Indigenous Methodologies
It would be impossible to make generalisations about Indigenous methodologies of research, teaching and political activism, whether in the context of the Americas, Asia or more globally. We wish to briefly introduce two dimensions of Indigenous feminist methodologies emanating from Indigenous scholaractivists in what is now known as North America, and more specifically, Canada. The first is the notion of what some Indigenous scholars have termed ‘land-based pedagogy’.51 The second is the importance of language in recovering and centring Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies.
Indigenous feminists – including Patricia Monture-Angus, Lee Maracle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Audra Simpson, Bonita Lawrence, Theresa Nahanee, Emma LaRocque and, in Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, among many others – have emphasised the centrality of their relationship to land to the ontologies and epistemologies, and the survival, of First Nations. Indeed, land is their basis for learning about law, kinship, economy and social relations. In the words of Glen Coulthard, First Nations territories have ‘associated forms of knowledge’;52 reflecting upon this idea, it becomes clear that colonisation is not only about settler states’ desire for the land itself as a resource (or territory, in the sense of the Westphalian state form), but that the colonial dispossession of Indigenous land was and remains central to attempts to destroy First Nations communities. The genocidal intentions of settler states lie not only in the wide range of measures used to diminish, contain and destroy First Nations people, but in the suppression of Indigenous knowledge, ontologies and ways of living that are carried through and in the land. We understand this way of knowing to be radically relational, not simply with other human beings but with nonhuman life and land. This is a radically embodied practice of knowledge formation, for one needs to be on the land to learn.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a crucial point about children and parenting. In the Dechinta Bush University, which takes place on land of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, children are welcome and included in the programme. This goes beyond recognition of the socially reproductive labour that many Indigenous and other parents (mainly women) undertake: here, ‘children are co-learners and co-instructors’.53 The collective nature of parenting at Dechinta Bush University, as in many non-Anglo and non-bourgeois communities, is an antidote to the poverty of the nuclear family form and also creates a richer and more dynamic learning environment for all present. There is a contact point here with the direction taken by scholar-activists, such as Federici, who see the health and well-being of children and the elderly as key aspects of the challenges of social reproduction under capitalism.
As mentioned above, an emphasis on learning, reviving and using Indigenous languages has long been central to anti- and de-colonial movements, and this remains the case in contemporary First Nations scholarship and activism. Political scientist Noenoe K. Silva offers exemplary research on how the use of native language – in her case, Hawai’ian – can challenge imperial historiographies of dispossession.54 Taking up long-standing critiques of the colonial archive, as formulated by Gayatri Spivak and others, Silva’s commitment to completely reframing the history of Indigenous Hawai’ian political formations and resistance to colonisation is subtended by a close reading and analysis of sources in Hawai’ian. It becomes clear in her scholarship that the work of making native agency visible in the historical record, the work of recentring Indigenous Hawai’ian worldviews with a view to supporting Indigenous sovereignty movements, is intimately connected to, perhaps even dependent upon, her excavation and use of political concepts in Hawai’ian.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1986 essay collection, Decolonising the Mind, written from the locus of postcolonial East Africa, begins with a reflection on the issues facing African writers at the time of independence. At the forefront of his concerns was the primary place of language in the enunciation of an anti-colonial politics, and in the continuation of the epistemic violence of colonisation into the postcolonial moment:
Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom … In my view language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner.55
We can consider, on the one hand, how the question of language was and remains central in its relation to culture and cultural practices – and intimately bound to the way we see the world, and our shared priorities about how to live. On the other hand, as African and Caribbean writers have long argued, it is also true that people have made the language of their former colonial masters their own, bending, reshaping and appropriating it in ways that produce new dialects and alternate lexicons pertinent to their particular locations and lifeways.
Whatever one’s position, it is clear that First Nations are engaged in a long-standing and continuous struggle to revive and use Indigenous languages as a part of a larger, global, anti-colonial struggle that has no clear end in sight.
Radical Imaginaries and Praxis
While there has been a general taming of the mainstream feminist movement, through its professionalisation and institutionalisation at UN conferences and within nongovernmental organisations, along with forms of glass ceiling feminism, a common thread among those interviewed in this book is a commitment to a transformative feminist praxis and collective action that aims for systemic and radical change. The term ‘praxis’ itself implies an organic interconnectedness of theory and practice in challenging ongoing inequalities and confronting histories of colonial and imperial domination. In this sense, radical knowledge production, the development of new methodologies and political activism are not in reality separable, and they do not exist as distinct categories.
Here, we understand the term ‘radical’ in the sense that Ella Baker, a central figure in the civil rights movement in the US who played a pivotal role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, uses it: understanding and resisting the root causes of economic, social and cultural oppression embedded in racial capitalism. The aim of such praxis is not simply to reform aspects of the current system, but to radically transform the totality of social relations through oppositional and coalitional politics. It is steeped in the long histories of Indigenous, Black, and Third World resistance to colonialism and imperialism, and radical imaginaries for a better world that were forged in relation to and dialogue with each other.
Ella Baker famously emphasised the importance of education to develop every individual’s leadership capacity, allowing every person to be a full participant in their own liberation rather than an observer waiting for orders from the top of hierarchical structures. Every social movement and/or campaign mentioned in the following interviews utilised a variety of strategies, tactics, research, alliances and modes of outreach and internal education. They produced knowledge, debated methods and made their fair share of mistakes, as well, while holding a deep belief in the ability of ordinary people to both understand and translate daily conditions into radical demands for change. Each experience deserves a book in its own right, to excavate the modes of knowledge production and community building that took place, and continue to take place, in its respective geographic and historical contexts. As social movements scholar Aziz Choudry notes, oftentimes, ‘given the academic emphasis on whether an action, campaign, or movement can be judged a “success”, the intellectual work that takes place in movements frequently goes unseen, as do the politics, processes, sites, and locations of knowledge production and learning in activist settings’.56 In light of this, we use the space that remains here to simply highlight a few common threads among the forms of praxis that are relevant to ongoing struggles.
The praxis emerging from collectives like the Combahee River Collective, the Brixton Black Women’s Group, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, and Southall