Indigenous History Month Statement and Reading List

Due to a confluence of factors, Room Magazine is posting this statement in acknowledgment of Indigenous History Month later than planned. However, Room holds that Indigenous histories, presents, and futures are to be honored year-round, and so offer this statement now to assert that.

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Room Magazine is printed on the homelands of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene and Métis Nations. Members of our collective labour in several locations across northern Turtle Island: upon the traditional and stolen territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sʔəl̀ilwətaʔɬ, (Tsleil-Waututh) nations, colonially known as “Vancouver”; in Moh’kinstsis in Treaty 7 land, colonially known as “Calgary”; in Tkaronto, “the place in the water where the trees are standing”; between, and beyond. We say this to acknowledge the land; we say this because land acknowledgments, while deeply important, constitute just one of just 13 out of 94 calls to action that “Canada” has managed to accomplish since 2015, an intolerably slow rate.

During National Indigenous History Month, and every month, Room urges our community, particularly the settlers within it, to dedicate themselves to the calls to action as a starting point among many, in this tenth year of the report’s existence. Contribute to mutual aid initiatives supporting Indigenous peoples and individuals, such as in Unist’ot’en. Celebrate cultural victories, such as ImagineNATIVE’s 25th anniversary of claiming space for Indigenous cinema. Bear witness and take action especially for Indigenous disabled people, poor people, children, elders, prisoners, and MMIWG2S+ and other systematically underprotected communities–even now, Indigenous women suffer the brunt of the Canadian government and society’s iniquities, having to fight for the rights to their own bodies and children. Honor hard-won Land Back victories–but stay unsatisfied with them, pushing them to greater heights of justice.

Let us not allow ourselves to forget that in this time of heightened, strategic nationalism, the state of so-called Canada is guilty of ongoing land theft and genocide. “Elbows up” land consolidation efforts and ownership, rather than what we owe to the land and always to its stewards, is a colonial construct meant to keep Indigenous sovereignty oppressed. All peoples’, all the Earth’s, liberation is bound up in Indigenous liberation, and land back is a necessity, whether in Turtle Island, Aotearoa, or West Papua.

Indigenous History Month Reading List

From “Scent of Burning Cedar,” by Lee Maracle, via The Walrus

But if it is a Salish story, then it makes no sense to try and fit it into English literature. I will not go to anyone’s table empty handed; that is not my tradition. I come to your table with a full banquet. You may not want my food, but I am okay with that, but I will not come with nothing to offer. Writing is food, the food of the heart, mind, and spirit. Stories are our banquets.

From “Dark Matters,” by Alicia Elliot, via Hazlitt

To say dark matter was “discovered” seems disingenuous since, theoretically, dark matter has always been here, filling space we once thought of as empty. In that way it’s not so different from these lands, which my people refer to as Turtle Island. To this day, people claim the Americas were “discovered” in 1492, despite millions of people living on these lands, creating on these lands, building histories on these lands for centuries before Columbus ambled along. Terra nullius, they called it. Empty land. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to assume that everything is empty before you choose to see it.

From “‘Yet we persist’: An Interview with Dr. Robin Gray on Place Names as a Mode of Restorative Justice for Indigenous Peoples,” by Susan Blight and Robin Gray, via The Capilano Review

Dr Robin Gray: Decolonization is not just aspirational rhetoric — like the way Canada tries to categorize the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Decolonization is a different ontological framework. Rather than an inversion of the same power dynamic, it’s a movement dedicated to generating new possibilities, renewed relationships, and more egalitarian configurations of power. We need settlers to get out of the tit-for-tat mindset, the crabs-in-a-bucket mindset, the colonial relationship mindset, so they can see that Indigenous decolonization benefits everyone and not just Indigenous peoples. True allies and co-conspirators understand and accept this fact..

Excerpt from “Nishnaabeg Brilliance as Radical Resurgence Theory” from As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, via The Walrus

The Nishnaabeg brilliance those Elders pulled me into was profound. Their world—a cognitive, spiritual, emotional, land­based space—didn’t recognize or endlessly accommodate whiteness, it didn’t accept the inevitability of capitalism, and it was a disruption to the hierarchy of heteropatriarchy. Thinking about it now, I see that it was my first flight path out of settler colonialism.

“Eden Robinson: On Writing and the Gothic,” Eden Robinson in conversation Room for Room 39.3 Canadian Gothic

I also think our current society is only possible through oppression. Our clothes are sewn in sweatshops. Our meat is factory farmed. The resources we use in our technology and vehicles are stripped from indigenous land bases around the world—loot and leave the mess for the locals. The economic meltdown in 2008 seemed to evaporate our collective conscience. We were so focused on economic wellbeing, social justice issues got shoved deep into the background and became not just unpalatable, but unpatriotic.

Excerpt from “Now, You Will Listen” by Layli Long Soldier, via The Offing

These are hard facts for non-Native high school students and faculty to embrace I know))) yet they are common everyday truths for Native students))) necessary truths to understand why the wound))) why the fierce push-back against the S-word and R-word))) why)))) we rise to our feet and sing for our little ancestors’ return))) why our relatives dig and place them in their rightful graves with their own hands))) why we sing))) for their fathers and mothers now long gone)))) for their families still here))) why we continue)))))))))) to sing)))) for our children today))) who walk the halls of these institutions)))) who sit obediently under fluorescent lights)))) listen to and absorb language))) spoken in contexts they did not choose))) where the past isn’t braided gently))) but knotted))) tangled into their minds))) as daily endurance.

“Thinking and Engaging with the Decolonial: A Conversation Between Walter D. Mignolo and Wanda Nanibush” Wanda Nanibush and Walter D. Mignolo via Afterall

Wanda Nanibush (writing from Palestine): The prefix ‘de-’ in decolonisation means to remove, reduce or produce the opposite of colonisation. It seems the first step would be to understand colonisation as the theft of land and liberty from Indigenous peoples. This connects any process of decolonisation to the prefix ‘re-’ in restoration, reparation and restitution of Indigenous lands, bodies, cultures and communities. For this reason, decolonisation means letting Indigenous people lead. Decolonisation involves unlearning and changing what colonialism is based on in terms of private property, manifest destiny, ‘discovery’, Enlightenment, Eurocentrism, Cartesian dualism, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism, positivism, sexism, racism, individualism, extraction, classism, violence and control. Decolonisation should challenge all that is thought to be proper and normal in current settler colonial states. Decolonisation involves a centring of Indigenous ways of being, knowing and loving. In this we assert sovereignty, no longer asking for recognition of it.