RADICAL CARE AND DECOLONIAL FUTURES: CONVERSATIONS ON IDENTITY, HEALTH, AND SPIRITUALITY WITH INDIGENOUS QUEER, TRANS, AND TWO-SPIRIT YOUTH

The spirituality and health of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit people occurs within and responds to contexts of extreme colonial violence. However, few studies have examined the relationships among the identity, health, and spirituality of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit youth and their perspectives and activism work in relation to the context of this violence. This study aims to better understand the importance of the connections among identity, health, and spirituality and their role in supporting Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit leadership in the enactment of care practices to promote health amidst colonial violence and the worlding of decolonial futures beyond and outside it. Informed by key insights from the grassroots movements and fields of Indigenous feminism, Indigenous queer thought, and radical resurgence, this study brings these insights into conversation, via qualitative interviews with five Indigenous youth activists (18 to 35 years old) from across the part of Turtle Island now known as Canada. Our analysis results in four themes: (1) identity, (2) spirituality, (3) the multidimensional nature of colonial violence, and (4) radical care. We delineate activating practices for decolonial futures, and signal the value of grounded, context-reflective, culturally safe, and intersectional health and youth services. This research demonstrates that spirituality is constitutive of and foundational to the identity and health of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit youth, and shows that health promotion and youth services must address the multidimensional nature of these needs if they are to truly support Indigenous young people, their movements of radical care, and the creation of a decolonial elsewhere marked by belonging, love, self-determinism, responsibility, and joy.

Zaynab Fawwāz’s Feminist Locutions

Lebanese-Egyptian Zaynab Fawwāz (ca. 1850-1914) was an unusual presence in 1890s Egypt: an immigrant from Shīʿī south Lebanon, without major family support, she created an intellectual place for herself in the Cairo press, generating a forthright voice on women’s needs as distinct from “the nation’s.” Like most Arabophone writers on “the Woman Question,” Fawwāz addressed girls’ education, but she focused less on domestic training than on work and income, gender-defined dependency, and exploitation. She highlighted gender-prejudiced uses of religious knowledge to further masculine privilege. Framing her arguments within terms of engagement defined by Islamic sharīʿah, she appropriated and redefined keywords for an indigenous feminism. She repurposed the Islamic-Arabic genre of biographical writing for feminist-inflected history writing. I consider how Fawwāz deployed terminology and genre to contest patriarchal readings of Islamic practice sustained by assumptions of masculinist authority. Fawwāz’s writings remind us that secularism was never inherent in Arabophone feminist theorizing, nor were the earliest Arab feminisms Western derivatives. Historical assemblages shaped by Islamic (and Christian) worldviews yielded creative syntheses that were firmly indigenous.

Solar Infrastructure as Media of Resistance, or, Indigenous Solarities against Settler Colonialism

The ongoing history of setter colonialism is inextricable from the infrastructures of energy and extraction that provide its material foundation. Addressing this inextricable relationship, this article explores how Indigenous solarities in Canada resist extractivism and generate conditions for just energy futures beyond settler colonialism through emergent solar infrastructures. Developing a preliminary theory of Indigenous solarities, this article anchors the author’s observations to Lubicon Cree energy justice activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo’s Sacred Earth Solar initiative and its two completed projects: the Piitapan Solar Project in Laboucan-Massimo’s home community of Little Buffalo, Alberta, Canada, which powers a community health center, and a partnership with the Tiny House Warriors. The Tiny House Warriors is a Secwepemcled movement to construct mobile tiny houses along the path of the Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline Project. This article’s approach is methodologically informed by recent infrastructural thinking from theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Deborah Cowen who offer an expansive, relational understanding of infrastructure. It is also informed by thinkers such as Myles Lennon and Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, who respectively see in solar energy infrastructures the possibilities to decolonize energy and to generate a feminist techno-ecological ethos. This article offers a brief account of the historical and contemporary relationship between settler colonialism and infrastructural development in Canada, before providing an overview of three mutually informing frameworks for preliminarily thinking through the materialization of Indigenous solarities: as media of resistance; as expressions of Indigenous feminism; and as expressions of Indigenous futurisms. The article concludes by scaling out from the context of Sacred Earth Solar’s emergent infrastructures of Indigenous solarities, connecting these efforts with larger movements of Indigenous resistance and renewable energy infrastructure initiatives. Ultimately, this article argues that Indigenous solarities signify myriad potentialities for reorienting our collective energy imaginaries from scarcity to abundance in ways that foreground Indigenous self-determination against and beyond extractivism.

Beyond Safety: Refusing Colonial Violence Through Indigenous Feminist Planning

Settler colonial violence targets Indigenous women in specific ways. While urban planning has attended to issues of women’s safety, the physical dimensions of safety tend to be emphasized over the social and political causes of women’s vulnerability to violence. In this paper, we trace the relationship between settler colonialism and violence against Indigenous women. Drawing on examples from community activism and organizing, we consider how Indigenous feminism might be applied to planning and point toward approaches to planning that do not replicate settler colonial violence.

On Seasons of an Indigenous Feminism, Kinship, and the Program of Home Management

It's early evening, a Friday night in October, and I have hauled myself off the couch to make dinner for my son and me. It's just us; the more active cooks in our family are away and the house is quiet. I've spent all afternoon immersed in scholarly literature about the history of home economics, and I chuckle at the irony as I pour premade marinara sauce over the noodles. I call up my son from the basement, where he's been immersed in his own studies, and find myself musing about our beginnings together—that spring when he arrived twenty-three years ago just as the trees were beginning to bud. I mutter about how perplexing cooking and mothering have been for me, and realize that these glimpses of me as a young mother and ponderings of how to take up increasing responsibilities as a middle-aged Indigenous “academic auntie” bookend my seasons of Indigenous feminist growth.

Resisting the White Possessive

At the turn to the 20th century settler colonialist and racist policies of land theft and systematic devaluation of Sámi livelihoods had produced an acute and dire political situation in Sápmi. Elsa Laula (1877-1931) and Karin Stenberg (1884-1969) were central activists and writers in the anticolonial Sámi national movement that organised in the south of Sápmi at this time. The political analyses in Laula´s book Inför lif eller död (1904) and Stenberg and collegues´ Dat läh mijen situd! (1920) offer scathing critiques of the settler colonial racism of the Swedish state at the time. Their contributions theorize the relationship between whiteness and property in the colonization of Sápmi, and the crucial role that racialization of the Sámi people have played in this process. These theoretical contributions are largely unknown to Nordic feminist scholarship on race and racism, however. In this paper I show how Laula and Stenberg´s analysis of racism offered insights that feminists would lend from American and British black feminist scholarship, as well as Australian indigenous feminism almost a hundred years after they were first formulated in the Nordic context. Finally, I consider possible reasons for the denial of this scholarly history in Nordic feminism. Merk: Selv om abstractet er på engelsk kan jeg godt holde innlegget på norsk.

Thunderbird Women

Indigenous gender roles have been distorted by colonialism, both through imposed systems of patriarchy and redefining gender roles within Indigenous communities. In Canada, the Indian Act of 1857 initiated a system of patriarchy which resulted in the loss of matrilineal family lines and Indigenous women’s rights to represent their community in leadership roles. This system still exists today, and despite numerous attempts to modify the law, the Indian Act still exerts patrilineal bias on Indigenous communities. In spite of this, there exists a large volume of research and literature by Indigenous women which investigates Indigenous feminism and the agency of Indigenous women in their communities. Examples include the writings of Sherry Farrell-Racette (Farrell-Racette 2010), Lee Maracle (Maracle 1996), Beverly Singer (Singer 2001) and Carol Rose Daniels (Daniels 2018) as well as online campaigns such as Rematriate (Rematriate 2018). Moreover, many Indigenous women in Canada are now stepping forward to address patriarchal systems in Indigenous institutions, such as the Assembly of First Nations, and outdated laws favouring male representation over female in meeting with governmental institutions. My research considers decolonization methods in relation to Indigenous feminist perspectives in research practice. Through an Indigenous research paradigm based on the teachings of the Indigenous Cree medicine wheel, this paper aims to decolonize homogenous forms of research by promoting Indigenous women’s knowledge. The medicine wheel in Indigenous teachings is a philosophy and a practical method of interpreting the physical, mental and transcendental domains. For research purposes, the medicine wheel offers a unique representation of Indigenous epistemology, ontology, axiology and methodology for use in research. Furthermore, following decolonial theory and Indigenous methodologies this research investigates the intersections of Indigenous feminism in decolonizing knowledge production and dismantling paternalistic affects in educational institutions. Including Indigenous approaches to listening, participation and storytelling as opposed to standardized interviews, as well as observation and document analysis, this thesis opens space for generating community-based definitions of Indigenous feminism. Focusing on the Canadian context, Indigenous women in Saskatchewan possess a vast amount of traditional knowledge and ways of knowing which have been devalued since the enforcement of the Indian Act. One vital way of Indigenizing cultural revitalization is by reclaiming Indigenous women’s epistemologies as a means of decolonizing gender roles and negating the impacts of the Indian Act.