UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA WGS 498/GSJ 598

Reflection (M4)

This module opens us to considering the relationship between intersectional and Indigenous feminist frameworks. Noting that foundational texts in intersectionality studies read so far make no mention of Indigeneity as a category of social difference nor of settler or neocolonialism as an axis of power, we opened this Module with the intersectional sensibilities in Patricia Monture-Okanee’s 1989 talk, presented before the coining of the term intersectionality.  

Monture-Okenee’s intersectional sensibilities articulate themselves strongly in her refusal to disarticulate her identity into a single axis perspective that can only recognize either gender or Indigeneity. Furthermore, she takes an intersectional view of violence when she frames violence against Indigenous women within a broader framework of settler colonialism. Within colonialism, Indigenous people face the violent imposition of legal, epistemological, and social orders. 

With Monture-Okanee we made the argument, echoed also in other texts, that intersectional thought is not the sole property of Black and women of color feminism. Indeed, in the “2012 Dialogue on Intersectionality”, several participants argued that intersectionality is “nothing new” since Indigenous knowledge systems are inherently intersectional. Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies recognize the interrelatedness not just of complex identities but also the “connectivity and interactions between water, land, and air, between humans and otherthan-humans, in the visible world and in the context of other-than-seen realities” (Barker 2019, 6).

In her 2019  introduction to critical feminist Indigenous politics, Joanne Barker uses water as an analytic grounded in Indigenous ontologies and practices “to think and move with other Indigenous women who hold and care for water as life, who see water as a relative, as part of a living network of interdependent relationships and deep responsibilities” (Barker, 2019, 1).

Our focus in this section was on Barker’s critical reading of intersectionality. Here her focus is on intersectionality’s conceptualization of “power and its implications for understanding imperialism and violence from the context of Indigenous feminisms” (Barker, 2019, 11). This focus goes beyond merely adding Indigeneity as another racial/ethnic category of difference that intersectional analysis must attend to (10). 

Indeed, Barker rejects understanding Indigeneity in terms of ‘just another’ race/ethnicity. Because “the presumption that indigeneity is merely another race and ethnicity … denies the very important legal, political, and social differences that indigeneity make” (Barker, 2019, 13). Instead, Barker urges intersectional work’s “attention to the formative place of location and territory within how ‘systems of oppression’ and state imperialism are defined and operationalized” (Barker, 2019, p. 13). Barker’s focus is on power, rather than just multifaceted ‘identities.’ Intersectional analysis needs to account for imperialism and colonialism. Without an analysis of imperialism and colonialism, the state’s claim to territory and its imposition of jurisdiction is affirmed, thus further harming Indigenous peoples and hindering efforts towards sovereignty and self-determination (13).

Barker’s text ends with the re-affirmation that the diverse struggles for liberation are bound up together (29), even in the face of complex histories of mutual suppression and violence, between Black and Indigenous people.

With Natalie Clark (2016) we briefly explored some tenets of a “red intersectionality,” specifically a strength-based approach that is capable of capturing various modes of resistance rather than solely focussing on victimization.

Via the 2020 virtual colloquium on “Relating Intersectionality and Indigenous-Engaged Research and Scholarship” you encountered how four University of Alberta researchers in a variety of ways related Indigenous identity and ways of knowing in intersectional research (Salami, Tate), and intersectional frameworks in Indigenous theorizing and action (Altamirano-Jiménez, Sockbeson).

References:

MONTURE-OKANEE, PATRICIA A. “The Violence We Women Do: A First Nations View.” In Challenging Times: The Women’s Movement in Canada and the United States, edited by CONSTANCE BACKHOUSE and DAVID H. FLAHERTY, 193–200. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt81bsh.21.