Recently, two very important moments in Guåhan history occurred. The first was a delegation of six CHamoru women who presented testimonies related to Guåhan’s colonial status—and the importance of political self-determination for CHamorus—to the Special Political and Decolonization Committee (Fourth Committee) at the United Nations. That same week, the second historic moment also occurred: International human rights attorney Julian Aguon delivered oral arguments to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to appeal the 2017 Davis v. Guam ruling. Some might call these two events happening in the same week a coincidence. But perhaps our manmofo‘na (ancestors) were pulling together their kana (power; spiritual energy), continuing to guide our people to liberation from the colonial confines of the United States. The CHamoru people of Guåhan, both on island and in the diaspora, are coming together to hold the US/American settlers accountable for past and present wrongs imposed on the CHamoru people, a people who have suffered from US colonialism for over a century and who continue to search for ways to right the wrongs of our past in hopes to imagine and create more sustainable Indigenous futures.

Having to fix problems brought by the colonizer is not something new for CHamorus. Our ancestors had to figure out ways to survive centuries of foreign occupations and the threats and trauma of war (e.g., WWII and, more recently, the North Korea missile threat in August of last year). In recent decades, two of the biggest problems for Guåhan have come in the form of invasive species and have resulted in devastating impacts on the CHamoru culture and Guåhan’s environment: the brown tree snake and the coconut rhinoceros beetle.

Shortly after World War II ended, a US military ship brought an invasive species to my home island of Guåhan (means we have) in the Mariana Islands. It was the brown tree snake, infamous for preying on and decimating the native bird population throughout the island. My dad has told me stories about some of these paluma (birds)—for example, the chichirika (rufous fantail) and the chuguanguang (Guam flycatcher)—and how there used to be so many of them around our village; he told me about how they looked, how they sounded, and the little quirks they had. Around the 1980s, these birds began to disappear, so my dad’s stories and my stories about our birds were very different. My only encounter with native birds growing up was through bird posters I saw from the Department of Agriculture or from my visits to the local zoo, where I would get to see the ko‘ko‘ (Guam rail).

In 2007, another invasive species was discovered, the coconut rhinoceros beetle (more commonly referred to as the rhino beetle), infamous for preying on the tronkon niyok (coconut tree) throughout Guåhan. 11 years later, and it has completely devastated the tronkon niyok population. Our tronkon niyok look very sick, so sick, it’s as if they are dying a very slow, very painful death. And for CHamorus, it is hard to fathom that our tronkon lina‘la‘ (tree of life; a common reference to the coconut tree) is facing a premature death, one that CHamorus were unprepared for, yet are now responsible for stopping.

It seems that this has been the pattern for CHamorus on Guåhan since the first encounter with foreigners in 1521 (when Magellan and his crew landed on the island). For almost 500 years, CHamorus have inherited problems which have been brought by outsiders and, as of 2018, we remain responsible for figuring out ways to solve them. Today, my island is under US occupation and, in addition to dealing with major losses of native flora and fauna from invasive species (e.g., those brought by the US), we are facing a major US military realignment (aka, the military buildup) which includes the transfer of 5,000 marines and approximately 3,000 dependents from Okinawa and the influx of thousands of off-island construction workers; the construction of a live-firing range site near the ancestral village of Litekyan; and even the flood of American franchises to make the military and their dependents feel more at “home” (the Olive Garden opened just last week and a Red Lobster will be opening soon). And it has become our responsibility to read the environmental impacts statements, to comment on them, and testify against them, meanwhile figuring out ways to mitigate as much damage as possible to our environment and our sacred spaces.

There are many, many issues that CHamorus continue to face because our island is an unincorporated US territory and because one third of our lands is occupied by the US military. We never get a seat at the table; we don’t even get a menu. Not only are our voices often never heard, we also don’t always know what is being planned for us, even in our own home. These are the attempts to purposefully exclude us and intentionally silence us. This kind of settler exclusion and silencing is disempowering, even debilitating for us as an Indigenous people. As Haunani-Kay Trask affirms, “For peoples who suffer the yoke of imperialism, it is a total system of foreign power in which another culture, people, and way of life penetrate, transform, and come to define the colonized society. The results are always destructive, no matter the praises sung by the colonizer.”^[i]

In “Protectors of the Future, Not Protestors of the Past,” Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua elaborates on some of the problems that Pacific Island nations are facing, in large part, because of our colonial situations: “Islanders on low-lying atolls are literally losing their ancestral homelands to the encroaching tides. In the high islands of the Pacific, like my own archipelago, sea-level rise may be less pronounced but increasing heat, changing precipitation patterns, and diminished natural resources are all posing new threats to cultural practices and material survival, especially for those who are more dependent on land- and ocean-based subsistence economies. Throughout Oceania, our waters are severely overfished, choked with pollutants, and stressed by ocean acidification […].”^[ii]She emphasizes that the “need for transforming settler enclosures, extractivism, and consumerism could not be more clear.”^[iii]

During the past two trips I made home this year, I paid close attention to our tronkon niyok. I observed them. I watched their weakened palms sway. I cried for them. I prayed for them to regain their strength and for the growth of new, mesngon (strong; enduring) trees. Because the tronkon niyok is our tronkon lina‘la‘. They give us life and provide us with life lessons. Their stories guide us, reminding us not to waste gifts given to us from our ancestors.

In one version of the story about the tronkon niyok, a young palao‘an (girl) becomes very sick because she is thirsty for a drink that no one in her village can provide. She ends up dying and her parents bury her in the tåno‘ (land). When her mom visits the daughter’s burial site one day, she notices a tree growing. Eventually, this tree produces a fruit (niyok), and the girl’s family drinks the juice from it, realizing it is the drink that the palao‘an had been thirsting for. CHamorus have learned to use every part of the tronkon niyok—for food, drink, coconut oil, mosquito deterrent, and weaving; thus why it is also referred to as the “tronkon lina‘la‘”. And, despite several colonial occupations, we have maintained our connections to them.

Today, because of the rhino beetle infestation, most of the tronkon niyok on Guåhan are sick; perhaps it symbolizes how our people are thirsty for some fresh niyok juice like the palao‘an in the story. How our people are sick. Under US occupation. Dealing with the utter exhaustion of having to survive within the confines of our colonial conditions. Constantly trying to fight (off) problems brought by the colonizer. Not because we want to. Because we haveto. For our ancestors. For ourselves. For our future famagu‘on (children). Trask states: “United States control has meant land dispossession, economic dependency, cultural exploitation, and, in many cases, death and disease for America’s captive Native peoples […].”^[iv]Control of Guåhan by the US has not only negatively impacted CHamoru people’s health and connections to land but has also traumatized our environment, our native flora and fauna. It has had devastating impacts on CHamorus as manaotao tåno‘ and manaotao tåsi (people of the landand people of the sea, respectively) as well.

Trask mentions: “[…A]s the preeminent military power in the world, the United States has dealt with the Pacific, since World War II, as if it were an American ocean. From an indigenous perspective, this makes the United States the most powerful imperialist nation in the Pacific. The continuing ravages of colonialism are what the United States has bequeathed to Hawaiians, Micronesians, and Samoans.”^[v] In times of grief or despair, CHamorus say “Na‘mesngon ham, pues hami sungon ha‘.” This can be loosely translated as: We have to make ourselves strong, so we can endure. In relation to what Trask and Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua offer us, perhaps this is one lesson we can learn from our tronkon niyok: Though we feel tired or weak and though we may be devastated by the colonial ravagement of our island environment, of our culture, and of our people, we have to work hard to challenge imposed settler colonial norms, or figure out ways to actively transform them, so that the next generations of tronkon niyok and the next generations of famagu‘on will be healthy and will have a chance to thrive. This includes figuring out CHamoru solutions and solutions within the US settler structure. For instance, we must keep growing our paluma population and working to eradicate the rhino beetle population while simultaneously testifying at the UN and making appeals to the Ninth Circuit. We have to keep doing these things so that we can ensure that our future generations of famagu‘on have a home to be rooted in. We have to ensure that they are rooted in our manmofo‘na, rooted in our sinångan (stories), rooted in our fino‘ (language), rooted in our tåno‘ (land).

I end this post with a poem I wrote while at home this past April. I had taken a walk by myself at a community park area called Paseo. On my walk, I reflected on my maternal grandmother’s recent passing, on the sickly tronkon niyok, on the story of tronkon lina‘la‘, and on the man-made peninsula built over debris gathered from WWII destruction upon which I was standing. The village I was in,Hagåtña (means her/his blood), is the capital of our island and one of the villages the Japanese bombed in 1941. Now it is one of the villages where the tronkon lina‘la‘ have transformed into tronkon måtai (tree of death). It made me sad to think about the passing of my grandma and the passing of our beautiful coconut trees and how their deaths were related, caused by foreign influences which our people have no remedies for.

My Grandma Lou was one of the people in my life who always kept me rooted in home and reminded me that when you have strong faith in something, you will work hard for it. Things might not go the way you expect them to right away, but when you keep working hard, something amazing and beautiful will happen.

Despite the colonial situation of my people and the death that is all around us, there is still beauty. Waiting for us.

Hagan Hagå‘ña (Daughter of Her Blood)

I come from the blood of my mother’s mother

and my mother’s mother’s mother

I chant this to i manmofo‘na na famalao‘an ini na tåno‘

the first women of this land

because my blood is of their blood

flowing through my veins

I am the perpetuation of their bloodline

the product of their stories

I am the dream they saw thousands of years ago

I am the reflection of i ginåtbo-ñiha, their beauty

I am the inheritor of i menhalom-ñiha, their wisdom

I am the niyok offspring of the tronkon lina‘la‘brought by the first famalao‘an who sailed to Guåhan

I am the life that my Nåna and her Nåna chanted to their ancestors for

I am grounded in i Nånan Tåno`

with roots flowing through lands and flowing through me

intertwined with intergenerational bloodlines

of famalao‘an

from the Mother(is)land

I am from Sabånan Mågas

the mountain of the chiefs

I am of manmaga‘håga siha

my blood flowing from female clan leaders

I am of fuetsan famalao‘an

I am Fo‘na’s vision that came to fruition

My name is palao‘an tåno‘,

Hagan Nånan Tåno‘-hu

My name is woman of the land,

Daughter of my Mother(is)land

Posted on October 23, 2018

Harvesting Souls

By Joseph Wayne Ricks

It was August, 1968. I wanted so badly to prove my patriotism as an American. The U.S. had just made us their 50^thstate in 1959. I was born and raised in Hawaiʻi. I grew up in Waikiki and then moved out to the west side in Waiʻanae when I was ten years old. It was a happy time. Coca Cola was ten cents in a glass bottle, and there was a yearning to do something fulfilling to be a good American. I was proud to be an American and eager to prove my loyalty, so I joined the U.S. Air Force when I was 19 years old. My step-father was so proud of me, until he found out I was being deployed to Vietnam. I was so naïve that I didn’t even realize why he had such a worried look on his face. I was going to war. It’s probably why they sent us young boys to war. We didn’t know any better.

In her chapter, “Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific,”Teresia K. Teaiwa tells us that it is nothing new that our Pacific/Oceania citizens have served in the U.S. Military for decades and have been in combat ever since the Korean War.^[1] Hawaiʻi boys saw combat with the infamous 442 Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army in WWII. Men and women from Hawaiʻi and the Pacific fought in the Vietnam War. And more recently they have fought in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. U.S. territories have always been an open stockade for U.S. military recruitment. Colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, globalization, and militarization all operate under the guise of patriarchal patriotism.

Teaiwa also reports that the Heritage Foundation confirms that Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders are disproportionately represented in the U.S. armed forces. She goes on to say, “There is a very strong sense of patriotism throughout the U.S. territories.” I guess for me, patriotism gave me a sense of a new identity. I was now somebody. I wore a uniform; I had a rank. I wasn’t just another local boy with no future in sight.

With my fifteen minutes of fame, I was just a kid and I had no idea about what was about to happen to me. The gruesome things I saw, the burnt flesh I smelled, and the sight of so many dead has scarred me forever. And if that wasn’t bad enough, when we came home, thinking we would be welcomed with open arms, instead we were treated like freaks by the anti-war movement. We were social outcasts without support for our psychological and emotional pain,our PTSD. As Al Pacino says in the 1992 film Scent of a Woman: “There is nothing like the sight of an amputated spirit. There is noprosthetic for that.”

I seek no pity, it’s just that war is senseless and my country, the U.S.A., has blood thirsty war mongers that always have an ulterior motive.

Pleasant Valley

By Staff Sergeant Joseph W. Ricks, U.S. Air Force

Explosive fields of sun-lit flowers

Dancing on the ball of death and destruction

Feeble peasants, drawn faces, bloody fingers

Scraping that sticky gooey gum sap that makes that evil shit

White powder smack, China white, Horse, Skag

Another generation annihilated

Nameless soldiers packing AK-47’s with dollar signs in their eyes

Guarding against malignant intruders

Broadcast General stoking his fine Cuban-made cigar

Delivering another command performance

Hootchie, hootchie mommas

Cruising in the 3-star General’s black limousine

Asphalt jungles that go nowhere

Followed by the center white line

American boys locked up in jail in Saigon, Vietnam

G.I. boku bullshit. G.I. numba 10!

G.I. boku bullshit G.I. numba 10!

Fiery napalm collage, desolation moonscape, devastation

Scattered throughout this once beautiful utopia

Humble pie and heart-sickened witness

Black and bleak body bags all in a row

Lying in this relentless hot humid sun

Sacred steam rising up from expired body heat

In this smoldering inferno of hell

A mortal sign of their last ounce of dignity

Leaving this God forsaken battlefield

That’s it Baby!

Faded Glory

WAR, FOR ALL THE WRONG FUCKINʻREASONS

Posted October 23, 2018

As I sit down to write this, I am recovering from a phone call about a dear friend who had gone to trial to bring her batterer/stalker/abuser to justice. The verdict was not guilty. The abuser is white male, priviliged, protected, assumed innocent. She is Pacific Islander, assumed crazy and a liar. It did not matter that she had TROs; that she had to leave the country for over a year to escape the stalking because the restraining orders failed; that other women of color replaced him as harasser; that she suffered seizures from the beatings; that there was evidence - videos, photos, medical reports, testimony. There was evidence. It did not matter that she had done everything the prosecutor told her to do, that the jury seemed to believe her and nodded. None of that mattered, becausein the end, the jury did not want to ruin his future.

His future mattered more than her lost years, her mental health, her injuries and her sense of safety. In the midst of the joke that was the Kavanaugh hearings andin the midst ofthe more insulting #himtoo movement being supportedby some Pacific Islander men, all of this makes sense. But that does not mean it hurts any less. The energy spent to discredit, blame, accuse, silence and intimidate women is exhaustive and petty. As more and more women begin calling out their abusers, the more violent those entrenched in patriarchy become. I watched my friend who dared to speak become calcified and hard, in order to survive in a world that is trying to break her.

But what of those women who never speak, who would break in the telling? Who wake each day and simply move forward? They too undergo a metaphorsis and grow sharp edges because they have witnessed what happens to soft flesh and opened mouths. These iwi women, drained of voice.

No one would ever accuse me of being without a voice, I never back down from a fight, but the truth is, I am one of these women. I never speak about the blackout rape, the intimate partner rape, the date rape and the morning after pill, or the gender violence of being beaten at gunpoint and kicked by steel toe boots by four young men. Men who looked like me, who lived where I lived. And this is only fragments. It is not the whole. What hurts most is realizing it was easier for me to fight for revolution than for my own body. I did not want to continually scrape over those scars and be exposed each time in the retelling. Instead I turned to the ʻāina and to my ancestors. I became an adze carved from bone.

Consistently, we wāhine, must individually transform into verterbra, each of us coming together to form a spine for our sisters when they can no longer stand, when they are cracked and broken. Our collective mana are the ligaments that bind us, but our mana is also the space of between that cushions the impact. To be mana wahine is to become iwikuamoʻo.

Because, when the disappointment comes...the failure of the state, the failure of our men to hold each other accountable and sometimes the failure of our movements...and the wound is left open, we, wahine arrive with rage and aloha, with food and lomi and acupuncture, offerings and prayers. We hold each other up and stand unafraid to cry. We develop our own interventions, become grounded in our ʻāina and make home in each other. We draw our strength from the wahine within our genealogies. As Te Awekotuku writes, “our resilience increases with our knowledge; reinforced with a deeper understanding of who we are, and who we’ve come from. For their memory carries us.”^[1] As iwikuamoʻo, we become the governance, the trusted advisors and the justice that should have been. This is mana wahine.

Do not imagine that Kanaka women, despite the many microaggressions, the violence and the attempted silencing, have turned our backs on Kanaka men. On the contrary, we have spent more movement hours ensuring that they do not feel attacked, feel supported and are cared for, while we are often blatantly excluded from leadership or ceremony, for the sake of the lāhui. We always put the goals of the lāhui above all others. But when Kanaka wāhine dare to invoke the phrase mana wahine, we receive the response, but what about mana kāne? As though male mana is ever in question. Even in the invocation of our own strength and leadership there is a male fragility that must be tended.

Dr.Leonie Pihama reminds us, “colonisation has coopted many of our people to participate in the perpetuation of unequal gender power relations.”^[2] A mana wahine framework makes it necessary to strive for a balance in our leadership, that is beyond male/ female, (cis)heterosexist binaries. Mana wahine, pushes us to “move beyond human interaction to incorporate all forms ofrelationships.”^[3] It is just as important for us to strive for a balance in the ways that we care for each other. To lift a people, to restore a country demands accountability. Accountability is not haole or western, it is embedded at the very core of our lāhui. That means that when there is a rise in anti-feminism or heterosexism being demonstrated by the colonizer, as we see being playedout in 45’s America, this is not the opportunity for indigenous men, men of Oceania, Kānaka to jump on the band wagon. This is the moment for Indigenous men, men of Oceania, Kānaka to demonstrate how our sovereignty can be and should be different.

When we speak of liberation, how do we embody it? If true liberation is throwing off the shackles of the most devastating aspects of colonization, why can’t we begin with ending patriarchy?

Posted October 16, 2018

Dancing Culture: The Anthropological Gaze in Dance Studies

By Maria Teresa Houar

I am a dance researcher, and so it follows that what I do is study dance. Basically, it means that I love dance so much that I would subject myself to research as a career, if you would believe that, though perhaps I am preaching to the choir now. At present, I am a PhD student in the Performance Studies program at UH Mānoa, which is how I came to be enrolled in this Political Science seminar on Indigenous Feminism, focused on the work of Haunani-Kay Trask, who is known for her work as an activist, scholar and professor of Hawaiian Studies here at UH Mānoa.

In engaging with one set of readings about the Trask-Linnekin-Keesing debate over “tradition” and representation in scholarship, I was particularly reminded of the problematic ways in which dance researchers have related to concepts of traditional forms of cultural dance and performance (such as forms which are rooted in pre-colonial practices) which belong to indigenous peoples, as static or dead art forms. From this view, traditional dance forms are practiced primarily as a means of historical and cultural preservation, however Western dance practices are exempt from these restrictive categories. Within the field of Joann Kealiʻinohomoku was one of the first to suggest that Ballet need to be redefined as a cultural dance form in her essay “An Anthropologist looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance” (Kealiʻinohomoku, 1970). I was reminded of this work when relating to Haunani Kay Trask’s tone and frustrations in her essay “Natives and Anthropologists: the Colonial Struggle” (Trask, 1991). These essays were written twenty years apart, which speaks to the persistence of the politics surrounding indigenous identities which seek to control and define tradition and authenticity.

Kealiʻinohomoku served as dance reviewer for the Honolulu Star Bulletin from 1960-1963. Not much information is available about her personal life and how exactly she came to Hawaiʻi besides that she was born in the Midwest and was married for 10 years to Thomas Samuel Kealiʻinohomoku (who is described as an “island singer” in his 1982 obituary) . It's not clear how long she lived in Honolulu, but her tactic of reversing the anthropological gaze back upon the institution of Ballet stands out from the majority of writing at that time, and it makes me wonder how being in Hawaii during the 1960s, just prior to the blooming Hawaiian Renaissance may have influenced her work.

Kealiʻinohomoku’s essay (online here) is an often cited source and featured essay in readers on cultural dance studies. It is one of the foundational examples of scholarship in dance that seeks to challenge, as well as to call out the racism of existing interpretations of cultural dance. She gives examples of how dance scholars used their bias toward Western choreographic, narrative dance forms to evaluate cultural dances and thus concluded, that such dances were “primitive”, “unskilled”, or “unconscious” and “repetitious” (Keali’inohomoku, 34). This level of disrespectful and diminutive language that dance writers used in their descriptions traditional dance forms is common for the time. But if you are not familiar with dance as a field of research or the type of scholarship it has produced, not to worry! What is important to know about dance research for the sake of this blog post, is this much:

Dance Studies is a relatively new field within academia, and the majority of writing about dance until the 1950s existed primarily in the form of dance histories, biographies, and interpretations of artists works. During the 1960s and 1970s, Dance Studies began to focus on more critical analysis, with perspectives on the socio-cultural production of dance works. A desire to “elevate” dance research to the level of “real scholarship” lead to an appropriating of research methodologies from fields in social sciences. Cultural dance forms became “research subjects” and like the fields it was seeking to imitate (mainly Anthropology and Ethnography), a large degree of cultural dance scholarship produced up until recent history was done from the perspective of a Western-Eurocentric academic gaze. Dichotomies of Western versus Non-Western and traditional versus modern became static and authoritative categories for dance forms, constituting a regime of knowledge surrounding these practices.

Even more problematic was that most of this research was being carried out and published NOT by members of indigenous groups or cultures being studied, who had the true knowledge of these forms, but instead by academics who would make theories about dance forms and cultural contexts based on Western epistemologies and scientific empiricism. There was no attention to embodiment of physical practice or care for the fact that embodied cultural information cannot accurately be translated out of its movement languages and into research “data” or written contexts. But this is probably a familiar problem for the audience who reads this blog; an audience I imagine is well-versed in Indigenous and Feminist Issues, and furthermore with the problems that result when trying to situate these discussions within the larger authoritative regimes of Academia with a capital “A”.

It requires rigour to maintain an awareness of one's privilege and power in any interactions, and to actively work towards breaking down any power differentials that may exist between the self and others. Calling one’s self a researcher or scholar seems, in my opinion to kick the stakes up several notches. Within the field of Dance Studies today, there are opportunities to imagine scholarship which approaches embodied culture equitably, however most scholars agree that to truly experience another’s lived subjectivity is, perhaps, an impossibility. By this definition, this would make research on Indigenous dance and other cultural forms carried out by those not immersed within those cultures and practices inherently “erroneous”.

(Insert picture me throwing in the towel here. jk lol.)

I personally was raised as a Theatre brat and thus mainly dancing Western theatrical forms- American jazz and ballet. And so as a person whose only experience with cultural dance practice was when we would dance Hula in school, my discussion of cultural dance here is not that of someone who has anything I would ever claim to be expertise in a cultural practice and what that lived engagement is like. Nor do I want to accidentally use language in my discussion of these issues that values tradition over innovation, so please check me here. However, from my particular subjectivity, identifying as a Queer person of color and indigenous Mexican American, I feel like it is pretty often that I feel a noticeable amount of what I can only describe as “hmmmmm” and “ewwwww” when I am engaging with scholarship that attempts to approach traditional and cultural dance forms within the field of dance studies, even where I lack expertise.

Its as if when these acts are over, practitioners put down their “artifacts” and hang up their “costumes’ and go back to their “real” lives with modern and oh-so-wonderful conveniences and thank-goodness-for-progress tech-gadgets. As if the evolution of traditional dance practices into a modern indigenous aesthetic representing the voice and experiences of contemporary indigenous people that could also called “real” or “authentic” culture is an impossibility due to its departure from a fixed position, enforced by the Western gaze violently deployed from academic institutions or the authority of the museum. As if those who do not have access to their “pure” authentic forms of cultural practices due to loss though colonization are subsequently denied access to traditional cultural experiences. As if only White, Western cultural practitioners have access to the realm of imagination of the past, and innovation when they decide to “progress” their traditions.

Because when I read about cultural dance practices, it's as if I am being told an elaborate story. This story is one that erases the existence of living indigenous people, in its conception of traditional and cultural dance practices as disembodied, dead forms, artifacts, museum objects, and historic documents. In this story, a person like me who was raised completely severed from their cultures, descended from displaced peoples within a matrix of cultures that I do not belong to, I am also violently erased. I recognize my own anger that follows, much like Trask’s in her replies to Keesing and Linnekin. Sometimes it feels like being on a philosophical and psychological battlefield, and this fight is no less than a life or death struggle.

Cultural practices are, within this model, only practiced for the sake of preservation, and can only be recognized as “authentic” when practiced as their pure form, which often is forced to meet an oppressive definition that authenticity can only be achieved through the recovery of the form in its “pure” state, as it existed “pre-contact”. Within this story, there is no paradigm where tradition is allowed a living existence, or imagination. Thus there are only two logical there are two options for the lived indigenous identity within this context: death or assimilation.

While the appropriation of cultural dance forms is still a huge problem not to be dismissed, (ex: Balanchine’s appropriation of Swing and Jazz) the fact that indigenous authorities and expert practitioners of their own cultural dance forms are not afforded the same privilege as, for example, a renowned ballet choreographer working to forge a contemporary evolution of these practices is interesting. A ballet choreographer can be called “bold” or “daring” when they create, while a contemporary choreographer of cultural dance styles who has a similar desire to create new forms risks being called “inauthentic”.

In fact, ballet is specifically linked to a history that emerges directly from authoritarianism not only in civil French society as well as French Militarism, but also in American Imperialism, and yet we rarely hear about these as being historic or “cultural” contexts of the form. Nor do we hear complaints from Western dance critics and Scholars that American ballet dance is a bastardization of “traditional French culture”. No one is insisting that ballet be performed as a court dance to display devotion and allegiance to the dead French Monarchs of the 17th Century, and that contemporary versions of the form be called “inventions” of ballet and not “true” form.

Kealiʻinohomoku elaborates on how during the 1900’s, early American aesthetic tastes were overwhelmingly Eurocentric, and contributed to the acceptance of ballet as the “apogee” of dance forms, therefore it is exempt from being viewed as a cultural form (35).

She tells us, “It is good anthropology to think of ballet as a form of ethnic dance. Currently, that idea is unacceptable to most Western dance scholars… By ethnic dance, anthropologists mean to convey the idea that all forms of dance reflect the cultural traditions within which they developed. Dancers and dance scholars... use this term, and the related terms ethnologic, primitive, and folk dance, differently and, in fact, in a way which reveals their limited knowledge of non-Western dance forms” (Kealiʻinohomoku 33). She goes on to review the available scholarship published on cultural dance at that time, which offers some alarmingly offensive and racist analysis and conclusions about a few grossly over-generalized cultural dance forms such as African Dance, or Native American dance (rather than specifying the particular group such as the Maasai, or the Hopi) within the oh-so-politically named category of “Non-Western Dance”.

While Kealiʻinohomoku’s essay is now several decades old and cites sources where more overtly offensive language such as the word “primitive” is used to refer to cultural practices, it speaks to the problems of how scholars view the traditional, and furthermore how scholars in fields such as Dance Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Anthropology to name a few have historically published research work that lacked critical or source evidence from expert practitioners for the purpose of gaining personal academic renown and economic capital.

Furthermore, in the case of the Trask-Linnekin debate, Anthropologists and other theorists leverage these problematic definitions of what is “traditional” to critique indigenous political movements that seek the right to self-definition, whilst also using their position as academics to claim false “objectivity” and freedom from their oppressive institutional and colonial gaze. Trask writes of Keesing, “(He) plows the complaining path of the unappreciated missionary who, when confronted by ungrateful, decolonizing Natives, thinly veils his hurt and anger by the high road of lamentation: Alas, poor, bedeviled Natives "invent" their culture in reaction to colonialism, and all in the service of grimy politics!” (Trask, 159)

Kealiʻinohomoku points out that you rarely see such authoritarian and oppressive perspectives about the “traditional” regarding Western culture theorized by those who occupy the role of “expert” or “scholar”, nor do definitions of what is “traditional” culture seem to be such a painful political struggle for those of the dominant culture. She states, “Let it be noted that no living primitive group will reveal to us the way our European ancestors behaved. Every group has had its own unique history and has been subject to both internal and external modifications.” (Keali’inohomoku, 37)

Trask and Linnekin, while disagreeing on other points, speak to this issue passionately. Linnekin responds to Trask’s critique of her work, and gives her own critique of Keesing by stating, “The notion of the contemporary construction of culture did not originate in anthropology, incidentally, but reflects a widespread dissatisfaction in the social sciences with reified concepts and the positivist paradigm. The issue in the invention-of-tradition literature is not authenticity, but the very nature of culture, culture change, and cultural process. (Linnekin, 173) and later Linnekin quotes Trask:

“What constitutes 'tradition' to a people is ever-changing. Culture is not static, nor is it frozen in objectified moments in time.”

Toward the end of her essay, Keali’inohomoku offers her own definition of dance. She writes:

“Dance is a transient mode of expression, performed in a given form and style by the human body moving in space. Dance occurs through purposefully selected and controlled rhythmic movements; the resulting phenomenon is recognized as dance both by the performer and the observing members of a given group.'”

Perhaps some of this definition could help to offer a useful definition of culture and tradition- as something that is a transient (changing) mode of expression, purposefully selected, and recognized by a given self-defining, autonomous cultural group.

Works Cited

Keali’inohomoku, Joann, “An Anthropologist looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: a Dance History Reader, Ed. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Durham: Wesleyan University Press, 2001, 33-43)

Linnekin, Jocelyn. 1991. Text Bites and the R-Word: The Politics of Representing Scholarship. The Contemporary Pacific 3 (1): 172-77.

Trask, Haunani-Kay. 1991. Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle. The Contemporary Pacific 3 (1): 159-67.

Posted October 8, 2018

Recovering Indigenous Women’s Knowledge

By Lynley Shimat Lys

“Every pakeha, no matter how liberal, well meaning, or politically sound, is racist, because white privilege, which is part of the overall scheme of patriarchal oppression, operates regardless of gender. Politically concerned Maori women - even the most sophisticated city dweller - will thus tend to avoid specifically women-oriented actions, and put their time an energy primarily into the ethnic struggle. As a short-term tactic, this is feasible and valid - but I maintain that ultimately, if at all, they move forward with the men on their backs.”

- Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Mana Wahine Maori (63-4)

Kia ora tātou.

Ko Te Moana Nui a Kiwa te moana.

Ko Grizzly Peak to maunga

Ko Strawberry Creek te awa

Ko Lys / Robertson te iwi

Ko Northbrae te marae

Ko Lynley toku ingoa

Tēnā koutou katoa.

On my father’s side of the family, my grandmother came from a Scottish Pākehā family which had been part of the setter colony in Aotearoa for several generations. My grandfather was born in occupied India, where my great-grandfather was the Anglican minister for the English settler colony in Madras / Chennai. My grandfather came as a settler to Aotearoa after WWI, when the English government offered land to WWI veterans to farm as a way of expanding the British population of the settler colony. I have various grievances with the English Empire, including the Empire’s long history of mistreatment, displacement, and other forms of genocidal behavior toward Māori people in Aotearoa.

I acknowledge my own background and Pākehā privilege relative to Māori people, including the fact that I inherit New Zealand citizenship by birth from my father. I identify myself as Pākehā in relation to this history and in reference to Te Reo Māori and Māori worldviews. I was raised on occupied Miwok and Ohlone land in Berkeley, California, rather than in Aotearoa, and yet I have various access points to the Pākehā settler culture and its traditions and worldviews. I take very seriously the need to educate myself on Māoritanga and Te Reo Māori, and on the negative impacts of the Pākehā settler colony both historically and today. I also strongly believe in the need for Pākehā people, such as myself, to take responsibility for our own positioning within the system of oppression, and to support Māori efforts towards decolonization in whatever way Māori iwi see fit. I offer this blog post as part of my ongoing efforts to educate myself and think through some of the history of decolonization efforts and ways that Pākehā people have been involved in these. Further on, I discuss resources for learning more about this history and ways to get involved.

One of the themes I noticed in reading the work of Ngahuia Te Awekotuku alongside the article “Matauranga Wahine: Teaching Maori Women’s Knowledge Alongside Feminism,” by Kuni Jenkins and Leonie Pihama, was the need for Māori women to have separate spaces, both in the Māori community, and in Pākehā educational institutions. From reading work by Te Awekotuku, including the essay collection, Mana Wahine Maori, it is evident to me that much of Te Awekotuku’s early academic work and training took place in Pākehā centered institutions, similar to the experiences of Haunani-Kay Trask, whom we have been reading in class. Both Te Awekotuku and Jenkins and Pihama indicate that they gained a great deal of insight on Māori women’s interests, struggles, and forms of knowledge through the creation of spaces specifically designated for Māori women. In the quote which begins this blog post, Te Awekotuku points out the problematics of having Pākehā women in spaces which are meant for Māori women to engage with both Māori women’s knowledge and with feminisms.

There are ways in which Pākehā people have been socialized to view Māori people, and specifically Māori women. Within the Pākehā colony in Aotearoa, Māori women find themselves in essentially the least socially desirable positions – denied access to the Pākehā controlled power systems economically, politically, and socially, and also positioned further down the socioeconomic ladder than even immigrants from Asia. They also find themselves positioned differently than immigrants from other Pacific Islands. In addition to this, the settler colony in Aotearoa has a self-image as benevolent and equitable toward Māori people, which ties into Pākehā views of the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of the New Zealand government, as progressive for having acknowledged the existence of Māori people.

The settler colony also has a long history of appropriation of particular aspects of Māori culture, to the extent that Pākehā people will often see themselves as somehow the interiters of traditions such as tikis, carvings, music, images of traditional Māori villages, the self-designation as “Kiwi,” the Māori national anthem, “Pokarekare Ana,” and other aspects of Māoritanga. Certain limited uses of Te Reo Māori have also been appropriated by Pākehā. While the New Zealand government has claimed Te Reo Māori as one of the official languages of New Zealand, most Pākehā have extremely limited use of or exposure to the language, and trying to speak only Māori throughout most of Aotearoa would prove quite difficult.

With this background in mind, it becomes quite obvious why it might be difficult for Māori women to discuss their experiences and knowledge in the presence of Pākehā women, and institutional spaces which are occupied primarily by Pākehā women. On a very basic level, there is the issue of social conditioning of Pākehā women to feel entitled to all things Māori, including the time and energy of Māori women. The differences in socioeconomic positions and daily realities of Māori and Pākehā women also play a role. This is not to say that there are no internal divisions between Māori women, rather that in order for Māori women to be able to discuss their own knowledge and experiences as Māori women, it is quite necessary to have separate spaces.

Jenkins and Pihama discuss some of the advantages and challenges the authors faced in co-conducting a Feminist course in the Education Faculty at the University of Auckland, in which they offered a separate tutorial section for Māori women. They discuss ways in which they organized and led the tutorial, as well as the set up of the lectures for the course. Pihama relates, “In the Maori women’s tutorial we were actually operating kaupapa Maori. We were coming very much from a Maori women’s base. And with Pacific women saying at the end of that year ‘We need ours, our space.’” Jenkins discusses some of the reactions of the Māori women in the course to having the separate tutorial, “we were revelling in our space … because the Maori women were controlling the information; they could engage it and suddenly they were being successful. They felt the pleasure of success at last from their own definition… ‘I can do this thing’. And suddenly they were no longer silent; their mouths had been unlocked and they could actually speak. That’s very empowering.” Jenkins and Pihama had decided to foreground the Māori tutorial in concepts of Mana Wahine, and to guide students toward accessing Western Feminist Theory from a position of already having knowledge within a Māori context and worldview. Pihama says, “the structure that was there [before] was not working for Maori women; not supporting Maori women’s theorizing in terms of creating that initial space where we don’t get overloaded with a whole range of western theories without knowing ourselves.” Part of the issue with the way the course was run previously was the assumption of a Pākehā worldview, and the ways in which a Māori worldview and Māori women’s knowledge was simply not considered let alone centered.

Jenkins and Pihama indicate that many of the Māori women had not been familiar with Western theory prior to the course, and were being put off by the combination of being in a Pākehā dominated space, dealing with theories grounded in Pākehā assumptions, and having no reference made to their own worldviews and life experiences. By beginning with concepts of Mana Wahine and situating the tutorial in a kaupapa Māori framework, the authors were able to ensure that Māori women in the course were able to connect their own experiences, discuss their views from a place that supported their culture and knowledge, and not deal with Pākehā women interrupting, taking over the conversation, or demanding to be educated on Māori concepts and terms.

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s writings as well often focus on the importance of centering Māoritanga, kaupapa Māori, and Mana Wahine Māori. Her work also brings up the necessity of recuperating womens’ knowledge that has been obscured by colonialism and by male-centric traditions within Māori culture. In the chapter “We Will Become Ill If We Stop Weaving,” of her book Mana Wahine Maori, she discusses women’s knowledge of traditional weaving practices in Māori and Pacific Island cultures, with reference to the October 1983 initial meeting of the Maori and Pacific Weavers Hui. This gathering of weavers lead to the establishment of the Te Moana a Kiwa Weavers society, a pan-Pacific weavers group, as well as the training of several members in textile conservation and conservation science. Weaving is discussed as a form of knowledge held specifically by women, and Māori and Pacific Islander women share their knowledge and discuss best practices and ways of further retaining and passing on this knowledge to further generations. This particular gathering was convened by and for the women involved, and created a community of weavers. Some of these weavers were also encouraged and sent by the community to undertake academic training in fields related to weaving, textiles, and conservation.

Later in Mana Wahine Maori, Te Awekotuku also recuperates the academic, intellectual, and cultural knowledge and skills of Māori women involved in the tourist industry, and particularly the history of Makareti, or Maggie Papakura, who was known as a tourist guide, but was also an accomplished scholar, intellectual, and activist. In the transcript of a speech given for the 1986 opening of the Centre for Women’s Studies and the University of Waikato, Te Awekotuku says, “she was politically motivated, she was articulate, she was a political fighter, she was astute, she knew what she was doing and she was actually worlds away from the glittering, glamorous, frivolous, feminine figure that she was constantly made out to be by the media.” Te Awekotuku undertook research at Oxford and researched archival materials related to Makareti. She notes that at the time of Makareti’s death, the scholar had been completing a Bachelor of Science degree in Anthropology at Oxford University and in the final stages of a thesis to earn a doctorate in the field. In wrapping up her discussion, Te Awekotuku offers,

this is why we women and why we Maori women need a place in the University and also resources for us to set up a Women’s Studies programme. Makareti’s story is not unusual, if you look at women around the world. It is about a colonized, a manufactured and quite deliberately fashioned media personality. The white media, pakeha entrepreneurs, and greedy publishers of her time have presented us with that distortion. Through something like the Women’s Studies programme, I think that we can bring her back to life, as she truly was, as she truly felt, as she sang, as she talked, as she wrote. We are giving our grand-daughters, our Maori grand-daughters, a chance to look back and to see, not just glamour and glitter and pzazz and panache but someone who was strong, resilient, capable, autonomous and inimitably brave; someone who was a leader and someone who was also a scholar.

Te Awekotuku’s work and activism draws from her knowledge of both the Pākehā-centered academy and Māoritanga and kaupapa Māori. Here she presents the story of a woman who she clearly considers to be a part of her intellectual whakapapa, as well as from a similar background within the cultural context of the Māori communities of Rotorua. Te Awekotuku has also done similar work in the fields of Moko and Māori women’s facial tattoos, carving traditions, and Māori traditions related to death and dying. For Māori women scholars, her work sets up an intellectual whakapapa that connects to women’s knowledge, traditions, and Mana Wahine Māori going back not only through the period of colonization, but also to periods of contact with Western settlers, and to Māori traditional hi/storytelling, including the hi/story of Hine, which forms the basis of the Māori anthem “Pokarekare Ana.” This centering of Māori women and women’s traditions, as well as the reclamation of Māori women’s intellectual and academic achievements, both in the Pākehā academy and in craft practices, does much to create a space in which Māori women can see themselves reflected as they take on Western Feminist Theory, and assert their voices and worldviews in Pākehā dominated society.

As a Pākehā person who finds value in feminism and greatly admires the activism and scholarship of Māori women, I am indebted to Te Awekotuku, and to later generations of scholar-activists like Jenkins and Pihama, for their work in centering Māoritanga, kaupapa Māori, and Mana Wahine Māori. I am also thankful for the efforts of these Wahine Māori to create separate spaces in which Māori women have been and continue to be able to discuss the specific needs of their own families and communities, to center their own worldviews, and to develop Māori specific forms of feminism and of Mana Wahine Māori. These separate spaces allow for Māori women to develop community and theory on their own terms and also to develop strategies for addressing their ideas, concerns, and challenges to a broader audience, again on their own terms.

For Pākehā and for others who are interested in supporting Māori decolonization efforts, I offer the following resources as a starting point for learning more. One important community effort is the centering of Te Reo Māori, through programs such as Māori Language Week, and the education of non-Māori people in basic principles of Māori tikanga. In Aotearoa, Kiwa Digital offers the Kupu app, which translates pictures taken by a phone camera into Māori words. Kiwa has been working with a variety of communities to offer apps to familiarize local communities with important aspects of protocol and recognition of the traditional Māori guardians of local lands. Many of these apps are available outside Aotearoa as well. Other educational apps are available from Plink, and a variety of iPad apps exist as well.

In terms of learning more about the history of Māori-Pākehā relations, the historical fiction novel The Parihaka Woman, by Māori author Witi Ihimaera offers a useful overview. Histories of Māori-Pākehā relations concerning feminist movements can be found in the anthology Feminist Voices: Women’s Studies Texts for Aotearoa / New Zealand, edited by Rosemary Du Plessis, and the film Sheilas: 28 Years On, directed by Annie Goldson and Dawn Hutchesson. There is a history of anti-racist activism by Pākehā and other non-Māori people in Aotearoa, as well as a history of non-Māori people supporting Māori activism. Some useful articles on both this history and the problematics of Pākehā anti-racism efforts include, 'The land of the wrong white crowd': Anti-racist organizations and Pakeha identity politics in the 1970s, by Miranda Johnson, “Reducing Racism Against Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand,” by Sylvia Pack, and “Pakeha Identity and Whiteness: What does it mean to be White?” by Claire Gray. Both Pack and Gray have written academic theses on related topics - Gray’s 2012 MA thesis from the University of Canterbury, White Privilege: Exploring the (in)visibility of Pakeha Whiteness, is available online, as is Pack’s 2016 unpublished PhD dissertation from Massey University, Racism in Aotearoa New Zealand: Analyzing the Talk of Māori and their Pākehā Partners. Other potentially useful resources include a recent manual on creating anti-racist spaces with a focus on Aotearoa New Zealand, available online from the Treaty Resource Centre – He Puna Mātauranga o Te Tiriti.

Posted October 8, 2018

Often in public health, we try to find programs and solutions that have a positive impact on the health of entire populations. While we may have the best intentions, it is imperative that we take a closer look at the power we have over vulnerable communities.

Research is based on discovery and certification of knowledge and has played an important role in our understanding of health inequities. "Good science", as we know it, is free of bias, objective, and based on facts. But the basis of good science has created a power imbalance and is reflective of gender inequalities, especially in our vulnerable communities. The U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee and Arizona State University’s Diabetes Project with the Havasupai Tribe are examples of unethical assertion of power on vulnerable communities in the name of science and understanding.

There is hope. Scholars like Haunani-Kay Trask have given us models of feminist power that can be integrated into research practices. In her book, Eros and Power: The Promise of Feminist Theory (1986), she offers us five components of feminist power: reclamatory, self-assertive, integrative, collective, and beneficence.

A community and academic partnership has reflected these components in what they’ve named the Waimānalo Pono Research Hui. Within this hui are Native Hawaiian Waimānalo community members and academic researchers who have had pre-existing relationships. Every month the hui meets to discuss health topics of importance to the community. Together they generate community-led research projects and events. What has been created is a transparent, equitable, and grassroots arena with an exchange of knowledge and critical consciousness raising. Haunani-Kay’s feminist power components are embedded throughout the hui’s practices.

Reclamatory. Waimānalo community members in the Waimānalo Pono Research Hui aim toreclaim the health oftheirpeople and ʻāina. By re-visioning and transforming the health of their community, they’re transforming a history of trauma that plagued the Native Hawaiian people. Generations of members meet monthlyto revitalize cultural practices like lāʻau lapaʻau (Hawaiian herbal medicine) and natural resources like limu (seaweed). Lāʻau lapaʻau has been integrated into a research study called MALAMA. The MALAMA study was in response to the two of the Waimānalo Pono Research Hui's identified topics of priority to address through research and other initiatives: ‘ai pono (healthy/nutritious food) and lāʻau lapaʻau. In this study, Native Hawaiian families in Waimānalo built aquaponics systems to be able to generate their own fruits, vegetables, and fish in their backyards. Members of the hui prioritized this study aiming to reduce chronic disease like diabetes and obesity.

Self-assertive. Academic researchers in this partnership understand their role as merely vessels to share their skills of academic writing and inquiry. They stand behind Waimānalo commuity members, giving them the desired amo to execute their needs. For example, Dr. Jane Chung-Do, a University of Hawaiʻi faculty member, has written and been awarded grants with Waimānalo native, ʻIlima Ho-Lastimosa, to fund a grassroots initiatives like the Waimānalo Limu Hui which was established in a Waimānalo Pono Research meeting. The Waimānalo Limu Hui has monthly work days to plant limu in their bay which was once abundant with this natural resource.

Integrative. A leading principle of the hui is to be pono. The members seek to achieve goodness and righteousness through balance of western academic and cultural epistemologies and knowledge. Neither the western academic or cultural have power over the other, but instead, both are integrated to achieve the aims identified by the community.

Collective. Rather than academic researchers imposing their inquiries on vulnerable communities, the Waimānalo Pono Research Hui has refused a patriarchal and domineering approach. Instead, they practice equality among each other and have become ʻohana, sharing in their quest for justice, but also sharing in very human things like recipes and fruits and vegetables from their gardens.

Beneficent. To resist power imbalances, members of the hui created protocols and rules of engagement. The set of concrete principles serves like a contract to protect Waimānalo members from any harm in their shared research projects and partnership. For example, one principle requires anyone who wants to engage in work with the hui must present their project at a monthly meeting. In that meeting, community members decide if the project is a go. In this process, only community members’ votes are counted, which protects their interest and their community from unethical and irrelevant research.

A community and academic partnership is not the norm in conventional research. It takes much more time to execute a research project and if the process is truly equitable, a desired research project may be shut down by community members. Nevertheless, public health could achieve much more with equitable partnerships like the Waimānalo Pono Research Hui. Gaining equity on a research team is crucial to regenerating the health of our most vulnerable communities, butas Haunani-Kay spelled out,it takes an unwavering commitment.

Posted September 28, 2018

“This is about stereotypes, racism at play, [and] discrimination, so we need to start reconceptualizing and valuing indigenous women, as a society. It should be a crisis when we see this level of loss of life.” -Christa Big Canoe, a lawyer and advocate for justice for aboriginal women who are murdered or missing.

My Kuleana and Commitment to Addressing Violence Against Women

I write this post for my community and other indigenous communities around the world so that we may share our stories and have the hard conversations that can lead us to an easier path of acceptance and love. I am a Wahine Hawai‘i, a mother, a daughter, and like many indigenous peoples, a survivor. We are all survivors, one way or another. This post aims to spark discussions surrounding the struggle of domestic violence (violence between partners in the home) and intimate partner violence (violence occurring in intimate relationships) amongst indigenous peoples.

I became concerned with this issue after living through it and later learning that I was not alone and that these struggles were far more prevalent than I realized. At first, I felt alone, ashamed, and unloved; feelings that do not dissipate when the relationship ends. As I began to heal, I could not ignore the idea of others enduring the same all alone. As I shared my story and/or desire to work in this area, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, and strangers shared their stories with me.

As a law student clerking in family court I was saddened but unsurprised to see so many Kānaka in the family court system for domestic violence, child abuse, substance abuse, juvenile court, fostering, TRO’s, and more. I could see connections to ways of living and being, ways of viewing one’s self and others, feelings towards the “system,” and a cycle of patterns occurring in our families. I originally wanted to go to law school so that I could work in areas of “Native Hawaiian Rights.” In addition to completing law school, I earned a Native Hawaiian Law Certificate by attending classes in the realm of native burial rights, Native Hawaiian constitutional rights, and Native Hawaiian trusts in addition to writing a thesis paper concerning blood quantum amongst Kānaka Hawai‘i and its legal implications.

However, in discussing issues of legally recognized Native Hawaiian rights and self-determination, I felt as if it was difficult to have these conversations when there are so many of our people fighting for their lives daily. Whether it is on the streets as houseless, or in poverty working multiple jobs, through violence in the home, or even amongst our circles holding back tears and suffering in silence. Living with these struggles for my entire life, this is where I have decided to fight for Native Hawaiian rights.

To the Indigenous Woman

This piece is written in response to “To the Indigenous Woman”^[1] and offered to compliment this video in its male vocalization on violence against native women. I have decided to include a male voice in this discussion to show how we can all get involved and do something. Whether it is simply opening your heart and ears to someone, volunteering at an organization, getting active in the legislature, donating to a shelter, or speaking about it in our homes, work place, and other life spaces. It is a difficult topic because it is ugly, disgraceful, and often personal in one way or another. However, it is for these reasons that we must be aware of such violence, how it works, how it lives in our communities, and how we can advance public, private, and government perspectives on actively addressing this issue.

The clip is one example of engaging in this topic and prompting advanced perspectives and analysis on violence against women. In this vocalization, the male voice is the narrator, thus providing an interesting perspective on violence against women. As an advocate in the community, I have learned that finding ways to engage various people and state actors is a challenge. The male perspective may reach others in ways that a female voice may not. In the clip, the narrator lists ways in which violence is sustained in our interactions, culture, and laws. In doing so he recognizes state and native systems and actors as complicit and failing native women. He claims that such abuses go on because “he can,” thus placing ownership on those committing violence and our communities for allowing the violence.

Discussions on Violence Against Women As An Indigenous Issue

Is violence against women an Indigenous issue? Native voices rise in unity against destruction of indigenous lands and sacred spaces, poverty, and poor living conditions in native communities. However, opposition to violence against native women is not always so unified. Narratives from native women raise concerns for a perpetuation of violence against native women in native communities.

These narratives coincide with alarming statistics documenting high rates of violence against native women throughout North America, and the world. According to the Indian Law Resource Center, “violence against indigenous women has reached unprecedented levels on tribal lands and in Alaska Native villages.

More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence.”^[2] From 2000-2012, greater than 70% of murders resulting from intimate partner violence were Native Hawaiian or Filipina women.^[3] A report conducted by Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence cited a Kaua‘i study of 502 women who participated in an anonymous telephone survey and respondents who reported experiencing intimate partner violence were as follows: 14% of the total respondents reported experiencing intimate partner violence. The rate for Caucasians was 15%, Filipino 11%, Hawaiian 21%, Japanese 5%, and other/mixed race 16%^[4]

I write from a Kanaka perspective but I aim to discuss this topic on various levels. First, as an indigenous issue in North America with an understanding that similar complexities occur in indigenous and colonized populations around the world. Second, I aim to focus on the stories and complexities in Hawai‘i amongst Kānaka Hawai‘i. I have melded statistics and analysis of violence against native women together because this is not solely a Native Hawaiian issue, and further analysis from the standpoint of an indigenous issue can provide us with further understanding on the consequences of colonial violence and its effect on native peoples.

It is important to note that violence, especially in the home, often goes unreported. Statistics result from data gathered in reported experiences and are limited by resources available to service providers. National statistics of domestic and intimate partner violence amongst Native Hawaiians is further limited as Native Hawaiian statistics are often lost in analysis of Asian and Pacific Islanders as a group. It is difficult to find data amongst national organizations with expertise, recognition, and national funding. Native Hawaiians are often not considered in Native American statistics reviewed as such statistics can be limited to Native Americans on the continent and Alaskan Natives. However, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs provides some statistics and analysis in this area in Haumea—Transforming the Health of Native Hawaiian Women and Empowering Wāhine Well-Being.[^5]

Academic scholars also delineate significant and problematic instances of violence against native women. In Gender, Sovereignty, Rights: Native Women’s Activism against Social Inequality and Violence in Canada, Joanne Barker examines conflicts surrounding gender politics and women’s rights within native sovereignty movements through discourse on native peoples in Canada and ramifications of the Indian Act. She maintains that contemporary native women’s struggles against social inequality and violence present a history of sexist ideologies and practices that is magnified by colonial law.[^6] For example, in her analysis she explains how the Indian Act resulted in the “corrosion and devaluation” of native women’s participation in Indian governance, economics, and cultural life.[^7]

In Fighting the Battle of Double Colonization: The View of a Hawaiian Feminist, Haunani-Kay Trask shares her experiences as a Native Hawaiian activist adding to an understanding of conflicting conditions for activist women working in indigenous circles. Trask asserts that “indigenous women must fight for their own liberation as women even as they fight for the liberation of their people.”^8]

Trask’s writing details instances of male domination and female subordination by Native Hawaiian men in the Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana. This includes an account of violence towards women and children. In this analysis she says,

it was not uncommon for men in the ‘Ohana to defend violence against women as a man’s prerogative or none of anyone’s business. I was continually amazed to find some of the most ardent advocates of Aloha ‘Āina to be perpetrators of violence against women and their children, and if not violence, then forms of neglect, especially regarding child support, which I would call abusive.[^9]

Barker similarly describes a “systematic escalation of violence against Indian women” and a rationalization of sexist discrimination and violence against women.[^10] In her analysis of Native peoples in Canada, she attributes such violence to the prevalence of sexist ideologies and practices in band governments and Indian organizations that ignore that native women are most often the targets of violence.[^11] Barker’s analysis delves deeper into the implications of colonial law and colonial tactics that prompt these internal conflicts and Trask provides a similar but personal analysis through her experiences as a native feminist and activist; both pieces present common traits of violence stemming from colonial and patriarchal oppression.

In addition to expressing varying aspects of violence against native women, Barker and Trask point out a culture of acceptance or acquiescence to violence against native women. Such acceptance in our families and communities perpetuates this violence. Similarly, To the Indigenous Woman concludes with a plea that we “do something.” Indigenous feminists like Barker and Trask have identified past negative responses to female vocalization of such inequalities amongst native women. However, these past acts do not define our present or future. Given the above arguments and statistics, I ask once more, is violence against women an Indigenous issue? If so, what will we do about it?

Concluding Thoughts: To My Indigenous Sisters and Daughters

From my perspective as an indigenous mother and survivor of domestic violence, I would like to conclude with words of strength and love mirroring the male voice in To the Indigenous Woman and addressing my native sisters and daughters, whether they be gender conforming or not, whether they are currently recognized by family or not. You are not alone.

To my indigenous sisters and daughters,

We raise our voices and stories for you

you are not forgotten or alone

You are not defined by gender or your defiance to its impossible standards

You are not to blame or to be ashamed for what was done

You are not required to give until you have nothing left for yourself.

He may have said you were nothing or made you feel powerless.

Yet, you are here.

You have endured and you persist.

You have lived and walked through darkness with a light carried from within

surrounded by your ancestors and carried in the hearts of women who have hurt and lived for you.

Let this light and those before you remind you that you are never alone.

Stand tall with your native sisters, support and love one another

Let our stories and our lives remind the world of the story of our people

Let our actions and perseverance show our strength

Let us teach our daughters that strong nations value women.

NOTES

^[1] http://indianlaw.org/safewomen.

^[2] Indian Law Resource Center. “Safe Women, Strong Nations” last reviewed September 12, 2018. http://indianlaw.org/safewomen.

^[3] Chelsie Evans, Domestic Violence Action Center, email message to author, April 12, 2017.

^[4] Mieko Yoshihama and Chic Dabby. “Facts & Stats Report: Domestic Violence in Asian and Pacific Islander Homes, 2015,” Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence(2015).https://www.api-gbv.org/resources/facts-stats-dv-api-homes/.

^[5] Office of Hawaiian Affairs. “Haumea—Transforming the Health of Native Hawaiian Women and Empowering Wāhine Well-Being”last reviewed September 13, 2018. https://19of32x2yl33s8o4xza0gf14-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/OHA-Womens-Health-Report-Book-1.pdf.

^6] Joanne Barker, “Gender, Sovereignty, Rights: Native Women’s Activism against Social Inequality and Violence in Canada,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (June 2008): 259.[

^7] Barker, “Gender, Sovereignty, Rights,” 262.

^8] Haunani-Kay Trask, “Fighting the Battle of Double Colonization: The View of a Hawaiian Feminist,”Working Papers on Women in International Development 52, (1984): i.[

^9] Trask, “Fighting the Battle of Double Colonization,” 12.

^10] Barker, 263-64.

^11] Barker, 264.

Posted Sept 17, 2018

Lateral violence and healing

By Jonathan Fisk

As colonialism does best, it has reached its crusty hands across the globe, spreading the diseases that thrive wherever it touches. These infections have many names – sexism, racism, queer-antagonism, trans-antagonism, capitalism, and so on. These diseases weren’t necessarily new in the places colonialism reached, but unanimously they bolstered and worsened under its grip. Indigenous communities were not, and are not, an exception to these corruptions that have festered under colonization.

The painful truth is that we must recognize and address the various -isms that colonialism has incited within Indigenous communities, while also fighting against the powers that assault our community. As Joanne Barker states in her paper Gender, Sovereignty, and the Discourse of Rights in Native Women’s Activism, we must “bring about social equity between and for men and women [and other genders] in [Indigenous] communities—an equity that is an essential aspect of decolonization and social justice for [Indigenous] peoples.”

Lateral violence describes the violence committed within between members of oppressed communities, often by exerting differing intra-community powers, even when those levels of power might be similarly subjugated at an inter-community level. Although the term lateral violence calls up images of physical violence, it’s important to note that it also includes psychological and emotional violence.

Lateral violence breeds, and likewise is largely born from, intergenerational trauma; in Indigenous communities, this can be traced back to the violent effects and tools of colonialism, such as residential schools throughout Canada that stripped kids from families and cultures from peoples.

After centuries of continual trauma, the pain becomes embedded into who we are, ingrained into our DNA. Repeatedly subject to harms and struggles, our peoples are given little to no chance to reconcile and heal. With all that pain mounting and brewing in our communities, it’s no wonder that sometimes we take out the pain on each other – lateral violence.

The patterns of this lateral violence often mirror, if not being directly derived from, colonial power structures. These are the same power structures that cause thousands of Indigenous women to become missing or murdered over decades without any sizable public outcry or governmental interventions. It should therefore be of no surprise that lateral violence, especially in its physical form, is often committed by cishet men against women and LGBTQIA+& two-spirit people.

As a bisexual and nonbinary/two-spirit Taíno, I’d like to draw special attention to the harms faced and support needed by the LGBTQIA+ and two-spirit family. We’re too often pushed to the side or altogether erased, even within Indigenous feminist rhetoric. This leaves us tragically vulnerable to both colonial and lateral violence – to wounds that might never heal.

A common pushback against cries for addressing gender- and sexuality-based injustices within Indigenous circles is the claim that these power dynamics are simply traditional and that fighting to change these ‘traditions’ is anti-Indigenous. This argument, however, is disingenuous – there are strong histories of this existence,acceptance, and prominence of LGBTQIA+ and two-spirit people in Indigenous communities.

Even if our presence wasn’t traditional, traditions are by no means static – who we are is valid, even if our identities reflect the changed world we live in today and not purely our pre-colonial concepts of how to be a person. A strong culture is a dynamic one that celebrates community members in their fullness rather than dismissing them for being ‘deviant’.

Our continual erasure in Indigenous circles, the denial of our histories, and the rejections of our worth are all acts of lateral violence against us. Even tolerance or acceptance of us is notenough. Anything short of celebrating and fighting for our presence and our worth signals to others that we’re less than valid – that we’re not part of the heart of our communities, but rather offshoots, extraneous details.

There’s no panacea for combatting lateral violence against LGBTQIA+ & two-spirit people – definitely not in a world still plagued with colonialism, in forms old and new. Nor does combatting lateral violence in our own communities look the same everywhere – the needs of LGBTQIA+ & two-spirit people, the specific violence we face, changes with context and community.

So, pay attention. Pay attention to what Indigenous LGBTQIA+ & two-spirit people are saying and writing, inside and outside your circles. Pay attention to what other people within Indigenous circles are saying about us, about whether we’re being celebrated, merely tolerated, or altogether erased and depreciated. Pay attention to our histories within different communities and learn about our prominence, past and present.

So, show up. Show up when we ask for assistance against erasure or violence within our own communities. Show up by being proactive about educating others about our histories and our worth, and in correcting those who don’t celebrate our presence and our worth. Show up by alleviating the burdens that weigh us down, and by prioritizing us rather than just including us.

To undo cycles of intergenerational trauma, to combat lateral violence against LGBTQIA+ & two-spirit people within Indigenous communities, there needs to be an emphasis on healing – healing ourselves from the internalized diseases of colonialism, and healing others from its traumas. Healing how we think of community until all of us are celebrated in our full selves in all of the complexities we hold. Healing our fights for Indigenous sovereignty and liberation, for unless we forge that future for all of us, it won’t be truly attainable for any of us.

Posted September 17, 2018

Anthropologists Anonymous of Hawaiʻi is a Hawaiʻi-based mutual aid fellowship whose stated purpose is to enable its members—both native and non-native—to recover from their experiences in anthropology in order to live a decolonial and anthropology-free life. Their members meet once a month in an undisclosed location on Oʻahu far from their ethnographic field sites. This is one of their stories.

I’m a recovering anthropologist. I first learned about anthropology as a seventh grade student in a Hawaiian culture-based charter school. Mykumu, a Hawaiian woman, told us about anthropology and the study of culture. I thought it was cool. She was a recent anthropology graduate from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo (UHH), and she took my classmates and I on huakaʻi across Hawaiʻi Island. We worked in the loʻi of Nāpoʻopoʻo in Waipiʻo, and woke up early to chant to the rising sun at Kumukahi. This was alldonewith the purpose of (re)connecting to our ʻāina and thus to our Hawaiian identity.

Five years later, when I was about to graduate from high school, a Hawaiian anthropologist came to our school to talk to me. She was the daugther of one of our school’s board members, and was was the first person from my community that I knew of who had aPhD. She recently moved home to Hawaiʻi because she accepted a position in the Department of Anthropology at UHH. Through her encouragement, I enrolled at UHH and became an anthropology majorat a time when the department had an unusual number of Hawaiian students (mostly women). We supportedone another, and navigated our way through a disciplinethat always seemed slightly distant and foreignto our own cultural upbringing.

I graduate from UHH in 2013. Immediately thereafter, I studiedanthropology at the University of Denver (DU). I was the only Hawaiian student in the department. I was one oftwelve graduate and undergraduate students out of a total population of 11,778 who identified themselves as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.

At DU, classes that focused on Indigenous cultures and histories typically framed Indigenous peoples within comparative frameworks that examinedculture before and after contact with the West. The colonial legacy of anthropology, as well as the reflexive turn in the field, were both discussed by the professors in theoretical rather than applicable terms. Indigenous politics were gestured to, but never adequately dealt with.

Within this context, I completed my master’s thesis. Instead of looking towards contemporary anthropological theory as the foundation of my scholarship, I drew significantly from the works of Indigenous women on Hawaiian epistemology and decolonizing methodologies, as well as the work of native male anthropologists on the indigenization of anthropology by Indigenous peoples themselves. I am grateful that my graduate mentors supported my framework—perhaps because they were ill equipped to provide critical feedback on methodologies and histories that they lacked experience in. In 2015, I graduated from DU.

At that point, I seamlessly moved through anthropology for six years, developing a romantic sense of an indigenous anthropological praxis, albeit the stories that I heard from other colleagues with regards to their isolating experiences in the discipline and in their respective academic departments.

Today, I am a graduate student in American Studies. The move to not pursue a Ph.D. in Anthropology, but rather in American Studies, was not a critically-informed decision. But within the first semester of taking course in American Studies, the protective walls that I built around anthropology began to crumble.

My courses critically engaged with anthropological texts, pushing back against the idea of an Anthropology that was “the most obsessively self-critical discipline in the academy” (Linnekin 1991, 173). My advisor, a Hawaiian woman trained in studying rhetoric and literature, criticized anthropologists in her own writings, highlighting how anthropologists poached Hawaiian knowledge and silenced native authority. Through various readings on race, gender, sexuality, and Indigenous sovereignty, I became aware of the continual structures of power and oppression that reified anthropological knowledge over other forms of knowledge production. One of my fellow cohort members in the department, another recovering anthropologist, shared with me her traumatic experience as a woman of color who was constantly gendered and racialized as a native informant and spokesperson for people of color within her department.

Through all of this, I remained skeptical of the continual issues that pervaded the discipline. When reading works such as Haunani Kay Trask’s “Native and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle,”I acknowledged the colonial origins of the discipline, but secretly tried to find sympathy for the anthropologists that she chastised. I thought of Trask as the Angry Native Woman, whose political woes were detached from a lived reality.

It was at that point that I realized my complicity in anthropology. My lack of critical understanding reflected my depoliticized movement through the discipline. I needed to change.

At the start of my recovery, I started to consider that my experience in Anthropology at UHH (and to some degree, DU) was atypical. The reality for many minority students is that they are one of a few students within a sea of whiteness—both in terms of students and faculty members—in anthropology and other academic departments. For instance, the Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology, formed by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, reported in 2010 that anthropologist of color (AOC), the majority of whom were women, experienced racism and marginalization within their department.The report also included statements made by AOCs about experiencing sexism, elitism, and classism. Closer to home, the Association for Social Anthropology of Oceania, “an international organization dedicated to comparative studies of Pacific topics,” was called out for their failure to support Indigenous Pacific Islanders in the field. What these examples reveal is a discipline fractured by racial and hierarchal tensions. Although some work has been done to address these issues, there is still clearly much more work to do.

In light of these issues and in recognizing my problematic notions of Anthropology, I became motivated to learn more about why Native peoples and other minorities continued to face issues with the discipline. One particularly salient discussion within a Hawaiʻi context is the Trask-Keesing-Linnekin debate that occurred in 1991 in The Contemporary Pacific. Although the debate is 27 years-old, the issues that were raised continue to be pertinent today—evidenced in the fact that I have to read this debate for a class at UHM at least once a year.

The Trask-Keesing-Linnekin debate originated in an article by Roger Keesing published in The Contemporary Pacific in 1989 titled “Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific.”At the core of the debate were the issues of academic privilege, the characterization of the use of tradition within the context of Indigenous nationalist movements as “invented,” and the power of anthropologists in defining culture. In response to the essay, Haunani Kay Trask wrote “Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle,”in which Trask confronts Keesing on his positionality and power as a white male anthropologist, whose career was built off of the cultures of Native peoples, and his inappropriate useand representationof the Hawaiian nationalist movement within his own essay. Keesing responded to Trask in “Reply to Trask,”as well as Jocelyn Linnekinin “Text Bites and the R-Word: The Politics of Representation Scholarship,”who was compelled to write in response to Trask’s critiques of her work.

In the past, I read this debate with a critical eye towards Trask but not towards the anthropologists. The notion of “invented traditions,” as described by Keesing and Linnekin, was compelling in understanding the process of cultural transformation. Today however, after reading more of Haunani Kay Trask’s work alongside the work of more recent Indigenous feminist scholars, I have a new found appreciation for the critiques that Trask raised. Trask reminds me of what I need to do as a recovering anthropologist in order to decolonize my own perceptions of the field, and perhaps, to leave anthropology behind altogether.

In reading Trask’s response, I started to further consider her audience and her rhetorical strategy. Here are two of my takeaway points after my most recent review of her essay:

Trask reverses the anthropological gaze to critique the privilege and power of white anthropologists in the academy.

After reading through Trask’s response to Keesing, it is clear to me that she strategically employs anthropological tropes of describing culture in generally static terms as a strategy for critiquing the power and privilege of anthropology, and of making apparent the artifice of anthropological knowledge. The rhetorical question she posed mid-way through her essay is indicative of this: “If Natives must be held to Keesing’s criteria, why should he be allowed to escape them?” (1991, 160). So is her hypothetical statement about Hawaiians digging up the ancestral bones of “haole anthropologists...for osteological analysis” (162). In describing anthropologists, as if they themselves were their own subculture, Trask states that “anthropologists make academic careers and employment off of Native cultures”(162). She continues, adding that “anthropologists who secure tenure by studying, publishing, and lecturing about Native peoples are clearly ‘profiting’ through a guaranteed lifetime income” (162). I will return to these issues in the second point. In their replies, neither Keesing nor Linnekin choose to thoroughly address these isues and reflect on their privilege.

Trask’s points on the poaching of Indigenous knowledge for career gains continue to be valid concerns with regards to anthropology and other social science disciplines, even twenty years later. Recently, Tatah Mentan, in Unmasking Social Science Imperialism: Globalization Theory as a Phase of Academic Colonialism(2015),describes the domination of institutional American anthropology. His evidence of this is “the sheer quantitative dominance [of anthropology] in terms of numbers of scholars, number of university departments, associations, conferences, journals and research funds, a dominance that is so massive in quantitative terms that it acquires a qualitative value “(82). A more specific example of this is the American Anthropological Association, the U.S. national professional organization of the field, which roughly consists of more than 10,000 members. Clearly then, Trask tells us that one should look first at their own position of privilege and power before critiquing the power and “mythmaking” capabilities of others.

Trask reminds us of the political stakes and material consequence of our scholarship.

In her response to Keesing, Trask calls out anthropologists for their collusion with “the colonizing horde” that has sought “to take away from us the power to define who and what we are, and how we should behave politically and culturally” (162). She expands on this point in a footnote where she specifically discusses the power of anthropological knowledge production in settler colonial politics and in courts of law. The full excerpt is included here because of the layered meanings that are contained within:

In a colonial world, the work of anthropologists and other Western-trained ‘experts’ is used to disparage and exploit Natives. What Linnekin or Keesing or any other anthropologist writes about Hawaiians has more potential power than what Hawaiians write about themselves. Proof of this rests in the use of Linnekin’s argument by the US Navy that Hawaiian nationalists have invented the sacred meaning of Kahoʻolawe Island (which the US Navy has controlled and bombed since the Second World War) because nationalists need a ‘political and cultural symbol of protest’ in the modern period (Linnekin 1983, 245). Here, the connection between anthropology and the colonial enterpriseis explicit. When Natives accuse Western scholars of exploiting them, they have in mind the exact kind of situation I am describing. In fact, the Navy’s study was done by an anthropologist who, of course, cited fellow anthropologists, including Linnekin, to argue that the Hawaiian assertion of love and sacredness regarding Kahoʻolawe was “fakery” (Keene 1986). Far from overstating their case, Native nationalists acutely comprehend the structure of their oppression, including that perpetuated by anthropologists(emphasis added, Trask 1991, 166).

Although Linnekin responded to Trask by stating how she “wrote a lengthy critique of that (the Kahoʻolawe) report in a letter to the Navy at the request of the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana” (175), and describing her own work in support of Hawaiian communities, she missed a major point that Trask attempted to make: Anthropological knowledge about Indigenous communities, whether it be ethnographic, archaeological, or linguistic, is valued moreas objective truth by settler societies and academies than the voices of Indigenous peoples themselves. As a field that enjoys a position of privilege within academic, legal, and public spaces, anthropologists possess real-world power when it comes to describing and defining the cultures of Indigenous communities. Those writings, regardless of the context and spirit in which they were written, can and do have the potential to detrimentally imapct the lives of native peoples.

One need not look too far from Hawaiʻi to find evidence of this. The translated works of Samuel Kamakauand John Papa ʻĪʻī, for instance, translated, (re)organized, and published explicitly for analysis by anthropological eyes, continue to be seen as authoritative texts on Hawaiian culture and history, albeit the recent critical work of scholars, like Marie Alohalani Brown, who stress the importance of returning to the original source material, and of knowing about the biographical context of these Hawaiian scholars. Anthropology, therefore, has shaped (and continues to shape public knowledge around “authentic” Hawaiian traditions and what is constitutive of those traditions in the first place.

Closely reading through the Trask-Linnekin-Keesing debate made me realize just how depoliticized my trajectory within anthropology was. I read about politics as they manifested around issues of repatriation and authenticity, and I was somewhat versed in the reflexive literature in anthropology, but I never once thought to interrogate my own discipline’s continual complacency in academic imperialism. I am learning to let go of my previous romantic assumptions of anthropology in order to make room for a more decolonial and critically-informed life.

On my path as a recovering anthropologist, I’ve made great new friends and have ventured into new forms of literature and scholarship. Most recently, I’ve started reading more of Haunani Kay Trask’s work alongside those of Indigenous feminist scholars like Joanne Barker and Aileen Moreton-Robinson that are keen on addressing the pervasive issue of racism and patriarchy within and beyond our communities—academic (and Indigenous) or otherwise. So far, they’ve taught me the importance of considering gender as a construct that is on par with issues of Indigenous sovereignty and critiques of settler states. They also keep me in check with regards to the stakes of our scholarship.

Although I still dabble with anthropological theory and methods in my own research, I am more concerned with creating alternative pathways, or perhaps escape routes, for native students who find themselves in anthropology. This is my commitment to anthropology now.

As a recovering anthropologist, the threat of relapsing back into a state of ignorance is always present. To avoid this, I must continue pushing myself to learn more about forms of oppression that face our communities today, as well as the politics of our scholarly production. I must remind myself that anthropological knowledge is not produced inside of vacuum but has real-world material consequences that should be considered prior to engaging in a research project. I must continue seeking decolonial approaches to scholarship and life. Thanks to the support of friends and colleagues who remind of the stakes of our scholarship, who keep me in check when it comes to my anthropological tendencies, and who constantly express the issues that continue to exist in anthropology and other disciplines, I am hopeful that a decolonial future for me beyond anthropology is possible.

The work has just begun, but the journey is full of possibilities.

Are you a recovering anthropologist?

These five steps are crucial as you work towards living an anthropology-free life. Disclaimer: Although the process of recovery here seems straightforward, it is, in reality, messy. Completely overhauling one’s disciplinary training and recognizing one’s privilege in the academy and society writ large takes time and commitment.

5 Stages of a Recovering Anthropologist

Adapted from the “5 Stages of Addition Recovery” framework by CRC Health

1. Awareness and Early Acknowledgement

This first stage is marked by a growing awareness that there is a problem. In some cases, this realization results from conversations with family members, friends or co-workers. Few experiences are as essential to an anthropologist as the moment when he or she shifts from denial to a willingness to make a change.

2. Consideration

The second stage of the recovery process involves a shift from awareness to action. In this stage, the anthropologist learns more aboutsystemic racism, academic colonialism, and issues of power and representation within their discipline. This is when the anthropologist begins to look beyond himself/herself and to understand that friends, family members, and colleagues have been negatively affected by his/her choices and behaviors.

3. Exploring Recovery

The third stage of recovery is when the anthropologist is motivated to overcome his or her anthropological mindset. He/Shebegins taking small steps by consultingwith friends or colleagues who have been through similar experiences. This is when when the anthropologist makesthe critical decision to decolonize their scholarship and/or leave the discipline entirely.

4. Early Recovery

The fourth stage of recovery involves the process of abandoning people, activities, and behaviors that have been significant parts of the anthropologist’s life. They have yet to completely establish the foundation of their newly free lives outside of their former discipline.Slipping back into anthropology during this period can be particularly problematic, because recovering anthropologist may not yet have developed the knowledge and skills that will prevent them from backsliding into full-blown objective and depoliticized anthropology.

5. Active Recovery & Maintenance

The last stage of recovery is when the anthropologist has learned that they will need to continue to work hard for the rest of their livesto guard against relapse. This will require active monitoring of their thoughts and behaviors, ongoing practice of new skills, maintaining a support system, and staying alertof their privilege and position.Recovery is about much more than overcoming one’straining as anthropologist. It is a complete transformation of mind, body and spirit.

Posted September 24, 2018