There’s a reason I’ve shifted from supporting Indigenization of Canadian Universities to decolonization. The former has been mobilized by universities themselves as a response to the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Executive Summary, which included 94 Calls To Action, including many that apply to post-secondary institutions. As an optipemisiw/Michif/Métis woman from amiskwaciwaskahikan (Edmonton) in central Alberta, I am relieved to see institutions formalizing these responses to the TRC. And I am grateful to see the decades-long labour of Indigenous academics, students, and staff within institutions across the country finally recognized as foundationally important to transforming Canadian post-secondary institutions.

However, I wrote last April about my mis-givings about how this is actually playing out on the ground. Indigenization, generally, has been embraced by the upper management of Canadian post-secondary institutions. However, ‘Indigenization’ efforts tend to be surface and to shy away from delving into the painful, deeper violences that universities and — settler society more broadly — have enacted on Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands (and upon Black communities across the country). Universities want to be seen to be taking action, but we still live in a society deeply shaped by white supremacist settler colonial heteropatriarchal history and ideology. This means that who controls the narrative is still, overwhelmingly, white people.

As Frances Henry, Enakshi Dua, Carl E. James, Audrey Kobayashi, Peter Li, Howard Ramos and Malinda S. Smith demonstrate in their recent book The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity in Canadian Universities (UBC, 2017), this is largely because the Canadian professoriate remains very, very white:

“Many universities, particularly those in major cities, now have a very varied student body, however diversity is poorly reflected at the level of the professoriate, especially in the social sciences and humanities. Both racialized and Indigenous peoples are largely underrepresented in the country’s major institutions, and little is known about their experiences. The under-representation of racialized women scholars continues to be acute, with their numbers in the academy only marginally increasing over the past several decades (Kobayashi 2002b).” (Henry et al. 2017: 5)

What does this mean for Indigenization or Decolonization of Canadian academe? It means that the majority of the people making decisions are white. It means that arguments for changes to institutions have to be filtered through whiteness, through white bodies (both human and institutional), and that white people still, largely, operate to own, control, and command what any changes to a campus looks like. (This is what Dr. Sara Ahmed articulates when she discusses the notion of ‘white men as buildings’ in British academe (Ahmed 2014)). It means that racialized students, staff, and faculty are at an extreme disadvantage (and even at risk of serious sanction, expulsion, or firing) when they raise questions of racism and ethical violations in Canadian universities. It means that Indigenous faculty have to be the ‘good’ kind of Indigenous (inoffensive, mystical, peace-full) or else be labelled as trouble-makers or, for Indigenous women, risk being seen as the ‘angry Indigenous woman’ stereotype. It means that Indigenization is not Decolonization (Giroux 2017).

This is because academia still operates around the principle of what Dr. Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls ‘white possessiveness’ (Moreton-Robinson 2014: 475), a logic that concentrates ownership and control of racialized bodies, knowledge, ontologies in white hands. This is because whiteness cannot imagine the Other as possessing agency or self-determination:

““The “Aborigine” is invented as a white possession being accorded the necessary prescribed racialized attributes within racialized discourse. When racialized discourse constitutes and defines the “Aborigine,”, it is producing through knowledge a subject of its own making, one that it interprets for itself. This process violates the subjectivity of Goories and Koories by disavowing any trace of our ontological and epistemological existence. In this way “Abrogines” are constituted in and deployed by racialized discourse as white social constructs and epistemological possessions. This Aborigine has functioned discursively in the print media for two centuries with new racialized attributes added as the disciplinary knowledges of Law, Science, and Anthropology grew within the new nation.” (Moreton-Robinson 2014: 475)

In academia, this works to concentrate capital and power in the hands of white handlers and minders who oversee the lives and actions of racialized Indigenous peoples. As I pointed out in April 2017:

In academe, Indigenous bodies, stories, knowledge, and ‘contacts’ (‘informants’, ‘participants’ or ‘interlocutors’) act as a kind of currency or capital that is concentrated in the hands of non-Indigenous scholars and administrators. Therefore, overwhelmingly, it is still white people who control the flow of this knowledge and the parameters of these relationships. (Todd 2017)

(See Erica Violet Lee’s ethnography of white possessiveness of Indigenous knowledge in Canadian philosophy, here: https://moontimewarrior.com/2015/11/09/who-can-teach-indigenous-philosophy/)

One of the ways this capital concentrates in non-Indigenous hands is through the ongoing inability of many institutions to engage with the deeper legal-ethical meaning of their institutions occupying unceded/stolen Indigenous lands. Although there are very strong examples to the contrary (see the work that Indigenous communities are doing to hold UBC and University of Alberta accountable to Musqueam and Indigenous nations with history in the amiskwaciwaskahikan region (nehiyaw, Stoney Nakota, Blackfoot, Dene, Saulteaux, Haudenosaunee, Métis) respectively), all too frequently, the average response to ‘Indigenizing’ academia, when led by the white people who have concetrated our Indigenous cultural capital in their hands, is to enact ‘Indigenization’ through sweeping pan-Indigenous measures, measures that are not attentive to the specific nations whose lands universities occupy. This is problematic because it, once again, moves from a place of whiteness and does not disrupt the deeper violences through which hierarchical institutions like universities come to stand in Indigenous lands.

Now, before you think I’m dismissing Indigenization efforts unfairly, I do want to commend institutions across the country for their shifts in programming in the last few years, including cluster hiring, investing in student support programming, and hiring Indigenous administrators (Vice-Provosts, Vice-Presidents, Deans, Chairs, and Presidents). This is a very important shift in how universities conceive of their accountability to Indigenous communities who have historically been outsiders in academe. This is also important because Indigenous bodies, lives, stories, laws, art, cosmologies, and science have historically been objects of study in Canadian academe. Countless white scholars have made careers off of studying Indigenous life while Indigenous bodies were kept out of academe. It’s a relief to see more Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and upper administrators across the entire country. However, even with this increase in the number of Indigenous bodies in adminstrative and teaching roles in the university, white possessiveness abounds. As Dr. Eve Tuck, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities, at the University of Toronto, so concisely demonstrates:

“I have colleagues in the University who continue to do work on Indigenous people rather than with Indigenous people. So those parts of the University, I think, need to be challenged, need to be redesigned.” (Dr. Eve Tuck, CBC 2018)

So all is not rosy. If universities are ‘Indigenizing’ but not ‘decolonizing’, then the efforts amount to nothing more than window dressing. Academia remains, broadly, a hierarchical, conservative, racist, and sexist assemblage. Study after study reveals the challenges of Black, Indigenous and POC (people of colour) scholars to move through the intensely white space of Canadian academe (see the work of Dr. Malinda S. Smith, Dr. Rinaldo Walcott, Dr. Eve Haque and others who have long studied and articulated the ongoing racism of Canadian academe and Canadian society). Last month, the Dean of the Bora Laskin law school at Lakehead University, Dr. Angelique EagleWoman, resigned, citing systemic racism as the reason she could not continue her post. Today, the university announced that the interim dean who will replace Dr. EagleWoman is a white judge who jailed six members of Kitchenumaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation for defending their lands in 2008. What commitment can there truly be when an Institution that claims to be ‘Indigenizing’ goes from hiring the first Indigenous law school dean in the country, to immediately appointing someone to a leadership role in Indigenous territories, with power over Indigenous peoples, who has incarcerated Indigenous land defenders for asserting their laws?

Decolonization of Canadian academe calls for a total dismantling of the structures of oppression in the academy. It requires an intense commitment to actually transforming the structures themselves (see, also, Mbembe’s (2015) arguments regarding decolonizing South African academe). As Monique Giroux points out in a November 2017 article in The Conversation Canada:

“It should be clear by now that I don’t think “indigenizing” is the right approach to addressing Canada’s colonialism within universities. But if not indigenizing, what should we be doing as academics, as university administrators, as Canadians?

The question we need to consider is: In what ways have the university system and academic traditions harmed Indigenous nations, and how can we begin the process of reparation?” (Giroux 2017)

Reparation is physical, tangible, and it is concrete. It is more than territorial acknowledgements and it is not merely a ‘metaphor’, to cite Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s seminal 2012 article ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor‘. Reparation is more than hiring white-coded Indigenous faculty like me to token positions in programs that have deeply entrenched ideologies of what their field/discipline/world-view is. Reparations are a shaking up. Reparation is seismic, to think with the work of Christina Sharpe (2016).

Writing from his position as an academic working in South Africa, Mbembe (2015) articulates the need to decolonize the university in physical, tangible terms:

“Decolonizing the university starts with the de-privatization and rehabilitation of the public space – the rearrangement of spatial relations Fanon spoke so eloquently about in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. It starts with a redefinition of what is public, i.e., what pertains to the realm of the common and as such, does not belong to anyone in particular because it must be equally shared between equals. The decolonization of buildings and of public spaces is therefore not a frivolous issue, especially in a country that, for many centuries, has defined itself as not of Africa, but as an outpost of European imperialism in the Dark Continent; and in which 70% of the land is still firmly in the hands of 13% of the population. The decolonization of buildings and of public spaces is inseparable from the democratization of access.”

It is at this point of access that I want to turn, as a white-coded Métis woman. Through my racialization, my white-passing privilege, I have access to academic spaces that are not accessible to racialized students, staff, and faculty. I am never questioned about my right to being on campus, I am not carded by campus security or Ottawa Police. I am perceived as white by anyone who passes me in the street. Although I come from a mixed family with racialized Indigenous kin, I do not move through the world with the same experiences of racism that they encounter. I am not impacted in the way my racialized, visibly Indigenous ancestors were impacted by government policies and laws. And this is something I want to deconstruct a little in the Canadian university ‘Indigenization’ moment: if you are only hiring people who look like me to your Indigenization efforts, you are not changing the institution.

While I do my best to acknowledge my privilege, I still look the way I look. And this is why we need an intersectional lens (Crenshaw 1989) when we discuss what addressing the historical exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the academy looks like. We need to acknowledge that the academy is white public space (Brodkin et al. 2011), and as such, it operates to reproduce structures and (il)logics whiteness. And it works, consciously and deliberately and in often very hostile ways, to exclude and remove non-white people from its halls. In their study of whiteness in anthropology, Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson note both a racial division of labour and race-avoidant behaviours across anthropology departments in the USA (Brodkin et al. 2011: 545) which work to enforce these spaces as white. They employ the term white public spaces to describe the: “social construction of institutional spaces and refers to the implicit and explicit practices, beliefs, and values that govern behavior in them.” (Brodkin et al: 545).

When a space operates as white public space, it shores up whiteness. When the logics of whiteness — whether operationalized through white bodies, or through complicit white-coded Indigenous bodies — are left unchecked, it creates environments that remain hostile to racialized Indigenous people who have been historically marginalized and excluded from academia (and who have, frequently, been exploited and violated by academic studies of Indigenous laws, lands, and life).

So here is where I make the central point of this piece:

it is not enough to claim Indigenization but fill the institution with people who look like me. We must challenge the fundamental structures of exclusion that prevent racialized/visibly Indigenous students, staff, and faculty from being heard, supported, and celebrated in the academy. White-coded Indigenous faculty like me have a deep responsibility not to reproduce the logics of white supremacy and white possessiveness.

This means operating in ways that are honourable and ethical, and which acknowledge the forms privilege and power that we hold over racialized Indigenous students. It also means working in accountable ways to support the work of Black and other racialized students, staff, and faculty who still encounter racism and discrimination in academe. It means challenging Islamophobia that silences Muslim students, faculty, staff, and peers. It means operating, frankly, in a way that is deeply ethical and accountable and aware of ongoing white supremacy and white possessiveness at all times. And it means using our power within these structures to hold white and other white-coded Indigenous folks within the academy accountable for harming or violating vulnerable racialized students. It also means we must address the impacts of heteropatriarchy on Indigenous students, staff, and faculty.

In other words: if we are not dismantling the structures of white supremacy, we are neither indigenizing nor decolonizing the university. We are just upholding the status quo. And the status quo — with its impunity for white people murdering visibly Indigenous men and Black men across the country — is an unacceptable path at this particular point in our collective histories. We can and must do better.

Works Cited:

Ahmed, Sara. (2014). White Men. Feminist Killjoys Blog. Accessed 08/06/2015: http://feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men/ Brodkin, Karen, Morgen, Sandra and Janis Hutchinson. (2011). ‘Anthropology as White Public Space?’, American Anthropologist 113(4): 545–556. Crenshaw, Kimberle. (1989). ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex:

A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. University of Chicago Legal Forum Issue 1, Article 8: 139-168. Henry, France, Due, Enakshi, James, Carl E., Kobayashi, Audrey, Li, Peter, Ramos, Howard and Malinda S. Smith. 2017. The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities. Vancouver: UBC Press. Giroux, Monique. (2017). “If ‘indigenizing’ education feels this good, we aren’t doing it right’. The Conversation Canada. https://theconversation.com/if-indigenizing-education-feels-this-good-we-arent-doing-it-right-87166 Mbembe, Achille. 2015. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.” Lecture. May 2, 2015 at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. Retrieved October 05, 2016. (http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20- %20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf).

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. “Race Matters: the ‘Aborigine’ as White Possession”. Pp. 467-486 in The World of Indigenous North America, Robert Warrior, ed. New York: Routledge.