Lessons From Idle No More, No One Is Illegal, and Black Lives Matter

• In Event: 41.061 - "There Can Never Really Be Justice on Stolen Land": A Discussion for Emerging Scholars

Abstract

This paper furthers conversations regarding contingent collaborations (Guess, Smith and Tuck, 2016) as useful to understand a recent partnership between Black Lives matters Toronto, No One is Illegal Toronto and Idle No More. In April 2016 they occupied the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada Office in Winnipeg to draw attention to the 11 Indigenous youth who commit suicide in one weekend in Attawapiskat an Indigenous nation in Canada the settler nation state. Complicating, drawing from and furthering postcolonial, decolonial and settler colonial theories this paper will examine relationships that grew from mutual motivations-to resist the violence of settler nation states.

Understanding that resistance and decolonization theories are contested in settler nation states I pose the following question: What can social justice educators learn from 3 activist groups Idle No More, No One is Illegal Toronto and Black Lives Matter Toronto about fostering contingent collaborations with other scholars to theorize about education and colonization?

This paper draws from theories of settler colonialism (Simpson, 2011; Vercani, 2010; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Wolfe, 2006), postcolonial theory (Césaire, 2000; Spivak, 1988; Fanon, 1963) and nepantla “an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries” (Anzaldúa and Keating 1981, p. 1) to understand what motivated three activist movements with tangled and complicated histories to respond to recent events. For this paper colonization in Canada and the United States is understood as a “structure not an event” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388) that is still present, building, and dispossessing land from Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. And the Nation States continues to perpetuate violence against brown and black bodies, a history traced to chattel slavery (Tuck and Yang, 2012) and labor (Walia, 2013). In order to make sense of the recent events in Canada, I put forth a framework of contingent collaborations as a lens to understand how social actors developed mutually beneficial relationships without collapsing difference (SJEVoices, 2015). Drawing from blog posts and other forms of social media I make visible the material and figurative gains that emerge from contingent collaborations that disrupt settler colonialism, to complicate and inform educational scholarship and expose the cracks of education spaces. This paper is an answer to Leigh Patel’s call to untangle my own relationship to education, research and learning in relation to settler colonialism (Patel, 2014).

Author

• Talia London, University of Massachusetts Amherst