#indigeniety

[kala-ya-aan]

#6. The Aeta tribe of Luzon, 🇵🇭

#Bayanihan #IndigenousPeoples #FilipinoDiaspora #NativePinoy #Pureblood

[radicalurbanista]

“In white society, women and children held little or no political authority and were little more than domestic servants. Diplomacy, trade, and war--the public sphere--were the sole privilege of men. This included the sale and trade of hides at European or US forts along the Missouri River, unlike the Indigenous systems they had replaced, in which trade, exchange, and the sharing of material wealth was intended to strengthen kinship relations, rather than a market economy and private ownership.”

Our History is the Future, Nick Estes

[citationpractices]

“A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui discusses the distinctive shifts toward examining Patrick Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism as 'a structure, not an event.' Kauanui argues that a substantive engagement with settler colonialism also demands a deep rethinking of the associated concept of indigeneity–distinct from race, ethnicity, culture, and nation(ality)–along with the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies.

“the logic of elimination of the native is about the elimination of the native as native. And yet, to exclusively focus on the settler colonial without any meaningful engagement with the indigenous—as has been the case in how Wolfe’s work has been cited—can (re)produce another form of “elimination of the native.” (Kēhaulani Kauanui 2016)  

This week’s post features Kēhaulani Kauanui ‘s insightful writing on the politics of citing Patrick Wolfe’s well-cited theory that, “settler-colonialism, is a structure, not an event.” Her work offers an important reminder that it’s not enough to just cite and acknowledge settler-colonialism as a structure. It’s not the same as engaging with it, if our citation ignores questions of indigeneity.

Kēhaulani Kauanui's work points out that citations can act as a place holder for seriously engaging with ways that this structure is impactful for indigenous and non-indigenous people to a settler-colonized Land and what it means to write, work, theorize, and live in a structure that asserts non-indigenous life through the erasures of indigenous life and continual presence. As a non-indigenous person to Turtle Island, it also reminds me of the importance of citing indigenous resistance as a counterpart. Just as settler-colonialism is an ongoing structure, struggles against it is also fiercely ongoing. 

How are we citing settler-colonialism in our own work? How are we thinking of the question of indigeneity when we cite it? How does settler-colonialism as a structure impact how we come to know our work, and its’ relationship to indigeneity?

Check it out,

Fi 

[radicalurbanista]

“On December 26, 1862, a week before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln ordered the hanging of the thirty-eight Dakota men at Maka To (or “Blue Earth”--present day Mankato, Minnesota) as retribution for the 1862 US-Dakota War. The execution of the Dakota thirty-eight remains the largest mass execution in US history. Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey, who helped negotiate the 1851 Treaty with the Dakotas, then ordered the extermination or complete banishment of remaining Dakotas from the state. Settlers were encouraged and rewarded to take their own revenge with government-issued $25 scalp bounties which later increased to $200. When the Civil War came to an end, very few confederate officials and soldiers were sent to prison, and only one was hanged for war crimes. After surrender, many confederates went back to public office. General Sibley ordered that the Dakotas were to be treated as criminals, and not as prisoners of war. The aftermath of the war to maintain slavery, which cost half a million lives, was profoundly different from the aftermath of the Dakota uprising--and rarely are the two stories told side by side.”

Our History is the Future, Nick Estes

[splitsecondparadise]

White women have been the spokeswomen for feminism; they have created feminism in their image, an image which constructs gender as the sole basis of women's oppression, cloaked in the privileges and power attached to being White. To imply, as many White feminists have done, that the gender oppression experienced by privileged White women is the same gender oppression experienced by all women denies the reality of many women's lives. It fragments the identities of women of Color because it assigns the ways in which we do not fit the dominant model of gender to the non-gendered part of us, paradoxically diminishing the importance of gender oppression in our lives.

Nitya Duclos 

[lasmaracuyas]

Srivastava notes that White feminists tend to be deeply and emotionally attached to an image of themselves as inherently good and inherently “against” racism because of their sense of being oppressed themselves: their good intentions and desires to be “not” racist are privileged. Their subjectivity is historically informed – as Srivastava and other scholars have pointed out, by “colonial and contemporary representations of virtue, honesty, and benevolence [that] have been a historical foundation of whiteness, bourgeois respectability, and femininity.” 

We extend Srivastava’s observations.  Just as an overly strong investment in being “not” racist undermines the capacity of White members of anti-racist social movements to meaningfully respond to charges of racism within their organizations, equally powerful sentiments are at work in decolonizing contexts. Thus, if they mask the ongoing colonial relationships entrenched in neoliberal and neocolonial institutions, subjective investments in “not” being a settler colonist of the ilk of those in the past risks undermining the capacity of those White and/or settler colonial subjects that still benefit from colonial institutions to be critical of the limitations of institutionalized efforts to reverse historical inequities.

As (self)consciousness about whiteness, racism, and colonialism becomes more widespread, especially among White and settler colonial subjects and especially in institutionally embedded ways, Ahmed argues that a new subject has emerged. She/he is anxiously and emotionally invested in a virtuous and morally good critical stance with respect to whiteness and racism and, we would add, settler colonialism. In such a context, the very act of naming oneself as engaged in decolonizing, equalizing, liberatory forms of practice and policy is, potentially and simultaneously, an act of opening oneself to the risk of failing to meet these aims. We wonder, then, what space might exist for these admissions and for subsequent change, particularly because it remains the case that within institutions, “relationships and alliances will always take place in situations of asymmetry of power”. Indeed, relationships and engagements that are produced within institutions seeking to expand spaces of Indigeneity necessarily rely on “a prior ethnographic investment in what the [relationship] provides – that is, access to the stranger culture”. Thus, members of Indigenous communities who enter universities in the twenty-first century must necessarily be first constructed as “other”, as “strange”, so that this strangeness can be overcome both in the efforts of opening institutions to Indigeneity and, crucially, in the production of policies and practices about Indigenous peoples and their/our ways of knowing and being. 

"Troubling good intentions", Sarah de Leeuw, Margo Greenwood & Nicole Lindsay