.

Following from the last writing I shared here, the weeks since have been difficult for many people I care about, as well as for people I don’t know personally. The possibility of making restitution towards these circumstances begins with acknowledging the effects of my actions on other people. By recognizing some of those impacts here, this text is an initial step invested in taking responsibility, in building relationships of accountability and in moving towards the possibility of repair.

***

As someone who was raised believing I had mixed settler and Indigenous ancestry, I was recently called to investigate my identity in more detail and discovered that the family history that I was raised with does not match up with historical records. In response, I changed my self-identification to settler.

Growing up, I didn’t question who I was told I was. And yet, as an adult, I should have been more curious about my bloodlines, my ancestors—especially given that my self-identification allowed me to access resources and opportunities I would not have otherwise been offered. By neglecting to investigate this family history sooner or to consult Indigenous community and kinship networks about my family’s status, I have broken trust with peers, friends and collaborators. These repercussions extend beyond my personal relationships and outward into communities, causing feelings of hurt and anger. For this, I am deeply sorry.

My failure to understand the importance of substantiating what I believed my identity to be raises questions about my complicity with the structures of settler colonialism and white supremacy culture—urgent questions that I am committed to addressing both privately and publicly. 

In working to take responsibility, these are some initial actions I’ve begun working on and am committed to:

• Pursuing dialogue and accountability with Indigenous people I have collaborated with;
• Making amends for the grant monies I received that were directed to Indigenous curators by contacting the arts councils about the possibility of repayment and, failing that, making equivalent donations, over time, to Indigenous-led organizations that support Indigenous futurity;
• Seeking the professional advice of a transformative justice facilitator in making plans for further accountability and meaningful restitution.

Through these actions, I am working to understand the implications of my changed self-identification. I am hoping to build a framework of accountability that is articulated through relationships and that is committed to transformative forms of justice, while also recognizing that not all harms can be repaired.

This is the beginning of a long-term process and I know there is more to be done than what is mentioned here. As these processes move forward, I will continue to share publicly in this space.

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The Histories We Carry

This post has been substantially revised on 10 March 2021. As part of the questioning and learning that I am engaging in here, the original post can be downloaded here.

On 19 April 2021, I wrote further about my responsibilities to the information shared here. That post can be read here.

Social and political discourses are always evolving, and in Canada these discussions need to have Indigenous self-determination and the dismantling of settler colonialism at their core. Rising up from a long history of Indigenous identity being adjudicated by the settler state, recent conversations around indigeneity have called for greater accountability on how Indigenous people fit into Indigenous communities, recognizing also that Indigenous identity is impacted by historical and ongoing processes of colonization.

In my bio, I previously identified as having mixed settler and Indigenous ancestry, which reflected an understanding of myself that I grew up with. The earlier version of this post shared my thinking around choosing that language. However, when recently reviewing historical census data, I have not been able to find corroborating documentation for my family’s claims to Indigenous ancestry. This is a space of confusion for me as it pits family histories against government records, and I am unsure how to hold these different sources in relation to each other. So, although census data is not a full understanding of who a person is or who a family are, this information does challenge who I have understood myself to be. This specific research, which is ongoing, followed the publishing of the original blog post shared here, and I am now trying to parse how inherited family histories are challenged by historical records.

The personal work of trying to repair family relationships, which I have been preoccupied with, is different in kind from the work of being part of a collective social body, and I should have also been working to establish ties to specific Indigenous communities to whom my family might have been connected before claiming a mixed settler and Indigenous identity. (And yet, I recognize that rebuilding these relations is not possible for every person who has been disconnected from their families of origin and their communities, and I want to hold a space for these people and the legitimacy of their experiences.) I apologize for relying solely on what has been presented as family knowledge in building my identity; this alone is not a fulsome marker of indigeneity because it neglects the kinship structures of Indigenous communities and it elides their agency in deciding membership on their own terms.

Conversations about Indigenous identity being tied to being claimed by Indigenous communities are important because they emphasize the self-determination of Indigenous nations, acting as a corrective to the many ways that settler-colonial governments have tried to adjudicate Indigenous identity out of existence. Having had only my mother to claim me does not make a community. In response to these concerns and as I work to better understand the information I have found in historical records, I am no longer identifying as having mixed Indigenous ancestry and I’ve removed the associated line in my bio.

Through my work, I have tried to understand the structural forces that have come to make the settler colonial nation state called Canada, which is my home, and how those same forces have come to shape my family too. This is ever more important for me given the new knowledges I have about what historical records suggests about my family. In the work that I have done that has been explicitly aligned with my indigeneity, such as residencies supported by the Canada Council for Aboriginal curators or with the Wood Land School, I have been committed to working with artists to challenge structures of supremacist power and to critically interrogate the systems that allow settler colonialism to continue to unfold. However, I apologize for pursuing these professional opportunities without the attendant care that they deserved; I should have had a more fulsome understanding of who I am before participating in programs that were identity related. I recognize that this is a symptom of those same systems I am wanting to dismantle and I am invested in figuring out what kinds of repair are possible from here.

I remain committed to pushing the work of dismantling supremacies within an ongoing settler colonial project further and making this work more precise. In part, this means figuring out how to work in a way that doesn’t detract from the urgent labour of Indigenous self-determination, and to figure out how I might use the privileges I am afforded in service of these decolonized futures.

***

My revised bio can be found here.

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Closure

Wood Land School: Kahatenhstánion tsi na’tetiatere ne Iotohrkó:wa tánon Iotohrha /Drawing Lines from January to December is now closed. Although I have chosen to no longer be a part of Wood Land School, I remain committed to interrogating the possibilities and limits of institutions, and to making a future that is more just than the histories we have inherited.

This is just EVERYTHING.

After a long award show a girl can't wait to take it off!@brunomars #24kmagic pic.twitter.com/3TfwsV4kZ0

— Halle Berry (@halleberry) February 27, 2017

Every Name in History is “I”

(I’ve been conducting writing experiments, prompted by Eva-Lynn Jagoe. I’m trying to not be precious about it. Here’s a bit of how I approached her prompt to write a piece in which the grammatical voice shifts.)

***

Every name in history is “I,” though you wouldn’t know it for the way our stories pass from one generation to the next. If the individual remains, and most often they do not, then “I” is made into an object of the proper name. The complexity of being becomes the simplicity of thing. However awful the repeal of the capacity for narrative may seem, this fate is to be saved from something worse, which is your subsumption into the unnamed masses upon which history plays. If this fate is difficult to bear—your agency inevitably undone—then persistence must be sought outside of historicization. Here, we experience the other as if they belonged to us.

Another interpretation of the claim is possible. If every name in history is I, then each signifier is revivified when we assume it as our own. I am Friedrich Neitzsche who first authored these words to the historian Jakob Burckhardt in 1889, a mere two days after collapsing in the streets of Turin with his arms around the neck of a horse. I am Jalal Toufic who took Nietzsche’s words for his own in trying to understand the act of murder conditioned by anonymity between a soldier and their enemy in an essay first published in the year 2000. I am the object of address in every “you” or “we” or “their,” performing a restorative kind of magic in answering the offered call. I suppose that poetry is a name for this inverted reification, where the thickness of language compels identification, turning nouns back into verbs. This kind of direct address resists strict interpretation. How do we live within poetry? To live within poetry is to register oneself being addressed. Here we experience the other as if they were us.

The torture of every name in history being “I,” mine, is that history anticipates my name being sung back to me, dead. Nothing registers this loss so deeply as love. How is the form of love reconstituted by history when we recognize that all our electricity will dissipate? Love makes us terrified. Love renders us pathetic. Love is written and rewritten with such regularity as to be utterly banal; history tells us this. Here we experience ourselves as if we were another, our identity unstable and exceedingly vulnerable to the whims of the beloved.

There are many ways of being distant, many ways of being near.

Experiments with Language

I played a game of writing, where I spent 10 minutes telling about a text that has profoundly shaped me:

Leonard Cohen’s “The Favourite Game”

Passed into my hands with heat, an exchanged book was set to become an emblem of a relationship that was just then beginning to unfold. In any case, this one especially, the scope of paradigm shift cannot be anticipated because it is a reordering that renders assumptions about the world mutually incomprehensible. So I was someone before and someone else after. Our intimate dancing began and ended, a regular chronology afterall, but in the interval I took those words and marked them on my body. This is language I want to be read upon my flesh when it lay dead, language I wanted to be read each time my clothing fell to the floor. Because it was love—sweet, young—that pressed those words into my palms, I could not consider its eventual unravelling; my skin was scarred in a moment of indulgence or optimism that now other lovers read on my body instead.

And then I spent six minutes telling about a text I have shamefully not read:

I have a pat answer for this. I have a pat answer for this and it has been so for years, compounding the shame. I have a pat answer for this and I am just days distance from doing the thing I always do rather than meeting the writing on its own terms. Virginia Woolf, pockets full of rocks, how have I not been there with her? Oh, but Rebecca Solnit wrote of her writing and I take that in, always reading around Woolf instead of meeting her head on.

 

In the spirit of careful precision, this distinction as articulated by Nelson Maldonado-Torres:

Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday.

We are all students and subjects of coloniality. So what are we gonna do about it?

And what happens to sovereignty when it rests upon an empire, both to the colonizing nation and the colonized state? Is sovereignty diluted or made stronger when set in relation to patterns of oppression?

In the first issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang present “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” a call to examine the ways the term is diluted when applied to projects that are anything other than the repatriation of Indigenous lands and life. It’s a powerful article. Read it here. Their call to be aware of the import of the term corresponds to a reconsideration of what exactly we are doing in cultural venues (like art galleries) when we try to critically approach ongoing processes of colonization. In short, most of the time, the thing we are doing is not decolonizing. It’s not that there is no value in this kind of work, but we need to grapple with “how the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence–diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.”

In working toward that consideration, Tuck and Yang make some important clarifications in what they call the set of settler colonial relations. I found these two particular articulations to be precise and useful in thinking through a colonized landscape in North America.

First, distinguishing between settler and immigrants, they note that “settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies.”

Second, an idea of race is deployed differently according on one’s position in the set of relations, which Tuck and Yang see as being composed of three nodes: settler, native, slave. Race is constructed in ways that always lead back to the fortification of settler power so that “through the one-drop rule, blackness in settler colonial contexts is expansive, ensuring that a slave/criminal status will be inherited by an expanding number of ‘black’ descendents. Yet, Indigenous peoples have been racialized in a profoundly different way. Native American-ness is subtractive: Native Americans are constructed to become few in number and less Native, but never exactly white, over time. Our/their status as Indigenous peoples/first inhabitants is the basis of our/their land claims and the goal of settler colonialism is the diminish claims to land over generations (or sooner, if possible). That is, Native American is a racialization that portrays contemporary Indigenous generations to be less authentic, less Indigenous than every prior generation in order to ultimately phase out Indigenous claims to land and usher in settler claims to property.”

Understanding the way our own identities are configured in relationship to access to land, resources and power is just one essential step in being able to re-do the order of the world in a decolonial way. And it must be accompanied by those literal re-doings.

I do not put much stock in polls, but the recent proposal to ban religious headwear and symbols in Québec, which is laid out in a piece of legislation titled the “Charter of Values,” is supported by a shocking 58% of people in the province according to a Forum Research study. The proposal has less support in other parts of Canada, but not by much: disturbingly, 47% of people asked are in favour.

The legislation, as it is formulated now, aims to outlaw public employees from wearing hijabs, turbans, kippas, visible crucifixes and other religious clothing and symbols in schools, hospitals, day cares and other government buildings in the province. Or as Colby Cosh summarized it, the charter seeks to dictate “purely personal, passive displays of religious faith by employees [which] are inconsistent with the government of Québec’s overall secular mission and nature.” The idea is that the adornment of religious symbols by public employees somehow compromises the province’s commitment to secularism, but I really don’t follow the logic. The province is composed of individuals, all of whom have beliefs. State functions are processes carried out by people. I’m not sure how this competency is affected by religious clothing or symbols.

Québec Premier Pauline Marois has said that the charter “reflects universal values, Quebec values, and would be a uniting force for the province.” But just to be clear, the value represented in this charter is racism, a racism that could propagate further intolerance by normalizing imposed conformity to a single dominant culture. I follow this logic, and it’s shameful. Monoculture does not make unity. Cultural unity, to have any real value, must require something of its citizens: at base, an acceptance of diversity. Which means encounters with difference, not cultural camouflage.

Last year, Vancouver’s Access Gallery presented Always Working, a curatorial project by Gabrielle Moser. The exhibition reflects on contemporary modes of working–often intangible, rooted in process of care and computation–and asks how global flows of capital respond to these process when they malfunction. Specifically, Moser is curious about useless excess (not necessarily work for its own sake, but deliberate actions that refuse their regular associations with service) and how it resists being absorbed back into an economic accounting of labour and capital. In the stumble of the economy in the face of these kinds of unproductivities, Moser proposes that work is activated “as a space for social critique and political action.” Affective tendencies, here, become thoughtful disruptions of systems that otherwise rely on totalizing mythologies for their propagation.

Departing from this exhibition, Moser has guest-edited a section of Fillip 18, further exploring the relationship between desire and labour. She has commissioned projects by Sven Lütticken and the artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian to reflect on the conditions under which artistic labour is made to appear or disappear.

Moser will be hosting a launch of the journal tomorrow night in Vancouver at Access, and has arranged a performative discussion where a number of cultural workers have been invited to present texts that further interrogate the ways labour is utilized, exploited or subverted in the art world. Though I will not be present for the launch, Gabby will channel me (its own kind of affective labour!) to contribute excerpts from Samuel C. Florman’s The Existential Pleasures of Engineering and Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. The former, published in 1976, is a manifesto imploring engineers to recognize the emotional and intellectual privilege of the work they do. Berardi’s text, published in 2009, counters the propagandistic tone of Florman’s treatise, suggesting that a globalized economy relies on the promise of creativity and flexibility in order to demand excessively more labour from workers. Our desires are leveraged to prolong the working day (because we believe in the work we do and/or because we live in debt) and expand working spaces (to the home office, or the wherever-you-may-be when your cellphone rings).

In a way, it boils down to this: what is our desired (practical) result? How do we imagine the relationship between ourselves and society? How can labour be in service of our desires, not the other way around?