Syllabus Sunday: Indigenous Mobility And Urban Perspectives

Oct 24

Published on Patreon Nov 10, 2019

Hi All, welcome to our first Syllabus Sunday where we share information, books, journals, videos, and articles to educate you on topics related to mobility justice.

November is Native Heritage Month but what many don't know is that this month is a really hard for Native peoples as they have to deal with Columbus Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Halloween, and no one actually knowing November is Native American Heritage Month. A lot of these "holidays" and "appropriations" revives a lot of historical trauma, debates, and the continual struggle of erasure.

Another fact many don't know is that 75% of Native peoples in the U.S. live in cities. We've attached readings of Native feminist theories that are useful for understanding the activism of urban Indigenous women because they deal specifically with urban contexts, how class formations happen among urban Indigenous communities, as well as how issues of race also shape the urban Indigenous experience in relation to climate change and environmental justice. Within the fields of education and urban Indigenous history, Native people remain on the margins. Also bringing in feminist and decolonial perspectives can help us locate knowledge-making practices squarely within struggles for social justice in the city and climate change.

During climate strike week, light was shed on the fact that 5% percent of indigenous people protect 80% of the worlds biodiversity. While the media tokenized Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg to push an environmental movement, many indigenous youth activist pushed the message that the environmental movement was ignoring indigenous communities who are always on the frontline of protecting land, air, and water who needed to be the center of climate justice.

In addition, news of indigenous struggles from Ecuador, Hawaii, Alaska, Brazil, and North Dakota etc of land destruction through industrial land grab and degradation circulated and reminded us that indigenous struggles are a continual neo-colonial struggle.

Acknowledgement of Indigenous “ownership” (and therefore, implicitly, of colonial occupation and dispossession) is one thing. Granting Indigenous people some determination over the land upon which our cities and suburbs have been imposed, quite another. The question of coexistence between Indigenous people and culture, and the settler state, is central to book, Planning for Coexistence? Recognizing Indigenous Rights Through Land-use Planning in Canada and Australia, by the Australian academic Libby Porter and Canadian Janice Barry.

The book considers case studies of coexistence experiments in urban contexts in Australia and Canada—examples of Indigenous communities "testing and renegotiating the use of traditional but now urbanised lands and how governments and planning authorities respond."

The book got me thinking about representations of indigenous peoples in our own movement in mobility justice. I know I'm not the only Native-Xicana voice in cycling advocacy but in the ten years as a blogger and activist, I have not seen many like me on a panel in this space sharing our histories, knowledge, and hopes for the future of sustainable cities and transit. Even when I was a student in sustainable urban development, I did not read or see indigenous perspectives on "land relationship planning", a concept I learned from Chumash reservation visits and family knowledge of ancestral land.

What most planners were not taught in school is that planning has been an apparatus of colonization of the "New World". Every parcel of land in our country belonged to Indigenous people at one point. After colonization, Indigenous people were forced on reserves where familiar planning tools were [mis]used for their subjugation. On top of this, planning denied the existence of an ancient Indigenous planning, land management, and nomadic traditions. The political, legal and bureaucratic exercises of power were based in a racist and paternalistic attitudes that denied natives of their land and mobility to hunt, gather, cultivate, visit relatives in nearby tribes to, or seek relief from winter or summer in the plains or mountains. In addition, reservations today continue to lack access to public transit, roads, and are isolated from basic services like water and electricity while living near coal plants, pipelines, and nuclear plants. For many of my Native family members living in Kern County, CA near industrial farmlands, cancer rates are high along with many other issues related to colonization and isolation.

Unlearning of the colonial cultures of planning so that planners become allies in the pursuit of justice and reconciliation is one hell of a task and will require deep analysis and care to not replicate patterns inherited from a colonial past. It's really hard for non-native peoples to understand that there are protocols to speaking and working with indigenous communities. It is disrespectful to assume that Indigenous communities follow the same cultural protocols and will respond to same planning approaches.

It's also easy to underestimated how challenging it would be for non-natives to read Indigenous work, after all these years of colonial relations. Indigenous feminist decolonial theories are often unfairly expected to answer to whiteness and gender to non-native relationships to land in the future. Perhaps, non-natives who wish to be allies, can start by challenging attitudes and assumptions, accepting responsibility, and learning about Indigenous history, culture, values, governance and planning systems, and in doing so be able to communicate new stories of theory, practice and ways of knowing.

In a time of climate emergencies, we’re not going to fight climate change by just changing our habits, we have to address policies and treaties being broken today by oil, coal, water, plastic, farming, logging, mining, and the scientific industry. Development in the name of progress does not mean degrading the land, peoples health, and forcing people into cars instead of improving public transit, cycling and walking and indigenous knowledge of land relationship planning.

For your Syllabus Sunday, I've complied a list of Indigenous feminist work and Indigenous management of natural resources, mitigating climate change, and revitalizing communities. I would start with one book, one video, and one podcast. It's not all rosy information and requires confronting complicity and acknowledging that Indigenous ways of knowing have always been in balance with Mother Earth but worked against so that Western institutions can validate the erasure and genocide of Indigenous peoples.

Books

-Living on the Land: Indigenous Women's Understanding of Place

-As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance.

-Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

-Decolonizing Planning: Experiences with Urban Aboriginal

-Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia

-Indigenous Cities: Urban Indian Fiction and the Histories of Relocation

-Reclaiming Indigenous Planning

Videos

8th Fire: Indigenous in The City

Decolonizing the City: The Future of Indigenous Planning in Vancouver

Theodore S. Jojola "Indigenous Planning"