Becoming Better Relatives: Envisioning the Practice of Migrant-Native Relationality Through Overlapping Onto-Epistemologies – Shyamoli Patil-Gupta
Honorable Mention, 2019-2020
Abstract
Grounded within critical Indigenous studies, anti-colonial and decolonial theories, and scholarship on migration and diaspora, this paper builds on emerging scholarship that examines the nexuses between these literatures to interrogate the “settler of color”. In doing so, it turns to the term “postcolonial-migrant-settler” to make sense of the unique positionality of migrants who were once colonized subjects, but now make homes and meaning as settlers on Indigenous land. This paper argues for the unique potential of these kinds of migrants to act in solidarity with Indigeonus nations given their own histories of anti-colonial organizing, and to undergo a second stage of decolonization that transforms the postcolonial-migrant-settler to decolonized migrant-guest. This analysis is grounded in Minneapolis, engaging Dakota, Hindu, and Jain onto-epistemologies to make an argument about how the mirroring onto-epistemologies and understandings of land, kinship, and justice between these three groups are a means of understanding relationalality between them, and subsequently as a tool for decolonization. In imagining a template from which to work, this paper examines land-based relationality and resurgence practices being enacted by Pacific Islander migrants and Dakota and Ojibwe community members in Minneapolis. Though focused on a local context, the connections made speak to larger questions about trans-Indigenous organizing and lateral solidarity that are increasingly important given a future of capitalism-driven climate change that intensifies dispossession and creates conditions of displacement. The arguments that are presented are with the main goal of beginning the steps towards being better relatives and mapping a template for material decolonization.
