Im excited to be hosting this amazing study group and discussion Beyond Metaphor for Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, featuring Chumash scholar and artist Sarah Biscarra Dilley!
In this workshop, participants will have an opportunity to discuss and interpret Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s 2012 essay, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor with careful attention to place-based context.
Recognizing the complex history and ongoing present of lands now encompassed in “California,” the discussion will focus on an embodied, reflective, and relational understanding of the text – hopefully supporting good relationships, balanced collaboration, and rooted movements.
There are many ways of knowing and academic approaches to knowledge are only one. Academic texts can be challenging and many of us have not had access to the brilliance our Indigenous relatives working in academia, theory, and knowledge production have created. This workshop invites all of our comrades, collaborators, supporters, allies, and accomplices to engage with Indigneous Theory and join this virtual discussion.
To prepare, please review a copy of article Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.
It can be a dense text! Try not to overthink it too much, absorb what you can, draft questions for what may not gel.
Here are [some] tips [I find helpful] from Dr. Roy Perez (writer and an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego.) that he wrote for his students on how to read theory in a humanities/interdisciplinary context because he wants his “students to read theory with more confidence and less self-sabotage”.
1. Theory is an effort by writers to make sense of phenomena for which we don’t yet have sufficient language. So, reading theory can feel difficult, and the writing can seem unnecessarily complicated. It's helpful to think about why and how we read theory.
2. Be easy on yourself. You will feel lost often. Grasping theory is an iterative process, which means ideas get stated over and over in different ways. Ideas evolve within an essay and from one essay to the next. Like all writers, theorists improve over time. Stick with it.
3. Theory is a poetic process and an imaginative endeavor. Style and language matter to theorists in a way that they might not to a scholar whose goal is to transmit data or information. Clarity isn’t always better because it often simplifies things that need to be complex.
4. Reading closely and actively is more important than reading completely. When time and energy are tight, you can get more out of taking your time with five pages than getting through 50. Make the most of what you can read.
5. Reading actively includes: marking passages that are confusing or clear; writing notes in margins; establishing a practice of jumping around pages for footnotes and rereading; capturing questions as they cross your mind; and writing (in complete sentences) about the reading.
6. Theory is a cumulative project. This means that the language we have now didn’t exist when the authors were writing, and many of these authors gave us the language we have now. It also means that theory is a conversation, not a singular thesis: ideas move and change.
7. Find and follow pleasure where you can. Some ideas will blow your mind, so track down those conversations and read more about those ideas. You won't connect with all theory, but pay attention to your gut when you do connect. You'll write better about stuff you like.
Original source: https://twitter.com/ultramaricon/status/1308099756510466049
Compiled (via twitter) by: Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher (PennGSE) with permission from the
authors.
Presenter bio:
Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini [Northern Chumash]) is an artist and educator residing at xučyun/Huichin (Oakland), nitspu tititʸu tsʔitɨnɨ chochenyo, in the unceded homeland of the Chochenyo-speaking people (unratified Treaty “E” region). Her written, visual, and material practice is grounded in collaboration across experiences, communities, and place, connecting extractive industries, absent treaties, and enclosure to emphasize movement, embodied protocol, continuity and possibility. While her foundation is shaped by body, land and the worlds in and around us, she is currently a PhD Candidate in Native American Studies at University of California, Davis, nitspu tititʸu tsʔitɨnɨ patwin, in the unceded homeland of the Patwin-speaking people (unratified Treaty "J" region).
Inés Ixierda is a Mestizx interdisciplinary artist, media maker and organizer in Oakland/ Huichin. Her community work is grounded in autonomous feminism, survivor led self determination, abolitionist dreams, ancestral knowledge and matriarchy. She has been a core member of collectives including Queer Magic Makers, Corazones Diasporicos, Mugworts Queer Cabin, and Cntrl/Shift art gallery. She leads Sogorea Te’ Land Trust’s creative and media projects, political education, events and works on the land with plant medicines.
Sogorea Te Land Trust is Urban Indigenous Women led Land Trust. Sogorea Te’ calls on us all to heal and transform the legacies of colonization, genocide, and patriarchy and to do the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.