Unsettling Movements: Decolonizing Non-Indigenous Radical Struggles in Settler Colonial States
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UNSETTLING MOVEMENTS: DECOLONIZING NON-INDIGENOUS RADICAL STRUGGLES IN SETTLER COLONIAL STATES CRAIG FORTIER A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIOLOGY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO DECEMBER 2015 © Craig Fortier 2015 ABSTRACT Recent decades have seen a rise in Indigenous resistance to dispossession by the settler colonial state and resurgence in culture, traditions, languages and forms of governance. These processes have had a profound effect on the politics and principles of a growing current of non-Indigenous and settler activists in Canada and the United States. Coming out of Black and women of colour anti-racist feminism, migrant justice, anti-capitalist, queer/trans*, anarchist, abolitionist and other anti-authoritarian political movements, this emerging decolonial politics has had a profound impact on the strategies, tactics, and goals of social movements. Based on fifty-one in-depth interviews with organizers in nine cities within the Canadian and U.S. settler states as well as ethnographic and historical research, this dissertation grapples with the fluid and transformative principles of decolonization that are re-structuring social movement politics and practice. It also explores the historical trajectories that help align anti-authoritarian movements towards a politics of decolonization. Decolonization, I argue must be foundational to liberation in settler states, although one’s positionality shifts or changes one’s responsibilities to this process. This is particularly important considering how nationalism, sovereignty, and indigeneity are understood within a settler politics of decolonial solidarity. Finally, I challenge the settler colonial logics that underlie the desire to reclaim the commons in hopes of putting forward new pre-figurative possibilities that might help us in achieving decolonial futures. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am incredibly fortunate to work with a dissertation committee composed of radical intellectuals. I thank Hyun Ok Park for her meticulous review of my work, her ability to foresee key issues and gaps in my thinking, and for the great amount of care and encouragement she provided me in her effort to see to it that this project was rigorous in both its academic and activist aspirations. Hira Singh engaged me in consistent and provoking intellectual debates around the relevance of a Marxist and materialist analysis to my research. He walked the picket line with us during a cold and bitter academic strike and spent that time mentoring me and pushing the analysis of this dissertation. Even before I began this PhD, Lesley Wood has been an inspiration to me in the way that she straddles the responsibilities of being an organizer within radical movements and an exciting and innovative academic. Lesley has consistently advocated for me, provided me with support and encouragement, pushed me to think deeper, shown me care and friendship and helped to mentor me on what it means to work with integrity, accountability, and responsibility in the academy. I must also mention the support that I received from the Department of Sociology at York University. I had the good fortune of benefitting from significant advice, mentorship and direction from the three Graduate Program Directors who served during my tenure at York: Radhika Mongia, Kathy Bischoping, and Lorna Erwin. They helped guide me through the bureaucracy of graduate school and gave me important lessons on how to be a good teacher, a dedicated researcher, and a meaningful contributor to an academic department. I must also give my sincere appreciation for the often unrecognized and unheralded work of the staff within the Sociology Department. I am iii certain that no one would be able to complete their graduate degrees at York without the hard work and dedication of all the support staff. In particular, I would like to thank Dahlia Katz, Elizabeth Nam, Jackie Siebert, and Joni Kingsley for their hard work and support. I want to give special mention to Audrey Tokiwa and Rita Kanarek with whom I developed a very close friendship and respect. I am forever grateful for the long conversations with Audrey about baseball and for all of the discussions on political theory I shared with Rita. Travelling to all of the cities where I conducted interviews was time-consuming and expensive and I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the financial support that I received in order to set off on that journey. I was able to conduct this research thanks in part to the financial assistance I received from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Fieldwork Fellowship, the Rosemarie Abella Scholarship, and travel grants from the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the York Graduate Student’s Union, and CUPE 3903. I must also point out my deep appreciation for the long-time radical activism of my union local CUPE 3903 in fighting for decent benefit plans, better job conditions, higher wages, and a better learning environment for students. I was proud to fight alongside rank-and-file members of the local on the picket lines to resist and reverse the latest attempt at imposing further austerity and neoliberalism within the university. iv AUTHOR’S PREFACE Most of this dissertation was written in the city of Toronto, the traditional and unceded territories of the Huron-Wyendot, Neutral, Haudenosaunee, and Michi Saagig Anishinaabeg peoples. This city, the one I call home, has been and continues to be a shared and contested space and though I know very little about the relationships that existed upon these lands prior to European colonization, I recognize that these relationships are palimpsest in movements and encounters that shape the city today. These relationships flow through the Rouge, the Don, the Humber, and the Credit rivers, as well as all the other waterways buried deep below the concrete; they warp and bend city streets like Davenport Avenue that have been used for thousands of years as lake- side trading and travelling routes before Europeans filled in parts of Lake Ontario to claim even more territory; they creep along the train tracks where worn out graffiti calls out “This is Indian Land” and “Free Shawn Brant”; and they act as a great lesson of how we can come together to create a shared space of belonging should we choose to listen to these teachings. I hope that this dissertation is an acknowledgement of the need to re- generate and foster these relationships here in Toronto and throughout Turtle Island. In the course of doing this research I travelled through Haudenosaunee, Algonquin, Anishinaabeg, Métis, Sto:lo, Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, Saanich, Lekwungen, WSÁNEĆ, Ohlone, and Lenape territories and have been thankful to meet and talk with many people seeking to foster relationships of mutuality and accountability between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in all of these places. I want to acknowledge and speak briefly about my own history and identity, at least as I understand it today. I grew up in a working class household in the poor post- v industrial city of Welland, Ontario. Welland is a city that straddles the settler-state- imposed border between Canada and the United States and one that emerged from the construction of the Welland canal as a shipping channel that connects Lake Ontario with Lake Erie. My father’s parents followed the construction of the canal from the towns of Robertsonville and Gaspé in Québec and are the descendants of early French/Acadian settlers. My mother’s parents were drawn to the Niagara region later as part of the wave of working people moving off farms and out of the mines into the factories of what we now call “the rust belt”. My grandfather is a Polish migrant, who after World War II was unable to return to his family because he had fought for the British Army and Poland was now under Soviet control. Britain did not want to give Polish veterans immigration status and my grandfather along with five thousand others were sent to Canada as part of the Polish Resettlement Act of 1947 where he worked for many years in the mines of Noranda, Québec before migrating south to the great lakes region in order to work in the steel plants of southern Ontario. My grandmother’s family is from Sturgeon Falls, Ontario where they lived as miners, hunters, and farmers. My grandmother was of mixed ethnic origin and I have been told many different interpretations of what that mix might be, but most often it includes some combination of French, Spanish, English, and unspecified “Native”. Similarly, my knowledge of my father’s family comes from oral stories told by various family members who assert conflicting and contradictory stories about whether or not our French Canadian/Acadian family is mixed with Mohawk and/or Mi’kmaq ancestry. Given my understanding of the erasures of Indigeneity through settler colonial practices of elimination and the long history of settlers “playing Indian” (in the words of Philip J. Deloria), I am often vi conflicted in how to think about and be responsible to identity. This is made more complex by the structures of capitalism and heteropatriarchy1 that have generally broken up my ties with blood relations following my father’s courageous decision to come out of the closet in the late 1990s and live as an openly gay man. I have been helped to think through some of these complexities by a number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous elders and mentors, and while I continue to delve deeper into my own family origins and stories as best as I can, I believe it is important to recognize and acknowledge my positionality as the descendant of predominantly poor white settlers.