Wat Kwanu Wuradu. Welcome. In the Mohawk language, the word for the Mohawk language is Kanyangeha. And the word in Kanyangeha for this place, Montreal, is Tjo Tjage. And I'm privileged to welcome all of you.
and especially Kim to Haudenosaunee territory. I'm going to just say that before every meeting, my people would say some words. In fact, it's called the Ahoto Garibata.
words before all else. And it's a pretty long thing, so I'm not going to do the whole thing. But in it, we thank all of the natural world.
And the first thing we thank is the people. And so what we say is, Today, we bring our minds together as one, as we give greetings and thanks for the people. And we remind ourselves...
This person is not in the Mohawk version. We remind ourselves that we have been given the duty to live in harmony with each other and with all living things. And so this, I hope, sets the tone for this wonderful talk we're about to hear.
Nyawa Goa. So we're very pleased to welcome you all to the first of the Future Imaginary Lecture Series. Skamonade and I run a research network called Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace.
And a couple of years ago we started working on what's called the... Initiative for Indigenous Futures. And this is a partnership of universities and communities that are looking at how to develop multiple visions of tomorrow so we can help understand where we want to go today. We have four main components. residencies, we do workshops, we do symposia, and we also are trying to build an archive.
The whole idea is to encourage and enable youth and elders, artists, academics, and technologists to imagine how we and our communities will look seven generations from now. This lecture series provides a public forum in which our most innovative indigenous thinkers, makers, and activists can come here to Concordia, to Montreal, and share their visions of the future, or their way of thinking. thinking about the future.
The goal is to center Indigenous views of the future in public conversations, and to be challenged and inspired by these views. As the Kiowa Comanche author Anne Scott Momaday once wrote, we are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least completely, who and what and that we are.
So before I introduce our speaker, I want to turn the mic over to our audience. our guests tonight, Concordia University's new provost, Graham Carr. Thanks very much, Jason.
Thanks very much, Davonetti. It's great to be here this evening. I think it's fair to say that universities have a lot of work to do in terms of addressing issues around truth and reconciliation.
and issues around indigeneity in the university and relationships with indigenous peoples and indigenous communities with whom we're in touch. Literally the day after I became provost, I had the privilege to travel with Elizabeth Fast, one of our indigenous scholars, and Charmaine Lynn, our executive director of community engagement to the University of Alberta, where there was a two-day forum on the role that universities should be playing with respect to the truth and reconciliation process. And one of the takeaways that I think all of us had from that is that... Different universities in different parts of the country are at different points on that journey.
And here at Concordia, while we are, I think, doing a number of positive things in indigenous space, we are a long ways behind where many other universities are in other parts of the country. And I think that's a challenge for all Quebec universities as well. So... I'm also pleased to say that one of the initiatives that the university has committed to as a The result of our strategic directions process is to make a priority of addressing questions of indigeneity within the university context. Part of the truth and reconciliation process...
process of course is dealing with a long and painful history and it's also about dealing with the present but in this context at Concordia where we're talking about the future imaginary particularly in a university. that prides itself as a next generation university. One of the things that I think we need to be thinking about is there are all kinds of next generations.
There are next generation students, there are next generation seniors. But demographically, the single biggest cohort of next generation people in Canada are First Nations peoples. And so it's all the more important for a university that wants to position itself as a next generation university. the next generation university that we addressed this.
I guess the last thing I would say is one of the happy byproducts of being at the Forum in Alberta two weeks ago was that I had the opportunity, we had the opportunity to hear Kim D'Albert speak. So I was looking forward to the next opportunity, didn't expect it to be coming quite so quickly and I'm thrilled to be here this evening. So welcome, welcome. Université Crincordiale, bienvenue à Québec, c'est vraiment un plaisir de vous accueillir and we're so happy to have you here this evening and thank you all for being here.
So just one more thing before I do introduce Dr. Talbert, I want to thank our sponsors. So the Hexagram Research Network is the primary co-sponsor of this event, with additional support provided by the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment. and GeoGrad, the Graduate Student Association of that department.
I also want to thank the Milieu Institute for Art, Culture and Technology for providing us with a home base from which we do all of our work. So, our guest tonight. I'm very excited to be hosting her.
I first came across her book, Native American DNA, Tribal Belonging, and the False Promise of Genetic Science, several years ago. I was struck immediately by her ability to forcefully examine the intersection of indigenous knowledge and western science, and to clearly articulate how the science serves the colonial project of indigenous erasure and eradication. I then went on a bit of a TallBear binge, reading her other written work and watching videos of her time. talks online. It's nice.
There's at least eight or nine videos of her talking online. I encourage people to go check them out. So her thinking has helped me reframe my thinking about indigeneity, scientific methodology, the role of technology in our cultures, our kin relationships, and the agency of the other or more than human.
So really mind-expanding stuff. It's been a real pleasure to walk through your thoughts. So officially, Dr. Tim Colbert, Kim... TallBear is an associate professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, where she's also a newly minted Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and the Environment.
She co-produces the new Edmonton sexy storytelling show, Prairie Confessions, modded on the popular Austin show, Texas Pet Post Confessions. Building on lessons learned with geneticists about how race categories get settled, Dr. TallBear is working on a new book that interrogates colonial... commitments to settlement in place within disciplines and within monogamous state-sanctioned relationships.
She's a citizen of the Sisseton Wapiton Oriente in South Dakota. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Talbert to Pecordia University. Thank you for that welcome. And I have to say I'm intimidated to be in Haudenosaunee territory because you guys are known to be militant and powerful.
So I'll do my best. So I'm going to get right to it. This is a very different talk than the talk I've been doing.
talk that I gave in Alberta a couple weeks ago, as I move from thinking about the politics of genetics in particular, to thinking about the politics of marriage, monogamy, and thinking about moving towards what I would call indigenous or critical relationality. But I hope by the end of the talk you'll see that these things really are deeply connected. So I'm going to start with a 100, and I do these, write these hundreds as part of a creative...
writing practice with six other writers around the country. It was an online writing group that I was part of. And I was writing about non-monogamy, but I ended up beginning to write about expanding my ideas into relationships with other kinds of kin.
And this is kind of a point when I was making that change. So this one is called Sufficiency. At a giveaway, we do them often at powwows, the family honors one of our own by thanking the people who jingle and shimmer in circle.
They are with us. We give gifts in both generous show and as acts of faith in sufficiency. One does not future hoard.
We may lament incomplete colonial conversions, our too little bank savings, the circle we... hope will sustain. We sustain it.
Not so strange, then, that I decline to hoard love and another's body for myself. I cannot have faith in scarcity. I have tried. It cut me from the circle.
Established hierarchies between humans and other than humans, for example the human versus animal divide, are co-constituted with hierarchies established between humans. Animal is a term that commonly denigrates particular humans as such. savage or less evolved. In North America, settler categorization and management of land and water, as common or privately owned, as conserved or open for exploitation and development, has been entangled with state management of... women, children, slaves, indigenous people, and other than human bodies.
Such bodies have been seen as less evolved, as in need of taming, as ripe for exploitation or development. Vulnerable human bodies, like vulnerable other than human bodies, vulnerable earth and water bodies, have been objects of intervention, knowledge, and control. My previous work has focused on forms of genetic science that construct race, racial categories as both methods and justifications of control of indigenous and other bodies and lives.
This newest work challenges compulsory monogamy and hetero and homo-normative couple-centric marriage. They too have been important techniques of ownership and state management of indigenous and other human bodies. They too have been objects of the scientific gaze, both natural and social sciences.
My work is informed by Scott Morganson. work on queer settler colonialism, especially his use of the term settler sexuality. In turn, Morganson cites and builds on the work of indigenous feminists and queer critiques of U.S., in particular, sexual colonization, when he defines settler sexuality as, quote, the heteropatriarchal and sexual modernity exemplary of white settler civilization.
Morganson also builds on a Foucauldian explanation of sexual modernity as state the biopolitical management of bodies and populations. Perhaps an even more fundamental binary or hierarchy of life than that of civilized versus savage or culture versus nature, binaries commonly applied to women, indigenous people, people of color, queers, the disabled, is that of life versus not life. For example, Mel Chen describes an animacy hierarchy that deanimates certain bodies below others, with humans and Western heterosexuals.
heterosexual males among us, occupying the highest perch. Monogamy and marriage are also part of sustaining an animacy hierarchy in which some bodies are viewed as more animate, alive, and vibrant than others. Think about all of the processes in our society that shore up this institution of marriage and all the other kinds of relationships that are excluded from that.
I therefore situate a critique of compulsory monogamy in marriage not only within feminist, indigenous, and queer critiques of settler sexuality. but also within indigenous and queer critiques of the divide between humans and other than humans. I draw on scholarship that helps us see the possibilities for disaggregating these objects, sexuality and spirituality, that a settler worldview has made for us as it still seeks to modernize us, to evolve us into citizens absorbable into the white nation.
Rather, we can focus on understanding both sexuality and spirituality as sets of relations, and and power exchange between humans and between humans and other powerful beings. Subtler relations be that marriage and sex between humans or forms of hierarchical intimacy between humans and nature. is not economically, emotionally, and materially sustainable for lots of persons, both indigenous and not, both human and not.
Rather, thinking about going back or forward into indigenous forms of relationality and other practices of critical relationality, this can offer us more sustainable intimacies for the planet. So I want to talk now about imposing monogamy and settler marriage in a little bit more detail. It was not always so that the monogamous couple ideal reigned.
Historian Nancy Cott argues with respect to the U.S. that the Christian model of lifelong marriage, monogamous marriage, was not a dominant worldview until the late 19th century, that it took work to make monogamous marriage seem like a foregone conclusion and that people had to choose to make marriage the foundation of the new nation. Sarah Carter shows how marriage was part of the national agenda in Canada, too. The marriage fortress was established in 1932. to guard the Canadian way of life.
Feminist science study scholar Angela Willey shows how turn of the 20th century sexologists influenced a major shift in European and American cultures toward embracing now dominant notions of romantic love, monogamy, individual autonomy, and couple centricity. While monogamy had been part of oppressive Christian ideals, sexologists made it into secular human nature. More highly evolved people, they said, should not... participate in the less evolved practices of non-monogamy, nor should they be bound by arranged marriages. Rather, they should be free partners willingly choosing one another and involved in, quote, a project of personal fulfillment and self-actualization.
Their more evolved, enlightened, and individualistic coupling was juxtaposed with the savage others who were their foils, i.e., polygamists who engaged in arranged marriage that also centered accompanying extended kinship responsibilities. At the same time that settler monogamy and marriage were solidified as central to both U.S. and Canadian nation-building, indigenous peoples in these countries were being viciously restrained, conceptually and physically, inside colonial borders and institutions that included residential schools, churches, and missions, all designed to save the man and kill the Indian. Part of saving indigenous people from their savagery meant coercing and indoctrinating them into the monogamous culture. couple-centric nuclear family. Kim Anderson, a Cree Métis feminist, writes that one of the biggest targets of colonialism was the indigenous family, in which women had occupied positions of authority and controlled property.
The colonial state targeted women's power. It tied land tenure rights to heterosexual one-on-one lifelong marriages, thus tying women's economic well-being to men who controlled private property. Indeed, women and children were property.
The confining and unsustainable nuclear family today is still the evangelical ideal for the settler state. be ahead of myself here. I'm going to stick on this one for a minute.
So I want to talk about two forms of indigenous relationality and the words Tio Shpaye and Oyate will be defined in a minute. 155 years after the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862, when my ancestors were supposedly brought under colonial control, the fundamental social unit of our peoples remains the extended kin group.
The Dakota word for extended family is Tio Shpaye. The word for the people, which sometimes translated as nation is Oyate. In reservation communities, the Tiochpayé hooks up into the Oyate, and governance happens in ways that demonstrate the connections between the two.
I was a happy child in those moments when I sat at my great-grandmother's dining room table with four generations and later in her life, five generations. We gathered in her small dining room, people overflowing into the equally small living room. All the generations eating, laughing, playing cards.
drinking coffee, talking tribal politics, and eating again. The children would run in and out. I would sit quietly next to my grandmothers, hoping no one would notice me because children's games bored me, and I preferred to listen to the adults' funny stories in wild tribal politics. Couples and marriages and nuclear family got little play there. The matriarch of our family, my great-grandmother, was always laughing.
She would cheat at cards. She told funny, poignant stories about our family and others, natives and whites in our small town throughout the 20th century. Aunts and uncles contributed childhood memories to build on her stories. Tribal politics were all always on the menu. My mother would link that into national and global politics.
A great-grandchild might be recognized for a recent accomplishment and the newest baby would be doted upon as a newly arrived human who chose our family. The mom might be 18. and unmarried, but she had help. As Kim Anderson explains, our traditional societies had been sustained by strong kin relations in which women had significant authority. There was no such thing as a single mother because Native women and their children were not married. children lived and worked in extended kin networks.
So it didn't matter so much in 1976 when I was eight years old that my mother moved to Minneapolis for work. There were few jobs for her in South Dakota and urbane Minneapolis intimidated me. Along with my seven-year-old sister, I stayed behind with our great-grandmother in our small reservation town. My mom was only 28 years old at the time and she took my two youngest siblings to the city. I suppose that was enough for her to handle and she knew her eldest too.
two were cared for. Her work in Minneapolis was important. It was a highly political time. The American Indian movement was working on community development projects like survival schools and low-income housing for urban natives. My mom became a successful grant writer and eventually brought those skills back to the reservation to help start tribally controlled schools and housing on the reservation.
Beyond producing and caretaking extended biological family, the Tiochpae is also cultivated and nurtured by making kin. Dakota and other indigenous peoples have ceremonies to adopt kin. In my extended family, we also engage in a lot of legal adoption aided by the Indian Child Welfare Act that prioritizes the adoption of indigenous children by tribal families.
Children's ongoing cultural connection to tribal communities is emphasized in that legislation, which indigenous peoples lobbied assertively for as one response to the colonial kidnapping of children from indigenous families who were deemed unfit for non- exhibiting normative settler family structures. Despite much colonial violence against our families, we are in everyday practice still adept at making care. So with hindsight, I see that my road to ethical non-monogamy as a critical practice, informed by the politics of indigeneity, race, and political economy, began early in life, as I was nurtured within a tiyoshpaye enoyate. Yet ironically, I was also subjected regularly by both whites and indigenous peoples ourselves to narratives of shortcoming and failure.
I regularly heard descriptions of Native American broken families, teenage pregnancies, and unmarried mothers. I observed extreme serial monogamy, disruptions to nuclear family, and other failed attempts to paint over our tioshpaye a normative, middle-class veneer. I thought it was our failures to live up to that ideal that turned me off a future of domesticity and marriage, and that's why I ran for coastal cities and higher education, and why I asserted from a very early age that I would never get married.
I did eventually marry, both legally and in a Dakota neo-traditional ceremony. when I was nearly 30. Despite my youthful disavowals, even I didn't have the oppositional momentum to jump the tracks of the marriage railroad. Today I'm nearly 50 and I see that it was not my family's so-called failures that dampen my enthusiasm for couple domesticity.
Rather, I was suffocating all my life under the weight of the aspirational ideal of a middle-class nuclear family, including heteronormative coupledom, even while I had lived contented... it turns out, a counter-narrative to that settler ideal. Unsurprisingly, the feeling of suffocation intensified after marriage.
My co-parent is an anti-racist, feminist, indigenous, right-supporting, cisgendered white male who, until recently, was always the primary caretaker of our now teenager. I do not blame him as an individual for my misery in the marriage system. We must collectively oppose a system of compulsory settler sexuality and kinship that marks and...
indigenous, and other relations as deviant. So he as an individual did the best that he could. In this opposition, this includes opposing state policies that reward normative kinship ties, for example, monogamous legal marriage over other forms of kinship obligation.
It includes advocating for policies, for example, universal health care, easier child custody arrangements, non-monogamous, and more than coupled bonds that support a more expansive definition of family. Decolonization is not an individual choice. This takes a collectivity advocating for systemic change.
The present settler sexuality system attempts to railroad all of us into rigid relationship forms established historically to serve the heteronormative and increasingly also homonormative imperial state. and its unsustainable private property interests and institutions. Present, past, future.
I resist a lineal progressive representation of movement forward to something better and movement back to something pure. I bring voices and practices into conversation from across what is called time in English. There are many live conversationalists at my table both embodied and no longer embodied and I lean in to hear them all. I try to grasp ways of of relating that Dakota people and other indigenous peoples practiced historically.
From what it is possible to know, after the colonial disruption to our ancestors' practices and our memories of how they related, marriage was different from relatively recent settler formations. Before settler-imposed monogamy, marriage has helped to forge important Dakota kinship alliances, but divorce for both men and women was possible. In addition, more than two genders were recognized, and there was an element of flexibility in gender identification.
People we might call genderqueer today also entered into quote-unquote traditional Dakota marriages with partners who might be what we today consider cisgendered. But as I try to write this, I engage in essentially nonsensical conceptual time travel with categories that will lose their integrity if I try to teleport them back in time or forward. So much has gone dormant, will go dormant, so much has been imposed onto Indigenous peoples, both heteronormative settlers and non-Northean settlers.
sexuality categories and now also queer categories. The record is also clear that there was plural marriage for men. What were are the spaces for plural relations for and between women then? An indigenous feminist scholar from a people related to mine has confessed to me her suspicion that the multiple wives of one husband, if they were not sisters as they sometimes were, may have had what we today call sexual relations between them.
She whispered this to me. as if we were blaspheming. But in a world before settler colonialism, outside of the particular bio-social assemblages that now structure settler notions of gender, sex, and sexuality, persons and the intimacies between them were no doubt worked quite differently. Recognizing such possibilities and looking for answers to such questions is an important step to unsettling settler sex and family.
This is a formidable task, one that will be met with resistance by many indigenous people. Our shaming and victimization, including in sexual ways, has been extreme. Christianity ensured that speaking of and engaging in so-called called sexual relations and the ways of our ancestors was severely curtailed.
Our ancestors lied, omitted, were beaten, locked up, raped, grew ashamed, suicidal, forgot. We have inherited all of that. And we have inherited Christian sexual mores and settler state biopolitics that monitor, measure, and pathologize our bodies and peoples.
With that history as the cliff looming behind us, it is no small thing to ask indigenous thinkers to consider the advantages of what we might call ethical non-monogamy. With a community's knowledge and a partner's consent, few of us will have that choice. Thank you.
I suspect there are especially younger Indigenous people who might join me in thinking hard on the non-monogamous arrangements of our ancestors. We have been so keen to embrace other decolonizing projects, to consider the wisdom of our ancestors' ways of thinking. Why should we not also consider non-monogamous family forms in our communities? I've had especially white feminists bristle at my refusal to condemn Dakota historical practices of plural marriage.
How can I support polygamy? With that word for that meaning one man with several wives, it can also refer to one woman. and with multiple other partners.
Their views on non-monogamy are conditioned by their impressions of non-consensual or non-rigorously consensual forms of non-monogamy in which men alone have multiple lives. They often cite Mormon or Muslim polygamies. I can't speak with much expertise to the variety of non-monogamous practices among those peoples although I know that there are varying levels of consent and not all polygamy should be painted with the same broad brush but I ask us as indigenous people to learn what we can about the role of non-monogamy in our ancestors' practices which importantly were often not attached to proselytizing religions that's key and which featured greater autonomy for women. What I know for my ancestors, again, is that women controlled household property and marriage did not bind them to men economically in the harsh way of settler marriage historically. What were the values underlying our ancestors' non-monogamy that might articulate with 21st century Indigenous lives?
Many Indigenous communities still exhibit a framework of extended kinship where responsibilities are more diffusely distributed. where we work as groups of women or men or other gendered people ideally to share child care, housing, and other resources. In my experience, our ways of relating often seem to contradict the monogamous couple and nuclear family. I am interested in seeing... seeing us explicitly, not only implicitly, de-center those family forms.
Perhaps our allegiances and commitments are more strongly conditioned than we realize by a sense of community that exceeds rather than fails to meet the requirements of settler sex and family. The abuse and neglect in so many indigenous families born of colonial kidnapping, incarceration, rape, and killing is very real. But perhaps our relentless moves to caretaking and teal spying... more than a normative settler family forms. Maybe that's not simply the best that we can do.
Maybe it's the best way to heal. I've seen sociological research recently under the label of indigenous masculinities, research that is pro-indigenous fatherhood, but which continues to center the normative... two-parent nuclear family form without question. Colonial notions of family insidiously continue to stigmatize us as they represent the standard against which we are measured. Perhaps our kinship arrangements are actually culturally, emotionally, financially, and environmentally more sustainable than the nuclear family two-parent model that we are failing at and that's why we are quote-unquote failing.
If we already often share the care of children, economic sustenance, and housing, why must sex be reserved for the monogamous couple? Sexual monogamy can, in one interpretation, be seen as hoarding another person's body and desire, which seems at odds with the broader ethic of of sharing that undergirds extended kinship. What if my colleague's suspicion is correct? Is it so uncomfortable to imagine women in partnership also with the same spouse, with everyone's gender identification more complex than biology alone, sharing not only, say, daily work, but also when the need or desire arose, sharing touch as a form of care, relating, or connection? So I'm going to jump to a little bit of theory now and talk about the idea of disaggregating sex in order to re-aggregate relations.
And I'm drawing on the work of David Delgado Shorter, and you can read along. He's in World Cultures, I think it's called, at UCLA. David is an ethnographer, but also works with... he has a class on UFOs and supernatural stuff and because he's in LA he has like UFO psychics come to his classes.
I was like, oh I'm so cool, next to David. Okay, so, but he's really helped me think through. through these things recently, and so I like to share with you what I've learned. Sexuality is not like power.
Sexuality is a form of power. And of the forms of power, sexuality in particular might prove uniquely efficacious in both individual and collective healing. Further, I will suggest that sexuality's power might be forceful enough to soothe the pains of colonization and the scars of internal colonization.
In an essay... titled Simply Sexuality, indigenous studies scholar David Shorter focuses on Morea Kamem, healers, seers, powerful people among the UMA, and indigenous people living on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. He originally set out to understand the spiritual aspects of what they do, to examine Morea Kamem as powerful healers, but his analysis has come to entangle both sexuality and spirituality, and I always use scare quotes around those two words. During his field work with Southern U.S. U.M.A. and Sonora, Mexico, an elder told Shorter that individuals who engage in non-monogamous and or non-heterosexual relationships are commonly also more a common.
This is not always the case, but it is often the case. In fact, in northern U.M.A. communities in Arizona, more a common has come to be conflated with terms such as gay, lesbian, two-spirit, and other less positive terms. The healer or seer aspect of the word has been lost for the U.M.A. and the U.S., who have much ethnic over- overlap with Catholic Mexican-American communities.
Shorter found that he could not understand the powerful spiritual roles and community of Morayakamem without also understanding their so-called sexuality. Shorter explains that in many indigenous contexts, there is an interconnectedness in all aspects of life. So following the connections between sex and spirit, Among the UMA was akin to following a strand of a spider's web.
In English, we are accustomed to thinking of spirituality or spirit, sexuality or sex as things. With that ontological lens, Morayakamem becomes an object, a class of person defined along either sexual and or spiritual lines. However, within their context, sexuality and spirituality can both be seen as actually constituted of human relational activities. They are sets of relations through which power is acquired and exchanged in reciprocal fashion between persons, not all of them human.
In describing how relations or the relational sharing of power become things in a non-indigenous framework, Shorter uses the term, get ready for this, objectivating the intersubjective. My undergrads do papers based on this theory, so it works for them. Okay, in his spirituality essay, he explains that intersubjective, like related, emphasizes mutual connectivity, shared responsibility, and interdependent well-being.
So we might think of sexuality, spirituality, and nature, too, not as things at all, but as sets of relations, in which power and sometimes material sustenance circulates. We might resist objectivating the intersubjective. We might resist hardening relations.
into objects, which might make us more attuned to relating justly in practice. To return to Moriakamim and resisting a classification of them as gay or non-monogamous, we can see them instead as relating. They have reciprocity with and receive power in their encounters with spirits, ancestors, dreams, non-human animals, and also in the human realm when they use their power to see for and heal other humans suffering from love or money problems, addictions, and other...
afflictions of mind and body. Emphasizing relations and exchange, Shorter explains that the social role of more akame is not a means for individual self-empowerment. A more akame does not identify themselves as such, although we identify them as a more akame in order to refer to them.
They do not accentuate their pertinent personal characteristics and capacities, for example their sexuality or their power to heal. Shorter explains that more akame focus rather on their work in community, that they work tirelessly and selflessly to maintain right relations, and they resist having those relational activities and that power objectified into these categories. So understanding Morayakamim relationality and community can help us to understand their so-called sexuality and ours too as a form of reciprocity and power exchange.
We can begin to unthread it from being an object like gay or straight that is constituted once and unchanging. So-called sexuality is one form of relating and sharing of power that is reconstituted over and over based on the intersubjective dynamism of two or more persons. Shorter encourages us to see that for more a common and for all of us sexuality can be understood as a way of being that directly and intentionally mediates social relations across the family, clan, pueblo, tribe, and other forms of relations. including other than human persons.
We may come back to that in Q&A. So with this understanding, sexuality begins to look more like a type of power, particularly one capable of healing. Shorter does not reveal the details of Moriakamem's sexual relations beyond noting their often non-normative sexualities, but his theoretical treatment of sexuality as relational power exchange is instructive for pondering how indigenous people and others might find ways in collectivity to oppose... sexuality in marriage.
Given the goal of thinking relationally, what might indigenizing sexuality mean? I hope it is clear by now that that question is actually oxymoronic. Rather, we might consider that the goal is to disaggregate so-called sexuality, not back to tradition, not forward into progress, but into and back out into that spider's web of relations or any net visual that works for you. like this internet visual too.
That is a web or net in which relations exchange power and power is intention thus holding the web or community together. So this is my thought experiment. As part of decolonial efforts can we work ourselves into a web of relations and I'm thinking in terms of space and not a time concept now and I thank you for the people here for really making me grapple with time more explicitly than I have but as I was as I was thinking about this talk I resisted.
notion of linear time right and I real I said I went immediately to a space metaphor and to reconstructing and changing space. So I'm sure somebody else has written on that, but I'm going to be looking into that now. So in small moments of possibility then, can we resist naming sex between persons? And can we resist naming sexual... Sexuality is an object.
Can such disaggregation help us decolonize the ways in which we engage other bodies intimately, whether those are human bodies or bodies of water or land? in good relation, and with less monitoring and regulation of categories, might that spur more just interactions? We could do the same thought experiment then with spirituality, too, for it is also about relationality and engaging other bodies, maybe just not always material bodies.
We won't escape the moments when sex or sexuality, spirit or spirituality is the best that we can do with this limited English language. But we can lean toward disaggregating objects and instead focus on... promiscuously re-aggregating relations? Can we see ourselves as relating and exchanging power and reciprocity in ways that we now label as sex?
In support of a stronger tioshpaye or extended kin network with both living relations and those whose bodies we come from and whose bodies will come in part from us. I'm thinking of both the human and other than human bodies with whom we are co-constituted when I talk about thinking about building a stronger tioshpaye. to Yoshbae. But to return to the by now mundane topic of ethical non-monogamy, in relating with more than one partner in my life, I have come to regularly ponder how this serves kinship across my life. How do these relations serve others?
What about our respective children? Multiple romantic relations can help raise and mentor children in community. How do our relations serve our other partners?
I have found affectionate and supportive friendship with the partners of my partners. This is a key benefit for me of ethical non-monogamy. How does the different sustenance I gain from multiple lovers collectively fortify me and make me more available to contribute in the world? If I am richly fed, what and who am I able to feed? What is possible with a model in which love and relations are not considered scarce objects, to be hoarded and protected, but which proliferate beyond the confines of the socially constituted couple?
What began as a personal political experiment? and ethical non-monogamy is turning to de-emphasizing monogamy and non-monogamy as objectified forms of sexuality. And again, I'm indebted to my fellow feminist science studies scholar, Angela Willey, who just wrote a book called Undoing Monogamy, the Politics of Sex. science and the possibilities of biology for inspiring my newly established will to unsettle both concepts.
I am caught up sometimes in objectivating the intersubjective, that is, when I identify myself as non-monogamous as a sort of form of sexuality, but let me be clear that I view ethical non-monogamy as but a step in decolonizing from compulsory settler sexuality. It's a placeholder until I, we, find other ways of framing and naming more diffuse, sustainable, and intimate. intimate relations. As an indigenous thinker, I am constantly translating. I see indigenous thinkers across the disciplines and outside the academy doing similar work, combining our fundamental cultural orientations to the world with new possibilities and frameworks for living and relating.
Our peoples have been doing this collectively in the Americas for over five centuries, translating, pushing back against colonial frameworks, and adapting them. We've done it with respect to syncretic forms of religion and ceremony. with dress, music, language, so-called art, and performance?
Why should we not also articulate other ways to lust, love, and make kin? A de-objectified reconstituting of right relations and nurturing, healing exchanges of power seem an important next step. Within the grand scheme of things, purposeful and open non-monogamy and reconceiving of more just intimacies with other than humans, and I'm thinking here of the theoretical...
and world-reconceiving work of Idle No More and of the water protectors at Standing Rock right now, these seem like important next steps. Settler love, marriage and kin, in hetero, homo, human-centric and mononormative forms does not have to be all there is. Settler relations with land and water do not have to be all there is. I have to have faith in that. I am only beginning to imagine.
And so now we're going to open it up for questions from the audience. So you should get over there. I'll get over here?
Oh, okay. Are you hanging out up here? Yeah. Okay, cool. Just for the sign.
Okay. So any questions to start off with or observations or comments? Go ahead.
I just wanted to say Chi-migwetch Si-es-ka Kujaka-na-mi-ya I only understand I only understand I'm just thinking all of the words I'm just thinking all of the words in my father and my mother's language that are just of this kind of enormous gratitude and acknowledgement and very spirited gift of reception I guess. I just wanted to say thank you. I really feel like this is so crucial for me to come and listen to you talk and to come I can't even my repressed colonial caps can't really let out right now what's happening.
I just wanted to say thank you so much. Thank you. It is so huge and... Oh my god. Yeah.
I'm from Sutena. From where? Sutena. Where's that?
Right next to Calgary Treaty 7. Oh, okay. In the middle of the block. You know I'm American, so I'm still learning my geography.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I think I saw University of Alberta.
I just moved there, but yeah. I grew up in South Dakota. Okay.
And yeah, I've been using the term two-spirit, but feeling limitations on it at the same time. Well, and we need more writing about that, right? I think that it's really interesting, the work that's been done in that area.
Yeah. Yeah, so I'm just so thankful right now. I feel like the advocates. Well, we can be in touch, right? You know, or something like that.
Right. Yes, Kathy? I'm also a scholar and I study violence and I imagine that you have thought a lot about how we can transform relationships into, you know, peaceful, loving, caring ones through changing the nature of relationships.
And I just wondered if you could share some of your thoughts about that. Well, I'm doing a personal experiment. You know, I mean, what I thought about is kind of contained in this talk. You know, I wasn't a sexuality studies scholar, right?
So a lot of what I've learned in the last few years as I've taken this on and tried to relate it back to my environmental and techno-science work has come from younger scholars, particularly those working in queer theory, right? And then also feminist scholars that are not... just feminist science studies people, but I come from feminist science studies, so I don't come through traditional feminist kind of genealogy.
I didn't really do women of color feminism, it's all feminist techno-science stuff. So yeah, I don't, I feel like I don't have anything to offer then. and probably many other people in this room have better answers to that question than I do. But I do think that comparing our intimate relations with non-human bodies, in this case we're talking about water and land, and the concept of consent, which should guide our relations with human bodies, I think. And then you get tricky.
It gets tricky, right? And there's a divide between sort of Western notions of sentience and agency and then indigenous ideas about non-human animals as kin and non-human bodies. as kin. But there's actually really interesting anthropological work happening right now where you've got a non-Indigenous anthropologist trying to find a way to explain to the academy how one can have knowing intellectual exchanges with non-human animals.
So how can one, there are ways in which Indigenous peoples have had relations, maybe consent is not the right word, but relations of reciprocity and exchange in which, you know, I've been begin to think a lot about how sex is like eating. You know, we have sex with our relatives, and we're all related. I don't mean in, you know, incest. I mean we're all related in this room, right? But we also eat our relatives, and that's the difference between Western and Indigenous ontologies.
We know that we are eating our relatives, and you don't get to live without killing. So I, you know, I go back to what Donna Haraway says about who and what is made killable. And so in all of this language, we need to try to get at how do we sort of, how do we just... closely relate intimately with other bodies that actually sometimes have to materially sustain us. And so I have been thinking a lot about this language of consent and how can we We transform that into another kind of language.
And I think going back to indigenous practices in terms of how indigenous people hunt, how they've lived on the land, helps us get at these kind of more just ways of relating that if they're not fully embodied within this notion of consent, we need to come up with some other words for talking about that. So that's kind of where I am in terms of thinking about these things side by side. But it's been really helpful for me to link up kind of personal decolonial practices with thinking about my previous environmental work and the kind of ways that I support environmental activists doing this work. And I see women at the forefront of these movements, right? And the women in this, I don't think this is just coincidental, who are organizing with Idle No More and who are organizing at Standing Rock are also actually doing work around reproductive justice, around sexual decolonization.
They are making the links too in their practice. And I actually, my theory is informed by the theory that I see them working out on the ground in their activism. That's probably not an answer to your question, but that's where I went with those thoughts. Yeah. Thanks.
Well, I'll go ahead. Actually, I want to ask my question, but I'm so I'm impressed by all those ideas that I've heard for the first time just now. The idea of sustainability, I don't actually understand what you mean by that, because usually we think of sustainability and...
in environmental context, right? But you seem to have like- How would you define it in an environmental context? What's that? How would it be defined in an environmental context?
Well, see, is that you're asking a question? I'm not supposed to be answering. Well, I guess just having Something that is...
that we can see that it will last in time? Yeah, not using more than... Yeah, I never tried to define environmental sustainability, but I'll tell you what.
So I really had my eyes open to expanding the definition of that when I kind of theorized around the edges of a green building project. When I was at Berkeley, there were a group of architects and engineers there who were working with the Pinolevo Pomo Nation in Mendocino County. And there was a feminist engineer, Alice Saccagino, at Berkeley. And he was like, she... She's cool.
And so feminism matters in changing science. So Alice got a group of grad students, and her students are very super diverse class-wise, race-wise, from different geographical locations. And they went up to Pinoleville, and Pinoleville wanted to build green houses. But the U.S. green building standards are super urban-centric, and these are rural people. You can't tell them to live in little townhouses above, like, stores, you know, and they've got bunches of kids, and they've got dance regalia, and they hunt, and they make canoes.
And so they needed a different kind of house. house, but this kind of pushed up against the sustainability criteria of U.S. green building. And so they argued for this notion of cultural sustainability.
And so what did that mean? It meant that they had to meet with architects and engineers to tweak the designs in that house to maximize the environmental sustainability while also making space for the sustaining of those cultural practices and relations. And there was a real conversation, and in that conversation they realized it's not only engineers and architects that have technical knowledge and it's not only community people that have culture. culture.
They all have, you know, technological ideas and they all have cultural grounding. I resist the word bias, but everybody's grounded culturally in some kind of way, right? And so that was the first step.
And then I begin to think also in relationship to the non-monogamy stuff about emotional sustainability, not asking too much of a relationship, right? And I think this a couple-centric relationship is maybe quite unsustainable for many of us. And what else is lost? What other kinds of relations are not nurtured in the... the community when the nuclear family and the couple gets privileged over that extended web of relations.
So I actually, now that you ask this, I will go back to standard notions, definitions of sustainability, and I will try to incorporate that into a definition of what I mean when I say this. I think, so that would be, that would actually be really helpful for my own thinking, so thank you for that. This is really new stuff, so I still feel a bit like I'm meandering around, but you know, and when you do academic work and you have a hunch, you eventually get to the place where you're like, there's a... a reason that it's not, I'm not just kind of crazy. These things are connected, right?
In the back there, and then over here. I was thinking about that today actually because if you get into non-monogamous communities, right, contemporary 21st century urban, you know, polyamory type stuff, there's a whole, most of the conversations are not as politicized when I'm talking about it. the majority of the conversations there are about how to manage jealousy but I actually think Angela Willey's book Undoing Monogamy she looks at monogamy and non-monogamy So there's this debate going on in communities, right? Whether it's scientists or whether it's polyamory practitioners, you know, is monogamy genetic or is non-monogamy more natural? And this is the debate.
And Angie Willey is saying, no, they're both biosocial, right? So she was in a lab at Emory University that's studying the quote-unquote monogamy gene in prairie voles and comparing those to another species of vole, and they're looking at pair bonding. And then she studied the scientists at the same time, right? And the way that they have a will to see monogamy, and then...
kind of heteronormative, couple-centric relationships onto these prairie bulls in the lab. It's fascinating. And so, but what she comes down in the end is, look, I'm not going to say that non-monogamy is more natural than monogamy, even though that's kind of the standpoint I'm coming from. I would like to see somebody study the biosocial constitution of jealousy and paranoia and all that. I think there are ways in which, I'm not willing to say that jealousy is simply social conditioning.
I think there's also probably, you know, embodied aspects of that. that we could also study in a material way. So it's, you know, I don't know what else to say besides that, I think. But for, you know, being an intellectual, to me, if I understand something, I feel that I can overcome it, you know, which may not always be the case, right? We want to understand as if that's going to make a huge difference.
Hopefully it does. Yes, you. Next Monday, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!
, a Pacifica news station, I love her. will be going to North Dakota and turning herself in because she has been arrested for covering the attacks on the indigenous people working to stop the pipeline. We need our support. It will be covered on Democracy Now! next Monday for sure and elsewhere for that week.
But they're thinking of increasing the charges against her, and she's going to challenge that. That's great. So give her support next week. Yeah, she's been pretty badass in her coverage of this. Yeah, read the media coming out of North Dakota, the Bismarck trip.
It's just, that's the world I grew up in. Oh my goodness, yeah. So it's good there's a national and international eye on that right now.
Thank you. Right there? Yes, and then back.
Yeah. Matriarchal system sort of within the Indian community and now how it's changed to like the man being the woman of the house now and like here but what can be done about that now? Well you know I didn't call it matriarchal even though there are in some yeah but just that women had more agency right?
Yeah. I'm not somebody who studies matriarchal and patriarchal kin forms historically. It's very interesting. When I'm talking about the imposition of property regimes, not only on land but bodies, that was done through federal policy. I imagine it was parallel in Canada, but in the U.S. there were a series of federal policies to again save the man or the person and kill the Indian.
Those were about dividing collective land bases into individual allotments, the head of household who was a man would get 160 acres he could get more acres if he had a wife and more acres if he had kids but the woman couldn't hold the property on her own so she automatically had to get married to have that kind of support base and the job was to break up the tribal land base so I don't really make pronouncements about our cultural practices in that way but I look more at the impositions of settler structural notions but I would say that the gendered pattern of colonization is such that we still have at least in U.S. tribes, I don't know what it is in Canada, disproportionate numbers of women who have attained higher education. So colonization affects different genders differently, right? And we also see disproportionately women in jobs like professors and in professional jobs.
It's really quite interesting. So we do have women in all of these positions of leadership and authority. At the same time, we've still... We've all got, you know, gendered patterns of sexual violence, so there's these really contradictory things that are happening in our communities.
You know, whenever people say, well, what should we do? I'm not a planner anymore, and in fact, that's why I'm not a planner. to be an environmental planner and a community planner because I don't really know what to do other than to try to think through these things and help us think about... I do think that new ways of thinking about the world can help us envision new ways of being and acting. So I'm going to cop out and say I became an academic because I don't have any policy prescription.
Back there, yes. I was wondering, why did the situation on Standing Rock evade you? What about it? Why is it related to my talk? Why is it related?
Oh, because I was talking about, so if we expand the notion of having more just, intimate relations, I'm trying to disaggregate sex as an object. So we tend to fetishize this form of relating. That really tends to coalesce around the penis and the vagina.
And then sexuality is kind of, we draw all these kind of disparate body parts and practices into this object that we then name sex or sexuality in order for the state, for science, for religion. for men to have managed historically. So if we're talking about kind of breaking that apart and engaging in more intimate just less hierarchical relations that are less likely to be managed by the colonial state, that also implicates the way we relate with non-human bodies, with land, with water, and you have activists who are involved in Idle No More, who are involved in Standing Rock, a lot of indigenous environmental activism has in fact been led by women who as I said earlier are working simultaneously on what we might think of as environmental protection projects, but they're also working on these forms of sexual decolonization and reproductive justice. So there are links being made between how we engage in less hierarchical, more just and sustained relations. And those relations can be called, you know, our relationships to the land or living in harmony with nature, but they can also be called, you know, how are we living in harmony?
How are we having consensual, productive, intimate relations with other human bodies? So I'm looking at, you know, the way human bodies relate to non-human bodies. in various forms of intimacy, right? Sex is one way of relating, just one way. There are, you know, we have other forms of intercourse.
We have conversation as a form of intercourse, right? We have various forms of touch. We have intellectual kinds of intercourse.
So does that help? Maybe I need to, like, expand that conversation out more. Is there anything that we can learn?
Because I don't really know what's going on. Oh, what's going on at Standing Rock? And then I'm trying to, there's a... Oh, so you just wanted an explanation of Standing Rock?
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm assuming everybody knows. So at Standing Rock, there's resistance to the construction of the... Dakota Access Pipeline, which I think the company's called Energy Transfer Partners, which is building the pipeline.
And there was inadequate consultation done by Army Corps of Engineers with tribes. And in the U.S. we have a pretty strong language of a government-to-government relationship, and all of the federal agencies are required to go through these consultative processes. And they, I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but they did not go through an adequate consultative process.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which is a federally recognized tribe, established a camp. There are now several camps that have been established by different groups of activists and people coming in. So when Standing Rock established a camp, you also have Native people coming from reservations all over the country, establishing their own camps, kind of coming in to help support. the blockage of the construction of that pipeline.
And right now, and there are probably people in this room who know more about the details than me, are, there's a, it's unclear if there's a stop. Army Corps has said they're not going to allow the further construction until they engage in consultation. Who knows what that means?
But right now you've actually had people tying themselves to the equipment and they have stopped construction. Then what you had is you had the company that's building the pipeline bring in dogs. I don't know if you've seen this stuff in the media, but there were dogs brought in. brought in by private security. There are conversations going on right now by law enforcement in North Dakota as to whether they're gonna continue to be involved or not.
There's tribal land here that some of the camps are on. There's federal land, there's private property. Because we have these real checkerboard situations in terms of land tenure in that areas.
There's all of these different kinds of laws and policies coming into effect to try to figure out if the pro, the media calls them protesters, they call themselves water protectors. They're worried about the pipeline was going right under the Missouri, which is a big source of water. So it's, and the pipeline had been moved to that location because people, I think it was up in Bismarck, which is the capital, didn't want it going in their backyard.
So they sent it down to run right through Indian country. So that's what's going on at Standing Rock. And the activism coming out of there is really interesting. And again, it's led by women, and a lot of the women that I know there are also working on, there are women there who are also working on sex worker rights advocacy. So those linkages are not coming out in the press, but they're there.
I just, um, you just said something that really kind of sparked an idea. While you were talking about consent and the importance of consent and then the inadequacy of consultation, I think there's something really important there. Because consent is not... Consultation is like consent.
And some companies sometimes are put in a different situation where people kind of say, oh, well, we consulted them. But they didn't necessarily consent. So I think that's a really important difference to be made. in terms of having those just relationships.
Right. No, it's interesting. If you look at both what you can see in the mainstream media and what you can see in indigenous media, and then just what I'm getting on Facebook, because I've got a lot of fellow tribal citizens at the camp, they're waging this war on multiple fronts.
So the tribe and Chairman Archambault are using their attorneys and they're going through the government-to-government channels of the colonial state, But you've also got activists out there that are tribal members from multiple tribes. So they're definitely taking multiple tactics. It kind of looks like from the outside sometimes that you've got these kind of sold-out, colonized tribal leaders going through the normal routes.
And then you've got the real radicals over here. But there's a lot of relations happening and conversations happening between different actors there. And they're pursuing whatever means I think they can to stop this construction or slow it down. So, yeah. But I do think that's...
they're very critical of the consultation process obviously but but still pursuing that as one avenue of resistance writers or slowing things down I want to encourage you not to prematurely close off the possibility of policy-relevant outcomes. I'm not. Fifteen years ago, the Law Commission of Canada did what they did, which was to look at areas in Canadian law that kind of... ...supported heterosexual coupling as the ideal form of human relationship at the expense of all other forms.
And made recommendations around law reform that would kind of tear that down and support... ...and reconfigure Canadian law to try to support a greater variety of close... ...what that report defines as close adult... personal relationships on the understanding that what was the good that the law was going after there was supporting human relationships, not just that particular narrow.
That's much narrower than what you are. But it just makes me think that there is a kind of, or has been and could be an opening onto ways of thinking about things like law reform and institutional reform that could reflect the kind of thinking that you're doing around expansive conceptions of human and non-human relationality. Right.
So, you know, University of Calgary, I can't remember his name, a researcher there just came out with a study a couple of weeks ago on polyamorous families. And it was it was there are some legal recommendations in that as well. I hear it's getting a little pushback, but CBC did an article with some polyamorous families in Edmonton after that came out. Yeah, no, I think I do think changes in the law like that can help us be attuned to our non-human relations and better ways to it.
So you've got to. I think you've got to chip away at or reconstitute these kind of fundamental orientations to the world. And this fundamental orientation to the world can get exhibited in the way that we produce human family.
But I think that also, you know, it's not an accident, I think, that indigenous peoples have had, and I'll talk about my people, had these really emphasis on making kin through a variety of forms, not only having sex, right, but also adopting kin, and we still do that. And... having that attunement kind of bleed over into the way that they... You know, we call non-human beings relatives too, right? So, and a lot, you know, there's a lot of avenues to come at this from.
And, you know, I originally started when I was looking at histories of race and looking at the way that geneticists... cohere can around genetic lineages and then looking at the histories of how hierarchies of race and evolution have informed their thinking and continue to inform the way they categorize and name populations and races, there's a lot those fundamental kinds of ways of seeing the world deeply infuse our sciences and all of our institutions and there's a lot of ways to go at it, right? So yeah I want somebody to have those policy recommendations but that's not my skill set I was asked that in a talk a couple days ago about policy recommendations and I was like I don't do policy There we go I'm looking at this part of your PowerPoint, and I guess I was thinking about sustainability, and in a sense we think of sustainability as projecting forward, but I wondered about if you thought, or how you might, or we might think about a sustainable or ethical relationship with the indigenous past, or with ancestors.
That's a really good question. Do you have an idea? That's clever of you. I mean, I can tell you what I mean by this, and maybe there's an answer in there. I just wrote an article for Anthropology News, actually, about this little bit of history that's here.
And what I was trying to do, so this is a little pro or tail yate duta, and he's my four greats grandfather. And he was the chief that reluctantly led the Dakota war against settlers in Minnesota in 1862. And after that... 38 Dakota warriors were hung in Manicato, Minnesota Lincoln signed the order for their execution the reservation era began for Dakota people exiled into what's what's now South of North Dakota.
But if you look at the history leading up to those, the decade before 1862, Little Crow and with other chiefs had been going back and forth between Washington, D.C. and our tribal areas. And had been, I'm rereading this history now because there's other people working on kinship stuff. You can go back and read that history as they weren't only treaty making, but they were also... it could be seen as attempting to make kin because they had made kin relations with previous non-Indigenous people but who hadn't exactly settled in the same way and weren't trying to build a new state, right?
So we tend to look at Little Crow as a perplexing kind of person historically because he made decisions that seem compromised or seem to have misjudged the situation. But if Dakota people, and they had been making kin for quite a long time with European or European... American people who were moving through that territory, engaged in trading and things like that. There were attempts to do that, it looks like, with the emergence of the settler state, and that wasn't going to work because the settler state is bad kin.
They're just terrible, terrible relatives. And so I'm kind of looking at the way he was making, he made kin not only through treaty relations or attempted to, but he also had multiple wives, four sisters, and he went around Dakota country. He left his father's village when he was 20 and for 20 years traveled and moved around through different Dakota villages and made kin and learned how to be a diplomat through making kin. And so it's really interesting to reread that history. So I'm thinking about making kin as a form of diplomacy and not only making kin through sex, which we've continued to do, right?
I mean, you know, indigenous peoples have done that, but we don't think about it as a form of diplomacy anymore. We talk about this government to government relationship. We talk about indigenous sovereignty because we have been kind of drawn up.
into this thinking about the nation and indigenous nations and that's a really good strategy just like you know the consultative process at Standing Rock but that's not the only strategy it's got its limitations and so I'm interested in being promiscuous with with strategies as well for how to expand indigenous sovereignty right so that probably doesn't get its sustainability but I am going to think more about defining that and hopefully I can answer these questions the next time can ask. So one more from the audience, and then I'm going to ask the questions. Sure.
Yes? Yes. Thank you for that. It was really very exciting. I was really moved by the way you talked about hoarding for the future.
Response to colonial forms of possession and the enforcement of colonial forms of possession. And so my question is, I was trying to think about how hoarding and these other forms of protection might be responses to conditions of scarcity, right? Enforced conditions of scarcity.
And I'm very moved by the way in which you're thinking about this aggregating process and these kinship relationships as providing conditions of sustainability in response to those forms of scarcity. These kinds of threats to life, living, relationships. And so my question is really about how those forms of disaggregating objects, how those forms of... of relationality deal with a kind of double-edged sword of dispossession. On the one hand, there's a resistant form of dispossession that's not for the future, that is these kinds of forms of expanded...
relationship and relationality, and on the other hand, there's a kind of persistence of colonial forms of dispossession that make people have to continue to do more but less, right? To continue to have to build these sustaining relationships under conditions of threat. And can you maybe speak a little bit about that, you know, dispossession as this mode of... Loving more loving more really and in the face of dispossession as pipeline construction, the constraints of the monogamous family, the kind of pressures that are always being put on people who are subject to a great deal of abandonment.
Well, you know, when I talk about hoarding for the future, I actually don't think, at least the indigenous communities I grew up in, we do a terrible job at hoarding. Like, we just, we never have any savings at all, unless we become middle class like me, but I'm still not good at it. You know, because...
there's always there's always um being in an extended family people need things and you are called upon if you are in a if you if you have a good income you are called upon to provide money especially if you're not there doing the work right um and so there's always a crisis, there's always somebody in the community in need, and you've got to help sustain that. So I wasn't really talking about us when I'm talking about hoarding. I'm talking about the settler culture that's imposed upon us. It's just simply not, a position of not hoarding.
But it's just letting that go. It's just letting yourself be in a position of not hoarding. What that means in terms of...
Well... I guess I feel like we haven't really had a choice about it. And instead of pathologizing ourselves for failing to, or for not having a choice, or for falling down on the job of living up to settler cultural ideas, I guess my point was just that we should embrace the fact that what we're doing is not deviant.
We're actually still sustaining ourselves. in these webs of relation. I mean, maybe I'm not really understanding your question. I guess it... But I want to, so...
But the forces of the kind of colonial power is to enforce particular forms of possession. Right. And at the same time, continually dispossess people. Right.
Everything. Yeah, yeah. And so how do these forms of sustainability, of kinship, of disaggregating objects, how do those, I mean, those are forms of dispossession against colonial forms of possession, right?
But they're also working against the scarcity of dispossession as a kind of material practice of all the camps. And so, you know, one of the things that that can do is being, is more rich kind of forms of exchange and more rich, but it's also more enforced forms of making, of taking away, of... ...negating her own forms of responsibility, right? Because people are caring for themselves, because... Let's talk more.
We're having dinner later. Let's talk, because I think there's something really interesting here. And Krista also did, like, psychoanalysis stuff, right?
Which I haven't. And I suspect there's something... Because I was sitting there thinking about that there's some interesting... Sexual contradictions happen in here, right?
So I do want to talk... I'm doing it from the standpoint of power. Yeah. This is about how, what this possession is. How you negotiate the relationship between an imposed structure of possession...
And how I'm still calling for it today. ...as the kind of material fact. Yeah.
Well, let's talk about it more because I'm interested to figure out. Maybe the conceptual knots can be sort of lubricated a bit with some wine. That was very poetic. So my question is, when I first called and talked to you about coming and speaking, one of the things that you said to me was that you weren't sure about this sort of um, uh, Language of the future, so like thinking in terms of linear time, past, present, future.
And then when we were talking yesterday, you were talking about sort of you like to think of it as, you know, you're in an ever-changing present. And I wonder if you can sort of just expand on that a little bit. in terms of where you might see the worth of this kind of future thinking or where it maybe needs to be sort of turned around into a different kind of thinking to be useful for the sorts of things you want to see happen. Well, I mean, I only know from my perspective.
perspective of having to respond to it, it made me, as I was saying earlier, I think, if I'm unwilling to engage in the concept of past and future, how else am I going to talk about these things, right? These visions for the kinds of changes that we can see or how we think about the seventh generation, right? And so I went back to, and I am going to do more of this now after having to respond to this in this paper, I went back to a spatial metaphor and a metaphor about material.
material transfer, so thinking about the web, right? The sort of web and that different weavings can happen and reweavings. But I also was thinking about if I think about seven generations and I want to resist this sort of linear kind of future thing, how do I talk about that? Well, multiple generations come from our body.
There's a material transfer from our body to the bodies that come from our bodies, right? There's also material transfer as humans and nonhumans co-constitute. one another. And so that's where I'm going to go.
But I'm not saying other people shouldn't think in terms of futures, because obviously you all doing that has been very generative for me, even if I might use another kind of language, right? I mean, I remember I had a student in a class two years ago at University of Texas talk about Afrofuturisms, and I said, what is that? And then they said, oh, there's indigenous futurisms too. And I said, oh, you know, I don't like that, but I don't know why. But it's really productive for me, right?
It's really productive. And then the technology aspect is really interesting, too. And as we were talking about earlier today, one of the other reasons I want to resist the notion of linearity is because it's too tied to progress, and progress this way and backwardsness in this direction, right? And people across time and space have used various forms of technology.
I want to resist high-tech stuff as the kinds of technology we should focus on to do things in the world. And I really think we under... undersell the intellectual prowess and the really complex forms of development of our ancient ancestors.
I mean, Vine Deloria Jr. said this a lot. He said there's a lot that's been lost, and we are sitting here, you know, for him it was in the 20th century, assuming that they were all cavemen banging on rocks. I think we really undersell the knowledge that ancient people had, and the knowledge that nonhumans had.
have you know and and every time the new scientific study comes out they're like oh dolphins are self-aware it's like well why wasn't your fundamental assumption that maybe but the fundamental assumption is something else right and if we have go into our our research with these fundamental questions that de-animate or putting on humans into a lower hierarchy it's going to take us longer to see actually what they do know and what they do do because we're we're not willing to see it in the first place so anyway that's kind of a tangent but um it's been really generative for me and i am going to work work that into the rewriting of this book chapter. Great. Yeah, thank you.
Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Kim. It's been fabulous.
Thank you all for showing up on a Friday night and joining us in this conversation. Thank you.