Tracing Ancestry: Personalizing our Role in Decolonization

The following is a paper that was read as part of the session on "Changing Political Climates: The Relational dynamics of Obligation in Urgent Anthropological Research" at the AAA/CASCA meetings in Vancouver, BC. November 21, 2019

Anthropologists like to think that we are the most self-reflective academics when it comes to thinking about how our discipline has an entangled history with colonialism. We discuss how the remnants of this history affect our discipline’s current reputation and conduct, the state of our current relationships with power and privilege, as well as the long-term ethical relationships that we have with the people we work with. As anthropologists we are often aware of how the conduct of our disciplinary ancestors informs the relationships that we have with people today --- we know this through our own inquiry –  and oftentimes we come to know this from people who we work with informing us of the negative impacts anthropologists have had on their communities.

Talal Asad, Diane Lewis, Bernard Magubane, and Faye Harrison were some of the first to call attention to anthropology’s history and place within the broader context of colonialism. In 1997 a volume entitled “Decolonizing Anthropology” was released that came out of the first invited session for Association of Black Anthropologists at the AAAs. It has been the labour of anthropologists of colour that demanded this colonial history be taken to task, and called attention for the need to reflect not only on anthropology’s historical entanglement with colonialism --- but for change to where the remnants of this entanglement continue to be pervasive and how/where the discipline continues to engender colonial processes. Let me repeat this, it was anthropologist of colour that called out this very white, very privileged discipline to think about its own history --- it was anthropologists of colour that spearheaded this dialogue that continues to acknowledge, question, and discuss this history for how it can and should be taken on in all of our endeavours. Discussing how we personally, as practicing anthropologists, can engage in research that is accountable to the people that we study with was pervasive throughout most of my anthropological training –  in undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, and throughout the creation of much own and my colleagues research projects. The remedy for many of us was that we as anthropologists must engage in collaborative research to involve the people we work with throughout the research project. But collaborative research often falls short of its promises in practice for any number of reasons, including that we arrive in the field we arrive with already informed research agendas, the people we work with do not have the capacity – time or financial – to spend working on our projects and often times especially as graduate students we do not have the financial resources to compensate locals for their time and efforts spent on our projects.

Being aware of our disciplinary history is not enough. Understanding the implications of the colonial encounter on the discipline we work in is not enough. Implementing collaborative methodologies in our fieldsites, which are most often times in places far flung from our everyday and regular lives is not enough. Writing papers in academic journals about ongoing colonialism is not enough.  Nor is presenting at an academic conference. Studying, analyzing, critiquing, and offering solutions for resource extraction projects, ongoing colonialism, and decolonial efforts happening in these fieldsites is not enough.

How much impact do we really make when we publish a paper, even if in a popular anthropological journal designated with a high impact factor? Social worlds, including the expropriation and destruction of indigenous lands are evolving, deteriorating, or whatever you want to call it -- at such a rapid rate that by the time our writing is finally accepted for publication the social landscape has changed and so have our understandings of it. Besides, in the real world these are esoteric journals that only few people have access to, and even fewer ever actually read.What is expected out of us from our institutions in order to move forward in our careers as anthropologists is void of any real obligation to the people we work with or to the world outside of the ivory tower.

So I ask, what are our real world obligations, as anthropologists, to decolonization?

We as anthropologists are in a unique position. We have trained our minds in such a way be critical of social worlds, we are aware that context is everything and that studying the long durée of places and relationships is vital to understanding the current world and the state of social interactions. We are really good at understanding people and places and describing the significance of social interactions, their meanings, and why any of this even matters --- but it is often from arm’s length. We are disconnected. Even if we’re being self-reflective about our position of being an outsider or acknowledging our disciplinary history.

Our obligation as anthropologists is take these skills and apply it to our own lives – in our everyday worlds.  Beyond our fieldsites.

Time and time again the very power structures that anthropologists study and critique are reproduced in our own worlds. I’ve noticed that anthropologists are often blind to the power, race, gender, and class imbalances that are existant outside of their fieldsites – and happening in their own social lives. There are race, gender, class disparities (and abuses) in the very departments that we work in. We see a lack of care to remedy these toxic structures and continue to victimize some, while protecting others.  Most of us in this room can think of examples from our own institutions that we have either personally experienced or have been witness to.  I’m sure we can all recall how anthro-twitter exploded when it came light that a popular open source anthropological journal continually reproduced and upheld power imbalances and failed to adequately address or remedy them.

We as anthropologists need to stop this hypocrisy. We cannot simply use all of the skills and knowledge that we have built careers on only to place it elsewhere, outside of ourselves and outside of our own lives. We need to apply it to our personal lives.

Our obligation is not to speak from our ivory towers about the social ills of the world. We can take these social ills to task in our own lives. We are best equipped to make change through the way we live our own lives rather than constantly yelling into an echo chamber of anthropological dialogue. Our obligations and contributions to decolonial efforts is to lead by example in our communities and families to make grassroots change.

We need to take up the immense amount of emotional and mental labour exerted by anthropologists of colour beyond considering the colonial history of the discipline --- we need to extend it beyond a relationship with  a discipline and begin to focus on how we can decolonize our relationships elsewhere beyond a fieldsite that we chose.  We need to personalize these efforts and have a deeper look at our own lives – We can start this through tracing our own ancestry to see how it has informed our positions in our own lives – and how colonization figures in our own personal and familial narratives.

My undergraduate thesis and Masters research projects brought me to fieldsites far from everything I knew. And yet they drove my attention home, back onto myself – to question my own life and social worlds. I always knew that I had Métis ancestry – that my father grew up in a Métis community – my interest in Indigenous landscapes, histories, and rights lead me to question what this Metis ancestry really meant to me. I decided to trace this ancestry – not to determine the ethnogenesis of this identity or to prove my Métis-ness but to understand my ancestral entanglement with colonial processes. Tracing geneaological lines was easy for me – my grandfather and aunt had already done much of this work years ago – tracing our family line back as far as they could ---8 generations in Canada. What I look for are the stories of the lives of my earliest ancestors living in Canada. Not much is recorded about any of them beyond their dates and places of birth and death, and for some the plots of land that they lived on throughout their lives. Except for my 4^th great-grandparents. Much was recorded about my 4^th great-grandfather, Hypolite Brissette. He was born in 1796 in Varennes (now a suburb of Montreal). He fought in the war of 1812 at the battle of Châteauguay. Shortly after he started worked with the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) as a middleman in a canoe – he criss-crossed the continent for 30 years via canoe bringing goods across the continent as far north as Great Slave Lake – and as far west as Fort Vancouver (present day Portland). He met his wife – my 4^th great-grandmother -  Archange L’Hirondelle at Lesser Slave Lake – they continued to move throughout the continent for work but based themselves in the historic Métis community on Drummond island – in Lake Huron. Hypolite and several other men from this community eventually worked with Captain Bayfield in his survey of the Great Lakes and ironically helped to demarcate the island they were living on as American territory. In 1828 this Métis community migrated from Drummond Island to Penetanguishene --- generations of my family have lived there since. I purposefully do not state the racial identities of these ancestors – because I do not know for certain- different records identify Hypolite as halfbreed, as Frenchbreed, as red. Archange is identified as Métis, as Cree, as Indian, her father’s HBC record indicates that he may have been from Kahnawake. I do know that they were members of this historic Métis community.  Their actual identity is unimportant -- that’s not what I am looking for. What I am grappling with is something a little more tender to me and all descendants of this community--- I’m questioning their role in processes of colonization – and am coming to understand it as at once colonized and colonizing. Hipolyte and Archange moved across the continent for work--- their bodies moved in order to aid processes of colonization with HBC and surveying. Not necessarily by choice. Their forced migration from their homebase from Drummond island to Penetanguishene in 1828 was due to colonial efforts of marking international boundaries and land ownership – they were placed onto land at Penetanguishene some of the only land where the crown had made treaty at the time. They were displaced from their home and aided the crown in placing people on the land that had been expropriated from other Indigenous people. Penetanguishene continues to be a recognized rights bearing Métis community. There is a talk Saturday morning about a 1908 ethnographic account of this historic migration --- that I’m looking forward to see – but its focus like much Métis focus is on the place of identity.

All of this is not an easy history to take on. It’s an incredibly tender spot to prod at---  not only for me. But the implications of this prodding may affect my family, the Métis community at Penetanguishene, and for wider Métis communities throughout Canada, especially in light of the ever-growing politics surrounding Métis rights and recognition – and an ongoing struggle in determining who is and isn’t Métis in Canada. I feel that my obligation here is not to determine the Indigenous identity of this Métis community – or prove Métis-ness – or uphold the recognition of this community as metis to the metis national council or the government of Canada. But am sitting with this very real history that is deeply entangled with colonialism, that are at once colonizing and colonized. And feeling what that really means to me and the life that I live today. I am still working through the process of determining how this ancestral history translates into present day obligations.

In order to process these feelings and determine how I can decolonize my own life I imagine the lives of these ancestors. Not as it was in the past – but if they were able to sit with me in the present. Would they recognize the landscape? Would they recognize the relationships that people have with the land? Would they recognize the kinds and types of relationships that people have with one another? I canoed a 400 km route that figured in their lives – this route zig-zags through the province of Ontario – it took me about nearly 3 weeks of 6-hour days of paddling to complete. As I paddled I imagined Hipolyte  – the man who canoed across the continent and back – questioning why I didn’t have a motor on the back of the canoe – or better yet why I would choose to canoe at all when I could get from point a to point b in just over 3 hours in a car.  I read historic plaques and imagined the questions they would have of these histories and what they would have to add to the narratives.

Imagining with them in the present brings me away from romanticizing their lives – I imagine they would have some nasty opinions of me and the way I live my life – and would not recognize what I do for work – anthropology- as a profession.  I struggle with imagining their opinions and thoughts on what Penetanguishene is today – I struggle with imagining what their thoughts would be about what my obligations are today. I realize that many of their opinions may be unsettling to me and many others in this room,

The major takeaway from tracing this ancestry is that my obligation to decolonization is to recognize the colonized and colonizing role of my ancestors in the landscape where we feel deeply rooted and connected. Not to sit with these complicated feelings alone – but to discuss them with my family, my wider community. To not to end our conversation at the point of identifying ourselves as having an Indigenous identity or ancestry– but to take up the ways that we have a colonizing and colonized history. And what that history obligates us to. How do we move forward as a family, as a community?

The anthropologists of colour who invoked anthropology’s colonial history as a point for the discipline to reflect on it's history was not only an invitation to examine anthropology --- what is missed is that it also serves as an invitation for us all to take on our personal histories and stew in the unsettling feelings of our personal histories. To feel the discomfort of them, feel accountable to them, figure ways through them. But not alone - to discuss these histories with our families, neighbours, and communities. As Tuck and Yang (2012) have declared “decolonization is not a metaphor” – that Indigenous lifeways need to be restored – land needs to be returned. And that “decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity” (Tuck and Yang 2012). Thus, our obligation is to ensure that we strive to create social worlds wherein settlers feel accountable to colonization – and give space to Indigenous sovereignty – we begin this through examining our own and everyday lives with our own personal communities and networks.

Bibliography

Harrison, Faye V. Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. American Anthropological Association, 1997.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1, no. 1 (2012).