My grandfathers worked as miners digging subterranean paths in coal mines during their adult life. At the same time, my grandmothers worked as cleaners and cooking servers for higher classes families in the stolen and - yet - unceded indigenous Guarani territory (currently also known by the colonial-settler village name of Arroio dos Ratos, far down in South America). As young adults during the industrial revolution, my parents continued the path as services workers: my mother in the health care system and my dad as a carpenter and electrician. Digging into my family history for at least four generations, I can trace the pattern of poor work conditions, underpayment and low-class status in my family lineage. My current lifestyle has disrupted the rhythm of working in a physically demanding and underpaid job as a white settler woman living as a journalist, yoga instructor and writer on the Northern edge of the same continent as my ancestors.
Raised in the wave of globalization, the internet and hedonism, I've listened to my parents demanding labour stories and watched their every day exhausted bodies while experiencing my childhood within a low-class environment, knowing that "those of us marginalized by dominant ways of knowing are very clear about the shape and texture of power" (Lind 372). Through the weaving of time and the possibility of sitting in a circle with professors that taught me to transgress, I've been decoding the social norms, learning and analyzing how to navigate in this colonial, patriarchal, imperial and racist system of oppression that marginalized my ancestors in the hopes that my work-life would present the possibility of another outcome for my embodiment as an adult during this lifetime.
While I constantly invite my present and future to a respectful relationship with the Earth and its beings, "as I write, I am located on land that Indigenous peoples have occupied and travelled since time immemorial and that they continue to occupy and travel now with peoples from many other nations" (Haig-Brown 4). The territory where I am blessed to experience the best quality of life within my whole lineage is the stolen and unceded tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ (land in Syilx language) of the Syilx / Okanagan people (the contemporary city name of this territory is a Syilx word for grizzly bear; Kelowna).
Learning geography sciences in my early childhood, I was introduced to the white-settler perspective of the American continent. I was taught in school that I was born in Brazil, and I have been, until recently, desiring and achieving the goal of experiencing living in 'first world' & 'developed' countries, such as Canada. However, as Dr. Himani Bannerji perfectly expresses in Geography Lessons: On being an Insider/outsider to the Canadian Nation, "Canada" was a mental rather than a historical space. It was an idyllic construction of nature and adventure" (Bannerji 63). Involved in the white settler dream of achieving financial success as an immigrant in a first-world country, I could not observe that I have been perpetuating the same system of oppression I am trying to escape by, even unconsciously, desiring to occupy the oppressor's position of power.
Biking around the city built on stolen and yet unceded indigenous territory, my body blends into the white-settler norm. However, in the daily circumstances of engaging in personal conversations, I am constantly being informed about how people react to my accent and grammar mistakes and that I am a Latina woman. Therefore my gender and ethnicity are contributing to determining my identity as a member of a cultural minority in this multicultural context. As Dr. Lind explains in Materialising the Decolonising Autobiography, "Whiteness, to be clear, means different things in different contexts." (Lind 377) In the city built on stolen and yet unseeded Guarani territory where I was born, for example, I was a low-class white woman. My white passing dominated codes contributed heavily to navigating places as social contexts in which the class I used belonged did not necessarily allow me to be seen. However, in the 'Canadian' territory, receiving by others the ethnic identity label of Latina invited me to revise my sense of identity. Understanding that "we are pasted over with labels that give us identities that are extraneous to us. And these labels originate in the ideology of the nation" (Bannerji 65), I can see that my the imagined 'Canada' built on the idea of a welcoming and polite nation is giving me tools to question my white-norm, and how the intersection with class, race and gender can place me in interesting entanglements receiving or perpetuating systemic power, privilege and discrimination.
When Dr. Lind explains that "the concept of wilderness, and in particular a wilderness that gets transformed into farmland, is a key metaphor in the construction of Canadian whiteness" (Lind 378), I see the mirror of the same settler-colonial structure behind the plan on the occupation of Pindorama (land in Guarani language) by the Portuguese since 1500. The mass migration of white labourers (often peasants and poor) receiving from European kingdoms "the possibility of upward mobility because of their race" (Noble 90) happened from the northern top to the far south of the continent, leaving behind over five hundred years of a system of oppression that now rules the layers of inequality in our idealized white-settler Nations.
"Immigrants to Latin America came from latecomer countries to emigration from Europe and were in several respects different from those who crossed the Atlantic in the early phases of the movement. They were not, however, different from those Europeans who opted for the United States in the same period. On balance, the consensus is that Latin America received poorer and potentially less productive immigrants than the United States simply because the dominant stream emigrating from Europe over 1880-1914 came from the economically backward areas of Southern and Eastern Europe." (Sánchez-Alonso 11)
Ignoring and denying the indigenous presence of the territories, followed by the continued enslavement of Black and Indigenous people and the massive migration of low-class Europeans to start settler colonies, is the colonial tapestry into which I observe that my past has been woven. Aware that I have both white Iberian European and Pindorama indigenous ancestry, I am invited into this decolonizing autobiography with an excruciating amount of discomfort around the whiteness within me. Since "whiteness is also a complex constructed product of local, regional, national, and global relations, past and present, that are linked to relations of domination" (Noble 92), I found myself pulling the threads of my life and observing the friction between the colonizer within me that ignored for a long time my own discomfort with the injustice within this system of oppression and the exhaustion to keep 'professionally succeeding' in this white settler context.
Identifying my life story as tied to a white-colonial process promotes my continued nausea, considering that even though I have identifiable poor and indigenous ancestry woven into my fabric past, "the materiality of my body is undoubtedly engaged in this classed, racialized project of respectability" (Lind 374). When digging into my European ancestry, I cannot trace the territories they came from, only knowing that all my last names are somehow connected to tribes and villages and incredibly complex nuances dating back to the Celtiberian territory. If "to inherit wealth as a result of colonial land appropriation" (Lind 382), I wonder - and frequently daydream - if my peasant ancestry lived a pagan lifestyle. According to Dr. Anna Fedele, "pagans want to create non-hierarchical, gender-equal communities, based on a deep respect for nature and each other's beliefs and choices" (Fedele 241). As a Pre-Christian movement, I imagine a white ancestor of mine that, such as what I am doing right now, had questioned the violent premise of the settler culture conquering a "promised land."
In his book Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape, Dr. Jean Bobby Noble explains the difference between becoming White and knowing one is White. "Knowing one is White means understanding oneself as a product of White supremacy or systemic racism that is larger than one individual and that also precedes our entry into the public domain" (Noble 93). Recognizing my desires and fulfilled dreams as a product of the ideal citizen of the settler dream, I wonder what privileges and systems of oppression I can pause, question and decolonize within my existence. Looking closely at my identity, as Professor Dr. Emma Lind says, I am also "accustomed to watching otherwise articulate, well-read, reflective white anti-racists fumbling around tongue-tied every time the topic of race came up" (Lind 373), including myself. As a consequence of the invitation to build a decolonizing autobiography, I observe the opening of studying the developments of gentler and more respectful threads for my personal and our collective-cocreated Earth's future.
Works cited:
Alonso, Blanca Sánchez. "The other Europeans: immigration into Latin America and the
international labour market (1870–1930)." Revista de Historia Economica-Journal of
Iberian and Latin American Economic History 25.3 (2007): 395-426.
Bannerji, Himani. The dark side of the nation: Essays on multiculturalism, nationalism and
gender. Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000.
Emily R.M. Lind (2021) Materialising the Decolonising Autobiography, Life Writing, 18:3,
371-383, DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2021.1930495
Fedele, Anna. "Iberian paganism: Goddess spirituality in Spain and Portugal and the quest for
authenticity." Contemporary pagan and native faith movements in Europe (2015):
239-260.
Haig-Brown, Celia. "Decolonizing Diaspora: Whose Traditonal Land are We On?."
Decolonizing philosophies of education. Brill, 2012. 73-90.
Noble, B. "Songs of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural
Landscape (Toronto: Women’s Press), 19." (2006).
Comments