6. De Zie Contre Menti Kaba – when two eyes meet the lie ends: a Caribbean meditation on decolonising academic methodologies

Nadine King Chambers

Ayiti as the starting point¹

This chapter opens with the Haitian-Canadian poetry of Junie Désil to honour the overlooked space where black people in the Caribbean uphold more than just a singular lineage in the effort to keep our stolen selves uncolonised. The Haitian revolution (1791–1804) represents one of the greatest blows against all the wrack and ruin various European colonisers brought to Haiti. Its stories and legacies continue to be under siege from anti-black, anti-indigenous, pro-colonial forces; therefore I chose to begin to tell this complicated living tale of life, land and law by turning to literature and art, refusing white hetero-patriarchal systems of power and expanding space for our science and our fact to breathe freely in our fugitive stronghold labelled ‘fiction’.

The best work begins at home and lives in the generative economy of poetry at the kitchen table:

This poem is the power of a Black Haitian elder transmitting herstories – unsettling authorised space and time – to make an indigenous and black map that tells the stories we need,² hard ones included. These are the guides bequeathed, not via the internet but within the web of our palms resisting being ‘blanked’ to continue the sacred work of decolonising what we remember and reinforcing our ability to revolt against the colonial present in which we find ourselves.

Jamaica: an instructive contrast

On the Jamaican coat of arms, Anacaona’s people are portrayed resting comfortably with hands palm-down on either side of the British shield. The original inscription from 1906 reads ‘INDUS UNTERQUE SERVIET VNI’, meaning, ‘The Indians twain shall serve one Lord’. The inscription was changed in 1962 to ‘Out of Many, One People’, yet post-independence there is no substantive reference to indigenous presence as shaping the present.³ The now 113-year-old image keeps indigenous peoples of the region symbolically re-purposed by the coloniser’s drive ‘to make flat all that is high and rolling; to make invisible and wutliss [worthless] plenty things’, as noted by the Rastaman in Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014, p. 17). In Junie’s grandmother’s 500-year memory-as-living-flesh piece Anacaona is recognised as the original royalty; the poem is a living recognition of this island’s mine.⁴ How different this is from the amnesia riddling Jamaican memory, created when the British hid this inheritance in the 1906 coat of arms and covered over the jacket of the Spanish who arrived as traders to Xaymaca and left as génocidaires.⁵ All colonisers made maps; and in those maps lie all their intentions about territories and systematic political imperatives. Kei Miller’s Rastaman protagonist would salute Junie’s grandmother as a force against the imperial cartographic drive ‘to make thin and crushable | all that is big and as real as ourselves’ (2014, p. 17).

I am the granddaughter of Jamaican campaigners for the federation dream and a daughter raised on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) on Jamaica at a time when all the rich and varied demotic speech of the Caribbean surrounded me as fact. For me, there is pride in wishing federation existed, coupled with the attempt to understand the shadows of things done by the British, with Caribbean countries’ names listed on colonial contracts or agreements before federated or untethered independence was even a thought. My desire has run over more than ten years of slow research about the Aluminium Company of Canada (ALCAN) and how its corporate control, granted by colonial authority, altered hopes, rivers, dreams and rocks for smelters – connecting Jamaica to British Columbia. My work is about finding a way through the wide range of ‘out of many [arrivals], one people’ in order to shift the Jamaican sense of indigeneity, complicated by our histories as peoples ‘trafficked’, ‘travelled’ or ‘having made their way’ in a society built on enslavement post-genocide. The far-ranging consequence of the generally accepted reports of indigenous death may have created an inability to see indigeneity elsewhere. What was jest for Twain is no joke for existing Taínos and other indigenous peoples. Patricia Mohammed wrote: ‘Undoubtedly, the scars of enslavement of African peoples are deepest. No other group apart from the Indigenous Amerindian population under colonization in the West Indies, suffered so much in terms of inhumanity, both physical as well as in the disruption and eradication of its cultural memory’ (1998, p. 7). But is that true in all ways and all places? Not necessarily; and I am most moved by black Haitian women’s memory of Anacaona, the female Taíno cacique [local chiefs] as proof that ‘Dé zié contré menti kaba’: when two eyes meet, the lie ends – or cannot start.⁶

This is what this chapter attempts: an invitation to attend to long relationships or lack thereof between racialised communities. It is an invitation to my own community to take up the new challenges because ‘risk demands that we look at blackness across the diaspora and acknowledge not just black subordination but those historical and social moments in which blackness is articulated with and through settler and other forms of colonial power’ (Jackson, 2014, p. 64). My work is primarily directed towards those of us in the diaspora located between the Caribbean and Canada, for whom the term ‘decolonisation’ includes acknowledgement of indigenous sovereignty and stolen land.⁷ I am acutely aware that in Canada and other parts of the black diaspora of the Caribbean (such as the UK) the term ‘decolonisation’ is also used for various systems and structures in our fight for self-determination as part of our diaspora’s complex, layered sense of ‘at home and abroad’. My aim is to find a way for my community and its diaspora to take indigenous struggles for sovereignty over life and land seriously. I will do so by considering how the economies of settler colonialism in British Columbia were unified with slave colonialism in the Caribbean through multinational state and corporate engineering.

Journey in the Caribbean and Canada: 1803 to the present

In 1991, after two fantastic years in Trinidad and several years in Ontario, I arrived in Vancouver knowing nothing of the lies riddling the story about British Columbia’s beginnings. Vancouver was not ceded by Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish peoples. In such places one has to grapple with the terms ‘settler of colour’ and ‘uninvited guest’. As if that were not enough, it was a trial to answer folks from Jamaica asking, ‘Weh yu deh?’ Often my answer drew a response of, ‘I couldn’t live so far’. However, I did live ‘so far’ and it was there that my sense of indigenous ‘Canada’ was clearest and, unlike in Brampton, Ontario, I learned to see the presence of many indigenous nations and their traditional name-places. Oddly, the clarity was starkest when my citizenship test revealed the lie: not one question asked whether I knew anything about indigenous Canada. In 1997 I set out to remedy my swearing of allegiance to that discursive violence representing past and present horror by going off the ‘grateful immigrant’ path to seek some truths. I had not realised that some history of my own – things done by the British with Jamaica’s name on them – had arrived ahead of me in that region and directly to a nation that has never signed a treaty.

One afternoon in a Crossroads Restaurant, Kingston, on a trip to Jamaica in 2015, I ran into a friend who had just repaired a traditional African drum and was returning it to its owner. By chance, this exchange included mention of my research about ALCAN. This elder from Manchester (Jamaica) lit up and spoke about the impact of mining on land her family had struggled to acquire post-emancipation. ‘We were flooded out’, she said, adding, ‘Even the graves went under water’. I was shocked, because I had only ever considered the process of displacement by man-made flooding to have existed on the British Columbia side of the story I had been tracking for more than a decade.

In the mid 1930s a sample of Jamaican soil, unfit for sustaining grass for animal husbandry, was sent off to be tested for other possible usage. Slowly Jamaica – a colony with barely a glimmer of self-governance by its majority – moved from a fading plantation system back into the global realm as part of a mining commodity chain. Across two seas in Britain and Canada, horizontal plan-cabinets were opening as hands searched for and pulled out early 20thcentury water-power maps of British Columbia, eventually narrowing down to the Gitamaat and Henaksiala territories in north-central British Columbia on the Pacific north coast of Canada for the building of a smelter and power-generating facilities (Powell, 2011).

A timeline – one entwined from many to give context

• 1834: Abolition of British slavery, 272 years too long while indigenous communities of North America, like the Gitamaat and the Henaksiala stewarding their territory since ‘time immemorial’ meet Hudson Bay Company traders.

• 1865: Morant Bay War in Jamaica; and HMS Clio is part of the Royal Navy’s gunboat policy directed at Kitamaat village (British Colombia).

• 1883: Missionaries arrive at Tsee-Motsa (Kitamaat village); and my beloved paternal great-grandmother is born in Airy Castle, St Thomas.

• 1947: Jamaica’s Minerals (Vesting) Act and Mining Act.

• 1948–9: Gitamaat and Henaksiala communities merge and are referred to jointly as ‘Haisla’.

• 1951: Building of the Kemano Generating Station in Haisla territory.⁸

• 1952: First shipment of ore leaves Jamaica (for the US).

• 1953: ALCAN town of Kitimat (northern coastal region of British Columbia) opens.⁹

• 1960s: Armed with a UK degree my father is an engineer with ALCAN in Jamaica. My first home is an ALCAN company house. Meanwhile in Kitimat the smelter is now a major wage-economy employer of the Haisla.

In the 1950s Gitimaat and Henaksiala (collectively identified as Haisla) spaces were violently restructured to build a smelter as part of the processing of Jamaican ore. Anglophone world powers’ desire for bauxite for war as well as reconstruction after war required two things: the ore itself and the power to transform it. Yet this start has connections to Guyana and Barbados and so more than one of the nation states in the Caribbean Basin stand in the shadow of things done and imprinted as ‘the West Indies’ almost exactly one hundred years earlier in what is now known as British Columbia, Canada.

In 1803 James Douglas was born in Demerara, Guyana, to a Scottish man and a mixed-race mother from Barbados. By 1851 he was both chief factor of the powerful Hudson Bay Company and governor of Vancouver Island, the colonial starting place for what became British Columbia. The relationships between settler societies and indigenous peoples on Vancouver Island was discussed in 2017 as the focus of a powerful gathering, aptly titled The First Nations, Land, and James Douglas: Indigenous and Treaty Rights in the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia,1849–1864.¹⁰ By the 1920s the British had also tied Guyana (the southern root of the Caribbean with the largest indigenous populations) to Saguenay, Québec and Innu people in eastern Canada in a mining relationship that one might consider an administrative blueprint (echoed in the ‘lakes’ of Linden, Guyana) for the subsequent mining relationship forged between Kitimat and Jamaica.

What I am unearthing keeps revealing just how deep colonisation is, how vast, how complicated and how problematic if narrowly assessed from different locations, and without considering the possibility of connected histories. On the question of legal certainty, the erasure of Taínos from Jamaica works as de facto ownership by colonisers. Not so on the other side of this geographic equation in Canada: the definition of British Columbia is completely unlike most of Canada from Alberta to almost all parts to the east, and from the general discourse around treaty-making. In British Columbia the record shows only a handful of treaties, or in some cases agreements interpreted as treaties, made on Vancouver Island. The fact is that after 1854 the British crown simply refused to provide Douglas with more funds for the complete legal annexation of Vancouver Island and the mainland west of Alberta. At the time of confederation (1867), and to this day, the bulk of British Columbia, including Haisla space, is (in legal terminology) unceded to any crown entity, whether British or Canadian.

Before methodology, what kind of intention is needed to handle this complexity?

How should one discuss a colonial relationship between two geographical areas, time lines and peoples who on the surface appear not to have met? How should one centre unwritten ethical guidelines that traditional research checklists do not include? How should one research and write this, having lived in these two different worlds marked by settler-colonial horrors? Precisely because of these challenges I hold fast to a commitment to ‘just see clearly’¹¹ and understand fully. I meditate often on the following quotation from Dorothy Allison, who explains her commitment to the high stakes of truth-telling: ‘If we are not to sacrifice some part of ourselves or our community we will have to go through the grief, the fear of exposure, and struggle, with only a thin layer of trust that we will emerge whole and unbroken. I know of no other way to do this than to start by saying, I will give up nothing. I will give up no one’ (1994, p. xx).

Inspiration comes in the work of Métis-Dene author Marie Clements through reading her play Burning Vision (2003) about uranium mining by Dene people and the destruction of Nagasaki which uses a fantastic theatrical writing device called chronotopic dramaturgy. Space and time are restructured to bring together more closely the lives and deaths of indigenous miners and Japanese civilians from multilinear chronologies. Clements starts in the late 1800s with the prophecy of a Dene seer and ends with the journey of Dene elders to Hiroshima in 1998. Her work inspires me with its structure of character, stories and ethical commitment to ‘breaking space and time’ to reveal relationships.

This indigenous play is one of my keystones, a guide to challenging the arch of colonial time through my personal search for reparative research justice within and outwith the frameworks set by academic arenas. Furthermore, to undo colonial structures by serving the community as encouraged by Shona Jackson – to do the work of ‘making visible and intelligible research that does not fit into the balkanised categories of difference produced by predominantly white, academic departments, social worlds, and ways of knowing the colonial world’ (2013, p. 63). In 2015, unaware of Jackson’s journal piece, I decided to restart my own research on the topic, while being soberly attuned to the risk and potential rejection of work that refused the centring of white academics or the abundance of work done by racialised scholars with white scholars rather than with one another. In 2016 I wrote: ‘[S]ince inception this “Western academic life” has been a settler-colonial project purposed to structure time so whiteness must perpetually be ahead … The work of centring our own bodies, experiences and thought was – and still is – a long and dangerous journey’.¹² My personal academic journey starts by remembering I was born and first housed in a space shadowed by a Canadian mine. To understand the impact of mining in Jamaica, I also turn my attention to the other side of the shadow – to the lands and indigenous peoples who exist before and after ALCAN’s smelter and power line. Turning the focus on to Kitimat and Kirkvine, I have committed to trying to find ways to remove the concrete of colonial timelines that have been told as separate ‘marches of progress’ bequeathed to the ‘wilderness’, ‘savages’ and ‘sub-humans’ as well as humans and/or identities categorised as ‘extinct’.

First, the courage to start was guided by the familiarity of resource-extraction without value-added means of production and the sense of hinterland. What I learned about periphery and centres within the Caribbean, I could now apply to processes that seemed to be happening in British Colombia.¹³ Somehow putting my findings together brought me to this rocky place of straddling two connected worlds as if I were both an optometrist and the client sitting in the dark squinting and attempting to focus my vision on some sort of ‘flim’ shown while fumbling with lenses marked ‘colonial’, ‘post-colonial’ and ‘neo-colonial’.

Second, paying close attention to things that do not fit the meta-narratives of ‘civilisation’, for example: the red mud lake Jamaicans have lived with my entire life, and which I have flown over many times, gains a different significance if I think about how we do not really use the word ‘lake’ in our patois. We discuss river water, sea water or holes. Words that imply a natural or neutral phenomenon – ‘red’, ‘mud’, ‘lake’ – hide the violence that is an artificial holding pen created for tailings that seep into our aquifers and in drought times turns to carcinogenic dust drifting through the breathable air.

Lucky for me there are clear coincidences in broad daylight, one of my two favourites being talking to an older Jamaican neighbour whose childhood friend, he recalled, had gone to Kitimat. He mentioned his unique name. I wrote it down. A few days later, back at work in the university and standing in a queue talking, my accent was pronounced. A young blonde woman timidly asked me whether I was Jamaican. I said yes, and she said she was not, but her father was, to which I gave my standard response: ‘If you were raised in a Jamaican household anywhere in the world, to me you are’. Welcomed, she gave me her name, which was of course the name my neighbour had given me, that person being her uncle. My other favourite coincidence was a conversation in Vancouver with an Italian-Canadian horse-trainer during a year away from academia in ‘by-the-sweat-of-your-brow-you-will-be-known’ wuk as a hotwalker (work as a stable worker). ‘You Jamaican?’, he asked. ‘Yes’, I answered; and he proceeded to tell me that in his long and varied employment record he had run a barber shop in Kitimat where he had drunk good rum with Jamaican workers at the smelter. Every time these coincidences happen, I know I am bound into them and required to be serious about how our eyes could possibly ‘make four’ with Haisla people to stare straight into the face of those who set the table for white supremacy’s voracious capitalism in our lives.

The set-up for the take

Multinational arrangements are key drivers of this Kitimat-Jamaica connection, linkages between Canada, Britain (through its Caribbean colonies) and the US by means of the shifting of global power over the course of World War Two. Through war-acquisition rights to resources, these deals for extraction and production had already occurred in the name of ‘national defence’ long before the Caribbean independence celebrations of the 1960s. By drawing on a range of scholars from various disciplines and historical as well as geographical regions, it is possible to begin to understand the interlocking framework of power that allows the unchecked extraction of water and soil for ALCAN’s endeavours in Canada and Jamaica.

In 1967 Jamaican economist Norman Girvan noted: ‘Within each Caribbean territory, as a rule, there is zero internal mobility of bauxite – factors controlled by different companies and a full international mobility within each company’ (1967, p. 19; emphasis by the author). ALCAN is one such company. Girvan’s Foreign Capital and Underdevelopment in Jamaica (1971) notes the following:

Attention to the impact of deeply localised pre-operation clearings first seems to appear in the academic realm in 1987. The late George Beckford’s compilation of essays were published in that year in the journal of the Institute for Social and Economic Research (now the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies) (Beckford, 1987). Within that home-grown scholarly publication lives critical academic attention to the silent, subtle power or deliberate absence of the state as corporations removed farming communities for access to bauxite reserves – rarely cited. Certainly, there is scholarship on Jamaica as part of the global commodity chain. However, many of those texts replicate the same extractive method around academic knowledge that presents the global reach. For example, a close examination of one of the most recent pieces of scholarship, Mimi Sheller’s Aluminium Dreams (2014), a documentation of the global network of mining companies which penetrated the Caribbean, reveals two key omissions. First, in Sheller’s book, the word ‘Jamaica’ appears multiple times, yet Jamaican scholarship goes either unmentioned in the bibliography or appears as nothing more than minor endnotes in her work: Norman Girvan (1971) and Beckford’s afore-mentioned compilation of essays by various scholars, all of which predate Sheller’s text. Second, the British and Canadian settler-colonial histories are missing. These allowed a state-corporate partnership facilitating the dispossession of shoreline vital to Haisla subsistence for the creation of the port, smelter and power lines. In other words, attention is not paid to a key issue in the social and cultural impact of mining and manufacture on local peoples from distinct areas connected by the path carved out by a single company. That company controlled the transportation of ore extracted from one location and created a value-added product in another location.

My work – by contrast – strives to shine a light on locations; to encourage letting go of linear macro space-time frameworks which sometimes reduce our ability to see precisely how distinct communities are assaulted in networked isolation and appear to be mute in the retelling of globally scaled tales. From the shadow of the mine I am inspired by black feminist geographer Ruthie Gilmore, who states:

In line with that wish, it is possible to trip up what is conceived of as ‘territory of the state’ by returning to Kari Polanyi Levitt’s work (2002), which is only a small part of a lifetime of solidarity with Caribbean economists and social scientists of the New World Group who were instrumental in founding the consortium of Institutes for Social and Economic Research (UWI) (cf. Girvan, 1967). This is my contribution: to support new ways of thinking through the impact of multinational entities within and through the Canadian state which connects these two far-apart locations. Gilmore inspires me to recognise the importance of attention to the devaluation and dispossession through settler-colonialism that precedes the wage-controlled work places controlled by ALCAN in Kitimat, tied to the ease with which dispossession of land occurred in the afterlife of slavery in Jamaica.¹⁴

British Columbia-based academic Matthew Evenden’s explanation, using the pattern found in commodity chains, works well, as long as one is willing to keep the impact discussion in the realm of ‘dynamics of warfare and environmental change over distance’, and to speak of ‘mobilized distant peoples, places, and environments’ (2011, pp. 70–1) without paying close attention to how factors such as race, rural location and colonialism allow scholarship to remain distant. This distancing leads to crucial details about people becoming footnoted material.

On the other hand, in both concert and contrast with Evenden, Tina Loo’s work extends Levitt’s work in a sense, by tracing relationships of power in studies of forced relocations in Canada. This grants a Canadian scholarly entry point into a more direct link between northern British Columbia and Jamaica when she points out:

I also draw affirmation from Loo’s earlier work on Africville, where she states: ‘The process … reveals how contingent and subtle state power could be … In addition to giving us insights into its dynamics, these negotiations allow us to understand something of the amplitude, tone, and timbre of that power – of how it was experienced by those who exercised it and those over whom it was exercised’ (2010, p. 627).

Evenden and Loo are just two possible examples of Canadian academic points of entry to unpack generally understood ideas of simple citizenship in reference to mining corporations: definitions of peoples without reference to the abysmal gap between indigenous peoples and white settlers or racialised migrants who may, on the surface, be listed together under ‘local citizenry’, although the latter are dealt discriminatory treatment. Finally, as another example, studies of the operation of mining always require an expanded definition of ‘hinterlands’, that is, located within and outside Canada concurrently – in the past and present.

Beyond land acknowledgements that recapitulate but do not resolve injustice

How can one apply the term ‘post-colonial’ to racialised people who never agreed to colonisation and have not died? What does it mean to understand how minerals, such as bauxite ore, black and Asian people had been removed and shipped to cement displacement of indigenous folks in the 1500s Caribbean? How can one trace the linkages from that southern series of displacements to northern displacements in Canada in both countries through the profit-for-war and war-for-profit in the 1940s and 1950s? Why have we not seen more documentation about what triggered more long migratory journeys for many Jamaicans who had no other prospects once land struggled-for had been appropriated? What are the consequences of those processes before independence and as forms of neo-colonialism after it? How do we clarify the difference between European colonisation and modern-day Caribbean immigration: is it or can it be different in significant elements? I take heart when reading indigenous scholar Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw):

In hindsight, there are silences in indigenous studies as well as Caribbean studies which although not equal, are critical to approach with a sharp awareness. These studies are written by people (and here I can say ‘us’) refusing to remain subjects of colonial or historical studies. I speak of those silences (and there are many kinds) without blame, recognising the sheer survival, stamina and strategy required for ethical authorship, but also the corrosive effect of white supremacy on academic endeavours in multiple forms. I look at where areas of postcolonial studies have met (or not) and grappled with (or not) areas of indigenous studies in my quest to re-frame Kitimat and Kirkvine. The critical distinction is that I choose to focus on indigenous studies created by indigenous scholars who are not all dead or published posthumously. Key to this focus is an understanding that the crime called colonisation is not over. Therefore, I must ask different questions of postcolonial readings by valuing the indigenous academics who have spent time critically examining the literary output of the postcolonial Caribbean. The late Banaban/I-Kiribati (Pacific) scholar Teresia Teaiwa said: ‘I tried to … draw closer comparisons between the Pacific and the Caribbean in the area of cultural politics, as some glaring discrepancies emerged, most notably when it came to accounting for the enduring power of discourses of indigeneity in the Pacific – something superseded in the Caribbean by discourses of race and class’ (Teaiwa, 2006, p. 76).

Modern-day Canada began as a process of confederation in 1868, without the consent of indigenous peoples, while corporate entities continued to build as a result of British Columbia’s shift in 1871 from British colony to Dominion of Canada – illegally. The 1950s are the start of multivalent exploitative linkages between Kitimat and Kirkvine, which become two contemporaneous places with markers of indigenous relationship to land and markers of black relationship to labour. Perhaps this connection could be a starting point for revealing deeper truths about celebrated states and corporations?

I started wrestling with this issue in 2001 after a series of mind-opening classes by an indigenous lawyer and instructor who took students, case-bycase, through 113 years of indigenous people’s legal battles with settler Canada’s policies and courts.¹⁵ Taking those classes in Indigenous studies at the Institute for Indigenous Government and Langara College was life-changing. It explained things that my citizenship test of two hundred questions had failed to cover in terms of the knowledge a ‘Canadian’ should have. It explained what a ‘multicultural’ act graph did not make visible since indigeneity was shown as separate from racialised peoples categorised as migrants from ‘founding’ or ‘settler’ nation-states. Furthermore, postcolonial studies in academia and anti-racism work in the 1990s and early 2000s in Canada generally lacked consistent and connected attention to indigenous struggles.

In 2011 Byrd named a key problem:

Today, fortified by Clements’ Burning Vision, I frame my personal demon in academic terms: how does one begin to address collisions outside the indigenous Caribbean in settler-industrial societies such as Canada and the position of the Caribbean racialised arrivant-cum-immigrant who unwittingly, by presence of numbers, forms part of the ongoing colonisation of indigenous nations in Canada? Furthermore, plantation wealth was migrated out of the Caribbean into other parts of the Commonwealth, such as Canada, by settler-colonialism and its attendant racial capitalism. This exploitation developed into the corporate, militarised and civic assault for which reparations are also due to indigenous peoples in those territories. I have coined the term ‘settler-industrial’ to name the ways in which the industrial age was financed by plantation profits and the public funds used to reimburse the white and near-white plantocracy for the loss of slavery.

I find it important to think carefully about that Caribbean pre-independence history as someone who inherits it, not from a position of ruling power or whiteness, although the markers of a white, Western education are inscribed on me like an old skin and difficult to free myself from what often feels like a solitary quest for transformation.¹⁶ The focus of much of our post-independence Caribbean history is quite rightly the struggle to recover from slavery. Beloved academic and performance ancestor R.M. Nettleford’s book title Inward Stretch, Outward Reach (1993) inspires me as an instruction to understand racialised peoples who also have been unjustly othered – in the case of the Caribbean – and the indigenous inhabitants impacted by the arrival of gold and spice-driven colonialism before their capture was entrenched by the arrival of black people and Asians. Poet and librarian ancestor Audre Lorde makes it plain: ‘I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you’.¹⁷

I strive, both through reading outside of my identities and being anchored by deeply personal reasons, to revolt against the anti-indigenous Canadian settler-colonial agenda in which I am imbedded. Ground, the heart of Jamaican agriculture, was transformed by extraction after the discovery of bauxite. I closely followed the red dirt of my memory torn out of ‘that island’s mine’,¹⁸ washed in acid, shipped and electrocuted to form aluminium in unceded Haisla territory. However, the machinations that facilitated these changes are not part of everyday black people’s discussion of the struggles within societies riddled by the legacies of invasion and slavery. These complex decolonisation discussions – beyond silence or quick platitudes – need to intensify now.

Resisting terra nullification when black diasporas celebrate Black History Month

In the academic arena, I can see a productive encounter between Caribbean studies and indigenous studies, mindful of Tiffany King’s interrogation of the academic structure of settler-colonial studies that spread from antipode to ‘centre’. White settler-colonial studies, she states, ‘focus on terra nullius and land disappears the settler’s relationship to violence and the intricate and violent processes’ (2016, p. 4). I work to upset the logic that comes with only thinking of a settler-terra nullius construction, as we understand the clearing done by invasion and by the creation of reserves on the west coast of British Columbia. In the 1800s the Canadian corporation-settler-state coming into formation was in various kinds of fraught relationship with indigenous peoples. Therefore, academic texts which centre the commodity chain and the relationship of colonisers in the process of commodification make actual racialised people living in forms of relationship with the land disappear by retelling the story of corporate-state-arranged business conducted to steal land and labour without mentioning what happened or to whom it happened, then and now.

I need to be clear that it is not ethical for me to conflate land loss by indigenous people living in their traditional territory and – remembering the drummer I met – the land loss of formerly enslaved people in spaces from which indigenous people were cleared away by genocide (although not entirely). That said, these losses are displacements and for me they do collide with each other, although administratively and geographically separated. I would need various maps to be remade to enable these losses to be recognised meaningfully and, as Noxolo et al. state, ‘recognition that not only are some spaces, times, places, peoples and relationships apart from this postcolonial interaction … but beyond this, that they might also want to actively refuse some forms of responsible relationships that northern [read: white Western-trained] academics want to imagine’ (2011, p. 8).

On the community side, I remember Black History Month in 2014, when I spoke on three occasions in Vancouver, a city which probably has the highest number of international mining-corporation headquarters per square foot in and around the intersection of Burrard Street and Hastings Street in the city centre. I spoke first to an audience of black students, many from Caribbean and African continental bauxite-mining areas of the global South, to speak of the solidarity of decolonial action by the 1974 bauxite levy. Second, I spoke to elders, some of whom came from communities in Jamaica that had been pushed out by land expropriation in the 1950s. Finally, I was an invited speaker at an indigenous-led event filled with people currently dealing with mining and tailings-pond proposals in the lands and natural lakes they call their ancestral home. I kept the unsettling question the same: what could the celebration of Black History Month mean in unceded indigenous territory?¹⁹

In 2017 the illegal celebration of the 150th anniversary of Canada required – no, demanded – that immigrants ignore the structure of colonial incursion that dishonours treaties and the reasons for treaty. As an immigrant scholar I must pay close attention to the realm of academia, a location of knowledge production that actively and consistently works to control time and definitions without challenging settler colonialism. I draw inspiration from the impetus that drives black British academic and community activist Robbie Shilliam in his book The Black Pacific. This academic text is anchored in the presence of ancestral/spirit/root work in engagement with, and respect for, the power of the arts and history. Shilliam brings to light South-South anti-colonial connections, calling for ‘[p]olitical commitment among critical intellectuals (especially those occupying the Western academy) to displace current academic endorsements of privileged narcissism and, instead, to help make more intelligible the deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity. To this provocation … colonial science is a science you can use or discard; decolonial science is another science’ (2015).

Reading Burning Vision has allowed me to pay attention to the framing of the story; and Clements’ deployment of chronotopic dramaturgy girds how I imagine my decolonial responsibility to resist the path of ‘terra nullification’ before inscribing anything on a blank page with the aluminium of the pen or the laptop frame I am using. I work against the ease with which the grain of academia runs, which positions the writer as a surveyor who ‘replicates not just the “environment” in some abstract sense but equally the territorial imperatives of a particular political system’ (Gilbert and Tompkins, 1996, p. 279). Let the blank page be a warning, to remind me of the risk of an uncritical postcolonialcoloniality in unceded territory; my responsibility to silences in these two places; and, finally, when I ask ‘whether the question itself is worth asking or is necessary to answer, whether the question itself is not the first in a series of violations’ (Sangari, 2011, p. 8).

I have seen those violations, where the academic questions steeped in settler-colonialism today make an equivalence between discussing the damage as a matter of fact (as if that were enough), and doing something about it. Too many times I have seen ‘groundbreaking’ intellectual work as a sort of absolution or abdication due to the objective status accorded the academic, whereby the responsibility is simply passed on to the listener. Instead of a race to do something groundbreaking, what I aim to do is to look at the breaking of rocks that were of ritual significance to the Haisla in order to situate the smelter, to process in turn the broken grounds of Jamaica that were ripped out of that island’s mine.

Slowly coming, coming home

The good news is that this change has already started in the Caribbean, notably in the Antilles with Melanie Newton of Barbados and her article ‘“The race leapt at Sauteurs”’ (2014), as well as Shona Jackson from Guyana and her book Creole Indigeneity (2013). We need more conversation in the vein of Jacqui Alexander pondering on the scholarship and activism ‘when a regional feminist movement in the Caribbean … by the 1980s had begun to chart the failures of anticolonial nationalism, implicating capitalism and colonialism in the unequal organization of gender’ (2005, p. 9). Respectfully, I ask whether the same can be done for regarding the exclusion of indigenous peoples from our discussions related to race at home (and within Canada)?

In 2017 the Institute for Gender and Development Studies in Trinidad at UWI (St Augustine) received the support, in the form of an organisational grant from the AntipodeFoundation [sic], earnestly to start what I believe will work to supersede the scholarship by non-Caribbean people that still dominates the authorship of early histories of the Caribbean. In this new effort, perhaps we can spend more time listening to past and present stories of indigeneity as it manifested, survived and survives in smaller and equally important places such as Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominica and most predominantly in the big southern root of the Caribbean – Guyana.

The distance of 5,902 km between Kirkvine and Kitimat is simplest when I am just travelling from A to B, harder when I hunt colonisation in archives and hardest when I commit to revealing the linkages between geographical spaces of sea and mountains. How exactly might communities in Jamaica and British Columbia be linked by the paths of colonial industry? I commit to looking at places that appear as blanked, stripped of texture, stories and peoples in the official records, then beyond to listen for libations for the rocks, people and trees in the living land and human resisters and the utterance of the resilient in the present: still alive, still standing, still holding.

A Jamaican teacher in the audience of the presentation on the ‘Slave Ownership Project’²⁰ organised by the History and Archaeology Department of the UWI (Mona) commented in distress, saying, ‘We got the writing of it wrong’. Without hesitation I said, ‘No, it was the best we could do at the time’. Perhaps now is the moment to return to the records in the archives and beyond to speak again to the macomeres,²¹ the village lawyers, the corner preachers, the market women and the reasoners to do the work Professor Augier urges us to do to keep the nation together. I believe it is the work of every one of us who understands something about the wake of these ships of history to decolonise the relationship between the indigenous Caribbean and those of us trafficked and travelled and migrated (Sharpe, 2016). My chapter is an invitation to join a decolonisation quest to re-navigate history and make room to undo the lie that leaves unexplained our Caribbean relationship to place names and food that began in what my Boriken sistren Luz Guerra calls the ‘mothers’ story’ echoed in the opening poem.²² This journey is not complete and occasions constantly arise to drive these very questions into the present in which I stand, whether in Jamaica or in British Columbia.²³ I close with Lorna Goodison’s encouragement that we:

The first time I stood as an uninvited guest at the edge of Tsee-Motsa (Kitamaat Village), facing the smelter that forms the other side of the shadow of the mine under which I was born, my head was held high, but my eyes were cast low … listening. I will continue my slow research work to do something beyond the structure of academia to obey protocols of higher laws than a tri-council policy-statement certificate on research ethics.²⁶ May I first – and, I hope, always – return to that memory before uttering even one question.

Dé zié contré menti kaba.

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_________

1 Ayiti is the original Taíno name of the island of Haiti. Following a visit in 2015 to an exhibition of work of one of her most famous artist sons (Jean-Michel Basquiat:Now’s the Time at the Art Gallery of Ontario), I sent a postcard of the 1988-piece ‘Exu’ from Jamaica to a beloved Marxist friend on 19 May 2015, writing: ‘Go against your thought that the Soviet/Russian [revolution] overrides everything including the centrality of the Haitian Revolution … relentlessly seeking freedom as it exists in our pulsing imaginary and this question of the flesh’.

2 The oldest known maternal ancestor in my Jamaican family story is Catherine LaFebre, who sailed from Haiti to Jamaica with her father and stayed there rather than sailing with him to France.

3 See The Gleaner, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120404/lead/lead93.html [accessed 15 Aug. 2018).

4 W. Shakespeare, The Tempest, re-purposed by Chickasaw scholar J. Byrd. It is important to note that concepts of land and ownership are vastly different in indigenous cosmologies from capitalist concepts and practices.

5 A ‘jacket’ is a Jamaican term for a child being raised by a man who is unaware that he is not the biological father.

6 Personal exchange with Luz Guerra (Boriken/Puerto Rico) confirmed by a Désil elder: ‘I am talking to you about a third person, who is absent, and I lie against him/her. You manage to bring the victim and me together and discuss the matter, at some point you will discover that I lied’.

7 These times require attention to deployment of the term ‘indigenous’. I considered past, present and possible usage of the terminology in reference to black communities who arrived in eastern parts of Canada from the 1800s onwards and used it to identify themselves as separate from later waves of black migrants; as well as in reference to scholarship created in the Caribbean by arrivants as ‘indigenous’. Within the body of this chapter I use it to designate communities of distinct peoples living in a sui generis relationship with land which has been under siege by European colonial expansion into north, south and central parts of the Americas.

8 This was preceded by the creation of the Kenney Dam in north-west British Columbia (opened in 1954) and the destruction of Cheslatta T’En communities, as described in B. Christensen (1995).

9 Kitimat is the town built by ALCAN. Kitamaat is the Haisla village/landmark.

10 See https://hcmc.uvic.ca/songheesconference [accessed 25 Feb. 2019].

11 Personal communication with M.A. Logan (Lele/Trinidad) over 24 years.

12 N. Chambers, unpublished letter to the editorial board of the now defunct, formerly independent e-journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 25 April 2016.

13 I am indebted to the late Dr Eric Grass, a Metis instructor on urban aboriginal issues at Langara College (Vancouver). In 2004 he answered my suspicion with a quick, gracious, firm affirmation based on his time as a postgraduate student in conversation with African students about mining in their respective countries.

14 I seek a new Das Kapital by black and indigenous authors working on systems and resistance to settler-colonial capitalism and its concomitant ‘development’ trajectory.

15 I am indebted to Barbara Buckman for 17 years and counting of unflagging mentorship.

16 Critical to this quest are the works of and conversations with Luz Guerra, Claude Brown, Karina Vernon, Tyler Bellis, Cease Wyss, Esther, Marcus Briggs Cloud, Barbara Binns, Larissa Lai, Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Ivan Drury, Chimwemwe Undi as well as the people I have cited here. All errors and omissions on this unfolding journey remain mine.

17 A. Lorde, ‘The uses of anger: women responding to racism’, keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1654&context=wsq [accessed 26 Feb. 2019].

18 Shakespeare, The Tempest; Byrd (2011), p. 30.

19 Black History Month 2017 opened with the Vancouver chapter of representatives from an international black organisation with the city’s mayor and chief of police celebrating the production of the Canada Post stamp image of Mathieu Da Costa (d. after 1619). Mathieu was an African robbed of his name and birth location who survived or sidestepped being acquired, stolen, kidnapped or sold by competing settler-colonial forces in the days of black enslavement in the New World by trading his language skills for work that was integral to European colonisers in what became Canada. The event at city hall occurred two weeks before the multi-decade annual memorial March for Murdered and Missing Aboriginal women, which is an embodied survival song against settler-colonial violence enabled by city and federal police actions of neglect and brutality in unceded and treaty territory.

20 ‘The structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763–1833’, Department of History workshop, University of West Indies (Mona), 2 June 2015.

21 A Caribbean term used to reference one’s closest female friends, godmothers to children, bridesmaids, and so on.

22 This was relayed to me in a personal exchange.

23 E.g., when Hurucán (the god of storms) strikes and Guyana issues an invitation that the country’s vast land mass can serve as ‘a gift’ to all people from several affected Caribbean nations with no mention of indigenous title or rights to said same lands (http://newsday.co.tt/2017/09/21/guyana-offers-land-for-hurricane-victims [accessed 15 Aug. 2018]).

24 I always hear ‘hand-miggle’ in conversation with ‘History lesson at grandma’s knees’.

25 Goodison (1988).

26 See http://www.pre.ethics.gc.ca/eng/index [last accessed 15 Aug. 2018].