immanence

I have been hesitant to follow up on my post of last summer on “Reindigenization and Allyship” because of the complications surrounding this issue, especially in my state of Vermont. The following can be considered part two in a series, as I continue to think through the politics of indigeneity, identity (including its malleability), territoriality and claims to land, and trauma and historical grievance. I see all of these as issues that will be central to the kinds of conflicts this world will see more of as climate change deepens and its associated impacts spread.

I should say at the outset that I write this as a Ukrainian-Canadian-American whose “whiteness” (and maleness) has given me clear benefits and privileges in the settler-colonial North American context. At the same time, my family histories, going back even only to my wartime refugee parents’ and grandparents’ generations, carry legacies of trauma associated with war that approached genocidal dimensions. (In some parts of Ukraine they were exactly that in the 1930s, a legacy that is very evident in today’s conflict; and the genocide of Jews was very much a part of the “bloodlands” that my relatives mostly, though not all, survived.)

The local prompt for these reflections is the work that my university’s Indigenous Peoples Working Group has been doing over the last few years, including relations some of us have cultivated with, on the one hand, members of state-recognized Abenaki tribes, and on the other, members of the Abenaki communities in Quebec, who are descended from those who lived in western New England up until settler wars forced their relocation north.

I have been one among several non-Indigenous individuals involved in co-organizing an event that will allow the latter — the Abenaki of the Odanak First Nation — for the first time in a generation, to speak publicly at the University of Vermont. This event, however, has elicited concern and some protest from members of the four state-recognized Abenaki groups, who have seen in it an attempt to question their identities.

For me, this is a complex issue that will need some time to be worked out. One of the members of a state-recognized Abenaki tribe, Jeanne Morningstar Kent, has just published a lengthy article commenting on this event and the controversy surrounding it, especially in its connection to the work of scholars like Darryl Leroux, who have questioned Vermont’s state-recognized Abenaki tribes as consisting mainly of self-identified Abenaki “race-shifters” (individuals who intentionally shift from white to Indigenous racial identity, without necessarily having any Indigenous ancestry).

As I have suggested before, I am not in a position to comment on the work of Leroux or others who write about race-shifting, Pretendianism, and the like, nor on the status of anyone claiming ancestry or identity as Indigenous. As a white academic, the best I can do is to use my research skills to contribute to the documentation of issues that bear upon these questions, so that Indigenous communities can use them as they see fit. I look to Indigenous communities to identify what being Indigenous means, and who belongs in that category.

That said, I also support a more general “reindigenization” in relations between people and their past, and between people and the land (recognizing that the term itself can be problematic). And I appreciate the work of white Indigenous allies in contributing to that — for instance, through supporting Indigenous recognition and sovereignty, Indigenous language revival, Indigenous agroecology, and the like.  

I just want to comment here briefly on something that I think is fairly central to Kent’s argument, which happens to overlap with some of my own previous research on identity. 

Kent writes:

“There is an unexplained recognition which draws Natives together.  Whether raised with the culture or not, people know where they belong and search for “home.”  Perhaps, it cannot be explained scientifically or with statistics and charts, but it does not mean that it does not exist.  The situation is not the same as those with no heritage claiming they were Indian in a past life, drawn to the culture, or simply having motives for personal gain.  It is a genuine, unexplained connection that no amount of science can explain.  Not even DNA has offered certainty because how much of one parent’s genes are passed to siblings can vary so much that siblings appear to not even be related.”

In my work on identity among followers of New Age, ecological, Neo-Pagan, and neo-traditionalist Native Faith spiritualities (the former three in North America and the U.S., the latter two in Eastern Europe, with overlap in the third category), I have found that the feeling Kent describes — of a loss of a “sense of home” and the desire to reconnect with it — is widespread among these communities. This is in concordance with many other researchers’ findings (e.g., the work of Sarah Pike, Kathryn Rountree, Graham Harvey, Barbara Davy, and others in the fields of religion and ecology, Pagan studies, and related fields).

Some find that “sense of home” within the practice of a spirituality rooted in claimed or perceived Indigenous or Native traditions. This phenomenon has a long history and covers a broad range, from “Indianthusiast” re-enactors and hobbyists to those who have changed their lives based on extended encounters with tribal or traditional elders. I have found no reason to doubt that the “search for ‘home’” such people often describe is real: the feelings associated with the “need,” the “search,” and the eventual “finding” of a “home” are genuine experiences, which often contribute profoundly to the experienced reality of one’s identity once it is “found.”  

Kent writes that “The situation is not the same as those with no heritage claiming they were Indian in a past life, drawn to the culture, or simply having motives for personal gain” (italics added). This would appear to be a key point of differentiation here. But I am not aware of any way to clearly distinguish these two categories — i.e., between those with some Indigenous heritage and those with none — except through genealogical demonstration (on paper or orally transmitted) of that heritage. And yet, as Kent argues, genealogical research is not fool-proof. Church and census documents, which genealogists rely on, do not convey everything there is to be known about a person. Sometimes they may be misleading; typically they can be quite incomplete.

But if genealogy is not taken seriously (as Kent seems to suggest), then we are left with little means of defining the difference between people with Indigenous heritage (no matter how insignificant) who are reclaiming that heritage based on their perceived “search for ‘home’” and people without Indigenous heritage who are doing the same thing. This would seem to leave us in a bind, the kind identified by Indigenous scholars like Kim TallBear and others for whom race-shifting takes away from Indigenous peoples’ capacity to reclaim their histories, lands, and communities.

I think it is worth framing these questions in a broader field, one relevant not only to North American contexts but to others around the world as well. When we do that, a series of other questions become relevant:

• What are we trying to achieve through distinguishing Indigenous from non-Indigenous people, or people of one identity category from those of another?
• Are we aiming, for instance, to achieve some measure of historical justice and reparation? If so, is our goal to give individuals benefits that their cultural identity categories have been deprived of previously, or to promote group benefits that would lead to greater collective autonomy and self-governance?
• What role does intergenerational trauma and its reparation play, or should it play, in such identity recognition? How are respective traumas — from colonization, land theft, cultural genocide, physical war, and so on — to be treated and compared (and should they be compared at all)?
• What role might such trauma play in anticipating traumas to come (which climate science and social science tell us we should prepare for)? For instance, ought Indigenous and traditional communities play a leadership role, by virtue of their histories, in contending with challenges many of us will be facing for the first time? In other words, if we don’t learn from those with experience, will we ever learn?
• What is the value of historical legacies — including traditional knowledges and practices (ecological and other kinds) — for informing how we approach the challenges of environmental crisis, climate change, and ecological revitalization? Should we be aiming, for instance, to recover languages and practices of “living in place” that could help restore ecological relationships for a “greener,” more sustainable future?
• In a world where identities are only becoming more complex — with biracial and multiracial identities becoming more common, with racial categories (which are nationally and regionally specific) clashing against each other and affecting each other, with refugee populations integrating into national populations, and so on — what role should race, indigeneity, ethnicity, and other identity markers play in determining who belongs, and in what role, as part of a local or national narrative, and what benefits they deserve for it?
• Are we aiming to restore a more cohesive and integrated sense of historical continuity in a place, region, or nation — for instance, a more complete and inclusive national narrative (such as would support the idea of Canada, the U.S., Australia, et al., being inclusive and multicultural nations)? If so, are our efforts intended primarily to help Indigenous people or to assuage settler or colonial guilt?
• How else does white/settler/colonial guilt figure into Indigenous (or other identity) recognition processes, and how might it lead these efforts astray?
• What role does competition for limited resources — such as job opportunities, tokenistic political representation, rights to limited land resources, hunting and fishing licenses, and the like — play in pitting Indigenous/traditional communities against other communities, as well as the former (such as historically recognized versus self-identified Indigenous people) against each other?
• How have claims of oppression come to be viewed in our intersectionally-conscious society, and what happens when they become a commodity to be feigned by those without the legitimate history to claim them?

There are many other questions that could be added, and our answers to them make a difference. For instance, if we are aiming for individual reparation, then determining which individuals deserve it and which do not would seem a significant decision; if group, then we may need to approach the matter differently. And if multigenerational trauma is central, then determining the scope of that trauma would seem important, but so might determining what it means more generally and comparatively (a topic I’ve written and spoken about before).

Yet much of the world does not have as clear cut a history of colonial and Indigenous relations as we find in the Americas, Australia, or New Zealand (and even in those places things can get sticky and tangled).

To take my own ancestral country of Ukraine as an example: this is a place that has featured long histories of coexistence between many peoples — Ukrainians (once known as Ruthenians), Russians, Jews, Poles, Tatars, Armenians, and many others, whose own histories get ever more tangled and indistinguishable the further we look into the past. Those histories sometimes erupted into ethnic clashes (especially when such clashes benefited imperial or land-based aristocrats), but by and large did not. Modern political movements — totalitarian socialism and fascism among them — helped to “purify” territories into what they are today.

In the conflict between foreign aggressors and defenders of the homeland, however, as is happening today in Ukraine, it becomes clear that some people “belong” — by virtue of their commitment to the place and its people — while others (foreign aggressors) do not. Belonging, in this sense, is forged in the struggle for the future of a land and its people.

But there are futures, and there are futures. These have yet to be envisioned and crafted in the practical politics of moving from an unjust and unsustainable present to a socially and ecologically viable future.

This is where I want to suggest that identity can play a positive role. There are many ways of identifying with the building of a better world. Some of these are local and, where ancestry is a given, can also be ancestral. (This is the case for Indigenous people whose genealogy is clearly that.) Indigenous people need allies, but not those who identify with an imagined Indigenous ancestry. They need allies who are willing to work with them on real struggles.

The criteria I have in mind, then, for sorting through these questions of identity, Indigeneity, and any privileges or recognitions that may accompany them, are more future-oriented than past-oriented. They call for looking forward more than looking backward. But this can only occur if the process is built on ethical and reliable foundations, which requires that individuals reflect on and acknowledge their own standing in the light of history.

Inviting representatives of the Odanak Abenaki First Nation to speak at the University of Vermont will, I hope, help this process of self-reflection and contribute to a dialogue by which Indigenous and non-Indigenous Vermonters and others can move forward into a more viable, and more historically and culturally respectful, future together. It is important that Indigenous voices and narratives be heard (which is why I got involved in this event), and that time be allowed for Indigenous communities to “process” this sharing of narratives.

It is also important that non-Indigenous people refrain from jumping to conclusions on one side or another of any debates that may arise. This is not for our edification, our justification of whatever positions we may be taking, or our sense of right or wrong. It is to open up the arena of discourse to those who justifiably belong within it, and to allow time and space to take place for whatever recognition and healing, personal and collective, that may need to unfold.

Ultimately, we will all be called to take a position on the side of the future we want to build, and it will take time for the stakes, and the necessary steps toward that future, to become clear.