From Askiy to the Sea

At the core of all Indigenous resistance is the inextinguishable desire to live on and with our homelands, as Indigenous people. 

But settler colonialism flattens this collective identity and relationship to land in order to facilitate conquest and domination. Dian Million (2013) describes the racialization of distinct Indigenous polities to more easily categorize and contain as a settler mechanism of surveillance and control. Steven Salaita (2016) adds that Indigeneity is a political category determined by pre-colonial inhabitancy and emerges in the context of settler colonialism. “Indigenous” is a useful term for organizing a critical mass of distinct peoples who share conditions of displacement, dispossession, and domination under settler occupation. 

Before we were named Indians, First Nations, Aboriginal, Native American, or Arab Israeli, we named ourselves in accordance with our own cosmologies and ontologies. Our identities and relationships to our homelands are older than settler colonialism and, no doubt as J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (2018) maintains, will withstand and endure beyond settler colonialism.

READINGS & RESOURCES

Palestinians repeatedly state that Israel’s genocide on Gaza did not begin on October 7, 2023.

Rather, Israel’s latest aggression is part of an ongoing Nakba, a catastrophe that led to the violent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and the death of 15,000 more as part of the creation of the Israel. The formation of this settler nation-state can be traced back even further still to Britain’s Balfour Declaration, which claimed Palestinian territories for its establishment in 1917. Palestinians living under Israeli occupation face ongoing settler encroachment, displacement, control, and terror. 

This history of conquest and domination is familiar to Indigenous peoples living under Canadian and United States settler colonialism. All three settler states have been assembled through a steady encroachment of white settlers, displacement of Indigenous peoples, bureaucratic and militarized elimination tactics and techniques, and the establishment of settler institutions.

READINGS & RESOURCES

When solidarity between Palestinian and Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States emerges to respond to the dynamics of settler colonialism, it is grounded by deep respect, reciprocity, inspiration, and collaboration. 

While there were historic attempts at solidarity, those efforts were blocked by colonial states and a more concrete commitment to a shared struggle emerged in the 1970s during the nascent years of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO offered support to AIM’s armed occupation of Wounded Knee in 1974. Palestinians protested in solidarity with the Mohawk people during the 1990 siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawake — that seventy-eight day standoff between Mohawks, provincial and federal law enforcement, and the Canadian armed forces. The late Lee Maracle, in an open letter protesting the Assembly of First Nation-Israel delegation, wrote, “I have been a consistent and clear supporter of the rights of the Palestinian people to their homeland free of Israeli occupation and annihilation since 1972…It does not take too much historical digging to find out that Israel is the newest colonizing settler state in the world.” Indigenous and Palestinian solidarity has only strengthened since October 7, 2023, as collective, grassroots movements to end Israel’s genocide continue to grow.

READINGS & RESOURCES

A common Zionist retort to women and 2SLGBTQQIA+ solidarity with Palestine is, “Hamas would kill you in Palestine.”

This is a not-so-subtle suggestion that women and 2SLGBTQQIA+ solidarity is misplaced with Palestinians uniformly labeled sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic. But this assertion relies on Orientalist stereotypes depicting Palestinian women and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people as victims who need to be rescued from their barbaric hypermasculine men (Razack 2004). The selective and highly suspect concern about gender and sexuality is a discursive tactic meant to discourage solidarity and even justify genocide (i.e. “these people are savages”). 

Further, the claim that Palestine isn’t a safe place for 2SLGBTQQIA+ peoples belies the recent history and contemporary criminalization of queer and trans identity in Israel, Canada, the United States, and other Western nation-states. In the U.S. and Canada, the aggressive suppression of sexual expression and gender diversity is foundational to the formation of the two white settler societies. Israel’s pink-washing campaign, Brand Israel, for instance, is a multi-million dollar campaign intended to revitalize Israel’s international reputation through selective engagement with queer and transgender communities. This homonational strategy simultaneously asserts Israel’s progressiveness while depicting Palestinians as backwards.

READINGS & RESOURCES

In 1976, Mahmoud Darwish and Lee Maracle each recited their poetry during Darwish’s visit for the UN Habitat Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Maracle read an English translation of Darwish’s poem “Write Down, I am an Arab.” In 2015, in memoriam of the great Palestinian poet, Maracle dedicated “Talking to the Diaspora” to Mahmoud and the children of Gaza. The collection contains a poem entitled “Remembering Mahmoud.”

Palestinian and Indigenous artists and writers continue to find inspiration in one another and use their creative works as vehicles for freedom dreaming and social transformation.*

*Freedom Dreaming was coined by Robin D. G. Kelley

READINGS & RESOURCES

Palestinian and Indigenous peoples turn to one another in mutual recognition.

Sometimes Indigenous people regard Israeli military occupation as if witnessing our ancestral history; sometimes Palestinians look upon Indigenous conditions as one possible outcome. The reality is that our struggles are in many ways distinct and occuring along different settler colonial time horizons. But nonetheless, this Reading List is a reflection that we see ourselves in one another and that has also meant that we increasingly turn toward each other to find our liberated futures.

READINGS & RESOURCES