Unsettling the Commons by Craig Fortier

Author:Craig Fortier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arbeiter Ring Publishing

The Commons as Relationship

I met with Hannah Lewis on a breezy summer afternoon adjacent to a blooming garden filled with traditional medicines that have been planted by predominantly xwmәθkwәy’әm (Musqueam) Elders and youth on a farm run by the University of British Columbia, itself occupying the unceded territories of the xwmәθkwәy’әm people. Hannah coordinates the program that links members of the xwmәθkwәy’әm community and other Indigenous nations to the UBC farm. When I asked Hannah how she conceptualizes this work as part of a decolonial politics her response highlighted the importance of understanding settler colonialism as a pervasive and ongoing structure rather than as an historical event. She relates:

I’m obviously prefacing it with still being on my own journey and recognizing that what it means to me will be shaped by all the different kinds of privilege that I carry. But to me, it’s about understanding the continuing legacy of colonization and the ways it still operates in all of our lives and in the spaces that we’re in and what it means to come together to work at dismantling that and envisioning a future beyond that. In the spaces that I work in right now, specifically, that seems to be around creating decolonizing relationships around the food system especially with respect to Indigenous food sovereignty and knowledge. Especially the ways that traditional food knowledge has been delegitimized and threatened by colonization over time and still today.

A significant part of the unsettling process for non-Indigenous people is recognizing and resisting the ways that dominant ideas and ways of knowing seep into our practices, relationships, and aspirations. To understand settler-colonial sovereignty as a relationship rather than as an historical event is to disavow it of its seeming permanence. As Coulthard suggests, settler sovereignty is constituted by relationships. Sovereignty as the notion of “supreme authority over territories” is the dominant paradigm of the contemporary settler colonial state. However, it also structures the logics with which we resist these very states, particular with respect to the seeming battle for control over the state (or state-defined territories) between “the people” and the capitalist elite. Sarita Ahooja, a South Asian organizer and co-founder of NOII (Montréal), explained how her experiences travelling to Mexico to support the Zapatista liberation struggle in Chiapas profoundly changed the way she understood relationship building as critical to radical movements back home in Montréal:

I think what that experience taught me is that relationships are fundamental and that the decolonization process is a radical shift in relationships. So relationships between individuals, relationships between individuals and the land, relationships between groups of people—you know, it’s all about relationships and how they interact—and we are proposing a different relationship. In our own organizing we aspire to creating those relationships that we see as the future of our society.

The relationships that Ahooja is talking about are those that are experimented within meeting spaces, at blockades, in our party spaces, at our places of work, during mass protests against international summits and within our various struggles that centre care, consent, accountability, reciprocity.

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