BeyondChe

My Discussion Week

Week05 / 6 February- Elsie Paul, Paige Raibmon, and Harmony Johnson. Written as I Remember It (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014).

Readings

Week 1 -Smith, Tuck and Yang, Justice

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999; rev. ed. 2012), chaps. 1, 8. PDF chap. 1 PDF chap 8

Colonialism and imperialism intertwined- Columbus and Cook are not just entities but symbols of the destructive swathe they caused
Arbitrary but systemic roll out of subjugation of indigenous peoples, ultimately to suit colonizer's needs- and as part of the Enlightenment, tied to the notions of the "modern" man
Ideas and ideals of colonies and the ways in which colonizing Europeans must also be subjugated in service of the larger Imperial project or mother country, which played out against the local, specific indigenous experience.
post-colonial discourse also often serves non-indigenous scholars

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-words: Refusing Research,”223-247 in Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, ed. D. Paris and M. T. Winn (Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications, 2014). Tuck and Yang PDF Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (New York: Routledge, 2017), chaps. 1, 3, 6. Sources & Methods PDF Daniel Justice, “A Better World Becoming: Placing Critical Indigenous Studies,” 19-32 in Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2017). Justice PDF

1. From the Smith, O’Brien, Lomawaima, and other readings, begin to construct a history of history. In what ways is our discipline coterminous with, complicit in, and constitutive of colonialism as it manifests at local, national, and global levels?

History has largely been writing the history of Empire (Chakrabarty, Saied?) and of power. History of a place legitimizes belonging to a space.
What is the purpose of history and how is this different for different groups? And who is history for?
Is decolonizing research really just to assuage the guilt of the colonial hangover of Empire?
When we have a fragmentary archive, can we be with comfortable with an incomplete or a one-sided narratives?

2. Taking into consideration the very trenchant critique of trauma-based studies launched by Tuck and Yang, how do we balance a need for surfacing the history of colonialism and bearing witness (perhaps problematic phrasings in and of themselves) with a sensitivity to the concerns raised here? What is a way forward?

Methodology vs Method- pain/trauma narratives
Structures vs events as ways of looking at history- wisdom over knowledge, wisdom is relational, not just transactional

3. Our colleague Daniel Justice uses terms like humility and empathy as important features of ethical and smart scholarship. What role do you feel (pun intended, perhaps) these more affective components of our lives should play in our intellectual work?

Locate ourselves within the other "centres of the world"
What can be achieved by writing speculatively?
Authenticity of subaltern voices

Week 2-These Mysterious People- Susan Roy

***Questions due at 6pm on Sunday*** These Mysterious People- Susan Roy

The ways in which archaeology was used as a colonial dispossession tool of Musqueam lands: Scientific sites vs grave robbery, preservation myth, arbitrary colonial interpretations of land "use."

1. Dane's Questions/Themes

Book is situated between Research, Place, Knowledge
Susan Roy's refuting of the notion of "these mysterious people"- relationships with archaeologists, perhaps a lack of "evidence" for competing claims to midden and "ancient" ancestry. Is Susan Roy's conclusion lacking finality or rejecting the notion of finality? Also, this term comes from the Ottawa Citizen but was selected as the preferred title by Musqueam
Colonial archeological practices appropriated by Musqueam

2. Mystery/Uncertainty

this is antithetical to the colonial order so even the choosing to be "mysterious people" is a political choice by Musqueam
Dane thinks there are two "mysterious people" in this book- archaeologists and the individual Musqueam using the notion of "mystery"- the stone is also a through-line, perhaps an uncomfortable one but we are meant to sit with this familiar item that makes uncomfortable. Paige's read on it: is there any question that these people are Musqueam and it's ridiculous to ask them to prove heritage.
Information is withheld purposely throughout the text

3. Historical and Ancient Past

Musqueam situate themselves in a very different notion of time, archaeologists are trying to situate them in the either the ancient or historical past, either way: "vanishing"
Binary of continuity and change and life and death are necessarily applied differently

4. Authenticity and Performance of Authenticity

Ceremony mobilized for political purposes- this and Musqueam use of archaeology as response to colonial settler-state "criteria"- however arbitrary
political gain vs cultural preservation
public vs private but really there are multiple of publics
Coast Salish notion of status being based on knowing your history and how it interplays with predatory colonial practices: residential schools and their impact
1886 colonial government asking people of the past to prove themselves with colonial present criteria- organized into bands, but Indigenous groups did not see themselves this way, the binaries that are created destroy, distort, and obscure how Indigenous people viewed themselves.

5. Notion of permission

Who grants permission and for what?
Even when archaeologists had permission, there was mistrust of Musqueam and mishandling of artifacts
Also plays into valorization of heritage

6. Movement and Coast Salish Historical Understanding

qeysc:am (kai-schum) stone and its movement, punctuated by periods of rest
movement also antithetical to colonial understandings of land ownership, yet movement is essential to Musqueam
how land gets marked- use of house posts and readings of their meeting, reserve land suddenly becomes the only legitimate Indigenous land
the movement through land, out of necessity, obliterates Musqueam claim of land

7. Materialism

role of and relationship to objects, the social life of things
cultural objects being removed from their locality (i.e. to museums) does not rob them of their cultural significance or social potency
what does it mean to historians to consider qeysc:am as an ancestor
the image of qeysc:am appears throughout the text but disambiguated from Roy's narrative. She continually references the stone but not necessarily tied to the images. (example pg 104, the caption is just 'object from the Marpole Midden sitting on a porch
to Musqueam the value of the object is the social value of it, not the literal object itself
the object itself was not separated from its social/discursive value- the meaning, value, and material can change, be worn out, replaced

Week 3-

Week 4-Written as I Remember It

Week 5-The Sea is My Country

Who is Reid's audience this book? kind of an old-school traditional historical work, difference between nation and community- it is written for a nation, almost for legal use, as opposed to for a community. Challenging notions of property, ways of knowing space

Why is useful? Addresses a certain conception of tribalism over nationhood. This method is mainstream American Indian history

How is Reid using oral history? Is it extractive? Lack of clarity in his methods? Comes back to the question, who is this history for? Only high status families have access to whales, most people have access to salmon- it is not a "people's history of the Macah"- expressions of acquiring goods and wealth is a major theme

Marine Tenure- Reid takes on the notion of sentimentality and "ecological Indian"

Those that did well in colonial economic framework are celebrated
purchasing of sex came post- Cook
The ways in which maps, borders shape our conceptions of space/power and by exploring perhaps more traditional narratives of power
Is the book guilty of being declensionist?

Week 6- Thrush, Batt, Carlson

Prehistory concept- how are scholars writing about this? how do we conceive of histories of people who are no longer part of memory?
How does extractive archaeology methodology interplay with this? Ongoing extractive practices with communities: how does sources and data get used and re-used to extract new conclusions
Power relations between different types of knowledge, corroborative impulse.
Good intention vs "heart" and respecting relational aspects
DO we still need a pre-history/history divide?
How do we address colonialism/and reconciling Indigenous agency?
Implications/distortions if we over-emphasize colonial rupture
Brooks is arguing poor treatment of women in ways led to Pueblo downfall, Juliana Barr illustrates was the Pueblo developed not from their past but as a deliberate rejections of that past. Barr argues that centers of wealth and coercion of power and wealth made them vulnerable, whereas decentered communities were more resilient - this upends a number of notions about American imperialism
Societies like the Pueblo were already post-Apocalyptic before the Spanish arrived
Colonialism itself is dynamic

PAPER: you're looking for structures and patterns in the writing

Week 7 Feb 27 The Middle Ground

Everyone: Chapters 1-4, 7, and Epilogue. Dane, Jakub, Elspeth, Nicole, and Henry: Chapters 5, 6, and 8. Nick, Rosie, Vicki, and Michael: Chapters 9, 10, and 11.

Overall read: very much American perspective, focus on relations rather than context of space, balance of power shaped by geography in the literature, why is the space absent? His Middle Ground is a metaphor rooted into space, so why then is there a lack of specificity around space? Is the complexity the point? Is this ultimately a history of (focus on) white relations with Indigenous people, as opposed to Indigenous-white relations. Subjectivity of sources is overwhelmingly European. Is he over reaching or is this just his project; reckoning with public discourse.

Fractured memory: his style, language, what does he achieve or leave out by doing this? He also leaves out further distinctions/weirdness of French and Americans, despite the fact that he does point out couriers des bois were a threat to the French. Each group has needs and needs each other to operate in this space, which didn't equate to equal power. But Indigenous people had economic and political needs beyond what Europeans may have perceived. Written in a time of fringe empires.

Coll- History is a discipline very much behind the times, a generation or so- less reflexive because that's what anthropologists do. Paige argues that the inclusion of French, etc in American history is still bound up in strict borders.

Public vs Private is problematic because there are Indigenous publics that non-natives are not privy too.

How are these questions of power linked to agency? Violence- White kind of gets caught in the notion of making use of land- mobility isn't necessarily a sign of refugee

Chapter 1- Refugees - violence, and Iroquois "shatter"
Chapter 2- The Middle Ground- Algonquian and French worlds melted
Chapter 3- The Fur Trade- previous examinations have focused solely on economic trade, misinterpreted Algonquian enthusiasm for knives, guns, and cloth and the ritual. French were somewhat at the whim of non-market values of Algonquian desire for goods
Chapter 4- The Alliance- Despite France overthrowing the Iroquois in 1701, the pays d'en haunt became even more fractured, forcing the French to change their approach
Chapter 5- Republican and Rebels
Chapter 6- The Clash of Empires
Chapter 7- Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground - Pontiac's Rebellion was almost the reverse of the ultimate racial show- down Parkman imagined. Instead of revealing an unbridgeable chasm between Indians and whites, it succeeded in restoring, at least diplomatically, a common world and a common understanding.
Chapter 8- The British Alliance
Chapter 9- The Contest of Villagers- European-Indian alliances in the pays d'en haut had originated and thrived amid a contest of imperial powers; Fort Stanwix Treaty line was the limit of the king's claims, and he could not cede what he did notown. They told the Indians that they could not believe that the Americans would "act so unjustly or impolitically as to endeavour to deprive you of any part of your country under the pretext of having conquered it." The Indians pressed for assurances of aid and believe that if the Americans threatened their lands, the king would assist them." Villages continued on their own
Chapter 10- Confederacies - late 1700s, The Americans understood the confederation to be an alliance of tribes, but tribes in the pays d'en haut were less meaningful as political than as ethnic units. Only took common shape when they opposed other groups.
Chapter 11- The politics of benevolence - Lincoln's reasoning lay behind a kind of imperial benevolence that made it possible to reconcile saving the Indians with stripping them of their lands. Loose confederacy goes to negotiate with Wayne but he is expecting them to act with unity but of course there was little agreement as to how land should be divided up. This division, in turn was exploited. Exacerbated by the North West Company that acts as an imperial power, affecting French, British, and Algonquin social networks.
Chapter 12- Epilogue: Assimilation and otherness

1. The Rituals of Possession: Native Identity and the Invention of Empire in Seventeenth-Century Western North America- Michael Witgen Sort of an imperial fiction that relied upon the rhetoric of empire that belied the reality of the situation. "This overly determined perspective obscures the extent to which native social formations in the Great Lakes and western interior operated and evolved independent of their relationships to the empires of the Atlantic world. European claims of discovery and possession in this region represented the rhetoric of empire rather than a genuine expansion of political sovereignty." Asserting and using the symbols don't necessarily

2. What Is the Middle Ground, Anyway?- Philip J. Deloria- How do we avoid everything becoming 'the middle ground?' As an analytic tool, the middle

ground seeks to find a way to talk about relations between the always- blurry nature of cultural production and the shifty boundary-drawing exercises that establish social and political- the inbetweenness of culture and power is essential to understanding it. From White: "The middle ground depended on the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force. The middle ground grew according to the need of people to find a means, other than force, to gain the cooperation or consent of foreigners."

3. "Nindoodemag": The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701, Heidi Bohake Imperial powers forced to negotiate with a complex group of Aboriginals. "Aboriginal political organization was far more complex, a fact the French recognized in the preamble to the treaty. The document names twenty-five distinct Native American political entities as parties.'

So for White, he's trying to draw purely on this notion of fractured identities from a fractured history but Bohake explains that this might be overly simplisitic and not taking into account Anishinaabe origin-kin stories?

"For White the paucity of documentation from which he had to work results in "a historical landscape that consists largely of dim shadows." Thus, he argues,

"a fractured society has been preserved in fractured memory. To pretend this world exists otherwise is to deceive." The dim shadows of this historical landscape, however, can be more clearly illuminated when scholars become familiar with Anishinaabe communicative practices."

Week 8 March 6th Indians in Unexpected Places

Indians in Unexpected Places-Deloria

Collection of essays- cultural studies approach, linked to the leap into modernity that some Indigenous
The unexpectedness of his method as well
Shifts how we can look at different source material as historical- Smoke Signals
Personal sources- the family history?
This book is about a moment and to challenge the idea of an anomaly
Shifting histories of non-Indigenous expectations of Indigenous- "things were different and we cannot forget that things used to be different."
How can this not be read as erasure of Indigenous history?
Whose window or expectations are these for/about? What are the political stakes here?
What began these representations and why did these end?
American preoccupation with national myth-making capitalizing on Native American identities- Indigenous resistance didn't go away but there is a window that opens roughly around
Politics of place- spacial- internalized American frontier space, technologies of the time that created this break. Special confinement- razor wire
Redman's Rebuke- equivalent to an Indian Fredrick Douglas Jackson
How do we avoid looking at these particular moments as hinges that hang on settler-colonial moments- viewing this as translation
The chuckle- humour, the laughter exposes our expectations and undermines them but without the nuanced framework, we are just re-inscribing our previously held beliefs.

Rifkin and Affect

Is the there a disjuncture between Rifkin and Deloria?
Rifkin argues we need to be aware of what frame we're using
Does he set up a binary of settler time and Othered time?
how do we ground this in academic work? I think he mischaracterizes Deloria
Adding people to the conversation doesn't get around to the time issue, what constitutes existence
Co-presence of peoples- what assumptions do non-Indigenous scholars make about this grand unified idea of Indiginiety

Week 9-The Clay We Are Made Of-Susan Hill

What is Hill's goal? Same as Deloria's? does unexpectedness come in?

Continuity and change, historical sources create the image that we have of Haudenisaunee being contradictory and "over" participating in "modernity"
3 chunks or themes- Introduction of origin story, Middle piece of more conventional modes of history but with her cultural knowledge, and the conclusion around actions.
The argument comes at the end and is deliberately framed as such.
What she is arguing for: reconciliation and the "polishing of the covenant chain," Great Law and binding of peoples' histories and how settlers are now (and in the past) bound to this history, book concludes with a re-efying of the offer: we are here, we have responsibility, and we want to negotiate. Or, centre the relationship, having to constantly remind the government of their responsibility

Themes of dispossession connected to the origin story
Haudenisaunee continuity is centred in the text, especially in the beginning - which includes misreadings of Haudenisaunee origin stories and history
How does land show up in the text?

Hunting territories- allows for an expansiveness of land "tenure"- Hill doesn't really re-engage this concept
Boundaries of reserve, boundaries created by broken promises/displacement
So how do we do this history as non-Indigenous scholars? Question and interrogate? Can we simply cite Hill and say "she's dealt with it here"

Where is the boundary between continuity and ahistorical writing?

Does she give us a definition of Haudenisaunee time?

One of her audiences is those that do not her history
She does give us plenty to reckon with about place- constituted by meaning and relationships

Week 10- Fractured Homeland- Bonita Lawrence

Week 11- Red Skin, White Masks and Grounded Authority

Red Skin, White Masks- Glen Coulthard

Grounded normativity- why normativity? Land based relationships being asserted normative, naturalizing resistance rather than oppression.
Land of way of being, relating to others through land- does the relational nature of it make this non-transferrable? Or, if it's more of an ethical framework, it can be transported?
Grounded to mean embodied in people's bodies, in land, and in practice
How do we build our houses rather than tear down the master's house with the master's tools?
Does Coulthard then argue that Indigenous peoples without land then or in the diaspora are less Indigenous? Or is it a part of Indigenous resurgence not Indigeniety?
Urban Indigeniety- land must be reclaimed, urban has more access to resources but urban Indigeniety is a product of capitalist processes.
Seeking colonial permission is creating the white mask
Coulthard is arguing that the answers are in the past- weaponized narratives of forgiveness, true reconcilliation is tied to land
Marx and the process by which communal lands are capitalized- this idea came from the New World- Coulthard wants to shift this towards acknowledging the dispossession of people perpetuates this
Affective, performed reconciliation- dilaectic between desire, love, rage
How does Coulthard argue is needed in the historical discipline? If we are writing a history, we need to foreground the dispossession of lands

Grounded Authority- Shiri Pasternak

Preface situated within Israel-Palestine- addressing her own positionality
How are claims to Indigeneity recreated and appropriated elsewhere? (i.e. English Defense League)
Archive of Interference - this isn't Indigenous communities who can't their shit together, silences are a form of resistance to research harassment
How does "jurisdiction" play out according to Pasternak. The initial agreements keep getting overwritten, denying easy mapping. How is this different from sovereignty? Jurisdiction is practice, sovereignty is an abstract notion.
Capital actually has some flexibility but the State is trapped within its own logic. Corporations don't really care who has jurisdiction, if it makes something cheaper. The State needs to maintain its legitimacy and sovereignty
Pasternak believes that the Trilateral Agreement would have "provided possible solutions to on the ground problems"- the ontology of care