[This Page is slowly being updated with the “findings” from the dissertation that became the main source material for what took place during the Learning to Listen project (2019-2025 and is still considered a work in progress. For more immediate “findings”, and even for practices that could be helpful, please see the ‘zines that have come out of this project]
How do we (settlers, especially us Euro-descended ones) begin a journey that leads us away from the perceived safety of everything we know? How do we begin to walk in a direction that leads us away from not only everything we know about the “world,” but away from that “world” itself?
These are important questions to consider for us as we attempt to unlearn the structures of knowing and beliefs that have brought the entire planet to the point of ecological crisis we are experiencing today. These structures have at the same time (some might say though that these are linked) have negatively impacted the wellbeing of all (if not most) of the Indigenous cultures around the Earth.
This section is all about the steps that we might take on this journey. In other words, this is where you can learn more about the methods that this project is practicing, and the ways we are seeking alternatives to (re)write, (re)right, and (re)rite our being on stolen land (please see Baldy). They will help us create a special map, one that might be shared in story. It might not be physical, but it will guide us to a place where settlers will be able to learn to listen.
Turning To
Both Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Ganohalidoh Jeff Corntassel write about the spectrums of resurgence and resistance in how Indigenous communities can and do resist ongoing colonization. They both also write about important a Turning Away from engagement with settler colonialism can offer the chance for Indigenous peoples and Nations to dream and imagine a world where they no longer need to factor responses to settler colonialism in dreaming what comes next.
In my supervisor Ganohalidoh’s view, a Turning Away is not a foolish disengagement with the settler state. It is not ignoring the state and it’s real impacts on the lives of Indigenous people. A Turning Away is a reconfiguration of where Indigenous people might be focusing their energies. It is a taking up of sovereignty not because the settler state acknowledges Indigenous sovereignty, but on Indigenous terms alone. A Turning Away is just a part of the spectrum of resistance to the state, and can support other forms of resurgence, even those that include the state in their planning.
In Ganohalidoh’s evaluation, a Turning Away has four interrelated elements. A Turning Away…
- Centres Indigenous nationhood and land/water-based governance;
- Honours and practices relational responsibilities, which form the basis for Indigenous self-determining authority;
- Decentre the politics of recognition, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism; and,
- Engage in everyday acts of renewal, remembering, and regeneration (Corntassel 2021: 74).
How can settlers support an Indigenous Turning Away?
Learning to Listen frames this participation as a Turning To. An act of turning our settler selves away from the settler state in order to support Indigenous sovereignty as the governing authority on stolen Indigenous land. Turning Away from the state includes ceremony and protocol, consultation and relationships with other beings, and is a conscious act of forgetting and unseeing the colonial structures as truth that must be constantly (re)newed. It is very much rooted in everyday acts. It is relational, land-based, feminist, community-based and generative.
Like Ganohalidoh’s Turning Away, a Turning to:
- …Turning To means that settlers must begin to “come to terms” with the reality that the colonial powers we support see and treat Indigenous bodies as “a direct threat to [colonial] sovereignty and governmentality” (Audra Simpson quoted in Simpson 2017: 104).
- …Turning To is to respond to an invitation from Indigenous people and accepting Indigenous leadership “sets the tone for protecting and expanding sites of Indigenous resurgence” (Corntassel 2021: 8; Elliott 2018)
- …Turning To supports Indigenous Nations and communities as they “make careful decisions about where to direct their time and energy,” increasing capacity to resist, increasing participation in Indigenous governance and sovereignty actions, and decentring the state and state bodies from appearing to be the only avenue for redress (Corntassel 2021: 81).
- …Turning To (re)positions Indigenous Nations as the main source of governance and recognizes Indigenous internationalism and Indigenous Treaty Making as “actions [that] can sometimes render the state redundant in terms of mutual recognition” (81), situating the power of the settler portion of “recognition” at the community and interpersonal level, undermining state attempts to continue Indigenous erasure and genocide through the politics of recognition (Coulthard 2014).
- …Turning To is an everyday act, a practice, that is private, lowkey, silent, uncelebrated, (inter)personal, and profoundly connecting. Nick Estes (2019) writes that these everyday acts are emergent and transformative, and they manifest “the collective faith that another world is possible” (19).
Turning To Indigenous leadership is not an act of throwing up our settler hands and claiming that the settler colony is not our responsibility. It also IS NOT an attempt to obscure power relations.
(re)Orientation
As any wayfinder will tell you, orientation takes an awareness of the cosmos (lands, seas, stars, seasons, planets, clouds, etc) and requires points to help determine where you are in relation to where you are going. European-descended settlers have been trying to find our way with a broken compass, (re)colonizing land already occupied and people displaced through perpetual dispossession, even in how we come to resist our own oppression within the capitalist-colonial systems we imported here.
Like the Four Elements of a Turning Away above, points of (re)orientation can assist us settlers while we both Turn To Indigenous leadership, and for taking up practices that support our turning to through everyday practices.
Basically, if you are participating in actions that say they support Indigenous Sovereignty, wellbeing, leadership and honour Indigenous peoples as leaders on their stolen lands, then you can use the four elements above and the four points below to sit with your experiences, sit with what you are participating in, and ask yourself if this/these actions are doing what they are saying (here these terms are literal: Talk is talk, and too often we settlers stall in the talk phase. “Doing” here means action, literally means doing…are you showing up? Are you literally supporting Indigenous peoples, or are you saying that you are? performing that you are?)
The four points of (re)orientation to assist settlers making a turn…
- Honour interdependency with the natural world;
- Renew sacred commitments via ceremony and regular gatherings;
- Generate Treaty responsibilities and/or acts of solidarity from relationships;
- Focus is on appropriate ways to act as self-determining nations (versus who has legitimate authority).
More will be described below, and a “Day on the Land” will offer an example of what the 4 elements and 4 points of (re)orientation look like in practice.