Asian Indigenous Relations

Chair: Michael Hathaway, Simon Fraser University

Discussants: 

Ty Bryant, Simon Fraser University

Geri Lee, Simon Fraser University

Ashley Caranto Morford, Weber State University

Gage Diabo, Concordia University

Abstract: This roundtable theorizes Asian settler colonialism in the Canadian context, considering how diasporic Asians living within Indigenous lands come to participate, coercively and willingly, unknowingly and knowingly, in Canadian settler colonial processes. While critical scholarship and discourse relating to Asian settler colonialism remains potent in the context of Hawai’i, the term (and settler status of Asian diasporas relative to other sovereign Indigenous lands) remains undetermined (Fuijkane and Okamura, 2008). There is an urgent need to address the under-conceptualization of Asian settler colonialism in Canada, given that over 7 million diasporic Asians are living in Canada – while Canada continues to enact, erase, and dismiss ongoing genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples whose lands Asian diasporas are making lives within.

Our discussion combines emerging, early career, and established diasporic Asian and Indigenous scholars, educators, and community organizers (Filipinx, Chinese, Punjjabi-Sikh, Kanienkeháka, and We Wai Kai) to address Asian settler colonialism. The first half of this roundtable utilizes Asian settler colonialism as our anchor, as we will discuss Asian complicities in Canada’s settler colonial processes, Asian-Indigenous relationalities in a Canadian context, and braided decolonial futurities beyond the nation-state. Questions that we take up, and encourage our audience to engage with include: How do Asian Canadians experience and (un)knowingly enact colonialism within Canada, and how can we navigate these complications and relationalities across Asian Canadian and Indigenous communities with an ethics of care? How might the concept of decolonial endurance (Hui, 2023) illuminate the roles storytelling, play, and care hold in Asian-Indigenous relationalities in and beyond Canada?

In the second half of the roundtable, we perform a close reading along with attendees of a passage from Sto:lo educator Lee Maracle’s autobiography Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel (1990). The passage recounts and asserts a decades-long platonic relationship between a Chinese Canadian man and an Indigenous woman, challenging conventional understandings of Asian-Indigenous relationalities (Mawani, 2010; Hu Pegues, 2021). To close the panel, we will create space for an interactive dialogue about how this passage helps us witness and reimagine the futures of Asian-Indigenous coalition building and relationalities against and beyond settler colonialism.

Ashley Caranto Morford: [Welcome to] the Asian Settler Colonialism and Asian-Indigenous Relations in Canada roundtable discussion. We are so thankful for you to be here on the very last day of this conference and early on a Sunday… right? It’s Sunday? Early on a Sunday morning. Let me begin by recognizing the lands that we are gathered on today, we open by recognizing and thanking the lands that are currently nourishing us and on which we have all gathered to think together today and throughout this conference. These are the lands of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples. The name “Ohio” itself is derived from the Kanien’kéha word, “ohi:yo,” the great river.

Ty Bryant: All right, Gila’kasla everybody! This is a greeting in my traditional Liq’wala language, meaning, “I share my breath and spirit with you.” I’m Ty Bryant, a master’s student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, and I am simultaneously occupying the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen peoples…this is colonially known as “Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, British Columbia.” As you will come to know over the course of the panel, Asian-Indigenous relationalities have defined a large portion of my life, and is an area of inquiry and attention that did not begin at theadvent of graduate school. I have been a product and facilitator of these relationalities ever since my mother was hired at Yen Brothers produce company, a successful produce enterprise operated by the Yen family, who are Chinese-Canadian settlers on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. I would now like to turn to the format of our session before I introduce the chair, who could not make it in person today, my colleague, Dr. Michael Hathaway from Simon Fraser University, who will be delivering his remarks via a pre-recorded video that we will show shortly. This roundtable is broken up into three distinct parts, the first being a critical application of the theoretical framework of Asian settler colonialism to the settler colonial nation state of so called “Canada,” the second, as you can see through what’s on your chairs and the books up here – the two editions of Lee Maracle’s 1990 text, Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel, we will be doing a deep reading and interactive portion of the panel where we invite you to give your thoughts along with us. And I really, actually appreciate that it’s kind of a smaller room, so we can turn it into a little seminar, hopefully…if you’re up for it. And aside from that, we have prepared comments as well that we can interweave throughout. I’ll now play the video, and also, just as a reminder, we’ll try our best to allocate time for a Q&A at the end, but we have so many comments prepared and lots to talk about. This just makes me think that I wish we submitted a two part panel, and maybe we can do that next year [at AAS 2026] in “Vancouver,” which is very fitting. So yeah, a little preview for maybe what we’re already thinking about. So yeah, let’s transition to the video, where Michael Hathaway will be answering our first question, along with introducing and contextualizing the two parts of our panel, which is, where do you know from (Zuroski, 2020); that is, what is your positioning and who are your community relations? Who are your kin? What has brought you to this discussion and this commitment? Thank you.

Michael Hathaway: Hello. My name is Michael Hathaway and my pronouns are he/him. I’m delighted to play a small part of this exciting panel today, and I apologize for not being able to make it in person. So I was raised near where I am right now on the Lenape territory outside of “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” And I grew up at this Quaker boarding school, where my father was a teacher. And there, when I was a student, I took the first Asian Studies course that they had taught, and soon after that, I was able to travel to Akwesasne, Mohawk Territory, where I got to meet some leaders there that had a long term relationship with the school. After I went on the trip, I started subscribing to the famous Mohawk newspaper called Akwesasne Notes. And when I would read these, I was really amazed by the kind of the depth of international Indigenous relations. And I began to see how important this was, and this was so different than the stories that I had heard before in the larger society and school about seeing Indigenous people as vanished, as victims and utterly local people, not transnational players. Then I was an anthropology graduate student in the 1990s, and I spent sometime…several years in China, where I was looking at Indigenous politics there, especially how they were transformed by international environmental projects. After graduate school, I have spent the last almost two decades now in what is known as “Vancouver,” on these territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, and there, I’ve been motivated to support connections and conversations about the shared lives and intersecting histories between Indigenous folks of Turtle Island and Asian travelers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. So here we have this panel, titled Asian Settler Colonialism and Asian-Indigenous Relations in Canada, and we have a number of wonderful speakers to start thinking about these shifting histories, including what one of the speakers, Gage Diabo, describes as “the bad feelings.” So as some of you know, just to help set up this context in terms of Asian settler colonial studies, a lot of this work arises from Hawai’i, especially in the context of a vibrant, powerful, and sometimes playful Indigenous rights movement, and before the US military takeover of these islands at the end of the 1800s…by the US government that tried to turn these islands into plantations of sugar cane, of pineapple…creating the largest military bases in the Pacific and a site of tourism…the queen of Hawai’i was a real globetrotter, gaining acknowledgement of her kingdom’s sovereignty by a number of foreign countries. And then later, after this military takeover, many of the laborers brought in to work on these plantations were from Asia, especially China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. And it’s been a really interesting place that generations later, we witness a unique zone in the world where relatively large and powerful populations of both Indigenous folks and immigrant Asian populations have both created these challenging coalitions and also weathered antagonistic relationships, alliances, and debates that sweep up so many people within the ivory tower as well as in the streets and city hall. So these are these very vibrant debates, and people like Ty have really been trying to take this work, and others here, and bring this into a Canadian context where this is not really kind of gaining this kind oflevel of public conversation. So together, they are creating, though, these vigorous conversations about how while, many have viewed settler colonialism within this framework of a binary between the white immigrants and Natives, how might we think of Asian immigrants to these places? What are their roles in challenging or supporting these long term forms of Indigenous dispossession, or also forms of decolonization or work on towards forms of sovereignty. What might we learn and understand about how this operates in a variety of spaces across the world? How does this change over time? You can think of many different examples. So for example, I’m interested as well…how do forms of Han Chinese settler colonialism in places like Tibet or Xinjiang borrow from colonial logics like those created by Wajin Japanese in both northern Japan and Ainu territories or in what’s now seen as Southern Japan in Okinawan territories. And how does this compare or relate to movements of poor farmers from Japan to Hawai’i, or fishermen to “British Columbia,” in “Canada.” In all of this, I think it is important to not assume that one’s heritage is conflated with national citizenship. After all, many of the Japanese who went to work under these hellish conditions in Hawai’i are actually Okinawan…and these days, Okinawans from Hawai’i are deeply informed by the very different politics of working towards sovereignty that is happening in Hawai’i as compared to Okinawa itself. So there are these powerful currents that are moving back and forth. So I want to emphasize that we need to attend to connections, rather than just kind of like assume that we are looking at comparisons between different nation-states. It’s really kind of challenging the kind of ontology of the nation-state itself…that’s part of the project, I think, in really interesting ways. And for the third part of this roundtable, our speakers are doing a deep dive into the powerful work of one of the most influential literary figures in Canada, Lee Maracle, and over the years, before she passed, I had the pleasure to meet her several times, to be in awe of her utter fearlessness. And I should note that she came from a line of intellectual and political leaders, including her grandfather, known as Chief Dan George, who’s a well known actor. And then he surprised “Canada” in 1967 when he was being asked to speak for the 100 year celebrations of the Confederation. And this talk was right near my home in “Vancouver,” where at this large stadium…I think it was 32,000 people, where he decried the effects of the colonial project over the previous century. So he did not praise the Canadian project, as all the other speakers had on that day…so some said that he threw a monkey wrench into the celebratory machine. So his granddaughter, Lee Maracle was a major player, not only in literature, but in Canada’s Red Power Movement for Indigenous rights. And one of the things she helped do was create NARP, the Native Alliance for Red Power, which was deeply inspiredby what was happening in Mao Zedong’s China. So amazingly, after reading and selling Mao’s Little Red Book, she and a group of people from the Vancouver area were invited to China…this all-Indigenous group, and as far as I know, they were the first such group to travel across the ocean from “Canada.” Really as kind of international diplomats, in a way. So Lee Maracle was also, as I believe you will hear, deeply against the American military’s atrocity in the Vietnam War, to think of other kinds of forms of connection with Asia. And she was interested also in building solidarities with visiting delegates from North Vietnam. Although Maracle later changed her position on China, she was part of these larger dynamics that brought together alternate contacts, different stories of differentiated colonialism, multi-generational relationships that are in process, stimulated and shaped by powerful thinkers and those seeking to build relational ethics and networks like the people we see here today, those who also acknowledge the messy histories and entanglements that have shaped everything that we see and feel. Thank you so much for allowing me to be part of this, and I’m excited to hear the conversation that follows. Thank you.

Ashley Caranto Morford: All right. Kumusta. Ako si Ashley Caranto Morford. Hello, my name is Ashley Caranto Morford, my pronouns are she/her. I am an assistant professor in the Department of English at Weber State University. I come to this discussion and to thinking through and working to build and honor Asian-Indigenous relations as a diasporic Filipina and British settler who has lived my entire life as an uninvited occupant in the Indigenous territories, currently colonially occupied by the “US and Canada.” Presently, I’m living as a settler and I’m being nourished by the waters and mountains of Shoshone territory, what is colonially called Ogden, Utah. On my father’s side, my ancestral roots trace back to England, specifically the Dover and Liverpool regions. On my mother’s side, my ancestral roots extend throughout Luzon and the Visayas in the Philippines. My mother grew up in Manila, and she can trace roots back to Pangasinan, where her father, my lolo, was from…as were his parents. Her mother, my lola was from Cebu, and her parents lived throughout the Visayas. My forthcoming book project entitled Settler Filipino Kinship Care: Confronting Colonial Canada and Honoring Indigenous Life, takes up and addresses the question: how can Filipinx in “Canada” be better kin and better relations to Indigenous lands and life? When I was entering the third year of my undergraduate studies, back in the day, I visited an art exhibition about the work of Tsimshian artist Roy Henry Vickers. Visiting that exhibition made me realize how much I didn’t know about the Indigenous lands I was living in, and about the Indigenous cultures that have lived in deep and intimate relationality with these lands since time immemorial. That compelled me to enroll in an Indigenous Studies class taught by Cree-Métis scholar, Dr. Deanna Reder at Simon Fraser University. That class offered an earth shattering, world changing, transformative experience for me, one which helped me to begin to critically understand my experiences as a woman of colour, the myths of North American exceptionalism, and the colonial narratives about the world and my place in it that I had been fed. Indeed, that experience led me to become a major in Indigenous Studies. While this is certainly rapidly shifting now, at that time within Indigenous Studies, as Michael alluded to in that video, so much of the focus seemed to be on white settler histories, experiences and responsibilities, and I often found myself being subsumed into white settler positioning. So part of my coming to this question of settler Filipinx responsibilities stemmed from my desire to move beyond the white-centric framing of settler positioning and the white-Indigenous binary, which overlooked Filipinx experiences of “North American” and “Canadian” colonialism. Again, this is rapidly shifting now too. But at the time, I also saw that these conversations about Filipinx positioning in “Canada” and Filipinx responsibilities within Indigenous lands weren’t happening in earnest in Filipinx “Canadian” community spaces, or there was a resistance in these spaces to conceptualizing our positionings in these lands as settlers. So I want to take a few moments to unpack my understanding of Filipinx positioning in “Canada.” As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s work help us to understand, settler is not an individual identity, but rather a structure and system that one becomes positioned in. I understand settlers as those who have become part of the settler colonial “Canadian” nation-state, who are not Indigenous to these lands, and who do not have ancestral histories of being stolen from their homelands through the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Settler is not a homogenous positioning, given that, as Patrick Wolfe and others have asserted, settler colonialism is an ongoing system and process fueling “Canada’s” existence. The positioning of settler cannot be confined to the historic event of European colonizers first arriving in these lands, nor can it be positioned only towards their descendants. In short, it cannot be reduced to white “Canadian” nor to colonizer. Settler is a continuously unfolding and developing position that Filipinx are indoctrinated into, participate in, whether by choice or through coercion and embody when arriving to, seeking to become part of, and hoping to be recognized by the “Canadian” nation state. But at the same time and amidst our entanglements in “Canadian” settler colonialism, white-centric framings of settler do not align with nor speak to the experiences of Filipinx “Canadians,” and this white-centrism is why I think many Filipinx I have organized and thought with have resisted the positioning of settler. Given that the mass displacement of Filipinx from their homelands is caused by the ongoing legacy, structures and impacts of “American,” “Canadian,” and other colonialism and imperialism in the Philippines, Jody Byrd’s conceptualization of the arrivant, which they developed from the work of Kamau Brathwaite, holds resonance for Filipinx experiences and positions in “Canada.” According to Byrd, in the Transit of Empire, the positioning of arrivant “signif[ies] those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe.” As I conceptualize Filipinx “Canadian” positioning in “Canada,” I land on the positioning of arrivant settlers. This positioning signals that our collective relationship with “Canada” and “Canadian” settler colonial systems, structures, and processes is different from, and in many ways, incommensurate with white “Canadian” settlers. The positioning of arrivant settler recognizes that we have been displaced from our homelands due to the violence of colonialism. It conveys that colonial violence has continued to impact how we experience, navigate, and are treated within so called “Canada.” And it asks us to understand that we are on Indigenous lands, and that we carry responsibilities to Indigenous lands and life here.

Gage Diabo: Skennen’ko:wa ken. It means peace to everybody. I’m a Kenienkehaka scholar of the wolf clan. I’m actually double wolf clan, which makes me somewhat of an incestuous abomination, who was raised and is now very fortunate to work in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, south of Tiotiake (“Montreal”), a traditionally shared place of meeting between the various of Iroquoian and Algonquin peoples. I don’t think of the Kahnawake Reserve where I live as ancestral lands, since my people were traditionally located in and displaced from lands further south in what is currently known as Upstate New York. But then again, I don’t wish to lock my people either into like a historically bound image of ourselves as occupying “X lands.” And for what it’s worth, I also hold a “Canadian” passport that permits me to travel like I’ve done this weekend with relative ease between current day nation-states, although I will also note with great bitterness that the 1794 Jay Treaty should also afford meand my people equivalent rights of free international passage across the very fraught “Canada-US” border. All that being said, I first became a settler and came to think of myself as a settler when I moved to Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory in the late 2010s for my doctoral studies at the University of British Columbia’s “Vancouver” campus. It was there that I was first exposed to the West Coast’s very powerful forms of Indigenous presence, as well as to the City of “Vancouver’s” thoroughly Asian character and constitution. I’m indebted, as such, to “Vancouver” based scholars like Chris Lee and Christine Kim, who helped get my first piece published, as well as creative writers and theorists like Fred Wah, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong from and around UBC, for giving me the crash course in Asian Canadian criticism that brought me into the fold of these discussions about Asian-Indigenous relationalities. These are still, as we will allude to a lot today, undertheorized and underdiscussed topics in my own home field of critical Indigenous Studies, which is unfortunate, because I feel like, I, as a very total neophyte in these matters, I’m far from the ideal candidate to be participating in, much less stewarding, these discourses around Asian-Indigenous relations in which we’re now stewing. But then again, here we are. And thanks for having me. [Laughter].

Geri Lee: Hello. My name is Geri Lee, my pronouns are she/her, and I am a third-generation Chinese woman who was born and raised on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations of Turtle Island. Both sides of my family come from Guangdong, China. My mother’s side is from Ponyue, and my father’s side is from Toisan. I come to you as someone who learned about Asian settler complicity much later in life, and has only recently started to think about the ways in which I, along with my family, have created a life in so called “Canada,” which has only been made possible through the systematic erasure of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. As a sociology student who is researching digital sex work on OnlyFans and labour conditions within the platform economy, I will admit that coming here to speak with you all today is definitely outside of my comfort zone, as Asian Studies is still new to me in many ways. My entry point to thinking about and discussing Asian-Indigenous relationalities is largely informed by my engagement with feminist frameworks that consider the role of race, gender, and disability, among other social factors in shaping lived experience. While I have previously written about Indigenous women’s experiences of survival sex work in “Vancouver’s” Downtown Eastside and the violence that informs this type of labour, these projects have exclusively analyzed the relationship between the white settler state and Indigenous women and femme-presenting people. It was not until more recently, through my participation with AIR [Asian-Indigenous Relations] and immersing myself into the literature about Asian-Indigenous histories that I began to consider how racialized settlers like myself tacitly benefit from and uphold these colonial institutions. Working within AIR has served as a reflexive practice for me, primarily because the work that we’ve done has required me to reflect on my own experience as a Chinese settler, who for most of my adolescent life, sought security and a sense of belonging in the term “Chinese Canadian,” because I felt that my “Canadian” identity would compensate for the emotional and cultural distance I felt for my Chinese side. Being unable to connect to my grandparents due to language barriers and a lack of understanding about their lives in China were obstacles fostering a Chinese identity that I felt comfortable with growing up. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I felt a lot of shame not being able to connect with my culture in ways that my family expected me to. So falling back on my other half, my “Canadian” identity, was often the comfortable default, because that side of me had never been challenged. So, when Ty asked me last year to help him build out a bibliography that was originally for his directed readings course, I don’t think either of us anticipated that this simple Zotero list would lead to the formation of AIR, and open up avenues for theorizing and organizing on the ground in “Vancouver,” and I certainly did not anticipate the amount of self reflection I would be doing as a result of this work. Although my involvement with AIR over the last several months has allowed me to unpack the emotional ties I had to feeling and to being “Canadian,” I want to preface that this is, and will likely always be, an ongoing process for me. So, I’m hoping that through this discussion, we might be able to learn from each other and to leave with more questions that allow us to think about the relationalities that have made our presence in these spaces, both in the context of this conference room, as well as in the place we call home, possible.

Ty Bryant: Once again, my name is Ty Bryant, my pronouns are he/him, and I’m a member of We Wai Kai First Nation near colonially called “Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada.” I come to this discussion and in thinking through and working to build within and honor Asian-Indigenous relations, as somebody who was born and raised as an off-reserve youth on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. While my ancestral and unceded territories are only 240 kilometers away from MST territories, I’ve experienced immense pain and loss being forcibly disconnected from my culture and homelands via cumulative intergenerational trauma brought upon via settler colonialism, imperialism, and gender-based violence. With that said, a major narrative thread throughout my life course has been ongoing, chosen family dynamics and intimate, close proximities to various Asian diasporas and community members. I’ve become whole in my Indigeneity and identity by and through my relationalities with the grander Asian diaspora, as well as with the kin from my nation. Though, for the last six years, I’m specifically thinking and feeling with the Taiwanese diaspora on MST territories. I have always felt like my experience as an urban Indigenous personwith such strong affinities to Asian settlers as well as Asian-Indigenous relationalities in general, has been underrepresented or outright ignored in mainstream media and scholarship. Therefore, I come to you today as an Indigenous scholar and organizer, who considers Asian Studies their primary academic discipline, which at times, has been an uncomfortable experience to navigate. To use some of Lee Maracle’s words here from another book, I am Woman, many Asian diasporic peoples have imprinted and moved me along my chain of people, helping me reach this point in my personal life and scholarly career. I’m currently working within the realm of Asian-Indigenous relationalities in three contexts, which are as follows. The first is my ongoing master’s research and thesis, which concerns multiple generations of the Taiwanese diaspora on MST territories and how they are navigating roles and responsibilities intergenerationally towards host nations. I do not care to place my research yet within specific scholarly homes or camps, because it is evolving and ever changing as I approach writing up my thesis. I hope that today we can also talk through the dilemmas of trying to position Asian-Indigenous relationalities in specific forms of scholarly inquiry, and we are definitely going to deconstruct and unpack what that means for us in terms of organizing. Part of my work is actually considering an assemblage of relationalities, readings, community work, language, geographies and truly complicating what it means to not only be Taiwanese in so called “Vancouver,” but also what it means to pursue a project [as an anthropologist] that is pedagogical as it is anthropological, as I am often the first Indigenous person within a Turtle Island context, that my participants are meeting and learning from. I am also considering how the Taiwanese community is reckoning with a history of invisibility and marginalization while still being racialized settlers, especially given that “Vancouver” is home to the largest percentage of the Taiwanese diaspora within the “Canadian” nation-state, who are often conflated with the Chinese diaspora, which is carried forth from transnational pull and understanding, conventionally, that Taiwanese is Chinese. The other mode of inquiry, as has been alluded to and was up earlier on the screen, is the formation of Asian-Indigenous Relations Society, an academic research team and non-profit that I have co-founded with Geri Lee, Cynthia Cui and Marc Castro, all [current or former] students at Simon Fraser University. Our whole panel is comprised of either co- founders or key contributors to our outputs, initiatives and community building efforts across Turtle Island. We also collectively steward a digital resource that you can visit via the QR code or at asianindigenousrelations.ca [you are here reading this now!], which consists of publications and a multimedia library featuring over 200 sources regarding Asian-Indigenous relationalities. We have only been in operation forclose to a year, but we’ve established a mycelial type network of scholars, mutual aid, and ideas and activism with over 30 members, spanning Asian-Indigenous diasporas as well as numerous institutions and professional practices.

Ashley Caranto Morford: All right, so we’re going to take some time to talk about the question: why theorize Asian settler colonialism in the “Canadian” context specifically, and why has Asian settler colonialism in the “Canadian” context been under theorized up to this point? So, within diasporic Asian Studies, work on Asian settler colonialism and Asian and Indigenous relationshas focused predominantly on the “US,” and as Michael said, especially the Hawaiian context. We might think, for instance, of Kanaka Maoli scholar and land defender, Haunani-Kay Trask’s 1997 keynote address at the MELUS Conference raising awareness to Asian settler violence against Indigenous peoples in Hawaii and the publication of Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i, edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura in 2008. Though, of course, this is vital work there is an urgent need to look at Asian settler colonial entanglements beyond Hawaii. For so too are settler colonialism and Asian complicities within colonial structures, ongoing and violent issues throughout all of the so called “Americas.” “Canada” continues to be a settler colonial empire too, and its settler colonial atrocities often go unchecked and unrecognized within global discourse around colonial, imperial violence and legacies. Indeed, there is often a misconception of “Canada” as a peaceful, progressive, diverse and tolerant country injuxtaposition to the “US.” This misconception particularly erases the ongoing acts of genocide and dispossession that “Canada” perpetrates against Indigenous peoples, and while I am still forming the thoughts I share next, I do want to say that it feels especially difficult, tense and fraught, but increasingly necessary and urgent, that we theorize and have unsettling conversations about Asian settler colonialism in the “Canadian” context right now, given Trump’s imperial threats toward “Canada,” and the ways in which the Trump administration is negatively impacting “Canada,” we are witnessing “Canadian” patriotism emerging within community spaces that have previously been critical of “Canadian” settler colonialism, and that have previously called to question the legitimacy of “Canadian” sovereignty over the Indigenous lands that it is violently occupying. In short, and bear with me, because I’m still thinking through this, this liberal “Canadian” patriotism in response to Trump’s attacks on “Canada” is happening in ways that enact what Tuck and Yang might term “settler moves to innocence,” asserting “Canadian” sovereignty while now conveniently neglecting to mention and recognize Indigenous sovereignty in Canada’s infringement on it. I do think we can hold space for the necessarily difficult conversation of reckoning with and recognizing both, that Trump’s attacks on “Canada” are incredibly worthy of outrage and fear, and need to be challenged and addressed, and that regardless of this, “Canada” is nevertheless a settler colonial regime that continuously dispossesses Indigenous people of their lands and undermines Indigenous sovereignty. We have to be open to finding a way to hold both of these realities as part of Asian and Indigenous solidarities in the “Canadian” context. Now let me take a moment too, to think about the Philippine archipelago as well. While much of the critique around the devastation of colonial imperialism in the Philippine and Filipinx context has rightfully focused on the US Empire, and the Canadian Empire has not ignited the same amount of scrutiny, Canadian imperialism significantly shapes lives in the archipelago, and it grows and shapes the Filipinx diaspora. For one, the “Canadian” nation-state has an immense mining presence in the Philippines, and “Canadian” mining in the Philippines is ongoingly harming the archipelagos, lands, and lives. These processes are especially oppressing and displacing Indigenous communities in the Philippines. Indeed, as we think about Asian settler colonialism and “Canada,” Ruanto-Ramirez emphasizes that non-Indigenous Filipinx have consistently encroached on, and settled, within Indigenous lands in the Philippines, often at the encouragement and pressuring of colonial nation-states, and sometimes enacting violence against the Indigenous populations of those territories to do so. Speaking of non-Indigenous Filipinx violence against Indigenous peoples of the Philippines, I feel this issue is important to recognize and contend with as well. So I’ll end my reflections on these questions with this idea. I’ve repeatedly pushed back against a belief that has at times come up in diasporic Filipinx spaces I’ve been in, that all the island’s peoples can be considered Indigenous. This assertion is dismissive of and harmful to Indigenous peoples in and from the Philippines. The term Indigenous must be recognized as a highly political identity term and must be used intentionally and with responsibility. As the members of IKAT (Indigenous Knowledge, Art, and Truth) emphasize, dominant ethnic groups in the Philippines, including “Tagalogs, Visayans, and Ilokanos […] are not Indigenous because they are recognized by Philippine law as part of the ethnic majority.” Furthermore, assertions that all Filipinx are Indigenous, not only risks erasing sovereign Indigenous peoples and nations in the context of the Philippines, but also enact, to draw on Tuck and Yang again, a “settler move to innocence” that makes ambiguous diasporic Filipinx entanglements and ongoing settler colonial violences occurring on Indigenous lands, both in the Philippines andin diasporas like “Canada.”

Gage Diabo: I want to echo and a bit preemptively supplement what others here have contributed, and also think ahead to our discussion of Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel by talking about the strange linguistic dimensions of Asian-Indigenous interfacing in Canada and specifically in Montreal, Quebec, where I’m living and thinking. I can best ground my discussion in the context of my home reserve, where my primarily English-speaking community of Kahnawake is located, very precariously within the Francophone-dominant province of Quebec, which puts us at verbal odds with not just our Francophone Indigenous neighbours, like the Eastern Cree, Atikamekw, Innu, and Wendat peoples, our damn cousins, but also members of the French-speaking Asian and Afro Caribbean diasporas in Quebec, in particular, the Vietnamese and Haitian communities that are really solidifying in the region. I think this language barrier is a major part of why it took my becoming a settler Vancouverite for me to fall into Asian-Indigenous studies in the present and in earnest. Anglophone Kahnawake simply has neither the historical inclination nor the present tense motivation or bandwidth to deal in the French language at all, as vital as it may be to the quality of our neighborly relations. It’s unfortunate, but we’re just very angry at the existence presence of Frenchness in our midst, and students of Anglophone Montreal literature have their own fun, jargonistic terms for this problem: there’s the “two solitudes,” taken from the Hugh MacLennan novel, and also “doubleexile,” which I would amend in the Kahnawake Mohawk’s case, to something like triple, if not quadruple or quintuple exile, in the sense that as a direct result of waves of colonial dispossession and assimilation, we are linguistically exiled from, on one hand our would be kin in seemingly all directions you can name, from English-speaking “Canada,” from Francophone Quebec, from the rest of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose members live and operate primarily on the “US” side of the border, from our Francophone kin, who I’ve named previously, and also from Francophone settlers of colour, with whom we share a kind of subaltern positionality, but from whom we are at a very fundamental remove. There exists a lot of bad feeling, as I’ve called this problem in my piece of the same name, that sort of keeps us from even beginning the conversations that would lead to a potential coalition, and I would love to see, you know, some more ofthe strength of thinking and togetherness that I’ve witnessed on the West Coast brought into force on the East Coast, in excess of these linguistic boundaries.

Ty Bryant: All right, so Geri and I will be responding together in tandem for this part of the panel. So Geri will kick us off.

Geri Lee: So, I think Asian settlerhood in Canada has been difficult to theorize because Asian diasporic relations within the “Canadian” state have traditionally been treated as disparate and disjointed events, affecting specific diasporic groups, rather than as a continuous process whereby racialized groups, however marginalized, contribute to and indirectly benefit from the overarching system of oppression that is settler colonialism. And I’m mainly thinking through Patrick Wolfe’s assertion that settler colonialism is a structure of violence, not an event. Adjacently, in thinking about how specific Asian diasporic groups, such as Chinese and South Asian immigrants were historically treated in the 20th century – for example, the Chinese head tax and the Komagata Maru, the public education system, at least in British Columbia, and its framing of historic events has positioned the racist treatment of Asian diasporic groups as equal to that of Indigenous peoples. And on that note, I kind of want to pivot to focusing on this discussion of anti-racism and multiculturalism in “Canada” and how Indigeneity has been absorbed into these frameworks. So, the lack of representation of Indigenous communities and anti-racism discourse and organizing has been critiqued for decades. Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, who are writing this in 2005, discuss how anti-racism movements within “Canada” propel the colonial agenda by failing to acknowledge the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoplesin the Americas, and it also fails to consider how “Canada,” as an active settler state, maintains the subjugation of Indigenous peoples and lands in a way that renders Indigenous people and Indigeneity issues invisible through an anti-racist framework. So similarly, Beenash Jafri, who is writing in 2010, demonstrates that anti-racism organizing has excluded Indigenous communities due to the misalignment and understanding of how racism differently impacts racialized and Indigenous groups. Jafri is drawing on one example of how the perception that racism is experienced equally often renders invisible the ways in which one racialized group’s subordination might actually be implicated in these hierarchized power relations that actually contribute to the subordination of Indigenous groups. And much later on, Métis scholar Chris Anderson, who was writing in 2017, also discusses this in a few of his works, where he describes how Indigeneity in Canadais often treated as a racial category that is commensurate to other racialized groups. And an implication of this move, of course, is thatit delegitimizes Indigenous Nations’ moves to sovereignty and claims to land.

Ty Bryant: Thank you, and now I’m going to take on the very difficult question of why Asian settler colonialism remains undertheorized. And this is something I’ve been ruminating on for years and years, so these are still ongoing and preliminary thoughts, but I’m going to do my best to be clear here on what I mean by undertheorized. We need to start out by applying Haunani Kay-Trask’s definition of settler colonialism directly to the “Canadian” nation-state. So I’m reworking a quote here: “”Canada” is a society wherein Indigenous cultures and people have been murdered, suppressed or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who dominate land and life, with civil rights becoming an issue, and this is important here, of how to protect settlers from one another.” So thinking through what Trask is saying here and the legacy of Asian settler colonialism, and Asian settler colonialism studies, there is a lot of potency and density, as Michael was explaining earlier, when it comes to analyzing and focusing on the ascendancy, specifically, of Japanese-American identifying people in Hawai’i, being made possible by and through “United States” settler colonialism, which allows for a honing in on the political power gained and used by Asian groups against Native Hawaiians in service of empire. Trask and others go on to talk about how OHA trustees and governors are Indigenizing themselves as Hawaiian to protect investment, control and mobility, while eliding commitments to land back and dismantling the settler superstructure. This makes me think of the “Asian-in-place” framework, which reframes immigrant underdog stories to help fortify Hawai’i as a multicultural haven state, differentiating itself from other stories and narratives regarding Asian identities, experiences, and stories across colonial geographies and the social worlds of the so-called “United States.” It would be irresponsible to attempt to apply such a concept, with a rich lineage of place based activism and thought, to a whole nation-state, without thinking through the distinct formation of Asian settler colonialism in “Canada.” This allows me to draw on Leanne Simpson, as cited by Gage in the article Bad Feelings, Feeling Bad, who speaks to the lack of outreach to and with Asian peoples in the context of the 2012 Idle No More Movement, where Simpson addresses how Black and Brown relationalities are often addressed in these conversations, but not Asian ones. As Gage mentions, it is merely implied, at best, how Asian as an analytical category and identity marker figures into these conversations. This also leads well to mentioning how as a response to these specific social conditions in so-called “Canada,” disparate and overlapping terms, as Gage was referring to earlier with linguistics and grammars of Asian-Indigenous relationalities, have been utilized and ported over from other geographies and scholars to attempt to get to the bottom of the superstructure that mediates and sometimes fails to govern or make legible in its own terms, Asian-Indigenous relationalities and their densities. These terms, which are still being debated to this day in a “Canadian” context, including within our own research team and the discussion today, include “refugee settler,” “alien capitalism/alien,” “colonizer,” “arrivant and arrivant colonialism,” “Asian settler ally,” “non-preferred or undesired immigrants,” and a “minor settler or co-colonizer framework.” There’s a double entry into grammars here, because I’m also thinking of asymmetrical relationalities that are theorized and described through specific words and phrases. And these include “amorphous,” largely, I’m thinking of Renisa Mawani, who is referring to Foucault’s genealogies, as well as “messy,” “non-linear,” “neither unequivocal nor explicit,” “dense,” and “heterogeneous” in terms of some of the possible entry points here.

Ashley Caranto Morford: Okay, so before we move into looking at Lee Maracle’s work, we’re going to talk about these questions, they are: How do Asian Canadians experience and enact colonialism within “Canada?” How can we navigate these complications, incommensurabilities (Tuck and Yang, 2012; Lethabo King, 2020), and relationalities across Asian Canadian and Indigenous communities with an ethics of care? So as I said previously, speaking of the impossibilities and the messiness of language, I’ve been working with the idea that Filipinx in “Canada” are positioned as arrivant-settlers. Recognizing that Filipinxs who have come to “Canada” to stay are settlers, is not to overlook the colonial harms and precarities that many of us have and do experience. Nor does such recognition undermine the ways that the “Canadian” regime enacts colonialism on Filipinx peoples and attempts to disempower Filipinx communities. Rather, I believe that for Filipinx in so-called “Canada,” to recognize ourselves as settlers, invites and calls on us to honor our distinct obligations to Indigenous lands and life, and it also recognizes and urges us to contend with how, when we come to these lands to settle long term, we do become beneficiaries in and complicit within the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and ongoing processes of settler colonialism. Recently, in my work, I’ve been thinking through how the Philippines as a labor brokerage state encourages the making of Filipinx as settlers in the Indigenous lands currently colonially occupied by “Canada.” Robyn Magalit Rodriguez coined the concept of the Philippines as a labor brokerage state. Under this system, Filipinx people are viewed as commodities to be shipped abroad to labor overseas and provide remittances back to the Philippines and its economy. Working in partnership with other nation-states, the Philippine government hascrafted official policies dedicated to exporting Filipinx as laborers. “Canada” participates in this labor brokerage system, which is perhaps most discernible through the live-in caregiver program in so-called “Canada,” wherein 90% of admissions to the program are women from the Philippines. The Philippines is one of the biggest sources of migrants to so-called “Canada.” Dani Magsumbol has emphasized how ubiquitous this expectation of Filipinx laboring as part of the global working class is within Philippine society. Now, the labor brokerage system is intended to send Filipinx abroad only temporarily, and yet, since the idea that Filipinx must leave to labor has become so naturalized within Philippine society, this expectation of leaving encourages the making of Filipinx acts as long term and permanent settlers in so-called “Canada” to gain the security of permanent residency or citizenship and lessen the threat of deportation from so-called “Canada,” Filipinx immigrants to these territories must work with, not Indigenous nations whose territories they seek to live within, but rather the “Canadian” government following its policies and framings, thus participating in an ongoing process of legitimating the “Canadian” nation-state and its jurisdiction over the Indigenous territories it occupies. Entrance into “Canada” requires that one be well versed in the mainstream “Canadian” system and narrative, and that one demonstrate their ability to be indoctrinated into the status quo. So for example, the 68 page study guide in preparation for the “Canadian” citizenship exam, published in 2012, contains a minuscule few pages on Indigenous peoples, in which readers learn that Indigenous treaty rights are embedded in “Canada’s” constitution, but do not learn about what Crown-Indigenous treaties are and what responsibilities come with these treaties. So to gain “Canadian” citizenship, one need not demonstrate in-depth knowledge about the Indigenous nations whose lands they are coming to live on, but must demonstrate a substantial understanding of British and Canadian law, protocols, histories, and epistemologies. In short, in order for Filipinx immigrants to experience a sense of security without the ongoing threat of deportation, they are forced to assimilate into the “Canadian” body politic, and in so doing, are required to participate in a process that legitimizes and upholds the validity and the power of the “Canadian” colonial system. This is one primary example of how we witness incommensurabilities when it comes to Filipinx and Indigenous solidarities in “Canada.” And these are incommensurabilities that we need to be aware of and navigate as we work to address “Canada’s” colonialism in a multi-pronged manner that strives for everyone to be liberated and safe. And I’ll end this question by sharing one story from my own experiences of Asian-Indigenous kinship. We each are going to experience particular threats and oppressions, as well as specific privileges within “Canada’s” settler colonial system. And as we navigate these and contend with incommensurabilities, we have to remember that there is no one way that showing up for one another and being good kin takes shape. I remember in 2019 and early 2020 when the Wet’suwet’en were fighting against capitalist corporations and the “Canadian” nation-state trespassed on their territory to build pipelines without their consent. As someone who has the privilege of “Canadian” citizenship, I was incredibly involved in organizing work that involved blocking roads and rail tracks where people were getting arrested. A fellow Southeast Asian comrade wanted to support the Wet’suwet’en, but did not have the security of citizenship or permanent residency, and was at real threat of being deported if they participated in actions such as blockades. So instead, they got heavily involved in fundraising activities and educational events. All of this to say, solidarity can be through large-scale organizing and large-scale highly visible acts of revolution, but it can also be at the micro level, through interpersonal care and small-scale daily acts of love, connection, co-creation and support. As Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes recognize, “While large-scale actions such as rallies, protests and blockades are frequently acknowledged as sites of resistance, the daily actions undertaken by individual, Indigenous [and other systemically oppressed] people, families and communities often go unacknowledged, but are no less vital to decolonial processes.” I am reminded too of the insights of Black organizer adrienne maree brown, who says that “Small is good. Small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small).”

Ty Bryant: I think this bridges well into Geri and I’s remarks here, and I’m gonna kick it off by kind of grounding what we want to say in the context of what I’ve been reckoning with for the past few years of how to move from what seems like an abstract…what Gage says is an abstract realm of epistemological alliance to the material realm of coalition. So small daily actions are what is animating a lot of myethnography right now with the Taiwanese community. And it also reminds me of my major framework I’m drawing on in my research called “alternative contact,” which is a term and methodological framework to help ground analysis of how “Asian Canadians enact colonialism within “Canada.”” It’s from Paul Lai and Lindsey Claire Smith in 2010, in a special issue of American Quarterly, and they developed the term to ask what insights may be gained in orienting towards Indigenous diplomacy and contact with people and places outside of dominant European-Indigenous relational historiography. I think the benefit of this is that it allows us to deconstruct both the “Canadian” nation-state and “Asian subject positions” simultaneously. This entails questioning common narratives regarding Asian diasporas and immigration, such as how Geri has been thinking through her own identity and language and culture on MST territories. This also reminds me of my own work with my participants, as aforementioned, and conversations with Geri and others within our research team, considering how one becomes and knows they are “Canadian,” especially relevant right now, and how identity is articulated and oversimplified via the term Asian Canadian or hyphenated diasporic identities in relation to the nation-state. This also takes me to Judith Butler via José Esteban Muñoz’s, whose term disidentification is also useful and generative in seeing how these identity labels are both a sign to which Asian settlers do and do not belong, simultaneously navigating desire, identification and ideology within and against the nation-state that seeks to correct its past wrongs, whether it’s anti-Asian racism, apologies and national guilt, or small scale everyday actions of reconciliation that are touted and celebrated. This has been step one in developing my toolkit in terms of praxis and in terms of navigating what it means to be writing up these relationalities and placing them into an academic context. I also want to mention that these relational orientations avoid assigning Asian populations the same degree and structural position of colonial agency and power as Europeans, while also seeing how Asian communities and Indigenous nations are subjected to the exact same settler colonial forces, but in much different intensities and scales. At the end of the day, I believe that any solidarity work and reckoning of Asian settler complicity mut center land, for Nishant Upadhyay in their book, Indians on Indian Land, which came out last year, mentions “failing to center land does not rupture the settler state, nor work towards decolonization,” which is not a metaphor or something to be relegated completely to the literary and linguistic, which brings us to Glenn Coulthard and Leanne Simpson with their piece Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity in 2019, which orients Asian communities towards Indigenous land rather than racialized categories and the fabrications and lies of the “Canadian” nation-state. This work has [gained momentum] since 2008 where Rita Wong published Decolonization. I approach my work with AIR through these practices, as well as my ongoing work with the Taiwanese community, which I believe makes possible what Larissa Lai calls like co-constitutive, rather than a juxtapositional framework for relation-making both locally and transnationally.

Geri Lee: So, in thinking a lot on Ty’s theoretical overview here, an example I can point to and flesh out is the recent mobilization of resources and power at the municipal political level in so-called Vancouver, where Mayor Ken Sim, a second-generation Hong Kong professed Vancouverite right, has, as of this week, created a development plan to effectively evict and relocate Indigenous residents of the Downtown Eastside “back to their home communities.” Back in his 2022 municipal election campaign, Sim was the first mayoral candidate in history to be endorsed by the Vancouver Police Union, the beginning of an intimate relationship to the Vancouver Police Department, which has since only led to significant increases in the budget for policing, as well as a return and a rejuvenation of an ideological, hard line, militant approach to over policing the Downtown Eastside and its residents, at least 31% of whom are Indigenous with varying proximities and engagements with the Chinatown community, and by extension, vulnerable seniors and youth and other Asian settlers who use drugs or occupy space in these areas of the city. Recent reports indicate that despite the planned document being leaked, as well as major backlash and discourse from Indigenous organizations, Downtown Eastside residents and settlers of colour, Ken Sim will still be following through with the plan, and this is also significant in the sense that we can critically analyze Sim’s ascent to power within municipal politics by returning to the framework of “Asian-in-place as “local,”” which Ty discussed earlier. Dennis Kawaharada points out in his article that this framework emerged from Haunani-Kay Trask in her 2000 article, Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony, where she targets Candace Fujikane’s claim, traced back to 1994, that locals of Asian ancestry in Hawai’i belong to a “local nation,” a third space sought after to theorize Asian identity and allyship beyond Asian nation-states and the United States. This led to Fujikane agreeing with Trask and repositioning herself and her fellow Asian diasporic kin as settlers, rather than populations with claims to belonging that are rooted in Indigenous dispossession.

Ty Bryant: So to round things out, I just want to further apply this to the Ken Sim situation. I’m full of rage about this. So leaning into his position as a lifelong Vancouverite, and employing a sense of a “fun city” and a “Sim City rhetoric,” Ken Sim is effectively rendering his expertise as an entrepreneurial outsider in government as based upon his experience and hardships living his life out in Vancouver, as somebody who is marginalized as an Asian Canadian. Trask would say that this is merely a gloss for the reality of the sociopolitical context of these discursive and material moves to innocence and attempted dominance over Indigenous land and life.So therefore, “the local” becomes celebrated and trusted without being considered a settler or considering themselves a settler. Therefore, it is necessary to define Ken Sim’s status as a settler, not strictly through his political power that is exercised in the Downtown Eastside, but also by and through his relationship to Indigenous peoples in the settler state that he seeks to govern a part of. To do so, and finish my point, I would like to illustrate this by repurposing a quote from Fujikane and Okamura’s book Asian Settler Colonialism: “Above all, [Ken Sim doesn’t] want any reminderof [his] daily benefit from the subjugation of [host nations and Indigenous peoples.] For [him], history begins with [his] birth in Vancouver and culminates with the endless retelling of [his] allegedly well-deserved rise to power. Simply said, [Ken Sim] wants to be [just another Vancouverite].

Gage Diabo: Bet you didn’t think Canadians were this disgruntled! [Laughs]. But pardon my English, we’re really fucking pissed off these days, and I’ll speak briefly to the linguistic divide that I’m currently very unhappily navigating as an English-speaking Indigene of the Canadian province of Quebec, with the would-be separatist nation-state, we’re going to look at the dark side of coalitional thinking briefly, for the current Quebecois government, is the Coaition Avenir Quebec, or CAQ, headed by their founder, Francois Legault…that fucker. He’s spent the first half of the 2020s on a course to legislate Anglophone Quebec to the margins and sooner rather than later, out of existence, through unilateral measures like Bill 96 which installs French as the sole administrative language of the province, except in cases where residents can prove ties to a “historical Anglophone community,” and that is the verbiage they use, and which would include the Mohawks of Kahnawake, as well as closer to home for me, a very harsh strangulating enrollment capon English-language universities like McGill and Concordia University, where I was recently hired. And so Asian and Afro-Caribbean settler presence in Quebec factors into this picture in an odd indirect way, which I think we’ve all been kind of theorizing a bit here. By courting Francophone settlers of colour (who are, themselves, colonized peoples with histories of dispossession and enslavement in and from their own Indigenous lands), the current CAQ government is generating the French-speaking critical mass it needs both to retain legislative power and demographically to crowd out the so-called “historical Anglophone communities,” who stand as an obstacle to Quebecois nationalism. It’s a complex and very unhappy geopolitical frame that makes no one look or feel good, while Quebec gets to appear increasingly diverse and multicultural as Asian and Afro Caribbean immigrants achieve their own critical mass in major metropolitan regions like Montreal. That demographic power merely fuels white settler colonial power, in turn, all under the guise of an ostensibly free and bilingual Canadian society. And beneath all of that, you know, perhaps consciously forgotten from all of that, are the Indigenous First Peoples of these lands, who are now put in the awkward, almost conservative position of having to look around us and say things like, where did all these immigrants come from? Which is a terrible sentiment that I’m hearing more and more in the mouths of my fellow Kahnawake Mohawks, who would otherwise, you know, be very thoughtful and decolonial minded folks. This putsour desired Asian-Indigenous aoalition on the east coast off on the wrong foot, if not, traps us in a dead end, that, you know, imagines this incommensurability as a kind of, you know, death blow, or so we would assume…for Anglo-Franco relations have a funny way of persisting, to paraphrase Jurassic Park, despite the antagonistic rails on which we’ve historically been placed. And I’m thinking throughout this conversation of my one surviving grandfather, who, although he doesn’t know it, is trilingual. He speaks English. He was a survivor of the Indian residential school system under the Jesuits. He speaks Kanien’kehá:ka despite that history. But what he doesn’t realize is that he also speaks French. He makes fun of the French with whom he works as a greenskeeper on golf courses, but when he speaks his version of Francophone gibberish, he’s speaking grammatically correct French. He understands the French that he claims to not understand, and he’s, you know, fostered lifelong friendships and partnerships with white settlers and Francophone settlers, despite the fact that the party line in Kahnawake is we don’t date the French. You know, I think in that history, there is a powerful potential for those linguistic and cultural gaps to be somewhat bridged, and that I would like to keep in mind, despite the anger that I’m unfortunately spewing into the microphone today.