Dialogues of meaning- making part 4: Letter to Nealob
Possibilities for being together, differently: Reflections on decolonial coalition-building
Dear Nealob,
We are co-working together again today at 10C, surrounded by the Out on the Shelf library books. I am at the small round table in the corner, and you are working beside me at a long table with our friend and SOPR colleague/collaborator, Naty Tremblay. You’re all sprawled out with your long scroll of paper and bag of art supplies, visually recording your notes as you work on/through your qualifying exam (QE).
It’s been a tough week for both of us. Over coffee this morning, we lamented about how the QE process has caused a dissonance between our values and our actions. You are immersed in conversations about radical care, mutual aid, and racialized queer anti-oppressive practices. I am immersed in conversations about decolonial praxis, relationality, and the ‘unsettling’ nature of change. But we are both feeling a bit hypocritical. At times, the volume of work is keeping us from enacting and embodying the practices of care and relationality we are reading and talking about. We can’t check in with people we love as often as we would like. We have to say ‘no’ to family dinners, hikes in the woods, and fun nights out with friends. Our bodies ache, creak, and groan from lack of movement and stress. Your QE outputs are due to your examining committee in three days (eek!), so you are feeling a lot of pressure.
While this part of the QE process is a struggle - intellectually, physically, emotionally, and relationally, I am writing this last letter to you in the spirit of both hope and friendship. This week, I’ve been reading my field on decolonial coalition-building and lessons on transforming Indigenous-settler relations. I have been seeing some elements of those readings showing up in our ‘dialogues of meaning-making’ practice. I’d like to share some of my reflections with you in the hopes that they might be relevant to your social movement work.
Naty sitting at a long table with Nealob’s beautiful visual notes spread out in front of them. Allison is at a small table in the background.
Nealob (left) and Allison (right) are holding up Nealob’s graphically recorded notes.
Why coalition-building?
To help shape my understanding of the possibilities for transforming Indigenous-settler relations, I have been engaging in conversations that grapple with questions about how to co-exist well across chasms of ontological and epistemic difference, and complex entanglements of power. To me, coalition-building is some of the most hopeful work there is. Davis et al. (2022) describe coalition as “a site of learning and transformation’ (pg. 340 citing Davis and Shpuniarsky, 2010), and this has certainly been true for me. I have experienced tremendous personal growth since I started my role as manager of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP) five years ago. In our work, we bring together First Nation, Métis, and settler leaders, practitioners, scholars, conservation practitioners, philanthropists, artists, among others - all committed to supporting the advancement of Indigenous-led conservation in what is colonially known as Canada. The shared interest between conservationists and Indigenous peoples in caring for and protecting more-than-human relations (e.g. lands, waters, plants, animals) provides fertile ground for creating contingent coalitions, and it has been incredible to watch the Indigenous-led conservation movement build momentum and grow over the past few years. In a forthcoming paper, my coauthors and I reflect on some of the strengths of the CRP and our coalition work. Through bringing together a wide range and diverse group of people in a partnership intended to seed and catalyze change, there is a sense that we have helped create a ‘new normal’ where Indigenous-led conservation is not something that is happening on the margins but is the future of conservation (Bishop et al. forthcoming). Many new relationships and collaborations have formed through the partnership’s work, creating support for communities and their place-based work; we have supported political mobilization; influenced national and provincial level policy-making; and crucially, have provided spaces for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit leaders/practitioners to learn from/with one another (Ibid.). I am so grateful to have been part of a process that brings people together across difference to envision and attempt various interventions into colonial systems and structures.
While hopeful, coalition work is also the hardest work I have ever done. Drawing on the work of Anna Rios- Rojas, Alarcón et al. (2020) remind us that coalition work requires us to embrace a “‘pedagogy and politics that breaks your heart’ in order to break up with power” (pg. xvii). This idea that we need to open ourselves up to heartbreak in order to bring about meaningful change resonates with my experience doing coalition work, and can be seen throughout the literature. As described by Kluttz (2020), “solidarity is messy: it is not fixed or settled or easy, but requires continuous rethinking, and acknowledgment and self-reflection on positionality, power, privilege, guilt and legacies of oppression” (Pg. 52). Being in coalition also requires humility, emotional discomfort, openness to contingency and change, vulnerability, and a commitment to decentering colonial recognition, and colonial forms of power (including whiteness) (Boudreau Morris, 2017; Davis et al. 2022). It requires learning to cultivate an attentiveness to people and Place by learning to listen iteratively, with care and humility, and without ever becoming too settled with one what is hearing (Beausoleil, 2022; Davis et al., 2022; Larsen & Johnson, 2017). Participants must be attentive to the process - because decolonization is a process as much as it is a goal - and aware not just of who we are in our relationships but how we are (Boudreau Morris, 2017; Stark, 2023). Even so, “coalition is a microcosm of colonial relationships,” and undoubtedly, mistakes will be made (Davis et al., 2022, pg. 620). We must, therefore, always remain vigilant for the ways in which “colonial power relations and assumptions are often reinscribed within alliance relationships” and be wary of “settler moves to innocence”, which can “recenter whiteness, resettle theory and entertains a settler future” (Ibid. pg. 620; Kluttz, 2020, pg. 10, citing Tuck and Yang, 2012).
I have been grappling with some of the risks and lessons learned from our coalition work with the CRP, alongside my collaborators. At times, we have overemphasized the education of settler conservationists, unintentionally creating space for both settler-moves-to-innocence and elite capture (Bishop et al., forthcoming; Tuck and Yang, 2012). The national scale has meant that, at times, we have flattened place-based differences, leading to a pan-Indigenous approach (Bishop et al.). Our reflections on these unintended consequences have left me questioning whether decolonial coalitions are possible beyond place-based scales, and if not, what alternatives are there for challenging the national structures of the settler-colonial project? One of the biggest lessons from the CRP and one of the most important themes arising from the literature is the question of how to engage one another without flattening difference and creating opportunities for some mutual understanding and collective action to end oppression.
Meeting at the threshold
The central question at the heart of all of the readings from my QE field on decolonial coalition building is how can we come to know each other across difference in ways that disrupt violence, when we are all differently located within oppressive power relations? The readings offer different frameworks, strategies, and possibilities. Kelly et al. (2023) offer a methodology they refer to as “choreographies of co-resistance” which “foregrounds the agentic desires of bodies to live relationships marked by non-interference and respect for difference through mapping how these relations might materialize if we attend closely to process, place, time, and moving bodies” (pg. 2 (citing Foster, 2011). Similarly calling for movement and non-interference, Larsen and Johnson (2017) write of the possibilities that emerge when people learn to listen and respond to the agency and call of Place to guide co-existence. They argue that by centering the Land and more-than-human relations of a place, we can learn to “walk with” one another on paths which “may run parallel, as when two parties act autonomously but in solidarity, or they may come to a ‘partial connection’ that is ‘neither singular nor plural, neither one nor many, a circuit of connections rather than joint parts’” (Ibid., pg. 41 citing Strathern 2004, 54; ). Drawing inspiration from Mignolo and Tlastanova, Larsen and Johnson (2017) also adopt ‘border thinking” which allows for "“thinking from the outside in” to help develop an ontological openness and guard against the “academic voice’s desire to appropriate other ontologies”(pg. 17-18). Alarcón et al. (2020) deploy Lugones concept of ‘world travelling’ as decolonial praxis - using love and friendship to “facilitate entry into each other’s worlds” (pg. xv).
What is common across all of these frameworks, is a need to create - and protect - a space in between. Beausoleil (2022), a settler-scholar living in Aotearoa (New Zeland), describes participating in a year-long training program on tikanga marae (Maori protocols of encounter). This protocol requires settler people to “gather as a people” before an encounter between hosts (Maori) and guests (settlers/ other visitors) can occur (Ibid., pg. 708). This requires people to “develop a sense of who they are as a collective, and why they have come. If this does not occur, the meeting cannot go further” and “the ability, desire, and experience of being unmarked as a social group stands at the heart of countless failures to meet in Indigenous-settler politics” (pg. 709).
“As we moved together toward the universe with love, our bodies also opened to being transformed by each other through solidarity that celebrates difference”
Being prepared to meet at the threshold is important, challenging, and serious work if we are to learn how to be together differently. Nealob, I can see how our collaborative work has helped us create a space between, where we have practiced meeting each other in a threshold. This afternoon, our friend Naty asked us whether we knew each other before we started the SOPR program. We shared that we did not - and we didn’t know each other well at all before we started this collaborative process together in January. Over time, we have developed a real friendship. We have learned about each other’s kin - friends, families, and partners. We’ve learned how to support each other through the many ups and downs of being a PhD student. We’ve laughed and I’ve cried. We have come to appreciate that while we are very different people who are very differently located, we have so much we can offer one another because of (not in spite of) that difference.
We are also drawing on different activist and intellectual traditions. Through sharing our work with one another, I am learning to see and respect where our paths run parallel, where they converge, and where they diverge. For example, I now notice references to mutual aid and care work in the conversations I am engaging in my QE fields. These ideas are present in Sarah Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa and Leanne Simpson’s (2023) dialogue about “intimate practice of care” as being an essential part of resurgence work (pg. 131), Diane Million’s writing about kinship and care with the more-than-human and how spirit resists enclosure in urban landscapes, and Hughes and Barlo’s (2020) methodological intervention on “yarning with land” which speaks of relational accountability as an ethics of care. I also see the contributions of queer and two-spirit peoples, and Indigenous feminisms throughout resurgent scholarship. The knowledge created and shared by these activists and scholars urges us to name cis-heteropatriarchy (Simpson, 2018) and “the gendered hierarchies that colonialism introduced and continues to maintain in many Indigenous contexts” (Arvin, 2019, pg. 339) as an essential power relation within settler-colonialism that must be dismantled.
Our projects are not the same. At the heart of my work is a commitment to the decolonial project as defined by Tuck and Yang (2012)—the rematriation of Indigenous Land and lifeways. But we can learn from, with, and alongside each other. I know that my thinking, scholarship, and decolonial praxis are stronger thanks to our friendship. I am grateful to Maynard and Simpson (2022), who provided a map for us to follow on our meaning and kinship-making practice. Nealob, thank you for co-creating this practice together. I am looking forward to seeing where we will travel - together and apart - during the next phase of our PhD journeys.
I’ll end our series of correspondence with a poem by Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv), is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk and mixed-settler ancestry. They live in their ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC. The poem is an example of world-building across difference. Jess is writing to bell hooks, expressing their gratitude for bell’s enduring wisdom and love.
Works Cited
Alarcón, W., Benfield, D.M., Fukushima, A.I., & Maese, M. (2020). Guest Editors' Introduction: "World"- Making and "World"-Travelling with Decolonial Feminisms and Women of Color. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 41(1), x-xxi. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/755336.
Arvin, M. (2019). Indigenous feminist notes on embodying alliance against settler colonialism. Meridians (Middletown, Conn.), 18(2), 335–357. https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-7775663.
Beausoleil, E. (2022). Calling in to cut back: Settlers learning to listen for a decolonial future. Ethnicities, 22(5), 705–720. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211062918.
Bishop, A., Roth, R., McGregor, D., Nitah, S. & Moola, F. (2023). [Forthcoming]. Catalyzing transformative change in the conservation sector: Lessons learned from a decolonial conservation partnership.
Boudreau Morris, K. (2017). Decolonizing solidarity: cultivating relationships of discomfort. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(4), 456–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241210.
Davis, L., Denis, J. S., Hiller, C., & Lavell-Harvard, D. (2022). Learning and unlearning: Settler engagements in long-term Indigenous–settler alliances in Canada. Ethnicities, 22(5), 619–641. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211063911.
Housty, J. (2023). Crushed Wild Mint. Nightwood Editions.
Hughes, M., & Barlo, S. (2021). Yarning With Country: An Indigenist Research Methodology. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(3–4), 353–363. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420918889.
Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa, S. & Simpson, L.B. (2023). In Stark, H. K., Craft, A., & Aikau, H. K. (Eds.). (2023). Indigenous resurgence in an age of reconciliation. University of Toronto Press.
Kelly, E., Rice, C., & Stonefish, M. (2023) Towards decolonial choreographies of co-resistance. Social Sciences, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12040204.
Kluttz. (2020). Unsettling allyship, unlearning and learning towards decolonising solidarity. Studies in the Education of Adults, 52(1), 49–66. https://doi.org/info:doi/.
Larsen, S. C. & Johnson, J. T. (2017). Being together in place: Indigenous coexistence in a more than human world. University of Minnesota Press.
Maynard, R. & Betasamosake Simpson, L. (2022). Rehearsals for Living. Penguin Random House Canada.
Million, D. (2023). Spirit as matter: Resurgence as rising and (re)creation as ethos. In Stark, H. K., Craft, A., & Aikau, H. K. (Eds.). Indigenous resurgence in an age of reconciliation. University of Toronto Press.
Simpson, B.S. (2018). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minesota Press.
Stark, H.K. (2023). Introduction: Generating a critical resurgence together. In Stark, H. K., Craft, A., & Aikau, H. K. (Eds.). Indigenous resurgence in an age of reconciliation. University of Toronto Press.
Tuck, E. & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), pp. 1-40.