#aileen moreton-robinson

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

oh fuck apologies to the person with the🦆 emoji who wanted to know my opinions on Australia, I accidentally deleted your ask :(

I will say that you asked at. such a time. because I'm currently reading Aileen Moreton-Robinson's book Talkin' Up to the White Woman. so at the exact moment my main thoughts about Australia are mostly dedicated to how strikingly similar the colonizer violence deployed to destroy the indigenous population is between Australia and the US. sobering and chilling to see how identical the process of dehumanizing people to uphold white supremacy is around the world.

very beautiful country though, I've always wanted to visit and see some sharks.

[maleswillbemale]

Are there any Lakota feminists you admire?

It's a little hard to compile a list of Lakota feminists specifically. While there are some, there aren't enough, and I'd like to broaden my answer to cover more than just Lakota women fighting for feminism for Indigenous women all over the world. I hope that's okay.

These are women I encourage anyone to look up and check out their work, we all come from different backgrounds so I might not agree with/have experienced everything shared by them but I think every Indigenous woman's voice is important!

Jihan Gearon - Navajo, feminist and artist

Tarcila Rivera Zea - Quechuan, feminist activist, founder of multiple organizations for Indigenous women

Debora Barros Fince - Waayu, activist and human rights defender and lawyer in Colombia

Rauna Kuokkanen - Sami, professor and Indigenous feminist activist

Aileen Moreton-Robinson - Goenpul, Indigenous feminist and author, Australia's first Indigenous Distinguished Professor

Sarah Eagle Heart - Lakota, author and co-founder of Return to the Heart Foundation

Madonna Thunder Hawk - Lakota, civil rights activist and co-founder of Women of All Red Nations

Mandeí Juma - Chief of the Juma

Ávelin Kambiwá - Kambiwá, specialist in public policies on gender/race, feminist in Brazil

Jodi Voice Yellowfish - Creek, Lakota, and Cherokee, founder and chair of the MMIW Texas Rematriate organization

Wilma Mankiller - Cherokee, first female principal chief of her nation

Annie Mae Aquash - Mi'kmaq, member of AIM, deserves justice for her murder

Jolie Varela - Paiute, led a hike with indigenous women across their cultural land as an expression of sovereignty, founder of Indigenous Women Hike

Lee Maracle - Stó꞉lō, feminist author

Tillie Black Bear - Lakota, activist for domestic violence towards Indigenous women

Other Indigenous women I look up to/admire, not necessarily feminist specific:

The Bearhead Sisters - Sister trio singing group, Wilhnemme

Acosia Red Elk - Umatilla, jingle dancer

Deb Haaland - Laguna Pueblo, Interior Secretary for the USA

Amelia Marchand - Colville, warrior against climate change

Lydia Jennings - Pascua Yaqui and Huichol, warrior against climate change

Roberta Tuurraq Glenn-Borade - Iñupiaq, warrior against climate change

Robin Wall Kimmerer - Potwatomi, fantastic author, please read her book Braiding Sweetgrass if you haven't already

Fawn Wood - Cree and Salish musician

Moving Robe Woman - Lakota warrior, fought against Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn to avenge her murdered brother

Buffalo Calf Road Woman - Cheyenne warrior who was the one to knock General Custer off his horse during the Battle of Little Big Horn

Bernie LaSarte - Coeur d'Alene, program manager for the STOP Violence Program

Mary Jane Miles - Nez Perce, tribal vice chairman

Crystalyne Curley - Navajo, first woman to become Speaker of the Navajo Nation Council

Article about multiple Indigenous women in Mexico who run Indigenous women's centers

Lily Gladstone - Blackfeet and Nez Perce actress

Rebecca Thomas - Mi'kmaw poet and activist

Sacheen Littlefeather - Apache and Yaquim actress. Keeler is a horrible person and not worthy of listening to whatsoever, Sacheen Littlefeather did more activism for Indian Country than Keeler will ever accomplish in her miserable life

Brianna Theobald - Not Indigenous to my knowledge (I could definitely be wrong), but researched and wrote a wonderful book about the treatment of Indigenous women in regards to reproduction and sterilization

The brave woman at Standing Rock photographed by Ryan Vizzions. She has since passed away due to a car accident I believe, but I'm struggling to find her name. Once I find it, I'll update this post.

Honor the Grandmothers is a good book to hear Lakota and Dakota women elders share their experiences.

[meikuree]

more recent commentary from Zoe Todd on Braiding Sweetgrass, from a Twitter thread on 30 April 2024. text reads:

I gave away all my copies of Braiding Sweetgrass in 2021+stopped teaching it because I realized that if an Indigenous sister builds a body of work without fulsome acknowledgment of Critical Indigenous Studies and the 4th World, it’s for a settler audience, not for transformation.

When the spell was broken and I started to analyze the text for how it deals with whiteness, ‘white possession’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015) & ‘settler politics of recognition’ (Coulthard 2014), I realized it was another anthropological reimagining of pan-Indigenous life.

The real test for me though was in how white folks and folks aligned with whiteness were mobilizing this ‘braiding’ body of work above and over (and against) folks who are working in explicitly anti-imperialist registers & putting their bodies on the line against police states.

Took me a while to publicly critique the work tho, because as critical Indigenous scholars we are quickly labelled as ‘aggressive’ if we question reconciliation & other liberal larks. Even as the state arrests & brutalizes land protectors in one breath and ‘braids’ in the other.

I hope my work is never ever used to justify occupation by the settler state. / The enduring lesson for me: everything, I mean everything, can be weaponized so long as ‘white possession’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015) and ‘settler politics of recognition’ (Coulthard 2014) are in place. And it was diffractive reading of all these texts together that changed me. 🐟

Huge credit to Rowland Robinson for turning me towards Fourth World frameworks and David Parent for turning me towards Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work — our colleagues teach us what to read where settler disciplines (in my case biology and anthro) failed to!

Tweets can often feel ‘sharper’ than the underlying work. Here is my recent thinking through how the state is using ‘braiding’ where it ought to honour Indigenous sovereignties instead. [youtube link: https://youtu.be/ofcn95DmKUs?si=hHKvqSxBgukjUiT2]

Metis scholar Zoe Todd:

Social media thread from 22 June 2021. Text reads:

White folks consume work like Kimmerer’s ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ – written by a white coded Indigenous prof in the global north like me – & seem to selectively absorb that this work is all love + reciprocity. What you miss is that it’s also justice, repair, truth, redistribution. There’s a canon of ‘indigenous eco’ scholarship written largely for white audiences that erases the decolonial / decolonization struggles and scholarship of folks in Global South. This feel good work from Canada / US often erases Black Studies, & doesn’t attend to capital / empire. […] I also invite scientists, ecologists in global north to spend meaningful time learning about anti-colonial, anti-imperial social theory & centuries of anti-colonial revolutionary writing / thinking before re-iterating work of whole disciplines without citing us. It’s embarrassing. If me speaking bluntly to scientists, who have shaped the world into one violent universal for centuries, makes you uncomfortable, imagine what it’s like to watch white supremacist colonial capitalist systems consume & destroy worlds & then take credit for Indigenous ontologies.

More from the same thread, by Todd:

Text reads:

Indigenous land protectors are assassinated all over earth for protecting lands / waters / atmospheres. Far too many folks in global North publishing articles about decolonization or ‘integrating indigenous knowledge’ are extractive of work folks do to enact Indigenous sovereignty. As they say, talk is cheap. But if your commitments are not to dismantling white supremacy, capitalism, & the every day structures of imperialism and colonialism that brutalize Black, Indigenous, migrant, and other communities then kindly remove decolonization from your disc0urse. Sitting in meetings with white people with well paying jobs in global north, who benefit from extraction and death in Indigenous lands every day – and watching them rake in funding and citations while they condescendingly explain ‘braiding knowledge’ is peak white supremacy. […]

——-

Text from another post in Todd’s thread:

For the white enviro scholars: […] Your citations are built on colonial capitalist extraction & accumulation. What if you did the quiet work of repairing relations without making it a CV line?

——-

Posted the same day, by Todd. Text of an older post, re-shared by Todd, reads:

What white people writing about decolonization in Canada don’t get is that what you write and publish means a lot less than how you act every day. Your relationality as settler colonizers far more important than your CV.

Todd’s added commentary from 22 June 2021:

Decolonization is not a monograph.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"…both Vancouver Island and the new mainland colony were severely cash-strapped. The solution to this problem lay in land. Perry notes that “land lay at the heart” of the colonial project in British Columbia; it was the “medium through which colonial society aimed to reconstitute itself.” Indeed, David McNally and Glen Sean Coulthard stress that land is “foundational” to settler capitalism because so-called primitive accumulation “pivots on the theft, enclosure, and parcelization of the earth.” Accordingly, some colonial officials justified usurping Indigenous lands by invoking the doctrine of discovery and viewing the region as terra nullius – empty and free for the taking. The local government was already taxing certain exports (such as gold and coal) and imposing tarifs on all imported goods to generate revenue for public spending, but now the Colonial Ofce encouraged it to steal and sell of Indigenous lands, at a high price, to raise additional funds to support various initiatives, including schools. This is how, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, the “possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty” were “operationalized, deployed, and affirmed” in the British Empire. Herman Merivale, permanent under-secretary for the Colonial Office, explained the scheme:

Might it not be desirable to suggest to the Governor that in any funds acquired from the Sale of Indian Reserves – which it might be intended to appropriate in the service of the Indians – a good portion should be set aside for the purpose of a school for the education of the children ... As V. Couver’s Isld and B. Columbia advance in prosperity they should not overlook the civilization & interests of the Indian, which so far as I can see can be best promoted by the establishment of industrial & educational Schools for the younger members of that race.

As in other settler colonies throughout the British Empire, Merivale’s proposition became policy: portions of reserved and stolen lands were sold, and part of the proceeds went to the creation and funding of schools that could teach new generations of Indigenous people to accept colonial authority and to contribute to the emerging capitalist economy.

Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon confrmed as much in an 1859 letter to Douglas:

In the case of the Indians of Vancouver Island and British Columbia... I would enjoin upon you, and all in authority in both Colonies, the importance of establishing Schools of an industrial as well as an educational character for the Indians, whereby they may acquire the arts of civilized life which will enable them to support them- selves, and not degenerate into the mere recipients of eleemosynary relief.

Douglas agreed.

The frst laboratory for the new policy was Victoria, where two recently arrived Anglican clergymen, Reverend Alexander Charles Garrett of the SPG and William Duncan of the CMS, worked among the lək̓ ʷəŋən, as Lempfrit had almost a decade earlier. Garrett came to Victoria in 1859 and quickly rose to prominence. An ordained priest, he was elected principal of the newly created Indian Improvement Committee, and Duncan, a lay cleric, became its secretary. In 1860, Garrett wrote on behalf of the committee to request that Douglas “be good enough to grant a site on the Indian reserve for a school house and master’s residence, for the benefit of the Indians” near Victoria. Given that the project needed “some substantial and reliable source from which to draw the necessary funds,” he suggested that a grant of money at least equal to the amount that the Committee may be able to raise, would be required to meet the expenses of erecting the necessary buildings and also that one half the amount of expenditure for the maintenance of the Institution, should be secured by the Government from some source local or otherwise, the Committee to raise the other half.

In essence, Garrett proposed a cost-sharing agreement between missionaries and the government, a model that became standard for Indian education in Canada by the 1880s. He assured Douglas that in supporting the initiative, he could help Victoria become “the seat of a flourishing and efficient establishment for Missionary and Industrial enterprise.”

- Sean Carleton, Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2022. p. 57-59

[lilysresearchportfolio]

3D Compendium and Readings

The compendium “A Sense of Place” provides extensive information on how contemporary artists engage with the idea of place in their work. It encompasses not only physical attributes but also cultural, social, political and environmental lenses. By reading this compendium, I was able to understand new ways in which artists interpret and respond to the idea of place. One key aspect of the compendium is the artists’ use of different mediums to represent specific locations. For example, Kathryn O’Donnell’s artwork  “Still Lives” evokes a sense of place through the use of charcoal and graphite on paper. This piece invites viewers to contemplate the artist’s personal or cultural associations with that place. The artist’s choice of charcoal and graphite emphasises textures and tones, creating depth within the artwork and further drawing viewers into the scene. This work evokes a sense of familiarity but also ambiguity, which made me reflect upon the different places and environments I am attached to and why I consider them significant and meaningful. Moreover, the compendium emphasises the significance of considering the cultural and social context of a place in artistic representations. Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s exploration of beach culture in her article “Bodies That Matter on the Beach” provides an understanding of how historical, social, and political factors influence our perception of places. Furthermore, through the compendium, I was able to discover the artist Cristina Flores Pescorán who was featured in the Biennale of Sydney 2022. Pescorán’s use of unique materials to create intricate weaves and veil-like curtains was very appealing to me, especially from the way they interact with the space. Overall, the compendium provides valuable insights into the different approaches that contemporary artists use to explore the concept of place in their work. By examining the works of Kathryn O’Donnell, Vernon Ah Ke and Cristina Flores Pescorán, I was able to appreciate the different meanings connected with “a sense of place”, specifically meanings I didn’t consider before.

[othersociologist]

Indigenous sovereignty and responses to COVID-19

Season 1 "Race and COVID-19," Episode 2, "Indigenous sovereignty and responses to COVID-19." We discuss how principles of Indigenous sovereignty, as theorised and practiced by Indigenous scholars and community leaders, can help us to think about the particular challenges being posed by the Covid-19 global health crisis. We have heard racism being referred to analogously as a virus or a pandemic but that would be to see it as somehow naturally occurring, rather than being wilfully orchestrated as a key technology of racial-colonial rule. We’re chatting with our panellists about how their work can help us to critically unpack the logic of race. 

Panellists: 

Jill Gallagher AO is a Gunditjmara woman from Australia who has been the Chief Executive Officer of the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO) since 2001. In 2017 Gallagher was appointed Commissioner of the Victorian Treaty Advancement Commission until the voting period ended in October 2019. Gallagher was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2009 and the Victorian Aboriginal Honour Roll in 2015. She was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2013. Gallagher has served on a number of State government and statutory advisory committees including; the Victorian Early Childhood Development Advisory Committee, the Equal Opportunity Commission Victoria Indigenous Reference Group, the Child Death Review, the Cooperative Research Centre on Aboriginal Health, and the Premiers Aboriginal Advisory Committee. Learn more about VACCHO: http://www.vaccho.org.au/ 

Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people (Moreton Bay) and is Professor of Indigenous Research at RMIT University. She was appointed as Australia’s first Indigenous Distinguished Professor in 2016 and was a founding member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). She is the author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (UQP); The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minnesota Press); and the editor of several books, including Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations (The University of Arizona Press). In 2020 she was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the first-ever Australian Indigenous scholar to be elected. See her classic book: https://www.uqp.com.au/books/talkin-u... 

Dr Debbie Bargallie is a descendent of the Kamilaroi and Wonnarua peoples of New South Wales. She is a Postdoctoral Senior Research Fellow with the Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University and is also a member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. Debbie holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the Queensland University of Technology and researches on race and racism. Her book Unmasking the racial contract: Indigenous voices on racism in the Australian Public Service (2020) is published by AIATSIS Aboriginal Studies Press. See her book: https://aiatsis.gov.au/publications/p...

[allmenshudderatme]

A Global Feminist Reading List

Yesterday I finalised my feminist reading list for 2018 - details at the blog!

[rf-times]

(Some paraphrased notes from “Talkin’ Up to the White Woman” by Aileen Moreton-Robinson)

Many early Australian feminists positioned themselves as essential to furthering White Australia through their status as mothers, since the policies meant that only white immigrants were accepted, white middle class women said that their position must be elevated as they were key to sustaining the white population, many advocated for eugenics or lack of access to birth control to increase population growth (meanwhile Indigenous women had their families taken from them, were sterilised, systematically abused and were discouraged from reproduction) while others advocated for birth control but under the reasoning that the white population would be best served by “quality over quantity”. Australian feminists fought for allowances for European-descent mothers and widows which were granted in 1912 and the 1920s respectively, meanwhile Indigenous women were not directly entitled to receive a maternity allowance until the 1940s and child endowment was only granted to Indigenous women who matched a perceived degree of whiteness, living conditions and display of social behaviour akin to white people. Even various white feminist activist groups in the 1920′s and 30′s who were appalled by the conditions of Indigenous women and the removal of mixed race children from them, blamed Indigenous women’s sexuality as the cause for their problems (especially blaming them for the “problem” of mixed race children) and that white women should educate and impart white feminine morality.

[cridhe]

[shewhotellsstories]

“Whiteness is and has always been fluid: to be white is less a state of biology and more a state of proximity to formal power, of access to an exclusive club. And every step of the way, White Womanhood has been key to perpetuating white supremacy. It has acted as a buffer between white male power and the rest of the population. It has whitewashed the crimes of whiteness, from Indigenous child removals to the rationalization of imperialist wars. In short, White Womanhood has functioned as the maternal arm of empire. “White women civilized,” writes Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “while white men brutalised.”

-Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Hi Sex Witch! This is a book rec question, really. Do you have any recommendations you would give people who want to start reading about gender theory? I know I want to learn so much more about queer gender identity and about its cultural impact and growth in different places but I dont really know where to start because it's such a big topic to cover.

Gender related or not, thank you so much for everything you do!

god okay that's a huge ask and I don't want to just throw a bunch of super dense unapproachable text at you where you're just getting into it (Judith Butler is so good to read but they are WORK) so here's a long list of some authors you can pick and choose from

Sara Ahmed

Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele's illustrated nonfiction Gender and Sexuality

Kate Bornstein

Ivan Coyote

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Angela Davis's book Women, Race & Class

Shon Faye

Leslie Feinberg

Cordelia Fine

Jules Gill-Peterson's book History of the Transgender Child (fairly dense read I will not lie)

Ruby Hamad's book White Tears/Brown Scars

Kit Heyam's book Before We Were Trans (haven't personally read this yet but I'm excited to)

Patricia Hill Collins

Mariame Kaba ("Makenzie she writes about prison abolition not gender" THE OPPRESSION ARE INTERLOCKING)

Mikki Kendall's book Hood Feminism

Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider is a great place to start)

Aileen Moreton-Robinson's book Talkin’ Up to the White Woman

Molly Smith and Juno Mac's Revolting Prostitutes is a BRILLIANT feminist analysis of sex workers' rights by sex workers

Amia Srinivasan's book The Right to Sex is just shakingly brilliant

Sabrina Strings' book Fearing the Black Body is a FASCINATING explanation of the formation of contemporary gendered norms and fatphobia as part of the creation of race, cannot recommend it enough

Susan Stryker

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Kai Cheng Thom

Riki Anne Wilchins

Rafia Zakaria

this is obviously not a complete list please not one @ me, it's just! a place to start browsing!

[sxpositive]

Book recs on feminist theory ? Or just books that somehow positively impacted you pertaining to this ?

This is quite tricky to answer because most of the articles, chapters, and books I read that have really formed my understanding of feminist theory have come from my university readings and are very all over the place so I can’t recommend one book.

However, some great authors that were very influential to me are:

bell hooks

Andi Zeisler 

Raewyn Connell

Laurie Penny

Julia Kristeva

Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Rebecca Solnit

Michael Foucault 

Kimberle Crenshaw 

Elizabeth Bernstein 

John Berger

Judith Butler

The thing is, for a lot of these authors I’ve only read some of their work or have mainly incorporated their theories without visiting the original texts because they’re so dense *cough* Butler *cough*. All the authors in italics I would recommend reading for fun, the ones in bold I would recommend reading if you’re interested in more theory, the ones left blank just read their wikipedia pages. 

This is also an amazing resource for introductory texts to feminist theory. (It’s the reading list for my first year core subject of my degree)

[fatehbaz]

I think a lot about water, in this time. [...] Whisperings of rivers that greet the sea. The currents that pull between oceans, deep below. The saltiness of estuaries that ebb through the roots of mangroves. Waters that return to themselves, always different, streaming off, merging back, sinking in. [...]

To refuse is usually understood as being-against: the Bartleby-an preference not to; refusal as strike, occupation, boycott, cancellation, retaliation, resistance, from passive evasions to spectacles of revolution. The no of refusal is a mode of survival: an impenetrable boundary, silent or shouted. It is a refusal to be killed or to succumb: the Indigenous refusal of colonial recognition, the Black refusal of white erasure and enclosure. But before refusal as dialectic, in the now unused meaning found in common Latin, refusal also meant to give back, to restore, to return. Derived from re-, “back”, and fundere-, “to pour”, this meaning fell out of use, likely because conversational Latin was not transcribed but comprised of evolving and divergent dialects [...].

The addition of refusal as return – a definition always already slipping away, consigned to hearsay and archival traces – disarranges refusal’s march towards the future, seeking action, reaction, momentum. An understanding of refusal as return – a (re)turning to an (un)known because nothing ever returned to its self-same or absolute – unsettles narratives of resistance that are framed only in opposition. The idea of pouring back or watering expands the conceptualisation of refusal as an act of liberation. Refusal as return swells refusal’s imagination-otherwise, loosening it and diffusing it. [...] Water as reverence, libation, in memory of. Water as sustenance, poured as a gesture of nourishment and love. Water thrown out, released, a dam burst, a flooding rain scattered across the ground (“to scatter” is also contained within fundere) [...].

-------

The dream of self-same return anchors much of Western environmentalism. [...] Who and what constituted Man had been made sacrosanct by the time the 1493 Papal Doctrine of Discovery decree was issued [...], establishing a religious, legal, and political basis for widescale dispossession. [...] Imperialism, reminds Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, was always already “a discursive field of knowledge” [...] What was considered not-Man (that which was classified as non-sentient, not self-determined, unknowing, fungible) was valuable only insofar as its accumulation of economic value, always in oppositional and inferior relation. The displacement and genocide of Black and Indigenous people were thus inextricable from conceptualisations of nature as distinct from European religious, social, and political life. [...]

The making of nature is tied to [...] the nation-state, and white supremacy, a confluence reiterated again and again through the production of the world. The systemic enslavement of African people by European colonisers, the indenture of South Asian people, the blackbirding of South Sea Islanders violently instrumentalised non-white people for the propagation of white wealth.

Vast ecosystems flattened for plantations and fields, raw minerals pulled from the ground and sea for the building of nation-states, agriculture and war – resource extraction has always been a precursor of climate catastrophe. Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls the logics of the “white possessive” the mode of rationalisation underpinned by the “desire to invest in reproducing and reaffirming the nation-state’s ownership, control and domination”. [...] The ordering of land into resource also translates into the enclosure of land for pleasure, play and study. What is desirable and worthy of conservation as delineated from what is exploitable for mining, housing, or agriculture has been arbitrated by those who profit, for whom this world is for.

This is why the construction of nature, the nature claimed to be healing, could never be anything other than the most forceful articulation of power. [...]

-------

The affectivity of Anglo-European nature cannot be [...] debunked through reason, in part because there is no consensus on what nature consists of. Nature is felt, embodied, atmospheric, emotional, encultured to the point of seeming absolute. It can perhaps only be approached where desires entangle, where through entanglement some give might be leveraged. Refusal as return is disorienting. [...] Return disavows final consolidation into power and justice because there is no end: remember, to re-pour means to come back to fluidity. To consider refusal as return is to turn to the past with an openness to expansion. Return is never identical; the past is never boundaried. On the contrary, the past illustrates the limitations of capitalist time and the fallibility of colonial history. Return is a reckoning with what is presumed to be universal. Rather than certainty, return offers only the folding of the past into the present.

As well as the being-against of refusal, return allows for a being-with, a sitting-with. [...]

A return is an invitation to humble oneself to another approach. Being-with requires a pause from which to imagine this otherwise, in all of its vastness and uncertainty. It is a moment between, where one is asked to hold onto many possibilities at once. To be-with such an undoing needs a disposition of attentiveness, listening, curiosity and noticing, an attunement, following I-Kiribati poet and thinker Teweiariki Teaero when he says, “two ears, one mouth, don’t talk too much. Learn to listen more”, or Fijian academic Unaisi Nabobo-Baba when she speaks of silence as a “pedagogy of deep engagement”. [...]

We are told to be certain.

We are taught in discourses and languages that name and possess, universalise and reduce to quantifiable parts. In doing so, we do not learn to be-with what is beyond us.

The immensity of the loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities exceeds what we can comprehend. But as Indigenous and Black Studies scholars, artists, and ecologists show, so do the myriad, and insuppressible flourishings and alliances, the joyfulness and love, the lives lived otherways. Attunement leads us to the gaps and silences and soundings that run through everything, that connect the earth and all who live and die. 

-------

AM Kanngieser. “To undo nature; on refusal as return.” transmediale. 2021.

[anniekoh]

The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies Tiffany Lethabo King (2019)

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.

Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders edited by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

Many people learn about Indigenous politics only through the most controversial and confrontational news: the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance, or the battle to protect Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, a site sacred to Native peoples. But most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream—and so, of course, does its significance. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program Indigenous Politics. Issue by issue, she interviewed people who talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist. Collected here, these conversations speak with clear and compelling voices about a range of Indigenous politics that shape everyday life.

Land desecration, treaty rights, political status, cultural revitalization: these are among the themes taken up by a broad cross-section of interviewees from across the United States and from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Australia, and New Zealand. Some speak from the thick of political action, some from a historical perspective, others from the reaches of Indigenous culture near and far. Writers, like Comanche Paul Chaat Smith, author of Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, expand on their work—about gaming and sovereignty, for example, or protecting Native graves, the reclamation of land, or the erasure of Indian identity. These conversations both inform and engage at a moment when their messages could not be more urgent.Contributors: Jessie Little Doe Baird (Mashpee Wampanoag), Omar Barghouti, Lisa Brooks (Abenaki), Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez (Brothertown Indian Nation), Margaret “Marge” Bruchac (Abenaki), Jessica Cattelino, David Cornsilk (Cherokee Nation), Sarah Deer (Muskogee Creek Nation), Philip J. Deloria (Dakota), Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga Nation), Hone Harawira (Ngapuhi Nui Tonu), Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), Rashid Khalidi, Winona LaDuke (White Earth Ojibwe), Maria LaHood, James Luna (Luiseño), Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Quandamooka), Chief Mutáwi Mutáhash (Many Hearts) Marilynn “Lynn” Malerba (Mohegan), Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), Jonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio (Kanaka Maoli), Steven Salaita, Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), Circe Sturm (Mississippi Choctaw descendant), Margo Taméz (Lipan Apache), Chief Richard Velky (Schaghticoke), Patrick Wolfe.

[siancore]

White Australia has come to "know" the "Indigenous woman" from the gaze of many, including the diaries of explorers, the photographs of philanthropists, the testimony of white state officials, the sexual bravado of white men and the ethnographies of anthropologists. In this textual landscape Indigenous women are the objects who lack agency. The landscape is disrupted by the emergence of the life writings of Indigenous women whose subjectivities and experiences of colonial processes are evident in their texts.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson

[jurassicpark1990]

11 & 17 for book asks!

11. what non-fiction books do you like if any?

tbh i wish i read more nonfic but here are some of the ones i've liked so far :)

your own kind of girl by clare bowditch (memoir about grief and depression - made my Sob)

the russian five by keith gave (this made me feel things about the red wings which is weird af)

roar by sam lane (this is about pivotal people in the formation of the aflw and it was fantastic)

talkin' up to the white woman by aileen moreton-robinson (highly academic but essential for all white australian feminists)

the seven necessary sins for women and girls by mona eltahawy (not exactly my brand of feminism but still quite good)

17. top 5 children's books

this is not a very diverse list so if anyone has any recs i would greatly appreciate it! also i don't remember children's books besides roald dahl so my bad if this list is wrong

the bfg by roald dahl (this was my favourite book for the longest time lmao)

holes by louis sacher (does this count? it might be more ya i dunno)

101 dalmatians by dodie smith (was deeply obsessed with this for a long time)

percy jackson series by rick riordan (again not sure if this counts but i read these as an adult and had so much fun)

a series of unfortunate events by lemony snicket (maybe these don't count either?)

thank you so much for sending this ily <3<3<3