Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics

L21(b) - Indigenous Resistance, Decolonization and Building Alliances

Date: Jun 5 | Time: 03:30pm to 05:00pm | Location:

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Emily Grafton (University of Regina)

“Building Partnerships and Trust: Labour–Management–Inuit Relations, Unionization, and the Goals of Reconciliation”: Gabrielle Slowey (York University), Collin Xia (York University)
Abstract: This project asks: what happens when hiring preferences and training obligations contained in an Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement (IIBA) are incorporated into a collective agreement? How can a trade union work collaboratively with a corporation to maximize hiring and training opportunities for Inuit workers? How does the inclusion of a trade union help forward the agenda of Inuit workers, and how does it help bring the objectives of the IIBA into focus? To answer these questions, this paper/presentation will reflect on a one-day event hosted in Morrisburg, ON that brought together scholars, union leaders, mining company executives, Inuit members represented by IUOE Local 793, and land claims organizations (e.g. Nunavut Tungavik Inc and Qikitani Inuit Association). Together, this paper will examine and explore ways in which a trade union can work collaboratively with a corporation to advance reconciliation and maximize hiring and training opportunities for Inuit workers. This project responds directly to TRC call to action 92, in which the corporate sector of Canada is asked to adopt the “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a reconciliation framework and to apply its principles, norms, and standards to corporate policy and core operational activities involving Indigenous peoples and their lands and resources” (TRC 2015). The call to action recommends and identifies activities that include relationship-building, increasing access to jobs and training and education for management and staff as key elements.

Decolonising statelessness: Indigenous refusal of Canadian citizenship: Jocelyn Kane (University of Ottawa), Noémie Boivin (Université de Sherbrooke)
Abstract: Indigenous Individuals and communities across Canada are refusing Canadian citizenship through a variety of strategies including refusing Canadian passports and not registering the births of children. Since nationality is considered to be a good that protects against a variety of material and ontological harms including the risk of statelessness, this paper asks what are the implications of refusing citizenship for understanding statelessness in political terms? Within a decolonial framework, we trace the history of citizenship in Canada as a mechanism used to expand settler colonialism and exclude Indigenous nationhood. Learning from two specific Indigenous communities that refuse Canadian citizenship, parents of Freedom Babies and members of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, we highlight that refusal of citizenship is an emancipatory act that aims to materially disengage from colonial state injustice. We then argue that just as state citizenship for Indigenous peoples cannot be considered an absolute good, statelessness for communities that refuse citizenship cannot be considered an absolute harm. In doing so we question the modern colonial view that statelessness is always a condition of vulnerability which ought to be rectified by the granting of nationality, and reconsider statelessness in decolonised terms, that is, in ways that take seriously alternative forms of political membership and the active role that the "voluntarily stateless" play in refusing oppression and subordination.

Decolonizing Methodology in Wshkiigmong Dibaajmownan/Curve Lake Storytelling: Nadine Changfoot (Trent University)
Abstract: This paper discusses the decolonizing processes pursued, including affective generative unlearning/learning (Carla Rice and Susan Dion et al.), in settler-Indigenous research relationships-partnerships in our research-creation project Wshkiigmong Dibaajmownan/Curve Lake Storytelling. Short multimedia documentaries were directed by diverse Nishnaabeg with the support of diverse artist-facilitator-researchers from Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice. Committed to enacting decolonizing (Eve Tuck (Unangax̂), and Wayne Yang) and cultivating relationships-partnerships with Nishnaabeg based in respect and reciprocity (Margaret Kovach, Sakewew p’simiskwew) and relational accountability (Shawn Wilson, Opaskwayak Cree), the research brought Curve Lake members into a shared, intimate, and safe studio space over four days. The documentaries reveal: 1) the violence of colonization; 2) that storytellers proudly share complex, mixed Nishnaabeg-settler ancestry; and 3) they are diversely reclaiming Nishnaabeg identities through language and ceremony. In continued partnership with Curve Lake members in knowledge dissemination we are learning the importance of “decolonizing curation.” This involves guiding settler audiences into reciprocal relationship with Curve Lake members to disrupt settler power dynamics that impose time limits and hierarchies, for example, of settler dominance and tokenization. Generative tensions and processes in recognizing and unlearning settler colonial power relations arise within these partnerships that move and unsettle (Paulette Regan) to create possibilities. Assumptions around settler colonial being/becoming and knowing (i.e., onto-epistemology) are surfaced and challenged to ethically orient to decolonizing reflexive practices and enactments. Onto-epistemological processes comprising embodied relationalities (who is in the room matters) are needed, we conclude, for deeper understanding of ongoing meaningful relationship/partnership and Reconciliation.