As wedge issues go, the idea of an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women loomed large over the 2015 election. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper refused to call for one, despite the chronically outsized murder rate among indigenous women. Both the NDP and the Liberals were prolific in their expressions of outrage over Harper’s […]
Seven in 10 polled say helping families living below the poverty line should be the main investment priority for the government, while only 17 per cent say the same for support of Indigenous communities, according to the Ipsos survey commissioned by Yahoo Canada.
Sad state of affairs as we still struggle through the process of reconciliation/
You are legitimate. I know people will try to delegitimize you because of it, but you are still Red, still NDN, still Native and still part of our community. Cops, the government, whites don’t care if you speak your language when they abuse you, call you slurs or (try to) kill you. No matter how much of your language you know, you deserve to be recognized as someone who is surviving a genocide and who is power. Today I will say a prayer for you, asking Totilme'iletik to guide you.
And hey, if it’s any comfort, John Trudell, the Santee Dakota man who was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes’ takeover of Alcatraz refused to learn his language, citing Indigenous Peoples’ long-standing ability to work with what they were given, in this case, being taught English as a first language.
You are great. You are part of our community. Your skin, your heritage, your life is a testimony to survival. Not knowing your language doesn’t change that.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls, featuring Mohawk actress Kawennahere Devery Jacobs, is now streaming on Netflix!
From IMDB:
Red Crow Mi'g Maq reservation, 1976: By government decree, every Indian child under the age of 16 must attend residential school. In the kingdom of the Crow, that meansimprisonment at St. Dymphna’s. That means being at the mercy of “Popper”, the sadistic Indian agent who runs the school.
If you haven’t heard the interview yet, you can listen to it on soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/rae-gil/ei-podcast
Milo’s personal interview connects at many points to themes and articles of scholarship in our course as well as around indigenous parenting in Canada and pragmatic ideas for what Hunt and Holmes (2015) term “everyday decolonization” (p. 154) in many different relationships.
Milo’s account pointed to issues expressed in Clifford (2001) when zie discussed the struggles and possibilities of connecting to culture and stories while not living on your ancestral territory. Milo pointed out that this is a struggle zie can in some ways share with hir children in spite of the fact that zie is non-indigenous hirself. They both have to find ways of centering and connecting stories that often reference connections to ancestral lands while not living on, and often never having been to, those territories. As Clifford notes and Milo echoes, there is a constant struggle mirrored by many indigenous and non-indigenous people alike to resist “sacrificing attachments to a place, or places—the grounding that helps one feel at home in a world of complex interdependences.” (p. 470). Connections to land need not be an essentializing box that individuals are thrust into, rather these connections can be harnessed as a source of power and inspiration for those living in many different territories that are not those of their ancestors stories.
Milo’s example stands in stark contrast to the phenomenon of white parenting of indigenous children through forced relocation and rehoming of native kids en masse commonly known as the 60’s Scoop, discussed in Spencer (2017) among others. The attitude and language of the scoop has been the dominant narrative for transracial parenting in Canada, one which focuses on assimilation of native children through their parenting by non-indigenous parents. Milo’s account provides a different take on the opportunities of mixed-race families, one where, rather than the children losing sight of their indigenous heritage through connection with their white parents, white parents are instead integrated through interaction with indigenous languages, knowings, and stories by way of their children.
The intersections of queerness, community, and indigeneity that Milo addresses issues that are likewise rising to the fore in contemporary discourse. An example of this can be found in Hunt and Holmes’ (2015) talk about the struggles of trans/genderqueer settlers negotiating life and allyship on the stolen lands that make up Vancouver and Victoria British Columbia. Their call to adopt a “decolonial queer politic [that] is not only anti-normative, but actively engages with anti-colonial, critical race and Indigenous theories and geopolitical issues such as imperialism, colonialism, globalization, migration, neoliberalism, and nationalism” (p. 156) closely mirrors Milo’s active attempts to grapple with the myriad larger forces that impact hir family in an active way. As the authors note, this process “[unfolds] in daily acts of embodying and living Indigeneity, honoring longstanding relationships with the land and with one another.” (p. 157) This struggle is, as both the title of their piece and this blog implies, a daily and ongoing struggle, a negotiation which Milo points out isn’t something one needs to have fully figured out before embarking on the important challenge of raising a kid.
An article from Discorder by Kat Kott (2017) explores the experiences of a few two-spirit/queer indigenous people living in Vancouver, who describe their experiences. “The heteronormativity of colonization has affected Indigenous communities. ‘There’s racism and homophobia within Indigenous communities,’ June says. Despite the traditional reverence for two spirit people, Lacie explains, ‘We aren’t necessarily revered in the way people think we are.’”
This sentiment connects keenly with the critiques offered by Smith (2005) that colonial impositions of gender roles and homophobic ideas and laws that are legacies of the colonial settler state which have widespread and lingering impacts in indigenous communities to this day. In our in-class discussions on Smith’s article, the issue of sexism and homophobia as a singularly colonial legacy was contested as essentialist and reductive by some of my classmates. Nevertheless, the utility of situating colonial narratives of gender as having deeply impacted indigenous communities’ perception of gender and sexuality is clear from both Smith’s article’s discussion of the importance of sovereignty rhetoric in these contexts, and the lived experiences of the two-spirit individuals interviewed in this piece. Activism on this issue must allow for the complex interplay of oppressions to be fully expressed and acknowledged in order to allow for true change to surface. And the best criticism and activism must come from those speaking their truth from inside these experiences of intersectional oppression.
Milo’s family serves as a wonderful example of the ways individuals are negotiating “the edges, the traversed and guarded frontiers of a dynamic native life” (Clifford, p. 471) and in the process redefining their relationships to history, land and each other.
Bibliography
Clifford, J. (2001). Indigenous articulations. The Contemporary Pacific, 13(2), 467-490.
Hunt, S., & Holmes, C. (2015). Everyday Decolonization: Living a Decolonizing Queer Politics.
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19(2), 154-172.
Smith, A. (2005). Native American feminism, sovereignty, and social change. Feminist Studies, 31(1), 116-132.
Spencer, D. C. (2017). Extraction and pulverization: a narrative analysis of Canada scoop survivors. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(1), 57-71.
Unsettling Colonial Gender Boundaries | Discorder Magazine | CiTR. Citr.ca. Retrieved 15 June 2017, from http://www.citr.ca/discorder/june-2017/unsettling-colonial-gender-boundaries/
Milo has granted consent for the distribution of this podcast.
CKUR will be broadcast on 106.3 FM and is expected to launch next June.
Taking over the waves! Making media happen from an Indigenous perspective is so important, as Ginsberg and Myers (2006) illustrate so well. Without control over the stories, material oppression is an easier option for settler governments.
See: Ginsburg, F., & Myers, F. (2006). A history of aboriginal futures. Critique of Anthropology, 26(1), 27-45.
I often see people trying to be allies to natives, but still pushing or supporting the idea that the only thing we have to care about is the environment. this is a harmful narrative that communicates two things:
1) that colonialism and our oppression is ancient history
2) that native lives are less important than native land
if you want to be an ally to native people, stop perpetrating the same colonial bullshit we’ve been trying to destroy for ages. yeah, our land is important, but you know what? so are we! remember it.
Living at the intersection of two different identities can cause one to question whether the two could ever exist in congruity. We like to think that people have ample communities related to their identities, but people that identify with two separate communities can feel disconnected to both. One way to validate those living in disconnect is to give space to share their experiences, and to show they are not alone.Unsettling Colonial Gender Boundaries is a new media and video art festival within Queer Arts Festival that showcases work by two-spirit Indigenous people.
Great piece from local publication Discorder about the intersections of indigeneity and queerness, and the ways settler society disallows and invisiblizes indigenous ways of understanding gender.
This Sunday at 9PM ET, join us here for a live stream of Gord Downie's The Secret Path and a post-show CBC Arts live panel on the road to reconciliation.
Gord Downie’s Secret Path (which is about Reconciliation and the era of Residential School’s) can be watched at the link above.
Info:
On October 22, 1966 near Kenora, Ontario, Chanie Wenjack died when he walking home to the family he was taken from over 400 miles away. Fifty years later, Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie has taken Wenjack’s story and turned it into the Secret Path project, including a solo album, a graphic novel and an animated film.
It was a live broadcast, but you can scroll back and watch it from the beginning.
Everyday Indigeneity @everydayindigeneitypodcast - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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