The Internationalist Archive
Eva Jewell is Anishinaabe from Deshkan Ziibiing and a member of Chippewas of the Thames First Nation in Southwestern Ontario with paternal lineage from Oneida Nation of the Thames. Her research is in areas of Anishinaabe cultural and political reclamation, Indigenous experiences of work and care, and accountability in reconciliation. She is the research director at Yellowhead Institute and an assistant professor of sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University.
For issue #90 of The Internationalist, we draw from her essay, 'Towards an Anti-Colonial: Feminist Care Ethic' which was first published in Making Space for Indigenous Feminism edited by Gina Starblanket and published by Fernwood Publishing.
Here, she explains how the 2021 discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada highlighted the need for genuine, transformative action in addressing the structural legacies of colonialism, rather than symbolic gestures, in order to achieve meaningful reconciliation for Indigenous Peoples.
In late May of 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced the discovery of 215 unmarked graves outside of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, prompting a media storm in the summer of 2021 that thrust Canada’s Indian residential school system into the international spotlight. As Canada’s genocidal history was exposed, Canadians began searching for answers. Established in 2008, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc) heard testimony from thousands of survivors of Canada’s Indian residential school system across the country, culminating in a six-volume final report released in 2015. Accompanying the report were 94 Calls to Action meant to redress the ongoing structural legacies that Indigenous Peoples experience in Canada and advance reconciliation. These Calls, as Gitxsan scholar and child rights advocate Cindy Blackstock aptly put it, are the “Survivor’s work plan” for Canada. In their 2015 federal campaign platform, the Liberal Party (led by Justin Trudeau) promised to fully implement all 94 of the Calls to Action. As of 2022, only thirteen of the 94 Calls to Action have been completed. Since 2019, I have co-authored an annual check-in on the progress toward completing the trc’s 94 Calls to Action with Ian Mosby for Yellowhead Institute. In the first two years that we published our reports (prior to the Kamloops revelations), there was little public uptake or interest on whether or not the Calls to Action were being implemented. But after Kamloops, the issue of child graves outside of Indian residential schools brought an urgency to what action Canada had committed toward reconciliation. Galvanized by the announcement of more than 750 possible unmarked graves outside of the former Marieval Indian Residential School, the now mounting physical evidence of child death continues to horrify Canadians. There has been a significant increase in attention to the Calls to Action as media outlets and Canadians searched for evidence that there was justice for these children, that this was an issue that was being taken care of. Unfortunately, our reports provided little solace to an aching Canadian public whose identity built on delusions of caring benevolence were now entirely upended. Interestingly, we found that in the three weeks following the Kamloops revelations, three Calls to Action were completed — more movement on the Calls to Action than in the previous three years combined — and that each were hardly among the transformative, urgent Calls to Action that would materially change conditions for Indigenous Peoples. Canada was working hard to appear that it cared. In its hasty implementation, Canada invoked the appearance of a caring response, indeed, a moral response — and, in so doing, attending to the grief of Canadians with the balm of “making good on a promise” — to divert from the reality of its own incredible, ongoing violence.
If anything has compelled settlers to reflect on the meaning of their presence in these lands, it is the post-Kamloops era of reconciliation. Having studied Canada’s performance of reconciliation over the years from a critical Anishinaabe perspective, I am often asked by Canadians, “What can I do?” Individual Canadians feel compelled to engage in acts of reconciliation where their country has failed, but there is the problem of the neoliberal condition where “change” is individualized and paired with consumptive behaviours; whatever small gesture becomes a temporal, symbolic act that, in the end, still upholds settler colonial systems. By way of example, Phyllis Webstad, a Secwépemc woman and survivor of St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, began telling her story to children in 2013. Her story of her grandmother’s loving care being represented by an orange shirt (which would later be taken from her upon arrival at the institution) began as a powerful pedagogical tool that conveyed to a new generation of children the gravity of what it meant for Indigenous children to be taken away from the care of their families. Since then, “Orange Shirt Day,” observed on September 30, evolved into an event typically seen in Canadian public schools across the country until it rhetorically merged with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in 2021. The ensuing National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is now symbolized by wearing an orange shirt in an homage to Phyllis’s grandmother’s care. Orange T-shirts have since become an important commodity, and the annual observance of this day is accompanied by the availability of orange products for purchase in the month of September, not least of which is a special orange sprinkle donut by Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons. Webstad’s felt experience of being dispossessed of her grandmother’s care demonstrates that in a neoliberal context, these avenues of “solidarity” are commodifications that reify settler colonial capitalist practices and a Canadian culture of symbolized benevolence. Such is the nature of individualizing change in a neoliberal context. As Tuscarora author Alicia Elliott tweeted on September 30, 2022, “The government and politicians, who have power to make real change, have encouraged everyday Canadians to think reconciliation is achieved through individual capitalist consumption.”
There is utility of feminist care analysis in contemporary Indigenous worlds, as it can inform our critiques and engagements with matters such as reconciliation. If inclusive of a settler colonial analysis and if aiming toward anti-colonial praxis, I propose that feminist care ethics can assist settlers to reflect on their daily practice of how they embody, normalize, and contribute to the perpetuation of settler colonial conditions, with space for considering how care can transform rather than reproduce settler colonial structures. Having analyzed the instruments of reconciliation rhetoric over the years, I’ve come to understand that reconciliation is an aspirational project with necessary precursors to its actualization. There are, in my mind, two discrete forms of reconciliation, about which other scholars like Rachel Flowers, Tracey Lindberg, David MacDonald, and Ginger Gosnell-Myers have also written. The first discrete form of reconciliation is for Indigenous Peoples: it is a commitment to repairing the relationship, understanding, and connection we have to our worldviews, languages, care practices, governance structures, and ways of life that residential schools and the Sixties and Millennium Scoops violently disrupted. Canada’s policy of genocide stole hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children from their nations. Children who ought to have been populating distinct, unique, rights-bearing Indigenous nations and societies with renewed generations of knowers and members. If 150,000 children attended Indian residential schools, and congruently with the schools, many more were adopted into white homes during the Sixties and Millennium Scoops, then it follows that millions of people — parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, clans, houses, and any variation of kin structures unique to Indigenous governance systems — were violently dispossessed of their inherent right to care for their children. This speaks to the power that our nations pose if they are socially and culturally reproduced. To reconcile for Indigenous Peoples is not to reconcile with the state and normalize the hellscape that is settler colonialism. It is not to educate settlers or inform their curiosities of our differences. I am of the mind that for Indigenous Peoples, reconciliation is a spiritual, cultural, and ontological reparative project with deep political implications like land back, cash back, and worlds back so that we can reproduce our futurities as peoples with distinct, longstanding, and pre-existing relationality with our lands. We did not choose for white “care” to disrupt our worlds. But our acts of repairing the care we extend to ourselves, our land, and our relatives is the work of “reconciliation before reconciliation,” as Lindberg has described it.
It is no secret that reconciliation is the contemporary, popular, discursive means by which Canadians understand Indigenous issues. The concept of reconciliation is critiqued for its malleable qualities that allow it to be twisted and co-opted by the Canadian state as a feel-good, moderate, harm-reduction approach that fails to transform the structures that violate Indigenous Peoples and our lands, waters, and non-human kin. And yet, I’ve found utility in the concept if only to serve as a topical segue to impressing the importance of anti-colonial, restorative, resurgent practice in our own communities. It is a useful springboard for considering how we “reconcile” or confront the colonial legacies that continue in our communities.
There is, indeed, a need for much deeper consideration of this care, or of this reconciliation, that we extend to ourselves as Indigenous Peoples. As the early feminist care ethics scholars found, care is a feminized activity despite it being necessary for all, and it is an aspect of human life that has been denigrated under patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism. An honest and truthful look at care in our own communities might reveal the same patriarchal, colonial power issues at play. Like other populations, Indigenous women, queer, and feminized people bear much of the care labour in our communities and continue to be targets of violence: “The disturbing frequency of domestic and sexual violence among Native people is nothing other than a result of centuries of settler colonial violence and dispossession”. Considering that “reconciling with ourselves” is a labour of care and an act of social and cultural reproduction, it must then be rooted in an Indigenous feminist tradition of critical intervention, as Gina Starblanket explains in her chapter “Being Indigenous Feminists: Resurgences Against Contemporary Patriarchy” in the second edition of the Making Space for Indigenous Feminism volume. Resurgent practices necessarily invoke cultural memory, the formation of which is never neutral since it involves deliberate choices about which knowledge is “relevant,” and which knowledge can be “forgotten”. Starblanket asserts then, that maintaining a critical mind to how cultural memory is constructed — with particular focus on which practices are remembered for their alignment with political narratives like cis-heteropatriarchy — is a vital and necessary component to the action of resurgent endeavours; else these movements reproduce the same structures that harm our communities. Concepts of care in any one of our Indigenous worlds is a broad practice, a way of life, a profound attunement to the relational matter of kin with transformative possibility. To remember and reclaim this modality is powerful, if done so with a mind to Starblanket’s cautions about unwittingly reifying the very structures of oppression we are attempting to dismantle.
For settlers, reconciliation is a reckoning with and commitment to changing behaviours, practices, beliefs, and structures that normalize settler colonial violence and white supremacy. It is a radical re-membering of the responsibilities that come with the right to be on this land, and the original laws, relationships, kinships, and treaties that permit them to be here. It is an acknowledgement of the limits of settler rights in these lands, and the long, ongoing history of violence against the land and her original inhabitants that amounts to the crime of genocide. The majority of Canadian activity, occupation, industry, and infrastructure has been built without the consent of the nations on whose lands these exist. For settlers, reconciliation means acknowledging the role of change in the home, by deeply reflecting on what worlds are created in everyday moments — the construction of situations, as French sociologist Lefebvre theorized — and how to leverage this into community organizing and action. Feminist care ethics, if attentive to how care contributes to the social and cultural reproduction of settler colonialism, can provide us with insights into everyday transformative actions that can propel settlers toward meaningful reckoning with their colonial reality. Brannelly and Boulton note in their assertion that feminist care ethics can provide guidance in Indigenous–non-Indigenous research relationships, enabling “explicit consideration of issues of politics, privilege and ethics, calling for recognition of inequality and responsibility for action in solidarity with the people affected.”
While feminist care ethics can provide settlers with relational guidance (particularly when it comes to reconciliation), vigilance is required to remain attentive to the liberatory goal of relationality. This is not always a feel-good exercise. To return to my killjoy sentiment, I summon Rachel Flowers’s experience intervening in settler feminist solidarity, which she details in her piece “Refusal to Forgive: Indigenous Women’s Love and Rage.” Flowers resists settler scholar Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox’s characterization of Indigenous women’s direct action as evidence of growth from “frustrated anger” to “powerful loving action.” Irlbacher-Fox effectively implied in her 2012 essay “#IdleNoMore: Settler Responsibility for Relationship” that anger for Indigenous women is an ineffectual sentiment and that loving action is a more purposeful, positive affect with greater potential for change. The implication here is that settlers are more likely to support Indigenous causes if they are couched in heartwarming displays of love that are more comfortable to view for settler onlookers. The work of reclaiming care for Indigenous Peoples, even if it is couched in heartwarming sentiments that are comfortable for settler onlookers, is still very much an act of undoing colonial worlds and power. My critique of feminist care ethics and my killjoy approach is very much a project of Jean Améry’s ressentiment, to which Flowers refers in her work as “the intolerance for the way in which descendants of the perpetrators are allowed to facilitate a forgetting of the past.” Early feminist care scholars, in their endeavour to empower feminized, moral dimensions of care, neglected to attend to the geopolitical context of their presence and claims to care. While a powerful concept for the movements of Indigenous reclamation, settler reckoning, and perhaps Indigenous-settler relations, care’s political dimensions and its role in social/cultural reproduction cannot be overstated.
While feminist care ethics literature is “diversifying” from its traditions in white feminist scholarship to include powerful perspectives of care from Black and Indigenous care experiences (among many others not mentioned in this chapter), there is much work to be done to adopt an analysis of the specificity that is the settler colonial geopolitical context of care ethics. Learning from a rich Indigenous feminist literature from the likes of Dian Million, Kim Anderson, Cutcha Risling Baldy, Laura Harjo, and Mishuana Goeman (to name but very, very few) can offer insight into how care and social reproduction of Indigenous worlds is anti-colonial labour taken on by femme embodiments — labour that is subversive to the very care labour white women engage in to uphold their settler colonial worlds. Contemporary feminist care ethics can be helpful in that it identifies how instruments of settler colonialism are reproduced through care in social and cultural reproduction. As an Anishinaabe interlocutor engaging with feminist care ethics, I don’t think the role of white women’s care in the broader scheme of violence against Indigenous Peoples, specifically women, queer/Two-Spirit people and children, can be overstated. White women were culpable in the genocidal project of settler colonialism, which eroded Indigenous worldviews in the name of white dominance, guised as the very care and responsibility that is theorized as dignified labour.
It is also important to expand on how we as Indigenous Peoples socially and culturally reproduce our worlds and, while not the sole focus of this chapter, more attention to how care has been gendered under colonial patriarchy and disproportionately placed on the shoulders of Indigenous femme embodiments is necessary. This is the work that I am committed to continuing as an Anishinaabe interlocutor with feminist care ethics. In an age where political projects such as reconciliation are commonly framed through notions of interrelatedness and care, where care is then increasingly taken up as a relational claim between settler Canadians and Indigenous Peoples, it is imperative that we focus on our respective responsibilities in the work toward creating the conditions for reconciliation. It’s possible that reconciliation is a space we will come to in the future, but the conditions in which cultural and social worlds are reproduced must change for that to be a possibility. There must be meaningful reflection on the conditions of settler colonial violence that continue to be reproduced on stolen Indigenous lands and a commitment toward centring Indigenous lives, worldviews, and legal orders as the framework for reconciliation. I think that feminist care ethics is a potential site for a more mainstream analysis of how the logics, structures, and behaviours that uphold settler colonialism are reproduced, and white women’s role in that reproduction — if even in commentary on the utility of our affect in resisting colonial violence — cannot be overstated. For this to be a possibility, mainstream feminist care ethics scholars need to be taking up more analysis and critique of how care and social reproduction in the geopolitical context of settler colonial states necessarily means upholding a power dynamic within which Indigenous Peoples, among others, face violence. Until then, as Gary notes, feminist care ethics as a liberatory project will fail. Not only will it fail to resonate with Indigenous feminist scholarship, it will fail to recognize its complicity and contributions to ongoing violence, ironically, in the name of care.
Excerpted from Making Space for Indigenous Feminism edited by Gina Starblanket, published by Fernwood Publishing. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
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