Obligations

This text is from this place, and that means it will not always travel well, generalize well, make sense elsewhere (…) That's fine.

Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, p. 29

Dieser Text kommt von hier, und das bedeutet, dass er sich nicht immer gut übertragen, verallgemeinern oder anderswo einen Sinn ergeben wird (…) Das ist in Ordnung.

It is common to introduce Indigenous authors with their nation/affiliation, while settler and white scholars almost always remain unmarked, like “Lloyd Stouffer.” This unmarking is one act among many that re-centres settlers and whiteness as an unexceptional norm, while deviations have to be marked and named. Simone de Beauvoir (French) called this positionality both “positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general.” Not cool. This led me to a methodological dilemma. Do I mark everyone? No one? I thought about just leaving it, because this is difficult and even uncomfortable to figure out, but since this is a methods text I figured I should shit or get off the pot. Feminist standpoint theory and even truth and reconciliation processes maintain that social location and the different collectives we are part of matter to relations, obligations, ethics, and knowledge. Settlers have a different place in reconciliation than Indigenous people, than Black people who were stolen from their Land. As la paperson (diasporic settler of colour) writes, “‘Settler’ is not an identity; it is the idealized juridical space of exceptional rights granted to normative settler citizens and the idealized exceptionalism by which the settler state exerts its sovereignty. The ‘settler’ is a site of exception from which whiteness emerges. . . . [T]he anthropocentric normal is written in its image.” This assumed positive and neutral “normal” right is enacted in the lack of introduction of settlers as settlers, as if settler presence on Land, especially Indigenous Land, is the stable and unremarkable norm. What allows settlers to consistently and unthinkingly not introduce their relations to Land and colonial systems is settlerism. See paperson, A Third University Is Possible, 10; and Beauvoir, Second Sex.

In light of this complex terrain, my imperfect methodological decision has been to identify all authors the way they identify themselves (thank you to everyone who does this!) the first time they appear in a chapter. If an author does not introduce themselves or their land relations, I mark them as “unmarked.” I do this rather than marking settlers as settlers because of the advice of Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), who encourages people to look at structures of the settler state rather than focusing on naming individual settlers, which reenacts the logics of eugenicist and racist impulses to properly and finally categorize people properly. TallBear, Callison, and Harp. “Ep. 198.” I take up this method so we, as users of texts, can understand where authors are speaking from, what ground they stand on, whom their obligations are to, what forms of sovereignty are being leveraged, what structures of privilege the settler state affords, and how we are related so that our obligations to one another as speaker and listener, writer and audience, can be specific enough to enact obligations to one another, a key goal of this text. How has colonialism affected us differently? Introducing yourself is part of ethics and obligation, not punishment. Following Marisa Duarte’s (Yaqui) example in Network Sovereignty, I simply introduce people in this way by using parentheses after the first time their name is mentioned. Duarte, Network Sovereignty.

Cf. Dave Snowden & Simon Wardley