Student Blogs | Race, Gender, and Settler Colonial Violence

Asilo (Asylum). Lithograph tarp by J. Leigh Garcia, 2016 

Moderator’s note: Andrea
Verschuyl (American Indian Studies, UW) presents two stories about how “indigenous
peoples have long struggled against narratives that historicize them, marooning
them in a distant past” and how one of the “great claim[s] of these discourses
is that all Native peoples are dead.” Verschuyl continues: “In death, they are
largely conceived of as a noble people whose erasure from the Earth was
unfortunate … ” But we are still here; we endure; we are not ghosts of settler colonial and capitalist violence.

Verschuyl’s
essay goes beyond a mere critique of food “as a medium of insidious and
destructive symbolic exchange … used by the state … to demand the deaths of
Indigenous peoples asking for a better life.” She connects the experiences of indigenous transborder
travelers avoiding death in the “weaponized landscape” of the Sonoran Desert
and the hunger strike initiated in December, 2012 by Attawapiskat First Nations
chief, Theresa Spence, in response to the austerity and neglect of the Canadian
government as a means of slow death.

These stories about violence against native women and displaced transborder
travelers reveal how the U.S., Mexico and Canada share status as settler colonial
nation-states with a history of deploying the biopolitics of “letting die the other” –
as Derrida once said; death from hunger, malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, detention; imprisonment; displacement; lack of access to
health care; but also the violence wrought of a weaponized landscape. These are crimes
against humanity and designate a legacy of institutionalized racism as a form of
state-sponsored terrorism serving capitalist enclosures and displacements of indigenous
people.

Ms.
Verschuyl prepared this post as one of eight review essays submitted for an ongoing
seminar on “Food Sovereignty Movements in Mexico and the United States” during
Spring Quarter at the University of Washington (Seattle). Other essays from my students are
forthcoming.

A 'rape tree', Arizona desert. Courtesy of A Journey of the Heart.

From tracing food packs
and tuna cans on la línea to the fast of Theresa Spence

BIOPOLITICAL
MARKERS OF SUFFERING & THE REFUSAL OF DISAPPEARANCE

Andrea
Verschuyl | Seattle, WA | May 6, 2018

... displaced travelers, many of whom are Indigenous, are meant to die. Colonial
states have manipulated food, customarily a form of creating positive symbolic
meaning amongst peoples, to create conditions that attenuate the
destruction of Native communities.

In Chapter 5 of the edited volume, Mexican-Origin Foods,
Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives, author Consuelo
Crow presents a lucid picture of the perilous Sonoran Desert crossing from
Mexico into the United States. Crow explicates the biopolitical underpinnings
of employing the desert in this way, weaponizing land—a conceptual and material
space that has traditionally brought life and teachings to Indigenous peoples.
This weaponization of the landscape seeks to deter displaced natives peoples
from transborder crossings or otherwise kill them. Scattered along the pathways
mapped by ‘migrants,’ rendered ghostlike in their transience and secrecy, are
the corporeal remains of the foods and other items they selected to take with
them.

Crow proposes that these items are symbolically
encoded, evidence of sovereignty enacted when a person is imprisoned while
still technically “free.” Crow goes on to delineate the capitalist shadow cast
by these objects, naming numerous corporations, who have intentionally, or
inadvertently capitalized on the clandestine Sonoran Desert crossing. Nestle,
for instance, a company responsible for numerous land-water grabs in Latin America,[1] displacing
thousands of Indigenous peoples and Latinx farmers, was recently connected to
the sale of water bottles specifically designed for clandestine migration. In
the dead of night, even the glimmer of water can give the traveler away, so
according to migration tradition and law, water bottles are painted black.
Nestle recently began selling black water bottles in border towns, discreetly
profiting from both the dispossession, and displacement of Indigenous and
Latinx peoples.

Crow ends by arguing against the practice of
“medicalizing” unauthorized migrants and their experiences, advocating for
systemic change by “working to end the underlying state of economic exception
and illegality that undermines transborder struggles for a more civil and
democratic future” (106).

         An important
question of symbolism is raised by Crow in her chapter, and indeed, symbolic
violences have long been enacted against Indigenous minds and bodies to attend
their material disappearance. Crow writes, “How food is consumed, where it is
consumed, and who is consuming it can all be charged with emotion and
significance, both positive and negative, depending on who is doing the
charging. Foods are transformed from quotidian household staples to items that
emanate philosophies of race, class, gender, religion, and politics” (86). What
Crow describes as the “migrant meal” illuminates an agency over body, enacting
choices that, if given the opportunity, tell stories of the individual’s
culture, family, and community. The symbolic essence of food is contradictorily
used to support the traveler (sometimes with accidental consequences and
obscured racial biases, such as the unfortunate distribution of canned refried
beans in the Sonoran Desert crossing), and punish them if they are placed in
detention. Crow recounts the story of “a woman deported into Nogales” who
shared with her that “her frozen burrito was thrown at her on the floor, and
she was instructed to pick it up and eat it without using her hands” (88).

If the symbolism encoded in food is used to
produce “detainee subjectivity” (88) by the state and its bodies of power, then
the literal destruction of food and water by militia groups and ICE along
migrant trails in the Sonoran Desert speaks plainly. These displaced travelers,
many of whom are Indigenous, are meant to die. Colonial states have manipulated
food, customarily a form of creating positive symbolic meaning amongst peoples,
to create conditions that further attenuate the destruction of Native
communities.

         Food as a
medium of insidious and destructive symbolic exchange has been used by the
state, either directly, or through its citizenry, many times to demand the
deaths of Indigenous peoples asking for a better life. In December, 2012,
Attawapiskat First Nations chief, Theresa Spence, stopped eating in response to
the austerity and neglect of the Canadian government. She intended to fast,
living only on fish broth and water, until she could meet with the Prime
Minister, Stephen Harper, and the Governor General to discuss the abrogation
and outright disregard of First Nations treaties.

“‘Each of these men had a hand in suffering,’
she said, ‘in the failure to meet their historic obligations to the land and
the people on the land.’” (Audre Simpson, The Chiefs Two Bodies:
Theresa Spence and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty, 2014). Given
that Spence was still eating, many non-Native Canadians clamored to charge her
with “political insincerity.” As the spectacle grew, what became clear was that
the main concern of the media was not the intentions of her decision to forgo
eating, or even the dismal conditions of the Attawapiskat peoples, but rather
her body, and specifically— as noted by Audre Simpson—her fat. While Indigenous
communities across Canada supported Spence in her act of personal physical
sacrifice, the running story in the media and amongst many liberal and racist
Canadians was to question the biopolitical markers of her suffering by
pondering over the fabricated settler colonial logic that asks whether she was
really abstaining from food at all, or merely “going on a cleanse.” The media
undermined the legitimate concerns voiced by Spence by focusing almost exclusively
on the chief’s weight, as if this is an objective indicator of being well-fed
or malnourished depending on which angle of the colonial gaze is set upon her
body. Her political act challenged the destruction of her lands, and thus, her
peoples, but her story was instead denuded into a tabloid “puff piece.”

Subjected to the colonized morality of the
Canadian government, Spence’s soft hunger strike had not met the conditions of
moral interest, her pain was insufficient to require the public’s attention and
care. The public did not see the evidence of hunger and suffering in her
physical body, they clearly did not consider that a hunger strike situated in a
cultural context of genocide and trauma might demand more “interpretive
flexibility.” (Audre Simpson, The Chiefs Two Bodies). In her
keynote speech at R.A.C.E. Network’s 14^th Annual Critical Race
and Anticolonial Studies Conference, entitled The Chief’s Two Bodies:
Theresa Spence and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty, Mohawk scholar Audre
Simpson alleges that in order to render herself sympathetic, her cause worthy
of concern, Theresa Spence would have to die. Indigenous life is not normative
in the colonial context because it symbolically undermines the claims to sovereignty
made by the settler state. Native bodies, themselves encoded with political
messages evoking alternative ways-of-knowing, being, and making meaning, are
unsettling manifestations of claims to knowledge and place that, in the context
of western epistemological and ontological hegemony, necessitate their
disappearance.

         Returning to
Crow’s chapter, we can use Audre Simpson’s lecture, and the story of Theresa
Spence and her two bodies—her fleshy, corporeal form, and her political form as
an Indigenous woman—to tease out two conclusions. Underpinning these
conclusions is the understanding that destruction of Indigenous lands as a
means to destroy native bodies and embodied knowledges has long been embedded
in colonial projects wherever they persist.

         Firstly, the
destruction of food and water by ICE officials and militia groups is an
exercise of biopolitical violence and similarly destroys the symbolic foods and
water that represented the displace native travelers’ ability to exercise their
agency in the form of choice—assuming, of course, that all choices are rooted
in a cultural mosaic of influences, relationships, and knowledges. The castaway
fragments of life left in the desert post-round-up, such as hand-embroidered
cloths stitched with messages from loved ones left at home, meant to cradle
tortillas and other sacred foods, symbolically denote the casting away of
cultural effigies, further anonymizing the ‘migrants’ and locking them into an
“invisible nothingness” (85). Here, both Native bodies and embodied knowledges
are disappeared.

Humanitarian cache. Courtesy
of gaby
romeri. No More Deaths

         Secondly,
and with regards to the dangerous medicalizing of ‘migrants,’ the story of
Theresa Spence suggests that in the context of travelers in the Sonoran Desert,
their lives are only meaningful in the event of their deaths. The only
Indigenous body, in this case, deserving of making it into the United States,
or in Theresa Spence’s case, deserving of political support, is a dead one.

         Indigenous
peoples have long struggled against narratives that historicize them, marooning
them in a distant past. One great claim of these discourses is that all Native
peoples are dead. In death, they are largely conceived of as a noble people
whose erasure from the Earth was unfortunate, but inevitable in the face of superior
technology and white “civilization.” Indigenous peoples enacting their
traditions, Indigenous leaders fighting for their lands, Indigenous migrants
enacting “the sovereignty embodied in individual acts of transmotion,” (105)
are compelled to endure repeated projects seeking to disappear both of their
bodies: their physical bodies, and their embodied knowledges. In this sense,
the border control apparatus detailed in Crow’s essay represents the same
colonial intent under a different name: the only Indigenous peoples deserving
of life are those who are already dead.

Sources

Simpson, Audre. 2018. “The Chief’s Two Bodies: Theresa Spence and
the Gender of Settler Sovereignty. Unsettling Conversations.” RACE2014 Keynote
1. ‘Vimeo, 12 Apr. 2018. URL: vimeo.com/110948627.

Crow, Consuelo. 2017. Tracing food packs and tuna cans on la
linea. In: Mexican-origin foods, foodways, and social movements :
Decolonial perspectives, Eds. Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland,
and Gabriel R. Valle. Fayetteville, Ark: University of Arkansas. Pp. 83-106.

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[1] Moderator’s Note: See Elliot Gabriel’s report, “Coke, Nestle Near
Ownership of World’s Second Largest Aquifer.” The Dawn: International
Newsletter of Popular Struggles. February 26, 2018. URL: http://www.thedawn-news.org/2018/03/01/coke-nestle-near-ownership-of-worlds-second-largest-aquifer/.

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