Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities Volume 8 Issue 1 Resisting Borders: Rethinking the Limits Article 4 of American Studies 2019 Subversive: Space as a Movement-Making Tool Maddie Schumacher Macalester College, [email protected] Keywords: placemaking, memory studies, social movements, colonization, transnational studies, Maori, New Zealand, American Indian Movement Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/tapestries Recommended Citation Schumacher, Maddie (2019) "Subversive: Space as a Movement-Making Tool," Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/tapestries/vol8/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the American Studies Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Subversive: Space as a Movement-Making Tool Maddie Schumacher Toitu he kainga, whatua nga-rongaro he tangata The land still remains when people have disappeared. I take a moment to honor that I am Hapu​: the basic political unit within Maori on Dakota land, in a country built by society; a sub-tribe or clan. stolen labor. Macalester College is situated Hegemonic​: politically or socially dominant on the ancestral homeland of the Dakota or in power. people, particularly the Sisseton and Intersectional​: a concept to describe the Wahpeton bands, who were forcibly ways in which oppressive institutions – exiled from the land because of aggressive including racism, sexism, queerphobia, and persistent settler colonialism. I make ableism, xenophobia, and classism – are this acknowledgement to honor the interconnected and cannot be examined Dakota people, ancestors, and descendants, separately from one another. as well as the land itself. Iwi​: set of people bound together by descent from a common ancestor or Glossary ancestors; the largest social units in Maori How can we speak if we don’t know the society; a tribe. words? Mana whenua​: territorial rights, power Aotearoa​: the Maori name for the islands from the land. of New Zealand, literally translating to Marae​: open space or courtyard where “land of the long white cloud”. people gather; the Te Reo word for Capitalism​: an economic and political meeting grounds; the focal point of Māori system in which trade and industry is communities throughout Aotearoa. It is controlled by private owners for profit. In usually a complex of carved buildings and an increasingly globalized world, grounds that belongs to a particular iwi, free-market capitalism results in the hapu, or whānau. exploitation of human labor and natural Memory studies​: an academic field that resources for the maximization of profit. studies memory as the past made present. Chicanx/o/a​: Mexican-American. The methodology is primarily focused on Dominant space​: the construction of space how memory happens in the present and that physically excludes or renders how it is a form of work, labor, and hypervisible indigenous people, people of action. color, and others with marginalized Nonbinary​: an umbrella term for a gender identities. identity that is not solely woman/female or man/male. 1 Neo-colonialism​: the control of Global Te Ao Maori​: the Maori world. South nations and peoples by Global Te Reo​: the first language of Aotearoa; the North nations through indirect means, eastern Polynesian language spoken by aimed at reinforcing capitalism and Maori people. cultural subjugation. Tikanga​: the Maori way of doing things, Pakeha​: white New Zealander of whether in culture, custom, ethic, European heritage. etiquette, formality, lore, method, Papakainga​: the ancestral home of an iwi protocol, etc. or Maori kinship group, or a housing Whakapapa​: genealogy; to recite in proper development for Maori on their ancestral order; literally: to place in layers. land. Whānau​: often translated as ‘family’, the Person of color​: a person who is not solely term includes physical, emotional and white, Pakeha, or of European parentage. spiritual dimensions and is based on Prison-industrial complex​: the overlapping whakapapa; can be multi-layered, flexible interests of government and industry and dynamic based on a Māori and a tribal which result in the use of surveillance, world view. It is through the whānau that policing, and imprisonment as solutions to values, histories and traditions from the economic, social, and political problems – ancestors are adapted for the in particular including the rapid expansion contemporary world. of prison populations in recent decades and heightened government spending on Introduction imprisonment, regardless of actual need. We cannot deny what we witness Queer​: an umbrella term for people who with our own eyes: the rich’s exploitation are not heterosexual and/or cisgender. of the poor, the most vulnerable in our There is discussion over the use of the societies being locked up at term queer; who should be able to use it, ever-increasing rates, and the and the context in which it should be state-sponsored murders of black and used. I find the term to be liberatory in its brown bodies. Oppression – and violence inclusivity; compared to terms like gay, to ensure continued oppression – exists in lesbian, and bisexual, it is language that every region and state on this earth. highlights identity rather than an And yet, this is what ties us attraction or gender based in binary ideas. together: a common struggle against The Te Reo word for queer is takatāpui. imperialism, racism, sexism, and Subversive​: seeking or intending to disrupt domination. Queer, feminist Chicana established systems or institutions. scholar Gloria Anzaldua once wrote of the Tangata whenua​: a Maori term that means border between Mexico and the United “people of the land”, generally used to States as “​una herida abierta​, where the refer to Maori communities or Maori Third World grates against the first and people as a whole. bleeds. And before a scab hemorrhages 2 again, the lifeblood of two worlds positionality and why my belief in merging to form a third country – a solidarity is more than aspirational. I then border culture” (Fisher Fishkin 2005). move to a discussion of memory studies, Anzaldua’s language is significant: as couching native struggles in a modern borders and border-making are cross-boundary dialogue in order to tools of separation, we also contain a express a transnational frame. In my first power to redefine ourselves using the very section, I examine how race and cultural tools meant to divide us. memory are imprinted onto natural All those of us whose nonexistence is landscapes, imbuing nature with meaning. demanded, I analyze the Twin Cities’ and Aotearoa’s who have been pushed down and out to twin legacies of indigenous removal and the fringes of society, criminalization of culture as well as their we who are most distanced from the West historic and contemporary constructions and whiteness, of “wilderness.” In doing so, I bring we whose bodies are scabs, together Pacific and North American memories of the hurt our ancestors have indigenous environmental memory in endured, order to describe and argue against the are members of a third country border exclusion of indigenous people from each culture; country’s nation-building project and full one where political borders cease to be nationhood. In my second section, I insert logical or consequential. these ideas of land and memory into the We are bodies of borders; context of taking and making space. I representatives of ourselves; observe how both Maori and American tied to our collective experience more Indian movement-making utilized place than any political nation. to subvert the erasure of indigenous It is precisely this arbitrariness of borders, land-based memory and the manufacture lines drawn in the dirt to separate those of of dominant space. Finally, I assert that us who would otherwise be relatives, these indigenous movements should serve that calls for a new ethos in our struggles as guides for future movements and against domination.1 space/land-based tactics in dismantling Ultimately, it is clear that modern oppressive structures. In total, this paper manifestations of oppression demand more argues that the connections between land from us than isolated movements with no and indigeneity are inextricable from each grounding in land, memory, and identity. other, and that the same colonialist forces In this paper, I begin by sharing my that erased indigenous memory must be reclaimed in service of liberatory 1 Find this paper’s accompanying zine at movements. https://www.facebook.com/100000596522144/post s/2177415252288338/​ and at Wellington, New Zealand public schools 3 Positionality around the globe. I do not want to equate All knowledge and research is struggles. Instead I want to nuance the situated in the framework of the author. complexities of transnational oppression Our race, ethnicity, gender identity, and make the case for solidarity between nationality, sexuality, class, and faith indigenous people and people of color tradition inform our research topics, across political borders. methodologies, and findings. This paper I am further connected to both the begins with an assumption of shared Twin Cities Metro Area, Minnesota and investment in intersectional indigenous Aotearoa New Zealand because I have justice – but claiming solidarity in this done significant learning and have forged way requires a prelude. I am not relationships with indigenous people in indigenous, but I am the descendent of both places. In Aotearoa, I was primarily Cantonese people who immigrated taught by Ngarangi-Mata-Tauira illegally from southern China to San Tataiaro-Rangi Te Rangiuia, a native Francisco, California during the era of the speaker of Te Reo and a practitioner of Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Like my Maori tikanga. In the Twin Cities, I have subject of study, my heritage traverses the taken part in conflicts around indigenous Pacific Ocean.