Canada | Savage Minds

This entry is part 14 of 20 in the Decolonizing Anthropology series.

By Zoe Todd

I have an ambivalent relationship to Anthropology. And an even more ambivalent relationship to the idea of decolonizing it.

I work in Canada. I am from Treaty Six Territory in central Alberta, from a city that bears the nehiyawewin (Plains Cree, Y Dialect) name amiskwaciwâskahikan. I am Métis on my dad’s side of my family, with roots that stretch back to Métis communities throughout present-day Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. I offer this introduction so that you can place who I am, who I am related to, and which territories I am bound to through movement, stories and time. I do so in order to ensure that readers and interlocutors can locate my knowledge in its own complex relationality to the places that I and my ancestors come from and moved through. I also provide this information to foreground the focus of my piece, which is a meditation on the visceral decolonization of the academy – and anthropology—here in Canada.

I had planned to write a post about the challenges of bringing Black and Indigenous scholarship into the classroom and into our published work in Canada, a country convinced of its moral standing and human rights excellence, yet which is regularly and wilfully blind to its vexing colonial violence. But a young nehiyaw (Cree) man, twenty-two year old Colten Boushie from the Red Pheasant First Nation, was shot and killed on a prairie farm in Saskatchewan last week after he and his friends sought help for a flat tire. And everything I think about this weekend as I write this post keeps coming back to this horrific death, and the inter-related realities of Black and Indigenous death at the hands of police and settlers, and the erasure of Black and Indigenous scholarship here in the lands within which we teach anthropology across Canada (and across the border in the United States). And I keep thinking about the logics and structures of academia as ‘white public space’ (Brodkin et al 2011) which produce narratives that normalize and even obscure the life and death of racialized peoples in favour of an undeniably white canon that resuscitates and re-animates white bodies into our classrooms ad nauseum (as Sara Ahmed so succinctly describes here). Continue reading →

The following is an invited post by Sarah Williams and Jennifer Gibson.*

“It’s business as usual at University of Toronto”, the Provost’s messages proclaim. These messages, meant for students and the media, assert that CUPE 3902 Unit 1’s decision to strike has had no impact on undergraduate classes or the daily operations of Canada’s largest university, recently ranked number 20 in the world. This union represents more than 6,000 graduate student employees. The provost’s claims seek to undermine both the value and importance of graduate student labour and justify the administration’s hard line against raising the minimum funding package, stalled at $15,000 per year, to an amount closer to, though not exceeding, Toronto’s version of a poverty line, the “Low Income Cut-Off” (LICO), which is $23,000. However, underneath the calm and unaffected airs of the university administration lies the reality that over 800 undergraduate classes and tutorials are no longer meeting or have been cancelled for the duration of the strike. As finals draw closer, so too does the possibility that students’ graduations may be delayed.

At base, the aim articulated by striking CUPE 3902 members is one of structural change to the funding relationship between graduate students and the university. The guaranteed minimum funding package achieved as a direct outcome of this union’s last strike, fifteen years ago, has dramatically diminished in real wage value thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living in one of Canada’s most costly cities, and has not seen any increase to account for inflation since 2008. Meanwhile, tuition––particularly for international students––continues to climb to the maximum rates legal in Ontario ($8,000-20,000––the highest rates in all of Canada). Combined, it is these two issues that have led to the now 21 day standoff between graduate student contract workers and the administration. If any tentative agreement is to achieve ratification, two core demands must be addressed: meaningful increases to the minimum funding package, and significant reductions in post-funded-cohort tuition. Continue reading →