“Draw Me an Anglican Worship Service”: Studying Coloniality in Canadian Anglican Liturgy Through Drawing

The 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada identified ongoing structures that continue to enforce oppression against Indigenous peoples across Canada and deform the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Scholars in the Americas describe these structures as coloniality and recognize their overt and subtle embeddedness within Western culture. As a part of a larger research project investigating coloniality in Canadian Anglican liturgy, this paper focuses on one ethnographic tool to reveal the subtle manifestations of coloniality: drawing. While the drawings were initially used as a starting point for interviews, they emerged as a source of data themselves, demonstrating the unconscious ways participants conceived of Anglican worship. This research analyzes selected drawings to demonstrate the ways in which they manifest domination, Eurocentric liturgical practices, and binary classifications, showing that coloniality remains a subtle and pervasive force in liturgical practice.