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Abstract
This article explores the resurgence of Indigenous/Palestine solidarity during the Wet’suwet’en land sovereignty struggle in Canada that took place around the same time Donald Trump’s Middle East “peace plan” was released in early 2020. Historicizing this resurgence within a longer period of anti-colonial resistance, the article attends to the distinct historical, political-economic, and juridical formations that undergird settler colonialism in Canada and Israel/Palestine. It contends with the theoretical limits of the settler-colonial framework, pushing back against narratives of settler success, and shows how anti-colonial resistance accelerated economic crises that led both settler states to enter into “negotiations” with the colonized (reconciliation in one case, and peace talks in the other) as a strategy to maintain capitalist settler control over stolen lands. The analysis also sheds light on a praxis of solidarity that has implications for movement building and joint struggle.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank the blind reviewers and JPS editors for their deep engagement and outstanding feedback.
Endnotes
Notes
1 The clans are the Gilseyhu, Gitdumden, Laksilyu, Laksamshu, and Tsayu.
2 Glen Coulthard argues that reconciliation has four different meanings: first, Canada’s recognition of Indigenous culture and practices; second, the restoration of damaged political relationships between the state and Indigenous nations; third, an attempt to address unsettled claims pursuant to competing sovereignty between Canada and Indigenous title to land; and fourth, the willingness of the state to partially confront the past.
3 See Office of the Wet’suwet’en, “BC and Canada Ignore Wet’suwet’en Title Holders to Push Pipeline Agenda,” press release, 1 October 2018,
http://unistoten.camp/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/October_1_2018_Press_Release.pdf.
4 For full details, see Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, [1997] 3 S.C.R. 1010, https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1569/index.do.
5 For media coverage, see “Media Archive,” website of the Unist’ot’en people, accessed 10 May 2020, https://unistoten.camp/media/news/.
6 Turtle Island refers to the entire continent of North America. It is a term used by Native American and First Nations people and is based on an Indigenous creation story. See “The Story of Turtle Island: Traditional Story of Onondaga,” Turtle Island Native Network, http://www.turtleisland.org/front/article3.htm.
7 “Jadaliyya Co-editor Noura Erakat Interviewed by CNN on ‘Deal of the Century,’” posted by Jadaliyya, 19 May 2020, YouTube video, 5:01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp3HXqcuZI&t=4s&ab_channel=Jadaliyya.
8 “Jadaliyya Co-editor Noura Erakat Interviewed by CNN,” YouTube video.
9 The Dish with One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee by which they are bound to share the territory and protect the land.
10 Rana Barakat, “Writing/Righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous
Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2018): pp. 349–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2017.1300048.
11 Steven Salaita, Inter/nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2016), p. xv.
12 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance,” Critical Ethnic
Studies 2, no. 2 (2016): pp. 19–34, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.2.0019.
13 The Palestinian Youth Movement, “The Palestinian Youth Movement Stands in Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en!,” 24 February 2020, https://www.pymusa.com/wetsuweten.
14 Nadine Naber, “‘The U.S. and Israel Make the Connections for Us’: Anti-imperialism and Black-Palestine Solidarity,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): p. 17, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.2.0015.
15 Nick Estes, “Indigenous Studies: As Radical as Reality Itself” (lecture, Modern and Critical Theory Lecture Series, University of New Mexico, 13 November 2018). For a video recording of the lecture, see “2018 10 30 Indigenous Studies,” posted by Unit Fellows, 13 November 2018, YouTube video, 54:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqrinGlpzQk&t=484s&fbclid=IwAR15lKIWqbHNaGB_hLkv3IeVX_E_pZOZYf_YL21YQyvTlibUgX6CX_UiKiw.
16 Palestinian leftists in Canada typically subscribe to a politics of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, national liberation, and anti-imperialism, as well as critiques of hetero-patriarchy; some are affiliated with left-leaning political parties and/or with feminist and queer movements.
17 Brandon L., interview with author, 25 April 2020, Ontario, Canada. Interviewee’s last name is withheld for privacy.
18 Rana Nazzal, interview with author, 20 April 2020, Toronto, Canada.
19 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p.11.
20 Chandni Desai, “Shooting Back in the Occupied Territories: An Anti-colonial Participatory Politics,” Curriculum Inquiry 45, no. 1 (2015): pp. 109–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2014.995062.
21 Hanna Kawas, interview with author, 19 April 2020, Vancouver, Canada.
22 Shilo Hill, Onondaga Beaver clan, Haudenosaunee, Six Nations, online communication with author, 25 April 2020.
23 This conceptualization is informed by Simpson’s notion of “resurgence.”
24 Robin D. G. Kelley, “From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking,” JPS 48, no. 4 (Summer 2019): p. 70, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.48.4.69.
25 Kawas, interview.
26 Linda Tabar, “From Third World Internationalism to the ‘Internationals’: The Transformation of Solidarity with Palestine,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2017): pp. 414–35, quote at p. 417, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1142369.
27 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Solidarity Is Not a Market Exchange: An RM Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, Part Two,” interview by Jack Amariglio and Lucas Wilson, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture and Society 31, no. 2 (2019): pp. 152–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2019.1592407.
28 Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, “Marching with Oscar López Rivera: A Long History of Palestinian-Puerto Rican Solidarity,” Mondoweiss, 19 June 2017, https://mondoweiss.net/2017/06/marching-palestinian-solidarity/.
29 Gord Hill, “From Gaza to Gustafsen: The Link between the Intifada and Indigenous Sovereignty” (lecture, Vancouver, Canada, September 2009). For a video recording of the lecture, see “Colonization and Apartheid,” posted by Ion Delsol, 26 September 2009, YouTube video, 9:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8xvMoR4dXE&ab_channel=IonDelsol.
30 Linda Tabar and Chandni Desai, “Decolonization Is a Global Project: From Palestine to the Americas,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 6, no. 1 (2017): p. xiii, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/28899/21542.
31 Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 98.
32 Kole Kilibarda, “Confronting Apartheid: The BDS Movement in Canada,” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, no. 7 (November 2009): n.p., https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/07-confronting-apartheid.
33 Mike Krebs and Dana M. Olwan, “From Jerusalem to the Grand River, Our Struggles Are One: Challenging Canadian and Israeli Settler Colonialism,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 2 (2012): pp. 138–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648846.
34 Dana M. Olwan, “On Assumptive Solidarities in Comparative Settler Colonialisms,” feral feminisms, no. 4 (2015): p. 92, https://feralfeminisms.com/assumptive-solidarities/.
35 Olwan, “Assumptive Solidarities,” p. 91.
36 Naber, “‘The U.S. and Israel Make the Connections for Us,’” p. 17.
37 Gale Courey Toensing, “‘Redwashing’ Panel Follows Academic Associations’ Boycott of Israel,” Indian Country Today, 31 December 2013, updated 12 September 2018, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/redwashing-panel-follows-academic-associations-boycott-of-israel.
38 Olwan, “Assumptive Solidarities,” p. 93.
39 Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, “Acts of Omission: Framing Settler Colonialism in Palestine Studies,” Jadaliyya, 14 January 2016, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32857.
40 Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Press, 2017).
41 Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Fifth House Books, 1989).
42 Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): p. 269, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2017.0020.
43 Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 36.
44 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
45 Bhandar and Ziadah, “Acts of Omission.”
46 Nahla Abdo and Nira Yuval Davis, “Palestine, Israel and the Zionist Settler Project” in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, ed. Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: SAGE, 1995), p. 300.
47 Zachary Lockman, “Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): p. 12, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648824.
48 Abdo and Yuval Davis, “Palestine, Israel and the Zionist Settler Project,” p. 302.
49 Heterogeneity of racial positions considers the differential ways that people are racialized for land and labor. For example, Black people were considered chattel and were therefore enslaved and turned into property; Indigenous peoples were to be eliminated in order to access land; and migrants were deemed exploitable, deportable “aliens.”
50 Day, Alien Capital, p. 29.
51 Aboriginal title is a concept crafted by settler states. While treaties recognize First Nations sovereignty, settler states simultaneously diminish it.
52 John Burrows, “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government,” in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equality, and Respect for Difference, ed. Michael Asch (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), pp. 155–72.
53 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report, Supplementary Report, May 2019, https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Supplementary-Report_Genocide.pdf.
54 The “Indian Band” is a governing unit of Indians in Canada instituted by the 1876 Indian Act. Bands hold reserve lands, and band councils are responsible for the governance and administration of band affairs. See The Indian Act, R.S.C. 1985 c.1-5, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/i-5/.
55 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
56 Bhandar, Colonial Lives, p. 20.
57 Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1965), p. 27.
58 Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism, p. 24.
59 Sherene Seikaly and Max Ajl, “Of Europe: Zionism and the Jewish Other,” in Europe after Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 120.
60 Seikaly and Ajl, “Of Europe,” p. 122.
61 Seikaly and Ajl, “Of Europe.”
62 Abdo and Davis, “Palestine, Israel and the Zionist Settler Project,” p. 294.
63 Noura Erakat, “Whiteness as Property in Israel: Revival, Rehabilitation, and Removal,” Harvard Journal of Racial and Ethnic Justice, no. 31 (2015), https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/discovery/fulldisplay?context=PC&vid=01UTORONTO_INST:UTORONTO&search_scope=UTL_AND_CI&tab=Everything&docid=cdi_gale_infotracacademiconefile_A431565327.
64 Erakat, “Whiteness as Property,” p. 71.
65 Bhandar and Ziadah, “Acts of Omission.”
66 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report, Supplementary Report.
67 Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus.
68 Day, Alien Capital, p. 26.
69 Erakat, “Whiteness as Property,” p. 71.
70 Omar Jabary Salamanca et al., “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648823.
71 Barakat, “Writing/Righting Palestine,” p. 8.
72 Barakat, “Writing/Righting Palestine,” p. 8.
73 See Adam J. Barker, “The Contemporary Reality of Canadian Imperialism: Settler Colonialism and the Hybrid Colonial State,” American Indian Quarterly 33, no. 3 (Summer 2009): pp. 325–51, https://doi:10.1353/aiq.0.0054; Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008); Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): pp. 120–43, https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768340; Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): pp. 387–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.
74 Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” p. 134.
75 Barker, “Contemporary Reality,” p. 80.
76 Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
77 Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,” Social Justice 35, no. 3 (2008–9): pp. 120–38, https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768504; Kelley, “The Rest of Us.”
78 “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and Racist Nationalism,” posted by Haymarket Books, YouTube video, 11 February 2021, 1:25:45, quote at 55:58, https://youtu.be/WRZNfkgSrXo.
79 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Day, Alien Capital; Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Sharma, Home Rule; Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): pp. 1–40, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.
80 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” p. 17.
81 Nadine Suleiman Naber, “Imperial Whiteness and the Diasporas of Empire,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (December 2014): pp. 1107–15, https://doi:10.1353/aq.2014.0068.
82 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”
83 These questions are also posed by Naber in “Imperial Whiteness.”
84 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”
85 Byrd, Transit of Empire.
86 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Detroit: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
87 May Ella, interview with the author, 15 April 2020, Toronto, Canada.
88 Moe Alqasem, interview with the author, 15 April 2020, Toronto, Canada.
89 Kelley, “From the River to the Sea,” p. 71.
90 Alqasem, interview.
91 Adam Hanieh, “From State-Led Growth to Globalization: The Evolution of Israeli Capitalism,” JPS 32, no. 4 (Summer 2003): pp. 5–21, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2003.32.4.5.
92 Leila Farsakh, “Palestinian Economic Development: Paradigm Shifts since the First Intifada,” JPS 45, no. 2 (Winter 2016): pp. 55–71, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2016.45.2.55.
93 Raja Khalidi, “The Economics of Palestinian Liberation,” Jacobin, 15 October 2014, http://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/the-economics-of-palestinian-liberation/; Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017).
94 Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, p. 13.
95 Hanieh, “From State-led Growth,” p. 18.
96 Hanieh, “From State-led Growth,” p. 18.
97 Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, p. 12.
98 Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, p. 13.
99 Hanieh, “From State-led Growth,” p. 8.
100 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
101 Coulthard, Red Skin, p. 4.
102 Coulthard, Red Skin, p. 5.
103 Coulthard, Red Skin, p. 6.
104 Paul Davenport, “Economics,” Canadian Encyclopedia, 7 February 2006, edited 29 June 2015, https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/economics.
105 Glen Coulthard, “Placing #IdleNoMore in Historical Context,” The Tyee, 4 January 2013, http:/thetyee.ca/Opinion/2013/01/04/IdleNoMore-Historical-Context/.
106 Coulthard, Red Skin, p. 119.
107 Coulthard, Red Skin, p. 119.
108 Bhandar and Ziadah, “Acts of Omission.”
109 An Indigenous-feminist delegation was co-organized by Linda Tabar, Audrey Huntley of No More Silence, May Ella, and Chandni Desai. The project emerged from a visit Tabar organized for Huntley at Birzeit University.
110 Khan al-Ahmar is a village in the West Bank that was slated for demolition in 2018 for the expansion of the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.
111 Noura Erakat, “Geographies of Intimacy: Contemporary Renewals of Black-Palestine Solidarity,” American Quarterly 72, no. 2 (June 2020): pp. 471–96, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2020.0027; Naber, “‘The U.S. and Israel Make the Connections for Us’”; Salaita, Inter/nationalism.
112 Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez, “Decolonization and the Pedagogy of Solidarity,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): p. 49, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/download/18633/15557/.
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Chandni Desai
Chandni Desai is assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Desai is working on her first book, tentatively titled Revolutionary Circuits of Liberation: The Radical Tradition of Palestinian Resistance Culture and Internationalism. Her research interests include comparative settler colonialism, anti-colonial thought, resistance culture, liberation politics, state violence (carceral politics, securitization, and militarism), political economy, internationalism, abolition, and decolonization. She coedited a special issue on decolonization and Palestine for the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society. Desai hosts the Liberation Pedagogy Podcast.