Where Are We From?: Decolonizing Indigenous and Refugee Relations

A paradigmatic shift has impacted scholars working in Indigenous, critical race, ethnic, diaspora, postcolonial, and Canadian studies to examine “alternative contact” (Lai and Smith), to look past histories of contact and post-contact dynamics between European, white settler, and Indigenous societies, and to focus instead on contact and dialogue between and amongst non-white and Indigenous communities. However, the figure of the refugee has not received as much attention in the existing scholarship as the diasporic, migrant, or settler of colour figure. If refugees are considered, they are treated as an afterthought or subsumed under all the other conditions of forced and chosen migration. Furthermore, some refugees are themselves Indigenous, while some occupied positions of neo-colonial power within their home countries, which implicates them in the continued dispossession of presently existing Indigenous people. As such, “refugee” and “Indigenous” are not always mutually exclusive; in some instances those referred to as “refugee” are at the same time undergoing a process of forced de-indigenization or have, themselves, been the drivers of de-indigenization. When the complexities of refugeeism and Indigeneity are transported to settler colonies, where the distinction between colonized/colonizer and Indigenous/non-Indigenous is palpable and where colonization continues unabated, refugees are caught by a purported binary of Indigenous/settler. In the context of Canada, Indigeneity is more readily understood as a terminological placeholder for hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations whose stories of creation and histories of existence tie them, inseparably, to the land they live on. Also referred to as First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, or as “Aboriginal people” in accordance with the Canadian Constitution’s s.35 “Aboriginal rights” section, Indigenous people entangled with settler colonialism have a long history of displacement and dispossession precipitated by parallel processes of global capitalism, empire, and war. Under assimilatory legislation commissioned as a part of a wider genocidal project, Indigenous people were targeted by the Canadian nation-state for eradication and through their survival continue to contend with a racist, anti-Indigenous country that is, for the most part, still committed to a vision of de-indigenizing Indigenous people. So while refugeeism and Indigeneity may substantially intersect on a number of levels, they are rarely addressed in relation to one another in either refugee or Indigenous studies (Coleman et al.). In this chapter, the scholars, hailing from Métis and Sino-Vietnamese refugee backgrounds, will address this gap by juxtaposing their families’ migration narratives and discussing the practice of genealogical disclosure as an accountability and relation-building tool. Already a common praxis amongst Indigenous, feminist, and racialized scholars, the practice of genealogical disclosure functions as a strategy of decolonial and anti-racist resistance for the authors that ethically situates their knowledge production and political investments as scholars, pedagogues, and community allies. Ultimately, they claim that the practice of genealogical disclosure, grounded in Indigenous kinship principles, performs an ethical and pedagogical role as it lays bare the refugee and Indigenous person’s responsibilities to each other, to their communities, and to the land and its sentient and non-sentient inhabitants.