On Settler Colonialism: Hearing from the Kanien:keha'ka (Mohawk) Nation
Just like many other United States Americans and residents of Turtle Island (North America), I grew up in the traditional territory of Indigenous peoples (Haudenosaunee to be exact), unaware of the settler-colonial state I lived in or the implications it has for Indigenous peoples and the way our society is constructed. To be clear, I am part of the settler population but my intention with anything I write or do is to challenge white-settler dominance, not speaking for Indigenous peoples but learning from and standing in solidarity with them. Since I have begun to understand the concept and realities of settler colonialism, I am baffled that many of us in the settler population have never heard the term let alone know what it means.
Understanding settler colonialism
Settler colonialism is a specific form of colonialism that does not operate to extract but rather with the ultimate goal of creating a permanent settlement. This often plays out in the form of discourses that perpetuate the idea of virgin land and the ultimate erasure of Indigenous peoples and cultures. Settler colonial states include Canada, the United States of America, Australia, South Africa and Israel. Settlers learn in school that colonization and conquest were a series of events, many of them violent, but all of them in our past. However, this is not how settler colonialism functions or maintains its power, and it is surely not how Indigenous peoples experience settler colonialism today.
In his landmark article on settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe situates invasion within the idea that it is not an event but rather a structure. From this framework colonization is not in the past, it is occurring now, today, and assimilation becomes a tool of the settler-state to rid themselves of Indigenous peoples without the legal and ethical dichotomies that come with genocide. Just as we are grappling with the fact that the history of enslavement follows us today in profound ways, we must accept that colonization in the United States of America is not to be used in the past tense. In settler states colonization did not happen, it is happening.
Let us recognize the land
“We the Haudenosaunee people live on less than half a percent of our original territory” -Katsitsionni Fox
As I write this and stare out at the tall trees and fields of corn that surround my home, I am keenly aware that I am living on traditional Kanien:keha'ka (Mohawk) territory. I had the honor to have an open conversation about settler colonialism with Katsitsionni Fox (Bear Clan), a Kanien:keha'ka (Mohawk) artist, filmmaker, and educator who lives in Akwesasne “land where the partridge drums” and is the director of the Title 6 program for native education at the Salmon River High School, teaching courses in native studies, Haudenosaunee art and native film. Akwesasne is situated in between the artificial borders of two nation-states, the United States and Canada, and two provinces, Quebec and Ontario, and one state, New York. The Mohawk are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois confederacy and one of the many things Katsitsionni told me was that the Haudenosaunee people live on less than half a percent of their original territory. The Kanien:keha'ka (Mohawk) Nation extended what is now the northeastern region of New York State, southern Canada, and Vermont but they now live on a fraction of their traditional lands, parts of which they still seek from colonial governments today. Settler colonialism has impacted Indigenous peoples in ways I could not even begin to explain here nor had the time to touch upon in my short time with Katsitsionni, but I hope what we did talk about can serve as a stepping stone on your journey to dig deeper into these issues.
Learning from the Kanien:keha'ka (Mohawk) Nation
I wanted to know how Katsitsionni saw decolonization taking place in her community and as we started to discuss the topic, she stopped to explain that
I don’t really like the word “decolonization, I like the word indigenization, I think it is more positive.
I quite agreed with her as the real goal of decolonization is to indigenize our world, replacing the colonial structures that dominate it. One of the many ways this is happening in Katsitsionni’s community is through the Akwesasne Freedom School where she told me she worked for a time and her own children had attended.
Some of the acts of indigenization, our practicing sovereignty, is through our planting of gardens and I think with Covid-19 going on there is a lot more people having the time to get back to planting our traditional gardens and using our heirloom seeds. It’s really important we do things like that to carry on these seeds that our ancestors have saved for generations and that we still have. The Freedom School has that right in their curriculum, they do planting as part of the curriculum for the students.
The Mohawk people have been impacted by settler colonialism in an extraordinary number of ways one being forced assimilation in boarding schools. These were Christian schools in which the aim was to suppress Indigenous language and culture in the children who attended them. However, the Freedom School is the very opposite of this settler colonial attempt of fractionating Indigenous culture as its mission is “revitalizing a rich and diverse language and culture within the community of Akwesasne”.
The curriculum is based on our Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwe which means the ‘words before all else’ and so the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwe or sometimes they call it the opening address is how we give thanks and appreciation to the earth from our mother earth to the people, to the fruits and berries, the water, the fish, the plants, the foods, the animals, the trees, the birds, the winds, the thunders, the sun, the moon, the stars and everything up into the sky world.
Katsitsionni explained that the children in the freedom school leave with a respectfulness for each other and the earth that western education could benefit from. Changing the way, one thinks about the word is one of the many ways the settler-population can support indigenizing society. Taking the time to give thanks to the life forces that sustain us in this way is a seemingly small but meaningful action we all can take in a fast-paced world that pushes us to exploit our earth.
Decolonizing our minds
While the brunt of settler colonialism's violence has been inflicted on Indigenous peoples it is also the root of many of the unequal and exploitative knowledge structures that shape settler colonial society. Settler-colonial discourses around race, gender, capital, and the environment were all shaped for colonial purposes. While these structures have evolved to their present-day forms their roots in colonialism cannot be denied.
Take gender as an example. Above you will see a piece of pottery that Katsitsionni made for her “Life Givers” series and is titled “Three Sisters.”
Katsitsionni told me that
Our people, the Haudenosaunee people, are a matrilineal society so a lot of what we do comes through the women so when babies are born their clan comes through their mother and their mother is even responsible for choosing their Kanienkehaka name. It was the women that were mostly responsible for our foods…When the Europeans came over I think they really kind of attacked the roles of our women and one of the major things that happened as a result of colonization is that the roles of women, especially in agriculture, were reversed with boarding schools, when they took our kids away to boarding schools…and tried to annihilate our culture and language. They tried to put us into the roles that they were used to of women doing housework and women staying in the house and men being out in the garden, they tried to force us into their box of how they viewed the world.
The Haudenosaunee people are not alone as many other Indigenous cultures are matrilineal, women being extremely valued in a way that does not resemble the patriarchal society that has been imposed by colonial knowledge structures.
While it is important to see the ways in which these colonial constructions have impacts on both Indigenous and settler society and in turn learn from Indigenous ways of knowing, Katsitsionni and I discussed that this cannot come without taking responsibility and making amends for injustices.
There is a lot that is being uncovered lately with social injustice, environmental injustice, and I think for the settler population or Europeans, the Western people, there is so much shame that is attached to the history of this country (The United States of America) that people are not seemingly willing to accept or take responsibility for. So, I think overcoming that and coming to a place where we can acknowledge those injustices and try to make amends for that and be able to move forward.
Seeking regenerative solutions: The North Country Art, Land, and Environment Summit
The North Country Art, Land, and Environment Summit will hear from Indigenous peoples, leaders, educators, and activists who work on many of these issues. You may be asking yourself why I chose to tell you about gender in a series on food sovereignty? It is because to decolonize and challenge settler colonial privilege, is to recognize that all of these issues are connected through their roots in colonialism. As the series progresses, I will take you through the ways in which colonial constructions of the environment and food have endangered access to healthy, sustainable and culturally appropriate foods and the ways in which the efforts of Earth Guardians can help everyone learn to care for themselves, their earth, and their fellow human. We are living in a climate crisis and are being shown our food system is incredibly fragile, but everything is not doom and gloom! There are answers coming from people working incredibly hard on these issues that this series and The North Country Art, Land, and Environment Summit hopes to show you. We can change our world if we just take the time to learn.
The North Country, Art, Land, and Environment Summit is being organized by Talking Wings Productions and will take place between September 9th and October 2nd, 2020. Their team is primarily comprised of Veronica Blake Lavia, Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo, and producer Alejandro Beltrán Cordero. You can find out more about Talking Wings at https://talking-wings.com and the Summit at https://nocoenvironment.org/.
Katsitsionni Fox is an artist, filmmaker, and educator. She is the owner of Two Row Productions and you can find her new documentary “Without a Whisper - Konnon:kwe” that tells the story of how Haudenosaunee women influenced the women’s rights movement at https://www.withoutawhisperfilm.com/.
Banner image courtesy of Talking Wings Productions.
