Strategic essentialism is key to decolonization – it’s about creating counter-hegemonic stories to disrupt the erasure of the colonial history and present.
Arvin, Tuck and Morrill 13 (Maile Arvin, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at San Diego, Eve Tuck, Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Coordinator of Native American Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz and Angie Morrill University of California, San Diego, Ethnic Studies, Graduate Student, “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy” Feminist Foundations, Vol. 25 No. 1 (Spring) 2013 http://ethnicstudies.ucr.edu/people/visiting_faculty_lecturers_postdocs/arvin/DecolonizingFeminism.pdf)
Smith’s critique is meant to be a generative one, insisting on making real connections between Native and queer studies for the future of both fields and all of the peoples these fields engage. She further argues that “while both ‘tradition’ and ‘the future’ must be critically engaged, it does not follow that they can be dismissed” (ibid.). We also place importance on ideas of Indigenous futures, which are always also interlaced with Indigenous traditions, histories, and even ghosts, in our own theories of decolonization. Eve Tuck (2009) has written about desire-based research as a key counterpoint to damage-centered research frameworks, which too often present Indigenous peoples as broken, arguing that “[d]esire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore. . . . Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future” (417). Angie Morrill (forthcoming) further writes that “[g]hosts haunt the future with expectations,” noting that we share desires with ghosts, therefore Native desire is a kind of time machine. For Maile Arvin (forthcoming), decolonization involves regeneration, which she defines as “desires and practices oriented by transforming settler colonial dispossession and recreating a people-possessed (rather than an individually self-possessed) Indigenous future.” In each of our approaches toward decolonization, we do not intend to recommend to our readers one proper set of decolonial practices, but rather create spaces in which decolonization can be deeply considered and experimented with in the specific contexts of different places. Overall, with this challenge to recognize Indigenous ways of knowing, we insist that it is most important to acknowledge Indigenous concepts and epistemologies as complex, knowledgeable, and full of both history and desire. Engaging Indigenous epistemologies, without appropriating them or viewing them merely as a mystical metaphor, is a method of decolonization that could play a significant role in creating a future for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing.