summer reading part two

all quotes from the book indigenizing the academy: transforming scholarship and empowering communities edited by devon abbott mihesuah & angela cavender wilson


from chapter 5: "warrior scholarship: seeing the university as a ground of contention" by taiaiake alfred

"colonialism is not an historical era, nor is it a theory or merely a political and economic relationship.  it is a total existence, a way of thinking about oneself and others always in terms of domination and submission that has come to form the very foundation of our individual and collective lives."

 "five hundred years of physical and psychological warfare have created a culture of fear among both the subdued and dominant peoples.  we have all emerged out of a shameful past, a history of racial and religious hatreds, of extreme violence, and of profound injustice.  it is impossible to even acknowledge it truthfully.  our modern culture, for both the victims and the perpetrators, consists in a denial of the past and of its moral implications.  it is an aversion to the truth about who we really are and where we come from.  more than the moneyed privilege of the newcomers, more than the chaotic disadvantage of the original peoples, this is what we have inherited from our shared past: relationships founded on hatred and violence and a culture founded on lies to assuage the guilt or shame of it all.  we are afraid of our memories, afraid of what we have become, afraid of each other, and afraid for the future.  fear is the foundation of the way we are in the world and the way we think about the future.  it has become normal, and we have grown used to it."

"the conception of the truth that will liberate us from our colonial past is this: honesty and courage lead to mutual understanding, and understanding creates the crucial connections that generate the sense of community - love - that is needed to overcome the disconnection and division and mutual hatreds that reinforce colonialism."

"in withdrawing from relevancy and immersing ourselves in the battle for personal gain or involving ourselves only in disciplinary and academic fights, we are playing assimilation's endgame."

"for those among us who are opposed to assimilation to the north american standard of conformity to possessive individualism, consumer culture, and state patriotism, there are two imperatives in an Indigenous ethical frame.  the first is to respect, value, and honor differences (independence); and the second is to organize one's mind and attitudes around the idea of the sharing of space (interdependence)."

"universities are part of the larger institutional system serving imperial objectives, today called 'globalization' when referring to the economic facets of the process or 'modernity' in relation to the cultural facets."

"given that academe today is such a crucial part of the larger injustice of modernity. . .are we part of the process of destruction of Indigenous cultures and nations, or are we upholding our responsibility to contend with it?  what can we do?  and what is the way to transcend this situation and regenerate our communities and cultures so that our peoples may survive into the future?"

"struggling against and negotiating with the descendants of europeans occupying our homelands for all these years, we have become very skilled, in the european way, at naming everything about ourselves: beliefs, rights, authorities, jurisdictions, land use areas, categories of membership in our communities. . . as if it were enough to speak these things to make them into a reality.  in fighting for our future, we have been sucked into thinking that 'Indigenous' or 'First Nations,' 'Carrier,' 'Cree,' or 'Mohawk' (even if we use Kanien'kehaka, or Innu, or Wet'suwet'en) is something that is attached to us inherently, and not a description of what we do with our lives."

from chapter 6: "seeing (and reading) red: Indian outlaws in the ivory towers" by daniel heath justice

"it's the standard stereotype for Native peoples throughout the americas: we're measured by pieces and parts, 'torn between worlds,' relegated to some romanticized past, never fully of the present.  and sometimes, in reality, we're pulled between the ranks and privileges of powerful institutions and the kitchen tables of our families, where life and culture so often gather.  Native wholeness is a threat to white dominance, as it evades the allotment of our lives and lands and faces the threat directly.  our fight is that of all Indigenous peoples: to remain whole, unbroken, and adaptive through tradition."

"humility is elusive in an academic world that privileges individual achievement over communal harmony"

 "to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson - that we were never meant to survive.  not as human beings." - audre lorde

"whether Native or non-Native, we've been trained by the overculture to see whiteness as normative and eternal; decolonization, in this worldview, is not only portrayed as unrealistic, but even pathological, for it brings into question the very conceptual foundations upon which the colonial estate is built."

"the struggle for sovereignty is not a struggle to be free from the influence of anything outside ourselves, but a process of asserting the power we possess as communities and individuals to make decisions that affect our lives." -clyde warrior

"we're also active participants in the community's making of meaning.  we're not outsiders looking in; we're insiders looking in and out."

"American Indian people have recently experienced the end of the world. . . [we] are a postapocalypse people who, as such, have tremendous experience to offer all other people who must, in their own time, experience their own cultural death as part of the natural cycle.  the ways in which American Indian people have suffered, survived, and managed to go on, communicated through story-telling, have tremendous potential to affect the future of mankind." -sidner larson

"all people have poetry in them.  some can't write it, but the poet can listen intently to what people say and send it out into the world.  it's a process of translation for the people." - marilou awiakta