How can we Decolonize our Organizing?
By Kaymi Yoon-Maxwell
*This post was written by a settler on behalf of the 2016 F-Word Planning Committee, which was composed of 5 settlers. It is important to note that the Planning Committee changes each year, and therefore we do not want to speak as though there has never been or will never be Indigenous folks on the committee*
As students in an institution which occupies unceded Musqueam territory, what does decolonizing our organizing look like? In thinking about our experience with the F-Word, we also want to think about this question in the context of other activist organizing we are a part of, in our school work, and in our relationships.
“Despite our efforts, there is always room for improvement and the fact that we, as a group, operate on the stolen and unceded lands of the Musqueam people at an institution like UBC is often contradictory to decolonization, and difficult to navigate. This year, we are working on leveraging our privilege as UBC students to support Indigenous communities and resistance.” – Rashmi Abeysekra
In her journal article, “Ontologies of Indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept,” Sarah Hunt talks about how academic conferences (in the case of her piece, Geography conferences) are most often lacking in meaningful presence of Indigeneity and Indigenous knowledges (Hunt 2013, 2). We can understand this in the context of the F-Word Conference within the field of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at UBC. Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill write about the need to decolonize feminism and Gender and Women’s Studies (2013). In their writing they shine a spotlight on Gender and Women’s Studies lack of attention to Indigenous peoples and lack of dedication to decolonization. They give five central challenges that Native feminist theories pose to Gender and Women’s Studies. They say that “[a]ttending to settler colonialism requires a significant departure from how gender and women’s studies… are regularly understood and taught” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morill 2013, 9). As the undergraduate student group for UBC’s GRSJ program, we need to step up and challenge ourselves and each other to live up to Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill’s five challenges. In Paulette Regan’s words concerning decolonization: “institutions do not lead social change. The people do. And so it is up to us” (2010, 10). Here are the five challenges accompanied by questions we need to challenge ourselves to engage with in future organizing of the F-Word Conference:
(1) Problematize Settler Colonialism and Its Intersections – “to problematize and theorize the intersections of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and heteropaternalism” (2013, 14).
We can’t just know about settler colonialism and that it is bad, that’s not enough (Pinch 2014, np). We must always problematize settler colonialism in all the work that we do. We need to recognize that “a decolonized gender and women’s studies [we could insert ‘F-Word Conference’ here] that pays greater attention to both heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, activating the models provided by Native feminist theories, could produce liberatory scholarship and activism for Indigenous women, non-Indigenous women, and, ultimately, all peoples” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 17). We have always made an effort to work from an intersectional approach and to understand interlocking systems of power. But, to quote Harsha Walia, “[i]ntersectional approaches can… subordinate and compartmentalize Indigenous struggle within the machinery of existing Leftist narratives: anarchists point to the anti-authoritarian tendencies within Indigenous communities, environmentalists highlight the connection to land that Indigenous communities have, anti-racists subsume Indigenous people into the broader discourse about systemic oppression, and women’s organizations point to relentless violence borne by Indigenous women in discussions about patriarchy” (nd, np). With all the issues in the world that we want to talk about, we can’t do it without acknowledging the unique marginalized position Indigenous folks hold in so-called Canada (and other settler colonial states!). To truly decolonize our organizing, “Indigenous struggle cannot simply be accommodated within other struggles; it demands solidarity on its own terms” (Walia nd, np).
How do we make our conference an intersectional platform to a host of different social justice issues and commit to decolonizing?
(2) Refuse Erasure But Do More Than Include – “to refuse the erasure of Indigenous women within gender and women’s studies and reconsider the implications of the end game of (only) inclusion” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 17).
“There still could, and should have been more Indigenous voices present in… our panels and workshop slots. Most importantly, Indigenous voices were missing from the planning committee and GRSJUSA at large. More work needs to be done for the proper inclusion of Indigenous Peoples not just for the conference, but for our club as a whole.” – Ghada Dbouba
Coutlhard argues, simply recognizing (or simply including) “serves to reinforce the dominance of colonial power, and as such is not a viable way to transform the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada” (qtd. in Hunt 2013, 3). We landed somewhere around here in 2016. We included topics of settler colonialism, decolonization, Indigenous resistance and resurgence, in our possible topics for submissions, but those that were selected ended up making only one panel. We had a few workshops engaging with issues of settler colonialism and ensured that folks would need to attend one of the three by slotting them at the same time, but that also meant that you couldn’t go to all three. We had an Indigenous catering company make the dinner for everyone and do an introduction to their business and to the food they had made. But still. There is more we can do to refuse erasure and do more than include.
What does this look like? Does it mean having an Indigenous keynote speaker? Does it mean inciting a partnership with the FNIS program and/or the Musqueam Nation? Does it mean having the whole theme of the conference be decolonization and settler colonialism? Should this year’s 2017 conference be on the theme of decolonizing feminism? But what happens after that?
(3) Craft Alliances That Directly Address Differences – “ to actively seek alliances in which differences are respected and issues of land and tribal belonging are not erased in order to create solidarity, but rather, relationships to settler colonialism are acknowledged as issues that are critical to social justice and political work that must be addressed” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 19).
“We decided to do the land acknowledgment ourselves, and situate ourselves as settlers, as opposed to have a “token” indigenous person do the land acknowledgement, this was a decision we came to as a group after much discussion.” – Alison Watts-Grant
Bloom and Carnine “[e]ncourage learning that is personal, emotional, spiritual, embodied, and communal” as part of being a decolonial ally (2014, np). We have the opportunity in planning this conference annually to engage a huge community in these dialogues. To that note, we also have an opportunity to lift up and support Indigenous voices in our platform. Pinch says that we need to decolonize our own organizing frameworks without “piggybacking on direct actions, looking for token Indigenous involvement or laying claim to struggles that aren’t [our] own” (2014, np). She also says that educating settlers cannot just be on the backs of Indigenous peoples and instead settlers much take the time as allies to educate others (Pinch 2014). However, we must be sure not to give more credit to non-Indigenous allies than to Indigenous peoples whose work may be in “the everyday work of sustaining Indigenous communities and making small scale changes” (Hunt and Clare np) and who have always been resisting settler-colonialism in both public and private ways.
With the goal of this blog being a potential resource for future organizers, is it presuming there won’t be Indigenous organizers? How would a future Indigenous F-Word organizer feel reading this?
“I have been thinking about the difference between inviting Indigenous peoples and their voices to a conference, and co-organizing the conference with them; and that is a big difference. So i think in terms of improvement, I would suggest co-weaving and co-creating if possible.” – Mengxi Wang
In the last set of questions after challenge 2, I asked if refusing erasure means inciting a partnership with Musqueam. “As one of the first steps of planning, ask permission for any gatherings, marches, etc. from an Indigenous representative of the land you are on. Invite them to collaborate in planning around gatherings, conferences, actions, campaigns for justice work on their traditional homeland and be open to the work shifting because of such collaboration” (Bloom and Carnine 2016). How do we do this without tokenizing? How do we foster a meaningful relationship with Musqueam when our committee changes every year?
(4) Recognize Indigenous Ways of Knowing– “to recognize the persistence of Indigenous concepts and epistemologies, or ways of knowing” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 21).
Todd says that to decolonize the academy “we must consider our own prejudices, our own biases” and address the subtle and not-so-subtle violences created by the academy through the silencing of Indigenous voices and exclusion of Indigenous knowledges (Todd 19). Though, as Hunt explains, Indigenous knowledge cannot simply be fit into our current understanding of academia as Indigenous worldviews inherently push these limits (2013, 3). Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill recognize the barriers to effectively decolonizing Gender and Women’s Studies (read: GRSJ) as a discipline already marginalized and often discounted within the academy (2013, 28). Decolonization requires a “profound re-centering of indigenous worldviews in our movements for political liberation, social transformation, renewed cultural kinships, and the development of an economic system that server rather than threatens our collective life on this planet” (Walia nd, np).
How do we work this into our organizing practices? How do we make space for Indigenous ways of knowing to be centered in our conference? How do we ensure that we are not co-opting or de-centering Indigenous knowledges? How do we make space for other social justice issues that GRSJ students want to present about as well?
(5) Question Academic Participation in Indigenous Dispossession – “to question how the discursive and material practices of gender and women’s studies and the academy [at] large may participate in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands, livelihoods, and futures, and to then divest from these practices” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 25).
The fact that UBC here is here on Musqueam land means that Musqueam people do not get access to their traditional lands. The fact that we are here as settlers on Musqueam land learning in this institution means we are complicit in dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill say that a step to questioning this complicity in Gender and Women’s Studies is to look at the curriculums and the Indigenous representation there (2013, 25). We need to continue to do this with regards to our panelists, workshops, keynotes, themes, topics, etc.
Considering the process of selecting students to present on the panels are anonymous, how do we ensure that we don’t just have a conference full of settlers talking about decolonizing?How do we ensure we have Indigenous speakers on our panels? How do we also ensure that we are still centering student voices (one of the goals of the F-Word) when most students are not Indigenous?
“We have a long way to go to continue organizing with decolonization at the forefront” – Kaymi Yoon-Maxwell
Well. this turned into a lot more questions than answers on how we can meaningfully work towards Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill’s call to decolonize feminism. So, I end with a call to action to current and future organizers of the F-Word to work harder at decolonizing our organizing. I urge us to continue these discussions and asking these questions to try and create a conference that one day doesn’t replicate any of the violence it aims to destroy.To quote Syed Hussan, “[d]ecolonization is a dramatic re-imagining of relationships with land, people and the state. Much of this requires study, it requires conversation, it is a practice, it is an unlearning” (qtd. in Walia nd, np). Walia expands by declaring that “[d]ecolonization is as much a process as a goal” (nd, np).