by Isa Ansari
The SJRC has been conducting interviews with scholars and community members from our diverse network to try to understand and highlight some of the ways in which they are responding to COVID-19. Last week I had the opportunity to co-interview Dr. Kim TallBear and Dr. Jessica Kolopenuk, scholars and professors at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. They are the co-founders and principal investigators of Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (STS), a research training program based out of the University of Alberta that seeks to “promote Indigenous self-determination” by supporting Indigenous led techno-scientific innovation and ways of inquiring and producing knowledge that support Native peoples and their communities (https://indigenoussts.com/). Among other things, we talked about what a “productive embrace of crisis” looks like, how Indigenous people are positioned well to embrace crisis in such a way, and how we might move forward and “live well together on stolen land” (TallBear & Kolopenuk, personal communication, 15 May 2020; unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this post come from this interview).
Dr. TallBear’s research focuses on the integral role that notions of race and Indigeneity have had in shaping genetic sciences, as well as the role of technoscience in both colonization and, increasingly, Indigenous governance. Her book, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013) looks at how genetic sciences that purport to be able to genetically identify races may pose threat to Native American sovereignty and claims to land, resources, and their own history. She also writes and speaks widely on decolonial sexuality, and co-produces a project called “Tipi Confessions”, which is described on their website as a “performance laboratory” that incorporates spoken word, storytelling, music, burlesque, erotic fiction, and more into shows about gender, sex, and sexuality informed by decolonial and critical sexuality studies (http://tipiconfessions.com/). Dr. Jessica Kolopenuk’s research also centers around Indigenous people and genetic sciences, focusing on how 21st century biotechnologies are still steeped in the same, unequal colonial power dynamics that define our current political, scientific, legal, and social orders. The core of her work is Indigenous self-determination, which she seeks to foster through Indigenous STS as well as her own research (https://indigenoussts.com/principal-investigator/co-pi-dr-jessica-kolopenuk/).
When asked about the role of Indigenous STS in the context of this pandemic, Dr. TallBear noted that Indigenous people are situated in such a way that engenders a particular “productive embrace of crisis”. Dr. TallBear noted that there has been less lamentation of what is happening in the Faculty of Native Studies as compared to the rest of campus. She says, “We are spending less time lamenting the old world. We’ve been lamenting our old world for hundreds of years, this is just another major transition.” Both Dr. TallBear and Dr. Kolopenuk attributed this to the fact that, as Indigenous people, they are used to crisis: “I don’t mean to be cliché, but I think it’s true, Indigenous peoples often come from communities and families that are living in crisis half the time. This is just another crisis, it’s a big crisis, and it hurts, it’s not like it doesn’t hurt our communities, but my mom once said to me, Native people are best in crisis, we just start organizing.”
In this case, they are organizing with the Faculty of Native Studies and two other faculties on campus to create an online minicourse called “Indigenous Peoples and Pandemics” that will be open to the public this summer. Usually, Indigenous STS hosts a training internship program called SING Canada in the summer that is “designed to build Indigenous capacity and scientific literacy” (https://indigenoussts.com/sing-canada/). It is a “collaborative co-thinking project” designed to train indigenous genome scientists “in the service of Indigenous communities having governance and cultural authority over the kind of research that happens in their communities.” Because of COVID-19, this year’s SING Canada program was cancelled, and in its place the minicourse is being developed. The course will integrate public health, biology, epidemiology, history, sociology, and more for the purpose of understanding how pandemics have affected Indigenous communities throughout history and in this moment, emphasizing that “for Indigenous peoples, epidemics and pandemics have always been syndemic with colonialism and colonial settlement.” They hope to integrate it into a larger course that will be offered at University of Alberta next winter.
In her article “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming” (2019) published last spring, Dr. TallBear cites “making kin” as a potential “creative alternative to nationalist assertions of inherent sovereignty” and to narratives of progress toward a “multicultural” future that neglects Indigenous people and histories of dispossession all together (TallBear, 2019). During our conversation, I asked what “making kin” might look like generally and in the context of COVID-19. Dr. Kolopenuk, who is Cree, Peguis First Nation, commented that the history of her people is deeply intertwined with the history of Scottish settlers, who they sided with over the Métis people. Because of this, “making kin with settlers” has always felt normal to her. Dr. TallBear’s experience, as an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, and having been raised on the Flandreau Santee Sioux reservation in South Dakota by her mother and grandmothers, was different. She was “uncomfortable” at first when she moved to Canada and found that the history of Indigenous/settler relations was seen as a history of kin to kin, in addition to a history of treaties between sovereigns. She soon realized, however, that regarding treaties as a “desire to draw people into kinship relations” might be the “only way to live well together on stolen land,”
One of the ways to achieve this is through language revitalization. As Dr. TallBear noted, “It is hard for us to think about better ways of living together in a language that is so incredibly violent…so built around binaries and moral absolutes.” Dr. Kolopenuk gave the example of learning what the word for newcomer or foreigner is in the Indigenous language of the territory you are occupying, and figuring out what kinds of relations you are drawn into with that understanding. For example, the Tsimshian people of the pacific northwest coast’s word for strangers translates to “driftwood.” What role does driftwood serve in this particular area? How can understanding this help us to understand how we can embody our roles with grace and consideration for the people who were here before us, and who remain? Dr. Kolopenuk stressed that making kin is not about disavowing settlers and the US settler nation state of our history of genocide and land theft. It is not about charity, or the “strategic operationalization of virtue.” Rather, it is about challenging ourselves to imagine and develop ways of relating and coexisting that culminate in greater respect for and commitment to the land and First Nations.
We also talked about how we can apply this tactic of making kin in acknowledging our relations to the more than human, such as the virus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes COVID-19. Rather than using the dominant war metaphor to talk about SARS-CoV-2 as a foreign enemy we must beat, how can we recognize it as a being with whom we have co-evolved, or with whom our relatives (bats and other animals) have co-evolved? What implications does this have for shifting our responses? Dr. Kolopenuk made the point that the history of our evolution has been a history of relations, of “evolving with viruses and bacteria” and that often “one often can’t live without the other.” How can we shift the focus away from the virus as the source of pathology towards the conditions created by industrial capitalism, as an arm of the settler state, that have rendered us vulnerable to the spread of zoonotic disease in the first place? A vaccine will do no good if we don’t also take seriously the role of deforestation, industrial meat farming and agriculture, and more in boosting our vulnerability to a virus like SARS-CoV-2. Another virus will just appear. After all, there will be no ‘end’ to the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus will stay with us just as most viruses do. We must challenge ourselves instead to find ways of “living with the virus” that include reframing our relations to each other, the land, and to other beings.
TallBear, Kim. (2019) “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming” Kalfou. 6:1