A CONVERSATION BETWEEN LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON AND SABRIEN AMROV
The concept of “Indigenous” is a complex and nuanced one when applied to peoples who have intimate and sophisticated political relationships with the land and waters to whom they belong and whose lives are fraught with the violence of dispossession stemming from different forms of colonialism. In this conversation between Palestine and Canada-occupied Nishnaabe land, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Sabrien Amrov generously reflect together on the political usefulness of such a term and their personal relationship to it.
Sabrien,
When Léopold first suggested we write to each other, he let me know that you didn’t feel knowledgeable in Indigenous Studies. I don’t feel knowledgeable in very much these days and I understood that caveat as a beautiful expression of humility. It reminded me of something Robyn wrote to me in one of her letters that would become Rehearsals for Living: the idea that we wake up each day more and re-learn the world as if we are learning anew. At the time, I understood this as an intellectual practice that increased my width as a living being on the planet and in this present moment. It compelled me to read outside of Indigeneity in North America every day. It asked me to bring with that practice of reading alongside an openness to engagement beyond fast critique. It had the impact of making me feel like I don’t know very much of anything outside of the narrow lane I usually exist within.
As I grow older, this is becoming a precious daily practice to me. I don’t want to become that person in whatever room resting on arrogance and their understanding of the world from the pedestal of expertise, particularly because what is going on outside of that room is most often the site of radical imaginings and theorizing that is most useful in making otherwise. I always want to know the world anew, I always want to be engaged in broad study. Engaged in the work of unlearning, and relearning and just learning because the world is an ever expansive place full of links and relationships and wiring that impacts me whether or not I know about it. I always want to be a student. And this is crucial for another reason: the drivers of colonialism study their methodologies and outcomes across occupied geographies and peoples and then use what they learn to do the work of colonialism better.
Léopold first proposed the idea of me writing to someone about the concept of “Indigenous” on a bus in Palestine, between Hebron and Haifa. My immediate thought was that I was the wrong Indigenous writer for this assignment. I’ve spent most of my adult life learning to think withinside Nishnaabeg thought. I’m not adept of many of the things western intellectualism demands of writers and thinkers. Reading The Funambulist often reminds me of this. My lane feels narrow. When I get asked to do things like this, I often give them Audra Simpson’s name. I was thinking about Audra that day in traffic because I remembered that she had written a letter in response to the disastrous article in The New Yorker earlier in the year by Manvir Singh called “It’s time to Rethink the Idea of ‘Indigenous.’” When I returned home, I reached out to Audra and she sent me her unpublished letter. Her critique was scathing and she fully refused his reliance on primitivism as one would expect.
Before I started writing, I googled you. I tell you this as a practice of honesty, because good letter writing is a more intimate intellectual practice than co-writing a paper, and intimacy depends upon honesty. I also know this dates me, because my kids would never “go to a website,” instead they would check Instagram or TikTok. I am however of the email and website generation and so I met you virtually first. I found the phrase “knowledge is a relational process” in your teaching philosophy. I smiled when I read that. With this shared understanding, I felt confident about our exchange in these letters because I also understand knowing as a relational practice. One that I want to begin anew each day.
I sat with Léopold’s request and the idea of Indigenous, thinking of all the things I’d rather write about. I thought about the lack of specificity in the term and its meaning from where I come from, the latest tool in a long list of names the state has given us to better position us in the matrix of its control. Throughout Palestine, I struggled to introduce myself in a way that gave audiences and the people I was meeting a way to relate to me. I started with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe, then moved to Anishinaabe to Indigenous and then Ojibway then Native American, and sometimes when those failed, the word “Indian.”
When I’m at home, this obviously isn’t a problem, although at home, I’m not Indigenous either. I’m Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe. I am from a particular clan. I am from a particular family that comes from a particular set of families that now belongs to a particular community that has been relocated and resettled on the reserve at Alderville, itself a colonial construct. I am Biidaasamose, a name given to me by an Elder from Treaty 3 territory, who spelled it Betasamosake on a yellow sticky note more than twenty years ago. More than that though, I think my relationship with Elder Doug Williams-baa from Curve Lake is how Anishinaabeg and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe know me. They witnessed our relationship that others read about in my work and in his and that ties me to a particular understanding and practice of our knowledge that is by no means universal. Within Nishnaabe thought, there is much more to be said. “Michi Saagiig” positions me geographically in the eastern part of the territory at the mouths of the many rivers that drain into Lake Ontario. Nishnaabe is a dialectal diversity and links me to Anishinaabe, Odawa, Nipissing, Ojibwe, Chippewa, Saulteaux, Bodewadmi, Algonquin, and several other smaller family groups in particular geographic regions. All of these relationships link me to Cree, Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota peoples, Mik’maq, Haudenosaunee, Wendat, the Red River Métis, and so on. Nishnaabe in different areas are responsible for relationships and areas of overlap, shared territories with other Indigenous nations. The Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe have this diplomatic relationship with the Wendat (Huron) and the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawks), who have distinct political practices.
The Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawks) have distinct and complex politics, designed and practiced to care for the ecologies we are both a part of, our peoples and each other. I’ve erased and retyped the word “complex” a few times in earlier drafts of this letter because I shouldn’t have to state the obvious, that Indigenous political systems are robust and complex. We are not primitive. And while the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and the Kanien’kehá:ka have engaged in conflict and warfare, we’ve also had periods of harmony and peace, and we’ve both learned from these. We’ve been together in an intimate political and ecological relationship for thousands of years. We have treaties. We have ceremonies. We have shared stories. We’ve both moved around geographically and use our diplomacies to travel the world. We both come home to Lake Ontario, to the Carolinian forests in the south and the Boreal in the north and west, the Canadian Shield and the Great Lakes St. Lawrence lowlands.
Our languages are different. Our cultures are different. The way we govern is very different. The Haudenosaunee are great farmers, and us not so great. In March, we all head to the sugar bush to make maple sugar. In the summer, they grow corn, beans and squash while we harvest wild rice. Maybe we meet in the berry patch.
Our politics are embodied and collective and practiced across scales.
We now share four centuries of dispossession, genocide, and occupation. Our experiences are not the same, although there are similarities. We allied with different European powers. The colonial border between Canada and the United States cuts right through Kanien’kehá:ka homelands. And of course the colonizers had a vested interest in exploiting our differences into divisions because fragmented Indigenous political relationality makes it easier to contain us. We’ve always been positioned under the colonial gaze as primitive, not because we are, but because it is easier for colonial powers to dispossess and disappear people deemed as disposable.
All of this misses the foundation of Nishnaabeg politics and our shared politics with the Kanien’kehá:ka, and that is the idea encoded in our origin stories, that humans were last to arrive on the planet in our origin stories, and that we were placed into a web of existing life. Sometimes we migrated from the Sky, other times the earth. Sometimes the east moves away from the Atlantic ocean and towards the Great Lakes. Those living things—plants, animals, trees, birds and insects, but also the sky, water and land—are not inanimate objects for our use or natural resources for us to exploit, but living, autonomous beings with thought and politics and knowledge of their own. We were created into a network of living, and our ability to exist and flourish was depended upon how well we fit into and reproduce the natural world we were born into and made out of. It is in this network that my clan, and name have meaning.
We were always Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, although I’m pretty sure that for my pre-colonial ancestors, that made little sense. It would have been their clan that held meaning when they traveled because within the Nishnaabe world it indicated which families would take care of them. Their name would mean something to other Nishnaabe. How they conducted themselves and embodied the political practices between the Nishnaabe and the Kanien’kehá:ka would have meant something to the Kanien’kehá:ka. Identity was embodied and rooted, not performed or announced. And as families and individuals lived these political practices there would have been exceptions, challenges, and struggles. Our processes for working through differences, conflict and even harm were designed to transform and to build or rebuild the layers of intimacy and empathy that the system asked of us.
Joshua Myers’ discussion of the Bakongo peoples’ theoretical understandings of the world and its influence on the Black radical tradition in his book on Cedric Robinson led me to reading African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo by Kimbwandende K.B. Fu-Kiau. There is a section in that book that talks about how human beings are a system of systems or a principle of principles, a pattern of patterns, and another that talks about how nations are like forests because forests are ensembles of diversity.
This is very similar to the idea of a nation I was thinking about when I wrote Noopiming—meaning in the bush. The bush or the forest is a diverse community of living beings that cycle and work in cohorts to reproduce the forest. In Nishnaabeg thought, the forest is a political formation of which Nishnaabeg are a part. It is connected to other political formations, water, tall grass prairies and Black Oak Savannahs, rice beds, and the moon.
How is it that the Bakongo peoples and the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe have such similar understandings of the worlds they make? Perhaps because we share a planet and the patterns that reproduce the planet. Perhaps because our ancestors, although on different continents and in different ecologies, saw themselves as part of a network. Perhaps because that relationality you were speaking of in your teaching philosophy comes from deep study and practice of living with the land and waters, not as a superior being, but as one that sees themselves only in relation to life. Perhaps when I read Bakongo philosophy from the lens of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe philosophy, my own understanding of myself deepens.
And herein lies why the term Indigenous is useful to me in study and is useful in building transnational relationships between movements for liberation. In both the Kanien’kehá:ka and Bakongo peoples, when I read through the lens of my own people, I can see myself as a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe reflected back to me. I see in their theories, ethics, and in their understandings of the world as their own and in alignment with Nishnaabe world making practices. I see their resistance to racial capitalism and when they put their bodies between settlers and the land. I see this in the Sámi, Māori, Kānaka Maoli, and with the Kayapó. I see it when Indigenous scholars the world over push back against the western conventions of the academy intent on reproducing coloniality as normativity and the continual positioning of Indigenous peoples are primitive.
Are there limits to this usefulness? Of course there are, and in the context of the insidious nature of settler colonialism that is the case with every term that we find useful.
There is only a small lag time when the term isn’t appropriated and remade by colonialism. We should expect this. The term “Indigenous” comes from a knowledge system, languages, and academic practices that were designed to reproduce colonialism. There is no definition that can collapse the history and present day iterations of global colonialism and its specificities into a single term while also rejecting the western academy’s insistence on primitivism. Definitions in and of themselves come from a kind of scholarship and thinking that aims to divorce concepts from contexts in order to make universal statements. Indigenous thought is rarely if ever about universality. The colonizing states of the world have adopted the term not because they care about our liberation, but to dole out restricted rights as a neoliberal tactic to perform benevolence and deflate resistance, while also continuing to dispossess and maintain that dispossession.
None of this is news to Indigenous peoples and yes, we will have to explain the term “Indigenous” to those in our communities who were mobilizing in different eras where different terms were useful. Of course we don’t relate to each other as “Indigenous peoples,” we relate to each other through our unique political and ethical practices and our cultures. None of this means we shouldn’t develop relationships with anti-colonial movements regardless of whether we recognize them as Indigenous. All of this means, as usual, we need to be sharp, critical thinkers and practitioners across scales, geographies, and time and continue to develop meaningful relationships with movements confronting dispossession, displacement and the desecration of the planet.
Sabrien, chi’miigwech for reading, and I can’t wait for your thoughts.
Leanne
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Salam Leanne,
Your words travel in friendship: they reach me before ever speaking face-to-face, before hearing the sound of my voice or figuring out my facial mannerism.
You are kind to see my caveat as a sign of humility. At times, I think my timidness to accept to participate in beautiful exchanges such as this one is rather an expression of fear. This fear is one I learned to carry (implicitly and explicitly) because of and through the academy. Instead, you begin (and end) your letter with a generosity to meet me where I am.
The reason I bring up your practice of exchange right from the start is because I think you seeing my caveat as humility rather than fear speaks to what Indigenous ontologies, in all their complexities and diversities, produce as interlocutors. How we understand knowledge and how we access reality also creates particular kinds of interlocutors in the world. Inside and outside the academy. Interlocution, in listening and speaking, is everything.
Much like you, I do not have nor aspire to a glossary of exactitude when it comes to concepts, but I do pay attention to what certain ontologies (re)produce in our worldly life and geographical imaginations. The western intellectualism you speak of, in my experience, is indeed arrogant; it seeks to win something at some game, but one is not sure exactly what it is. Indigenous intellectual practice, in my studentship, seeks to understand and works to make, as Michelle Daigle and Margaret Marietta Ramírez write, constellations of care functional in all the possible ways, at all possible scales, in all possible seen and unseen worlds.
The institutional minimization of other ways of knowing I have witnessed has made me disenchanted. But one the most beautiful practices of this worldly life is enchantment. I am a Muslim at my core, and in the tradition I follow, we do not produce knowledge, we seek knowledge. Seeking is to meet, not as industrial pursuit, collectables of subjectivities or museumification of stories; but rather a meeting: of people, of places, of ideas, of different times across different spaces, relationalities. These relationalities sometimes hold negative affects, positive ones, sometimes demand refrain, at other times reparations. They are in flux, but with the goal not of victory, but of living. Interlocution is more important than any form of depositing of information.
I write this letter as I wrap up an undergrad course called “Geography of Canada,” where I taught students about the settler colonial history of Canada and how much of how we operate in the world depends on spatial formation. In class, we spent a great deal of time speaking about what grounded normativity is. Introduced by you and Glen Coulthard, enticing the academy specifically, and society more broadly to consider the role of situatedness in how we understand ourselves, others, and the world. Developing situatedness forces students to be an interlocutor that considers how you found yourself here and what are the present-absent relationalities that should be acknowledged.
It is not a coincidence that most of my letter so far has been about the academy. It is, after all, where I first was introduced to Indigeneity. In Canada, as you know, we have had a huge push to promote Indigenous representation in our institutions of higher education. Sometimes it feels like Indigenous knowledge is treated as an ornament, rather than a body of knowledge and orientation regarding how to be in the world, and how to operationalize thinking tools about the social, political, economical and interpersonal dimensions of the world. Schwartz writes “hosting is not always a posture of generosity”and sometimes I think the emphasis on representation in our academy is more of a diversion than a serious consideration. I always worry about capitulation.
Layli Long Soldier speaks of capitulation in Whereas. Her prose highlights how the US government used the law to attempt to contain the sovereignty of Indian tribes. Federal apologies were always just formalities to continue this capitulation. Her poetry book was the one I finished reading with my friend Victoria before we started reading your book, NOOPIMING: The Cure for White Ladies.
This was how I first met you, long before your words informed my pedagogy. It was 2020, six months into COVID. I was in Istanbul, in a neighborhood called Uskudar, surrounded by the tombs of Sufi scholars and urban cat dwellers, right by the Bosphorus. Victoria was in London in Britain. Every Sunday, we would read out loud to each other and share words in a time where there was very little vocabulary to describe the heaviness we were experiencing. I had not googled you yet, I just knew that white women needed a cure, so part of the title of the book, intuitively, made so much sense to me. I wanted to read.
The entire book was a novel way for me to read a story. I read NOOPIMING as a physical and metaphorical experience in what it means to think through opacity and fragmentation of the self and Other. I had been reading Édouard Glissant, and I saw the form of NOOPIMING as an exercise in meeting through what he calls “opacity”: the realization that we are never to each other what meets the eye and the right to not be extracted. Layli Long Soldier admits in one of her prose poems that she was sad to find out that opaque did not mean transparent. But I think part of the reason her body believed this before seeing the definition is because there is something deeply familiar and organic about opaqueness. It is a characteristic we all carry and what makes us fundamentally human.
As Palestinians, we are often thrown this political argument that things would be better for us if we were not “ so fragmented.” But as far as I am concerned, Palestinians can disagree on a million and one elements about their political trajectory; it doesn’t take away Israel’s responsibility to end its brutal genocidal regime. Fragmentation doesn’t disavow us from having our sovereignty and dignity respected. Teaching this as a matter of fact is a great medicine for the arrogance of western intellectualism. So maybe there is an attempt to capitulate by telling people like us that we are not yet fit for freedom, but I like to think that it is terribly unsuccessful.
Barely any of this colonial practice of using “incompleteness” as a way to justify erasure was mentioned regarding Canada in my high school history lessons. I was born and raised in French Montreal, I was taught a sanitized version of the history of Canada. I did not understand the distinction between federal and provincial until high school, where I was taught a separatist understanding of Canada in relation to Quebec. I never learned the Canadian anthem in school, and we were socialized to be skeptical of the federal government. The only social, political, and economic tensions that were put front and center in history class were those of the English against the French. The Quebecois were understood as the oppressed people of Canada.
At home, it was a little different. I knew that every Sunday, my dad would drive and cross the Honoré Mercier Bridge to Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, the First Nations reservation of the Mohawks of Kahnawáke on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River. He made the weekly trip to get cheap tobacco from the reservation. He always had stories about the men he would spend time with there. “They are like us,” he would always say, but I never understood what he meant. It was only when I switched from the French school system to the English curriculum in college that I grasped the extent of settler colonialism in Canada. When you speak about the erasure of Indigenous peoples, the way Canadian history is taught is a great example of how communities can be right there in plain sight, but hegemonic narratives can make us all pretend that they are not. Grounded normativity and placed-based solidarity force us to break this presence-absence dynamic.
The way you speak of identity resonates with how I lived it in my time in Palestine. Identity in Palestine is also embodied and rooted: it is about what people do, their daily practices. The connection to specific homes and families, skills sets, the time spent in olive gardens, making way for crop seasons. Similar to what you describe belonging, relationships, and witnessing, people belong through the witnessing of your associations. How you came to be known through your interactions and relationship with Elder Doug Williams-baa from Curve Lake is how Anishinaabeg and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe know you. The witnessing of that relationship by others is so important. As a Muslim, the power of witnessing is also embodied in everything we do. The Shahada, which is the sentence you pronounce over five times a day during prayer and meditation, is not about believing in God, it is about witnessing. Witnessing is not always about the material world, but what is true about this practice is that once you witness something, someone, a relationship, an interaction, a lesson, there is a choice to be made: you either pretend you did not, or you respect your reality and acknowledge it.
But it has not always been neat for me. Your experience with how to introduce yourself outside of your home is the usual case scenario for me wherever I go.
My belonging is all over the place and filled with places of broken hearts, resentment, and estrangement.
I have rarely been able to tell someone where I am from without it being resisted in some shape or form. If I told classmates in elementary school that I am from Palestine, they would call me a liar because they couldn’t find it on the Larousse Dictionary’s back cover along with all the other flags. If I told people in Montreal that I am Francophone, they would say “well not really, where are your parents from?”; and if I told people in Ottawa I was from Montreal, they needed to know where before Montreal. If I told other Palestinians I meet in the diaspora that I was from Palestine, they would often ask “really are you sure?” because of my misspelled name. If I told someone inside of Palestine that I was from al-Khalil, they would reply “you mean the outskirts?”. If I told members of my family that I consider myself part of Doura (our village), they would tell me “yes but really not truly, right, like you haven’t actually lived here?”. They are not wrong. But there are parts of me that also believe that they are not right.
Now, I often tell people that I live close to the Bosphorus. Rarely do people ask for clarifications. I don’t know if it is because they don’t care for the infinite locations that make up the Bosphorus shore between the Marmara and Black seas, or if they smell my unwillingness to enter the ping pong match. Probably both. Istanbul made me comfortable with the mess, with the uprootedness. Everyone wants to lay claim to her and she just takes in anyone and everyone—not in equal and equitable ways—but she doesn’t make it hard for you to stay.
And yet, holding a comprised rootedness doesn’t divorce any of us from the responsibility to produce and reproduce love. I finish writing this letter on the train from Toronto to Montreal. I smiled when you said that you were on a bus from Al Khalil (what the Anglosphere has taught us to refer to as Hebron) to Haifa when this idea was presented to you. Al Khalil is one of my homes. The city is named after the prophet Ibrahim, who was qualified as al-Khalil, which means “friend.” It is where my sittou (grandmother) speaks to me, sometimes over the phone, sometimes in my dreams, and before 2015, in person, hand in hand, whispering the world in my ears. She is the only person that comes to mind that does not really ask me to get on the hamster wheel of proving who I am. She knows I am the daughter of the woman she let leave home at 23 to come to Canada with a man that did not quite know what he was doing besides fleeing Israeli assault.
There is so much one has to go through to get from Al Khalil to Haifa. Last time I was in Palestine was in 2015, so I can imagine the roads being worse during your visit. Wadi Al Nar (the Valley of Fire) always makes me feel like the car will flip over the side of the very very very very narrow road. I truly believe that the hills make prayers for us every time a Palestinian takes the road. They hold us together because surely our dying engines are not.
You travelling to Palestine, completing a short migration the way Mindimooyenh would have wanted, where you are faced with realities that speak to you in ways that you had imagined, and perhaps some not, is the type of witnessing that bonds our struggles together. You did not go there to be convinced, you did not go there for a forensic observation, you went there to meet Palestine and its people, to witness via a transient visit.
That form of transnational relationality is powerful, needed, and at the end of day, I believe, a scale of the intimate Indigenous diplomacy you speak of.
Leanne, as I finish writing this letter, Jenin has been invaded by Israeli colonial forces. I do not want to describe the scenes, because I often feel that Palestinians go out of their way to provide precision of the horrors that Israel imposes on us and our homes. In Palestine, the Israeli settler colonial genocidal regime operates with total impunity. Around the world, people know this. And yet, with all this laying bare, we see this growing movement of Israelis claiming indigeneity as a vessel to hold ownership. It is almost a rebranding of coloniality using the lexicon they think will give them legitimacy at this particular historical conjuncture where Israel’s impunity, though as ugly as ever, is under more and more scrutiny. Young adults who proudly identify as Zionists on TikTok are recycling words like “Indigenous,” authentic/original ancestry, as a way to keep a grip on power. That’s why when Israeli settlers lay claim through indigeneity, it doesn’t ring softly in our ears. It’s a colonial mentality they want to enshrine in an ontology that absolutely goes against their way of life.
Part of this appropriation of the lexicon is their fear of what is coming. It is their fear of justice that often forces me to fight the fear inside me. Rather than appreciating the critique of power that comes with Indigenous ontologies, Israel and its settler communities want to appropriate a simplistic understanding of the concept to keep hold of their coercion.
As I prepare my bags in Montreal to head back to Istanbul, I remember Mindimooyenh who tells us that “We live in an ecosystem of hurt.” And so, the potential for healing is just as great. Much like you, I am not invested in giving an exactitude of Indigeneity. But I can see, in the classroom, in coffee shops, near the forest and by the water, people are looking to be in the world otherwise. An Otherwise that has been here but cannot and must not be treated as something happening elsewhere far away from here.
Leanne, I have so much I want to share with you. For now, I say Ya3teeki el 3afia for your kindness, your words and mostly for your ability to see beyond what meets the eyes.
Salamat,
Sabrien
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