Narrating Colonial Silences: Racialized Social Work Educators Unsettling our Settlerhood
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v14i2.2215Keywords:
decolonization, indigenous, model minority, settler colonialism, recognition, reconciliation, social work educationAbstract
In this paper, three racialized social work educators unsettle our settled colonial silences as acts of self-decolonization and as a way of responding to the call to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Hailing from the uneven manifestations of global capitalism and coloniality in Morocco, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, we draw on various critical theories to interrogate our unique entanglements with the imperial project of entwined settler colonialism and white supremacy. We narrate our embodied coloniality and how the virulent materiality of global processes of displacement and dispossession plays out in each of our personal stories, everyday encounters, and practices as educators.
With the aim of teaching for social justice by modeling, we share the processes of unsettling our colonial settlerhood and puncturing our racialized innocence. Each story addresses three themes: contact and colonial relations with Indigenous peoples of Canada, complicity in global coloniality, and responsibility in responding to the TRC call to action. The first story provides a broad outline of our struggles with the Indigenous/Settler binary created to perpetuate the various forms of displacement and dispossession in settler colonialism. The second story probes the complexities in the Settler category by engaging difference-making as a central technology of dispossession. The third story probes the complexities in the Indigenous category through interrogating the perils and promises of recognition and reconciliation in the context of global hierarchies of nation-states and global Indigenous resistance. We conclude bymoving beyond our divergent trajectories and offering shared critical remarks on the human rights framework, the nation-state framework, and the coloniality of social work.
References
Absolon, K. (Minogiizhigokwe). (2011). Kaandossiwin: How we come to know. Fernwood Publishing.
Alfred, T. (2005). Wasáse: Indigenous pathways of action and freedom. University of Toronto Press.
Alfred, T. (2018). Don’t just resist: Return to who you are. YES!, 85, 31-32.
Amadahy, Z., & Lawrence, B. (2009). Indigenous peoples and Black people in Canada: Settlers or allies? In A. Kempf (Ed.), Breaching the colonial contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada (pp. 105-136). Springer.
American University of Beirut. (2013, June 17). CASAR Lecture - Comparing Colonial Regimes [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwj5bcLG8ic
Badwall, H. K. (2015). Colonial encounters: Racialized social workers negotiating professional scripts of whiteness. Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice, 3(1), 1-23.
Bakan, A., & Dua, E. (2014). Theorizing anti-racism: Linkages to Marxism and critical race theories. University of Toronto Press.
Bauder, H. (2008). Dialectics of humanitarian immigration and national identity in Canadian public discourse. Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees, 25(1), 84-93.
Blackstock, C. (2017). Does social work have the guts for social justice and reconciliation? In E. Spencer, D. Massing, & J. Gough (Eds.), Social work ethics (pp. 115-128). Oxford University Press.
Burke, N. (2004). Building a “Canadian” decolonization movement: Fighting the occupation at “home”. Colours of Resistance Archives. http://www.coloursofresistance.org/360/building-a-canadian-decolonization-movement-fighting-the-occupation-at-home/
CBC. (1975, January 27). Canada supplies the Vietnam war machine. CBC Digital Archives. https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/supplying-the-war-machine
Chatterjee, S. (2018a). Immigration, anti-racism, and Indigenous self-determination: Towards a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary settler colonial. Social Identities, 25(5), 644-661.
Chatterjee, S. (2018b). Teaching immigration for reconciliation. Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice, 6(4), 1-15.
Chen, K. H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press.
Coleman, D. (2016). Indigenous place and diaspora space: Of literalism and abstraction. Settler Colonial Studies, 6 (1), 61–76.
Coulthard, G. (2007). Subjects of empire: Indigenous peoples and the ‘politics of recognition’ in Canada. Contemporary Political Theory, 6, 437-460.
Daoudi, A. (2018). Multilingualism in Algeria: Between ‘soft power’, ‘Arabisation’, ‘Islamisation’, and ‘globalisation’. Journal of North African Studies, 23(3), 460-481.
Daschuk, J. (2013). Clearing the plains: Disease, politics of starvation and the loss of Aboriginal life. University of Regina Press.
Dauvergne, C. (2005). Humanitarianism, identity, and nation: Migration laws of Australia and Canada. UBC Press.
Davis, L., Hiller, C., James, C., Lloyd, K., Nasca, T., & Taylor, S. (2017). Complicated pathways: Settler Canadians learning to re/frame themselves and their relationships with Indigenous peoples. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(4), 398-414.
Dominelli, L. (2010). Globalization, contemporary challenges and social work practice. International Social Work, 53(5), 599-612.
Elkchirid, A. (2012). Multicultural Competencies for Community Counsellors. African Journal for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 15(2), 393-410.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. Grove Press.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
Hage, G. (2016). Etat de siège: A dying domesticating colonialism? American Ethnologist, 43(1): 38-49.
Heron, B. (2007). Desire for development: Whiteness, gender, and the helping imperative. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Holcomb, B. K., & Ibssa, S. (1990). The invention of Ethiopia: The making of a dependent colonial state in Northeast Africa. Red Sea Press.
Hyndman, J. (2000). Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism. University of Minnesota Press.
Hyndman, J. (2003). Aid, conflict and migration: The Canada‐Sri Lanka connection. Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 47(3), 251-268.
Kennedy-Kish, B. (2017). An Anishinaabe elder’s perspective. In B. Kennedy-Kish, R. Sinclair, B. Carniol, & D. Baines (Eds.), Case critical: Social services and social justice in Canada (pp. 3-11). Between the Lines.
Kennedy-Kish, B. & Carniol, B. (2017). A two-road approach to ethical practice. In E. Spencer, D. Massing, & J. Gough (Eds.), Social work ethics (pp. 270-281). Oxford University Press.
King, T. (2014, June 10). Labor’s aphasia: Toward antiblackness as constitutive to settler colonialism. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/labors-aphasia-toward-antiblackness-as-constitutive-to-settler-colonialism/
Krishnamurti, S. (2013). Queue-jumpers, terrorists, breeders: Representations of Tamil migrants in Canadian popular media. South Asian Diaspora, 5(1), 139-157.
Lawrence, B., & Dua, E. (2005). Decolonizing antiracism. Social Justice, 32(4), 120-143.
Loutfi, A. (2017). The status of mother tongues and language policy in Morocco. HAL Archives. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01623045/document
Madokoro, L. (2016). Elusive refuge: Chinese migrants in the Cold War. Harvard University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience. Postcolonial Studies, 14(3), 273-283.
Monture-Angus, P. (1995). Thunder in my soul: A Mohawk woman speaks. Fernwood Publishing.
Morgan, A. (2019, March 12). Reconciliation: Black people in Canada are not settlers. Ricochet: Public Interest Journalism. https://ricochet.media/en/2538/black-people-in-canada-are-not-settlers
Mountz, A. (2004). Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling. Political Geography, 23(3), 323-345.
Mountz, A. (2011). Refugees – Performing distinction: Paradoxical positionings of the displaced. In T. Cresswell & P. Merriman (Eds.), Geographies of mobilities: Practices, spaces, subjects (pp. 255-270). Ashgate.
Murad, Z. (2011). Beyond deconstruction: Evolving the ties between Indigenous Knowledges and post-foundational anti-racism. Counterpoints, 379, 422-433.
Ngo, A. (2016a). “Journey to Freedom Day Act”: The making of the Vietnamese subject in Canada and the erasure of the Vietnam War. Canadian Review of Social Policy/Revue canadienne de politique sociale, (75), 59-86.
Ngo, A. (2016b). A case study of the Vietnamese in Toronto: Contesting the representations of the Vietnamese in Canadian social work literature. Refuge, 32(2), 20-29.
Nguyen, V. (2013). Refugee gratitude: Narrating success and intersubjectivity in Kim Thúy's Ru. Canadian Literature, (219), 17-36.
Nguyen, V. (2019). Refugeetude: When does a refugee stop being a refugee. Social Text, 37(2), 109-131.
Nyers, P. (2006). Rethinking refugees: Beyond states of emergency. Routledge.
Pon, G. (2000). Importing the Asian model minority discourse into Canada: Implications for social work and education. Canadian Social Work Review/Revue canadienne de service social, 17(2), 277-291.
Price, J. (2011). Orienting Canada: Race, empire, and the transpacific. UBC Press.
Razack, S. (2004). Dark threats and white knights: The Somalia affair, peacekeeping, and the new imperialism. University of Toronto Press.
Regan, P. (2010). Unsettling the settler within: Indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. University of British Columbia Press.
Rifkin, M. (2013). Settler common sense. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3-4), 322-340.
Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. (1996). Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/royal-commission-aboriginal-peoples/Pages/final-report.aspx
SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. (2017). Glen Coulthard: Fanonian Antimonies [Video].YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZE6HmN-RA0
Sharma, N. (2006). Home economics: Nationalism and the making of 'migrant workers' in Canada. University of Toronto Press.
Simpson, B., Walcott, R., & Coulthard, G. (2018). Idle No More and Black Lives Matter: An exchange. Studies in Social Justice, 12(1), 75-89.
Snelgrove, C., Dhamoon, R. K., & Corntassel, J. (2014). Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(2), 1-32.
Sorenson, J. (1993). Imagining Ethiopia: Struggles for history and identity in the Horn of Africa. Rutgers University Press.
Sullivan, A. L., & Simonson, G. R. (2016). A systematic review of school-based social-emotional interventions for refugee and war-traumatized youth. Review of Educational Research, 86(2), 503-530.
Tascón, S. & Ife, J. (2008). Human rights and critical whiteness: Whose humanity? The International Journal of Human Rights, 12(3), 307 - 327.
Thomas, A. (2019, February 15). Who is a settler, according to Indigenous and black scholars: Descendants of slaves in Canada don't fit into our common definition. VICE. https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/gyajj4/who-is-a-settler-according-to-indigenous-and-black-scholars
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future. http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Final%20Reports/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf
Congress Mondial Amazigh. (2016). Amazighs of Morocco: An indigenous people despoiled. https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CCPR/Shared%20Documents/MAR/INT_CCPR_CSS_MAR_25280_E.pdf.
United Nations. (1994). Human rights and social work. https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/training1en.pdf
United Nations. (2007). United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples. https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (2018). UNESCO policy on engaging with Indigenous peoples. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000262748
Veracini, L. (2011). Introducing settler colonial studies. Settler Colonial Studies, 1(1), 1-12.
Walia, H. (2012). Moving beyond a politics of solidarity towards a practice of decolonization. Colours of Resistance Archives. http://www.coloursofresistance.org/769/moving-beyonda-politics-of-solidarity-towards-a-practice-of-decolonization/
Walia, H. (2015, January 21). 'Land is a relationship': In conversation with Glen Coulthard on Indigenous nationhood. Rabble. https://rabble.ca/columnists/2015/01/land-relationship-conversation-glen-coulthard-on-indigenous-nationhood
Wane, N., Jagire, J., & Murad, Z. (Eds). (2013). Ruptures: Anti-colonial & anti-racist feminist theorizing. Sense Publishers.
wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. James Currey Publishers.
Wayland, S. V. (1997). Immigration, multiculturalism and national identity in Canada. International Journal on Minority & Group Rights, 5(1), 33-58.
Wilson, C., Flicker, S., & Restoulo, J.P. (2015). Beyond the colonial divide: African diasporic and Indigenous youth alliance building for HIV prevention. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(2), 76-102.
Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387-409.
Wolfe, P. (2013). Recuperating binarism. A heretical introduction. Settler Colonial Studies, 3 (3/4), 257–279.
Wolfe, P. (2016). Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. Verso.
Zakhir, M., & O’Brien, J. (2017). French neo-colonial influence on Moroccan language education policy: A study of current status of standard Arabic in science disciplines. Language Policy, 16(1), 39-58.
Ziedenberg, J. (1995). Canada's Vietnam legacy. Canadian Dimension, 29(5), 24-28.
Zine, J. (2009). Unsettling the nation: Gender, race and Muslim cultural politics in Canada. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 9(1), 146-157.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published in Studies in Social Justice under the Creative Commons "Attribution/Non-Commercial/No Derivative Works" Canada licence.
The copyright for the articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles may be used, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. The submission of a manuscript to Studies in Social Justice will be taken to mean that the author understands and agrees to the following:
- the manuscript represents original work not previously published;
- the manuscript is not being considered elsewhere for publication in the same language (publication elsewhere in an alternate language does not preclude acceptance of submission to Studies in Social Justice);
- appropriate written copyright permissions have been secured for republication of any copyrighted material contained in the manuscript;
- copyright for this article is retained by the author, with first publication rights granted to Studies in Social Justice;
- by virtue of its appearance in this open access journal, it is understood that the article is freely available for use, with proper attribution, for educational and other non-commercial purposes;
- reuse of the article for commercial purposes by anyone other than the author requires permission of the author;
- the author agrees to cite Studies in Social Justice as a source whenever h/she later republishes or reuses the article in other platforms.
