As part of educating myself more deeply about the ways white supremacy suffuses the world I live and move in, I read Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s essay “Decolonization is not a metaphor." It's about time!This powerful argument for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism from other kinds (external and internal) issues in an uncompromising (their word is "incommensurable") case for the distinctness of their demands from those of other kinds of decolonization, social justice and human rights struggles. Worthy though these causes also are, nothing can take the place of restoring native sovereignty over stolen land and abolishing the settler state. Failure to recognize this, they argue, makes other justice struggles complicit in settler colonialism. (Case in point: the way the Occupy movement's call to occupy and redistribute everything erased the reality that all this takes place on already occupied land, not theirs to redistribute.) Decolonization is unsettling - in the most non-metaphorical sense.
As Tuck and Yang call out all kinds of anti-racist and decolonizing work (including making a searing critique of the celebrated work of Paolo Freire as just in your head) they challenge them to recognize they too are involved in "settler moves to innocence." These
tropes ... which problematically attempt to reconcile settler
guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity (3)
shape the thought even of people whose ancestors were brought involuntarily to these shores but are most evident in the thought of settlers of European extraction like myself. If I don't claim an Indian grandmother (though my American grandfather sort of did, a move I didn't take seriously since he was an orphan, another move to innocence) there's no question that I'm culpable of what they call "settler adoption fantasy": the idea, given its archetypal form in James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, that the settler can become native by sympathizing with the plight of indigenous people so much that they welcome him as one of their own. (Then they die, leaving him the legitimate and uncontested heir to the land.)
Words they wrote about Cooper's protagonist sound just like one of the refrains of my just completed "Religion and Ecology" course:
he adopts the love of the land and
therefore thinks he belongs to the land (15)
The title we chose (at my suggestion) for the collection of personal essays students wrote for the class was taken from Robin Wall Kimmerer: remembering what it would be like to love the world. Tuck and Yang would insist that love, like sympathy, is ultimately a settler move to innocence. Part of what charms me about Kimmerer's work is its less "incommensurable" conception of belonging to the land; she suggests one can "become native" to a place by entering into reciprocity with the land and its other-then-human peoples - almost allowing for an "adoption" by the land itself. "Settler futurity" is assured while the survival of indigenous people remains an open question - the opposite of what Tuck and Yang demand. [D]ecolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity (35). (This is not a critique of Kimmerer's book but of ways I can find myself taking it.)
I'd be lying if I didn't say that belonging to the land is one of my most fervent wishes ... but the fact that I just changed "most fervent wish" to "one of my most fervent wishes" confirms the problem!! The rootlessness of settler consciousness is dangerous, and not only in violent efforts to claim roots in someone else's land. I often wonder if I can even understand what it would be to belong to a place? (This is why the rest of Kimmerer's promise - that we might relearn what it is not only to love but to be loved by the world never fails to bring tears to my innocence-craving settler eyes.) Can I really understand relation to place as something more than simply unthinkingly taking it for granted, allowing my mind to wander elsewhere? Not a metaphor!
Anthropocene gestures beckon when you consider the Anglo-American "Anthropos" variously unable and unwilling to see even the earth as a place to which he has a relationship, whether terraforming on this planet or escaping to other planets or imagining a "world without us." But more than this coming semester's Rel+Anthropocene class needs to be arraigned for settler moves to innocence. Another passage early in Tuck and Yang's essay (8) cuts to the quick, reviving questions I've had about the very project of the liberal arts at least since Australia.
I have work to do.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,"
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1 (2012): 1-40
