As We Have Always Done
by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
“Indigenous bodies don’t relate to the land by possessing or owning it or having control over it. We relate to land through connection. The opposite of dispossession within Indigenous thought is grounded normativity.”
On expansive dispossession, Land and Indigeneity,
”A great deal of the colonizer’s energy has gone into breaking the intimate connection of Nishnaabeg bodies (and minds and spirits) to each other and to the practices and associated knowledges that connect us to land, because this is the base of our power. This means land and bodies are commodified as capital under settler colonialism and are naturalized as objects for exploitation.
The removal and erasure of Indigenous bodies from land make it easier for the state to acquire and mantain sovereignty over land because this not only removes physical resistance to dispossession, it also erases the political orders and relationships housed within Indigenous bodies that attach our bodies to land.
Indigenous bodies, particularly the bodies of Two Spirit and Queer people, children, and women, represented the lived alternative to heteronormative constructions of gender, political systems, and rules of descent. They are political orders. They represent alternative Indigenous political systems that refuse to replicate capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and whiteness. They are the embodied representations in the eyes of the colonizers of land, reproduction, Indigenous governance, and political systems. They reproduce and amplify Indigeneity, and so it is these bodies that must be eradicated- disappeared and erased into Canadian society, outright murdered, or damaged to the poit where we can no longer reproduce Indigeneity. The attack on our bodies, minds, and spirits, and the intimate trauma this encodes is how dispossession is maintained.”
“I see the dismantling of global capitalism as inseparable from the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and nationhood because capitalism at its core is not just incompatible with core Indigenous values but has to violently shred the bodies who house those values in order to sustain itself. Capitalism cannot create Indigenous worlds, because as Vijay Prashad says, ‘Capitalism has never been able to produce decency’”
“Extraction and assimilation go together. Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. The act of extraction removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning. Extracting is Taking. Actually, extracting is stealing- it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous- knowledge, women, peoples.” -page 75