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.