“If you don’t want us there, you don’t get us”: A Statement on Indigenous Visibility and Reconciliation

“Diversity is having a seat at the table. Decolonization is breaking the table apart to make a sweat lodge fire and bringing everyone in.”

—Lyla June

As we write this, it’s June. We are both feeling the pressure of trying to have a real break while managing our running tasks in academia and our homes. Andrea is annoyed because she wants to be in her garden and bathing suit. Every time we meet, her children jump on screen to beg for attention or chat with an aunty. Cindy is frustrated because she needs quiet time and space to process grief at the loss of her mother a handful of weeks ago. And it would be great to chat with her friend Andrea and her girls without talking about work. We need a break to tend to our own and take care of each other.

We resent this essay and the need for it. But we’re doing it anyway because it needs to be said. As Indigenous women in our universities and professions, we’ve witnessed our elders take on this work. It’s our responsibility now. We know what it’s like to be one of the few to be called upon—to be trusted to do the work.

This essay began out of the American Indian Caucus (AIC1) being asked, again and again, to guide settlers through how to make amends and how to make Indigenous space in academia. Specifically, we decided to use the prompts in the Special Issue to publicly respond to and engage with Andrea Olinger’s request for how to make amends after the 2021 Watson Conference. To summarize, Andrea R-M was invited to participate on a featured roundtable on decolonial practice in institutional spaces. She was aware that settler scholars would also be on the roundtable. Throughout the roundtable, each settler scholar admitted their lack of experience, expertise, and that they should not be on the roundtable. Due to the speaker order, the Indigenous scholars presented first and the settlers closed out the session ultimately providing settlers with the last word on the topic. Both Andrea and the other American Indian caucus members present experienced frustration and anger due to the settler framework and privilege inherent to the roundtable design.

Andrea and the three other Indigenous-identified2 presenters were the only Indigenous presenters for the entire conference thus further reflecting practices of tokenism and exclusion. Andrea and a few other AIC members reached out to Andrea Olinger to share their frustrations and explain why this was inappropriate and harmful. Andrea Olinger agreed that she had made a number of mistakes and issued a formal apology and offered action items for better accountability and to make amends. Andrea R-M reached out to the AIC on how to best respond to Andrea Olinger’s apology and move forward given this harm. In response, AIC members offered their feedback on how to move forward and shared their own stories of harmful experiences at Watson and other conferences.

Even though it hurt, it pissed us off, and it drained us instead of energizing us in the way that conferences are supposed to. This isn’t just about the Watson Conference or about Andrea Olinger. Both Andreas have been in ongoing discussion and Andrea Olinger is doing her own work on how to address these mistakes. Instead, we use this story as a form of truth-telling regarding the lived experiences of tribal nations people in academia for reconciliation. We use this story as a form of accountability and to mark it as an important moment in our profession. Where white settlers may want to forget this story—we refuse. Instead, we offer it as a teaching.

To clarify our opening, we don’t resent this essay. We resent that to make Indigenous space with a bunch of well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning folx is to brace ourselves for an act of settler colonial violence and white nonsense. Whether we are trying to do our own work and just need some damn permit approval, are staging institutional interventions, or invested in long-term collaboration, our everyday work feels like one meeting to get the task done and three meetings to educate settlers on Indigenous beliefs, practices, and communities. Or, we learn that people are trying to do this work on their own in the name of not putting more emotional labor on BIPOC and then they’ve gone and pissed off the elder they are working with or didn’t practice the right protocols for consultation and input and someone—whether it’s an Indigenous person or not, has reached out to us to come and fix it. Even aunties don’t got time for that shit.

What follows are a series of statements, practices, and observations on how we want to move forward in regard to working or not working with settlers in our institutions and professions. 

When Cindy and Andrea planned this piece, we imagined an open letter to the field. At times, we write to white settlers, especially as we engage in pretty direct critique and examples of harm. At times, we write to settlers of color—those who we have worked in coalition with and have hopes to engage in sustained relationships regarding shared efforts of truth, reconciliation, justice, and liberation. As we write, Andrea and Cindy invoke the viral video where two Indigenous aunties, from First Nations territory, call out white Canadian journalists for their inappropriate comments to Indigenous youth. Those aunties grab the mic and speak their truth. Andrea and Cindy imagine a version of that moment for our Indigenous kin: past, present, and future. Our goal is to speak the truth that we have spoken to each other or heard from other kin. Our goal is to state some much needed boundaries in hopes to move forward in less violent, more affirming, and more sustainable collaborations with Rhetoric and Composition.

Breaking the Table

Can You See Us? We Can See You.

In 2011, Kathleen Yancey, former CCCs editor, created a special issue on Indigenous and ethnic rhetorics. In the introduction that frames the issue, she titled it “Beyond Blue Eyes.” While Yancey does not specifically address phenotype, this title alongside an issue on Indigenous and ethnic rhetorics contributes to a problematic understanding of how our profession “looks for” or identifies Indigeneity (Arola 2017). Andrea still remembers how this framing caused immense amounts of pain and trauma to Indigenous scholars in Rhet/Comp who thought that this special issue would be an opportunity to finally represent the contributions and brilliance of Indigenous scholars.

We want to make clear that Indigeneity, although marked so in the federal census, is not a race. We are sovereign nations. Our identities are not marked by physical characteristics, but by how we engage in our Indigenous communities. We are accustomed to hearing how people discover their Indigeneity through ancestry.com. But we want you to know that Indigeneity is not about DNA so much as it is about doing the work of Indigenous belonging. Cindy is a blue-eyed “aunty,” and she also serves the Alabama Indigenous Coalition and its member communities, the Choctaw Nation, her own family relations and traditions, and the 4Cs AIC. Andrea is a citizen of the Chippewa of Thames First Nation, Chaldean and Lebanese, and advocates for educational sovereignty for every Nish and urban, Indigenous person within West Michigan, especially the young people who call her “aunty.” Cindy and Andrea, and the AIC, are doing on-the-ground work to defend land, protect water, preserve language, traditions and practices, confront colonialism, and enact survivance. This is how we and our relations know Indigeneity.

When thinking about Indigenous representation, one must consider the ongoing and intentional settler propaganda to narrate us into the past and project onto us particular phenotypes. Film does this, books do this, and news media does this; we call in our colleagues that they not continue this practice.

While we write this, we witness tribal nations across Turtle Island demanding truth from religious organizations regarding their participation in boarding schools. We witness the numbers increasing as more mass graves of our ancestors’ remains are found.  Every time we return to this draft, the count increases: 215, 500, 715, and now over 1000. We know it will be more. We witness our relatives grapple with this news and how the US responds. We carry real and ongoing pain about our ancestry—our connections to nations. There is ongoing settler and lateral violence around expectations of phenotype and enrollment. Even today there are continued  efforts to remove what little rights and access we have left to our sacred lands and places, to sever the connections between us and our relations. There are reasons—good reasons—why many of our ancestors refused to sign enrollment papers, changed their names, or hid away from efforts to catalog and remove them. We honor and recognize those stories. But, those are stories many of us will never tell you. We reject the settler and lateral violence demanding proof of identity. Instead, we listen to our elders and ancestors who have always had practices on how to understand belonging.

Addressing Anti-Blackness and All Our Relations

To make Indigenous space is to tie our survival to Black liberation and practice All Our Relations—to reject anti-blackness, homophobia and transphobia, colorism, xenophobia, or ableism. We begin here because when we demand a space at the table, we’re confronted by settlers making a choice between us and kin from a historically-oppressed community. This often occurs after we’ve been neglected/forgotten to be included in the first place. We don’t want to be at any table that chooses us over our kin. We don’t want to be at any table where we’ve been forgotten and then added on later. We unequivocally reject those beliefs and practices. While we demand recognition of our existence, that is not enough. We expect a consistent effort to find additional ways to determine the seats at a table that makes space for us all. Or, don’t bother inviting us.

We Are Not the NDNs You Had in Mind.

To be a good Indigenous scholar in higher education is to devote our research, teaching, and service to educate white people. It is to put our bodies on the altar of DEI in the name of saving settlers, hoping they will save us at the same time.

It is to create scholarship that feels like an inclusion and equity training unit in a first-year writing course while using Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” as the framework. It is to navigate your western knowledge systems that “identify,” count, and categorize in an effort to fix knowledge in the euro-centric tradition of objectivity when we know knowledge is negotiated between people within a context of relations and collective identity. It is to stand by and witness settler scholars appropriate and use Indigenous frameworks and paradigms without citing us. It is to write your land acknowledgement and allow you to speak it without credit, compensation, or accountability. It is to take on every service task and to believe administrators when they say that it is an “opportunity.” It is to believe in good faith that our work will be used for justice. It is to use our long term community relationships as collateral—as points of consumption for the university to extract from in the name of diversity, inclusion, and equity.

We Are Not Those Good Native Scholars.

While cultural rhetorics is a good space for us, we are written out of mainstream conversations of Rhet/Comp—like we are niche. This belief around being niche—around being trendy—is a form of settler colonialism that, like all trendy/niche scholarship, assumes that we will go away, eventually. It virtually assures we will be written out of the field as this kind of exclusion only mirrors the historic practices of settler colonialism with its intention to make us go away. We ask you not write us out or write over us because of that white supremacist narrative that says other experiences are niche and DEI is trendy.

Contrary to popular culture’s tales of dying peoples, we will never go away. We choose to write for other Indigenous people—for all our relations. We make an intentional decision to not be read or consumed or allowed to be translated in a particular way.

We’ve reviewed essays, listened to conference presentations, and been expected to engage with scholarship where the framework is settler colonial at least and anti-Indigenous as the baseline. We are expected to dedicate our scholarship to fill in the gaps of white settler knowledges. We are expected to come to you if we want to participate and only if we are packaged in specific, digestible ways. We are not for consumption. We are not your good Indian maiden.

We Don’t Need You the Way You Need Us.

Before we begin to discuss collaborative relationships, we need to make something clear. One belief with diversity, inclusion, and equity work is the idea of raising up and holding space for the voices of the historically excluded. Similar to how white activists and organizers are rewarded or awarded through coming to terms with their white privilege/fragility, there are similar workings within academia around collaborating with BIPOC scholars as a form of raising us up, especially junior scholars and graduate students, to a particular level of visibility.

It’s often framed as the BIPOC has the expertise and the white, often senior scholar, has the standing, social capital, or awareness of how to write for academic audiences and will use this publication opportunity as a form of mentorship. But this relationship is not pure. It provides credibility to that white scholar—that white scholar is an ally and should be upheld as such. In some ways, it signals that the BIPOC scholar needs that elevation for legitimacy. But we would not need this elevation if our work was not thought of as “niche.”

There is emotional labor, pain, and risk in those kinds of collaborations for us and our kin. What are the risks for settler scholars to collaborate with us? What do they give up in terms of their power, privilege, or control? Like settler nativism and moves to innocence, these forms of knowledge production are a land grab.  It’s conquest over and territorializing of Indigenous knowledges and brilliance.

Constructing the Teaching Lodge

We invite you into the teaching lodge. Bring your medicines. Wear your regalia. Miigwetch and Yakoke for bearing witness to us with hammers and bats breaking your shit. Kin, we are ready to build with you—if you are ready to build with us.

We are running on an Indigenous concept of time. But that doesn’t always simply mean the stereotypical lateness associated with our time by white settlers whose rigid sense of time is designed to mark a particular notion of work that centers production. For us, NDN time includes an intentionality of being deliberate, of making sure everyone who needs to be there, who needs to participate, has the access and opportunity to show up and do so. NDN time means we will get to yours when we are finished with ours.

We practice governance through consensus, whether it’s within the American Indian Caucus or through community relationships. When it’s time to make a decision, we take the time to ask and consult our elders, make sure our youth and youngsters have input and are cared for, and think about the long-term and short-term impact. If we make a decision, we talk about the labor of who will tend to that impact of the decision after. Everyone has an opportunity to contribute. Can you imagine what that looks like on a listserv or in a university committee discussing Indigenous student retention?

Can you—will you practice an Indigenous approach to time and relationality with us? This would mean slowing down or asking us first in collective, cross-coalitional efforts to give us the opportunity to practice governance through consensus. It takes time to reject the efficiencies and orderliness of a settler time table designed to center productivity instead of relationships. We’ve already practiced this with Caucuses when there has been a need for joint-statements. We are making a broader request to white settlers across professional and institutional spaces. We hope you will wait for us.

Bringing Our Relatives into Academic Spaces

A few years ago, Christi Belcourt took a photo of piles of paperwork she had to sign in order to be paid for a university speaking gig. We need to recognize the institutional expectations and hoops we have normalized, like reimbursement for services, piles of paperwork, and access to the internet and computers, are not normalized within Indigenous communities. If you want to collaborate and work with Indigenous people—you need to be willing to go the extra step of reducing the barriers and time to get paid or access to the event. These are not perceived as opportunities for non-academics in the way that they are for us.

Working in a Good Way

If you are asking the question, “Do we have an Indigenous voice here?” It is already too late. To be inclusive is not about making sure our voices are included, but taking the time to form ongoing, right relations from the beginning. It means we should be building with you—not being asked inside after the framework is created.

Earlier, we mentioned that we refuse to work at tables that participate in violences against our kin—that make decisions to choose one group over another to represent the historically excluded voices. Are you ready to join us in that decision? We ask that you recognize the anti-Indigeneity and settler innocence in your communities. We ask that you consider your own complicity in settler colonialism even when you identify from a systematically oppressed background.

All Our Relations

We ask our kin to consider taking on the same practice. There is also real anti-Indigeneity in your communities, and we ask for our relatives to reflect and address that as well. Whiteness is a zero sum game that requires us to accept a false reality that there is only so much merit to go around, and we must wrestle with our kin for the right to be validated in the meritocracy. But y’all already know meritocracy as a concept is inherited from settler capitalism, a system that pits us against each other and divides and distracts us rather than honoring our connections and kinship. Rather than lifting each other up. Rather than providing the space and time to engage our own cultural practices in our own time.

The Next Seven Generations

We invite you to join us in not being the “good” scholars higher education wants us to be. Let’s be the kinds of scholars who can and do return back to our communities. The ones who create knowledge from the brilliance and intellect of our communities. Let’s be the ones who tell stories. Let’s be the ones who refuse an intellectual relationship with Greco-Roman knowledges as the referent for our scholarly praxis. Let’s stop fighting each other over a small amount of resources or honors dedicated to us while white settlers enjoy the benefits of stolen bodies and stolen land. Let’s together make and imagine new possibilities. In these last moments, we remind you, that we’ve always, already been in coalition with you, whether it’s the historically erased cultural rhetorics, critical race theory, Queer and Trans Studies, and Disability Justice movements, Indigenous people are crucial members of these communities too, that one identity does not contradict another. We are here to maintain and sustain those spaces with you. Are you ready to be in relation with us?

Endnotes

  1. The American Indian Caucus (AIC) meets every year at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs), supporting Native American causes in the field, and providing members with support and community. return
  2. Throughout this essay we use a variety of language to describe our identities as Ojibwe and Choctaw women. To be clear, it is inappropriate for settlers to use “Indians” or “NDNs” to describe Indigenous people. Like good common practice, one should be as descriptive as possible beginning with a tribal nation when providing identity framing. If one needs to be general about Indigneous people, one should use “Indigenous” or “tribal nations people.” Native American and American Indian are phrases used and decided upon by the federal government used to homogenize Indigenous people and erase our sovereignty as political entities. If you would like to cite this essay and want to directly quote us, we ask that you replace “Indians/NDNs” with Indigenous people. return

Works Cited

Arola, Kristin L.. “Chapter 11. Indigenous Interfaces.” (2017).

COVER IMAGE CREDIT: Copyright: Valmedia.

KEYWORDS: academic discourse, American Indian Caucus of NCTE/CCCC, decolonial, indigenous visibility, NATIVE-AM, Rhetoric, settler harm reduction, whiteness

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