‘On Being Committed to Indigenous Feminist Interventions’: Jodi Byrd and Eve Tuck in Conversation

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s oft-cited article ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ (2012) ends: ‘Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere.’¹ Here, the authors push back against what they see as an increasing metaphorisation of decolonisation and, with it, the stripping away of that which makes it unsettling or disruptive. Understanding decolonisation as ‘elsewhere’ centres the land and its relations, asserting its incommensurability with North American liberal, settler and capitalist modes of spatialisation. As well as gesturing to the expansive potential that imagining elsewhere carries, this framing also invokes the idea that decolonisation is already happening somewhere ‘else’, inviting the possibility of solidarities across divergent worlds and experiences.

In this conversation, Byrd reminds us too that when thinking, reading, imagining otherwise, ‘we can't lose track of the elsewhere’: that is, we must hold the temporal and the spatial together. This is an enduring concern in both Tuck and Byrd’s writing: that the work of imagining otherwise – to find or recover ways of living, being and relating that move beyond colonial and capitalist structures – is always necessarily embedded in grounded relations with lands and waters.

Both Tuck’s and Byrd’s scholarship has been formative to our thinking, particularly in terms of how each theorises the machinations of power in the context of coloniality/modernity, as well as the possibilities for navigating collaboration and resistance within these spaces. Writing from distinct positions and disciplinary contexts, both give voice to the contradictions and concerns that arise when Indigenous topics and peoples come into relation with the Western academy – from the ongoing role played by US and Canadian universities in Indigenous dispossession, to the extractive logic that characterises how Indigenous knowledges are frequently subsumed into academic structures. As they observe here, there are particular tensions around the place of Indigenous feminisms in the academy, which are entangled with questions of queerness, consent, land, Black feminism and women of colour collectives. Moving through the work of imagining other or elsewhere institutions, as they demonstrate, requires collective thought and action.

Jodi A. Byrd is a Chickasaw scholar and is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (2011) theorises how the intersecting histories of Indigenous dispossession and transatlantic slavery have shaped US modernity, as well as the uneven global contours of racialised gendered capitalism. Byrd’s scholarship has further elucidated the connections between Indigenous and African American experiences, interrogating the pitfalls and potentialities of solidarity across enduring histories of colonisation and racialisation. Elsewhere, they have sought to understand the possible intimacies of Indigenous Studies and queer theory through the lens of Indigenous feminisms. Pulling at the seams of disciplinary borders, Byrd’s generative approach results in the creation of grounded, carefully considered spaces for dialogue and, potentially, action.

Eve Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St Paul Island, Alaska. She has published widely on topics relating to collaborative Indigenous research, Indigenous feminisms, collaborative research methodologies, and land education. Tuck’s scholarship embraces experimental and creative approaches to authorial voice and narrative form and exemplifies a commitment to collaborative research methods. Tuck’s primary obligations are to community; the theorisation of Indigenous research methods is mediated by an attention to what knowledges can or should not be disclosed. In 2017, Tuck founded the Tkaronto Collaborative Indigenous Research Communities Land and Education (CIRCLE) Lab, a lab based in Indigenous feminist ethics. Tuck is Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She is Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities.

This article forms part of the special issue of parallax, ‘Reading Otherwise: Decolonial Feminisms’. The issue features conversations which took place 2021‐23. Prompts relating to the speakers’ work and the key terms of the issue were circulated ahead of this conversation. Rebecca Macklin wrote the introduction to this conversation and facilitated the conversation with Maya Caspari. We started the conversation by asking the speakers what had brought them to their work.

Jodi Byrd: It’s a huge question. And I’ve been in the work for so long, it’s hard to think back; it’s such a weird thing to think about academia anyway as a ‘work’. All the questions that I had for thinking about today were: what do we actually name as an Indigenous feminism, and can it even exist in academia? And that’s a question I want to think with Eve about: what is it that we hope we can do if we are committed to Indigenous feminist interventions, especially around questions of decolonisation?

But what brought me to this question was just my experience in grad school all those years ago, in the 90s, when I was encountering postcolonial theory, in Iowa, in a place that had the Meskwaki Settlement nearby. I was Chickasaw. I was still forming my understanding of just what that meant in relationship to how I experienced the spaces I was in and feeling alone in academia. Well, there was one other graduate student in anthropology, and eventually, there were a few folks that were getting hired into the History department; Jacki Rand for instance; there were mentors, nationally and internationally. But I also felt really isolated. And I felt like I was told I was wrong, constantly. I sometimes refer to my first book which emerged through that graduate work – Transit of Empire (2011) – as the ‘Book of No’, because every professor I worked with told me: No, you can’t say that. No, you can’t say Indians are colonised. No, you can’t do this work. What about this literature? What about that history? What about everybody else?

And so, in a way, I wrote my first book as a way to try to answer all those kinds of questions that were set up to deny that there was any colonisation at all of American Indians.

But what inspired me, honestly, was work out of the Caribbean. My strategy for graduate school and getting through academia was to find the professors who would be willing to at least listen. And the faculty I found did work in Postcolonial Studies, did study Caribbean writers, did actually understand postcolonialism in a global way, and maybe had roots in Oklahoma. My dissertation advisor was a white settler woman from Oklahoma. And so at least when I said Chickasaw she knew what that actually meant, maybe more than I did at moments, and instead of saying no from the outset, she said: I don’t completely follow you, but give me a chance and I might understand.

So that’s the starting point. And then from there, I’ve learned over time that I think what brought me to this work is actually my family and my history. I feel like this is like a family-engaged project, when I look back to my community, and I look back to who my grandfathers were, my great grandfathers and grandmothers… they have been in this work of interacting with settlers, and trying to negotiate and strategise, failing and failing miserably sometimes – some of my ancestors were the slave owning elites in the Chickasaw Nation – trying to navigate this immense enormity of a crushing colonialism that kept us dispossessed and kept pulling everything out from underneath us and then just trying to figure out what possibilities could exist in pushing back and finding spaces to exist. So I think if I were to do that kind of reflection, I would scale in lots of different directions, but that’s the starting point for me.

Eve Tuck: Thanks, Jodi. Listening to you is helping me ease into the room. My family is from St Paul Island, Alaska, on my mom’s side. On my dad’s side, my family is white and is from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and I grew up in Pennsylvania. As soon as I could, I moved to New York City after graduating from high school, and that was because of the racism and homophobia that I observed as a young person in a small town. After high school, I went to Eugene Lang College, at what was then the New School for Social Research. There, I studied education, and I also studied writing. I knew that I wanted to have a writing life. I did a lot of coursework in Caribbean Studies, because there wasn’t an Indigenous Studies programme at the university that I was in. As an island person, and as a person who wanted to think about colonialism, Caribbean Studies was a really important lifeline to me.

Very early on in my doctoral studies at The Graduate Centre, (CUNY), I met one of the people who would become my mentor, Michelle Fine, who is a path-maker in participatory research. A participatory approach rather than extractive approach was important because of stories in my family about encounters with biomedical researchers and anthropologists and other kinds of researchers. These people were working on their own behalf, and sometimes working on behalf of the US federal government, in order to do studies that made an argument for occupation of the Aleutian Islands. She introduced me to Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who has since been a mentor and teacher to me, and to Bryan Brayboy, who has also been an incredible mentor to me. Even though Indigenous Studies wasn’t a big part of my graduate preparation, I was doing work in urban education in connection to these scholars who were having gatherings of Indigenous scholars in education and were creating publication opportunities and small conference opportunities.

Very early on, I also met Sandy Grande who came to speak to a class that Joel Spring was teaching – I think this is just as Red Pedagogy (2004) was coming out. Those early moments with Indigenous scholars engaging in both Indigenous Studies and in education really shaped the direction of my career and shaped how I thought about my connection to Indigenous Studies. Scholars working at the crossroads of education and Indigenous Studies are doing significant, dynamic work in terms of thinking about Indigenous futurities, and Indigenous relationalities and connections to lands and waters.

Rebecca Macklin: When did you first encounter each other’s work and/or each other? Did this change anything for you?

Eve: Jodi and I don’t know each other well, although I think very highly of you, Jodi. Part of that is my habit of shyness at conferences. Probably the first thing I read by you was Transit of Empire. I remember reading it and wishing I had a course that I could teach it in. Instead, I read Transit with the Black/Land Project, a community organisation that has been a long-time collaborator.² I remember a gathering that we had at my house. Collaborators had driven to come to my home, but then we got snowed in. We were reading your book and talking through it as the snow piled up high around my house. And then in 2015, I moved to Toronto in order to work in an all-graduate programme, where I teach graduate courses in Indigenous Studies. I now teach your work often.

I often say to students that I feel so appreciative of being a scholar at the same time that you are a scholar, because I feel like we’re living in the same time slip. In reading through the things that you’ve written over time, I can remember where I was; I was at some of the same talks that you were referring to or heard the same addresses that you were referring to. You are also making work in such a thoughtful way; you are engaging in writings or reading the writings of people that I’m also reading, and taking it up in a way that I very much appreciate. But it’s also so different than the way that I would pick it up, and do take it up… I just have a sense of real appreciation and gratitude towards you, that I get to make work at the same time as you.

Jodi: Oh my goodness, I feel the same way, actually, about your work. And, of course, this will be the article of yours that we refer to, which is ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, but that was just like, boom! It exploded a conversation and did this profound calling out of all this stuff that was constantly and absolutely maddening in response to how it is that I think academia responded to what’s happening in Indigenous Studies. Everything is decolonised, everyone is unsettling.

And I feel like you’re right. There’s something profoundly amazing about this moment, and the fact that we get to be thinking together – even just in the field, or at the same moment temporally – to try to respond to the most pressing issues: what it is that we imagine, what we hope for Indigenous communities, students and futures; if we can transform the conditions of what we've had to experience.

I also came from a really small town – in Nebraska. I left for school, but I stayed in the rural Midwest for way too long and in the ways the anti-Indigeneity and the homophobia and all these things grind on us there. And to think about your work; to think about Sandy Grande; to think about what pedagogy is for us has been amazingly rewarding; holding your work in this is how Indigenous Studies allows us to do interdisciplinary scholarship, to read beyond what we got trained in by academia. In academia everything is so territorialised, and everything is assumed to be the act of one person, one creator alone, right? And yet, Eve’s work demonstrates what collaboration can entail, what it means to be thinking with different people, in different locations, and to cross Indigenous and Black land projects – to really open conversations that require us to hold that relationality that is so vital to what a lot of us are hoping is the centre of Indigenous feminisms.

I’ve been equally inspired by the work and sometimes its challenges… I think there’s a challenge that your work poses to even what something like Transit – with all its theoretical language – is doing: where does it fall down? Where does it come into what is a lived practice? Or what is it we can actually teach through it? Are there different ways to actually mobilise community connection and community activism?

So, Eve your work has taught me to think on multiple levels, and really interdisciplinarily and collaboratively.

Eve: I also really learned from you Jodi, in the ways that you publicly named what was going on when University of Illinois fired Steven Salaita, and the way that American Indian Studies (AIS) named the betrayal at the heart of that, specifically the overriding of an otherwise very normal faculty hiring process.³ That, to me, shaped – or asserted – an insistence on the principles of Indigenous Studies and the stakes of Indigenous Studies as a field. And the implications of Indigenous Studies for all these universities that think that they want it.

I’m guessing it was a personally wrenching time to be betrayed by an employer and still have to work there. It’s not easy to move out of our particular positions in an academic institution; we can’t just make a move at the time that we know that we need to make a move. I feel like your collective work in those times has also been very instructive for the kind of Indigenous Studies that I want to be part of.

Jodi: There’s so much I can say about that… though it all feels like a blur at this point, not least in that it is something that now feels like an archive of someone and somewhere else. It was a collective experience in Illinois for the AIS programme. The lessons from what happened – and the ramifications of Salaita’s firing – are still resonating and perhaps still need to be thought about: about how institutions are not our friends, how the work we do to build is so easily undone. I’ve learned since that sometimes the better strategies are the covert ones, to figure out what you can steal, what you can sneak, what you can do beneath the radar as opposed to going full force to try to change institutions that will ultimately refuse change every single time.

For me, I think the lesson of AIS at Illinois trying to hire Salaita was that holding American Indians alongside Israel and Palestine revealed too much about what colonisation actually is, both here and there. And the temporal consequences of that, the present-dayness of ongoing American Indian dispossession, it can’t… it isn’t wanted by institutions. And there’s no real desire to look critically at what it is that the structures of education actually have enabled in the US and Canada.

And there’s lots of things we could talk about across borders here with the US and Canada. But I think this neoliberal impulse to continually institutionalise something is only ever going to fail Indigenous action, Indigenous education, Indigenous presence, Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous transformation.

Maya Caspari: That returns to the question Jodi raised at the beginning: what do, or might, Indigenous feminisms mean, and what can they do or mean within academic institutions?

Rebecca: And what does the ‘I’ or ‘we’ mean for you when you write or speak?

Jodi: Writing is so interesting and challenging as it raises a question for me. What is it that the words that we’re using carry? We write in English. I always used to, as a grad student, geek out over deconstruction and Derrida – because that’s what’s in Transit – and the idea that you can’t really control what words mean, or what they do… and the thing that always felt fucked up to me is how colonialism is embedded into the actual words that we can use to discuss it and name it. And there’s moments where the ‘I’ and ‘we/you’ meet, and this is where I get into a dilemma, right? When I write, I only can write from my perspective. I never want to be presumed to be speaking for any thing or one other than me. And sometimes I had professors say to me, I get to be in the academy where other people don’t, so I have a responsibility to speak for all those not here… there’s all these things that get said to Indigenous students and scholars, but really, when it comes down to it, I am just who I am. I have a family and a history that I come from, but I can’t ever speak as a collective for my community, for my Nation; nor would they want me to.

And yet, when I write, there’s always a slight distance there even so because I’m always aware that I can’t actually say what I want for myself in my own language. So there’s a way in which the language I’m working in – English – requires me to make a choice, to be an ‘I’ or a ‘we’, to speak for, or speak as, and these constraints are all already predicated upon a colonial history. And my goal in my writing… I sometimes think, even though I do high theory, I also try to go towards a personal voice in the ways I write, in order to bridge that dilemma, because the last thing I ever want is to use myself as some sort of cultural authority or some sort of located person that’s somehow able to adjudicate what counts as real for Chickasawness. I feel I’m also too much of a Spivakian in my understanding of the postcolonial feminist in that my act of speaking already comes at the cost of so many people who don’t get to speak at all. There are so many oppressions embedded into that act of speaking, of writing.

Yet I say all these things, and then I write about relationality. I write about what it means to actually understand responsibilities and respond or understand accountability. What is it that I need my ‘I’ or ‘we’ to hold in order to do that? So, there’s a constant negotiation around the self, and the self in relation, and how to enact that through the work. And I don’t know that I do it very well. I always think about what it is that I put into the work and how it is that I speak it and what I assume my legitimacy is to even say what I’m saying.

Eve: I often am writing alongside co-authors where the ‘We’ is really discreetly referring to those of us who are writing the article. I learn so much from the end of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997) in consideration of the ‘we’, and the invocation of ‘we’. There are different times that we’re needing to differentiate that ‘we’ inside a piece of writing because of our different positionalities, because of our different family stories. Another dimension is that I often refer to the kind of writing that I do and then I teach others to do, as being first-person theorising in which ‘I’ and ‘we’ becomes really important in terms of how we’re offering an analysis, how we’re naming particular urgencies, or how we’re anticipating people will respond to what we’re saying. In lots of cases, that might involve making clear a/our theory of change that is animating what we’re offering, or saying what’s off limits – building some boundaries or refusals into ways that others might take up our work.

That's really a primary consideration when advising graduate students who are writing about grief medicines (Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing), or who are theorising with urban Indigenous Two-Spirit youth (MJ Laing). There’s actually a lot of boundary-setting that needs to happen: you actually don’t have my permission to read this in this way. And anticipating what Dylan Robinson calls hungry listening: a kind of settler colonial habit of reading, that is very extractive of Indigenous work.⁴ Reading in order to sift for something that’s useful to just like, dig it up and plant it somewhere else.

Thus, in that work, the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ also means trying to define who is not the ‘we’; what’s not available for extraction. In a lot of cases, I’m thinking through ‘I’ and ‘We’ in a way that is meant to be pretty literal. Then there are times that I’m writing as a member of a field. I would say that I do that as an educator; as a person who is an educational researcher, there’s often times that I am making work that is an intervention for how that field understands itself. I use a ‘we’ in that case, because I feel like the strength is as a member of that field. And as a person who’s trying to push how that field understands itself and its responsibilities. And that’s because I felt accountable to the families and the young people who are coerced participants in schooling.

I would very rarely be writing as a ‘we’ as an Alaska Native person. But it happens all the time that Alaska Native scholars and community members will tell me that they really felt the ‘we’ in what I was writing in that instance. I’m curious about where that question comes from.

Rebecca: I think the ‘we’ was partly signalling the collaborative work that you do, and how you often co-author pieces. It was also speaking to the place you find yourselves in or have made for yourselves within the fields you belong to. But your push back, to think not only about the ‘we’ of the speaker, but also the ‘we’ of the audience and the ‘we’ of the readership is really, really important.

Maya: Yes, we were interested in what these words evoke, especially when used in academia. What do they suggest about how work is created, or who it belongs to? As Jodi discussed, how do you bring a commitment to relationality into the conventions and discourses of academia; navigate the relationship between who is speaking, and who is being spoken to – or for, or with?

Jodi: I don’t know if I was thinking so much about the pronoun or about in the usage of it in the grammar form. I was thinking about how it was hard for me when I first started writing – and maybe it’s because how I was trained in literature, or the fact that I was trained in the 90s as a writer – how it was really hard to write about Indigenous peoples as if I was part of it; there’s a way in which the language of scholarship and theory somehow requires a distance of authority, which meant I kept feeling like I was being told I couldn’t have an experience or philosophy for myself. I still have to go back through sometimes and challenge myself to say: why have I written this sentence the way that I wrote it? How did I lose myself in it?

Eve: I will say that I wish that, in writing, we could have ways that allowed us to dip in and out with precision or specificity when we’re writing as a ‘we’. I’ve just finished a piece with three early career Indigenous feminist scholars. We’re writing about visiting as an Indigenous feminist practice and pedagogy.⁵ I’m writing for the first time with Halieahana Stepetin, who is an Unangax̂ scholar. It’s my first time that I’ve gotten to write with another Unangax̂ person, except for my mom. In that piece there are things that Stepetin and I are actually writing about as a ‘we’ as Unangax̂ people, and then also with a scholar from a Métis community and a Homalco/Xwémalhkwu scholar. In that article we do the thing, which I’ve done for years now, where we’re writing as a ‘we’ and then there’s a point where it’s our individual names and a section that we wrote. And so, I half wished for the kind of thing that we do in a phone call, like a group phone call, or good accessibility practice, where you would start speaking and say, this is Eve speaking and dip into it, but then be able to signal that you’re back in the ‘we’ voice.

That’s just a small desire that I have for some better conventions to indicate when we’re moving into that specificity. Because that specificity and, as Glissant terms it, opacity does matter. It matters when I’m writing alongside Black colleagues; it matters when I’m writing alongside Indigenous colleagues from other communities; it matters when I’m writing alongside white people who have a settler relationship to land. That specificity is actually how we stay in good relation to each other. And then there’s also a precision when we are offering something together that I think is important and that I wish that we had better ways of indicating in written work.

Jodi: It’s interesting to be thinking about these problems of language, and especially to do it in the context of ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, the figurative mode of that, and how important that intervention has been; how it’s still unheard, I think. I repeatedly find I have to actually cite it and send people to it over and over and over. Like in Illinois, where everybody’s doing a conference and we’re ‘decolonising’ and I’m like, you know what, no, I’m not ‘decolonised’ or you’re not ‘decolonised’. There’s just this requirement to get to that point. And then to think about the overuse of ‘decolonial’, or ‘decolonisation’, that you’ve called out – what does it mean to have a metaphor function in this way? I’ve always wanted to ask you, and I would love to hear more, about the choice to name that settler desire to be decolonising a ‘metaphor’, and also to hear you think more about what's happening with decolonisation.

Eve: ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ is literally something that I called out across a microphone as the audience was leaving a really fucked-up conference session one time. I was the convenor of a session in which there had been really gorgeous presentations by Indigenous and Black educators who were talking about different place-based education programmes that they helped to craft and negotiate. The discussant was someone who I thought I knew well, but their remarks really just flattened everything that had happened in the session, and the person was extremely self-congratulatory about being part of decolonisation. As the person who co-organised the session, I was so disturbed by how that discussant had really misunderstood the theorising that had been happening there, and turned it into a cute diorama display. As people were leaving the crowded room, I said in a loud voice into the microphone that decolonisation is not a metaphor. Just calling it out to the audience as they exited the session.

But actually, I had written that sentence prior to that conference session, within a publication that I wrote with C. Ree called the ‘Glossary of Haunting’ (2013), where our narrator said something like, ‘sometimes I just want to write a note on a scrap of paper and slip it into somebody's pocket: decolonization is not a metaphor’.

Later, when K. Wayne Yang and I first started working on that article, I teased him, saying we were just going to send this one sentence article, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, and that was going to be our contribution to a new journal on decolonisation.

We wrote the article, which turned out to be longer than one sentence. The title itself was inspired by the article ‘Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics’ (2004), by Neil Smith and Cindi Katz. Sometimes I wish we had given the article a different title. People cite the title as though the title is the entirety of the argument of that article. Alas, ‘Decolonization is Not Containable to a Figure of Speech’ is not as catchy of a title.

There have been times where K. Wayne Yang and I wonder if we should write an update or anniversary edition. Or, if we should do an annotated edition in which we intervene in what we said then, and how we would say it now. I wish we had written with more elegance about the settler colonial triad; to clarify that this is not our triad, but how settler colonialism sorts us. I would have done that differently. At the same time, that thing that made me yell into the microphone the first time, is still such a frustration.

Jodi: I hadn’t known all this background… And, I mean, knowing how to yell something like ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’ into the face of the ways the institution grinds through this extractive process, taking everything and turning it into the institution, into colonisation… oh my god. That’s just such a powerful moment and a powerful scene.

I still send people to the essay. I teach it to students, and there’s so much in it that is helpful for giving them a way to confront for themselves the fact that they talk about these concepts of ‘decolonisation’, and most times don’t actually mean Indigenous anything; that there’s this gesture to settlers’ moves to innocence; to try to hold the complexity of the triads that are produced by racist settler colonialism, anti-Black settler colonialism. I mean, when I look at Transit now, I wish I could redo it; it was so hard to write it the first time.

I still ask myself after Transit, how do we convey the difference that Indigenous ideas, Indigenous thoughts, Indigenous interventions actually are when the ways in which we’re published, the ways in which everything is moved through academia and circulated, is actively trying to silence our difference? And maybe this gets to that question I had at the start: what is Indigenous feminism in academia? I mean, what is it? I had moments where I was thinking about this core question as we were headed towards our conversation, and I wondered, does it actually exist? Do we actually have one in our field? What would it mean to say we don’t? What does it mean to have all the amazing Native women who’ve been writing all along, who’ve done all this work, and yet to have our field which is masculinist? Indigenous Studies can be deeply masculinist; it can be silencing; it can be homophobic and transphobic. And I don’t think we have quite figured out yet the transformation that I would hope for: what can Indigenous feminisms potentially do to make more spaces for Two-Spirit, for queer, for junior folks coming up with all these ways to challenge what we’ve put in a compromised place? There’s all the ways in which citational practices have happened in the field: the ways in which some people get taken up, and some don’t.

Moments I’m proud of with Indigenous feminism in an academic context are for instance when trying to get a collective of us to actually talk about Andrea Smith,⁶ and what that meant for our field, but not have it to be the work of one person; to say instead that there is an actual formation here that has a meaning and that it’s derived through women of colour feminism; it’s derived through Black feminism; it’s derived through Indigenous cultures and communities and our own feminist collectivities… even though all of our collectivities have also been so constrained and transformed through surviving colonialism. And yet, I keep hoping for more. I just keep hoping for more, even with the immensity that we do have. So that’s what prompted me to ask the question.

I feel like I have a responsibility, at this point, to write pieces that actually name some of what’s happening; to actually say, hey, this is what happens when you put Indigenous Studies and Queer Studies together. And this is how it both succeeds and fails. This is what’s overlooked; this is what’s lost; these are the voices that fall out; and this is how the field is. I think Indigenous Studies is scared of queerness. I think, at the same time, it desires it in a very liberal gesture.

I find myself wanting to say that and wanting to name these things more and more, because realising where I’m at in my career as someone who is queer and non-binary, I want to actually make these conversations better for people who come after me – that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. And, with Transit and the work in the book, the thing that I’ve been so grateful for is the ways in which other people and other scholars transform and critique it, but also build on it and the fact that it maybe, hopefully, opens up things. I know that institutions and academia constantly want to shut doors, constantly want to close things – they want to shut everything down. So that’s what prompted the question of what we understand Indigenous feminism to be. This is me coming from this disciplinary formation in literature, and I’ve had incredible women I’ve worked alongside including Noenoe Silva, LeAnne Howe, Joy Harjo. I’ve seen different formations inside and out of academia and know what power there is, and I’m always like: I want more! I want decolonisation to not be figurative. I want our intellectual heft to transfigure the institutions that we’re in and I’m always a little unsatisfied that we haven’t done it yet.

Eve: Indigenous Studies is an interdisciplinary field, but there are fields that are prioritised within that, often History and Literary Studies and Art History and Anthropology. We can have conversations about Gender Studies and Black Studies and Education and other fields – how they come into relation to what we know as the ‘main’ set of questions, or set of scholars, or set of citations in Indigenous Studies.

I am working with students who are writing their dissertations and they sometimes write about ‘Indigenous feminisms’ and ‘Indigenous Queer Studies’ as distinct literatures. And, I think to myself, are those really different things?! To me, the best version of Indigenous feminisms is not separate from an Indigenous Queer Studies; but, working with students in the academy alerts me to the ways in which that is actually not how they are reading the work in the field. I am thinking here, too, of interventions by Melody McKiver and Billy-Ray Belcourt. My earlier work was not clear enough that Indigenous futurities are nothing without queer and trans Indigenous people. Indigenous queer land and life, to me, is self-evident; queerness is self-evident in Indigenous feminisms… But actually, it’s very important to make it not self-evident, but fully part of, and fully centred in how we’re describing what kind of futures we want for our communities, for our lands and waters.

Indigenous Studies can mean working inside institutions where we know there are people harming students, harming colleagues, and while we are being harmed by those same people. Having students who have moved their whole lives to come and work with me, watch me up close as I try to navigate that toxicity, that violence. I think about what students learn from watching me; how doing Indigenous Studies is sometimes to make work and be a person in a place that they really do not want us. And I think for that reason alone, it can’t happen only in the academy.

I feel that the most important work that I do in Indigenous feminisms in the academy is to really think through consent, and think with students about consent: in our participatory research, in our participatory research with community members, with young people, with more-than-human collaborators, with medicines, and all other living beings.

I have, for a lot of time, had to reimagine what my role is, as a person who supports the work of Indigenous scholars and Black scholars making work in relation to one another in the academy. For perhaps too long, I thought I was supposed to contort myself to be like a bubble around their work, using myself, my advocacy, my labour to shield them from the violence of the university. All of my understanding of my role as a mentor involved gestures of stretching and moving my body out of its centre in order to hold so much. And then I realised that nobody who loves me wants me to have that shape. Nobody who cares about me wants me to think of myself as the border between the toxic academy and these wonderful projects that the students are working on. I still do try to be as generous as I can be in hostile spaces.

That generosity helps me to see how what we are doing is different than what they think we are doing. I think that relates to time and our understanding of things as being very time-sensitive – that there’s a time for us to do the work in the academy and there’s a time for us not to. There are parts of this that we would be doing no matter what our jobs are; there are parts of these relations that I hope I would have been in no matter if I was a professor or not. It is those parts of it that I feel this is meant to help to enliven. And insofar as being in the university is a way to have a writing life, a nonfiction writing life, I do think that these little things that we make find their way to readers.

I remember Linda Tuhiwai Smith told me a long time ago to think of my writing, and think of writing in the footnotes, as messages to one another in a bottle. We don’t know what shores those writings will wash up on; we can’t predict that. But they bring us into another kind of relation, even in addition to these very local collaborations.

That’s how I’m thinking through what I’m trying to do in the academy. We can bring the people into our lives who are supposed to be there for these conversations.

Jodi: I like the message in the bottle. It’s interesting, because I’ve always thought in related ways about how I understand the role of anger.⁷ And what I tell myself is that I always understood it as a trace, right? Our work is a trace of a way to think differently. Who knows what survives or what pieces go forward, but there’s always some sense, or some hope, that there’s something that somebody else can follow at some point, if it’s useful. So the message in the bottle – to hear that from Smith; to see you’re thinking about that, too – is to see that this is maybe that strategy of stealing what we can. Of finding the subterfuge, the places to create alternative intellectual trajectories. It is maybe a strategy [built] around, not just the feminist anger or the feminist rage, but the possible possibilities of resistances that continue and surpass and outlast.

Eve: And I don’t know that it’s always the subterfuge…

Jodi: Well, ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’ was screamed into a microphone!

Eve: I’m thinking about the context of a national or a federal attention to truth and reconciliation and how those conversations have had their own agency, but not all in the same directions. There are many people who have worked to keep the conversations about reconciliation – which is a placeholder word for so much in universities in Canada now – close to responsibility to residential school survivors and their families. But reconciliation has become an industry. There are so many little new jobs for white people in reconciliation and so many new opportunities and new initiatives.

But there’s something even if, again, what they think is happening is not what we think is happening. There is a shift in the kinds of conversations that are made possible by these various interventions, or by these various reframings that I think do matter for the kinds of work that gets done, what gets understood as evidence, what gets understood as even the purpose of doing scholarly work.

Perhaps this is more related to where I was in my own career, but I feel like there’s a difference now. Then, people who entered the academy with big aspirations and hopes, and had those aspirations and hopes dashed or sobered up, now have a beaten-down relationship to the academy. Whereas now, I feel like there’s so many people who are just like, ‘I’m ambivalent about being here. And I don’t think that this is it – I am just doing this because we live in capitalism, and what other job am I going to have?’ So it also feels like there's not as much of a seduction by the academy in terms of what it makes possible in people’s lives. And that could, again, be very much just the group of people, the university workers including faculty and students, that I’m talking to and not really reflect the academy as a whole; but I just don’t think that people expect so much from the academy.

And this definitely is because of the lessons of institutionalisation of Black Studies, and African American Studies, of Women and Gender Studies that happened in the 70s and 80s, that I think that we are able to learn from, that shapes our expectations and understands that: okay, the university will never really fully understand what we’re doing. We’re going to try to move it as much as we can for this time period, while we have this attention and these resources, but we don’t have much investment in the theory of change that is the academy itself.

Maya: Thank you both. In some ways you’ve discussed this already, but I want to ask about how ‘reading otherwise’ might reverberate in your work. What it means for you? One of many things that interested us, Jodi, is your discussion in your work of how you hold ‘Blackness and Indianness’ together…⁸

Jodi: What does ‘otherwise’ mean? Ashon Crawley was somebody who tried to say ‘otherwise’ to think through other wisdoms, to think in different ways.⁹ And then we could instead focus on the other side of it: what is it that we’re trying to do this other to? The institutions that produce colonialism – we are all of us other in that formation as Indigenous peoples. You mention me saying that I want to hold Indigeneity and Blackness together in my work.¹⁰ That is, I hope, a way of trying to approach something that is an otherwiseness; that is about trying to not only just be accountable, and responsible to all those who brought me into existence in this – like my family, like my genealogy, the choices that were made by generations of prior Chickasaws and so many amazing resistance decisions, but then also participation in anti-Blackness.

I have Freedmen and folks in community who say: it is never really going to work out for Chickasaw decolonisation to be anti-Black; this is not our way to freedom, right? This way of otherwise is for me the core of even thinking about queerness or non-binary or Two-Spirit. It requires the other-than-human. There’s many places we can find the ‘other’ here too within this framework of otherwise; I think the best of Indigenous Studies methods, the best of our Indigenous philosophies, the best of what can be found in so many different places, is this way of thinking through something else, thinking through some other agency, thinking through what it means to be responsible to and for and in relationship to that other, and then forming alternatives.

Colonisation is about territoriality; it is about possession; it is about stripping resources; it’s about extraction; it’s about capital; it’s about dehumanization, about so many things. And our way forward is to try to not replicate, right? It’s to do other and different. I’m not saying anything profound here, but it’s to find those structures, and see their roots, to see how they’re planted. And to undo them.

I think ‘otherwise’ is such an important concept. And it has so many different strands of engagements that have happened in Indigenous Studies, and in Queer Studies, in Asian American Studies, in Black Studies. For me, the thing that I love about the possibilities of academia and about, at least, what I want Indigenous Studies to do in academia is to be able to do the work of both listening and hearing.

Eve: I definitely also think of Crawley's work in the use of the term otherwise, and think of it as an otherwise that reads for something that has been there all along. I think that in considerations of how Indigenous Studies might more meaningfully and responsibly attend to responsibilities to Black-Native people, and to relationships to both Black Studies and to Black communities, we can involve a reading otherwise for something that has been there all along.

Similarly, with reading for queerness, for queer life, for non-binary and Two-Spirit understandings of the cosmos and relationality and connections to lands and waters… that has been there all along. My thinking about this is also in connection to another one of my graduate teachers, who was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who writes in a way that lays out axioms. In different writings that I have made (some with K. Wayne Yang), we have also offered some axioms (The subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain; there are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn’t deserve; research may not be the intervention that is needed).¹¹ In these writings and in my support for graduate students, we are playing with the use of the format of axioms in order to make an argument or offer an analysis. It’s a moving of the starting place: like, what are we taking for granted in order to have this conversation? What are the conditions, or the agreed upon terms, that set the ethics of a conversation? I understand to read otherwise – or to live, or make work otherwise– as one that operates from a set of axioms that, for Indigenous Studies, do attend to relationships to Blackness; attend to settler colonial, and capitalistic tendencies towards anti-Blackness; and attend to queerness and to gender diversity. So, the terms of the conversation are just in a different place.

I think that the work of doing axioms is actually to say: these things are not debatable; this is what is constitutive of our field and what our field is working on now. And has been. That our field does not do harm to young Indigenous people, or lands, and waters; to be against harm is an axiom that I think our field can operate from.

That’s the way that I think about reading otherwise: that our starting place is somewhere different. And it’s not so concerned with the linear path of: how do we get from there to here. It’s like, actually, we’re there. And, to operate from a set of axioms is to acknowledge that we’re already there. And we don’t need to have this kind of procedural, gradual, incremental move towards a less homophobic, less anti-Black understanding of what our work is.

Jodi: I was going to say, with Crawley, and with Kandice Chuh, who gives us the ‘imagine otherwise’ here… I mean, for Kandice, it’s a process of critique.¹² This is what we mean by reading, right? It’s a way of doing; of engaging; of an ethic. Otherwise is a possible ethic of critique; of transformation, of decentering, of holding a field through which structures become legible toward disruption. Just like thinking about that axiom to think about what Eve just said.

I’ll also say that we can’t lose track of the elsewhere, which Eve’s work with K. Wayne Yang has given us too. The otherwise and the elsewhere. It’s so hard to name something as decolonial or decolonisation. But potentially the way we get there is to have the otherwise and the elsewhere. So to think about these as both temporal and spatial.

Eve: For me, Land Back is to find a way to live otherwise, and to be in relation to land in a way that is an elsewhere; that is outside of the domain of capitalistic relations to land; outside of extractive relations to lands and waters. The point is not to then create a new kernel of a nation-state that’s going to be the new social formation (but with Indigenous people in charge) but to find and renew otherwise ways of living.

A nation-state is not what any of us would have ever chosen as the way that we have a social formation. And empire is not the way that we would ever want to meet each other. I see these other ways of living already happening when I’m working with community organisations that are – through different mechanisms – returning land to Indigenous governance. Often those are Indigenous feminist collectives led by queer Indigenous women and non-binary people. That, to me, is important because it is an embodied, relational, in real time, future-oriented understanding of that kind of elsewhere and otherwise, rather than figuring out how we’re going to respond to dispossession through accumulation. Land return is not accumulation. It’s also not a ‘reclaiming’ – the verb is actually quite hard – and that’s why Land Back to me is good enough, for now. It is a kind of practice space for a relation that has other kinds of activations that are made possible through that rewiring or through that reconfiguration.

Jodi: That seems like a good place to end.

Eve and Jodi: [speaking in unison] Peace out.

The conversation took place in April 2022.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jodi Byrd

Jodi Byrd is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Email: [email protected]

Eve Tuck

Eve Tuck is Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Email: [email protected]

Maya Caspari

Rebecca Macklin is Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. Email: [email protected]

Ruth Daly

Maya Caspari is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Email: [email protected]

Rebecca Macklin

Ruth Daly is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Global Creative Industries at the University of Leeds. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, 36.

2 See: http://www.blacklandproject.org/

3 Salaita was fired from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) over tweets criticising the Israeli government’s 2014 assault on Gaza, which some students, faculty and donors considered antisemitic. Several academic organisations, including the Modern Languages Association (MLA), asked UIUC to reconsider its decision; the American Association of University Professors voted to censure UIUC for its actions. Salaita subsequently sued UIUC and the university Board of Trustees for violating his First Amendment right to free speech and for breach of contract. The case was settled in 2015. In the aftermath of Salaita’s firing, Jodi Byrd wrote of their desire ‘to validate, on the one hand, the reality that some on this campus fear Salaita’s voice and a raising tide of anti-Semitism around the world, and to remember on the other hand that his voice was speaking into a barrage of missiles aimed at a brutalized and entrapped people’ (Byrd, ‘Response to Bruce Robbins’). For more information, see: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/14/university-of-illinois-censured-for-pulling-steven-salaita-job-over-anti-israel-tweets. For more information on the legal case, see: https://www.loevy.com/blog/settlement-reached-in-case-of-professor-fired-for-uncivil-tweets

4 See Robinson, Hungry Listening.

5 Tuck and others, ‘Visiting as an Indigenous feminist practice’.

6 See: Barker and others, ‘Open Letter From Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith’.

7 See: Deer and others, ‘Rage, Indigenous Feminisms, and the Politics of Survival’.

8 Byrd, in response to Roderick Ferguson’s American Studies Association presidential address, discusses how Ferguson ‘gives us the chance to hold both Blackness and Indianness in the frame together’. See Byrd, ‘To Hear the Call and Respond’, 341.

9 See, for example, Crawley, ‘Otherwise Possibility’, 18–29.

10 Byrd, ‘To Hear the Call and Respond’, 341. This article responds to a 2018 address by Roderick Ferguson at the American Studies Association.

11 Tuck and Yang, ‘Unbecoming Claims’.

12 See: Chuh, Imagine Otherwise.