History of Native California by Humboldt PBLC featuring Dr. Cutcha Risling-Baldy (Hupa, Yurok, Karuk) Department Chair Native American Studies, Marc “Bubba” Riggins (Hupa, Yurok) Youth & Wellness Coordinator, Trinidad Rancheria, Marlené Dusek (Payómkawichum, Kumeeyay, Cupeño) Enviromental & Cultural Technician, Trinidad Rancheria, Ron Reed (Karuk) Ceremonial Leader and others.
Learn About Protecting
White Sage
Saging the World
Supporting Indigenous-led efforts to safeguard white sage
The viral trend of smudging is endangering white sage.
Metric tons of white sage (Salvia apiana) are being poached to supply an international demand. This plant is deeply rooted in the cultures and lifeways of the Indigenous communities of Southern California and northern Baja, the only region where white sage naturally occurs in the world. The devastating theft and the appropriated trend that it fuels stand in sharp contrast with the values and traditional practices of regional native communities.
Indigenous advocates express that white sage that has been irreverently ripped from the wild, sold on the black market, shipped across the planet, and burned without regard for Indigenous practices has no medicine. Native people have long fought for the protection and recognition of white sage. Rose Ramirez and Deborah Small, authors of the Ethnobotany Project, and white sage advocates say it’s time to Sage the World: we need to boycott wildcrafted sage products, grow native plants like white sage, and reorient perspectives of plants as ‘resources’ to ‘relationships.’
Decolonization is not a metaphor
Eve Tuck, State University of New York at New Paltz
K. Wayne Yang, University of California, San Diego
Abstract
Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, 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. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of Settler Privilege
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
Peggy McIntosh first popularized the concept of white privilege in her now-classic 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” The impact of her essay was due at least in part to its clarity and readability; it broke down into a list of easy to understand ideas why white people have unearned advantages in society based on their skin color. Not that it was necessarily easy for white people to accept that they are in fact “more equal” than others, but the essay opened up a conversation that has gained serious traction in our social discourse, especially now when racism is on full, unobstructed display in this Trumpian moment.
White privilege centers the concept of race, describing racism as systemic and hierarchical, often in binary terms of black and white, which has its limitations for other people of color. Racism is certainly not limited to African Americans; American Indian people have for centuries been targeted in countless ways that are fundamentally genocidal in nature. The single, irreducible element of the racism American Indians have been subject to is the acquisition of our lands, and this is what makes racism against American Indians different than all other forms of racism and discrimination. This is the core of a system we call settler colonialism.
Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex
The ally industrial complex has been established by activists whose careers depend on the “issues” they work to address. These nonprofit capitalists advance their careers off the struggles they ostensibly support. They often work in the guise of “grassroots” or “community-based” and are not necessarily tied to any organization. They build organizational or individual capacity and power, establishing themselves comfortably among the top ranks in their hierarchy of oppression as they strive to become the ally “champions” of the most oppressed. While the exploitation of solidarity and support is nothing new, the commodification and exploitation of allyship is a growing trend in the activism industry.
Anyone who concerns themselves with anti-oppression struggles and collective liberation has at some point either participated in workshops, read ‘zines, or been parts of deep discussions on how to be a “good” ally. You can now pay hundreds of dollars to go to esoteric institutes for an allyship certificate in anti-oppression. You can go through workshops and receive an allyship badge. In order to commodify struggle it must first be objectified. This is exhibited in how “issues” are “framed” & “branded.” Where struggle is commodity, allyship is currency.
Ally has also become an identity, disembodied from any real mutual understanding of support.
The term ally has been rendered ineffective and meaningless.
Accomplices not allies.
Braiding Sweetgrass
INDIGENOUS WISDOM, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE TEACHINGS OF PLANTS
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Our Sacred Waters
Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility
Charles Sepulveda, University of Utah
This essay evaluates the conditions of the desecrated Santa Ana River in southern California, historicizes its destruction, assesses what is being done to clean it up, and provides tradition as theory to offer an approach to a solution that re-centers a Native view of land. The essay provides a tribal specific, Acjachemen and Tongva, understanding of lands and waters in contradiction to the Western dynamic of submission central to the dual logic of heteropatriarchy and environmental dispossession. It also provides a historical analysis of the monjerio and traces the colonial logic of domesticating Native women. The Santa Ana River is the largest riparian ecosystem in southern California. The river has been domesticated and desecrated through channelizing and entombing sections in concrete. This essay theorizes that the Western understanding of nature separated from humans produced the heteropatriarchal system the Spanish brought with them to California. This structure was meant to naturalize patriarchy and have Indians submit to the nuclear family arrangement. These logics continue into the present, in contrast to Indigenous traditional ways of life that accepted plural partnerships, and various sexual orientations. It also attempted to disconnect California Mission Indians from their creation stories and the sacredness of water. Kuuyam, the Tongva word for guests, is offered as a decolonial possibility based on culture and tradition in which settler relations to land can be reformed and settler colonialism can eventually be abolished.
All My Relations
Podcast
Haslihail and Osiyo! Welcome to All My Relations, a podcast where we explore what it means to be a Native person in 2019. To be an Indigenous person is to be engaged in relationships—relationships to land and place, to a people, to non-human relatives, and to one another. All My Relations is a place to explore those relationships, and to think through Indigeneity in all its complexities.
On each episode hosts Matika Wilbur (Tulalip and Swinomish) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), delve into a different topic facing Native peoples today, bringing in guests from all over Indian Country to offer perspectives and stories.
(Re)membering ʻUpena of Intimacies
a Kanaka Maoli mo’olelo Beyond Queer Theory
Summary
As queer Indigenous theorists have begun to map the relationship between the policing of sexualities and gender with the theft of land and settler colonialism, the lack of theorization of Hawaiian sexuality, its transformation and oppression through multiple waves of settler and missionary influence, is a critical blind spot in contemporary Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholarship. Indigenous feminisms are importantly rooted in an intersectional analysis of the proliferation of heteropatriarchy, which marks the intimate relationship between patriarchy, homophobia, and settler colonialism. As such, focusing this project on an analysis of aikāne and mana wahine through Kanaka Maoli literature represents and important intervention into the great indigenous feminism/ Indigenous queer theory conversation. Through a close examination of Kanaka Maoli moʻolelo (Hawaiian literatures, histories and genealogies), this dissertation will bear witness to and amplify the memory of Maoli sexualities and the Maoli imagination, and also argue for their usefulness as tools for challenging and ultimately unseating the “white Settler logics” that continue to confine both Native studies and Native sexualities. By concentrating on the term “aikāne,” this project will also develop a foundation for Kanaka Maoli queer analysis and theory, and seek to add nuance to existing Indigenous queer theories.
In addition to the theoretical importance of integrating an analysis of Kanaka Maoli gender and sexuality within critiques of settler colonialism and the continued military occupation of Hawai’i, drawing upon these moʻolelo can also offer Kānaka Maoli the opportunity to begin to understand our unique history with regard to sexuality and desire. Debates over the past twenty years about marriage equality in Hawaiʻi have made the need for such research exceedingly apparent.[1] While many Kanaka Maoli Christians have declared that traditional Hawaiian values and same-sex love are incompatible,[2] a handful of Kanaka Maoli scholars have looked to the Hawaiian language archive to refute such homophobic claims (Kuwada 2013; “Ka Leʻa o ke Ola”). A detailed study of aikāne will augment the resources already gathered by these scholars.
In its subject, method, practice, and leo (voice), this project is conceived of as a decolonizing practice, joining the many other voices currently fighting to decolonize Kanaka Maoli moʻolelo and bodies. Since so many of the homophobic assertions that attempt to isolate our queer ʻohana (family, kinship) lack any historical mana (power, credibility, authority)—which is to say they cannot stand in the face of the overwhelming evidence found in our nineteenth and twentieth century nūpepa (Hawaiian language newspapers)—this dissertation must also continue the frustrating work of countering the enduring trend in Hawaiʻi and beyond that dismisses the need to consult Hawaiian language and other archival resources, while at the same time making flattening and ignorant claims about Hawaiian culture, values, and history.
“A Structure, Not an Event”:
Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui
ABSTRACT J. Kēhaulani Kauanui discusses the distinctive shifts toward examining Patrick Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism as ‘a structure, not an event.’ Kauanui argues that a substantive engagement with settler colonialism also demands a deep rethinking of the associated concept of indigeneity–distinct from race, ethnicity, culture, and nation(ality)–along with the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies.
I begin this essay1 by unpacking what I mean by “enduring indigeneity” in my title and what that means to an understanding of settler colonialism. Here I use it in two senses: first, that indigeneity itself is enduring—that the operative logic of settler colonialism may be to “eliminate the native,” as the late English scholar Patrick Wolfe brilliantly theorized, but that indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist; and second, that settler colonialism is a structure that endures indigeneity, as it holds out against it.
Wolfe’s essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”2 is often cited as the principal work representing the concept and theory of the settler colonial analytic. And although Wolfe insisted on making it clear time and again that he did not create the field of settler colonial studies—that Native scholars did—within the field of American Studies (as just one example), he tends to be most frequently cited as if he had. Indeed, this one article of his (although not his first writing on the subject, nor the last) also seems to be the most cited, perhaps because it offers so much in one piece by distinguishing settler colonialism from genocide, contrasting settler colonialism from franchise colonialism, and—through comparative work focused on Australia, Israel-Palestine, and the United States—showing how the logic of settler colonialism is premised on the elimination of indigenous peoples.