Colonization is as horrific as humanity gets: genocide, desecration, poxed-blankets, rape, humiliation. Settler colonialism… is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence – the snake in the flooded basement. – “A Glossary of Haunting” by Eve Tuck and C. Ree
I often feel haunted. I am haunted by mistakes and regret. I am haunted by past actions and decisions that have changed the course of my life. I often think about intergenerational trauma as a haunting. But I am cognizant of the fact that I am, even with these examples, understanding hauntedness – hauntings, being haunted – as a negative. As if anything bad that is passed down, that shadows our view of the future, that cloaks our understanding of ourselves, is what haunts.
Eve Tuck and C. Ree, Indigenous theorists and artists, ask us to reconsider this understanding of haunting. What if those who haunt are those who have been hurt? What if ghosts are the dispossessed, the murdered, the colonized, the violated and haunting is their agency, action, a ceremony of refusing to be forgotten? “Haunting […] is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation,” according to Tuck and Ree.
Canada’s very existence as a settler state is threatened by Palestinian resistance, and in many ways, relies on Israel’s existence as a way to assert its own. Both countries would like to ignore these ghosts or, worse, enable their ongoing dispossession, because if Canada were to deny Israel’s right to exist, when it too came into existence through the same violent means, what does that say about its own identity as a nation-state?
At their simplest, treaties are agreed upon, consensual relationships.
In “Settler Moves to Indigeneity: From Canada to Israel,” Megan Scribe, an Ininiw researcher, writer, and educator, states, “We understand violence, assimilation, and dispossession. We know what it’s like for others to claim our lands and our very identities. For our struggle in the Canadian context to have any integrity at all, we must call out the dynamics of settler colonialism in contexts elsewhere.” In other words, for Canada to admit Israel’s violence is also to admit its own. It would mean engaging and repairing relationships with ghosts that it would rather ignore.
Treaty as a haunting
Erasure and defacement concoct ghosts; I don’t want to haunt you, but I will. – Tuck and Ree
Treaty is a responsibility that haunts, too.
Our ancestors entered into treaty with the Crown – the 11 Numbered Treaties that most people are familiar with today – but Indigenous Peoples have been entering into nation-to-nation treaties since time immemorial. More important than understanding the specific legalese of these treaties is understanding the true spirit and intent of treaty for Indigenous Peoples, which is founded on mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and non-interference. At their simplest, treaties are agreed upon, consensual relationships.
Before I had the language to explain treaty, its history, or even the cultural significance of this important relationship agreement, I was being taught treaty.
All of us enter into treaty at one time or another: we enter into treaty when we plant our gardens, when we enter into romantic relationships, when we make community guidelines. We’re agreeing to boundaries, expectations, and mutual decisions for how we will be in relationship with one another.
As [miyo-wîcêhtowin, wîtaskêwin, and tâpwêwin] denote, treaty lives in our land, our language, and in our relationships. It is a construct, a system, a web. Despite all attempts by the nation-state to bury it, because it is a living ghost, it cannot be erased. Its haunting persists because language persists, because the land persists, because our memory and relationships persist.
The nation-state has attempted to re-story the history of treaty agreements with Indigenous Peoples. While there had been differences in opinion as to what treaties meant and which promises were binding, as Métis author and educator Chelsea Vowel explains, “European powers […] began to assert that Indigenous peoples were submitting to European rule when engaging in treaty-making.” Some First Nations have taken Canada to court over treaty disputes, and “[t]he courts, while at times taking an expansive approach to treaty interpretation, have also been steadily eroding treaty rights since 1982.” Despite this, Indigenous peoples continue to argue for their interpretation of treaty and their assertion of their rights under these agreements. Like any good ghost, treaty obligations refuse to be forgotten.
The responsibilities of treaty people are, among other things, to recognize the interconnectedness of our relationships, which extend to all living beings locally and globally. For nêhiyawak, we enter every treaty relationship with fundamental nêhiyaw laws that inform all of our treaty principles: miyo-wîcêhtowin [good relations], wîtaskêwin [peaceful living together on the land], and tâpwêwin [speaking with truth].
In order to live by miyo-wîcêhtowin and wîtaskêwin, we need to live in good relations to Indigenous Peoples locally and globally. Our natural laws do not draw arbitrary lines on land or relations. Our relatives are all of creation, everywhere, which means the lands under our feet and beyond.
In order to live by tâpwêwin, we are bound to tell the truth about injustice, oppression, and violence. When we see the genocide being perpetrated in Palestine, we must speak because we are people living on treaty territory; because to live on this land means we are bound to the natural laws of treaty, which require that we speak the truth.
As these laws denote, treaty lives in our land, our language, and in our relationships. It is a construct, a system, a web. Despite all attempts by the nation-state to bury it, because it is a living ghost, it cannot be erased. Its haunting persists because language persists, because the land persists, because our memory and relationships persist: “Haunting is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence, for genocide,” as Tuck and Ree put it.
Canada and Israel
The United States is permanently haunted by the slavery, genocide, and violence entwined in its first, present and future days. Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop. – Tuck and Ree
Like the United States, Canada and Israel are countries founded on violent settler colonialism, land theft, resource plundering, genocide, imperialist greed, and the displacement of Indigenous Peoples. The brutalization of Palestinians and Indigenous Peoples in so-called Canada has been well documented and shares similarities.
In order to establish Canada 158 years ago, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police cleared the plains of Indigenous Peoples who had lived here since time immemorial, forcing them off their land and onto reservations, requiring them to obtain a pass to leave until 1951. In 1948 in Palestine, over 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled to establish the state of Israel. Palestinians, too, were forced onto small parcels of land where their movement, safety, and sovereignty was, and continues to be, controlled by Israeli law.
In Canada, Indigenous Peoples are still experiencing traumas from residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and other laws and policies that prohibited Indigenous Peoples from practising ceremonies. As well, the Millennial Scoop, police violence, racism in the public health-care and school systems, and missing and murdered Indigenous relatives are all ongoing traumas. In Gaza and the West Bank, more Palestinians are murdered, injured, and displaced from their homes each day; they also suffer threats of widespread infection due to Israel bombing sewage systems and hospitals. They are detained in prison without cause, and Israeli settlers burn olive trees and destroy farmland with impunity.
Even though there are similarities in the oppression of Palestinians in Palestine and Indigenous Peoples in so-called Canada, there are also parallels in our love: our love of dance in powwow and dabke; our love of art in beading and weaving; our love of water in lakes, rivers, and oceans; our love of land in grasslands and olive trees; our love of animals in rez dogs and street cats; our love of our children and Elders.
The workings of settler colonialism are the same – a bag of reused and repurposed weapons in service of dispossession.
When nêhiyawak speak about everything being connected, we really mean that. We are talking about how struggle is interconnected; how the pervasiveness of white supremacy and settler colonialism show up in their use of the same tools globally and locally. White supremacy, genocide, and oppression wear the same face.
Treaty and Palestine
Decolonization must mean attending to ghosts, and arresting widespread denial of the violence done to them. – Tuck and Ree
In nêhiyawewin, pâstâmowin means going against our natural laws. As Sylvia McAdam states in Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems, “[i]t’s considered a pâstâmowin to remain silent or to take no action while a harm is being done to another human being or to anything in creation.” Canada has proven through its abuse of Indigenous Peoples within so-called Canada and Palestine that it cares more about furthering its own colonial power than its relationships to Indigenous Peoples. The government has been committing pâstâmowin and going against the natural laws – miyo-wîcêhtowin, wîtaskêwin, and tâpwêwin – inherent in our treaties. So too has Israel, and anyone supporting – or staying silent while witnessing – the killing of people, lands, and other living beings in the world.
One of our most sacred and peaceful laws is called nâtamâwasowin, which is carried out “in times of great threat and crisis. nâtamâwasowin [sic] means to defend for all human children of the world as well as future generations,” as McAdam notes. This law “directs us to defend for the children of all animals, plants, water, and the winged ones – everything in creation that has a spirit.”
Again, nêhiyaw law, which informs our treaty processes, does not differentiate between peoples or borders. Our laws are premised on the understanding that we are all related through our vast kinship networks. This law is calling on everyone to attend to their ghosts.
Even though there are similarities in the oppression of Palestinians in Palestine and Indigenous Peoples in so-called Canada, there are also parallels in our love: our love of dance in powwow and dabke; our love of art in beading and weaving; our love of water in lakes, rivers, and oceans; our love of land in grasslands and olive trees; our love of animals in rez dogs and street cats; our love of our children and Elders. There are parallels in our resistance. There are parallels in our fight for sovereignty.
As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson notes in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Indigenous Peoples traditionally “didn’t accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid, intimate collective and individual relationships of trust. In times of hardship, we did not rely to any great degree on accumulated capital or individualism but on the strength of our relationships with others.” In this time of hardship, individualism will not save us – our relationships will.
Treaties are the responsibilities of all people who live on and benefit from this land. I am reminded of this at every protest for Palestine I see broadcast across the world: when streets are lined with people in miyo-wîcêhtowin, when people demand wîtaskêwin by blocking ships and trains carrying weapons for Israel, when people speak tâpwêwin, the truth, to whomever will listen. Every single one of these people is invoking nâtamâwasowin. So, until settler-colonial states attend to our ghosts, let us haunt them.
