“The biggest challenge in the present crisis [2008] is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality — the production of specific things, the achievement of recognisably human goals that have something to do with a shared sense of what is good for the human community in the widest sense.”

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writing in The Spectator (23 September 2008.)

It’s one thing to profess to having a faith and to have hope for human action as a positive force; it is another to subscribe to a religion that has become highly codified and rigid. The more a religion exercises control against our free will the more we think of it as a cult – as a harmful form of mind-control and manipulation. I suspect that in the long run those faith groups that are more responsive to the lived life of individuals and communities are better able to speak to the people and guide them most effectively in their ethical, critical and creative choices. But the predicaments of doctrine, tradition, the use of Church buildings, and faith as an informant of social action have been thrown into stark relief by recent events in The City of London.

In an important sense the Christian faith does not offer a specific programme of actions; rather it helps to inform our choices and (one hopes) supports us to lead a better and a more responsible life. It is in these contexts that I want to explore the worldwide Occupy movements in relation to politics and postcolonial theology. Here are some questions and a few observations.

As I write two senior members of the Church of England have resigned over the issue of the occupation of land adjoining St Paul’s Cathedral in London. At the same time other senior members of the Church are now authorizing legal action that will if successful lead to the forced removal by the police of the occupiers who are campaigning against global capital, debt, and the London Stock Exchange. The reaction of the church is divided and we are told that the occupiers do not even know what they want to achieve. A more sympathetic and minority voice has been Madeleine Bunting writing in The Guardian on Sunday 30 October 2011:

“The critics complain that there are no clearly identified objectives; there is no manifesto. But ‘Occupy’ is not some proto-political party. Critics insist there must be leaders or representatives. But the protesters stubbornly refuse to conform to any of the conventions of our political and media culture.”

Let me say at the outset that I have been struck by the media hostility to the occupy movements. I’m writing from a British perspective and that may mean that your experience of the occupations, the activists and the media have been very different from mine. But a range of writers and thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek have also been prepared to celebrate the lack of a fixity of direction and purpose. The last thing a new movement wants is to build out of failed structures; the old politics and an irrelevant religion. The present climate of revolutionary play may to some historians, however, be deemed to be oddly reminiscent of the student-led revolts of ’68 and the experimental excitement and hope of the Situationists.

If to some people the occupiers appear to represent an unreal fantasy world of myth and imagination, perhaps the same can be said for the financial and economic gurus who seem to be unable or ill-equipped to deal with the present crisis (one in which a global youth population of 80 million may not find word). The need for critical dialogue based on common sense realities is one feature of the argument that Rowan William was proposing back in 2008:

“The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose — which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.”

The main complaint from the media and from commentators on the left and the right is that the Occupy ‘movement’ lacks a coherent programme; that it lacks specific demands. It has been confusing for some commentators that its participants appear to cross political party and class boundaries. Debate rages about who these groups are. They range from inheritors of the Tea Party movement sponsored by big business to a lunatic fringe of latter day hippies and anarcho-socialists. It appears to be a very wide church and it’s difficult to pin a label on the “occupiers.” Its semantic mobility and viral acceleration is further propelled by harnessing the potential of digital social media. A few tents in the City of London become the focus for global media. Small gestures can have gigantic consequences and I suspect that there has been more than one commentator who pointed to Luther’s nailed theses as the beginning of global movement almost 500 years ago. (In his case a movement disseminated at high velocity by the ‘new’ technology of the printing press.)

I had intended to refer to ‘them’ as protestors, but even that label harks back to a mode of activism that appears rather outmoded. Is there some kind of identity crisis going on; like Christians, are ‘they’ like us and also different from ‘us.’ It’s crucial to note in this regard that our obsession with categories and classifications (taxonomy was an Enlightenment project) is in its turn based on a need to police spaces and their boundaries. Space is a key battleground and it is also a place for identity-formation and for the construction of ideological coherence. Let us not forget that the architecture of Western capitalism and empire was in key respects constructed in the coffee-houses of London (see Jurgen Habermas’s work) where merchant, stock jobbers and brokers, mercantile officers, manufacturers, poets and journalists did deals and described for the first time a new outlook on how to shape the world.

It’s ironic, or apposite, then, that what we are seeing today is a campaign against unfair terms of trade, global capital accumulation, and hostility to the Starbucks’ model of transnational capitalism. (I suspect that the Occupiers are sceptical or hostile to the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility.)

It is significant then that the new tented communities are experimenting with the occupation of space as the basic unit of struggle. It is an issue that goes to the very heart of a privatized and commodified world; it is an issue that goes back, also to seventeenth century debates about the commons – a free space for community use; an unfenced zone available for the common good.

It is instructive to think about how few are the public and open spaces that remain available to the people. Schools and colleges and Universities are increasingly closed and privatized spaces. Free evening classes are in decline and many educational institutions are walled, gated, and protected spaces in both real and metaphoric respects. The spaces available to faith groups and community organizations have been in decline since the 1970s. Even the much loved public houses of intoxication (or not) are in steep decline.

A major concern in cultural geography and postcolonial theology is with the ownership and the occupation of spaces; the domination and the exploitation of spaces bys specific groups; the inequalities of space understood in discreet, local and global terms. Space then is crucial to the occupation in London, part of which is land owned by the Church. In the first instance the Occupiers were welcomed by the Church. Now that situation has changed and the Occupiers have been asked to leave.

Let’s ponder the centrality of space again. A key discovery in recent years has been to identify evidence of how where you live is the prime driver of where you will end up in life – and how and when you will die. Life expectancy across boroughs of London varies by seventeen years. Across the world, average life expectancy ranges from early forties to high seventies – almost twice as long.What questions does such a disparity raise? How does it affect our conscience as social animals and as ethical beings?

Surely a ministry and a social activism that fails to be informed by tragic inequalities will not be deemed relevant or responsive to human suffering by a majority of the global population. In Britain, we call the inequalities of health, opportunity and social mobility the ‘postcode lottery.’ How far is there an element in mission to cross boundaries and to embrace our common humanity?

Again I would like to quote Madeleine Bunting’s highly perceptive analysis of why the occupation of space needs to be understood as an essential feature of the ongoing debates:

“Space” is the theme that runs through much of what the protesters say. Their first agreed principle is that the current system is unsustainable, undemocratic and unjust, and they want to create the space to think of alternatives. First that means taking key symbolic public space – this is the politics of geography – to use it for conviviality, living, learning and participation. That’s no easy task in a city designed to facilitate only three activities – working, transport and shopping – with as little human interaction as possible. Metal fencing is springing up around even small public spaces in the City of London to preclude new camps. The protesters’ aim is to open up space, physically and socially, for people to connect and thereby open up space in people’s imaginations.”

Confusion, chaos and anarchy are one effect of an indiscriminate mixing of spaces. But doesn’t a true sense of equality suggest and imply a constructive potential for mixing, crossing, mingling, blending, exchanging? (Is our language in this regard ‘fallen’ if we think only of such exchanges as material commodities, financial transactions, and monetary vehicles?)

The occupy movements are loosely connected across the globe but they are not disorganized or chaotic. As The Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting has commented “The level of organisation is remarkable. There is nothing chaotic about this experiment in community in which no one is turned away, and everyone has their say.” In fact a participatory and deliberative approach appears to be at the core of what they do as the following example of ‘principles’ drawn from Take the Square demonstrates:

Inclusiveness, we are a movement of people, whose plurality goes beyond any label; no political parties, trade unions or associations represent us.

Horizontality, we gather together in assemblies for taking decisions, so these decisions are taken as most shared as possible.

Collective intelligence, facing the problems we use or collective intelligence to scape the logic of the power.

Respect, because we look for what join us together rather what divides us, respect for the others is basic.

Non-violence, because non-violence make us stronger, it allow us to change the reality, break the predictable, it make us more radical.

It is too early to let Madeleine Bunting have the last word, but her conclusion has proved controversial in the comments section attached to her newspaper article:

“One might have hoped that an institution such as St Paul’s, conscious of its own history of civic purpose and national identity, not to mention the radical gospel of a Jewish itinerant carpenter, would have grasped the symbolism of the moment more astutely. That they failed demonstrates all the more starkly the ethical bankruptcy of our age. And that, after all, is exactly what Occupy London is about.”

What the occupations mean and where they are going it is difficult to predict. But I do sense that there is an unfinished project that in a significant way is taking its bearings (conscious or not) from Rowan Williams, writing in 2008, so eloquently expressed

“Behind all this, though, is the deeper moral issue. We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors.”

The following reflections describe the experience of the authors at the protest of a columbus day parade in Denver in 2007. The American Indian Movement of Colorado, in which author Mark Freeland is a member, has engaged in protest of this parade since the late 1980s in alliance with numerous progressive social change groups. 2007 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the columbus day holiday, which originated in the state of Colorado. Author Julie Todd was among a number of students organized for the protest by Mark Freeland at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where they are both still doctoral students. Mark and Julie wrote these words in 2010. They used them as materials for a required course at the school called Identity, Power and Difference during one session of the course that deals with allyship and solidarity. The protest of the columbus day parade in Denver continues. For more information, go to: http://www.transformcolumbusday.org/ and http://www.colorado-aim.blogspot.com/.

Disclaimer: Language used in the publication below
might be considered offensive to some readers.[1]

Our stories tell us who we are.  They hold the past, present and future together, and give continuity and meaning to what might otherwise be isolated moments in time.  If my story as a Native woman has a theme, it is loss—of  Indian status, of visibility, of culture, of language and of resources.

My grandmother, Margaret Paul, grew up on the Lennox Island Reservation in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was sent to a Catholic residential school in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, where she and her sister, Muriel, were beaten for speaking Mi’kmaq, their native tongue.  In the 1930s, when my grandmother was thirteen, she and Muriel ran away and joined Bill Lynch’s Show, a travelling carnival and fair. Through the 1940s she ran a speakeasy from a converted barracks in Halifax. She didn’t tell her children they were native.  By the time I was born, in 1973, nobody in my family spoke Mi’kmaq.  I learned about my ancestors in school, as a brief unit in Canadian history.

I grew up on the land and lived in a house my father built from wood and tarpaper.  In the summer I carried buckets of drinking water from a spring and in the winter I melted snow in a pot on the stove to wash in. My parents supported us by selling handmade crafts and by occasionally growing marijuana.  Poverty taught me to see class oppression. My family’s criminality taught me to question authority, and to distinguish between what was illegal and what was immoral.  This perspective has been invaluable as an activist.

I discovered racism in 1979.  I had just turned five.  Our primary class was lined up in the hallway waiting to be led to the washroom.  The students of Mrs. Cameron’s grade three class stood next to us.  To me, these eight years olds seemed impossibly tall, mature and sophisticated.  As they went, Mrs. Cameron addressed Nikki, a girl with tan skin, “And wash your face while you’re down there,” she said. “I can’t tell if you’re dirty or if it’s the colour of your skin.”  Her statement would stay with me forever, as an example of the power of white supremacy.  In their view, to be brown was to be physically and morally tainted. As a woman with white skin, my Nativeness isn’t visible to others.  My grandmother often praised my skin as pretty and feminine, and warned me to avoid the sun, lest my true nature be revealed.  Her bias got me thinking about the connections between race and gender at an early age.  Being treated as white, while knowing that I wasn’t, has made me self-reflexive.  I’ve grown up with white privilege, yet also been aware of white supremacy which society insists whites to be blind to.  While my scholarly activism often examines Native racialization, I also deconstruct whiteness, which is too often permitted to pass unexamined as if it were a neutral state of being.

The realization of what I’ve lost due to of generations of government-mandated assimilation has been a gradual process for me.  For years, the most obvious effect was financial—without band funding I incurred $52,000 of student debt.  In my thirties I began to realize that I had also lost a cultural inheritance.  I speak only a few words of Mi’kmaq. My white mother has spent more time on the reservation than I have. Yet I’ve also been fortunate.  I know my Mi’kmaq name, have made quillwork birch-bark baskets and bobcat tooth necklaces with my father, and got to witness my parents take an active role in Native politics when I was a child. I grew up rural, and experienced the ties with nature that our traditions take as a given, but which many urban Natives have not experienced.  Even my family’s parenting style was decidedly Native. Reflecting upon these experiences has led me to change how I define “Mi’kmaq tradition.” I examine the ways my family has of doing things, and realize that these traditions are no less Native for being off the Rez. I think of the bravery it must have taken for my grandmother and her sister to leave their abusive school without knowing where they would go, and I try to embrace that bravery in myself.

Moving to Toronto for university took me 1,264 km (785 miles) from the Mi’kmaq nation, so I couldn’t simply stop into the Native Friendship Centre and be sure of meeting a Mi’kmaq elder. Without access to other Mi’kmaq people, I turned to academic sources of support.  I became a voracious reader, seeking out scholarly articles, books, websites and blogs that discussed the Mi’kmaq.  I read about Native feminism, indigenous self-government, the pan-Indian and American Indian movements, Native Spirituality, and Native health. Sometimes I am disappointed by the lack of material available.  One side-effect of having an oral tradition is that it isn’t always available to people who have been assimilated. I am learning Mi’kmaq through online lessons, but have no one to whom I can speak it.  Like many native people before me, I find strength and inspiration in the Black Power movement.  I read Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton.  I read womanist and black feminist authors, such as bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. I listen to Public Enemy and Paris or find hybrids, such as Native hiphop groups Reddnation, Short Dawg Tha Native, or Slangblossom.

As a bisexual woman I’ve been involved in queer activism and community building for over 20 years, so when I focussed on my Mi’kmaq identity, I approached it from a similar angle.  Much as I did when I first came out, I started by seeking community.   I found my home in Native feminism and among two-spirited people.  Sharing a common sexuality or politics made it easier for me to bond with the Native people I met. I join groups online that discuss issues relevant to two-spirited Native women, share resources and compare experiences.

I join with other Native people in protesting our oppression, in part because I feel I need to embrace the visibility that my grandmother could not.  I out myself at every opportunity.  On valentines day I attend the March for Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women as we walk from police headquarters to the coroner’s office, protesting the lack of government response to the 580 native women who have been murdered or have gone missing over the past 30 years.  I march with fellow Natives, carrying flags of the American Indian Movement, in Take Back The Dyke and the Slutwalk.[1] I form bonds with other Natives, especially women and queers.  I go to the two-spirited meetings and the drum circle at the Native Canadian Centre. I go to the Annual General meeting for Two-Spirited People of The First Nations, where I cry when a man leads a closing prayer in which he thanks the Native peoples of the east coast for bearing the brunt of colonialism.

My activist work also involves producing work from my political and social perspective as a non-status feminist queer native woman. I co-chair a presentation on two-spirited identity at the University of Toronto’s Multifaith Centre.  I present scholarly papers on Mi’kmaq legends, Aboriginal gender and sexuality, and psychological decolonization at academic conferences.  I draft course syllabi on Native feminism.  I write articles about psychological decolonization and postcolonial theology and I write poetry about colonialism.  This kind of scholarly activism is a conversation, not only between myself and other Native scholars, but among many people inside the academy and outside, whose work reflects on the impact of racialization and imperialism on spirituality and sexuality. Native women, whether we are perceived as women of colour or not, need to join with women who have shared the experience of living under racism and colonialism. Their experiences do not have to be the same as ours for us to learn from one another.

Those who would join me in solidarity can do so in five specific ways:

1)       Learn about the history of colonialism in North America. This isn’t just “Native history,” it’s everyone’s history.  Don’t rely on Native people for this information.  People of colour are often expected to act as free educators for people whose racial privilege enables them to be ignorant of the lives of racialized others.  Go to the library or read from a reliable online source.

2)       Know the content of the treaties that relate to the land on which you live.  It’s something every adult should do, like reading the fine print on your lease or mortgage.  Know what the contract you have with the First Nation in your area is, and insist that your government representatives and the private businesses with whom they work honour that contract.

3)       Tell your political representatives to support Native cultural programs.  For generations government legislation outlawed Native language, culture and practices.  Insist that your government put at least as much effort into preserving and promoting Native language and culture as was put into eliminating it.

4)       Challenge anti-Native and imperialist remarks when you hear them.  Don’t wait for a Native person to do it for you.  There is no such thing as a neutral stance on racism, colonialism or genocide.

5)       Join with Native groups in protesting on key issues, such as land claims, self-government, poverty, or murdered and missing women.