Ontology focus bad - transhistorical analysis makes resistance impossible

Rita: Corey, your question is helpful, and Jeff’s response also helps me think through the movement between time-situated and place-based practices of ‘solidarity’ and ways of thinking about these situated practices in terms of an ethos of ‘unsettled solidarities’ that moves across time and space, that is a way of being in the world, a set of ongoing relations. Where I, where we, are never outside of struggle, everyone is ‘structurally implicated’ in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Everyone is differentially structurally implicated, where the ideology of presumed consent underlies settler colonialism. Jeff: I would add that living on another Indigenous nation’s territory also carries an obligation to support those defending their homelands. Cheryl Bryce from Songhees First Nation started the “Community Tool Shed” in 2009 to generate support for the restoration of Lekwungen food systems. The Community Tool Shed in Victoria, British Columbia, is where settlers and Indigenous peoples can come together to rid the land of invasive species, such as Scottish Broom, and to revitalize traditional plants such as kwetlal or camas. Cheryl’s focus for this informal group is on reclaiming traditional place names, educating people about the destructiveness of invasive species, and reinstating Lekwungen food systems. The tool shed meets once per month to pull invasive species on places that have been managed by Cheryl’s family for generations, such as Meegan (aka, Beacon Hill Park), and Sitchamalth (Willows Beach). To a ‘resident’ of Lekwungen homelands, the above-mentioned places are public lands. This demonstrates the urgency of reclaiming Indigenous place names in tandem with the restoration of Indigenous foodscapes and landscapes. The May 22, 2013 reclamation of the name PKOLS (formerly known as Mount Douglas) is one of many examples where communities can come together to demand representation on their own terms. These are everyday acts of resurgence that highlight the terrain of Indigenous struggles to restore and reconnect a place-based existence. Corey: And both examples you highlighted Jeff do not foreclose a wide-range of participants. The PKOLS reclamation led by the W̱ SÁNEĆ peoples, involved participation from Indigenous peoples across Vancouver Island and across Turtle Island, it involved the university through the Indigenous Governance program, and it involved local, non-Indigenous, activist groups, most notably Social Coast. The Community Tool Shed, a project that I’ve also been involved in for the past two years, does something similar. What I find really interesting in this work is that settlers and Indigenous peoples challenge our environmentally degraded and colonial present simultaneously. Yet, there is still attention paid to the different roles and responsibilities in this work. For instance, non-Lekwungen people in removing invasive species, and Lekwungen people in managing these lands and in harvesting plants such as camas. So unlike other stewardship groups around Victoria, those participating are not seeking to depoliticize this work, nor do they argue that this work erases their complicity or their potential complicity in colonization. In supporting Cheryl’s assertion of her roles and responsibilities, they aren’t seeking to restore land in order to claim it for themselves. They aren’t Locke redux. And, given the nature and extent of Broom here – you find it pretty much everywhere around Southern Vancouver Island, something like 18,000 seeds are produced in a single plant, and those seeds can lie dormant for up to thirty years – pulling broom one time really does not mean much. So there is a demand for long- term work, which itself can help build accountability through such place-based relationships. And since land is the irreducible element of settler colonialism, and that environmental degradation has often proceeded through and in support of settler colonialism, it provides an example of non-Indigenous practices with the land that aren’t necessarily colonial. Now I’m not saying that this is an example of decolonization or that those involved are somehow not settlers. After all, decolonization and the transformation of settlers requires subjective and objective transformations. Rather it’s a practice that does not reify colonization, and thus challenges settler colonial studies construction of settler colonialism as inevitable and transhistorical.