In drawing attention to this tendency, we are not placing ourselves outside of it—rather, we are implicating ourselves directly within the problem as settler-scholar-social workers who are attempting to include an “overview” of anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and/or Indigenist theories for our project.

With this uncertainty in mind, we want to specify that this section is being written for other settlers.

Furthermore, we want to specify that we will not attempt to give a comprehensive overview of a theory or theories; rather, we will aim to highlight some concepts and terms as a starting point—an incomplete starting point—for readers to access the highlighted resources and, as Tuck (2019) writes, “engage with Indigenous texts on their own terms” (p. 14).

We invite readers to join us in noticing and sitting with feelings of discomfort such as defensiveness, guilt, exasperation, or attempts to neatly “extract” knowledge.

Some parts of this section will deliberately use more long-form quotations than may usually be considered normal within academic work as we want to use the space to center Indigenous voices rather than our paraphrased (mis)understandings.

Finally, we have attempted to reduce the aforementioned violence of “making Indigenous perspectives fit” by not applying as strict a focus on length or categorization to this section as other sections within this project.

anticolonialism

can be defined as “the political struggle of colonized peoples against the specific ideology and practice of colonialism” by “emphasiz[ing] the need to reject colonial power and restore local control” (Ashcroft et al., 2013, p. 15).

There is much variation within the praxis of anticolonial theory, however, it has often taken the form of a “discourse of anti-colonial ‘nationalism’” where colonial structures of governance are resisted through demands of “an independent postcolonial nation-state” (pp. 15-16).

postcolonialism

“examines the effects of colonization and reconfigures the colonizer/colonized axis in different ways” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 8). While some feel that it has positively contributed through its conceptualizations of categories such as diaspora, migrant, and hybrid identities, as well as through its “ability to reveal the operations of counterhegemonic discourses as produced by the dispersed, or diasporic, subject” (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 8), it is a highly debated field; one main reason that it implies that colonialism is finished.

critiques of anticolonialism and postcolonialism

have unique aspects, however, one area that is shared is their tension within settler colonial states, like Canada.

Settler colonialism is “the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making himself the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing” (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, p. 73). In settler colonialism, “invasion is a structure, not an event”; that is, the “logic of elimination is embedded into every aspect of the settler colonial structures and its disciplines” (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, p. 73; Wolfe, 2006, p. 402).

In North America, settler colonialism operates through a triad of relationships, between the (white [but not always]) settlers, the Indigenous inhabitants, and chattel slaves who are removed from their homelands to work stolen land. At the crux of these relationships is land, highly valued and disputed. For settlers to live on and profit from land, they must eliminate Indigenous peoples, and extinguish their historical, epistemological, philosophical, moral and political claims to land. Land, in being settled, becomes property. Settlers must also import chattel slaves, who must be kept landless, and who also become property, to be used, abused, and managed. (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, p. 74)

Indigenism is not synonymous with Indigenous; from this definition, a person, either Indigenous or non-Indigenous, can work within or outside of an Indigenist framework (Simpson, 2004, 382).

Across Turtle Island (North America), the Indigenist outlook has largely adopted the six foundational demands stated in Latin America through the Indigenismo movement, “all of them associated with sociopolitical, cultural, and economic autonomy (or sovereignty) and self-determination” (p. 255). The fundamental component of this outlook is that “the land rights of ‘First Americans’ should serve as a first priority for attainment of everyone seriously committed to accomplishing positive change in North America” (Churchill, 2003, pp. 259-260, emphasis added).

Ward Churchill (2003) explains the primacy of this demand thusly:

Let’s imagine that the United States as a whole were somehow transformed into an entity defined by the parity of its race, class, and gender relations, its embrace of unrestricted sexual preference, its rejection of militarism in all forms, and its abiding concern with environmental protection. (I know, I know, this is a sheer impossibility, but that’s my point.)

When all is said and done, the society resulting from this scenario is still, first and foremost, a colonialist society, an imperialist society in the most fundamental possible sense, with all that that implies.

This is true because the scenario does nothing at all to address the fact that whatever is happening happens on someone else’s land, not only without their consent, but through an adamant disregard for their rights to the land. Hence, all it means is that the invader population has rearranged its affairs in such a way as to make itself more comfortable at the continuing expense of indigenous people. (Churchill, 2003, p. 259).

Given the tendency of the social work profession to try and adopt methods of “decolonization”, we think that it is important to center Tuck and Yang’s (2012) article entitled Decolonization is not a metaphor:

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. (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 1)

Furthermore, in Losing Patience for the Task of Convincing Settlers to Pay Attention to Indigenous Ideas, Tuck (2019) writes:

Indigenous and decolonial theories are unfairly, inappropriately expected to answer to whiteness and to settler relationships to land in the future…A settler future is preoccupied by questions of, What will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler?…decolonization is not obliged to answer questions concerned with settler futures…What I am coming to more fully understand is that the questions of “What will decolonization look like?,” when posed by settlers, are a distraction to Indigenous theorizations of decolonization. They drain the energy and imagination of Indigenous scholarship—they pester, they think they are unique, and they are boring. I want time and space to sketch the next and the now to get there. Decolonization is not the endgame, not the final outcome of a long process, but the next now, the now that is chasing at our heels. I am lucky to come from the long view. (p. 15)

Furthermore, we believe that as settler scholars, it is not our place to interpret theorizations of decolonization or assert that we are applying a decolonial lens.

As some Indigenous scholars have noted that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can work within (or outside of) an Indigenist outlook (see, for e.g., Simpson, 2004, 382), we will proceed humbly and cautiously to attempt to think within this framework by highlighting the calls for the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic autonomy (or sovereignty) and self-determination, beginning with land.

Moreover, instead of attempting to fit concepts within the categories of foundational assumptions with respect to power, relationships, and change process that we have organized other sections within this project, we will highlight some questions and concepts as a starting point—an incomplete starting point—for readers to access the highlighted resources and, as Tuck writes, “engage with Indigenous texts on their own terms” (p. 14).