#indigeniety

#6. The Aeta tribe of Luzon, 🇵🇭

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

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

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

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

Check it out,

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

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