Honoring Indigenous Voices
Decolonization and collective healing
“[150 or more years ago, William Apess, Pequot] talked about colonial violence as a cancer that would spread out of control and devour us all and I think in many ways that’s an illness that we are still suffering from, in our treatment of each other and in our treatment of the land and in the way we understand each other or don’t understand each other.”
This is a quote by Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) in an interview with J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli) discussing her book The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. It caught my attention as I was rereading Kauanui’s collection of interviews from her radio show compiled in a book called Speaking of Indigenous Politics; Conversations with Activists, Scholars and Tribal Leaders (2018).
I intended to include the book in a list of others that have transformed my understanding of colonization and historic & contemporary indigeneity in a celebration post for Indigenous Peoples’ Day… But as I revisited this and other books I had in mind, the depth and richness of their contents felt distinctly at odds with a summary/listicle format.
Also, coming back to their work has felt like reconnecting with beloved teachers — and I want to spend more time with them!
So this week, I’m shifting from the very personal perspective of healing I’ve been writing from. My intention is to, through Indigenous voices, focus on one of the most critical aspects of collective healing: decolonization.
Because whether we come from colonizers or the colonized or a mix of both (most of us), its effects live within each of us: “an illness that we are still suffering from.” This illness keeps us separated from ourselves, each other, the ecosystems we exist within.
Here’s a helpful definition written by Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato, who hosted the podcast Decolonize Everything:
“Decolonization is an active and ongoing process of dismantling white supremacy and all colonial institutions and ideologies that preserve and perpetuate domination over Indigenous and colonized peoples. Decolonization is resistance to the deeply seeded consciousness and practices of colonization past and present and the pursuit of liberation for land, humans and the more-than-human realm.”
Each day this week, I’ll share with you one particular Indigenous work or creator that has deeply influenced me and my perspective of colonization/decolonization and indigeneity. My hope is that these reflections and excerpts — along with the many links to additional resources — prompt you to dig deeper; if something you read resonates, if an idea is spurred, if you have a recommendation to add, please share it with this growing community of readers in a comment!
So let’s go back to where we started, with Speaking of Indigenous Politics by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), professor of Indigenous Studies at Princeton.
The powerful collection of interviews from Kauanui’s radio show, Indigenous Politics that ran from 2007-2013 on WESU (a station affiliated with Wesleyan University), offer a “platform for critical voices — highlighting Indigenous agency and resurgence — in their immediate context through a global approach to addressing the ongoing nature of settler-colonial domination and Indigenous resistance,” as she puts it.
Each of the 30 interviews included are So Rich, covering a wide range of issues like whiteness and indigeneity in Australia; Indigenous resistance to the U.S.-Mexico border wall; and ethnic cleansing in North America and Palestine.
What I especially love is that these are conversations between Indigenous peoples; it’s different than much of the mainstream content we read about native communities — which is filtered through a white/colonial lens and/or for a non-indigenous audience. As you follow the flow and tangents of the dialogue, you are brought further into these brilliant minds and human emotions, which gives even greater impact to the insights they share.
As Robert Warrior (Osage Nation) writes in the introduction:
“Regardless of whom in the Indigenous world you are talking to and where you are hoping to make an impact, the first thing you should do is take a good look around and figure out where you are. Whether or not that sounds simple or complicated, do yourself a favor and read these interviews for a great example of how to start from where you are.”
Below, a few excerpts from interviews that especially resonated.
In Kauanui’s conversation with Jessie Little Doe Baird, cofounder of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, they discuss her efforts to help reclaim Wôpanâak, one of 40 languages in the Algonquian family, as a spoken language after an absence of speakers that lasted six generations. (Here’s a recent interview with Little Doe Baird about the project.)
She’s been raising her daughter, Mae, to speak Wampanoag as a first language — one of the first Native-born speakers in roughly 150 years. Mae was four-years-old at the time of the interview and Little Doe Baird talks about how her daughter had started to ask her tough questions, looking for explanations, and how that pushes her own learning. Whether or not her daughter carries on the work as an adult, she says, “it’s one small thing that helps to welcome language home.”
Here’s a brief excerpt from their conversation:
Kauanui: You’ve mentioned that bringing back the language is the tribe’s sacred privilege and right.
Little Doe Baird: We talk about the privileges that we have, and in our teaching the privileges are only there if we keep the responsibility to those privileges … The language is our privilege because it helps us communicate with the rest of creation; but on the other hand, our responsibility to language is to use it, to keep it changing, because language has to change in order to be vital.
Here’s an excerpt from Kauanui’s conversation with Jean O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) who wrote Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England.
Kauanui: “Why the fixation on the so-called “last full-blooded Indian,” and why the denial that Indigenous people who were supposedly unmixed had descendants and that their racially mixed descendants didn’t count?”
O’Brien: … the idea of degeneration [eroding Indigenous identity based on a concept of diminishing “blood quantum”] is really central in making this whole myth of extinction work … it’s quite convenient for non-Indians to imagine that Indians are disappearing — after all, this is a colonial situation in which they’re claiming a landscape and they’re wanting to claim it as rightfully theirs.
… one drop of blood for an African American is a “pollution narrative.” If you can make a claim that a person possesses even one drop of African blood then they’re subjected to slavery depending on the moment in time, or racial discrimination. Whereas for Indian people, you have to demonstrate how many drops of blood you have. There’s this idea of “blood quantum” and qualifying for Indianness based on this idea of race, with the metaphor of blood coming through and making it work.”
I want to leave you with a couple more excerpts from Kauanui’s interview with Lisa Brooks, which I quoted at the top of this post:
Brooks: “There was this incredible confederation of Native nations … all the way from New York out into Illinois, probably, and south to Cherokee territory … At one time in American and Canadian and Native history, there was a real possibility that there would be an entire country that would be called the United Indian Nations that would consist of this confederation of Native nations.
… in the end the negotiations unfortunately collapsed. But it was probably two decades where Native leaders were working with each other and counseling with each other for months on end every summer, to figure out what to do in the wake of the American Revolution and how they were going to survive.
Kauanui: … none of what we see as the U.S. empire’s expansion was inevitable.
Brooks goes on to reference Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s theories of decolonization:
Brooks: Memory is a way for us to put ourselves back together … [I hoped that] the book could help serve as a tool for that process of rememberment. Because I don’t think any of us can heal, and I don’t think the land itself can heal, unless we do the really hard work … to confront the history of this place, to confront all of our ancestors rolled in it, and really, to confront the hard parts of history that too many of our ancestors worked too hard to forget.”
Thank you!