fossilized fish and plants at the Peabody Museum, New Haven

One: find your beloveds. Find your beautiful soul-kin. Check in with them every day. Tell them they matter. Weather storms together, like schools of fish in rough seas.

Two: Manifest care however you can, to whatever extent is possible in your given circumstances. Choose care. Choose tenderness. Admit to yourself when you are enacting care in name only. Regroup. Restore. Breathe. Ask for help if you can, in your circumstances.

Three: Find the green things, if you can. As @plantstudies teaches us — remember the plants are with us. They co-conspire our most audacious dreams (co-conspire an audacious otherwise, as Natasha Myers and Timothy Choy both offer us in their work on co-conspiracies)

Four: Remember that many orders of existence & being in this space-time are built on a deep relationality between us & the universe(s). Remember, deep in your cells, what it is to exist in tender co-constitution. What it is to exist in a political order beyond this hate-full present.

Five: Reach through space-time and feel for the other possibilities. If we are indeed in the glitchiest of timelines, remember we have collective will. Collective authorship. We are not beholden to the nightmares of those men of old who envisioned the world in extraction and pain.

Six: Again, as @plantstudies teaches us: soften. This is not a call to dissolve your boundaries and membranes, but a collective urgency to soften like lime rock in eons of rain dripping through caves, molding anew. Even the hardest of circumstances dissolve through gravity and time.

Seven: Story your resistance. Story your refusal, as Audra Simpson teaches us. Become comfortable as the ‘not-known’ breathes, as Marisol de la Cadena teaches us: humble yourself to not-knowing (de la Cadena) in this still magical and agential many-worlds. They cannot extract it all.

Eight: Imagine your kin beyond the narrow and rigid precepts the state imposed on us, as @KimTallBear teaches us. Become enamoured with the kinscapes (the brilliant term employed by Dr Brenda MacDougall in her writing on Métis kinship) that shape your life and longing.

Nine: Love audaciously. Seek fishy and mountainous forms of revenge where warranted. Refuse the scrips and scripts imposed by those intergalactic surveyors rending flesh from land. Leave offerings for the berry plants and the alder and spruce. Listen to the sparrows and squirrels.

Ten: Add your own survival & survivance to this script of refusal & tenderness and audacity & ‘presencing’ (after Vizenor). Write and shout your own existences into pastpresentfuture. Dismantle those ontologies of capital and whiteness that seek to render us mere monuments of excess

Eleven: Tend to sturgeon time & geologics. Remember the eons through which rock becomes sand. Expand your existence in lamellae of calcium & minerals deposited with insistence while stars explode + implode. Kiss the sea like supernova racing as particle + wave hurtling through millennia.

Twelve: Build something beyond this poem, grasping and searching as it is through electrons and energy-hungry servers imaged and imagined through the lens of Silicon Valley politics of (white patriarchal capitalist) possibility. Render a better structure for our audacious connection.

Thirteen: Also, read the scholars and thinkers who are breathing these possibilities into being. Read @hystericalblkns. Read @blacklikewho. Read @policingblack. Read @KimTallBear. Read @EricaVioletLee. Read @plantstudies. Read @prof_carrington. Listen to @Metis_In_Space.

It’s that time of year when professors like myself are editing, updating, or drafting syllabi for the coming fall semester here in Canada (and as I understand, the fall term is underway for many of my American peers!). As I head into my third year as an anthropology professor in Ottawa, Canada, I’ve been thinking hard about what it means to enact anthropology, pedagogy, and co-thinking in this particular place and time. I live, work, and teach in unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territory. In fact, Ottawa, Canada’s national capital, sits in entirely unceded Indigenous land. What does that mean? Well, our House of Parliament sits on land for which no treaty was ever signed or negotiated. This creates complex and urgent realities between a) the Algonquin communities whose laws and histories are inextricably bound to this city in the heart of the Ottawa River watershed and b) the broader Canadian nation-state (and its myriad institutions).

Working in unsurrendered Algonquin territory, I think a lot about how to make explicit the relationship between my workplace, Carleton University, and the unceded lands and waters it is bound to. Most of the non-Canadian audience of this blog has probably never heard of Carleton (I wouldn’t expect you to know much about it!), but to bring you up to speed: it rests within a verdant triangle of land that is bounded by the UNESCO World Heritage Rideau Canal and the Rideau River. While the mostly brutalist 1960s architecture of the campus does little to really celebrate the awe-inspiring land it is built on, the waterways that surround our campus tie us directly into the Ottawa River watershed that Algonquin peoples have tended to, laboured within, storied, and celebrated since Time Immemorial.

As a new professor, I’m repeatedly struck by how little we are expected to gesture to or tend to the specific lands, waters, and layered place-based histories we teach within. In Canada, a former French and British colony, we arguably still measure ourselves incessantly and self-consciously against American, British, French, German, and Italian (and other European) intellectual praxis. We often populate our classrooms with long-dead British, American, and other European thinkers, who themselves laboured within specific and storied landscapes and geographies that are worthy of their own care and attention. This is, of course, a symptom of the conceit of the ‘university’, which seeks to universalize the knowledge we share within postsecondary institutions. Achille Mbembe’s (2015) specific articulation of the pluriversity as a tool to — in reference to Fanon — provincialize european thought is, to me, a powerful way to unsettle the supposed universality of the anthropological theory and praxis we teach in the classroom.

I’ve written elsewhere about how I employ ‘watershed level thinking’ as one pedagogical tool in the classroom to encourage students to engage their studies in a way that is attentive to the geographies and legal-governance paradigms that animate this specific territory in Ottawa. Where possible, I also encourage my students to tend to the waterways around the university, applying Tsing’s (2015) ‘arts of noticing’ as a deliberate tool to unsettle the universality of the university. I build, too, on the notions of ‘Indigenous place-thought’ (Watts 2013) and ‘Indigenous place-story’ (Donald 2009) that Indigenous scholars Vanessa Watts and Dwayne Donald articulate, respectively, in their scholarship. My efforts to encourage students to think critically and closely about place and its stories is a small attempt to foster a sense of tenderness towards, and awareness of,  their surroundings. This is my attempt to encourage students to think critically about the territories they move within as they study. I employ this approach to encourage students to think about not only their role as scholars but as people bound to particular socio-political realities and stories.

To this end, I also think a lot about how there is a lot of day-to-day, routinized discourse within academia that demeans or diminishes work that is produced outside specific institutions. In the UK, we are conditioned to elevate scholarship from Oxford, Cambridge and the Russell Group. In America, we are conditioned to prioritize work produced at Ivy League and/or R1 institutions. In Canada, UBC, U of T, and McGill tussle for the honorific of ‘Harvard North’. Rather than lament or feel shame for not producing our work within specific (elite) localities in the academy, I argue that Mbembe’s manifestation of the pluriversity encourages us to tend to our specific responsibilities within the places we find ourselves. And this tenderness to, and tending of, specific localities in our teaching is not a mere nicety – it is an essential form of resistance and refusal (to gesture to the work of Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014)) – of settler-colonial and white supremacist ideologies which normalize the dispossession and erasure of Indigenous peoples  in stolen lands across North America. The pluriversity is also an important tool to refuse the white supremacist logics that erase Black scholars and thinkers from curricula, departments, and institutions throughout Europe and North America (see the work of Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman at UCL in 2014 to dismantle whiteness in the UK academy (Grove 2015), among so many other scholars who draw attention to the erasure of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and POC) scholarship from the classroom).

This work of pluralizing and localizing our teaching goes beyond recognizing watersheds in the classroom. It requires that we ask how our universities came about. It demands that we query whose labour brought the bricks and mortar to stand. To outright acknowledge the entanglements of slavery, white supremacy, land theft, and exploitation that built and build academic institutions (see: Beckert et al. 2011). It requires an unflinching look at the strange and paradoxical universalities and specificities of dispossession, elimination, and slavery that animate universities across North America. (I can’t speak to embodied and visceral experiences in other continents, but work by Achille Mbembe (2015) and Hamid Dabashi (2015) makes explicit the need to unsettle the white supremacy of the university, philosophy, and academia across many localities).

As a Métis scholar and teacher, I’ve been working to develop ways to foster thoughtful and tender responses to the places, situations, relationships we find ourselves bound up within both within academe and beyond. However, I am wary here of the tendency to want to universalize our place-based interventions and apply them to contexts far-removed from the places and beings through which they are thought (to reference Watts’ (2013) important critique of euro-american misappropriation of Indigenous Place-Thought). At a talk last year, someone asked if my theoretical framing of ‘tenderness’ as an ethical response to violence could ‘travel’. I’m not sure that my theoretical work can or should ‘travel’, ie: be applied to contexts outside of those it grows from. My work is bound up with the specific histories, geographies, kinship relations, and responsibilities that I carry as a Métis woman born of and in amiskwaciwaskahikan and the Lake Winnipeg watershed. And now, my work is also embedded within my complex responsibilities as an uninvited guest in unceded Algonquin territory here within the Kitchissibi (Ottawa River). To this end, I’m doing my best to explore the teachings Red River Métis share through our stories, laws, and histories about how to be good visitors in other people’s territories. This is a principle – this importance of visiting and being a good relation in other people’s territories – I hope to foster within my pedagogy as an anthropology teacher. However, I do hope that our specific place-based interventions encourage people to work hard to understand and tend to the specific stories and narratives of the places they live in.

So, in this sense, I wouldn’t expect my work to be universally applicable to other contexts because it is so deeply entangled with very specific and charismatic human and more-than-human beings with whom I have ongoing reciprocal relationships. I would hope that the work I do is useful in ways that are nurturing and inspiring to others, but I also hope that we can celebrate pluralities of understandings of how to do our work as anthropologists. In the same way that my work as an Indigenous feminist in Canada contributes to Indigenous feminisms (the plural acknowledges the dynamic and diverse philosophical and legal-ethical paradigms that inform Indigenous experiences across Canada), I see my work as an anthropologist contributing not to anthropology, but to anthropologies. In the pluriversity, we are co-constituting rich and dynamic ecologies of thinking and action that cannot be easily translated across the vast territories we occupy. But thinking across pluralities enables us to be more cognizant of the responsibilities we hold to and across these places.

So how do I make explicit the entanglements of the scholarship we’re reading and studying within the classroom with the lands/waters/environments this scholarship is produced within? I suppose it starts with unsettling our expectations that we can offer uniform anthropologies across North American institutions. Instead we need to ask ourselves what it means to teach in the specific places we find ourselves, and to make explicit the histories, materialities, and trajectories of the places we teach within. To tend to the human and more-than-human realities that shape those places. To commit ourselves to an ‘ethical orientation’ (a phrase I borrow here from Donald (2010))  towards, and involvement in, the life and livelihoods of these places. And by this, I mean we commit to an unambiguous political orientation to nurturing reciprocal and caring possibilities in these places we live and work. One possible way to support such an approach is to encourage universities to engage in land-based pedagogical programming. To teach students about the specific histories of the places within which they are studying. In Indigenous Studies programs across Canada, there is careful and nuanced support for land-based pedagogy programs that bring together academic institutions and Indigenous communities (see for example the work of Indigenous colleagues at the University of Alberta, University of Saskatchewan, and Dechinta). My workplace isn’t quite at the point of developing such a program, and to do so would necessarily require very care-full and thoughtful engagement with local Algonquin communities to develop programs that are deeply informed by Algonquin philosophy, language, legal traditions, and human-environmental knowledge. Perhaps in the future it will be possible to build such a program.

What I have learned in my first two years as an anthropology prof is that it is so very important for us to nurture pedagogies that enable students, communities, and institutions to speak of, and across, the dynamic experiences that shape their specific localities and entanglements. So as I finalize my course syllabi in the waning weeks of summer vacation, I’ll be thinking hard about how to offer course material that is attentive, and responsible, to this particular territory, its histories, and its co-constituents. I’ll be doing my best to enthusiastically embrace the pluriversity and the unique nodes of thinking and being that are possible here, now. My dream is to foster classrooms and programs that strengthen our relationships to place, and acknowledge our reciprocal responsibilities to the communities whose territories we are so fortunate to live and work in. And, perhaps naively, I still believe we can accomplish this tender reciprocity to people in place in our teaching, and I send out my solidarity and support to all of you as you enter the classroom to accomplish this mission anew this fall.

Addendum: this piece was written a few weeks ago. In light of ongoing white supremacist events/violence in the US, I also have to ask “how do we bring the specificities of place and time in the locations that we teach into broad and powerful conversations about how to dismantle white supremacy in the academy across North America? How do we work across the local realities in the cities and towns where we are employed in order to make sure students don’t dismiss these systemic realities as something that is reserved for ‘the deep South’ or ‘that other city’, but in fact encourage our students to look at the ways in which white supremacy has manifested and maintained the settler colonial nation-state in myriad and specific ways across the entire North American continent and beyond?”. I’ll be thinking about the interlinkages of Charlottesville, Trump, the KKK and the socio-historical specificities of settler-colonization and white supremacy in my current hometown as I develop my syllabi this week. And I’ll be doing my best to encourage students to think about the entanglement of local realities and global events while they study anthropology.

Works Cited

Beckert, Steve, Stevens, Katherine and the students of the Harvard and Slavery Research Seminar. 2011. Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History. Retrieved August 19, 2017. (http://www.harvardandslavery.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Harvard-Slavery-Book-111110.pdf).

Dabashi, Hamid. 2015. Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books.

Donald, Dwayne. 2009. “Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Metissage: Imagining
Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts.” First
Nations Perspectives 2 1: 1-24.

Donald, Dwayne. 2010. “On What Terms Can We Speak?” Lecture at the University
of Lethbridge. Retrieved December 05, 2014 (www.vimeo.com/15264558).

Grove, Jack. (2015). “Rejected MA was too critical of white establishment, says academic”. Times Higher Education,  May 2015. Retrieved August 19, 2017. (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/rejected-ma-was-too-critical-of-white-establishment-says-academic/2020316.article).

Mbembe, Achille. 2015. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.”
Lecture. May 2, 2015 at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.
Retrieved August 19, 2017.
(http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-
%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%2
0Archive.pdf).

Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler
States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the
possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and
Non-humans First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European Tour!” DIES:
Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2(1): 20–34.

In a way, I am thankful that I get to finish my guest blog post with Savage Minds on a day that is so important for Indigenous people across Canada. And I am thankful I get to sign off by sharing an interview with a brilliant Indigenous scholar, Jenny Davis.

I hope that through this guest blog series I have brought your thoughts to the visceral and lived experiences of Indigenous people in North America and how this drives our research, stories, and our passion for scholarship and action. I hope that I have provided food for thought–planted seeds as my friend Dawn-Marie Marchand says. I hope that we continue to examine our relationships to one another, in an accountable and loving way, for years to come. I know that I am dedicating my career to this ‘loving accountability’ that Cree legal scholars like Tracey Lindberg have taught me to honour.

hiy-hiy for listening and hiy-hiy to Jenny for kindly taking the time to answer my questions about her work.

Zoe: So, I’ve danced a bit around the elephant in the room in the last few weeks, which is something I want to bring up in a loving and gentle way before we begin. As I’ve sought out Indigenous and/or POC people to interview for this series, I have found myself in the rather awkward position, as a Métis scholar, of asking you (and others) to do an interview on your work and your experiences in the academy for a blog titled Savage Minds. So, I guess before we begin I just want to get it out of the way that this title bothers me somewhat. And I want to re-iterate that I say this in a loving, open way.  I mean, I understand that it is a nod to a highly regarded French anthropologist. And I love a good play on words (especially one that involves wild flowers!)–particularly ones that draw attention to contested words, or those that draw attention to words with baggage. And I acknowledge that Levi-Strauss has perhaps one of the most influential people in Anthropology in a great long while. But, as an Indigenous woman, it’s another one of those moments that puts me in a ‘double bind‘, so to speak–I want to celebrate anthropology while at the same time, some of our language and our phrasing, even when used ironically, alienates me from the anthropological academy—how do I explain to my non-anthropology friends that in writing for something titled ‘savage’ that the title is meant to be a nuanced commentary on anthropology’s history? It has made it awkward for me to seek out Indigenous interviewees for this series because I feel that I have to keep explaining the context of the title in an apologetic way in order to move forward. I don’t know how to address this, other than to preface our interview with a gentle statement about it just so it’s clear that I myself am struggling with the complex position of wrangling with the multiple, complicated facets of using words like savage (or indeed other loaded words from Anthropology’s past, like primitive or ‘hunter-gatherer’) in our work. Because while this title is playful and purpose-full (and politically informed), I have also been the person in the room critiqued for ‘going native’ by a classmate. How do we make space to talk about what happens when ironic use of phrases can unwittingly create space for the un-ironic, deliberate and pejorative use of phrases within our discipline? Hiy-hiy for letting me start off with this!

Anyway!

You are a linguistic anthropologist working at the University of Illinois. And you are an Indigenous scholar. I always like to ask other Indigenous scholars how they wound up in anthropology! How did you end up here in the discipline?

JD: I started out studying English and Spanish at my undergrad university (Oklahoma State) where I was able to take classes in linguistics. After my first class in sociolinguistics as a junior, I knew I wanted to work in that area. At the same time, my tribe (the Chickasaw Nation), was starting to build language documentation and revitalization efforts, and I was interested in being able to work with them in various capacities on that project. My interest in both language documentation/revitalization and indigenous gender & sexuality took me to the linguistics program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I was able to combine coursework in both linguistics and anthropology.

Zoe: How has your work shaped your relationship to the discipline? Are there hopeful aspects you see with regards to the value of linguistic anthropology as a place to explore topics that are meaningful to you as an Indigenous scholar? Are there challenges to doing your work within anthropology?

JD: My work is centered at the intersection of several disciplines—linguistics, anthropology, and Indigenous studies—and each is driven by a different, equally important focus on language, culture, and indigeneity, respectively. As a result, it is easy to see the strengths of each field as well as their weaknesses. In general, I see linguistic anthropology working to create the tools to discuss the role of language—and broader semiotic systems—in indigenous life and identity at levels ranging from single utterances all the way up to national or global language policy, and that really appeals to me.
One of the major challenges for any “Native” anthropologist working in Anthropology is the difference between Anthropology having acknowledged certain issues as a discipline versus whether or not those issues are addressed and challenged on an individual or institutional level. Our field’s origins in colonial endeavours, for example, have been the topic of countless conference panels, journal articles, and books. However, comments to those of us who do research within our own communities still demonstrate that an “outsider” view is considered more academic, rigorous, and “real,” and there is a tendency within the field to (begrudgingly) acknowledge the problematic nature of those settler colonial enterprises without actively changing their/our behaviour.
As an example, I was recently at a national anthropology conference where 3 separate people made reference to their fieldwork location as “my village.” One waved off potential critiques of the use of that phrase by recounting how ridiculous it was that a fellow scholar had once been chastised by a senior colleague for using it at some earlier conference. Another put the phrase in air quotes while laughing—thereby acknowledging that they knew it was a problematic way of referring to a field site yet were refusing to drop one of the long standing discursive tropes of Anthropology that position predominately white researchers from settler colonial countries as having some ownership or claim to indigenous communities around the world. Such discursive moves make it clear that there is still little expectation that the “researched,” or those that have very different claims to the “villages” under discussion, might also be in the room.

Zoe: You have written about gender, two-spirit gender, and queer theory. Do you think anthropology is doing a good job of engaging these issues? If so, how? If not, what can we work on to be better and more accountable for how we address these topics?

JD: There is phenomenal scholarship in gender, sexuality, and queer theory going on in Anthropology—research that is driving anthropological theory, methodologies, and ethics forward for the entire field. In fact, this week I’m looking forward to reading a new edited volume that has just come out, Queer Necropolotics, that looks at the intersection of queerness with structural violence and death in different contexts around the world.

An important aspect is to see queer theory and the anthropology of gender and sexuality as a core element of anthropological inquiry rather than at its margins. I think we can see some promising examples of the integration of queer scholarship in discussions that aren’t singularly about gender or sexuality, which is necessary for a robust engagement in Anthropology with these areas. Last year’s AAA conference provided several examples. For instance, a double panel on ‘Parsing the Body’ included a wide range of papers—one of which by Lal Zimman explored the role of the larynx, and its production of creaky voice, as an index of gender across both cisgender and transgender speakers. Another paper, by Wesley Leonard, on a panel focusing on ‘Producing Language Reclamation,’ included data from a number of indigenous language activists—some of which happened to be Two-Spirit. The inclusion of Two-Spirit people in discussion of language activism and revitalization—rather than only in discussions of indigenous gender and sexuality is actually a powerful move that positions them not just as “footnote deviants” (Hall 2003), but as speakers of endangered languages or otherwise typical representatives of contemporary Indigeneity.

Zoe: Where are you focusing your attention now?

JD: Broadly speaking, my research interests lie in the relationship between indigenous language(s) and identity, and my current research is focused on continuing two (related) projects: language and urban and/or diasporic Indigeneity and Two-Spirit identity and activism. My dissertation looked at the social dynamics surrounding language revitalization within my tribe focusing primarily on those living within the tribal jurisdiction in Southeastern Oklahoma. But a significant percentage of my tribe—and Native Americans in general—live outside of their tribal jurisdictions in urban “hubs” like Chicago, Denver, and NYC. These urban spaces provide interesting challenges and opportunities for language documentation and revitalization, and represent different sociocultural and linguistic dynamics than are usually the focus of research in linguistic anthropology on American Indians.
My research on Two-Spirit identity and activism takes place in many of those same urban spaces—where Two-Spirit organizations have formed over the past decades. Two-Spirit individuals are indigenous North Americans who spiritually identify as both female and male, and who may also identify as GLBTI Q (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer) Natives. As multiply marginalized position, Two-Spirit identity is often discussed and theorized by people with very little or no connection to the individuals and groups that live and define those position(s), and research on Two-Spirit people often focuses on “male bodied” Two-Spirit experiences, which erases the wide range of gender and sexual identities and experiences within the community. I’m interested in the ways that all Two-Spirit individuals, families, and groups negotiate all of the intersecting aspects of their lives in highly multi-tribal and multi-lingual contexts and how that informs our understanding of contemporary indigenous realities.

Zoe: Do you have any advice for other Indigenous scholars within the discipline? Anything you wish someone had said to you when you started grad school?

JD: First, academia has its own set of rules (many of which are based on a very different culture than yours), and much of your time will be spent figuring out, and crashing up against, these rules. Find someone (or several someones) who can help make them more transparent. It may be helpful to think of graduate school as an ethnographic study of Anthropology—take notes. Your etic observations may some day be invaluable to the community should it find itself needing to reclaim its cultural traditions or defend its existence to some government agency.

Zoe: (anything else you want to add!)

JD: Thanks for inviting me to the conversation, and including me with such an awesome group of scholars!

hiy-hiy, again, for this opportunity to guest-blog. It has been a positive and thought-provoking experience and I am grateful that it has nurtured kinship with other thinkers within and beyond our discipline.

Below is a conversation between Kyle Mays Wabinaw (@mays_kyle) and I about his work as a historian, and his experiences as a Black and Indigenous person in the American academy. I’m incredibly grateful to Kyle for taking the time to answer my questions, as he has been very busy of late–I’m very excited to see the work he produces as he takes up his new position as a post-doc at UNC Chapel-Hill. Hiy-hiy, Kyle, for sharing your insights and experiences with me.

Z: Kyle, I was introduced to you through our mutual colleague and friend Danielle Lorenz, who is a PhD student in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you for this series in the anthropology blog Savage Minds is because I want to share this platform I was invited to write for as a space to talk about the experiences of Indigenous and Black scholars in the social sciences and humanities. I’m also interviewing Jenny Davis, a linguistic anthropologist and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and my colleague and friend Catherine Clune-Taylor, who is a Queer Black philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Alberta. But before we delve into interview questions, I also want to congratulate you on your recent graduation and your new post-doctoral position at UNC-Chapel Hill!

So, my first question is more of a background one to help situate you and your work: how did you find yourself working within the discipline of History in the USA? And what are you working on now?

K: Well, first, thank you, Zoe, for including me as an interviewee. I really appreciate your work and perspective. I came to history in a number of ways. 1) I attended James Madison College at Michigan State University, which is a residential college of public affairs. While I think it was an incredibly racist/sexist place, I learned the rigors of academic debate and critical thinking. Perhaps most importantly, I learned that history is fundamental to any discipline, and a keen sense of history matters for developing a critical perspective about the world. I also learned the value of taking a transdisciplinary approach to asking questions about oppression, with history serving as my base. Again, I appreciate the education at Madison because it helped shape my passion for history, no matter how oppressive it often was.

Second, during my sophomore year, I took a course with an Anishinaabe professor, Dr. George Cornell, and he noticed me right after the first class. I remember it like it was yesterday. After going over the course syllabi and course expectations, he dismissed class early. My aunt Tracy told me to introduce myself to him, because he had worked with my great grandmother on some things back in the day. A few students were in line to speak with him about the course, etc. I walked up to introduce myself as my aunt instructed me. He stopped in the middle of his conversation and said, “Mays! I know you. I know your whole family. Your grandmother and I did a lot of work on the Michigan Indian Tuition Waiver back in the day. She was a fierce woman, and she didn’t take shit from nobody!” That brief moment led me to want to know more about the Indigenous history of modern Detroit (by modern I mean during the advent of the auto industry!).

When it came to choosing a graduate program, I chose history because I knew I wanted to recover, if not reconstruct, the history of Native people in Detroit. So, I asked Dr. Cornell what schools I should apply to. He recommended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and he specifically mentioned two names, who also served on my dissertation committee: Drs. Frederick E. Hoxie and Robert A. Warrior (Osage). He said that they would take care of me, a Native student, and see me through the doctorate. While I entered hostile territory (the University of Illinois has an egregious reputation as an unsafe space for Indigenous people, especially because of the legacy of a racist mascot!), Dr. Cornell was correct, and I couldn’t have asked for a better chair than Dr. Hoxie. I just finished a dissertation titled, Indigenous Detroit: Indigeneity, Modernity, and Racial and Gender Formation in a Modern American City, 1870-2000. I would sum up my work in three ways. First, I am interested in exploring how Native people are not pre-modern and that they lived in cities, prior to federal U.S. policies in the post-World War II era. In other words, cities and Indigenous people are not incompatible. Second, I highlight the role of gender, both how white masculinity is constructed through indigeneity, and, also, how Indigenous women like my great-grandmother and my aunt Judy Mays (Saginaw Chippewa), were central to the development of Indigenous cultural and educational institutions in postwar Detroit. Finally, my work is predicated on the idea of reinserting Indigenous presences in a city that has systematically erased indigeneity from the history and the landscape, and is now known as a Black-White city. Returning to the work of the Native women in my family, I am inspired by them to uncover the role of Native women in urban areas, and to make sure that their histories are not only uncovered, but shared for the next generation of Native (and other) peoples.

Z: Now, I only have a little taste of your work because we have only just ‘met’ online in the last few weeks, but I’d like to know more about why you have chosen to look at urban Indigenous experiences in Detroit.

K: I might be repeating myself here a bit, but here goes nothing! Let’s look at historical discourses about (modern) Detroit. The city is known for its once thriving auto industry led by Henry Ford. It was a major hub of Black migrants escaping the grip of Jim Crow racism of the South. Culturally, Detroit is known for its Motown music factory, led by Barry Gordy. We also know a fair deal about the city’s rapid rise in the early 20^th century, and then its swift and epic decline. As far as the city’s decline, the narrative suggests that the city declined after the 1967 race rebellion (I say rebellion to highlight its revolutionary roots) and even more after the election of the city’ first Black Mayor, Coleman A. Young, in 1974. All of these narratives place the blame on Black folks, instead of more critically highlighting the larger structural forces that go back to the 1940s (see Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis). And, quite frankly, placing the blame on an elite group of white people, but I digress.

Okay, so I had to say all that to get to the urban Indigenous experience. You see that I said nothing about Native people, and that is not surprising. In the bulk of my work I explore how elite white men systematically erased the Indigenous experience from Detroit’s past and also how they memorialized indigeneity to construct ideas about their race and gender (masculinity). In so doing, I hope to move historians and everyday people to consider the Indigenous experience in Detroit as a part of the city’s past, but also point to the Native people who still live there. So, the Indigenous history of the city is important not simply for history’s sake, but also to tell non-Native-people that Native people have remained, even though they are largely invisible to most Detroiters today. In other words, I want to completely rewrite the history of Detroit so that we can no longer even think about the city’s past and present without Indigenous people; we shall see if I’m successful haha!

Z: I have written lately about the experiences I have had as a white-passing Métis woman working in anthropology in the UK. I am asking those I am interviewing for this series what sort of experiences you have had as an Indigenous person, as a POC, within the American academy?

K: I always like to tell people that I am Black and Saginaw Chippewa. For me, that is important because if I deny, or even ignore being Black, I essentially deny my mother, her culture, and her family’s history. My experience is unique, being Black and Indigenous. I was teased as child for either not being Black enough or not Native enough or for being either one (I was a nerd, which didn’t help!). While I have always been comfortable in my own personhood, I often feel the double consciousness, shit, perhaps even triple-consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois referred to in 1903, because I am racialized as Black, I am considered Black and Indigenous by people who know me, and yet my experience is often rendered invisible in predominantly white spaces like the U.S. academy. But I think it’s easy to talk about white/settler-Indigenous relations; it’s much more difficult to discuss Black-Indigenous or even Indigenous-Indigenous conflict. Let me give a few examples.

I’ve had Black colleagues tell me about their great-Cherokee-grandmother or ask me how they can find out more about their supposed Indigenous heritage. I always reply nicely, but I want to tell them that I’m not a fuckin genealogist. I’ve also had Black faculty, upon hearing me explain my background, ask rudely, “are you ashamed of being Black or something?” Actually, a prominent Black Studies scholar at the University of Illinois said that to me. I’ve also been in majority Indigenous spaces and a Native person, assuming I identify solely as Indigenous, say pretty racist things about Black people. I’ve had Indigenous people in the academy try and challenge my identity because I don’t do “traditional” things–whatever that means–or because I didn’t grow up on a reserve/ation. I don’t let those things bother me because I come from a long line of bad-ass Indigenous women/activists, whom I can look up to, to keep me focused on fighting against oppression in a settler regime (the combination of settler colonialism and white supremacy).

Z: What do you hope to bring to the table in your new position at UNC Chapel-Hill? What are you really excited about? What are your goals with regards to working within the discipline of history?

K: During my two years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of History at UNC Chapel-Hill, I hope to bring to the table a strong commitment to writing for both academic and non-academic audiences. My goal is to reach as many people as I can with my research. I’m excited just to finally get to marinate on my ideas without having to respond to my committee haha! In all seriousness, I want to write for a variety of publics with the hope of reaching as many people as possible.

My goal for working within the discipline of history is to change the game. I don’t mean that as a cliché. I actually desire to bring history to young people, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth in urban areas. While I will remain a dedicated researcher and teacher in the academy, I believe that I was also put on this earth to work with young people–and history is one way to do that. I think we should ask important questions about how to teach–historically– the next generation. First, what do our youth know, and how do we build on that knowledge? Second, how can we use contemporary popular culture (i.e., Hip Hop) as a mechanism to teach critical approaches to history? Lastly, how can we use history as a tool for liberation and aid in the decolonization of our minds, our hearts, our communities, and society? I think we need to ask questions like these and more carefully use history to teach the next generation so that they can understand themselves in relationship to the past, their present, and our collective future.

So, I hope to contribute to the discipline of history creative ways of teaching and learning for the purposes of decolonization, however that might play out. I don’t want history to remain in the ivory tower, but also move beyond it, and be relevant in the 21^st century.

Z: (anything you want to add!)

K: Thank you so much for interviewing me. Keep up the good work, friend!

Zoe: Cato. You and I met through mutual friends, and in the last few months you have been incredibly supportive as I finish my PhD. You have shared your thoughts on Philosophy as a discipline. Something you have said a few times is that Philosophy looks to Anthropology as, and I’m paraphrasing here, an example of a truly reflexive discipline. Which I find both funny and tragic, but it speaks to so many different issues within and between both disciplines! So, I guess I want to ask you some questions about your work as a Black feminist in Philosophy. My first question, to help situate you and your work, is “how did you get into Philosophy to begin with?”

Cato: How I got into Philosophy to begin with is a great place to start, since I, like many philosophers I know (and especially the minority ones), kind of stumbled into philosophy. For example, ten years ago, I never would have imagined that I would end up pursuing either a PhD or a career in Philosophy. However, before I tell you the story of my stumbling, it probably makes sense to say a bit about myself, and my research. I am as a queer, black, cis-gendered, feminist PhD Candidate in Philosophy who sometimes presents as visibly disabled (I occasionally walk with a cane). My dissertation research takes up the international adoption of a new treatment model of intersex conditions in 2006 which, among other things, controversially reclassified these conditions as “disorders of sex development” or DSDs. In it, I review the histories of medicine, intersex activism and feminist academic scholarship that constitute the conditions out of and against which the DSD treatment model emerged, provide an argument for why it failed to reduce the number of medically unnecessary genital normalizing surgeries performed on infants and children with intersex conditions (as many of those who endorsed it hoped it would) and go on to provide a Foucauldian analysis of the science, ethics and biopolitics underwriting it. So, my areas of specialization generally speaking of philosophy of gender and sexuality, philosophy of science (particularly philosophy of biology), bioethics and the work of Michel Foucault…but I also have additional competencies in philosophy of race and social-political philosophy.

Like I said, I never really planned on becoming a philosopher. I began my post-secondary education with the intention of going to medical school, and so my first undergraduate degree is an Honours Bachelor of Medical Sciences in Immunology and Microbiology from the University of Western Ontario. I had dreamed of going to medical school for as long as I can remember – ever since I was a very little kid – so I never really considered any alternative career paths, and further, made a lot of strategic decisions specifically to achieve that goal (like getting a part time job at a doctor’s office in high school and choosing UWO because I could do my undergrad through the Faculty of Medicine rather than the Faculty of Science, etc). In the second year of my undergrad I took a Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality course as an elective, which I picked because I needed one more essay credit, it fit pretty well within my lab schedule, and being an out queer student actively involved with the LGBT organization on campus, I figured I might find it personally interesting. The first topic we covered in the class was the medical management of intersex conditions, reading articles by feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, feminist sociologist Suzanne Kessler, and bioethicist Robert Crouch, along with excerpts from the History of Sexuality, Volume One by Michel Foucault. This was, really, the beginning of the end of my best-laid plans to go to medical school, though I can only see that now in retrospect.

At the time, my reaction was just like that of everyone else in the class: I was horrified by the practice of performing medically unnecessary surgeries to “normalize” the genitals of infants and children unable to consent – surgeries which often compromise genital sensation and leave individuals sterile. Further, I was disturbed by both the toxic heteronormativity that motivated these practices, and its continuation in the face of clinical acknowledgement that there was no research to support it. Beyond this, I was unsettled by the short excerpts of the History of Sexuality, Volume One that we read and the questions it raised for me about the history of medicine (which I realized I knew nothing about), as well as it’s place in society. It’s objectivity and beneficence. I’m sure it was only because of my plans to go into medicine, as well as my considerable experience working in a medical setting, that I was not able to shake the topic once the class moved on to the next item on the syllabus. Intersex stayed with me though the rest undergrad and continued to emerge as a theme throughout my studies (for example, I did my major research project for my Biochemistry of Genetic Disease course on the intersex condition Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia). I also began to take more philosophy courses – as many as I could really. When I was advised that the conditions of my BMSc program would not allow me to double major, I took a heavy course load, such that by the time I finished my degree in Microbiology and Immunology, I had enough philosophy credits to complete my BA in the area in one more year (which I did – spite is one of my major motivators in life and being told I can’t do something pretty much guarantees that I’m gonna figure out a way to do it).

The more engaged with philosophy I became, the more I researched intersex conditions and their management and, most importantly, the more Foucault I read, the more alienated I became from my dream of going to medical school. Frankly, it all started to creep me the fuck out. I had begun to reframe and ultimately reinterpret some of my past experiences with medicine both as a patient and as support staff in a medical setting. Most importantly, I had begun to reflect on the patients with intersex conditions who had come through the practice and the ways in which they and their families had been managed. Reading these experiences in a new way disturbed much of what I thought I understood about medicine and its role in society, that is, I was no longer sure that I really knew what medicine was about. So a good chunk of my becoming a philosopher has to do with the way in which philosophy rendered my becoming a physician impossible. However, another good chunk of my becoming a philosopher has to do with how lucky I was that when I first stumbled into philosophy, it was in a context where I encountered many philosophers who mentored, supported and encouraged me (most notably, Tracy Isaacs, Samantha Brennan, Helen Fielding and Carolyn McLeod). It was a direct result of their urging and encouragement that I pursued an MA in Philosophy at Western and later, a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Alberta, under the supervision of Dr. Cressida J. Heyes. Without their continued support, as well as that of Cressida’s (which cannot be overstated), I am certain I would not still be here in the academy today, months away from defending my dissertation.

Zoe: So, my next set of questions is about facing/dismantling/negotiating the whiteness and heteropatriarchy of the academy. We’ve talked about my own experiences as an Indigenous woman—a white passing one—working in anthropology, and some of the challenges of dismantling norms which concentrate the voice of authority in particularly bodies (which Sara Ahmed writes so incisively and powerfully about!). The first time I read about you, it was on a blog by our mutual friend Karen Campos Castillo, heart-beats.ca. In your interview with her, you mentioned that there are very few Black philosophers in Canada, and NONE in the UK (as of 2011). This really opened my eyes to the whiteness of the discipline, and also confirmed my own anecdotal/lived experiences of the whiteness of the Euro-Western academy more broadly. What advice do you have for POC and/or Indigenous scholars who are in these white spaces? How do non-white scholars dismantle these constructs while also contending with what Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt (2013) calls the ‘epistemic violence’ (29) of ‘(neo)colonial’ (30) institutions like the academy ?

So one of the things I love the most about decolonizing/shifting paradigms in the academy is how we can bring ourselves, as scholars, into our writing. To literally bring our bodies and experiences into spaces we haven’t traditionally been welcome in. How do you bring yourself into your writing? How do you embody your thinking in your life?

What advice do you have for other women of colour (WOC) who want to be philosophers? How do you envision creating spaces where there are more WOC in the discipline?

And something you’ve talked about are the physical realities of where it is safe to be a black woman in the academy. Ie: we are taught to be flexible, to go where the jobs are. We’re told that in this economy we have to be grateful for any and every job that comes up—whether it’s an adjunct/sessional position or a post-doc. But you talk about how this is a fallacy for you as a Black woman. You can’t move to any city. You can’t move to Baltimore and take a job in a place where Black bodies are targeted. How can we–as scholars working in neoliberal universities–challenge those narratives of us as a movable, flexible, interchangeable work force? How can we acknowledge that as WOC and/or Indigenous women, we can’t work in any city, that we need to be in places where we know we are physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually safe?

Cato: This is such a beautiful set of questions – Thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss these issues. I hadn’t realized quite how much I wanted to talk about these things until presented with the opportunity to do so.

Philosophy is indeed a very white and very male discipline, and one that I would argue has not really acknowledged or attempted to wrestle with its own heteronormativity or whiteness as a discipline in quite the way Anthropology has via the Reflexive Turn. So navigating the discipline from the kind of subject position I do can be complicated. I’d rather not lay out specific advice for POC and/or Indigenous scholars who are in these white spaces (and I want to explicitly include those in PhD programs here), because I’m not comfortable with being prescriptive about the right or wrong ways to engage with whiteness and heteropatriarchy in the academy. All I can do is speak from my position and share those things that have been the important for me in terms of making my life as a philosopher sustainable. As I do this, I’ll try to answer all of your questions, but feel free to come back to any point you’d like me to say more about.

I think one of the most important things for me has been recognizing that being an academic, and specifically, being a philosopher in an institutional setting, is actually just a job like any other. And as with any job, I could leave it and do something else – academic training tends to make us believe that we can’t really do anything else or find a place for ourselves outside of the academy where we might feel successful, but that’s simply not true. If you’re a POC and/or an Indigenous person with the determination and the capabilities to do a PhD in any discipline, then you have the determination and capabilities to be successful at a lot of things.  Whether or not I continue to work as a professional philosopher is the result of the type of personal (though contextually mediated) cost-benefit analysis that is familiar to all of us as subjects under capitalism. The culture of academia is such that we tend identify very strongly with our identities as academics, which makes complete sense to me – becoming an academic is time-consuming and necessarily involves a lot of sacrifices such that it can be fairly consuming of the self. Furthermore, as academics (and particularly as philosophers) our output is in a very literal sense the content of minds (plus some data, depending on your discipline). To publish a paper is literally to say, “So, here’s what I think about this thing, world! How about those of you who know about this topic the best publicly let me know what you think, and in as much detail as possible please!” I also think part of it has to do with the fact that the academy is a disciplinary institution and the Academic is a disciplinary subject like any other, but that’s totally my Foucault showing.

This was a really important realization for me because it allowed me to have a little distance from my work and my identity as an academic, and to be clear about what was necessary for me to make my pursuing this line of work in a potentially hostile environment sustainable (in the way I might with any other job). I think the tendency for academics to over identify as such can lead us to put up with forms of oppression or discrimination from “discursive violences” to micro-aggressions, or even just fail to recognize them as such, and thus to internalize rather than externalize them. Realizing professional philosophy is just another job allowed me to make that cost-benefit analysis an explicit part of my engagement with philosophy and forced me to be clear about what I needed to make my life as a philosopher one that was liveable. It also allowed me to distance myself from the institutionally constituted norms that define me as a professional philosopher (or at least, one to be) and to differentiate that from my personal engagement with or beliefs about philosophy. There are many ways to do philosophy and be a philosopher – what is required of me in an institutional context is just one of those ways. However, again, whether that one way is one that I’m willing to take on or stay in depends on other needs that I have had to explicitly define over time being met. And the truth is, many of those needs are constituted by the privilege I do not have as a Black, queer, cis-gendered feminist woman with a sometimes disability within the academy.

For example, I know that my working as a philosopher depends in part on my being in community with other scholars (like yourself) from a variety of disciplines, in ways that are supportive, honest, encouraging and inspiring. Philosophy can be a very solitary practice and I think that in line with my general tendency towards introversion, my initial response to experiences of hostility was to further isolate myself in a very “Keep your head down and power through” type way. However, I eventually realized that approach was simply untenable for me – not only am I happier, but I am far more productive when part of this kind of professional community and I needed to prioritize creating it if it was not readily available to me. I also know that my being in philosophy also depends in part on my doing things to actively change philosophy, or to challenge/resist the heteropatriarchy and whiteness of professional philosophy so that it does become more accessible to others like me – but again, in ways that are sustainable for me. For example, I take part in committees like the CPA’s equity committee and was lucky enough to work as a graduate assistant at wonderful summer school for minority undergrads in philosophy at Penn State a few summers ago, the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute . I think the most important thing for me in dismantling the constructs of these spaces is to talk about them and to draw attention to them, honestly, even if it makes people uncomfortable (through things like this for example). I know that the honesty of other minority philosophers (and academics general), has been really important for me in terms of figuring it how and in what specific ways I was/am willing to engage with the academy. For example, Anita Allen’s  honesty about her choice to leave a primary appointment in Philosophy for one in Law has played a major role in the way I have renegotiated/reframed my relationship with the academy over the course of my PhD (and without which, I don’t think I would have finished).

Of course, the terms according to which working in professional philosophy must constantly be renegotiated such that I hope it remains a life I consider to be liveable (and knowing people like you in the academy make me feel optimistic about this), but I also acknowledge that one day, the balance may tip. As you mentioned, for example, I did a “practice run” on the job market this past season, and in the process, was forced to define certain firm boundaries in terms of what kind of life as a philosopher was liveable for me, and where. There were at least three positions that I did not apply for because I didn’t think I would feel safe as a black woman living in those cities, particularly from police violence. I actually prepared an application package for a position in Cleveland that I never sent in following the shooting of 12 year old Tamir Rice a week prior to the closing date. The assumption that we should apply to every single job ad and be able to just go wherever the job is assumes that as individuals, all academics have a lot of privilege. The point of my practice run way to get feet wet at preparing an application package (though, of course, if I got something, amazing) but I think the most important thing I learned was that I am not willing or able to go anywhere. I undeniably have a lot of privilege in this world as an educated cis-gendered, mostly able-bodied woman, but I don’t have enough to just apply to any job. My fat Black and often visibly queer body means that not all spaces or cities are physically, emotionally or psychologically safe for me in the way they are the average philosopher (statistically speaking). Again, I think talking about these things, drawing attention to them honestly is the first step to undoing them. Once we recognize the concrete barriers facing POC and/or Indigenous scholars, then we can start addressing them and making work as academics sustainable, and thus possible, for others.

As a cis-gendered woman without a diagnosed intersex condition who writes primarily about intersex management, the effects my various identities and my experiences have on my writing are more indirect rather than explicit. Though I rarely discuss or reference these experiences, much of my thinking and writing about intersex is coloured by my own experiences as a subject of medicalization (as a fat Black woman, as a woman with ankles that require(d) surgical reconstruction), of working in health care, and of living with and among those with disabilities. For example, in addition to both of my parents and many other members of my family having a plethora of health and mobility issues, I lived in a co-operative housing complex in Toronto for much of my early life where 50% of the population was people with disabilities. These experiences definitely influence the way in which I think and write about pathology, disability and autonomy.

I have actually written a few things that are a little bit closer to my own experiences and look forward to doing more of that in the future. But I would actually say one of the most important ways in which I bring myself, and my body into the academy is as a teacher. I always try to inject some feminism and intersectionality into my syllabi for Philosophy courses are notorious for having syllabi featuring all white male authors. Further, I think just my being at the front of the room as a fat, black woman in such a white male discipline is important, though it can also be challenging and complicated.

—

hiy-hiy, Cato, for sharing your thoughts and for continuing to inspire me to voice my own.

A National Post story on Stewart’s dissertation explains that he originally submitted his dissertation in the Nisga’a language:

“He wrote his first draft in the Nisga’a language. That failed to impress at least one senior UBC professor, a powerful figure who would eventually have to sign off on the work, or all would be lost. Stewart was called on the professor’s carpet and told his work was not acceptable. He was asked to translate “every word” of his dissertation into English. “So I did that,” he recalls. “There was still no guarantee it would be approved.”

And approval was crucial, of course. Without it, Stewart couldn’t complete his doctorate in interdisciplinary studies, which he’d been pursuing since 2010. It was his second attempt at a PhD; Stewart says he “ran into similar problems” in the early 1990s at UBC, while working towards a doctorate. He gave up, and concentrated instead on his architectural practice.”

What is important to note is that Stewart’s ability to write his dissertation in his own language was prevented by Euro-Western academic conventions that reinforce English as one of the de facto languages of knowledge transmission in Canada (the other being French). However, not all Canadian universities are hostile to students working in their own Indigenous language. In 2009, PhD student Fred Metallic submitted his dissertation at York University in Toronto in Mi’kmaq.

How can we truly enact self-determination, pluralities, Indigenous legal orders within the academy if Indigenous languages, themselves an integral part of Indigenous laws and sovereignty, are deemed only worthy to study as objects or relics, not to employ for intellectual labour itself?

I, for one, am thrilled by Stewart’s choice to forego punctuation in response to the demands that he translate his dissertation to English.

The complex negotiation of simultaneous and often contradictory sameness and difference across legal orders, societies, nations, communities, disciplines, and histories drives my research of human-fish and colonial relations in Canada, and this negotiation of sameness and difference is encapsulated in the use of the word ‘we’. The State often tells Indigenous people in Canada that we are a ‘we’. It does this by asserting ‘we’ are all Canadian, so we are all one happy family of Canadian citizens loyal to the laws and principles of the Canadian State. But, paradoxically, when it suits it, the Canadian State does recognize difference (on its terms), and in so doing it frames all Indigenous peoples in Canada (through the state’s preferred moniker ‘Aboriginals’) as a contemptable ‘them’: one amorphous group of vaguely inter-related First Peoples it can treat with the same indifference and barely veiled disgust. (This produces the further problem of forcing upon Indigenous peoples a ‘we’ unasked for by any of us: the ‘we/them’ as The Other which situates the default body of authority and knowing as a white, non-Indigenous one). In Canada, it bears noting that the since the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples issued its report in 1996, the Canadian State claims to recognize (though often fails to honour) a ‘nation-to-nation’ relationship between itself and First Peoples. This speaks to the articulation, in this place at least, of Indigenous peoples as nations and/or societies with our own laws, histories, language and claims to land/territory. However, the actual mobilization of this nation-to-nation relationship is another matter entirely. All too often, ‘we’ as Indigenous peoples are denied this nationhood and framed instead as a social, economic, and legal  ‘problem’ the State is saddled with. We and Them as distancing tools to avoid acknowledging ongoing legal-governance duties across nations.

As of 2011, there are 1.4 million Indigenous peoples–First Nations, Inuit and Métis—across the entire mosaic of territories claimed by the Canadian State. Each community, nation, people enacts and enlivens their own rules of relating to one another, to delineating respectful relationships to the land, to the other-than-human constituents of their nations, to determining legal and accountable membership. To frame Indigenous people as simply the Other, collectively and paradoxically denoted by settler-colonial actors as both a ‘we’ and a ‘them’ to serve various aims of the State, is to conflate our unique and plural nationhood and peoplehood, to flatten our long-rooted legal-governance practices that are informed by the places each of us lives. At the same time, however, there is a collective understanding of the place- and temporally- specific experiences different Indigenous peoples have experienced, and continue to experience, as peoples colonized by the French and British Crowns and now by the Canadian State. If we have one uniting factor, it is in the experience of having our legal orders and self-determination denied by various Empires and Nation States. This is a complex sameness and difference that is negotiated each and every day. Dwayne Donald (2009) describes this negotiation as ‘ethical relationality’–the recognition of difference while also negotiating what it means to live accountably and ethically within a shared place shaped by complex (and I would argue painful) historical realities.

It matters, then, who asserts the ‘we’. Is it a nation or people themselves defining kinship and governance relations for themselves, or someone else imposing the ‘we’ upon them? I puzzle through this question quite often as I study the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the state in Canada, and as I study human-fish relations within Indigenous legal orders. The ‘we’ and the ‘them’ employed within research, policy and political discourses matters. It creates walls, sometimes permeable, often not. As Sara Ahmed argues, quite often the people doing the describing, the citing, are not those who belong to a particular group being described to begin with. Her idea of ‘white men as buildings’ (Ahmed 2014) speaks to the pervasiveness of white, male scholars being the default voice and hive-mind of academia. If we continue to use the same citation practices, which Ahmed calls a ‘reproductive technology’ (Ahmed 2013), then it is very much within a discipline of White Men as Buildings that we find ourselves committing anthropology. The statistics bear this out in Britain, where of 18,500 professors in the entire country, only 85 professors are black and only 17 are black women (Grove 2014). I have tried, but failed, to find data for how many Indigenous and/or POC [People of Colour] scholars there are in departments in British anthropology. But my personal experience within the discipline demonstrates that it is still a very white space (though thankfully there are POC and WOC [Women of Colour] working in the discipline in the UK), which is not surprising when we look at the work of Brodkin et al. (2011), who demonstrate the racialised realities of the practice of anthropology in the USA.

So, anthropology is itself an interesting locus of ‘we’ and ‘them’. Who is being referred to in discussing the ‘we’ of anthropology? Who is doing the anthropologizing, and who is being acted upon? Which bodies do you conjure up in your mind’s eye when you envision the discipline? Who are the scholars of note describing when they discuss the ontological, the political, the theoretical? How often do you encounter an Indigenous scholar on a conference panel about Indigenous issues? How often do anthropologists acknowledge Indigenous peoples as active intellectuals and thinkers rather than informants passing down static ‘Indigenous knowledge’ or ‘traditional knowledge’?** Dr. Val Napoleon has taught me to move away from ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ to Indigenous thinking and thinkers because the latter reinforces the active and present nature of the intellectual labour we perform as Indigenous peoples working in and across relationships to one another, to the land, and to the State and its institutions.

Holbraad et al. (2014) explain that to them, the politics of the ontological turn “means giving the ontological back to “the people,” not the people back to “the ontological.””. But what if ‘we’—the people out there that anthropology, broadly, sees itself describing–never gave away the ontological? As I said in my previous post, indigenous self-determination in my home territory of amiskwaciwâskahikan/pêhonan/Treaty Six pre-supposes the ontological. We never gave ‘it’ away because ‘we’ have always incorporated the other-than-human and the understanding that many nations operate within their own cosmopolitics into our relations across nations, legal orders and geographies. We have continued to assert our legal orders in the face of the Euro-Western legal-governance and ethics of the French, British and Canadian States. We had treaties with one another through which we negotiated our own relationships to place, people and stories, such as the nehiyaw-pwat. We never relinquished our self-determination, ontological or otherwise. We have continued to think, write, speak, move and act within our dynamic and living intellectual practices. We don’t need anyone to give that (‘the ontological’) back to us, because we’ve held it all along.

So what would anthropological discourses look like if the halls of the academy physically reflected the actual societies we belong to? In Canada, one cannot avoid the daily encounter with the self-determination of Indigenous peoples because we all live in Indigenous land. Every city in Canada is in Indigenous land. Every scholar lives in Indigenous land. Every University is in Indigenous land. Every department, therefore, rests within sentient and knowing lands that long precede the Euro-Western state and its institutions, including the Euro-Western academy. On the other hand, my experience in the UK that it is much easier to render conversations about Indigenous self-determination and Indigenous peoples into philosophical or theoretical language—distancing language– because the ‘we’ doing the talking does not necessarily incorporate the people being described. But in Canada, the unruly and fleshy bodies of Indigenous peoples, which Vanessa Watts (2013) argues are inextricably bound to the soil and to the land–like the Mouthy Michif writing this very piece–are present and actively resisting the ‘we/them’ anthropology has employed in the past. We as Indigenous peoples are in your halls. We are actively asserting our legal-governance and intellectual lives in dynamic ways. We are working across sameness and difference. We will demand that the academy be responsible for how it impacts Indigenous sovereignty, just as we ourselves are responsible to our nations, communities, peoples for how our work impacts self-determination. We will ask how on earth you can write about Indigenous self-determination without citing Indigenous thinkers. We will write with or without you. We, the non-dominant voices and bodies of the discipline, will keep discussing the things that matter to us, and anthropology must decide whether it will keep being ‘white public space’ (Brodkin et al. 2011) that reproduces ‘white men as buildings’ (Ahmed 2014), or whether it will embrace the vulnerability, and potential, that comes with radically dismantling the ongoing patriarchy and white supremacy of contemporary Euro-Western academia. Anthropology re-imagined is anthropology unbound from its current  Euro-Western institutions and logics.

Either way, ‘we’ as Indigenous peoples and those not currently reproduced by the citational practices of the discipline and/or the Euro-Western academy, will do many things, because we are here to stay. It’s up to anthropology, broadly, to decide if it’s going to join us.

*special thank you to my colleague Danielle Lorenz for reading the first draft of this piece and offering editorial input.

**I say without hesitation that the work of scholars like Julie Cruikshank demonstrates a praxis of what I call ‘thoughtful anthropology’ that teaches all of us so much about what an accountable, reciprocal anthropology can look like. There is a lot of very good work being done in the discipline.

Works Cited

Ahmed, S. (2013). Making Feminist Points. Accessed April 24, 2015. http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/

Ahmed, S. (2014). White Men. Accessed April 24, 2015. http://feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men/

Brodkin, K, Morgen, S. and J. Hutchinson. (2011). Anthropology as White Public Space? American Anthropologist 113(4): 545-556.

Donald, D. (2009). Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Metissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts. First Nations Perspectives 2(1): 1-24.

Grove, J. (2014). Black academics still experience racism on campus. Times Higher Education. Accessed May 16, 2015, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/black-scholars-still-experience-racism-on-campus/2012154.article

Holbraad, M., Pedersen, M. and E. Viveiros de Castro. (2014). The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions. Fieldsights – Theorizing the Contemporary. Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014. Accessed May 16, 2015, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/462-the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions

Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European Tour!). DIES: Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2(1) (2013): 20-34.

Since writing the piece I have returned to Canada, where I currently am living and writing within unceded Katzie First Nation territory along the Lower Pitt River, which snakes its way south from Pitt Lake towards from the mighty Fraser River in the province known by the profoundly settler-colonial name British Columbia. Within this territory, much like my home territory in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), live fish. Many fish. Specifically: sturgeon, salmon, trout and many others.

As a little girl, I grew up fishing in northern Alberta. I learned about the land, about water, about relationships between humans and the other-than-human from sitting in the wooden boats my Métis dad built by hand. We would cast for jackfish, perch, whitefish and walleye. I still relish the quiet of sitting on the water, casting a Len Thompson red devil spoon or a wriggler lure with a ‘plunk’ at the water’s surface. The inscrutable fish swimming below, determining on their own whether they will bite. My Dad remembers abandoned fishing boats, from bygone Depression-era attempts at Alberta commercial fisheries, sitting beached and bleached against the sandy lakeshore of mânitow sâkahikanihk (Lac St. Anne) in his childhood. He remembers his friend’s family setting lines for suckers along the banks of the North Saskatchewan River, just under the hulking High Level Bridge, in the 1950s/1960s. This landlocked province, famous globally for its bituminous oil, is also a fish place. And whether we, as Albertans, realize it or not, fish have been shaping and influencing many aspects of political, social and legal-governance lives here for millennia (McNeil 1983: 4-5). In fact, my own doctoral dissertation examines the ways that fish shaped and shape colonial engagement in the small Inuvialuit hamlet of Paulatuuq, Northwest Territories, Canada.

Fish are slippery. John Law and Marianne Lien (2013) remind us of this in their wonderful piece on salmon farming in Norway. My Inuvialuk friend Millie taught me that fish carry stories in their bones. These are not my stories to share, neither as an anthropologist nor as a Métis person fortunate enough to work within another Indigenous people’s territory.  However, what I learned from her was to seek out the stories that fish carry in my territory. Within those stories, too, are law (Napoleon and Friedland forthcoming). Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe scholar Vanessa Watts (2013: 23) reminds us that:

habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies from an Indigenous point of view; meaning that they have ethical structures, inter-species treaties and agreements, and further their ability to interpret, understand and implement. Non-human beings are active members of society.

 Legal scholar Val Napoleon (who is  a member of Saulteau First Nation (Treaty 8 Territory) and  is an adopted member of the Gitanyow (Gitksan) House of Luuxhon, Ganada (Frog) Clan) advocates for Indigenous peoples to engage with, and actively rebuild, our legal orders (Napoleon 2007; Napoleon and Friedland forthcoming). In a recent conversation, Val Napoleon reminded me that ‘law is a language’ and that ‘law is a verb’. According to Napoleon (2007:3), Indigenous legal orders are practiced through “law that is embedded in social, political, economic and spiritual institutions”. As Napoleon (2007:3) points out:

Indigenous peoples applied law to harvesting fish and game, the access of berries, the management of rivers, and the management of all other aspects of political, economic, and social life. Since our legal orders and law are entirely created within our cultures, it is difficult to see and understand law in other cultures.

In my own work, I employ the concepts of Indigenous legal orders (Borrows 2014; Napoleon 2007), Indigenous Place-Thought (Watts 2013) and ethical relationality (Donald 2009) to examine the ways that people govern themselves within territories populated by a myriad of human and non-human actors. These three concepts—Indigenous place-thought, ethical relationality and Indigenous legal orders— describe what it is to live, accountably, in the land. They also help me to consider what is to live and work, accountably, across legal orders and pluralities. As Watts (2013), Van Camp (2012), Borrows (2014) and so many other Indigenous thinkers and artists teach us: stories, bodies, memory, land, law and knowing are inextricably bound together. These Indigenous articulations of place-story (Donald 2009: 10) and Indigenous Place-Thought (Watts 2013) coincide with, and complement, the theories advanced by anthropologist David Anderson (2000) of ‘sentient ecology’ and Tim Ingold’s (1996: 121) notion of an ‘ontology of dwelling’ and so many other scholars writing about the inter-relation of land, animals, thinking, stories and legal-governance relationships.

The people, moments and presences I wish to cite, first and foremost, when discussing human-animal, human-environmental and cosmopolitical matters in my home territory are those I grew up with as an Indigenous person in the prairies. My first teachers–the fish, the water, the land, my family–remain my most powerful ones. Viveiros de Castro (2003) calls for anthropologists to strive ‘to create the conditions of the…ontological self-determination of  people’. This is an important principle for anthropology to engage. However, as an Indigenous scholar, I argue, too, that Indigenous self-determination, within the plurality of legal orders I am responsible to in Treaty Six territory, pre-supposes the ontological. Self-determination encompasses the myriad relationships between people, land and the laws that are generated from relationships between people and place. In North America, it is almost funny to imagine anthropology creating the conditions for self-determination considering the often negative connotations and legacies it carries for so many Indigenous peoples (see, for example, Audra Simpson’s work for a study of the negative implications anthropology can have on Indigenous self-determination.  In her research, she examines the experience of Kahnawake Mohawks asserting sovereignty vis-à-vis settler states (Simpson 2014)). In many ways, self-determination is possible in spite of the structures and processes of the academy. In fact,  scholar Sarah Hunt (2014:30) (who is a member of the Kwagiulth band of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation) argues (and I cite this piece frequently in my work now because it is so well articulated):

The potential for Indigenous ontologies to unsettle dominant ontologies can be easily neutralized as a triviality, a case study or a trinket, as powerful institutions work as self-legitimating systems that uphold broader dynamics of (neo)colonial power.

If Anthropology is to engage Indigenous legal orders and self-determination effectively, it must also seriously address the structural violences of the academy itself.  Following the work of Sara Ahmed (2013, 2014), one very direct way in which to dismantle the structural violences of our work is to tackle the citational practices of our disciplines. Who do we cite when discussing Indigenous legal orders? Who is sitting on the panels about these matters at our conferences? Who is vetting these discussions in our journals?

Through the duties people posses to one another, to sentient and knowing lands, to the water, to the air (or climate), to animals and other-than-human presences, we also currently encounter one another across colonial realities. I argue that we negotiate simultaneous and often contradictory ‘sameness and difference’ across these legal orders.  This can produce friction, particularly when trying to translate legal orders and embodied experiences within an academic system that presupposes the logics of Euro-Western law and ethics. However, through the plurality of legal orders that animate Turtle Island, I am accountable to you, to the land, to other Indigenous peoples, to the fish.

Since posting my critique of the ontological turn, I continue to puzzle through my role as an Indigenous person from Alberta complicit in ‘committing anthropology’ within another Indigenous people’s territory in northern Canada. Perhaps I move through these academic and ethical entanglements and meshworks (two concepts I borrow here from Ingold 2010) like a northern pike. Slippery. Trickster-y. On the move. Hungry.

What I continue to think about within my own work, both as a researcher but also as a political agent moving between Canada and the UK, are my duties to the Indigenous legal orders, and those who think them and rebuild them, that animate sovereign Indigenous territories and nations/societies throughout Turtle Island. And I firmly feel that in my own work, in order to commit to the ongoing decolonization of Indigenous-State relationships in Canada, requires that I unambiguously confront the legal-governance implications of my role as researcher, as Indigenous feminist, as family member, as student, peer, as critic, colleague, artist, daughter, sister, cousin, friend. It is not enough to simply write about self-determination—I have a duty as a Michif/Otipemisiwak/Métis person living in amiskwaciwâskahikan/pêhonan to embody, every day, my reciprocal legal-governance duties to human and other-than-human actors alike. To the land. To the water. To the fish. To the plurality of legal orders (Borrows 2014) and the people who think them into being across the entire continent. These are ongoing and nuanced living relationships that require constant tending to and will require constant tending for the rest of my life. But in that tenderness, reciprocity, and care are the conditions for an accountable and ethically robust anthropology that is attentive to what it means to embody an ‘ethical relationality’ (Donald 2009) across legal orders.

In the coming weeks as a guest blogger for Savage Minds, I will share with you the insights of Kyle Mays Wabinaw, Catherine Clune-Taylor and others as time allows. We will explore what it means to be critical, present and accountable within an academy that still struggles with reproducing disciplines like anthropology as ‘white public space’ (as per the work of Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen and Janice Hutchinson 2011). We will ask what it is to ‘be ethical’ within an academy that, for all intents and purposes, remains firmly planted within a very particular legal-governance and ethical paradigm.

—

Ahmed, S. (2013). Making Feminist Points. Accessed April 24, 2015. http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/

Ahmed, S. (2014). White Men. Accessed April 24, 2015. http://feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men/

Anderson, D. (2000). Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: the Number One Reindeer Brigade. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Borrows, J. (2014). Physical Philosophies: Freedom and Indigenous Peoples. Public talk, Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Summer Institute, Osoyoos: Canada.

Borrows, J. (2014b). John Borrows on indigenous legal traditions: ‘We need to explore how we can take that law and carve it in new and beautiful ways’. Accessed May 07, 2015: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/john-borrows-on-indigenous-legal-traditions-we-need-to-explore-how-we-can-take-that-law-and-carve-it-in-new-and-beautiful-ways/article21960774/

Brodkin, K, Morgen, S. and J. Hutchinson. (2011). Anthropology as White Public Space? American Anthropologist 113(4): 545-556.

Donald, D. (2009). Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Metissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts. First Nations Perspectives 2(1): 1-24.

Hunt, S. (2014). Ontologies of indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept. Cultural Geographies 21(1) (2014): 27-32.

Ingold, T. (1996). “Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment”. Pp. 117-155 in Redefining Nature: Ecology Culture and Domestication. Katsuyoshi Fukui and Roy Ellen, eds. Oxford: Berg.

Ingold, T. (2010). Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials. NCRM Working Paper. Realities / Morgan Centre, University of Manchester. (Unpublished)

Law, J and M. Lien. (2013). Slippery: Fieldnotes in empiricial ontology, Social Studies of Science, 43(3): 363-378.

McNeil, K. (1983). McNeil, Kent. “Indian Hunting, Fishing and Trapping Rights in the Prairie Provinces of Canada”. (Report). Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan Native Law Centre.

Napoleon, V. (2007). Thinking About Indigenous Legal Orders. Research Paper for the National Centre for First Nations Governance. Accessed via the internet April 14, 2015: http://fngovernance.org/ncfng_research/val_napoleon.pdf

Napoleon, V. and H. Friedland, (forthcoming). “The Inside Job: Engaging With Indigenous Legal Traditions Through Stories”. Tony Lucero & Dale Turner (Eds.), Oxford Handbook on Indigenous Peoples’ Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Simpson, Audra. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life ACross the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.

Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European Tour!). DIES: Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2(1) (2013): 20-34.

Van Camp, R. (2012). Godless But Loyal to Heaven. Winnipeg: Great Plains Publications.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2003). And (Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology, 7). Manchester: Manchester University Press

Tansi! or Tawnshi!

These are, respectively, the nehiyawewin and Michif greetings of my home territory.  I grew up in amiskwaciwâskahikan/pêhonan in Treaty Six territory in central Alberta, also known by the colonial name Edmonton. Michif and nehiyawewin are two of several Indigenous languages spoken in my hometown, which is the traditional territory of Cree, Blackfoot, Saulteaux, Dene, Nakoda and Métis peoples. I am finishing my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen and will begin a position at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada in July.

Over the next month, I am excited to share with the Savage Minds readership some insights into the work of Indigenous and decolonial scholars in North America. I will explore the intersections and divergences between discourses in Anthropology and those conversations and issues being addressed by Indigenous scholars across a number of disciplines, institutions and communities in Canada and the USA. I am very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with thoughtful, supportive and creative scholars both in Canada and through my time living in the UK.

I am very excited to share with you the brilliance of some people who have deeply shaped how I think about my role as a scholar, an anthropologist, and an Indigenous feminist and who continue to hold me accountable as a thinker and political actor with reciprocal duties to people and place across multiple continents.