When I posted this on the discussion board, it was in the context of the Healthy Planet exhibit, the narrative of which created boundaries between the Global North and Global South and between nation-states and cultures– to make a point about health, development, culture and food. Lacking from the exhibit, beyond it’s absence of any kind of critical analysis,  was any sense of movement– everything was very fixed into these boundaries and if there was movement, it was things being exported from the West to the rest of the world: brands, foods, etc: globalization, McDonaldization: economic neo-colonialism.

How DO we think about decolonization in this context: the context of boundary production and systems of classification on a global level? I catch myself thinking in binaries constantly. Things are. Or they are not. Certain things are good; others are shit. It is difficult to think about colonization and globalization without having this very visceral reaction to the violence in both. And to see one’s self implicated in this is troublesome, to put it extraordinarily mildly. It is one thing to think we are all indigenous to somewhere and quite another to think about my ancestors coming over on the Mayflower. To locate one’s self at this nexus of privilege on a global scale…

Is decolonization the removal of boundaries? The dismemberment of systems of classification? No. When I think about decolonization’s resonances, I think about environmental pastoral rhetoric– the return to this bucolic time before industrialization, before people, before colonization. And I feel like within the context of environmentalism, it rings especially bullshit– there never was a mythical past pre-people pre-degradation that we can return to, especially since this particular narrative has a tendency to erase indigenous peoples when told by white enviros. we don’t have access to that past and every attempt to tell it is steeped in nostalgia and politics. To return to decolonization, I feel like there is something similar but not analagous– we don’t have access to a pre-colonial time, we can’t rebuild the Americas circa 1491 and indeed that desire can lead us to some genocidal places. Instead when I think seriously about decolonization, I think about a third syncretic option: the disruption of binaries in a much more subtle way.

I think revolutionary rhetoric is shit on a certain level. There will be no revolution. There will be no liberation as this telelogical end point; the end of history, the grand sweeping violent ushering in of a thousand year reign of social justice. The revolution, the liberation is a process, is the struggle itself, is you and me talking, is tiny acts of resistance now and forever. This is not to say that capitalism wont crumble at some point nor that we aren’t living in interesting times, nor to disregard revolutionary struggle here and abroad. But I think its very much a similar thing with decolonization. Decolonization is a process. Decolonization is not something static. It exists within these Western boundary/binary/classification systems and yet at the same time apart, resistant. To build resistance within the belly of the beast, that is perhaps the truly radical move. But at the same time, that is such an ambivalent position and so much tension to hold within one’s self. I think that is what I was trying to get at in my paper for Fem Search Meth.

I also think about the ways that boundaries play out on a very micro scale, separating people from one another through these reified, “self-evident” boundaries. Reaching across institutionalized hierarchies is a truly human gesture but its also incredibly difficult. But that is part of decolonization, perhaps. Thank you so much for an excellent quarter.

The Maviglia article touches on the activism within Vietnam veterans to get the diagnosis of PTSD included within the DSM. I think this is especially productive when we put it in conversation with native scholars who are proponents of Historical Trauma as, if not a clinical diagnosis, then as a framework for understanding and working with marginalized folks, particularly indigenous peoples. Maviglia outlines the strategies of vietnam vets as networking with clinical professionals for support and establishing solidarity with other communities who were experiencing symptoms.  Within both, we see the inversion of the dominant scientific paradigm of a rational, objective outside researcher without a stake in the proceedings beyond the advancement of knowledge.To connect this to my earlier thoughts about indigenous research, where this differs is in the insider status of indigenous researchers promoting historical trauma. How does this both complicate and make easier what is essentially the biomedical activism of indigenous scholars?

It is interesting to see folks adopting scientific paradigms into their self understanding and then advocating for the expansion of those paradigms when there is that lag between scientific knowledge and personal experience. There are two things in particular that I’d like to tease out of this First, how the articulation of one’s self is biomedicalized and how one actively participates in biomedicalization and second, how it is essentially communities diagnosing themselves, actively subverting scientific authority while they appeal to that authority.

With indigenous peoples in mind, this phrase conjures up visions of perseverance, of tenacity, of stubbornness. What drives communities that have undergone trauma or cataclysmic events on vast scales still adhere to one another, to resurrect traditional cultural values in the face of overwhelming suppression?

One of the first things this makes me think of is how survival itself becomes a political act. What does it mean when your very existence is contentious and must be advocated for and reaffirmed? What does it mean when systemic erasure and appropriation of your culture is so widespread as to be invisible? What does it mean to have your existence lodged in the past, part of pre-modernity, to have to fight to be recognized even as present? What does it mean when, like the Duwamish, you are undercut by others with whom you elsewise might claim alliance?

On one level, this brings to the fore questions of community and resistance. How does community function as a survival function? I think of the multiplicity of ways that communities are formed against colonialism: shared cultures, geographical proximity (often by force e.g. reservations), a common goal, a common enemy. Paradoxically, it would seem that the forces that shatter and splinter communities are the same forces that draw survivors together to construct new communities as mechanisms of healing. Are these communities are not solely formed in opposition but rather in solidarity with one another? Are they formed out of self-love more than hatred of the colonizer?

To me, this phase also has an edge of melancholia to it.  It brings up the unfinished and on-going project not only of colonialism but of genocide. Two premises: Genocide is multifaceted and multivariate, existing on levels of persons, cultures, and rights. Genocide is not a discrete event but the continual rippling outward of trauma. Does genocide ever stop? How does one derail genocide? “We’re still here” but for how long?

Jesus christ….

Further questions: How does one legally think about continual cultural genocide: the systematic erasure of a culture? How does one locate genocide within broader social structures? How has genocide been productive for the State and for states? How can we think about genocide transnationally or as a mechanism for producing and reinforcing nation state’s borders?

Within the definition, we see western norms playing out, slotted over the top of a global scale: individual responsibility for over messy collective, structural responsibility or accountability. Part of this may be purely strategic: how do you hold an entire culture or country responsible for genocide? Everything is so much messier and complicated than that.

I think of Hannah Arendt and her book on Eichmann standing trial in Jerusalem. Arendt sees Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat responsible for much logistical details of the Holocaust, as terrifyingly normal, evidence of “the banality of evil”: the normalization and bureaucratization of genocide during the Holocaust. To think of evil as banal highlights on the difficulty our cultural systems have in dealing with genocide or trauma on such a collective level like that. To be banal is to be invisible on a certain level, part of the everyday fabric of life. In this light, one could argue for the banality of genocide within American culture: a culture of genocide engaging in cultural genocide.

At the same time, to foreground collective responsibility is perhaps to let certain individuals off the hook with regard to their role in genocide. Eichmann, while perhaps not a monster per se, SHOULD be held accountable for his actions that resulted in the systematic murder of a people. The individual’s participation in genocide is a question of morality and agency, perhaps the best tools to which western culture has access to address the individual and individual action.

Another thing I have been thinking about regarding genocide is the HIV/AIDS crisis (specifically within North America; I’m sure much of what I am thinking is applicable to Africa but I don’t know enough to say anything for sure) and the American government’s response to it: too little, too late, underfunded and discriminatory. ACT UP, the radical direct action AIDS activist organization engaged in a lot of work deploying the term genocide to describe the crisis as a rallying cry to transform the gay and lesbian community’s response to it: from anxiety to rage. This is interesting to think about on a few different levels. If we accept ACT UP’s premise, AIDS was genocide through negation. The state was (presumably) not responsible for unleashing the disease itself but NIH’s delayed, underfunded, and inadequate response demonstrates the value of the lives of gays, lesbians, people of color, and intravenous drug users to the state: effectively nil.

Looking at the legal definition, this might be placed under Article II, section c: “Genocide by deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction”. However, it is easy to imagine “deliberately” being the legal sticking point for arguments about this. How do we locate intent within this? Individuals? This feels odd. The entire heterosexist hegemony is at fault here but unfortunately it is so banal that we difficulty seeing it, let alone its complication of conscious intent.

The role of disciplinary boundaries in outlining the particular research agenda in the Dis-ease and Displacement is particularly of interest to me as someone who feels very ill at ease sometimes in a social work program because of the position it occupies as a profession and pseudo-discipline. I am currently developing ideas for my thesis and am bumping up against the disciplinary lines of social work which often seem arbitrary and are very frustrating. Social work as a field of research seems only to mean something in terms of content: pertaining to marginalized peoples or the policies that affect them. The actual methods of social work research seems to be cribbed from other disciplines (which is positive on one hand because interdisciplinarity) but from a cursory glance, seems largely to be lacking reflexivity about its methodology beyond an analysis of positionality. Social work, on one hand, grabs at all this awesome community-based, praxis-oriented stuff while simultaneously being subject to the host of bullshit that comes from being technically a (health) science: a hard quantitative focus, a positivist worldview, and a bunch of problematic (and, worse, boring) baggage. What a strange position to occupy, straddling all these different worlds, feeling all of their limitations and none of their power.

The positioning of indigenous research within social work or welfare, within health sciences, is then even more curious. Indigenous peoples have a privileged vantage point into research methodologies having been the subjects of a deluge of research but have rarely occupied the subject position of being researchers themselves. As such, I have the urge to essentialize native researchers as inherently more reflexive about the research process and thus probably just better researchers as a result. However, given everything that I said above above social work and health sciences, the disciplinary boundaries and agendas in effect are very jarring to me when thinking about this work, particularly of IWRI, who weigh heavy on my mind not just because of this class but because I might be doing my practicum there. I asked in class, what does it mean to do indigenous research from this intensely colonial, positivist, quantitative framework, to inherit this baggage willfully when your very existence is in opposition to it? This question begs a lifetime of exploration. The best answer that I can come to at the moment is framing this research agenda as fundamentally strategic in nature.

Positioning the research as strategic then brings up a whole host of other questions mostly centered around a “masters tools” kind of thing. Does doing quantitative, positivist indigenous work reinforce the power of quantitative positivist research that was developed from this colonial framework? How does this strategy impact participants in this research? Is there really an oppositional binary between different ways of doing this research? How can we navigate this? What if the strategy fails? Positioning anything as purely strategic is fraught with different contradictions and problems. It seems to imply that content is subordinate to effect when they are both so important. But on the other hand, in the face of death, despair, disease, and displacement, strategy becomes such an instrumental tool. But that instrumentality of it is exactly what is unnerving about it.

What is my stake in this, anyway? Who are you, white boy, to be so concerned with brown folks and their knowledge production? I don’t know. I feel uncomfortable being critical of your article and of IWRI because it really does seem to play into tropes about authenticity and Indians or about fetishism of marginalized cultures, which kinda seems like the endgame of positionality: the most oppressed has the most access to Truth? Ultimately, I am interested in indigenous research out of my own dissatisfaction with western ways of knowing or of producing knowledge and my own look for some more holistic and reflexive way of doing, knowing, and being. This probably means I’m, in turn, maybe strategically instrumentalizing indigenous research for my own aims. Which is hell of problematic. But maybe valid: what would indigenous research agendas and methodologies look like if they were pointed at something other than indigeneity?

In many ways, we experience the world as the stories that we tell about it, about ourselves, and about others. Narrativity of the self is a crucial part of many forms of psychotherapy. One can imagine absorbing the impacts of historical trauma through the stories told by family and community members or through the stories the dominant culture tells about those it leaves in its wake. Part of these stories or of the transmission of these stories is the affectual response that accompanies them but cannot be made part of the stories, that belongs to the body. Bodies themselves tell stories that escape articulation not just in that they absorb the impacts of environmental damage but in that they contain the excess of affect that transmits trauma.

Decontextualized like this, this prompt makes me think about the amount of self-deception necessary in sustaining an unexamined life of privilege and inaction in a self-destructive, massively top heavy culture of death, poised to come crashing down around our shoulders at any moment. There is sleight of hand in obscuring interlocking systems of oppression but there is also willful belief.

On the one hand, perhaps it refers to witchcraft: the culture-wide performance involved in sustaining a vision of “the West” as coherent, just, rational, democratic. Or  the ideology that obscures the inequitable workings of capitalist economic system in conjunction with various cultural and institutional systems of making “isms” simultaneously productive and invisible. Or the diffusion of a matrix of power that interacts that produces and acts upon various different subjects. This is all witchcraft.

On the other hand, perhaps it refers to the witchcraft that ensures we remain invested in the status quo in so far as we cannot conceive of something else, something feasible. Or, as I am often caught, if we can conceive of something else, some utopian vision of liberation or an end to struggle but find ourselves too woven into our own web of cynicism and distrust of the state, leftist alternatives, and ourselves: a position equally apolitical. In this way cynicism can often be a crutch that disavows a more tenable position. It’s also a decidedly white masculinist position and, honestly, fuck that. I’d like to think I grew out of this position years ago but in my weaker moments, I find myself thinking that John Zerzan, Derrick Jensen, and Ted Kaczynski might have their redeeming qualities.