21 Indigenous Knowledges: Quotations
Decolonization is not a metaphor. “Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, nonwhite, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or ‘settler moves to innocence’, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (Tuck and Yang 2012).
Resisting extractivism in Canada. “Through fluid modes of resistance, communities across Canada are reshaping the governance of extractive industries. Ongoing approval of extractive projects, amidst uncertainty about consultation and consent process, has been met with strong resistance from communities and movements. In some cases, their efforts have led to delaying, altering and halting projects as well as to legislative victories, new legal precedents and evolving relationships between peoples, and between people and resources in Canada (Black et al., 2014; Gosine and Teelucksingh, 2008). These resistance efforts have been led largely by Indigenous people, sometimes with support from allies and environmental groups. People have set up temporary blockades and long-term protest camps, launched international boycotts, manually shut down pipelines, taken industry to court and taken to the street en masse to draw attention to injustice and to amplify the voices and demands of those resisting (EJAtlas, 2020). A watershed moment in recent history was the emergence of the Idle No More Movement in 2012 against the Canadian government’s dismantling of environmental protection laws and calling for respect of Indigenous rights and the protection of land, water, and sky. This movement sparked an unprecedented continent-wide network of urban and rural Indigenous people (K.N.N. Collective, 2014). In 2020, again a wide network of Indigenous communities and their allies mobilized to #ShutDownCanada, in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders resisting the Coastal Gas Link pipeline in BC in face of violent police repression. By blockading rail lines, port entrances, and ferry terminals, these coordinated resistance efforts brought economic activity to a halt, showing “rather forcefully the power that non-elites have to stop economic power in its tracks” (Shantz, 2020, n.p.). We see here the vast networks of frontline struggles joining forces, centring Indigenous struggles, and coalescing around transformative goals such as land restitution (#LandBack) and Indigenous self-determination (Pasternak et al., 2019)” (Gobby et al. 2022).
Complicated relationships with environmentalism. “Many historians trace the genealogy of the modern environmental movement to the ideals of mid-nineteenth-century naturalists and the creation of the national park system, and the preservation movement that started it. Born from the Manifest Destiny ideologies of western expansion, the preservation movement was deeply influenced by a national fixation on the imagined pre-Columbian pristine American wilderness and the social Darwinist values of white superiority. As this chapter reveals, those legacies carried forth into twentieth-century environmental organizing. The result was a contentious— and sometimes openly antagonistic—relationship between modern environmentalists and American Indians, making the attainment of environmental justice for Native people more difficult” (Gilio-Whitaker 2019).
Political boundaries. “What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold?” (Kimmerer 2020).
Submerged lifeworlds. “[…] I seek new approaches by analyzing submerged and emergent perspectives within the extractive zone, or the potential for forms of life that cannot be easily reduced, divided, or representationally conquered or evacuated. […] My objective is to decolonize the Anthropocene by cataloguing life otherwise, or the emergent and heterogeneous forms of living that are not about destruction or mere survival within the extractive zone, but about the creation of emergent alternatives. Unlike these doomsday approaches that play with destruction scenarios on the scale of the planetary, I study at the level of submerged life worlds within Indigenous territories, while pointing to African-descendent territories and ontologies, modes of living that, even if not often perceivable, exist alongside extractive capitalism. For the spaces, movements, artwork, and intellectual and activist genealogies I study, the paradigm of “no future” has already taken place and we are now on the other side of colonial catastrophe” (Gómez-Barris 2017).
Fire. “In his thirty-two-minute independent film Mencer: Ni Pewma (2011), Mapuche filmmaker Francisco Huichaqueo draws attention to the current dystopic landscape of the southern territories in Chile. […] The collective act of lighting fire to the land becomes the supreme example of communal sacrifice, and, to borrow Richard’s phrase, its own ‘ritual exorcism’ of settler violence. Invoking the nightmare (or ñi pewma, bad dream) as a descent into colonial and neocolonial hell, Huichaqueo’s visual language experiments with the dystopic surreal as a way out of the trap of realist representation” (Gómez-Barris 2017).
Bureaucratic Orientalism. “[…] my main thesis is that it takes modern means to become traditional, to be indigenous. A form of ‘bureaucratic Orientalism’ — to borrow Edward Said’s term (Said, 1978) — has been devised, constructing and reaffirming the Other through the minutiae of administrative procedures and contemporary representational processes” (Hirtz 2003).
A concept in the world. “In sharp contrast to the increasingly cautious academic approach to indigeneity, however, the concept has traveled, been transformed, and enthusiastically deployed the world over” (Dove 2006).
Dismantling the Indigenous vs. Western knowledge binary. “Certainly, what is today known and classified as indigenous knowledge has been in intimate interaction with western knowledge since at least the fifteenth century. In the face of evidence that suggests contact, variation, transformation, exchange, communication, and learning over the last several centuries, it is difficult to adhere to a view of indigenous and western forms of knowledge being untouched by each other” (Agrawal 1995).
