Takeaways from the Bandung du nord opening session

Settler colonialism leads to an erasure of Indigenous ways of being and knowing

Ellen Gabriel emphasised the role of education in the erasure of Indigenous peoples. The real historical experience of Indigenous peoples is not known to most settlers, because it is not taught in schools. But to understand what decolonization is, you first have to know the history of dispossession and imperialism that Indigenous peoples have withstood. Understanding this history shows you that the Canadian system is not a democracy, and does not guarantee freedom. For Gabriel, real freedom is self-determination, which means figuring out how we can preserve the land. Gabriel stated that the small territories that Indigenous lands have been reduced to are not sufficient for Indigenous peoples’ survival. 

Connecting freedom to preservation and thriving of Indigenous ways of knowing, Gabriel said that self-determination is necessary for Indigenous peoples’ survival and to prevent them from becoming a footnote of history. She said that Indigenous languages are important because they allow Indigenous peoples to reinforce their identity, and to give themselves strength and power. Sadly, only 3 Indigenous languages here are expected to survive this century. Gabriel said that Indigenous peoples need to revive the control they used to have, in the same way that they’re trying to revive the role that Indigenous women played in the survival of their communities and languages. She described how Indigenous women would use magazines and cut out pictures for Indigenous children to learn their language.

Omar Barghouti spoke similarly of the centuries of dehumanization and subjugation of the Palestinian people by Europeans. The physical erasure of Palestinians and their territory leads to an epistemic and cultural erasure, since you can’t be blamed for destroying something that doesn’t exist. Barghouti dates this policy back to the Doctrine of Discovery, which constructed Indigenous peoples as inferior or nonexistent.

Gabriel pointed out that the erasure of Indigenous ways of being is replaced by the entitlement of settlers’ presence on Indigenous lands. She said that the Canadian government doesn’t want settlers to know that all of Canada is an occupying state, and that settlers don’t have a right to be on this land. That right belongs to Indigenous peoples. She said that settlers need to understand tfhat their prosperity is a result of the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of this land. In contrast, the prosperity of Indigenous peoples is completely dependent on the occupying state. 

Gabriel and Michele Sibony both spoke of the role of public naming in the cultural erasure of Indigenous peoples. Sibony said that many places in Palestine lost their original names over the course of Israeli colonization, and without signs, people have no idea of the history of the land. Similarly, Gabriel said that the renaming of streets in so-called Montreal with Kanienʼkéha names was important for people to know the history and to learn to pronounce Kanienʼkéha words. And Amzat Boukari Yabara spoke about how the Haitian revolution restored the original name of Haiti to the territory that was colonially known as Saint-Domingue, describing this as a fundamentally decolonial act.

Boukari-Yabara also spoke of the destruction and creation of culture in settler-colonial contexts. He said that settler-colonialism is often achieved through cultural destruction in which the occupier appropriates the culture of the occupied by erasing the occupied themselves. At the same time, he pointed out that cultural products are also products of struggle that have a political dimension, taking négritude and créolisation in Martinique as examples.