former might use such research to better inform policy making, sovereign citizens might see this text as a betrayal of trust.

The difference in imagined outcomes among these two audiences underscores the difficulties and dilemmas that this research embodies, as a product of (state supported) academia. Due to my funding through the Government of Canada and McGill University, and my positionality as an

Albertan and Canadian citizen, I cannot claim neutrality. My position as an Albertan scholar is to suggest that just as identity is fluidic, sovereign citizen ideology surfaces and punctuates at specific intervals. Most individuals periodically express anti-state rhetoric couched within personalized narratives of failed promise or frustration with state structures. Yet, when people tell stories–– when they complain, argue, or decry injustices––they simultaneously make visible broader expectations of what a state should be. As with sovereign citizens, these moments of deviance and

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critique do more than challenge norms or break rules: they prompt reflection on what constitutes political membership and the ‘givens’ of everyday life.

Attempting to extricate the sovereign from the citizen is not only not possible but unproductive. In one way or another, however we identify, we are intimately tied to the state. Even in our contestations, rejections, and passive interactions with governance, few of us can live life free of state interference. As I reflect on the conversations, interviews, texts, and videos generated and encountered in the course of this research, I find myself in agreement with many of the sentiments expressed (something I acknowledge with difficulty). However, even if I share similar anxieties regarding state control, the purpose of democratic governance, or political representation,

I do not consider myself a sovereign citizen.

As a politically engaged anthropologist, I want my work to be beneficial in some small measure for my interlocutors, and contribute to raising awareness about their views and, more broadly, about sovereign citizens. However, this desire to discard citizenship, while still drawing the benefits of state governance strikes me as a luxury that few today can afford. To be clear, I am not suggesting that what sovereign citizens experience is not real, nor painful. Some trauma inflicted by the state is rightfully reshaped as skepticism and doubt in governance. Rather, what I wish to argue, from my own peripheral stance, is that my position is not neutral: as an Albertan and Canadian, I am tacitly bound up with many of these same moral positions. A sovereign citizen’s rejection of the solidarity of this “imagined community” (Anderson 2006) challenges the very grounds I find myself writing from: I cannot condemn my interlocutors any more than I can support them.

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The mediated approach I have taken throughout this thesis, drawing on poetry and ethnographic vignettes to trouble more normative approaches to studies on sovereign citizens, has been one way I have tried to navigate my own positionality as scholar-subject. At no point has it been my intent to produce scholarship that could serve the interests of lawmakers or legal actors seeking to contain sovereign citizens. If anything, I have argued that the current system of identification and recognition serves only a legal purpose of defining threat; it does not adequately capture the movement’s complexity and the diverse aspirations that inform it. Much of the research on sovereign citizens to date has also been aligned with anti-extremist agendas, both far left and right. I do not wish to suggest that these purposes are not valid. The goal of generating quantitative data to help policy makers and law enforcement thwart terrorism and criminal acts is, of course, important. As individuals grow increasingly skeptical about state governance and the validity of state systems taken for granted, sovereign citizens (or those like sovereign citizens) are good examples of the subtle and creative ways in which individuals contest or challenge these relationships. However, this thesis and its ethnographic data is better suited to examine larger emerging questions of citizenship and the state globally.

Across the world, current events such as the United Kingdom’s exit from the European

Union (Gusterson 2017) and “migration crises” in the Mediterranean and Latin America (Cabot

2018; de Leon 2015; Fassin 2016), prompt us to rethink our relationships to the state. In the face of eroding civil rights, increased nationalism, and tightening government control, localized concepts of citizenship and inclusion have become tenuous, and in certain moments, negotiable.

The assumed expectations of the state, not only as a fantasized polity but as a concrete system that structures everyday life, requires scrutiny too. While I have shown in this thesis that individuals

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can use to their advantage state resources in order to challenge that very same state, one underlying question continues to appear: whose sovereignty matters?

Within Canada, the sovereign citizen movement also points to a larger, underlying issue regarding its white settler colonialist past. Although there were and continues to be sovereign indigenous movements within the country33 (Annett 2010), they do not hold the same attention nor interest as their non-indigenous counterparts. Within my fieldwork, I encountered very few individuals who recognized the tenure ship of indigenous peoples on the traditional territories they sought to contest. This contradiction of whose assertions of liberty and self-sovereignty receive attention appears to me as no mistake. The subjugation of indigenous peoples’ rights and sovereignty within the movement is enmeshed in its supposed beginnings of the sovereign citizen movement as a white, Christian movement in the United States. Even Posse Comitatus’ real opponent was federal state authority, not the indigenous groups whose land they seized.

Still, this lack of recognition does not preclude other (non-indigenous settler) groups from using indigenized sovereign citizen-esque language in order to assert their own visions of governance. The Federated Republic of Kanata for example, uses indigenous rhetoric to strengthen its own sovereignty claims, including appropriating the Iroquois Confederacy symbol as a flag without permission (Mohawk Nation News 2014). Calling for the Canadian government to be held responsible for its painful, colonialist history as well as its present-day domination, they argue that

Canada is “…nothing more than a charade and fraud using the outward symbols of freedom, fairness and justice but with the effect of denying the fulfillment of a truly free and equitable

33 Very little information on indigenous sovereign citizen movements in the Canadian context is available. I did however, come across one group before my fieldwork season: the “Sovereign ©Squamish™ Government” (styled as such). A group based out of southern central British Columbia, they tend to periodically disappear online, making them difficult to follow extensively. 110

society, whilst wholly protecting the interests of a Crown and Church that are guilty of the aforementioned crimes [of genocide, colonial dependency, and impoverishment]” (2010: 412).

Certainly, while sovereign citizen beliefs might arguably be one way for disenfranchised indigenous communities to assert their own power and sovereignty over their land, the appropriation of indigenous struggles, histories, and power by settler colonialists poses significant problems for indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike.

Make no mistake that there certainly exists a relationship between indigenous struggles for determinacy and settler-state identity politics. In the context of this thesis, these are at time tenuous, at other moments recalcitrant. Engagements surface and disappear, shaped by the shifting possibilities, parameters and rhythms of discourse.. To ignore the historical legacies of settler- colonialism, its hegemonic domination of forms of identity and sovereignty would therefore also constitute a kind of erasure. Remaining attentive to political bodies, indigenous or settler, then is also a way to critically reflect upon the silences of citizenship as it has calcified or as it is challenged. My decision to focus on settler sovereign citizens, and not indigenous sovereign politics, is not only tied to the aforementioned difficulties in finding and maintaining relationships with interlocutors, but also my own hesitation in presenting indigenous sovereignty alongside settler rejections of state systems. This is not to say, however, that there are no indigenous sovereign citizen movements, nor movements in indigenous communities that in some manner resemble the sovereign citizen movement (Annett 2010). However, as I have underscored previously, there is little academic research available on indigenous sovereign movements. As I have covered only limited amounts of the sovereign citizen movement, this work could lead to further qualitative, long-term research on this topic. There is enormous potential for generating meaningful, impactful studies from this phenomenon, for both indigenous and non-indigenous 111

peoples alike. Understanding the causes and outcomes as a result of the perceived failures of governance, sovereignty, and rights can better help us create new policy change that can benefit diverse populations. While also attending to the human aspect, sharing experiences can also have the potential to aid public understanding. More academically, as individuals shift and change perspectives, a more expansive study can also make visible the vast interweaving of movements as they change, adapt, or fail over time. Long term fieldwork can be read alongside other phenomena including the aforementioned events of Brexit and the “migrant crises” while also potentially capturing multigenerational, cross-border disseminations of ideas and practice.

Still, despite these arguably rational and practical research goals, my relation to my interlocutors and collaborators (sovereign and citizen alike) pulls me in two different directions.

Just as I started this thesis at the crossroads of Albertans and sovereigns, I also end at a similar place, wondering what it is I have written for whom. The space on the side of the road is a place forged from turbulent memories and histories, polyvocal presences and its absences. Now I turn my attention to the road itself, pointing elsewhere, trailing away without a perceivable answer.

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