Cynthia Cui
I am a second generation Chinese immigrant, but many scholars in the settler-colonialism space, such as Iyko Day, would call me an alien settler: I have been entangled in many of the same racialized and colonized struggles as Indigenous and marginalized communities, but my position as a Chinese-Canadian has allowed me to benefit from the benefits of the settler colonial regime known as Canada. It is a combination of this complex positionality and unfortunate circumstances in my early career that has brought me into the world of fighting against colonization and, by extension, capitalism. Without those life experiences, I would have never met Ty.
I met him almost a year ago when he interviewed me for another academic project, but it wasn’t until a couple months later that we started talking. We found out that our thesis topics were very closely related: I was writing about Chinese-Indigenous relations in BC’s canneries, and Ty is writing about Taiwanese-Indigenous relations in Vancouver. Ty was doing his directed readings (DR) during the summer of 2024 and approached me with a proposal to help him develop a website that would 1) publish the outputs of his DR and 2) share resources with others who may be interested in learning more. That is how Asian-Indigenous Relations was born.
Ty Bryant
I would not be the Indigenous person I am today without the majority of the key people in my life history being members of the grander Asian diaspora. My chosen family has always looked much more like Cynthia or Geri’s than who you may expect an Indigenous person to be in familial relations with. Some of my fondest memories are of ha gao, learning to count in Cantonese, and being the youngest regular at Skylight Restaurant on Commercial Drive in Vancouver (where I could not live without my gōn cháau ngàuh hó).
I have always felt like my experience as an urban Indigenous person with such strong affinities to Asian settlers has been underrepresented or outright ignored in mainstream media and scholarship. This feeling is only intensified because of my deep ties to the Taiwanese diaspora in Vancouver, which have developed in the last six years. While my primary research interests (and frequent travel destinations) are Taiwan-based, I have done much preparatory reading on other forms that Asian-Indigenous relations have taken shape. Over the past year, I have also begun interacting with other colleagues at conferences and through the classroom, realizing that countless scholars, journalists, and community members are bringing to light the rich and complex shared histories our peoples have. Upon realizing I was much less alone in my mission, I reached out to Cynthia and Geri, two of my closest academic friends and allies, to kickstart a digital resource.
Luckily, they said yes and have refused to turn back despite our short yet continual exponential growth. Fittingly, our research team and digital resource are born out of and are a product of ongoing Asian-Indigenous relations. While offline relationalities are well-documented and advocated for, I am excited to bring this research area further into the digital realm, to document and advocate for our braided struggles and futures, and to give birth to new forms of Asian-Indigenous relations that take shape in a digital world that is a crucial, and necessary, geography of Indigenization. Here’s to renewed (and new) relations.
Geri Lee
My positionality as a third generation Chinese settler has been intrinsically shaped by my family’s history of immigration to Canada, which began with my great grandfather, Yung Yee Mook, who arrived in British Columbia in 1918 as a student. Growing up, I understood that my family’s presence in Canada was implicated in a complex history of settler colonialism. Family stories of head taxes, discrimination, and blatant racism were interwoven with anecdotes of kinship and belonging – all of which now reify my identity as a racialized settler. While I recognize that my family’s history of immigration and settlement is shaped by the desire for belonging and recognition as Canadian citizens, I dually recognize that these opportunities were made possible by the ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories and through the cultural and familial dislocation of Indigenous kin networks. It is from this position that I recognize how my relationships to Cynthia, Ty, and to Asian-Indigenous Relations are grounded in iterative processes of racialized (un)becoming and (un)belonging.
Ty and I met in the last year of our undergraduate degrees as sociology majors. Although we shared a few classes together, it was not until graduate school that we formed a friendship and began to seriously consider how our identities might serve as launching points for collaborative scholarship that would allow us to discuss our experiences in academia as Indigenous/racialized students.